Only Human Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Bea Britt lives alone in her grandmother’s house in west Oslo. Early one morning, she wakes to find a police hunt outside her window and drama unfolding on her TV. Volunteers are scouring the local woods looking for Emilie, a missing schoolgirl.

  Emilie’s rucksack is found in Bea Britt’s garden. But as her spiralling doubts and suspicions take over, is she a suspect, a witness or a potential second victim?

  The mystery of Emilie’s disappearance and Bea Britt’s story are intricately bound to the lives of two other women: Bea Britt’s grandmother Cecilie, a troubled 1930s housewife whose marriage has broken down, and university student Beate, who is desperate for love but plagued by uncertainty.

  Only Human is a rich, urgent novel about family, enduring oneself and others, and what is needed when life wears thin. It lays bare the hopes, dreams, fears and failures of three infinitely human characters, and is delicately revealing of the choices that shape a human life and our quest for companionship and love.

  About the Author

  KRISTINE NÆSS is a writer, editor and literary critic. She is widely regarded as one of the best Scandinavian writers working today, and is celebrated for her distinct, personal voice. Only Human was nominated for the 2015 Nordic Council Literature Prize, and is her debut in English.

  SEÁN KINSELLA is from Dublin. He has translated books by, among others, Kjell Askildsen and Tore Renberg. His translation of Stig Sæterbakken’s Through the Night was longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award 2014. He lives in Norway.

  KRISTINE NÆSS

  Only Human

  Translated from the Norwegian by Seán Kinsella

  1

  I switch on the TV, listening to it as I walk out onto the veranda and down the stone steps into the garden. The press conference is being shown. Hearing the noises from it through the open window seems to divide everything into two streams of sound: one fast flowing, choppy with bright light, belonging to the TV, and the other. Out here. Which is slow-moving, ponderous and indefinable. Midges and mosquitoes buzz about my face, my shoes sink a little in the moss that has supplanted the grass in the more shaded areas around the house. On the news they are saying there have not been any new developments. I step into the sunshine to feel the warmth. Rainwater from last night’s showers has accumulated along the folds of the tarpaulin protecting the firewood. It might get wet. Every time it rains I think about covering the woodpile with strips of corrugated iron instead. But I never get around to it.

  A white plastic chair stands at the gable wall of the house. There is green mould spreading up the legs, and two of them have sunk into the soft earth, leaving me slightly lopsided when I sit, but the chair has to stand in this spot, precisely where the sunlight breaks through the foliage. The stool on which I usually place the radio is made from wood and has begun to rot because of its soaking up the damp. Small snails cling to it.

  The plastic feels warm against my back as I sit down. I have my mug with me. In the mornings I fill it up with tea or coffee, in the evenings usually red wine. The peony, gooseberry bushes and plum tree are still doing well among the scrub and weeds. Strips of sunlight rest upon all the green, upon the bracken and the moss growing where previously there was a lawn. Now and again, a damp smell from the wall of the house hits me, possibly the foundations have absorbed moisture, that would explain the musty odour in the cellar. I am sensitive to smells. When down in the cellar you can see the sunlight through the spiderweb over the window, dead flies, the four legs of the chair outside, white, flaked plastic.

  They were in the garden just before six this morning. I was not afraid.

  No, I was not afraid, and maybe that was a bad sign, I thought and rolled onto my back to hear better, I have become listless, irresolute, could not care less about things. That was the customary accompanying self-analysis, I would usually admonish myself for that too, even at the same time as I was indulging in it, filled with self-contempt. This inner nagging, always there. At the same time I listened to what was going on outside, tried to identify the noises. Could it be animals? A badger or cat, perhaps the roe deer I sometimes saw making their way through the garden early in the morning. But the rustling of the tarpaulins covering Dad’s junk seemed too purposeful, and it could only have been footsteps I heard going across the grass. When the sound of men’s voices reached me, I got up and opened the window. The casement stay struck the window ledge as I was fitting the hole over the peg. A man wearing an orange reflective vest came out from behind the garage and said something to another man standing in the yard. They both looked up at the window. The logo of the Red Cross was visible on their vests.

  We’re searching for someone.

  The one who spoke was about my age, with short hair, greying at the temples, and glasses, an academic sort I thought, but evidently an out-of-doors type too. He was tall and well built, healthy, agile-looking. I felt something stir in my chest, before remembering how it was too late for that, men, sex, all that stuff. I had spent my sexual prime on individuals with serious faults and shortcomings. Individuals with low self-esteem, not unlike myself, as I was only too well aware.

  The men neither smiled nor apologised for the intrusion into my garden. They knew what they were doing, and how it took precedence over other considerations. It was all to do with dignity and respect. They had undertaken an important duty to society. They were searching for a person. I did not dare to ask whom, did not want to appear nosy. Sensation-seeking. I was above that kind of thing. I missed out on a lot because of it, had done my whole life.

