Excerpts - Murder and Madness

Excerpts from Murder and Madness

Translated by Tom Geddes

I am going to tell a story. It's arrogance on my part, hubris, I'm well aware of that, induced by the need to be understood; I can't plead any nobler motive. It doesn't improve matters that it's a frankly fantastical story, and even worse - I'm going to tell it without a hint of irony.

But there's a reason for my desire to tell this story. I woke up early a few days ago, the night had not yet lifted, and I stood for a long time looking out of the window that has provided my only view for some while now. It was dark, and the street was enveloped in a greyish haze, an autumn mist. The buildings were indistinct and distorted outlines, illuminated by the yellow glow of the street lights, the colours of the facades and signs muted as if someone had given them a coat of dirty whitewash. A gentle breeze caught the mist and drew threads of it, damp and silky, along the streets. A newspaper van drove slowly down the street, stopping here and there to drop plastic-wrapped bundles of newspapers. That was all the movement I could see for a long time.

I stood thinking about my strange and unexpected fate, so absurdly unexpected for a man of my disposition, an interested observer who had never harboured any ambition for significant achievement. I dwelt on the word fate, and how people give it such different meanings: for some it implies something preordained, fate as original sin, something determined from birth, something we cannot escape. Our ends are shaped by a divinity, rough-hew them how we will, as Hamlet said, That's one way of putting it. For others it simply means that that was the way things turned out, post factum, or, in a lighter vein, que sera sera. I wondered myself as I stood there whether fate was perhaps just a convergence, a meeting of two or more events, elements, factors, In that case, I thought, my fate must be the result of a convergence of secrets, evil, faith, murder and madness.

Maybe even my own madness. There are plenty of people in this town and beyond it willing to swear that I must be mad, stark raving mad. Some even call me cursed, that's a word I've heard used. Perhaps I am. That's also possible. The fact that I believe in God doesn't exclude the possibility of the Devil believing in me.

I can't put my hand on my heart and swear that I'm not mad, but I'm the same as most of us - I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw. But everything that happened, happened in October and November, when the wind was south by south-west. And I have to say in my own defence at this juncture that this is a country where outlines can be indistinct, and a man can have trouble finding something firm to hang on to when he stumbles, so I think neither my madness nor any curse there might be on me is the point - though I had to admit to myself, as I stood there looking out into the mist, that I had perhaps never had a clear concept of where the dividing-line lay between madness and sanity.

.... Margareta's mind was on something else entirely. She stood up slowly and said, "Can that be the sun rising again already?"

I got up too. There was a pale-yellow gleam over the town that hadn't been visible a few minutes before. "Strange," I said, but it was more than strange, it was verging on the bizarre, it was unnatural - a new sunrise so soon after sunset.

"It must be a fire," she said tentatively after a long silence, as the remarkable yellow light grew in intensity on the horizon. "There's a fire in the town." And we gathered up our things, ran as fast as we could to the car and set off for town, where we found chaos. Even on the outskirts all traffic - pedestrian, cyclist or motor - was heading in one and the same direction. When Margareta opened the window and called out to the people passing we found they were all making their way towards Kroken, our local slum area; a desolate place, cut off and remote, a little enclave of existential squalour. All towns have a district like that, their own little ghetto, what in the past used to be called poor neighbourhoods. Somewhere to put the less fortunate so they wouldn't cause any shame or embarrassment for the rest of us. Kroken was the seamy side of our little community, and I was driving towards it now, manoeuvering the car through the traffic as fast as I could, emergency lights flashing and my hand constantly on the horn, at Margareta's insistence, who after all was a trained nurse and might be able to help. But it was no good, I couldn't get through and had to give up in the end, and Margareta jumped out and disappeared into the crowds.

Few things frighten people more than a conflagration. Huge flames arouse a kind of Ur-angst in us, we are thrown back to a stage we were at many tens of thousands of years ago, when fire was something we feared and desired in equal measure, because we needed it and yet realised that we could never completely control it. Since the dawning of consciousness we have known that we are caught betwixt fire and fire: beneath us, within the earth, boils an inferno that can erupt at any time and drown us in molten searing cascades from the deepest layers of our own planet; above us is suspended a sun which inexorably dominates our lives, and one day will swallow us into its flaming jaws. Fire is the ultimate power, and what is mankind's innermost desire if not control over ultimate power? So, with our innate perversity, we are drawn towards fire as it approaches us. People always want to be where things are happening, regardless of what it is. We want to be as close to a tragedy as we can possibly get, whether from instinct or thoughtlessness, who knows? But that's the way it is, and I'm no exception, I wanted to see what was going on too, I always was an interested observer.

