Yours Until Death Read Online Free PDF Page A

feel as if you’re mushing through knee-high snow. It never really cleared up. The clouds were a tight grey lid on the city. Walking on Mount Fløien was like climbing through dirty waterlogged cotton. I felt as if I were standing up to the roots of my hair in a pair of old sea-boots. No birds sang. And when I got home there weren’t any goldfish swimming in the aquavit. I emptied the bottle to make sure. I was right.
    I walked around Nordnes on Sunday. Once there’d been little wooden houses leaning against each other. Now there were dreary concrete cubes people lived in. Where there’d once been a playground and a seemingly endless park, an aquarium now housed big fish in too small tanks, and there was a Marine Biological Research Institute in a high-rise best suited for studying flying fish. There was asphalt where you’d once walked with a girl and had scuffed the gravel with the toe of your shoe. No goldfish swam in my second bottle of aquavit. Not one.
    I went back to the office on Monday morning. The sopping grey cotton had moved into my head, and the phone reminded me of a petrified toad.
    My city still lived outside the windows, but it lived without me. Down at the market, fish sellers with large red hands cut neat slices of grey-white fish for the ladies with their blue coats and brown nylon shopping bags. The florists stood aroundand looked as miserable as their brown-edged flowers. A lone grocer at the vegetable market peddled carrots from Italy, pak choi from Israel and heads of cabbage from the last century.
    Rain and sleet fell in curtains, and the water in Vågen rose up and barked. It was one of those days when people go around with faces like clenched fists and it doesn’t take much to make them attack. The afternoon arrived slowly and late. As if it didn’t want to show up at all. The phone went on being silent.
    I sat and stared at it. I could call …
    I could call my mother if she hadn’t been dead for the last year and a half.
    Or I could call a girl I knew in the Census Bureau if she hadn’t been so sarcastic the last time. I’d said, ‘This is Veum.’ She’d said, ‘Veum who? The one with the phone?’ I’d spent several days getting the point. And hadn’t called back.
    Or I could call Paul Finckel, journalist. We could have a beer, eat dinner. But then he’d tell me about all the girls he’d had lately, and nothing’s worse than hearing about all the girls other people have had – especially if you don’t believe a word they’re saying. He was divorced too. I often think everybody’s been divorced. One way or another.
    Finally I dialled a number at random. A man’s voice answered. ‘Jebsen speaking.’
    I said, ‘Um. Is Fru Andresen there?’
    ‘Who?’
    ‘Fru Andresen.’
    ‘Wrong number.’
    ‘Sorry.’
    ‘Right,’ he said and hung up.
    I sat and listened to the dialling tone. A dialling tone’s a funny thing. If you listen long enough it begins to sound asif someone’s calling you. Or a lot of people. A chorus. If you listen long enough, the lady from the phone company comes on the line and asks you to hang up.
    So I hung up, and left the office before it died in my arms.
    Monday’s a strange day. The weekend’s depression hasn’t let go of you and the new week hasn’t begun. Maybe we could get along without most of the week. In my racket.

8
    I ate dinner in the cafeteria on the second floor. Had a kind of meat stew. It tasted as if the street sweepers had forgotten it. But it was my own fault. I’d eaten there before.
    When I got home I brewed up a big batch of herb tea to clear the system of all the weekend’s fishing in the aquavit and settled down with a biography of Humphrey Bogart I’d already read. The photographs had that grainy grey tone which told you they’d been taken years before in a never-never land that’s long since gone. You don’t find the likes of Bogie any more. If he showed up in Bergen today, we’d laugh him right out of his