  I withdrew from the window, made my way downstairs and went online. Sure enough, the newspapers already carried stories of a missing person. A twelve-year-old girl had disappeared from her home in Slemdal in Oslo.

  The photograph must have been taken in the early hours, at daybreak. The tarmac was wet, the leaves on the trees still dark, the street lamps glowing orange. It was on this road, they believed, that she had been walking at two o’clock the previous afternoon, and since then nobody had seen her. I recognised it immediately as Skådalsveien, and suddenly felt my body drain, my thoughts grasping at the words on the screen. Like believing yourself hidden, only to be seen, incredulous, the blanket being torn away. I was panic-stricken, and the anxiety took its usual form, a chaos of black and white dots in my vision. Alertness.

  Skådalsveien branches off from Gulleråsveien, continues uphill, past my house and straight on to the lower side of Vettakollen railway station, where it intersects Skogryggveien, before swinging uphill to Skådalen station. On the far side of the railway tracks, a little way up the slope, a forest path leads off to the left, past Mindedammen pond, and carries on into Nordmarka, the huge forested region nor
th of Oslo, while Vettaliveien continues towards the top. This is where the Montessori school is situated. On the other side of the school playground, Huldreveien runs down to Vettakollen station and Skogryggveien. Skådalsveien joins this road again a little further down and the ring is closed, unless you walk up the steep slope between the blocks of flats behind the station and end up in the woods.

  So that was where she had taken her dog for a walk. On the residential streets, close to the woods the whole time, and my heart pounded, because it could not have been anyone else but Emilie, the Emilie I knew, Emilie with the poodle, my Emilie. Yes, my heart pounded madly, the blood beating in my chest, throbbing at my temples and by my collarbone, it was fear that could easily be mistaken for anticipation. This was happening, finally something was happening.

  A child. I should have guessed. Their faces would not have borne those expressions had it been a senile escapee from the nursing home, because old people run away, it is not uncommon, they stumble and fall in confusion, end up out at night, exposed to the elements, freeze to death.

  The rescue services had not searched gardens when Agnieszka Andresen was killed the summer before last, nor did they use helicopters. Now two of them hung high above the rooftops. Perhaps they never got as far as organising a search from the air, seeing how a rambler came across Agnieszka’s dead body less than twenty-four hours after she was reported missing. Up by Mindedammen pond, in the thicket. It was a warm, quiet summer afternoon, midges swarmed in the sunlight, the forest smelled of pine and evergreen needles.

  She had been beaten with both blunt and sharp objects. Perhaps with rocks, a club or cudgel, and something resembling a pickaxe. The newspapers and online media published drawings of possible murder weapons, and I was not the only one to associate these with the medieval, due no doubt to these illustrations, which left you with the sense that we were dealing with something from a different era. A monk made an appearance on TV, talking about how he could not go out in his cowl any longer. He had, of course, always attracted attention when wearing it, he said, but this was different. Children were terrified, and grown men ran after him in the street, demanding to know both his name and his details. He had been interviewed by the police and they had searched his flat and storage space in the cellar of his building. Everyone who knew him described it as absolutely ridiculous. Two tabloids, Dagbladet and VG, featured lengthy interviews with his brothers from the monastery, his family and his friends, many of whom were well known. In the comments sections beneath articles and in editorials there was debate about how the enormous media focus on the case had given rise to a certain level of hysteria and whether or not this was healthy. Jesus, this was the way things had become. All the talk and talk and talk made me feel as though my head would explode, and yet I followed the story closely, gorged myself upon it, but in an almost absent-minded way, with indifference, yes, that was the way I had become. The newspapers piled up on the table, the TV had been on, the radio too, as well as the PC.

  I listened to an in-depth interview with the monk on the radio. The journalist asked what made a young man choose an existence behind monastery walls, rejecting the chance of a family, children and an ordinary love life.

  Love is not ordinary, he had replied, not enough.

  I did not know whether he meant there was not enough of it, or if love was not enough, as in a person’s life, and if that was the case, I thought, not enough for what or for whom? Because what is greater than love, what could be? Something extra, something that unfolds, and then unfolds anew, and so on, a blossom within a blossom?

  You could say, he said, that I have turned away from loving one in order to love everybody. I have such great yearning. So I seek expansion, constant expansion.

  I can remember being frightened of men in coats when I was little, at least when it was dark outside and I had to pass one on my way home, in the autumn gloom or on winter evenings. He might open his coat and trap me. He might be naked underneath, with a huge willy sticking right out. When I was around eight years old, a flasher used to turn up on the streets from time to time, he would open his coat and expose himself, or at least that is what I remember. I also recalled an aunt, laughing, opening her coat and jumping out in front of me in the living room and saying boo. Perhaps there was no flasher, just a prank. Or perhaps I remembered both a flasher and a prank? It can be hard to know the difference. If what you think you see is what you actually see. I was even more scared if a man had both his hands in his coat pockets, or walked slowly. If I could see he had his hands in front of him, in the pockets, over his crotch. When I thought about it, I was sure that on several occasions I had seen men on the road touching themselves under their coats. I did not believe it, but even so it happened. They touched themselves while looking into my eyes and walked slowly past. Why did they do that?

