The cat thought so, too. As Anita Solheim stood up, it hissed at me in total agreement and shadow-boxed in the air with bared claws in front of my foot; an unambiguous warning about what would happen unless I made a prompt exit.

Not wishing to tempt fate, I did as they commanded.

209

28

To visit a nursing home, however well run it is, you need strong nerves. It is like entering a waiting room for asylum seekers, waiting mindlessly for their lawyer to eventually deliver the happy news that their application has been approved on the other side. Then they can leave their waiting status behind them with weary smiles, look around one final time and abandon their luggage for others to pack. Because they won’t need it. At the border there will be nothing to declare.

At a nursing home uncertain old age waits for you with hungry eyes. Here, in the secure corridors of an institution, you may yourself totter through the last years of your life as you search for a lost key or a code you never managed to learn by heart. Because the door is always locked.

I arrived there in the tense hour before the eagerly awaited lunch. From the kitchen came the hectic clinking and clanking of metal and crockery, white-clad carers hurried past with bedpans in one direction, steaming towels in another, smiling like marionettes, driven to the edge of a nervous breakdown because of staff shortages and too much overtime, reliant on public budgets’ miscellany section, because politicians blindly wiped the elderly from the fund-allocation documents, unheedful of their own potential fates.

At the reception desk near the main entrance I was referred to the floor and department where Ingeborg Kløve lived, and a few minutes later I was wandering down a symbolic corridor.210

The atmosphere was that of spent lives, pungent with body fluids, damp with tearless weeping. From a room you would never visit croaky voices called for help. A man’s falsetto voice chanted monotonously: ‘Jesus – Jesus – Jesus…’ Along the corridor came a very old man in a cardigan with holes in the elbows. On his chest he wore all the medals and ribbons he had been awarded in the boys’ brigade. He marched like a soldier, as erect as a standard-bearer, and gave himself orders: ‘Skansen Battalion! Order arms! Port arms! Mark time! Forward march!’ But the ranks behind him were invisible and no one apart from himself kept in time.

A much younger man, barely past his mid-sixties, was sitting in a chair, supporting himself on the arm rests as though in a space capsule ready for blast-off, but his expression was more vacant than the void he was heading for and his eyes were lifeless satellites, meteorites that had collided years before.

A couple of chairs away sat an old woman dressed in black with a large, pink doll on her lap. She was talking in a low voice to the doll, holding it up and combing its hair, straightening the little cardigan it was wearing, and if you didn’t know her you would never have imagined she had once been one of the most energetic debaters in the student union in the late fifties, one of the most tenacious campaigners for women’s rights.