Oscarshavn is divided by bays and inlets, spread out over several promontories and headlands; quiet, half-hidden residential areas extend out towards the sea and in towards the land, coming to a sudden halt in cul-de-sacs, up against the sea, up against forest and mountain. The main trunk road cuts through the town from north to south; in the town itself we call it the High Street. They had closed it now in both directions so that ambulances and fire engines could get through. And that was where I got stuck in the traffic, not even able to turn to make my way home. I sat there for an hour and a half, in the car, while Kroken burned on the other side of the hill. Hubbub all around me: cars like a river of light and gleaming metal along the High Street, the pavements full of people. Drivers were switching off their engines, stepping out of their cars, standing talking to one another in odd untidy clusters, serious, excited. The lights from the shop windows, the street lights, the lights of the cars, bathed them in garish and changing hues, weird shadows and strange sharp patches of blue, red, yellow, green, white. Repeated patterns, the pulse, the rhythm, of a small town. And in the sky, the whole time, that unnatural glare, the red glow from the fire. I turned on the radio, tuned in to the local station, sat in the car smoking cigarettes and listening to the intense, dramatic reports from the fire. One of the apartment blocks had already burned down, said the female reporter, and the fire had spread to the two adjacent buildings. I got out of the car. At the top of the High Street blue and white lights were flashing, and the sound of sirens pierced the air, lingering for a few breathless moments before fading and disappearing again.

One of the passengers in a car in the lane next to me, a middle-aged woman I had seen before but couldn't remember the name of, wound down the window and said, "Terrible business, terrible business."

"It is indeed," I replied, wondering how long it was since I had last been to Kroken. It was years, I realised, ten years.

"It's amazing it hasn't happened before," she said, lighting a cigarette with the dashboard lighter. The winking multi-coloured neon sign on the facade of the Centrum shopping-centre tinted her red, blue and white in quick succession. She was wearing an evening dress and pearl necklace, her hair elegantly pinned up. A woman on her way home from, or perhaps on her way to, a party. Whichever it was, her evening was ruined. "That place has been a firebomb waiting to go off for years," she said. "Just imagine what stocks of home-brewed spirits and suchlike they must have there."

"I suppose so," I said, concerned about whether Margareta had managed to get through, whether she was hard at work now, whether she was taking care of herself with her weak heart. Sirens were wailing again, but this time I couldn't see the lights. On the radio the reporter was talking about a fireman who had gone missing in a fresh explosion. Someone started tooting a horn behind me in the queue. The sound of a child crying could be heard from one of the cars nearby. A large crowd of young people suddenly came streaming out of the Tiger Cage nightclub. It looked as if they had some definite purpose in mind, they were full of life and energy as they emerged up the steps from the club cellar. But it soon passed. They stood still and passive on the pavement in front of the big glass windows of the shopping centre, quickly reduced to confused groups of lethargic and characterless silhouettes. I got back in the car and lit the last cigarette in the pack as the reporter on the radio was interviewing a policeman about possible deaths. He was saying, "We don't know. We don't know anything yet. There's no point in asking about anything." The hooting in the queue was increasing. A woman police constable walked down between the lines of cars, no doubt to make the perpetrators desist. As she passed on her way back I asked when she thought the traffic would clear. "Fairly soon, quite soon," she said. "But there's no point in driving up towards Kroken. They've cordoned off the whole area. So please don't even try." And I thought to myself that it would soon be over now.

But it wasn't. On the contrary: that was how it all began, though I didn't know it then. Or rather, that was how the end began.

.... At some point - I have never figured out exactly when - it suddenly occurred to me that music and pain were all she had, absolutely all. She had no other interests, and no friends, male or female, and didn't want any. When she wasn't playing music or listening to music, she was lethargic, indifferent almost. She did nothing to her flat either, and it was only she and I who were ever there. She had a few bits of furniture, and for her own and the neighbours' sakes had had sound-insulation put in, so that she could play when she wanted to. But nothing else.

She dreamed; I think that was all she did. Dreamed and played, played and dreamed, and for her they were one and the same thing. Most people are rational, and dream about what is attainable; the really crazy dream about what is over the horizon, beyond the range of visibility, and unknown. Victoria was one of the really crazy, and she knew it, and it drove her into a rage whenever she allowed herself to recognise it. Because between dreams and their realisation lies an abyss that only talent and ambition can bridge, and Victoria lacked one or the other - a lack which filled her abyss with a pain that made her cruel; a cruelty without evil, as frightening as it was incomprehensible for those affected by it, the victims of it. I didn't know, and never discovered, what it was Victoria lacked, but it was something, and the pain was there, and she shared it with me in her innocent cruelty.

