A Hard Time to Be a Father

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‘Rentals and so forth.’

They came to a park. An untidy slope of snow, thawing, green and brown tussock showing through the white, ran down to a partly frozen stream, tree-lined. Ducks swam in patches where the ice had melted, milling around, uncomfortably close to one another. Stella parked the BMW on the gravel verge. On the other side of the road, overlooking the park, stood turn-of-the-century apartment blocks, balconied, shabby but attractive in their deep Hanseatic colours. They had been built in an age where there was more space, fewer people; the buildings stood at a leisurely distance from one another, their proportions pleasant.

‘How attractive,’ said Lothar, who would always rather praise than blame. Good humour, he felt, made the world go round.

‘I lived here for eleven years,’ said Stella. ‘Up there on the fourth floor. The balcony with all the house plants.

I was married to a musician.’

‘What happened?’

‘He betrayed me,’ she said, and seemed disinclined to say more.

‘Did you love him?’ he pressed.

‘Oh, yes,’ she said bleakly.

She made no move to get out of the car. They sat there in silence. A duck made an aborted landing on the ice down below, and took off again directly. That made her laugh.

‘I moved out so she could move in,’ said Stella. ‘It was the sensible thing to do. So sensible, the Norwegians. She was Miss Oslo, a long time back. She had a degree in anthropology, and could play the bassoon besides.’

‘Miss Oslo?’ he was confused.

‘I’m talking the old world, not the new,’ she said. ‘I’m talking Beauty Queens. Hers was the female face and form Norway chose to present to the world. My husband served the same function, but as a musician. He would take his orchestra abroad: how everyone applauded: cut out clippings back home. They were made for each other. Though I think now there are financial problems. They are getting older: the young tread hard upon their heels. Incomes fall. You know how it is.’

A man came out of the wooden doors of the apartment block. He was in his early sixties, perhaps: thin, a little bent, gentle, elegant, a man of some dignity and authority. He carried a violin case. He did not notice the BMW or its occupants, though they should have been noticeable enough.

‘There he goes,’ said Stella. ‘There goes George. His mind on other things, as usual. Music, most likely. Miss Oslo had to all but lie on her back and wave her legs in front of him, before he so much as noticed. But such long legs, in the end he couldn’t help it. I don’t blame him, I blame her.’

‘Don’t you want to speak to him? Shouldn’t you go after him?’

‘More fun to speak to Miss Oslo, 1970,’ said Stella.

A blond boy of about twelve came out of the apartment door, and ran after George. He too had a violin case; it banged against his legs when he ran. He took George’s hand.

‘That will be Tora,’ said Stella. ‘They had a boy, later, a half-brother for Karianne.’

‘Karianne?’

‘My daughter,’ said Stella. ‘She chose to stay with her father. This is Norway: children have rights too, you know. She’s seventeen now. It seemed best to keep out of her life one way and another.’

A dark-eyed boy came out of the apartment block and stared at the car. He was Turkish, or perhaps Kurdish, with smooth plump, dusky cheeks; beautiful, rather girlish. Lothar thought he would be perfect as a model for the child in his next book. When the boy had enough of staring, he went in again.

‘He’ll have gone to fetch his friends,’ said Stella.

‘Don’t leave me alone here,’ said Lothar, suddenly nervous and a long way from things familiar. The sun had gone in: such snow which still rested on branches stopped glittering, and the white had a kind of deadness.

‘Don’t be so nervous,’ she said.

She reached across him and opened the glove box. She felt beneath papers and brought out a hand weapon, squat, dull and black, showed it briefly to Lothar, smiled, and tucked the gun back under the papers again.

‘A gun?’ he asked, incredulous. ‘A real one?’

‘Yes, and it’s loaded,’ she said. ‘So don’t be stupid with it. But guns make anyone feel safe. Just knowing they’re there.’

He remembered she’d made some kind of deal with a couple of young men in a bar the night before they left Copenhagen. A box had changed hands. She’d insisted on going to that particular bar, though there were better, smarter ones nearby, and the night was chilly. Click, click, her heels had gone down the cobbled harbour alleys.

‘Copenhagen’s cheap for weapons,’ she said. ‘I got it for a couple of hundred dollars. I’d have had to pay nearer eight back home.’

‘But why?’ he asked. ‘What can you possibly want a gun for?’

‘I’ll sell it to help pay for the trip,’ she said. ‘Since there’s a personal element in us coming here, I don’t like to charge it to my business. I hate being out of pocket.’

‘How do you get a weapon through customs?’

She looked at him sideways: eyes still bright and long-lashed; delinquent.

‘I have a friend in every port,’ she said. ‘It’s how I make my living.’

He supposed it to be a good living: her bracelet was solid gold; the buckle on her belt likewise. Her cases were soft leather. She’d paid cash for the car hire: she kept a wad of notes in her bag, rolled and in a rubber band. Too many for a wallet.

