The Snowman ( PDFDrive )

Then her eyes had glided towards the window, across the fjord. Towards Finnøy perhaps. And as
Harry had left he’d known the damage was there and always would be.
He looked down at his hand. Aune was right; if every baby was a perfect miracle, life was basically
a process of degeneration.
A nurse coughed by the door. ‘Time for a few jabs, Aune.’
‘Oh, please let me off, sister.’
‘No one is let off here.’
Ståle Aune sighed. ‘Sister, what is worse? Taking the life of a person who wants to live or taking
death from a person who wants to die?’
Beate, the nurse and Ståle laughed, and no one noticed Harry twitch in his chair.
Harry walked up the steep hills from the hospital to Lake Sognsvann. There weren’t many people
around, only the loyal throng of Sunday walkers doing their fixed circuit around the lake. Rakel
waited for him by the roadblock.
They gave each other a hug and started the circuit in silence. The air was sharp and the sun matt in a
pale blue sky. Dry leaves crackled and disintegrated beneath their heels.
‘I’ve been sleepwalking,’ Harry said.
‘Oh?’
‘Yes. And I’ve probably been doing it for a while.’
‘It’s not so easy to be fully present all the time,’ she said.
‘No, no.’ He shook his head. ‘Quite literally. I think I’ve been up and walking through the flat at
night. God knows what I’ve been up to.’
‘How did you find out?’
‘The night after I came home from the hospital I was standing in the kitchen looking at the floor, at
some wet footprints. And then I realised I hadn’t got a stitch on, except for my rubber boots, it was
the middle of the night and I was holding a hammer in my hand.’
Rakel smiled and looked down. Skipped a pace so that they were walking in rhythm. ‘I started
sleepwalking for a while. Right after I became pregnant.’
‘Aune told me adults sleepwalk at times of stress.’
They stopped at the water’s edge. Watched a pair of swans float past, immobile and noiseless, on
the grey surface.
‘I knew from the very first moment who Oleg’s father was,’ she said. ‘But I didn’t know that he and
I were having a child when he was informed that his girlfriend in Oslo was pregnant.’