Before I Burn: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

happiness, I thought of all the newspaper cuttings lying at home waiting for me, how I always feel before a job which, from a distance, appears both alluring and intimidating, and as we passed over Lake Constance I saw a ripple extending outwards in the water like a feather.
    So, I had to go to a little square in Mantua to begin my story about the fires, that was how it felt at any rate as I sat high above Germany flicking through my black notebook, the one in which I had written nothing while at home staring across Lake Livannet.
    There, at a height of 8,000 feet, I began to write about the eighth fire, the one that began early in the morning of 5 June 1978, the one that broke out in the kitchen and culminated with Olav and Johanna Vatneli’s house in ruins. Every so often I peered out of the window and looked down on the continent gliding peacefully by beneath me. Lake Constance slipped slowly behind us and was gone, and I turned back to my notebook. Across Europe, high above Stuttgart, Mannheim, Bonn and Maastricht, until we descended towards Amsterdam I wrote about these two people I had never met but whom I soon felt I knew. And it wasn’t until we had taken off again, from Schiphol on course for Kristiansand, that I managed to get the fire out of my head. As we flew over the North Sea I was at ease, clear in my mind, and I stared out of the window, through my reflection, into the blackness and down at the sea I knew was beneath me.
    VI.
    THE FOLLOWING NIGHT I knuckled down, and ever since sitting in the darkness over the North Sea I had known where I was going to start.
    I set off from home in the dusk, turned left at the crossing outside the library in Lauvslandsmoen and continued northwards. The drive took only four or five minutes and I left the car by a high granite wall. It was a quiet September evening, no one was around, only the cows in the fields. A gentle wind from the west. A storm was approaching, heading in from the sea. I am always so at peace when a storm is on the way. I don’t know why, but that was how it was this evening as well; I felt like sitting on a bench, lying down, stretching out, sleeping.
    I didn’t see any swallows even though I stood very still for a long time. Perhaps they had migrated south, or perhaps it is only in my dreams that they have nests in the church tower?
    Earlier that day I had been to see the church verger in Nodeland, and had been allowed to see the cemetery records, a leather-bound book with the number 5531 on the title page. I was given permission to take it home. It contained 616 names. Minus the stillborn babies, that is; they were merely given a number, but they were still included. All were allocated a row and a grave number. Everything was ordered and well organised. This was the closest I could get to a map of the cemetery.
    However, it transpired that I didn’t need a map. Now, I walked straight to the grave. It was the second one on the right after entering the gate. I hadn’t known beforehand that was where it would be. It was almost frightening. But there they were, Olav and Johanna, the woman who had gone into the burning house and up to the first floor for her bag. The man who had been in shock at that point, standing outside gawping like a child, and who later that morning, when the sun was rising, lay on a sofa in Knut Karlsen’s house, screaming.
    As I stood by the grave I remembered the interview that was carried out a few days afterwards. Once everything was over and Olav was back to his normal self. I remembered almost verbatim what he had said: I am so soft like that. Johanna is quite different. She’s so calm, she is.
    That was what he said, the old stonemason. He was so soft. She was so calm.
    I stayed in the cemetery until I felt the first raindrops on my hair. At length I found Ingemann and Alma thirty paces away, and beside them, Dag. They were separated by a two-metre-wide wall of earth. He had been given a black headstone, a bit smaller