He could see he was of no practical use to her: she must sincerely want his company, or at least his body. He was flattered. This powerful, dangerous, effective person, with so much history, her body melting into his at night.

Now a young woman came out of the apartment block: pretty, and healthy, long-legged, black tights, short yellow skirt, leather jacket. A willowy black youth came out after her: shaven headed, well featured. They walked off hand in hand, black and white.

‘There goes the future,’ said Stella, without bitterness.

‘My daughter and what they’ve made of her. I’m going up.’

And without further ado, she left the car and vanished through the doors of the apartment block. She left the gun where it was: he was relieved. He had thought perhaps she was on some mission of vengeance. A group of boys, some nine or ten of them, had come out to stare at the BMW. They kept to their side of the road, reverential, passive and well behaved enough. They’d moved aside without protest, to let Stella by.

Lothar found his mouth was dry. He felt trapped. He realised he had no krone, only marks. He wished he could drive. Perhaps when he got back to Berlin he would give up the more extreme of his ecological principles, and take lessons. But would he be going back to Berlin? Past and future seemed to retreat. Supposing this alarming woman asked him to join her in England? What then? He might even accept. In theory, it was easy to work and earn in any European country.

He adjusted the driving mirror the better to see his face. He looked tired: the last couple of nights’ exhaustion showed. He took a compact out of his travelling bag, and opened it: dark blue eye-shadow. He applied a little to his eyelids with his fingers and smoothed it in. The action calmed him: he found people seldom noticed. Now a little mascara on the lashes. Soft, young, dark eyes looked back at him, but they weren’t his, they were out of the side mirror. The boy and his friends had crept up to the car. Now they pointed and laughed, white teeth sharp in wide mouths. He knew enough about vehicles to switch on the BMW’s ignition and close a crack of window, which he saw was open on the driver’s side. With a casual elbow, he triggered the central locking system.

He felt safer. He switched on the radio and stared fixedly ahead. The radio gave him rock music. Making as little movement as he could, he changed the station. Jerome Kern. When he allowed himself to look again the children had retreated to their own side of the street. Hostility now seemed to be mixed with curiosity. Avoid eye contact, he thought. Where were their mothers? Their fathers? Was there no one about to disperse them, send them about their business? Did the police never come down here?

On the fourth floor of the apartment block Miss Oslo opened her front door, thinking it was the dry-cleaning delivery, and saw George’s wife standing there. Most people by the time they arrived up here were panting a little. But Stella’s breath came easily.

‘I didn’t know you were in Oslo,’ said the former beauty queen. She had the sculpted face of so many Scandinavian women past their first youth: the hair scraped firmly back; handsome, all character, no nonsense.

‘I was just passing through,’ said Stella, and laughed. All kinds of things seemed to amuse her.

‘No one goes to Oslo on the way to anywhere,’ observed Miss Oslo. ‘You’ve just missed the others. What a pity! Little Tora went off with his father: they play such good music together. And Karianne’s off with her boyfriend for a couple of days. You should have given us some warning.’

‘It’s you I’ve come to see.’

‘I’m delighted,’ said Miss Oslo, backing into the layers of foliage which broke up the cold clean lines of the apartment. ‘You are always welcome here.’

Nothing was disorderly, nothing was out of place. Even the papers on Miss Oslo’s desk, at which she had evidently been disturbed, were neatly arranged: her reference books evenly placed. Old books. A Small Hut in Bali. The Penang Peninsula in the 1920s: Art and Habitat. Asian Myth, Eurasian Artefact. Distant places, distant years, collected, confined and organised, here in this Northern city.

‘I am not in the least welcome,’ said Stella. ‘I don’t want to be welcome.’

‘Ah, Stella,’ said Miss Oslo, kindly, ‘still the naughty little girl!’

And she made the Englishwoman sharp black coffee and they talked about George’s health and Karianne’s new black lover, and anything other than why Stella was there. Stella enquired about the possibility of marriage between her daughter and the black man, and Miss Oslo laughed and said Stella was old-fashioned: these days in Oslo, marriage was a rare occurrence. ‘But George would like her to,’ said Stella. ‘Or so he wrote and told me.’

‘I didn’t know you and George corresponded,’ said Miss Oslo, taken aback.

‘He writes to me,’ said Stella, ‘when you have an affair, or he’s upset in some way.’

‘How strange,’ said Miss Oslo, ‘that he should turn to you, when he and I can discuss everything freely.’

‘He doesn’t want to discuss,’ said Stella, ‘he wants to complain.’

She went out on to the balcony, and stood there, to look over the frozen park and the hapless ducks, and the city she once knew so well. Miss Oslo came out after her.

‘It’s quite chilly out here,’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t you rather be inside?’

‘I felt I couldn’t breathe in there,’ said Stella. ‘But that’s just Oslo, isn’t it? Airless.’

