“…or they could smother you in your bed. Is it real enough for you yet? Is it? Because this might be a foreign country for you but people still die here. They still leak blood.” Their bright eyes still fade. Her nostrils were wide and although her fingers were still folded, they were white around the knuckles.
“It’s real,” she said. The words were squeezed out, the way you squeeze air from a Ziploc bag before you seal it. I wondered if she might faint.
“Julia…”
She breathed for a moment. “If you were trying to scare me, you succeeded.”
“I wasn’t trying to—”
“Yes, you were.” She stood. “I’m going to call Annie. I can find my own way back to the hotel. It’s only half a block. Good night.” Her back was straight; she moved with enormous, fragile dignity.
Had I been trying to frighten her? Yes. Yes, because she had to see, she had to know, because she had to stay safe, had to, because someone—someone I didn’t know, someone I couldn’t see or hear or smell—was waiting back in America, and maybe their reach didn’t extend across the Atlantic and the North Sea to Norway, but maybe it did. I watched through the window as she entered the Bristol. “Another akevit over here!”
The corridor was quiet, the lights muted. The hotel hummed in shut-down, nighttime mode. There was a tray outside Julia’s room. I squatted down to look: the remains of a hamburger and fries. Upset enough to revert to familiar food, but not upset enough to lose her appetite. I touched the bun. Stone cold. Not surprising. It was two in the morning.
The door to my room seemed narrower than it had been. I clipped the doorjamb with my left shoulder as I went in. I did not turn the light on; there was enough illumination coming through the gauzy inner curtains to make out the tightly made, impersonal bed, the chaise longue, the connecting door. I stood for a while and listened. I was breathing heavily through my mouth. I shut it. Nothing.
I took off my jacket and threw it on the bed. Sat down. Stood up again. Still no sound from Julia’s room.
I eased the connecting door open. It was warm, much darker than my room. I closed the door behind me, listened. Nothing. I crept towards the bed. Still nothing. My heart began to pound like an asymmetric crank. There was a shape on the bed, very still.
My eyes were adjusting. I could make out her head, the spill of hair across her pillow. I reached out, held my hand, palm down, just above her face. Warm breath, steady and strong. I blinked hard. She slept on.
She knocked on the connecting door just before eight. “Aud, are you awake?”
“Come in.”
She was still in her robe, hair tucked behind her ears. She seemed surprised to find me still in mine, drinking coffee on the bed. She smiled tentatively. “That smells good.”
I picked up the phone, talked to room service.
“What did you say?”
“They’re bringing more coffee, another cup, and breakfast. I asked them to hurry.” She hovered. “Please, sit. Or we can sit over by the window if you would be more comfortable.” I felt ridiculously formal. “Julia, I want to apologize. Last night—”
“No. I came to apologize to you. I asked.”
“There was no need for me to go into such detail.”
“No, it was me who—Oh, give me some of that coffee will you?” I handed her my cup. She took a sip, then a gulp, made to hand it back but I made a keep it motion. She finished off the coffee, despite the cream. “That was good. You know what frightened me more than the details? The way you talked about it. Your face was…I’ve never seen anything like it, except maybe some African sculpture. All implacable planes. Almost inhuman. And your voice, harsh as a broken engine. And I looked at you and thought: Oh, that’s what he’ll look like when he comes for me. I’ll just be a thing, a problem to be solved, and it doesn’t matter that I’ve eaten cod’s tongues, or that I really don’t much care for akevit, that I like roses even though they have too many thorns, and hot coffee in the morning. I felt inconsequential.”
Room service rapped on the door before I could say anything and I had to attend to the usual ceremony of pointing out a table—by the window—signing the chit, wishing him a good morning.
“Come and eat.” In the light by the window her hair was more sable than black, rich as a bear’s winter pelt. I wondered how it would look flung back in pleasure. We sat opposite each other at the tiny table and though they did not touch, I felt the heat of her bare leg on mine. We pulled off lids.
“Bacon!”
And eggs, and juice, and toast. “I thought you might like something familiar and comforting. It’s Danish bacon—more like Canadian than American. Less fatty.” I realized I was in danger of babbling and poured coffee for us both. We ate quietly.
“I called Annie. She’s fine.”
“Did you tell her to be careful?”
“I didn’t have to. As soon as she worked out I thought something might have happened to her, she pestered me with questions. I told her I’d explain everything when we got back. She said she’d be careful.”
“Good.”
We ate some more. “I was looking through the What To Do In Oslo pamphlets. The National Gallery sounds interesting. I thought we could go this morning. That is, I’d like to go, and I hope you’ll come with me. And maybe later we could get that dinner we should have had last night. Oh, unless Borlaug wants to take us out to celebrate the finalization of the park contract.”
“He won’t. In Norway one never mixes business and pleasure.” Dornan smiled at me from the back of my mind, and raised his eyebrows.
Early morning shoppers sipped coffee in the outdoor cafés of Kristian VII’s Gate. Along Universitetsgata, students in bright colours stood on the grass talking in groups of two and three. Everyone looked splendidly healthy. They had probably had more than three hours’ sleep.
We had to wait outside the gallery for it to open. Julia was restless. She was wearing another silk shirt, this time in deep blue. It pulled to and fro over her shoulders and breasts as she shifted her weight from heels to toes and her briefcase from one hand to the other. Her hair was in a fat braid, tied back with brown velvet that matched her pants, and hanging over her right shoulder. She looked at her watch. “How long will it take to get to Olsen Glass from here?”
“Fifteen minutes if we take the tram, but allow thirty.”
The doors opened. In the lobby, she checked her briefcase and looked at the signs. “So the question is, do we do a lightning tour of the whole place or concentrate on one area?” She nodded decisively. “We’ll just do the section on Norwegian painting. This way.”
We were the only ones in the Norwegian gallery. The first thing that caught her eye was one of J. C. Dahl’s huge paintings of fjord light and water. She stood before it and her restlessness dropped away. She became as still as the deep dark waters of the fjord. Her chest moved gently as she breathed, her eyes unfocused. I knew that if I put my hands on her shoulders, they would be soft and relaxed. This was a Julia I had not seen before: distant, analytical, expert. The minutes passed. Suddenly she cleared her throat and moved on, walking past the works of Tidemand and Gude with a quick glance and a nod, as though confirming a theory. She spent a little longer with a series of etchings depicting barn dances and summer village scenes. “Well, here are some people at last.” She leaned closer, then stepped back, looking from one to another. “I can understand that Dahl wouldn’t want to put people in his paintings—they would be dwarfed by the scenery—but these artists seem to think people do nothing but dance around and put flowers in their hair.”