  No one knows exactly what happened to Agnieszka Andresen, the police would not go public with all the details and neither the perpetrator nor the murder weapons were found. Agnieszka was fifty-two years old when she was killed, living on benefits and a moderate alcoholic, but described as kind and unassuming. She had no husband, but she had a dog, as well as a crowd she hung out with, they would meet at a bar in Kampen.

  Middle-aged old bag, was my first thought, and I found myself filled with contempt, something flabby and ageing that had a knife put to its throat and was suddenly thrashing about, full of life.

  Where did that disdain come from? Because it often came, an abhorrence of people I did not know, a furious urge to destroy, to crush and obliterate. Or I might hear the most terrible stories without feeling anything at all. A person was killed, raped, blown up – you don’t say. Then I would just think about something else. About the weather. About myself. My children. Cold. Selective.

  But when they found Agnieszka Andresen’s dog, all those callous thoughts of mine melted away. It had been strung up in a tree. A black, flat-coated retriever. Its stomach had been slashed open, and it was hanging helplessly from its hind legs; stretched out like that it was as long as a person. That made me cry, and made the police revise their theory of the murder being an alcohol-related incident.

  I had stood at the window watching the police cars that time too. They drove back and forth on the road outside. An ambulance arrived, but without sirens. I turned on the TV, sat up all night following the story. They showed footage of the crime scene, the walking trail, the neighbourhood I had never really settled into. Was angry with. All those unfriendly, rich cows who lived around, in their perfect make-up. I had caught a glimpse of my own house on the screen. The residents were outside on the street talking to one another. Some of them had given interviews on camera, and they kept showing them on a loop, the same clips over and over again of the neighbours’ nosy faces. Horrible to think it happened so close by, they said, and we could not understand what she was doing up at Mindedammen pond. Why would she take her dog for a walk up around here when she lived on the other side of town? Those who knew her said she never went far from home. Mostly down to the bar in Kampen, but she did not take the dog with her then. She walked it close to the block of flats where she lived, or took it for longer walks in the woods, from Steinbruvannet lake and further into Østmarka, the forested area east of the city. So how could she have known about the trail in Skådalen? She was not even Norwegian. Polish, married to a Norwegian, then divorced. Agnieszka did not like dogs at all, her weeping mother in Warsaw had revealed. An entire TV crew had made the trip there to talk to her: ‘It was his dog, Olaf’s dog.’ Olaf was the husband. He knew nothing about it, he said on the phone from Spain, while the TV displayed a blurry photograph of a plump man playing golf in the sunshine. It’s just awful, he said. And the dog, here he was on the verge of tears, Agnieszka loved that dog, he had not had the heart to take it with him when they divorced. He had given it to her, he said. She had taken it in, the mother said, because Olaf ‘wanted to kill it’. Agnieszka was dutiful and kind, she said, ‘of course she was not drinking
’. I wouldn’t have said she drank more than anyone else drinks, said Olaf, she didn’t drink any more than him in any case, it was rather, look, he met someone else, you know. A bit more perky.

  They did not find the killer. I thought about that now, while the search parties walked through the woods towards the forest lakes of Bånntjern and Sognsvann, went over gardens, outhouses and paths in the neighbourhood with a fine-tooth comb. Maybe he has been here all the time, I thought, maybe he lives nearby, has a face I know or a gait I recognise because I usually see him at the shop, on the train or on the road.

  Yes, it might be down to pure chance, because sometimes you are lucky and other times not. If you cannot be with the one you love, then love the one you are with, all food is good food, and so on.

  Maybe things were looking up for Agnieszka at the time, and she was thinking about doing something with her life, trying new things. At any rate, she had begun going to the library to read the newspapers every morning, and that, her best friend had said, was something new. Maybe it had been a sunny day and she had been dazzled by the light on the newspaper spread out on the table in front of her. As she lifted her head and looked around for a chair in the shade, she caught sight of the librarian filling up the nearest display shelf with newspapers and brochures. The sunlight shone on the librarian’s bronze-coloured hair, it was so beautiful. Agnieszka felt the impulse to take a look through the adult-education catalogue she saw in the librarian’s hand. Maybe she could enrol for something, she thought, a sewing course, for instance, she’d had that in the back of her mind for a long time, to learn how to make her own clothes. Sometimes at night she would dream about patterns and colour combinations, in fabrics she had never seen the like of in real life, they would hang in an open window, diaphanous in the sunlight. In the dream, she only had to run her fingers over them, and they turned into outfits and dresses, garments she had never imagined could exist, and the body they adorned was her own, Agnieszka’s own face, ethereal, she dreamt.