“Yes,” said Singer. “I could do that. That’s probably the right thing to do. I realize that. I’d be released from constantly pointing out that I’m not to blame and that there’s no connection between the fact that Merete and I were going to get a divorce and the fact that Merete died in a car accident. The divorce meant that I would have had nothing more to do with Merete and her daughter. The car accident means that Merete died, and is gone, and her daughter grows up within her mother’s family, which is only natural, and that I have nothing more to do with her. You’re right. I’m free, I can shake off this grief and move on. But I don’t want to do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “As I said: I don’t know.”

  “No, that’s not as you said. When you said that earlier, it was because you couldn’t bring yourself to tell Merete’s parents that you and Merete were actually going to get a divorce. You won’t have to tell them. You don’t have to tell them anything, except that you think Isabella, in spite of everything, belongs with her natural family and not with you, since you doubt you’d be able to give her the care that a young child needs.”

  “I still don’t know. Maybe I can’t bear the thought of simply going my own way. Leaving all this. I could do it, in fact I ought to do it, but there’s something telling me I shouldn’t.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “I don’t know. But I’m scared. Scared to do what I’m saying I ought to do.”

  “What I’m saying is simply that it’s the decent thing to do. Shall I repeat that? It’s the decent thing to do. I’m not begging you to do this, no, I’m merely suggesting that you do it. Do the decent thing. What you want to do is not the decent thing. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what’s your answer?”

  “That things will stay the way we decided.”

  “But don’t you understand? Your wish to take care of Isabella isn’t valid. Your wish plays no role, because the truth is that it’s now known that the deceased wanted you to leave, and that’s what is so hair-raising, not only that you won’t leave and will stay here, but that you will also let her daughter live with you, as if nothing had happened. You are deriding her memory. And that is now known. You should know that.”

  Singer slumped, turning pale at the words the other man had spoken.

  “I had a feeling you would say that,” he replied. “But it’s late at night, and I have to try and get some sleep before Isabella wakes up. So I have to ask you to leave. Go, please go, there’s nothing more for you to say. I have my duty, and you have yours. You’ve said your piece, I’ve listened to you, and I thank you for it. But now I need to sleep, because, as I said, I’ve taken on an obligation that requires my attention.”

  The other man got up. He stood there in the middle of the cramped living room, pompous or formidable, there was something dismissive about him that underscored the formidable or pompous nature of his appearance.

  “It’s a terrible burden you’ve taken on,” said the other man, “and one day you’ll come to regret it, and then you’ll know there’s nothing to be done about it. Nothing. If only you cared about the young girl,” he exclaimed as he vanished into thin air, being the imaginary person he was.

  Silence. Singer sat slumped in his armchair. Suddenly he gave a start, as if he’d abruptly awakened after sitting there, dozing off, and he shook his head in bewilderment. He glanced over at the armchair, which was empty. He was alone, alone with himself, you might say.

  He thought he should go upstairs and go to bed. It was three in the morning, after all, and he needed to sleep. But he couldn’t manage to tear himself away from the armchair; he sat there thinking about what the other man had said. That was quite a salvo, thought Singer. Good heavens, and he was supposedly a man in whom I have a great deal of trust and would actually like to have as my friend, he thought, shaking his head in resignation. It really wasn’t all that unexpected, logically enough, I should add, thought Singer. But I have to admit that for a moment I was tempted by his suggestion. In a way it would solve everything. Everything would work out if I followed his suggestion. But he could have left out that part about me not caring about the girl. I didn’t say that, I said that she didn’t mean so much to me that I couldn’t accept having her disappear from my life, as a natural consequence of the divorce, and so it wouldn’t lead to any sort of irremediable sorrow, that’s what I said, but that doesn’t mean I don’t care about her. There’s a small but crucial difference. Yes, there’s a difference, damn it! thought Singer, almost upset. Not care about her! In spite of everything, I’ll be responsible for her for the next twelve years. I’ll be past fifty by the time I can think about myself once again. That’s clear. He could have thought about that before he started flinging out accusations based on a poor understanding of what I actually said, thought Singer.

  And that was how the night passed. Singer stayed up, slumped in his armchair, thinking over and over about his new situation and how he’d ended up in it, of his own peculiar free will. In a confrontation with death. Someone else’s death. Someone who had parted from him well in advance.

