K.O. Dahl - The Man in the Window

First published in 2008

by Faber and Faber Limited

3 Queen Square London WC1N 3AU

Typeset by Faber and Faber Ltd

Printed in England by CPI Bookmarque, Croydon, CR0 4TD

All rights reserved

K. O. Dahl, 2008

Translation Don Bartlett

The right of K. O. Dahl to be identified as author ofthis work has

been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of theCopyright,

Designs and Patents Act 1988

ISBN 978-0-571-23291-8

Is this a dagger, which I see before me,

The handle toward my hand? Come, let me

clutch thee: -

I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.

Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible

To feeling, as to sight? Or art thou but

A dagger of the mind, a false creation,

Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?

William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act II, scene i

Table ofContents

Lady in the Rain

Inthe winter gloom of Friday 13th January, Reidar Folke Jespersen started the wayhe started every day, at least for the last fifty of his seventy-nine years: onhis own with a bowl of porridge in the kitchen, his braces hanging loose behindhis back and the rhythmic clinks of the spoon against the bottom of the dish asthe sole accompaniment to his solitude. He had big bags beneath two bright blueeyes. His chin was covered with a meticulously trimmed, short, white beard; hishands were large, wrinkled and bore sharply defined veins which wound their wayup both forearms to his rolled-up shirtsleeves. His arms were powerful; theycould have belonged to a logger or a blacksmith.

Reidarhad no appetite. In the morning he never had any appetite, but being theenlightened person he was, he understood the importance of the stomach havingsomething to work on. That was why he began every day with a bowl of porridge,which he made himself. If anyone had asked what he thought about during theseminutes, he would not have been able to answer. For as he ate, he always concentratedon counting the number of spoonfuls - 23, clink, swallow, 24, clink, swallow. Along life as a porridge-eater had taught him that a bowl would, on average,provide between thirty-eight and forty-four spoonfuls - and if a trace ofwonder lingered in his consciousness during these routine-filled moments of thenew day, it was only his curiosity about how many spoonfuls it would take toscrape the bowl clean.

Whileher husband was eating breakfast, Ingrid Jespersen was in bed. She alwaysstayed in bed longer than her husband. Today she didn't get up until half pasteight, then she wrapped a white bathrobe around her and scuttled out to thebathroom where the underfloor heating was on full. The floor was so hot it wasalmost impossible to stand in bare feet. She tiptoed across, then wriggled intothe round shower cabinet where she took a long, hot shower. The central heatingensured that the flat was always nice and warm, but as her husband could nottolerate the same temperature in the bedroom, he always turned off the radiatorthermostat before going to bed in the evening. Thus the winter cold sneaked inovernight. And even though Ingrid Jespersen was warmly covered by a thick downduvet, she liked to indulge herself with the luxury of a hot shower to awakenher limbs, get her circulation going and make her blood tingle under thesurface of her skin. Ingrid would be fifty-four this February. She oftenfretted at the thought of becoming old, but her appearance never bothered her.Her body was still lithe and supple. These were qualities she ascribed to herdays as a dancer and her own awareness of the value of keeping yourself in goodphysical shape. Her waist was still slim, her legs still muscular, and eventhough her breasts had begun to sag and her hips no longer had their youthful,resilient roundedness, nevertheless she attracted admiring looks on the street.Her hair was still a natural dark colour with a tinge of red. But her teethworried her. She, like everyone of her generation, had had poor dentaltreatment when she was a child. And in two places the fifty-year-old patchworkof fillings had been substituted with crowns.

Themost pressing cause of this vanity was that she had a lover, Eyolf Strmsted, aman who had once been her ballet pupil and who was younger than her, and shedid not want the age difference to become too conspicuous when she was withhim. She turned off the water, opened the cabinet door and went towards themirror where a grey patina of condensation had formed over the glass. There wasstill a slight touch of uneasiness when she thought about her lover's reactionto her smile. At first she studied her teeth by grimacing to herself in themirror. Then she regarded the contours of her body through the film ofcondensation. She pressed her right hand flat against her stomach and spun halfround. She looked at the curve of her back, studied her backside and examinedher thigh muscles as she completed the manoeuvre.

Today,though, she stopped in mid-swing. She stood motionless in front of the mirror.She heard the outside door slam. Her husband's going to work without sayinggoodbye caused her to lose a sense of time and place for a few seconds. Thebang of the door disconcerted her and she stared with vacant eyes at her own imagein the glass. When at last she pulled herself together, it was to avoid lookingat her own nakedness. Afterwards she ran the razor slowly down her right calfbut it was an automatic, absent-minded movement, without a hint of thewell-being and repose the thought of her lover had evoked minutes before.

Thehusband, who had long finished his porridge, and had therefore put on his coatand trudged out of the flat without a word, hesitated for a few seconds in frontof the door, craned his neck and listened to the sound of running water as heconjured up images of his spouse with closed eyes, droplets forming on hereyelashes, breathing through an open mouth in the stream of scalding hot watercascading over her face. For more than ten years Reidar Folke Jespersen hadpractised sexual abstinence. The marital partners no longer touched each other.They had no intimate physical contact whatsoever. All the same, their love foreach other still seemed to others to have a great tenderness and mutualdevotion. This faade was not so very different from the truth for as thecouple's erotic love dwindled to nothing, the relationship still rested on atacit agreement - a psychological contract which contained all the elements ofmutual respect and a willingness to accept each other's foibles and quirks,such as putting up with each other's snoring at night - an agreement which alsoincluded the ability to do so and the extra strain involved in getting alongwith a person one assumed one wished well for every hour of the day.

Untilthree years before, Ingrid had regarded her husband's self-imposed celibacy asa caprice of fate, something she would have to endure in order to apportion duevalue to the time she had lived in tune with her physical urges. But when,about three years earlier, she allowed herself to be mounted by her ex-balletpupil, and when the self-same slim, muscular man withdrew his penis, after nextto no time, supremely aroused, out of control in his excitement andnervousness, spraying large quantities of sperm over her breasts and stomach,Ingrid Jespersen experienced a feeling of purposeful and satisfied calm. Herdaily life was given a new dimension, thanks to the lover. A hitherto ignored,but perceived lack had at long last been addressed and met. She embraced Eyolfwith passion. She cradled him in her arms. She stroked his supple back and hismuscular thighs. She explored him with closed eyes and sensed the satisfactionof knowing a piece of her life had slotted into place. And for the first timefor a long time, as once again she felt her ex-pupil's penis swell between herhands, as the low winter sun cleared the neighbouring block, permitting a sharpray to penetrate two gaps in the blinds to hit the shelf and a glass penguin -an ornament which broke up the sunbeam into a soft carpet of colours, a rainboweffect, which covered their naked bodies and added a symbolic beauty to herphysical enjoyment - at that instant Ingrid Jespersen knew that she wasexperiencing something which would have a decisive impact on her later life.