Nina raised her hand halfway to protest. It wasn’t correct that Ida had been home alone because Nina was sick. If Nina hadn’t gone to the Coal-House Camp, she would have been spending the night in a foul-smelling scout cabin with Anton. Ida was supposed to be spending the night with Anna. That was the agreement.
Morten brushed her aside with a tired motion.
“Ida’s mother wasn’t home because she had come down with radiation sickness. On multiple occasions, as I have learned, she visited a flock of sick Eastern Europeans in Valby even though she had promised not to do that kind of work while I was in the North Sea.”
Morten’s tired eyes, red from crying, caught hers and held them.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Not Ida’s mother, you. You promised, Nina.”
She cringed under his gaze. The nausea was coming back now, and there was a faint rushing sound in her ears.
“While you were in the hospital, three men broke into the apartment, where Ida was alone with a boyfriend I’ve never heard of. They beat him, and Ida, who was half naked.…”
Nina looked down at her hands. Please, would he stop soon? Could she stand to hear any more?
“They took pictures of her. They humiliated her. Our little girl.”
Morten’s eyes looked exhausted, lifeless.
“I have no idea if the break-in was related to what you were doing in Valby. But, do you know what? I couldn’t care less, Nina. It doesn’t interest me anymore. Our apartment has been sealed off because of potential radioactive contamination. As has our car.”
Morten flung out his arms, almost helplessly, Nina thought, feeling something hard and painful lodged itself like a lump in her throat. Then he took another step away from the bed.
“If it was just you and me.…” he said. “But it isn’t. And I simply can’t understand … I simply can’t let you bring Anton and Ida along with you into … into that permanent war zone you insist on living in. We’ve moved down to my sister’s for the time being. That’s what I came to tell you.”
For the time being, she heard. For a while. Maybe he could live with this, maybe they would be okay again.
But he kept moving toward the door, and then he opened it, and he was almost all the way out in the corridor before he turned around and looked at her with an unrelenting determination that destroyed her illusion.
“This is it for me, Nina,” he said quietly. “It’s over.”
NINA WOULD HAVE called out to him, but she couldn’t think what to say to make him stay. He stood in the doorway for a microsecond. As if he wanted to give her a mental snapshot for the family album. His long, slightly stooped silhouette. His shoulders, which along with his narrow hips formed a perfect V under the loose T-shirt. She knew that body down to the smallest detail, and images of Morten from their sixteen years together flickered through her mind. How he had stood at the foot of their bed a thousand times, tiredly pulling his T-shirt up over his head. The birthmark under his right shoulder blade, the soft armpits, the long muscular legs, and the soft, dark hair that covered his chest, arms, legs, and groin. His smile when he turned around and looked at her. But this time he didn’t turn around.
He didn’t even look back once as he turned down the corridor. Her diaphragm contracted painfully. As if she had been smacked in the stomach by a ball Anton had kicked. The realization that he was leaving her, that he had already left, struck in a single brutal blow.
In the bathroom the laggardly assistant clattered around, cleared her throat, and then finally reappeared with a full water glass in her hand that she passed to Nina.
“They don’t fill patients’ water glasses in the bathroom,” Nina said mechanically, and turned her sluggish eyes toward the assistant’s freckled face. She looked strangely guilty, Nina thought. As if she knew she was doing something she wasn’t supposed to. And her coat was white, not yellow. A faint suspicion crept to the front of Nina’s consciousness. Why was she even in the room? There was no reason for her to close the curtains. Nina hadn’t asked for any water.
The woman cleared her throat and pulled the corners of her mouth up into an expression that was supposed to resemble something halfway between perky and kindhearted.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “My name is Lone Walter, and I’m a journalist with Ekstra Bladet. Would you mind if I asked you a couple of questions?”
A little red spark of rage shot up through Nina. A journalist! Of course. No real health care worker had time to waste the way this woman had just done. Nina looked over at the empty doorway where Morten had disappeared.
“Did you get all that?” Nina tried to make her voice sound cool and collected as she turned her eyes to the woman by her bed again.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
The woman’s fake smile persisted, unflappable, and Nina finally felt the nausea regaining the upper hand. She reached for the basin next to her bed and vomited in long, pink jets. Blackcurrant juice, Nina thought, and looked up at the now slightly flustered journalist.
“Get the hell out of here,” she said. “I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want to talk to anyone.”
Tommi didn’t say anything. He just kicked the TV console so hard that the flat screen tipped over backward and hit the floor with an ominous crunch. Despite the fall, the TV kept displaying footage of the garage in Valby surrounded by yellow-and-black striped tape and people in yellow spacesuits.
Sándor remained motionless in his black leather recliner without saying anything, without drawing any attention to himself, without providing any provocation.
They weren’t in the city anymore, but some distance outside, Sándor didn’t have any real sense of where. The sound of planes taking off and landing could be heard at regular intervals not that far away, but when they arrived in midmorning after a long and frustrating night, he had seen grazing horses and flocks of wild geese. From the outside it looked to be just a fairly ordinary, red-brick farmhouse sitting alongside a derelict stable, and a dilapidated garage structure. Sándor didn’t know what they were doing here, and no one told him. Tamás wasn’t here.
“You don’t get to see him until we have the jacket,” Frederik had said.
The inside of the house was bizarre. The wallpaper in what must at one time have been the living room was painted a lurid egg plant purple, and on the walls was a series of equally lurid posters in clip frames. They weren’t there just for their entertainment value, they were a sales catalog. The girls, holding their breasts out provocatively at the viewer with both hands or suggestively rubbing their crotches, were accompanied by texts in German and English and a third language he assumed was Danish. “Russian Katarina, twenty-three, loves oral, anal, and gentle dominance; Anna from Riga, only fifteen years old—do you want to be her first?” But neither Anna nor Katarina nor any of their colleagues were in evidence, and some of the frames had already been taken down to make room for a half-hearted normalization of the room involving a lot of white paint, some wood paneling, and several plastic-wrapped bales of rock wool insulation.
In the middle of all that, there was an arrangement with a three-seater sofa, love seat, and armchair, as well as a glass-topped coffee table and TV console, a little island of bourgeois conventionality in the midst of the brothel ambience. Frederik had slept on the longer sofa for a few hours, Tommi on the shorter one, while Sándor had been left to curl up in the armchair.