  February nights are long and dark, although not nearly as long and dark as December and January nights; in mid-February the light both day and night is like the light at the end of October, and actually a little brighter because October usually has no snow, but in February the nighttime darkness is illuminated and reflected off the white, cold, let’s even say the caved-in and grayish snow; but it’s still a long time before there’s daylight when you wake up, this was something to which Singer could attest with his own eyes as he sat there. At seven in the morning he could begin to make out that it was dawn and not dark night. And it was also time for him to hear Isabella stirring upstairs and then running barefoot into the bedroom where his cold bed stood. There she’d find an empty bed, with the coverlet neatly spread on top, as if the person who had slept there was already up; or the bed might also arouse suspicion that it had been abandoned by the person who hadn’t slept there at all. And so, making a lot of noise (so Isabella would hear him), Singer went upstairs and called to her even before he’d made it all the way to the top step; yes, he called to her when he was slightly past the midway point on the stairs, so that when she heard his voice, or preferably his heavy footsteps, and had turned around to run barefoot toward the sound, she would see him as he climbed the last step and came toward her.

  And so began the life of the widower, soon to be forty, as the sole provider and parent of the six-and-a-half-year-old girl, Isabella, who was not his, but rather the daughter of his deceased wife. He continued to live in the rowhouse apartment up on the slope, not far from the teachers college, or the University College of Southeast Norway in Not­odden, as it would soon be called, and not far from Isabella’s grandparents. Isabella understood and didn’t understand that her mother was dead, and life went on, as they say, in its usual, daily grind, even though six months after the incomprehensible car accident the girl might come rushing into the bedroom and be surprised that her mother wasn’t there, just for a moment, before she again remembered that her mother was gone for good; but after a while this too stopped, at least from the end of August when she started first grade at the school. She also spent a lot of time at the home of her grandparents, as she’d always done; Singer and the Sæthres took turns picking her up from daycare, and she often stayed the night with her grandparents, so you might say that Singer and the Sæthres also took turns delivering her to the daycare center, even though it was most often Singer who drove her there, usually on his way to his job at the library.

  Initially Singer was the object of a great deal of attention from his colleagues, and also from Merete’s artist friends. Every now and then both Singer and his stepdaughter would be invited to dinner in the middle of the week by his colleagues and others, most often those who had children of their own and preferably children who were more or less the same age as Isabella. Then they would sit there, Singer and his little stepdaughter, in the kitchen of an unfamiliar home, and eat meatballs with mushy peas and creamed cauliflower and drink water or juice, surrounded by the family who lived there, in the midst of their friendliness.

  Singer’s days were busy, filled with work, housework, and caring for a seven-year-old girl, cooking, laundry, and everything else that makes up the everyday life of a single dad. This meant that life’s routines crept in and overtook and forced into the background the shocking event that had occurred in February, and the subsequent rituals of grief which then had to be endured. At the library he soon resumed his old place, and his colleagues and the book borrowers got used to seeing him again in his usual role as a dutiful and obliging librarian, and not as a forty-year-old man who had been struck and felled by misfortune. In a way there is reason to believe that the friendly reserve that characterized Singer’s conduct also seemed suitable or appropriate for his new status as a widower and parent to a seven-year-old girl who was not his. In any case, it was easy to offer him sympathy and, as mentioned, invite him home for simple, weekday dinners, which included fish dishes such as fish gratin and smoked haddock and poached cod with bacon and creamed carrots, since it was thought that a newly widowed man might not be vigilant enough about giving his stepdaughter the essential proteins and vitamins contained in a fish dinner. Isabella, during these fish dinners at the homes of Singer’s colleagues, would pick at the food and not eat even a bite more than she strictly had to, which served to underscore this fact, for both the hosts and Singer himself, who nodded and smiled, and said that the fish gratin or smoked haddock or poached cod with bacon and creamed carrots was tasty. It was important to teach children to appreciate the food, especially at a time when there were so many prepared frozen foods of insufficient nutritional value. But in all fairness, after Singer and his stepdaughter had been invited for a simple fish dinner, they were often invited back, perhaps two weeks later, and then they’d be served meatballs and creamed cauliflower, with a lot of gravy, and lingonberries, which Isabella liked much better. On Sundays they usually ate at the home of Isabella’s grandparents, and Isabella’s uncle and aunt and two cousins were most often there too. It has to be admitted, however, that Singer was more relaxed when he sat in the kitchen belonging to one of his colleagues than during these family dinners, when he was always wary, and not without reason.

