The Snowman ( PDFDrive )

‘You’re smiling.’
‘Am I? Must be happy then.’
‘About what?’
He patted his pocket. ‘Cigarette.’
Eli Kvale was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea, looking out at the garden and listening to
the comforting rumble of the dishwasher. The black telephone was on the worktop. The receiver
had grown hot in her hands, from squeezing it so tight, but it had been a wrong number. Trygve had
enjoyed the fish au gratin – it was his favourite, he had said. But he said that about most things. He
was a good boy. Outside, the grass was brown and lifeless; there were no signs of the snow that had
fallen. And who knows? Perhaps she had just dreamt the whole thing?
She flicked aimlessly through a magazine. She had taken off the first few days that Trygve was at
home so that they could have a bit of time together. Have a good chat, just the two of them. But
now he was sitting with Andreas in the living room and they were doing what she had made space
for. That was fine, they had more to talk about. They were so similar after all. And in fact she had
always liked the idea of a good chat more than the reality. Because the conversation always had to
stop somewhere. At the huge, insurmountable wall.
Of course, she had agreed to call the boy after Andreas’s father. At least let the boy take a name
from Andreas’s side. She had been close to spilling the beans before she was due to give birth.
About the empty car park, about the darkness, about the black prints in the snow. About the knife to
her neck and the faceless breath against her cheek. On the way home, with his seed running into her
knickers she had prayed to God that it would continue to run until it was all gone. But her prayers
had not been answered.
Later she had often wondered how things would have been if Andreas had not been a priest and his
view of abortion so uncompromising, and if she had not been such a coward. If Trygve had not been
born. But by then the wall had already been built, an unshakeable wall of silence.
That Trygve and Andreas were so similar was a silver lining. It had even sparked a little hope, so
she had gone to a doctor’s surgery where no one knew her, given them two strands of hair which
she had taken from their pillows and which she had read were enough to find a code of something
called DNA, a kind of genetic fingerprint. The surgery had sent the hairs to the Institute of Forensic
Medicine at Rikshospitalet which was employing this new method in paternity cases. And after two
months all doubt was gone. It had not been a dream: the car park, the black prints, the panting, the
pain.
She looked at the telephone again. Of course it had been a wrong number. The breathing she had
heard at the other end was the perplexed reaction to hearing an unexpected voice, indecision as to
whether to put the receiver down or not. That was all.
Harry went into the hall and picked up the entryphone.
‘Hello?’ he shouted over Franz Ferdinand on the sitting-room stereo.
No answer, just a car whizzing past in Sofies gate.