Before I Burn: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

before the hunt began. Now he was waiting in front of me. Ester was there, too. Ester, who always played the elf when we celebrated Christmas at my grandmother’s. Ester laughed in a way that made everything inside you melt. Ester was there. And Tønnes was there, a little to the back. Tønnes died only a few days after my grandmother, as though it was inconceivable that he should be the only neighbour left alive. And there were even more. There were many I recognised, whom I had seen at one time or another, perhaps at the post office counter, or in front of the postcard stand at Kaddeberg’s, or at the Christmas party in the chapel when the chairs were pushed back against the walls so that there was room for four concentric circles of people, each alternate circle rotating in the opposite direction around the Christmas tree while the snow swirled against the windows, and everyone’s cheeks were flushed as they sang. It was as though I knew them without knowing who they were. Even those I had never seen before. For all I knew, Johanna was there as well, and Olav, and maybe Kåre had made an appearance on his crutches at the fringes where the darkness made it impossible to see. Perhaps Ingemann and Alma were there, too. Perhaps Alma was there, too, with both legs intact, closing her eyes and leaning her head back. And who knows, perhaps Dag was there as well? Perhaps he was standing there with his arms crossed, right at the back of the church steps where I couldn’t see him.
    I have no idea where they came from, but they stood there, silent, serious, pale and reserved, waiting for me to begin.
    They had come to listen to me.
    Somehow I managed to collect myself enough to get through the three or four pages I had chosen. I read a story about a father who falls off a ladder and a son who knows he cannot carry him indoors to the sofa.
    When I finished there was a burst of applause. I wasn’t prepared for it. After all, I had read the passage in Norwegian, and no one, apart from my interpreter, would have understood a word. Nonetheless, the applause was resounding and sincere. Like a storm around me, the clapping merged with the wind, and the moment I raised my eyes I saw Pappa. He was right at the back, at the top of the church steps, with the massive door behind him. I had seen him once before, a few years earlier. On that occasion we had both been sitting in our respective cars. It was night. I had been driving in the deserted, well-lit tunnel beneath Baneheia, the Nature Park in Kristiansand. Then a car came towards me. I could see from quite some distance it was him. Yet only after he had passed by did it strike me that neither of us had waved. And so it was this time, too. Neither of us waved. Not long afterwards I saw Grandma standing there as well, with Grandad directly behind her. They stood to the right of Pappa. I don’t know whether they were smiling. I don’t know what they were thinking. But I saw them. And they saw me.
    The next day I took a taxi to Bologna airport. I was behind schedule, and we sped off at a 170 kilometres an hour on a motorway called the A1, which went straight to Rome. I just made it to the airport in time, boarded the KLM flight and found my seat by a window on the right, at the front. I sat down and, full of a kind of expectation, watched all the others who would be traversing Europe, all the way to Schiphol, Amsterdam. But I was unable to recognise any of those who entered and took their seats. All the dead had remained with the crowd in the darkened square in Mantua. Somehow I was reassured, and as the plane roared up the runway and lifted into the air I fell into a doze. We made a wide arc over the Po Plain; I saw the river winding like a snake, the tin roofs of the houses shining with a matt gleam, not a sign of life. Just flat, rust-red countryside. After a while the plane straightened and before long I could see the Alps rising beneath us. With a strange serenity, bordering on