  In the same way he was also wary when it came to Merete’s old milieu, which was connected to the ceramics company of Merete & Merete. Merete Holtan had told Singer that the name Merete & Merete would continue and never be changed, no matter what form this company or workshop or art gallery might take in the future, and no matter how it was run or who ran it, whether she did so alone or together with someone else, a replacement for Merete Sæthre, or possibly and preferably as a collective of three or four or five people, though still keeping in mind the goal of moving to the old location that had once belonged to the Tinnfoss Paper Factory. Singer, feeling quite moved, had thanked Merete Holtan for this, yet he’d otherwise avoided as much as possible spending any time in the old milieu of his deceased wife, even if it was to be called Merete & Merete for all eternity. The person he was most wary about was Merete Holtan herself, and her husband, Attorney Nils Hartvigsen, but also others with whom he thought Merete Sæthre might have had a close relationship — either by happenstance or on a more permanent basis — and he tried, as best he could, to avoid meeting them, especially on any social occasions. This was not all that difficult to do, because everyone understood that Singer didn’t feel up to socializing that spring, or during the ensuing summer. And when fall arrived, he had actually slipped so far away from the milieu in which he’d participated in his role as Merete Sæthre’s husband, that people no longer automatically thought of him in social contexts. Worse was trying to avoid meeting the lawyer and the lawyer’s wife, or Nils Hartvigsen and Merete Holtan, or Nils and Merete, if you will. He couldn’t avoid them completely, especially because Merete & Merete also had a business side that required his attention.

  What distressed Singer whenever he met Nils Hartvigsen and Merete Holtan, either together or separately, was the fact that they never gave the slightest sign that they knew anything. They behaved toward him, both together and separately, in exactly the same way Singer would have imagined they would have behaved if Merete Sæthre had never confided in her friend and namesake Merete Holtan that she was going to get a divorce, which Singer found to be most unlikely. This was true of their behavior toward him when he met them at the funeral, and it was also true of the following period, when he met Attorney Hartvigsen at his office, and it was true of the subsequent months, when they constantly exhorted him to come over and visit them in their mansion down by the Tinnfoss canal, frequently calling to invite him over. Even after a year had passed, they behaved in exactly the same way, as if they knew nothing, and this was true when he happened to run into Merete Holtan on the street and they exchanged a few brief remarks, or the time that Attorney Hartvigsen showed up at the library to borrow books; this was right before Easter, and he took out a stack of crime novels, and, as usual, they ended up chatting, discussing one topic or another, ending with Nils Hartvigsen spontaneously inviting him, and Isabella, to come to their newly purchased cabin on Lake Bolke for Easter, whereupon Singer regretfully declined, saying that he had already planned to spend the Easter holiday with family at home, with Isabella’s grandparents and his brother- and sister-in-law and their children.

  Singer couldn’t rid himself of a suspicion that this was some sort of calculated game on their part that had been planned, since they were so similar in how they behaved toward him — whether it concerned a brief encounter with her, or a long conversation and the subsequent spontaneous invitation from him. But why? What did they hope to achieve through this? Singer didn’t like it, and he became more uneasy as time passed. In the period immediately following the funeral, he could have understood this to be some type of tactful approach, but now, well over a year later? If they knew something, why did they pretend they didn’t know anything? What in the world were they trying to express? Surely they couldn’t be ignorant of the fact that Singer assumed that his deceased wife must have confided in her best friend? It couldn’t be denied that when the second Easter arrived after Merete Sæthre had died in a car accident and Singer had taken on responsibility for her daughter, Singer felt more hounded than ever.

  It didn’t make the matter any better that he was living in Merete’s rowhouse apartment, among her things and her furniture, with her photographs displayed on the counter. Out of consideration for Isabella, everything was to remain the same, this was Isabella’s home. For Singer, however, it became more difficult to bear than he’d thought. While Merete was alive, even during the last period when everything was falling apart, you might say, it hadn’t bothered him that he was living in her home, among her things, marked by her taste, among objects that were indicative of her personality. But now that she was gone, he found it bothersome. He was seriously thinking about moving to a different apartment. Here in Not­odden. He would take along all the things that had been in Merete’s possession and that her motherless daughter had grown up among: paintings, curtains, furniture, drawings, and photo albums, photographs hanging on the walls, the kitchen table, the stove, refrigerator, everything. The mere act of placing them in a different setting, in new rooms, seemed to him a complete liberation from a shattered past, to be quite blunt. The mere act of having a different route to walk, or drive, to work at the library seemed to him, when he thought about it — and he thought about it often — to be something close to happiness; he’d imagined himself going out the door of his new, unidentifiable apartment and down a totally new, unidentifiable street to the Not­odden library in the center of town.

