What could Singer do? Nothing. He could try to cheer up the little schoolgirl who had been brought here to the big city without having expressed any desire to come, or for that matter any lack of desire to come. But it didn’t seem as if she particularly appreciated Singer’s attempts to cheer her up. When Singer asked whether they should go to the movies, she always said yes, but when he asked what movie she’d like to see, she never managed to say whether she preferred one over another; so Singer ended up choosing what film they would see based on sheer guesswork as to which film he thought Isabella would most like to see, though at no point did she ever say, when he asked, whether she was looking forward to seeing it. But she would put on her coat, and then she and Singer would walk down to the Bislet tram stop and go to one of the movie theaters in the center of town, or they’d walk the rather long way over to the Colosseum to see one of the magnificent, epic kids’ movies that everyone was talking about, and which everyone in Isabella’s class had seen. And in the dark of the movie theater she would sit and stare at the promising images on the screen, at the epic story being told, which everyone had to see for themselves; she ate her candy but never screamed in fright or laughed with joy; actually she sat there quite calmly, focused on her bag of candy, which she even tried to eat as quietly as possible so as not to disturb anyone or draw the attention of others. Well, maybe it wasn’t the attention of others she was trying to avoid with her quiet manner, but rather the person sitting closest to her, the one who had brought her here, meaning Singer. In that case, it meant that Singer was sitting next to a little nine-year-old girl who was eating candy so quietly because she didn’t want her stepfather to notice her presence more than was absolutely necessary as she sat there, at his side, looking at this epic film rolling across the screen, a film she was watching because all the children, sooner or later, would see it, and that was why Singer had brought her here, to the Colosseum, and she stared at the screen and absorbed these images and this story without disturbing anyone with her fear or joy. And when the movie was over, they strolled out of the theater and straight out to the lit-up streets in the evening, both of them walking along lost in their own thoughts; they strolled along Kirkeveien, a forty-year-old librarian and his nine-year-old stepdaughter, through the bustling and lit-up life of the big city, more intense at this time, still early in the evening, which was dark and neon-lit, although rather chilly, and Singer asked whether she liked the movie, and Isabella always answered yes. But when she was back in the apartment, she was worn out and relieved to be back home at last and usually she would immediately go to her own room and most often sit down in front of the dollhouse and stick both hands inside and act out some event that had meaning only for her.

  After they moved to Oslo and in this way became immersed, all on their own, in the noise and anonymity of the big city, Singer had to admit that he didn’t understand Isabella. It was as if he lacked a key to her heart, and this both worried him and made him cautious. He was terribly afraid of influencing her, because he knew what consequences this might have for both of them. Isabella was an introverted child, yet she did the usual child things, almost without hesitation, as if they were the most natural things in the world. She liked to jump up and down on the mattress of the bed in Singer’s room, she did this now and then, and each time she would keep at it for quite a while, all alone. Otherwise she liked hiding in cupboards, and being found, plus balancing on the sidewalk curbs whenever she quietly set off on her route to school. But even when she did these things, which come so naturally to children, she did them in a serious manner, which was in sharp contrast to the impression the games actually should convey. When she jumped up and down on the mattress of the bed in Singer’s room, it was something she’d discovered all on her own, and when children jump up and down on a mattress it’s usually accompanied by delighted squeals. But Isabella jumped up and down in silence, and with a pensive look on her face. She lacked the childlike expression even though she was a child like anyone else. She carried out all these children’s games with a seriousness that was striking. Wasn’t she having any fun? Even though she was doing it of her own free will, on her own initiative? In fact, she was doing it for her own sake; she jumped up and down on the mattress without first asking for permission or calling to Singer to come and watch her. She was obviously interested in being a child and in doing all the childlike things that were at her disposal, but she didn’t laugh merrily, or shriek with fright, or with horror or dread, when she did them. She displayed no childlike enthusiasm for these childlike games, but instead a pensive seriousness.

  Sometimes she sang children’s songs. She might do it suddenly, all on her own, or she might be sitting in front of the TV and be exhorted to sing. Sitting all alone in front of the TV, doing what the song demands a person should do, but without the joy that a child is intended to display at these songs. Isabella sang with a very serious expression, as if she were bored, thought Singer. But she had voluntarily put on the TV for the children’s show, or she’d started to sing of her own accord, and why would she do that if she thought it was boring? Singer couldn’t figure her out. She was a child, after all, so why couldn’t she surrender fully and completely to the childishness that was her natural state? Her reality — and there’s no getting around it — was to be a child, after all, a nine-year-old girl. Look, there’s Isabella, nine years old; show us what is natural for you, Isabella! And in a sense she did show it to Singer and all the others. She did, there’s no getting around it. By immersing herself in games, she did show them (not only by virtue of her size and her childish face and the backpack she wore) who she was. She moved around the apartment, alone, eagerly immersed in playing by herself, jumping and dancing, sitting for hours in front of her dollhouse, singing her children’s songs. So far so good, except for the fact that she spends so much time alone, thought Singer. But why did she behave with such intent seriousness within this childhood she’d been given, which many would say was a gift? As if the whole time she were mimicking something that she realized should have brought her delight? Singer didn’t know, but now and then he would be seized by anxiety when he saw her involved in such withdrawn activity. Sometimes Singer thought it was almost eerie to see her jumping up and down on the mattress of his bed in his room with that pensive look on her face. Was she doing that because she’d heard, or seen, other children do it? Had she even heard or noticed the joy of other children as they did it, and that was why she wanted to try it herself, to see if that was how it really felt? Again and again?

  Singer didn’t know. But quite frankly, we expect from children a dewy anticipation about life, and an innocent surrender to the fact that they are children. When this is lacking and is instead replaced by a deliberate seriousness, then what? It causes concern.