I think pain and a perverse envy were the seeds of our demise. For many years after it was over I continued to be amazed at how love can die and turn into pure and unadulterated loathing, but I finally realised that hatred or loathing appears long before love dies, and that there is something else that helps it to germinate; in our case, envy. I had so much that Victoria didn't have: knowledge, intellect, inquisitiveness, and she envied me it and my freedom from the kind of pain she suffered. She had nothing but talent and pain, and her dream of squeezing that pain out of the piano keys into the world, but in its way that was still greater than everything I had, and I envied her what she possessed.

Because of this - because she had her pain and her dreams, and dared to acknowledge it; and because I didn't press her - she started treating me like a fool, and then outspokenly mocking me; and gradually, slowly but surely, my love for her became tainted, and began to hurt. I sat there, night after night, listening to her play, and with every note she struck on the keys it was as if she struck my own dreams out of my hands like frail, pitiful, commonplace flowers and tore them apart, petal by petal, swept them away with cold indifference and left me empty-handed. Not with evil intent, just by negligence, the way little girls in a fit of temper might crush the head of a doll they love. And there was nothing for me in its stead, only emptiness, and then longing, but whether it was a longing for something I had not yet found, or the longing for something that had once been there but now was lost, I could not say. And when she noticed it - when she noticed that she was growing and getting bigger, and that I was shrinking and getting smaller - I saw triumph in her eyes, and an ache entered my soul and took me over, slowly, stealthily, like a fever in the blood; so imperceptibly that I didn't recognise it as hatred until much later.

Every love is perverse. You cannot abandon it, it has to burn out, be reduced to dust and ashes before you're ready to accept that it's over. I've never been in any doubt about that. And the worst pain is that which you bring upon yourself. You can hate another person because that person loves you; you can hate yourself for loving another person. There are demons, and mine were questions and the desire for answers. Did she hit out in her sleep because she hated loving me, as I gradually came to hate loving her? Did she withdraw from me because I reminded her of something she was not, or told her who she was? Or was it something completely different, something that had nothing to do with me? I needed those answers before I could say to myself: It's over. I endured the scorn, the kicks and blows because I had to have answers before I could give up; and anyway they were never hard enough to cause pain or real damage, though nor were they so light that they could be explained away as playful or accidental. No, they were meant to wound and hurt, but she lacked the necessary strength for it; if she were to hurt, it would have to be done another way. And in the end of course she discovered how; in the end naturally enough she taught me what real pain was. She had to; it was inevitable.

.... "I've found you," a voice says, and I open my eyes and prop myself up on my elbows. The girl in the red dress. She is crouching by my side and watching me as I lie there.

Her face is in shadow and it's impossible to see her expression, but her voice is as I remember it: grown up, matter-of-fact, serious - almost old-fashioned.

But one way or another I manage to get to my feet, and can take a closer look at her. She is difficult to see, somehow indistinct, almost as if she is flickering.

I look around me instead, and find that something has happened to my sight, or to the town. It's night-time, real night. The street lights are off, there's no light in the shop windows, and the neon signs above them show not even a glimmer. The moon and the stars are invisible, but hidden by nothing but a cloudless sky without shape or movement, and everything is grey. Then, as I look, as I turn round and round looking, the town slowly fades away. The buildings flicker like the girl, and then they are gone; the asphalt disappears, street lights, benches, pavement; everything built or created by man gradually disappears, in the course of a few seconds, until nothing is left, other than a world I have never seen before.

She nods seriously. She is more distinct now; I can see her face. There's nothing scary about it, a little girl´s face, soft, calm, that´s all. "You've worked it out now."

"Am I dead, too, then?" I must be in the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns, if the quotation is to be believed; it's an alarming thought.

"I don't know. How should I know? Because I can reach you. Because you are near me. Because I can see you from here. It's not everyone I can approach. You're not dead, but you haven't long to go."

I light a cigarette. It's possible to do that. But the smoke tastes of absolutely nothing, and it vanishes into nothingness; there's not a movement in the air, no wind, not the slightest breeze. I exhale the smoke, and can't see it, it evaporates like breath. Then suddenly, from far away, I hear a noise, strangely mournful, immediately curtailed and impossible to describe. A call? A scream? No words seem to fit, or provide any meaning for the sound, but the girl - Elsa Marie - turns her head and looks towards it. "Don't touch anything here," she says, "and don't let anything touch you."

