And go ice bathing he did. One Sunday morning, at a relatively early hour to save attracting an embarrassing crowd, a few of the fathers made their way up to Steinbruvannet. Chairman Moen had even got hold of an ice bore and a good old-fashioned ice saw, so it didn’t take long to cut out a fairly large, square hole — the ice wasn’t all that thick at that time anyway. And let it be said right at the outset, since this is only a side-story, that Five-Times Nilsen actually did take a dip in the icy water — carried it off with considerable panache, in fact, and to the great glee of his neighbours. Not only that, but his wife, the rather pettish, but kind-hearted Mrs Nilsen, insisted on him staying home from the shop for a week, quarantined him, would not open the door to anyone, not even a poor flag-seller with his yoke around his neck; she was too busy squeezing oranges to save her husband from catching a cold or perhaps to give him the illusion of more tropical climes as he lay on the sofa with his face turned to the drinks cabinet’s scintillating solar system. There were those who were sure that he too was well and truly squeezed that week; word was that Mrs Nilsen would stop at nothing to warm him up again — there were even a few on the estate who wondered whether they ought not to rename him Ten-Times Nilsen.
In any case, the upshot of it all was that lots of blocks of ice — fragments of ice is possibly a better description — of all sizes lay strewn around the hole where the ice bathing had taken place, when Jonas and Margrete went up to Steinbruvannet to skate, on the afternoon of that same Sunday.
With Lego, Jonas had always found the transparent bricks the most fascinating — as a small boy he constantly dreamed of being able to build a whole house solely out of them — so the minute he saw those beautiful, gleaming blocks lying there all ready and waiting he knew he had to build something out of them. If he were honest with himself, he had been rambling on about doing something of the sort as they were walking up to the lake; after Margrete had turned those black and faintly Oriental eyes of hers on him and told him that when she was nine — before the family moved back to Norway, that is — she had visited Harbin in China with her father the diplomat and seen the fabulous ice sculptures and ice lanterns created for the New Moon Festival held there: thirty degrees below and a whole park full of shimmering ice structures. ‘It was like being on another planet. Triton, or somewhere like that,’ she said.
Only a girl like Margrete could think of mentioning one of the moons of Neptune in a sentence. She was wearing earmuffs over hair so black that it had a bluish sheen to it, like Cleopatra’s in the strip cartoons. Jonas stole a glance at her, so in love that it hurt.
What makes a murderer?
He forgot all about his skates. There weren’t many people on the ice apart from them anyway, only a couple of guys playing ice hockey way down by the dam. Jonas carried the blocks away from the hole, further out onto the ice, seeing in his mind’s eye a palace the like of which had never been seen before. On this particular Sunday the temperature was hovering just above — rather than below — zero, so the pieces of ice had not had a chance to freeze solid, instead they were slippery and slightly wet on the surface. Jonas started to build something, took a sheath knife from his rucksack, cut and pared the ice as he saw fit. Although for the most part he could use the pieces as they were, since they were all different shapes to start with. The hardest part was to stop the blocks from sliding off one another. ‘What do you think I should make?’ he called to Margrete. ‘Oslo Town Hall?’
‘The Crystal Palace,’ she laughed.
While Jonas was building, with no particular plan to begin with, Margrete danced around him on her figure skates, like a good fairy giving the work her blessing. She could do some simple figure skating, and she was a lovely, and really quite sexy sight in her stretchy ski pants and tight woollen sweater. But Jonas had no eyes for her, or rather: he was more keen on showing her that he was a conqueror, that he could create something magnificent, something of which she would never have dreamed him capable; he was totally engrossed, worked like a soul possessed, saw that the structure was starting to resemble a stave church, or maybe it was more like a slender ziggurat, a sacred building; he employed his knife like a woodcarver’s gouge on the hard ice, endowing those pieces which were to sit on the top with a more distinctive form, like little spires. On the very pinnacle he placed one chunk, totally transparent, and as he lifted it into place he noticed that there was a pearl embedded in it. Or not a pearl, but one of those little pearl ear-studs. He couldn’t imagine how it came to be there: trapped, as it were, inside an ice-cold giant clam. Maybe someone had dropped it; there was no way of telling. Most likely it wasn’t a real pearl either, he thought. Probably just some cheap junk. He wasn’t going to check right now, anyway, because he was finished, just as the last rays of the sun made the ice palace almost luminous; its walls and towers glittered and gleamed as if they were made from precious gems, or prisms. It was the sort of structure in front of which, at a later date, someone would place a vodka bottle, to produce a fabulous advertising shot. Jonas, for his part, thought fleetingly of a mirrored drinks cabinet.
Jonas calls out happily to Margrete, who is circling around further out on the ice. She does not hear him, is practising a jump. They are alone now; Jonas cannot see anyone down by the dam. It’s getting colder. He is glad of that, knows that this will cement his rather frail, unsteady construction. He calls out again, feeling proud, wanting to show off his masterpiece, a marvel of consummate symmetry. The sun is sinking lower and lower, soon only the tops of the spires will flash in the light of the last rays piercing the tops of the fir trees in the west. But it looks fantastic, a combination of stave church and a sort of ziggurat — truly a national monument — that might have been built out of transparent white marble, or air. A building from the land of fable. Jonas beholds it in the light, totally transparent, almost floating above the ice.