‘I don’t understand what you mean,’ said the younger woman. ‘Oslo is exceptionally unpolluted for a major city.’

‘Even out here it’s airless enough,’ said Stella, ‘I remember standing here one day while you explained to me how my marriage was over, and George nodded and agreed. I thought I was suffocating. So much sense, so little passion, it was hard to breathe.’

‘It was all for the best,’ said Miss Oslo.

Looking down, Stella could see the shiny roof of the BMW and the children who circled it.

‘Is it school holidays?’ she asked.

‘No,’ said Miss Oslo. ‘All the children are in school. Do come in and finish your coffee. It’s strong, but it’s decaffeinated.’

‘One is always so safe in Norway,’ said Stella, but she didn’t go inside. ‘More and more things to be safe from. Caffeine, nicotine, alcohol.’

‘These things are bad for one, or put others at risk,’ said Miss Oslo primly hovering.

‘These things are beautiful,’ said Stella. ‘It is one’s right to self-destruct before time.’

Miss Oslo’s face stayed blank.

Stella lit a cigarette and puffed. Politeness and distaste warred in Miss Oslo’s face; politeness won: she said nothing. Ash from Stella’s cigarette span in the wind and landed on the soil of a potted plant.

‘You can remove it later,’ said Stella, ‘flake by sinful, uncivilised flake! I see you have a string of nuts hung out for the birds. How kind you are, Miss Oslo; even the birds of the air experience your goodness! But Miss Oslo does not work out what happens next. She is naive. Those you do good to hate you. The birds of the air and the beasts of the earth will eat your crumbs, and return to take everything you have.’

‘I have a deadline,’ said Miss Oslo. ‘An article to deliver by this afternoon. I really have to get back to my desk.

But it was wonderful to see you.’

Stella came back inside, but made no move to leave.

Downstairs in the front of the BMW, Lothar stared fixedly at his knees. The children circled. There must be nearly twenty of them now. There were a handful of girls amongst them now, he noticed, not so good-looking as the boys; they had more crowded, cramped, sullen faces. Surely someone would come along soon. The boy he assumed was the leader – the one he had hoped to draw – drew out a coin and scratched it along the side of the car, slowly and deliberately. The children laughed. Lothar froze. He did not know what to do, or what would happen next.

‘Tell me why you’re here,’ said Miss Oslo.

‘I thought perhaps you’d like to know,’ said Stella, ‘that George has been sleeping with your baby-sitter, Camilla. Sometimes he writes to boast as well as to complain. It happens when you’re away, on your case studies.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ said Miss Oslo eventually. ‘George and I are totally open with one another in sexual matters. If there was anything to tell me, he would have discussed it with me.’

‘Disloyalty takes all forms,’ said Stella. ‘What you citizens of Oslo have to fear is not the enemy without, but the enemy within. It’s not the Russians creeping down from the tundra, or the Germans seeping up from the lowlands; it’s the serpent in your bosom, the snake you saved from the cold. George writes to me to say he wishes to marry Camilla; but he does not know how to break it to you.’

‘You’re lying,’ said Miss Oslo, white as a sheet: she had run her hand through her hair, and wisps had escaped from their confining band.

‘I wrote to him; why! I said, just to be honest about it, civilised. Do it in Camilla’s presence. Explain to her that her relationship with you is finished, dead. Your turn, Miss Oslo, to stand on the balcony, and try to breathe. Tora is so close to his father, from what you say, no doubt he’ll choose to live with his father and his new mother, not you and your no one.’

Some six or seven of the children had coins in their hands: they ran them in patterns over the car: the paint on bonnet and doors split, blistered and flaked as in their poison hands the sharp metal edges of the coins crissed and crossed. The children laughed to see the damage. Lothar reached for the gun in the glove compartment. He pointed it at the circling enemy, first this side then that. The children laughed louder and jeered and pointed. Either they thought the gun was a toy or they didn’t care what happened next. That last was the most frightening thing.

‘What goes around, comes around,’ said Stella, upstairs. ‘As life goes by, it becomes apparent there is some justice in it.’ Miss Oslo wept.

The leader of the boys leaned over and pressed his face, gargoyle-like, against the windscreen of the BMW. Lothar screamed aloud in fear and fired the gun; the bullet hit against toughened glass, failed to pierce it: instead ricocheted around the inside of the car, bouncing off walls and seat backs and dashboard, finally hitting and lodging in Lothar’s right shoulder. He screamed again, and the children scattered, scared off by noise, and running feet, and the wail of approaching police cars. By the time the ambulance had arrived, there was no sign of the children. Lothar freed the locks with his one usable hand, and even that was bloody. Someone opened the car door, and helped him out.

Stella came out of the apartment block in time to see the commotion: Lothar saw her and called out, but Stella could see it was not in her interests to be involved. She didn’t cross the road to him, but turned away and walked swiftly round the corner and out of sight.