Chapter 136: Tromsø

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 136: Tromsø

Dana found the man from Tromsø in four days, which she said was the easiest search she'd done all year and which she did not seem pleased about.

"He's got a Wikipedia page."

"He what?"

"Not for this." She turned the laptop round. "Anders Fiskvik. He was a composer. Not famous-famous — he wrote film scores in the nineties, one of them you'd probably recognise, and he taught at the conservatory in Trondheim for eleven years."

The photograph was from 2009. A man in his fifties at a piano, mid-laugh, caught by somebody who'd been standing to his left.

"And?"

"And he stopped in 2016." Dana scrolled. "No obituary, no announcement, no scandal. He just stopped. Last public performance March 2016, last teaching contract ended that summer, and then twenty-two lines of nothing. He's alive. There's a tax record."

Reeve leaned over. "So he retired."

"Composers don't retire at fifty-eight," Vesper said, from across the room. "They get worse and keep going."

Ivor confirmed it on the Friday and did not enjoy doing it.

"I didn't know his name until you said it just now. I want that on the record because it makes me sound worse rather than better."

"How did you find him, then?"

"I didn't find him. I was sent to clear his sister's house in Bodø in 2017 and he was there, sitting in the kitchen, and I did my work around him for six hours and he did not speak once." Ivor had his hands flat. "On the way out I asked him if he was all right, because you do, and he looked at me and said something in Norwegian that I understood, and I have never once in four hundred years understood Norwegian."

Nobody moved.

"What did he say?"

"He said, it's not finished, it's just stopped being me."

They went.

That took six days of argument and two of logistics, and in the end four of them went — Cole, Vesper, Dana and Ivor — because Thessaly refused to go and refused to let everyone go and won the second of those.

"If this is a construction," she said at the airport, "it's a very expensive one."

"You've said that."

"I'm going to keep saying it until it stops being relevant or stops being true."

Tromsø in February is four hours of blue light and then nothing.

Anders Fiskvik lived in a flat above a bakery with his sister's cat, and he answered the door in a cardigan and slippers and said, in English, before anybody had spoken:

"You're about the pages."

He made them coffee. He had a coffee machine that cost more than the sofa and he clearly used it every day and he talked about it while it ran, which Vesper found the most disorienting part of the entire visit — a man having a normal conversation about grind size while she stood in his kitchen with her heart going.

"I'm going to say the strange things first," Anders said, sitting down. "Because you've come a long way and if I ease into it you'll be here all night and I get tired at seven."

"Okay."

"I wrote eleven pages between March and July of 2016. I don't remember writing any of them. They are in my handwriting and they are not in my language — some of it is Norwegian, some is English, some is a third thing I've had four people look at and nobody can place." He turned his cup round. "And since the last page I have not written one note of music, and I don't mean I have writer's block. I mean the part of me that did it is gone, the way a tooth is gone, and I can feel the gap with my tongue."

Vesper asked the question she had come four hours on a plane to ask.

"Did it hurt?"

Anders looked at her properly for the first time.

"You have them too," he said.

"Eleven pages. Two years."

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"Two years." He sat back. "Mine was four months and I have thought since that I was — what is the word. Efficient. That I was a good instrument and it used me quickly." Something complicated went over his face. "Two years is very slow. I don't know if that's better. I would like it to be better, for you."

"Did it hurt?"

"No." He said it immediately. "That's the part nobody believes. It was the best four months of my life."

The cat came in and sat on the table and nobody moved it.

"I was fifty-eight and I had been writing the same music for eleven years and I knew it. You know, when you are finished. Everybody around you says no, no, the new one is wonderful, and you know." He scratched the cat's ear. "And then in March I woke up and there were two pages on my desk in my hand and I could not read them, and I should have been frightened and instead I felt — "

He stopped and looked for a word and gave up on English.

"Ettertraktet," he said. "Sought after. Wanted. I was fifty-eight and tired and something in the world had picked me, and I want to be honest with you: I did not fight it once. Not for four months. I got up every morning hoping there would be a page."

"And in July?"

"In July there wasn't." Anders shrugged, and the shrug was the worst thing in the room. "And there hasn't been since. And I am not unhappy — I have a cat and a flat and my sister's insurance and I go to the cinema — but I was used, and I miss it, and I have had nine years to decide whether that makes me pathetic and I have concluded that it does and that I don't mind."

