He smiled and was gone.

I sat gazing up the mountainside. There still wasn’t a single bonfire to be seen. But the prophecy had been clear enough, and you didn’t need to believe in God to see that it could well come true.

In the meantime we all had our assignments on earth. There were still questions to ask, still answers to root out in the darkness.

Gradually I could see the outline of a pattern. The person who 307could help me to see it with total clarity was probably Ruth Solheim.

Or Jakob.

Or Rebecca.

308

39

I rang the bell downstairs and Rebecca’s voice came from the adjacent intercom speaker: ‘Yes?’

‘Varg here.’

For a moment there was silence. Then the lock buzzed and I pushed the door open. The harsh light inside peeled off an elongated shadow of my body and pasted it onto the wall behind me. The stairwell resounded with a hollow echo, as though it was the shadow’s footsteps I heard.

As I walked up I saw Rebecca standing outside the door, waiting. Her face was pale, her mouth tightly pursed. But she had always been pale. Even after two months on holiday in the summer she was. But then she had always spent her summers in Hardanger.

‘Hi,’ I smiled cheerily. ‘May I come in?’

She shrugged and let me pass. ‘In there,’ she said, pointing to the kitchen. ‘Helga has a visitor.’

I could hear she had. From the sitting room came loud feminist laughter, as if after a successful castration. I walked by quickly before they scented the blood of a Christian male.

The kitchen was large with a blue-and-white checked wax cloth on the table, new units in white wood, green ceramic tiles above the sink and charcoal sketches in black varnished frames on the walls. Portraits of women, shaded and thoughtful.

Two empty wine bottles stood on the worktop and coffee was dripping contemplatively through a machine. Rebecca indicated the back staircase. ‘Up there.’309

I opened the door and came into the stairwell facing the yard. ‘The door on the right,’ she said, from behind me.

I opened it and went in.

It was the smallest bed-sit I had ever seen. The floor surface couldn’t have been more than twelve to fifteen square metres. There was enough room for a sofa bed along the wall on the left of the door, a desk and a chair facing the window in the middle, and a dresser and shelving along one short wall. On the other side of the room there were two suitcases, and skirts, blouses and a coat hung from clothes hangers.

On the desk there was a pile of student exercise books, an open coursebook and an English dictionary. On the window sill there was a black portable radio; someone was rambling on about how people used to celebrate Christmas in the old days.

A desk lamp cast sharp, white light over the open books. Otherwise the room lay in merciful half-light, although it was still unable to hide the stains on the carpet, the worn lino covering the floor and the impression of a homeless boarding-house existence that covered everything like dust. It felt like being in the lift, halfway between two floors in life, during a power cut after the caretaker had gone home.