Blood on Snow
- Автор: Несбё Ю
- Серия: Blood on Snow #1
- Год: 2015
- Язык: английский
- Год: Knopf, Doubleday Publishing Group
- ISBN: 978-0-385-35419-6
- Переводчик: Neil Smith
- Жанр: Триллеры
Электронная книга - «Blood on Snow». Краткое содержание книги:
“I’d be happy to run away with you, Corina, but I haven’t got a krone to my name.”
“No? Daniel always says he pays his people well. Loyalty has to be bought, he says.”
“I’ve spent it all.”
“What on?” She nodded past me, meaning the flat, to suggest that neither it nor anything in it could have cost a fortune.
I shrugged again. “There was a widow with four kids. I was the one who made her a widow, so I... well, I had a moment of weakness and put what her husband had been promised to fix someone in an envelope. And that turned out to be everything I had. I never knew the Fisherman paid so well.”
She gave me a sceptical look. I don’t think it was one of Darwin’s six universal facial expressions, but I knew what she meant. “You... you gave all your money to the widow of a man who was going to kill someone?”
Obviously I’d already worked out that what I’d done had been pretty stupid, even if I had felt I got something out of it in exchange. But when Corina put it like that, it sounded completely idiotic.
“So who was he going to kill?”
“Don’t remember,” I said.
She looked at me. “Olav, you know what?”
I didn’t know what.
She put her hand against my cheek. “You really are very, very unusual.”
Her eyes looked over my face, taking it in, bit by bit, as if she were consuming it. I know that’s the moment when you’re supposed to know, when you’re supposed to read the other person’s thoughts, realise. Maybe that’s true. My being dyslexic might explain it. My mum used to say I was too pessimistic. Maybe that’s true as well. Either way, I was pleasantly surprised when Corina Hoffmann leaned over and kissed me.
We made love. It’s not out of modesty that I choose this romantic, chaste euphemism instead of a more direct, instrumental word. But because making love really was the most fitting description. Her mouth was close to my ear, her breath teasing me. I held her incredibly carefully, like one of the dried flowers I sometimes found in the pages of books from the library, so brittle and fragile that they dissolved under my fingers as soon as I touched them. I was scared she would disappear. At regular intervals I raised myself up on my arms to check that she really was still there, that it wasn’t just a dream. I stroked her, lightly as a feather, and very gently, so as not to use her up. I held back before entering her. She looked at me in surprise — she had no way of knowing that I was waiting for the right moment. And then it came, the moment, the melting together, this thing that you might imagine to be trivial for a former pimp, but which was nonetheless so overwhelming that I felt my throat tighten. She let out a low, drawn-out groan as I pushed into her, incredibly slowly and carefully, as I whispered something tender and idiotic in her ear. I recognised her impatience, but I wanted it to be like this, wanted it to be something special. So I took her at a measured pace, and with hard-fought self-control. But her hips began to roll like sharp, quick waves beneath me, and her white skin shimmered in the darkness. It was like holding moonlight. Just as soft. Just as impossible.
“Stay with me, my love,” the breath in my ear panted. “Stay with me, my love, my Olav.”
I smoked a cigarette. She slept. It had stopped snowing. The wind which had been playing a mournful tune on the guttering had packed up its instruments. The only sound in the room was her even breathing. I listened and listened. Nothing.
It had been just like I had dreamed it would be. And hadn’t believed it could be. I was so tired that I had to get some sleep. But so happy that I didn’t want to. Because when I fell asleep, this world, this world that I had never much cared for until now, would cease to exist for a while. And, according to that Hume guy, the fact that I had until now woken up every morning in the same body, into the same world, where what had happened had actually happened, was no guarantee that the same thing would happen again tomorrow morning. For the first time in my life, closing my eyes felt like a gamble.
So I went on listening. Keeping watch over what I had. There were no sounds that shouldn’t have been there. But I carried on listening anyway.
Chapter 11
My mother was so weak. That was why she had to put up with more than even the strongest person could have handled.
For instance, she could never say no to my bastard of a father. Which meant she had to put up with more beatings than someone banged up for sex offences. He was especially fond of throttling her. I’ll never escape the sound of my mum bellowing like a cow in the bedroom each time my father let go long enough for her to catch her breath, so that he could start strangling her all over again. She was too weak to say no to drink, which meant she downed enough poison to fell an ox or an elephant, even though she was only small. And she was so weak when it came to me that she gave me everything I ever wanted, even when she really needed what she was giving me.
People always said I was like my mum.
Only when I was staring into my father’s eyes for the last time did I realise that I had him inside me as well. Like a virus, an illness in my blood.
As a rule he only came to us when he needed money. And as a rule he got what little we had. But he also realised that to maintain the fear factor — no matter whether he got a handout or not — he had to demonstrate what would happen the day she didn’t pay up. My mother would blame black eyes and thick lips on stairs, doors and slippery bathroom floors. And, as the drinking took hold, it did actually happen that she fell or banged into walls entirely of her own accord.
My father said I was studying to become an idiot. I suspect he may have had the same trouble reading and writing as I did, the difference being that he had given up. While he had dropped out of school at the earliest opportunity and hardly even read a newspaper after that, I actually had liked school, weirdly enough. Apart from math. I didn’t say much, and most people probably thought I was stupid. But the Norwegian teacher who marked my work said I had something, something behind all the spelling mistakes, something the others didn’t have. And that was more than enough for me. But my father used to ask what I thought I was going to do with all that reading. If I thought I was better than he and the rest of the family. They’d managed fine, doing honest work. They never tried to put on airs by learning fancy words and getting lost in stories. When I was sixteen I asked why he didn’t try doing a bit of honest work himself. He beat me black and blue. Said he was raising a kid, and that was enough work for one day.
When I was nineteen he came round one evening. He had been let out of Botsen prison the same day, after a year inside for killing a man. There hadn’t been any witnesses, so the court had agreed with the defence that the injuries to the man’s brain could have been caused when he tried to fight back and slipped on the ice.
He made some remark about my having grown. Slapped me jovially on the back. My mum had said I was working in a warehouse, was that right? Had I finally come to my senses?
I didn’t answer, didn’t say I was working part-time as well as going to college to save money so I could get a small flat when I started at university after my military service the following year.
He said it was good I had a job, because now I’d have to cough up.
I asked why.
Why? He was my father, victim of a miscarriage of justice who needed all the help his family could give him to get back on his feet.
I refused.
He stared at me in disbelief. And I could see he was wondering whether to hit me. That he was sizing me up. His little boy had grown up.
Then he let out a short laugh. And said if I didn’t hand over my pathetic savings, he’d kill my mother. And make it look like an accident. What did I think about that?