Dana asked whether anything had changed in the months before March.

"Nothing. That is the question everybody asks and I have gone through it a hundred times. No illness, no accident, no drug, no bang on the head." He counted them off on his fingers as though he had done it many times before. "I moved flat in January. I got the cat in February. My mother died in 2013, which is too far away to matter."

"You moved flat."

"To here. From four streets away." He gestured vaguely at the window. "I have thought about that more than the rest of it put together and there is nothing here. It is a flat above a bakery. My sister lived in it before me and nothing ever happened to her except cancer."

Vesper said: "Was the flat empty between her and you?"

Anders stopped with his hand on the cat.

"Eleven months," he said.

Nobody said anything.

"That is the first new question in nine years," he said, and did not sound pleased about it at all.

Cole hadn't spoken in twenty minutes.

"Can we see them?"

"The pages? No." Anders said it pleasantly. "I burned them in 2018."

"You—"

"I burned them because I had started reading them aloud at night," he said, "and I did not know that I was doing it until my sister told me, and she was frightened, and she was not a woman who got frightened. So I burned them in the sink and I have never regretted it and I would do it again tonight if there were any left."

Dana, very carefully: "Do you remember any of it?"

"Four words."

"Will you say them?"

Anders looked at her for a long moment and then at Ivor, who had not spoken since they arrived, and said something odd.

"You've brought the clearance man."

"Yes," Ivor said.

"He did my sister's house. He was polite and he did not take the photographs, which he could have." Anders turned back to Dana. "I'll say them because he's here and because I am seventy-two in April and I have carried this on my own since 2016 and that is long enough."

He said four words.

They were not in any language Dana knew, and she wrote them down phonetically without understanding them, and Vesper went white to the lips.

"You know them," Anders said.

"No."

"You went — "

"I don't know them." Vesper's voice had gone flat and hard. "I understood them. That's not the same and I'd like it written down as the second thing and not the first."

Dana's pen had stopped. "What do they mean?"

Vesper did not answer for a while.

"The door is the wrong way round," she said.

Cole put his cup down very slowly.

"Say it again."

"The door is the wrong way round." She wasn't looking at him. "That's it. That's the whole sentence and it doesn't mean anything and I understood it instantly and I have never heard it before in my life."

Anders was watching all of this with the calm of a man who had waited nine years for somebody else to be in the room when it happened.

"You see," he said, "now there are two of you, and it is not my problem anymore, and I am sorry — I am genuinely sorry — but I have wanted that very much for a long time."

They stayed another hour because it seemed wrong to leave immediately.

He showed them a photograph of his sister — Ingrid, forty-four in the picture, on a boat, squinting. He complained about the bakery downstairs opening at four and then admitted he'd have missed it if it didn't. He asked Vesper what she did and she said she was at school and he said "good, stay there," with a vehemence that surprised everybody including him.

At the door he held on to her hand slightly too long.

"I will tell you the only useful thing I have," he said. "For nine years people have asked me what it was like and I have said the true answer, which is that it was wonderful, and every single one of them has decided I am broken for saying so."

"I don't think that."

"No. You went white at four words, so you already know." He let go. "It will feel like being chosen. That is the whole trick and there isn't a second part to it. Nobody is ever taken over by something that makes them feel small."

When they left he shook everybody's hand except Ivor's, and to Ivor he said something in Norwegian that nobody translated and Ivor answered in the same language, and Vesper — who did not speak Norwegian either — did not look at either of them.

On the stairs she said, "He said 'you took nothing,' and Ivor said 'there was nothing worth taking,' and neither of them was talking about the house."

"Vesper—"

"I know," she said. "Write it down as the second thing."

The flight was at six the next morning and nobody slept.

At about two Dana came out of her room and found Cole in the hotel corridor sitting on the floor with his back against the wall, which is where he had been for an hour, and she sat down next to him without asking.

"Eleven months empty," she said.

"Yeah."

"That's not nothing. That's the sort of gap where a building gets used for something."

"Yeah."

She waited.

"That's not what I'm sitting out here about," Cole said.

"No. I didn't think it was."

He turned his hands over.

"He said it feels like being chosen," he said. "And that nobody ever gets taken over by something that makes them feel small."

Dana did not say anything at all, which was the correct thing, and they sat in a hotel corridor in Tromsø until about half three.

[End of Chapter 136]