"You don't need to be. This is my world, I can help you here. Just do as I say."

"What do you want of me?" I throw the cigarette away and it vanishes before it reaches the ground, without any sparks, without any trace. This is a country where nothing can change, ever.

"I want to go home. And there are many of us who want to go home. You are the only one who can help us."

How can I see in this place? There is no light, there is no colour, no movement or life. It is a night rather than a location, and in this night there is no laughter and no love. Here in this dark, colourless world there are no children, other than this girl and her kind; and the sun has never penetrated here. There are things that look like trees here, but they bear no leaves and never have done, no leaves have fallen, only bare spreading branches stretch out into the darkness. Here there are only outlines and shadows, nothing more. Perhaps even the outlines would prove non-existent if I tried to touch them. The sky above us has none of the blue tinge that even the darkest sky on Earth possesses; whether it is dark grey or completely black is impossible to say, because it lacks any luminosity, and it seems delimited, finite; it has nothing of the feel of infinity of the cosmos; on the contrary it feels as if it is quite close, no more than a high, painted ceiling. This whole place seems frozen rigid, so still is it; a world without movement, without space; our voices have no reverberation.

How would Turner have painted this landscape? Even a charcoal pencil would have given too much colour; here everything is grey, but it is a grey tone without white. Is it possible for me to return to the land of the living after having been here?

And what does this girl think about, in this cold, confined shadowland? Does she have feelings, dreams, longings? Is she blessed or damned?

She looks at me, and at last I see her eyes. They too are grey, seeking mine. I think I can see a longing in them, an overwhelming grief-stricken longing that paralyses me with its coldness, right to the marrow.

"But you can go home," she says. "You can go home anyway. I can disappear straight away, and you will be home, and everything will be almost as it was before. I'll do it if that's what you want. But

There is something moving behind me. I can feel it inside me more than I can hear it or sense it. It's fear, fear pure and simple.

"Someone else. I don't know who she is. But she is angry. She hasn't been here long. I've been here a long time and am not angry any more. Everything will be all right if you stick to me. She can't do anything as long as I am here, and she knows that."

The sensation of a presence is stronger for a moment, and then it fades away completely. I close my eyes and try to release my breath, but discover that I can't: I'm not breathing, even though my voice is still functioning.

"I think so. I don't know everything. We don't talk to one another here." She looks at me. The longing is still there; I can see now that she is longing to be me, and that renews my fear. She shakes her head. "Don't be afraid."

She takes me by the hand, and that grey endless darkness envelopes us and transports us through the town and out of it, until we are standing on the edge of the bog where she sleeps her involuntary sleep; we are there in less than a second - we are simply there. The bog is just as lifeless as everything else in this world. The same area as I recognise from before, yet entirely different, and I suddenly realise: this is the landscape Chopin saw when he wrote his Marche funebre; this is the world through which march his melancholy notes.

"I was angry that time. I was envious of you. I tried to grab hold of you. I think you felt it."

I should have known who she was - what she was - the first time I spoke to her, because of the voice. It is low and toneless and soft and distant. It was wrong, what I said to Berger: it doesn't sound adult, it is dead.

"Where are you lying? That's what you want, isn't it? You want to be taken home?"

"Yes. I'm lying over there. Do you see, there?" She points at a mound by the edge of the woods, the very one I grabbed at when I fell.

"I'll do my best." In the distance I can see a flickering, indistinct movement, and turn away. "What's that?" I whisper.

She nods. "Yes. You can go home." But she makes no move. "Is there something else?" I ask in a low voice.

I nod. Here I know everything. Perhaps we hadn't needed to talk to each other at all. Perhaps it would have been enough just to have brought me here. "Who was it who did it?"

"I don't know that either. But if there is anything you can do, when you get back home, it will be good. I can see only you, you understand. You are the only one I can see completely clearly. And you are like a weight, that can tip the balance. But I don't know how."

"I don't know that either. But I'm not asleep yet. We'll have to see. Go home now. Just let go of my hand and you'll be home."

And I let go of her hand and immediately she is gone, and the bog is gone. All outlines fade, only the darkness is left, a moment passes, and then I see a light unfold before me. It begins as a clear shimmering tiny point and expands, extends itself to all sides at the same time, until I am standing right in the middle of it, surrounded, engulfed, and I realise that this light is the white light that people see when they wake up from a near-death experience, and that we have misunderstood everything. It is not the white light of eternity that we see when we approach death, because we know nothing of death. The white light we see is the light of life, and we see it when we turn and retrace our steps, I realise that now, and I am aware that I am breathing again, breathing and weeping.