For three years we were together. We were moved around the classroom, so the diagonals between us were in constant flux. But we were there. In the same room. We listened. To the same voices. And occasionally our eyes met, over Jakob’s head or whoever was in the way, and in our faint smiles we forged thin, almost invisible, bonds that only when school was over would suddenly bring us closer, for a brief while, until they were broken for good and we went our separate ways forever.

She was still a young girl, physically gauche, who yawned openly in the first lessons, hid her giggles behind a hand when someone made a joke and became solemn if for some reason the conversation turned to religion.

She attended Christian Youth meetings every week, and a couple of times I managed to coax Jakob along to the clubhouse in Kalfarveien, though he was unaware of why. He was clearly bored while I, attentive and excited, watched her fold her hands, lower her head and pray to a God I didn’t know.

For a short period she got it into her head that she was going to save me, but pitted against such thorny questions as who Cain’s wife was, where angels came from and where Jesus was between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, she soon realised that 141this was futile. Unable to force myself to change, I lost a piece of her soul then and there.

A third important moment was when everything around us fell silent, the voices from the other rooms disappeared and we saw that we were alone. And, because it was predetermined that it would happen at this precise instant, I slowly leaned towards her. And because she had known me since we were small and we had almost been brother and sister, her face took on an expression of visible embarrassment as she turned it upwards and waited for me to reach it. And then I kissed her. At that moment, one stormy evening in June 1961, we kissed, and it…

I opened my eyes and stared up at the ceiling.

That was my mark. That was where I left my mark. Later many others left theirs on top and probably there were also some from before, but at that particular moment in time, that was my mark. Rebecca.

I closed my eyes again and could still smell her hair, her skin, which had the slightest hint of a perfume, and I could still feel the cool pressure of her lips in the softest kiss I would ever receive.

The images flickered on and we were standing by a front door in Landås. She was looking at the window to see if her father was waiting, meaning she would have to run, so the last kisses were all too fleeting. There was more flickering: I met her with some others – I stood with my hands in my pockets, watching where they went, and I never got back the piece of her soul I had once lost. ‘Promises are eternal’ her father’s congregation had sung while we were up in the gallery, but she had never made me any. I understood that then, even if it took me several years before I really assimilated it. Rebecca was never going to be mine. Not in that way.142