Jo Nesbø - The Redeemer

SHE WAS FOURTEEN YEARS OLD AND SURE THAT IF SHE SHUTher eyes tight and concentrated she could see the stars through theroof.

All around her, women were breathing. Regular, heavy night-timebreathing. One was snoring, and that was Auntie Sara whom they hadallocated a mattress beneath the open window.

She closed her eyes and tried to breathe like the others. It was difficultto sleep, especially because everything around her was so new anddifferent. The sounds of the night and the forest beyond the windowin stgrd were different. The people she knew from the meetings inthe Citadel and the summer camps were somehow not the same. Shewas not the same, either. The face and body she saw in the mirror thissummer were new. And her emotions, these strange hot and cold currentsthat flowed through her when the boys looked at her. Or when one ofthem in particular looked at her. Robert. He was different this year, too.

She opened her eyes again and stared. She knew God had the powerto do great things, also to allow her to see the stars through the roof.If it was His wish.

It had been a long and eventful day. The dry summer wind hadwhispered through the corn, and the leaves on the trees danced as ifin a fever, causing the light to filter through to the visitors on the field.They had been listening to one of the Salvation Army cadets fromthe Officer Training School talking about his work as a preacher on theFaeroe Isles. He was good-looking and spoke with great sensitivity andpassion. But she was preoccupied with shooing away a bumblebee thatkept buzzing around her head, and by the time it moved off the heathad made her dozy. When the cadet finished, all faces were turned tothe Territorial Commander, David Eckhoff, who had been observingthem with his smiling, young eyes which were over fifty years old. Hesaluted in the Salvation Army manner, with his right hand raised abovehis shoulder pointing to the kingdom of heaven, and a resounding shoutof 'Hallelujah!' Then he prayed for the cadet's work with the poor andthe pariahs to be blessed, and reminded them of the Gospel of Matthew,where it said that Jesus the Redeemer was among them, a stranger onthe street, maybe a criminal, without food and without clothing. Andthat on the Day of Judgement the righteous, those who had helped theweakest, would have eternal life. It had all the makings of a long speech,but then someone whispered something and he said, with a smile, thatYouth Hour was next on the programme and today it was the turn ofRikard Nilsen.

She had heard Rikard make his voice deeper than it was to thankthe commander. As usual, he had prepared what he was going to sayin writing and learned it off by heart. He stood and recited how he wasgoing to devote his life to the fight, to Jesus's fight for the kingdom ofGod. His voice was nervous, yet monotonous and soporific. His introvertedglower rested on her. Her eyes were heavy. His sweaty top lipwas moving to form the familiar, secure, tedious phrases. So she didn'treact when the hand touched her back. Not until it became fingertipsand they wandered down to the small of her back, and lower, and madeher freeze beneath her thin summer dress.

She turned and looked into Robert's smiling brown eyes. And shewished her skin were as dark as his so that he would not be able to seeher blushes.

'Shh,' Jon had said.

Robert and Jon were brothers. Although Jon was one year oldermany people had taken them for twins when they were younger. ButRobert was seventeen now and while they had retained some facialsimilarities, the differences were clearer. Robert was happy and carefree,liked to tease and was good at playing the guitar, but was notalways punctual for services in the Citadel, and sometimes the teasinghad a tendency to go too far, especially if he noticed others werelaughing. Then Jon would often step in. Jon was an honest, conscientiousboy whom most thought would go to Officer Training Schooland would though this was never formulated out loud find himselfa girl in the Army. The latter could not be taken for granted in Robert'scase. Jon was two centimetres taller than Robert, but in some strangeway Robert seemed taller. From the age of twelve Jon had begun tostoop, as though he were carrying the woes of the world on his back.Both were dark-skinned, good-looking, with regular features, butRobert had something Jon did not have. There was something in hiseyes, something black and playful, which she wanted and yet did notwant to investigate further.

While Rikard was talking, her eyes were wandering across the sea ofassembled familiar faces. One day she would marry a boy from theSalvation Army and perhaps they would both be posted to anothertown or another part of the country. But they would always return tostgrd, which the Army had just bought and was to be their summersite from now on.

On the margins of the crowd, sitting on the steps leading to thehouse, was a boy with blond hair stroking a cat that had settled in hislap. She could tell that he had been watching her, but had looked awayjust as she noticed. He was the one person here she didn't know, butshe did know that his name was Mads Gilstrup, that he was the grandchildof the people who had owned stgrd before, that he was acouple of years older than her and that the Gilstrup family was wealthy.He was attractive, in fact, but there was something solitary about him.And what was he doing here anyway? He had been there the previousnight, walking around with an angry frown on his face, not talking toanyone. She had felt his eyes on her a few times. Everyone looked ather this year. That was new, too.