before returning and meeting his own. His hands
had found a cloth to clean his glasses again and
again.
‘I know how you —’
‘You know nothing, doctor.’ The old man had
heard himself utter a short, dry laugh. ‘Don’t take
offence, Dr Buer, but I can guarantee you one thing:
you know nothing.’
He had observed the doctor’s discomfort and at
the same time heard the tap dripping into the sink at
the far end of the room. It was a new sound, and all
of a sudden and incomprehensibly he seemed to
have the hearing of a twenty-year-old.
Then Dr Buer had put his glasses back on, lifted a
piece of paper as though the words he was going to
say were written on it, cleared his throat and said:
‘You’re going to die, old chap.’
The old man would have preferred a little less
familiarity.
He stopped by a gathering of people, where he
heard a guitar being strummed and a voice singing
a song that must have sounded old to everyone
except him. He had heard it before, probably a
quarter of a century ago, but to him it could have
been yesterday. Everything was like that now – the
further back in time it was, the closer and the
clearer it seemed. He could remember things he
hadn’t thought of for years. Now he could close his
eyes and see things projected on his retina that he
had previously read about in his war diaries.
‘You should have a year left, at any rate.’
One spring and one summer. He would be able to
see every single yellowing leaf on the deciduous
trees in Studenterlunden as if he were wearing
new, stronger glasses. The same trees had stood
there in 1945, or had they? They hadn’t been very
clear on that day, nothing had. The smiling faces,
the furious faces, the shouts he barely heard, the
car door being slammed shut and he might have
had tears in his eyes because when he recalled the
flags people were waving as they ran along the
pavements, they were red and blurred. Their
shouts: The Crown Prince is back!
He walked up the hill to the Palace where several
people had collected to watch the changing of the
guard. The echo of orders and the smack of rifle
stock and boot heels reverberated against the pale
yellow brick façade. There was the whirr of video
cameras and he caught some German words. A
young Japanese couple stood with their arms
around each other, happily watching the show. He
closed his eyes, tried to detect the smell of
uniforms and gun oil. It was nonsense, of course;
there was nothing here that smelled of his war.
He opened his eyes again. What did they know,
these black-clad boy soldiers who were the social
monarchy’s parade-ground figures, performing
symbolic actions they were too innocent to
understand and too young to feel anything about.
He thought about that day again, of the young
Norwegians dressed as soldiers, or ‘Swedish
soldiers’ as they had called them. In his eyes they
had been tin soldiers; they hadn’t known how to
wear a uniform, even less how to treat a prisoner
of war. They had been frightened and brutal; with
cigarettes in their mouths and their uniform caps at
a rakish slant, they had clung to their newly
acquired weapons and tried to overcome their fear
by smacking their rifle stocks into the prisoners’
backs.
‘Nazi swine,’ they had said as they hit them, to
receive instant forgiveness for their sins.
He breathed in and savoured the warm autumn
day, but at that moment the pain came. He
staggered backwards. Water in his lungs. In twelve
months’ time, maybe less, the inflammation and the
pus would produce water, which would collect in
his lungs. That was said to be the worst.
You’re going to die, old chap.
Then came the cough. It was so violent that those
standing closest to him moved away involuntarily.
4
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Viktoria
Terrasse. 5 October 1999.
THE UNDER SECRETARY FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS,
BERNT Brandhaug, strode down the corridor. He
had left his office thirty seconds ago; in another
forty-five he would be in the meeting room. He
stretched his shoulders inside his jacket, felt that
they more than filled it out, felt his back muscles
strain against the material. Latissimus dorsi – the upper back muscles. He was sixty years old, but
didn’t look a day over fifty. Not that he was
preoccupied with his appearance. He was well
aware that he was an attractive man to look at,
without needing to do very much more than the
training that he loved anyway, as well as putting in
a couple of sessions in the solarium in the winter
and regularly plucking the grey hairs from what
had become bushy eyebrows.
‘Hi Lise!’ he shouted as he passed the