  What Singer was waiting for, and expecting, was the gossip. He was waiting for the moment when Nils Hartvigsen and/or Merete Holtan could no longer keep their secret, or they no longer wished to keep their secret, and they cracked. Or, to be more precise, this might have already occurred long ago, in fact it was just as likely that this was the case, so Singer was now waiting for the consequences to appear because they had cracked. And they weren’t the only ones who might crack. For all he knew, Merete could have confided in others, who sooner or later would crack, and probably much more easily than Nils Hartvigsen and Merete Holtan. Because when it came to the lawyer and his wife, Singer had reached the conclusion that they probably did not want to hurt him. If they had wished for a confrontation with him, because of everything they knew, they would have forced a confrontation long ago. Since they behaved as they did, Singer could just as well take this as a sign they had been initiated into and were aware of his conspiracy. He nevertheless kept his distance from them because he didn’t want to hear them admit that they had been initiated into and were aware of this conspiracy; he would have found such an admission on their part to be extremely painful, he couldn’t bear the thought that they should openly share his knowledge — the three of them conspiring in an all-too-dubious knowledge. He actually didn’t think they should share his guilt, to put it plainly; the longer he thought about what that involved, the more he held it against them because they might harbor certain thoughts they were trying to convey to him, assuming, in such a blatant fashion, that they knew everything. He pictured spending Easter vacation in their cabin at Lake Bolke, together with the two children they now had, and Isabella, and how, in the evening, after the children had gone to bed, they might approach him and confide in him, in an almost intimate manner, with great sincerity in their voices, saying that they understood him so well, and even though they knew what Merete’s last wish was, meaning the separation, they understood him so well when he in this way tried to, and practically succeeded in, demonstrating his reconciliation with her; in fact, they were certain that she too would have understood. This is what he imagined them whispering to him up in the cabin on Lake Bolke where he’d never been before, and he bristled at the thought of how painful that situation would be. That was what he imagined, and he found it extremely painful. So painful that he avoided them and kept them at a distance, even though it was stupid of him to do this, because he was then at a high risk of letting loose the gossip. Because if he’d kept them close, become a friend of the family, so to speak, that would have prevented them from letting loose about him. With him as a friend of the family, they would have been his co-conspirators, and most likely would have kept quiet. But now, a year later, without having had any contact with him, and having admitted as much, they would have given up in a way, having realized that Singer never wanted to see them, and thus he would have lost importance for them, with the result that it would be much easier to loosen their tongues. Consequently they would no longer keep the secret that they shared but instead tell a strange story, which was both true and had taken place and was continuing to take place, in Not­odden. Most likely they hadn’t planned to tell this story, maybe first and foremost out of consideration for Merete Sæthre, but it would take only one of them, inadvertently, to mention it once, and all hell would break loose for Singer. If Merete Holtan just once, under the influence of wine, revealed what she knew to a friend, that would be the end. Then the story would spread. And it wouldn’t be just one person that Singer was counting on to keep the story quiet. There would be at least one more person. Nils Hartvigsen could also give the secret away, under the influence of wine, during some social occasion among creative and witty people over at the Merete & Merete ceramics workshop, as they happened to talk in passing about Singer, who was quietly continuing his life, as a widower and the steadfast provider and stepfather for the daughter of his deceased wife. Two tongues that might wag in Not­odden, at least two tongues. He didn’t know how many others Merete had confided in, maybe not so many, but there could have been one more, he had to consider that, one or maybe two more. Sooner or later they would become loose-lipped. The chance of that happening increased as time passed, because the tactfulness that death, in spite of everything, instilled in a person would naturally diminish as the months (and years!) passed, and they would involuntarily become more loose-lipped. It was enough if someone in whom Merete had confided should spot Singer on the street and say, almost spontaneously, to the person she was with, as she saw Singer: “How strange that he would take care of Merete Sæthre’s daughter when they were going to get a divorce . . .” Maybe word had already spread, though Singer hadn’t yet noticed. Maybe the gossip was spreading from one to another, right at that moment, because a person in whom Merete had confided just before she died, now a year later, had caught a glimpse of Singer on the street, maybe even when he had Isabella with him, and all of a sudden she thought about what Merete had told her, and then it slipped out, inadvertently, as a question, and then word spread further and further. It meant that they were talking about him, discussing him and his relationship with his deceased wife and his stepdaughter, in numerous places when Singer was not personally present, nor was he aware of what they said. Because that’s how it is with the person who is the subject of gossip, what’s said will remain unknown to the person in question. For a long time. Word spreads along the most peculiar of pathways, but always detouring around him. Though not necessarily detouring around those who must not, at all costs, hear what’s being said. Sooner or later someone who shouldn’t hear about it, will find out all the same, by accident. So it’s possible that Per Christian Sæthre might have been told everything, both he and Henriette, his wife. And then it wasn’t far to Berit and Martin Sæthre. Even though it might take a while. But sooner or later it would happen.