In front of the house where she lived we said goodnight. For a moment her eyes found mine again and she stood still on the pavement as though something was holding her back, but then she was inside the door and gone. I walked home alone.

Six months later she and her family moved from Nordnes to another, newer, part of town. And in those days moving to another part of town meant someone was disappearing from your life.

But Rebecca didn’t disappear. Not for good. She returned.

96

13

I closed the photograph album and deposited the past in the cupboard. Then I had a shower, washed my hair and put on clean clothes. I went into the kitchen, boiled some water for coffee and started making some rice pudding.

While I was waiting for the pudding to finish I made myself comfortable in the sitting room. I took out the little amateur snap Jakob had given me. With the easily recognisable Blåmånen mountain behind her, Rebecca was sitting on a small crag surrounded by colourful September foliage. She was wearing an autumnal woollen jumper, brown speckled with red and orange. The photograph was like her, yet it wasn’t. I would have recognised her if I had met her in the street, of course, but the forty-four years had left their mark. The contours of her face were sharper, there was an ironic glint in her eyes and around her mouth a hint of resignation, but the autumn wind was lifting her hair and she was trying to keep it out of her eyes with her slender, girlish hand. Behind her, the sky was a calendar blue. Another page was about to be torn off. Another year was heading down the last slopes, to December.

I carefully put the photo away, as though afraid it might go up in smoke. Then I flicked nervously through the pile of Saturday papers. Nothing had changed. What they called news was nothing but old wine in new bottles. For the umpteenth time the local football team was planning to buy loads of players, hoping this would help them to keep their heads above the second division 97for a little more than one season. The year’s bestselling book was by a politician who was interviewed in a total of three newspapers, without revealing the politician’s or the newspapers’ allegiances. The northern arterial road was still being improved and there was hope for a breakthrough before 1990. And among the death notices I found the mother of an old classmate.

I looked around me. Once upon a time a family of six had lived in these rooms. There hadn’t been a sitting room, kitchen, bedroom or a shower then. On the floor below lived the same old married couple. They were at the kind of age when they didn’t seem a day older than when I moved in, thirteen years earlier, and they were of the type that looked as though they might live forever. In the summer they went to their cabin on Askøy every other weekend. In the winter they mostly stayed indoors. When I met them in the hall we talked about the weather, as we Norwegians do.