The floor was laid with a warm, matte oakwood and I slipped my shoes off, feeling its smooth surface against my bare feet. On the wall of the corridor leading to the other rooms were several black-and-white, professionally-shot photographs, blown up big and placed in identical brushed-bronze colonial-style frames. I moved from one to the next slowly, taking in each one carefully, stopping to take pictures of them all on my phone. The picture of your niece and nephew is so beautiful. I wanted to know their names. And the one with you and Eirik on your wedding day. Everyone always says that a bride was radiant on her wedding day, but never was it more true than for you. I could have cried just looking at you, and maybe I did. He’s a handsome guy, Eirik, but from a purely physical attractiveness perspective he pales next to you. Still, he has the self-satisfied smile of a man who believes he deserves you and knows he can afford to spoil you. Does he treat you like a trophy, Kristina? Does he make you feel like just another piece on the chessboard of his life? A queen perhaps, but a piece, nonetheless.

I liked the picture of you, Trine and Elisabeth, too. Back then, I didn’t know what I know now, so I thought it was just a cute shot of three cute teenagers posing together, smiling innocently at the camera, arms flung around each other’s shoulders. You’re in the middle, of course. Now, I want to know how you can walk past that photograph every day of your life. Doesn’t looking at those young, smiling faces fill you with dread and with the images of what was to come? Or do you think of yourself as so thoroughly healed that looking at them fails to provoke any emotional response? Then why do you cry on the street in Rosenborggata? Why do you fill your diary with all those detailed nightmares of crashing through forests echoing with laughing voices and the sound of gunshots? Why do you write out all those calculations, trying to work out if the outcome could have been different?

See, I get all agitated putting all of this on the page. It isn’t easy, that’s for sure. My mind is like a storm. I didn’t know then what I know now. I didn’t yet know what you’d been through or how much what happened to those three young girls would take from all of you. But even now, when I know everything, more than you, I still want to know how you can bear to look at all that innocence, every single day.

Are you ready to go back, further back, all the way back? Shall we go back to Carúpano? Yes, Kristina, I know. I know all about Carúpano.

39

Kristina