  Singer was concerned. He tried, as mentioned, to cheer her up, for example by taking her to the movies. But he also became more and more worried about her as time passed, because she spent so much time alone. It would be better if she’d spend more time with other children, but at least she did that in school, and then she no doubt laughed, he thought, though without conviction. But there was so little he could do. He couldn’t intervene and offer her guidance because he had no idea how to guide her. And so he was left perplexed and concerned. Perhaps others would have tried inviting over other children for Isabella to play with; Singer had colleagues at the Deich­man who had children the same age as Isabella, and he could have tried to make arrangements so that Isabella could spend time with them, since she wasn’t finding any playmates on her own. Or he could have suggested, even insisted, that she invite her school friends home, in fact he could have suggested that Isabella have a party of her own, even though it wasn’t her birthday; he could have said that the most fun parties weren’t birthday parties but parties that are given simply because you wanted to have one, but he couldn’t bring himself to suggest this. Or he could have enrolled Isabella as a member in some sort of club, a sports team, choir, music group, or something along those lines. But he couldn’t bring himself to suggest that either. He couldn’t do it, he found it impossible. He couldn’t interfere in that way. He couldn’t get himself to arrange friendships between Isabella and other children. He just couldn’t. So he remained puzzled, watching his stepdaughter playing her solitary, introverted games in the apartment on Suhms gate.

  It’s true that he tried to offer her a number of temptations. He tried to describe certain things as greatly tempting, things that he’d personally thought would be tempting for a child, and a girl. Going to the movies was one of these things. Taking ballet classes was another.

  “Lots of children dream of becoming dancers when they grow up,” said Singer. “So they start taking classes at the ballet school when they’re about your age.”

  But Isabella refused to be tempted. She had no dreams of becoming a ballerina when she grew up, Isabella had no idea what she wanted to be when she grew up. It looked as if Isabella thought it was enough to be a child.

  “What do you do at the library?” she suddenly asked him one day.

  “It’s called the Deich­man Library,” he said. “You need to remember that if anyone asks because there are lots of different libraries.”

  “But what do you do there?”

  “I’m a librarian.”

  “But what does a librarian do?”

  “Oh, they do lots of things, it all depends on what kind of librarian you are.”

  “But what do you do?”

  “Me? Oh, I, well you won’t see me. I’m downstairs in the basement. That’s where the exciting books are, the ones that nobody cares about anymore, or the ones that are so important that nobody is allowed to see them except for a few librarians. That’s where I am, down there. All day long, I never see the sun.”

  “But what do you do there?”

  “I take care of the books,” said Singer. “I do that all day, and when I go home in the evening, another trusted librarian arrives to take care of them.”

  “Do you just sit there staring at the old books?”

  “That too. To be honest, that’s mostly what I do. But I also go around and see to it that they’re okay.”

  “Are they okay?”

  “Yes, but they tend to have trouble breathing, so I have to take them out, one by one, and give them an airing. This is what I do.”

  Singer went over to the bookcase and pulled out one of the oldest books he owned. He held the book by the spine and let the pages slowly fan out. He stood there like that for a long moment, solemnly. Then he cautiously ran his fingers over the spine, searching for a specific spot, looking as if he were concentrating all his attention on finding it. When he’d found the right place to grip, he paused for effect and then: Bang! he closed up the book with a smack.

  “That’s what I do,” he said. “It’s awfully complicated, because each book requires its own technique. But when I’m done, the book has had a proper airing and will stay clean for a long time. Once I get going, the dust really flies, let me tell you,” said Singer.

  “I don’t believe you,” said Isabella.

  “What don’t you believe?”

  “That that’s what you do at the library.”

  “But it’s true,” said Singer, “truer than reality.”

  “No,” said Isabella and ran off to her room.

  Singer was rather bewildered. It’s certainly not easy to amuse her, he thought. And then he repeated the trick, just for himself. When the bang came, and the fanned out white pages closed up into a compact book package, he couldn’t help smiling. But she didn’t find it amusing, she didn’t even believe me. It’s certainly not easy being me. There aren’t many temptations she’ll fall for. Open a book, hold it along the spine in a special way, and then close it up with a bang, that’s my life. Down in the basement of the Deich­man. Truer than reality.

  And so the days passed, the weeks and months passed, and Singer’s concern about Isabella’s solitude grew. And behind it all was the specter of her quiet being, and the possible ordeals she encountered in her games. The serious child. The one that Singer, puzzled and concerned, pictured before him. The one who was always alone, and for whom he could do nothing except what he was already doing, such as providing both her and himself with what they needed in terms of food, clothing, and sources of entertainment in order to live a modest life, largely unnoticed but more or less accepted by those around them. The latter was especially true of Isabella. His concern about how she was doing at school had made him speculate about whether she was being subjected to scorn from the other children. And so he tried to ease this potential scorn and dismissiveness by dressing her so that she would stand out as little as possible from the group, in terms of appearance. This applied to everything relating to her appearance, even including the lunch she took with her. For example, how many open-face sandwiches should she have in her lunchbox? Two or three? And what kind of sandwiches? Could she have three with brown goat cheese? Wasn’t that asking for trouble, wasn’t it even ridiculous to have three open-face sandwiches, all exactly the same, especially with slices of dense goat cheese? On that point Isabella was able to offer a certain degree of help. At long last he’d been able to drag out of her the fact that she should not have more than two open-face sandwiches, and only one should have brown goat cheese, though she didn’t know what should be on the other one. When it came to clothes, however, Isabella had little to contribute, she paid scant attention to clothes, and her taste was too childish, with a penchant for pink, which was impossible because it was this childish taste that can so easily provoke dismissiveness among nine-year-old girls in the same class. Unfortunately, Singer didn’t have much to contribute either when it came to clothes. But he was definitely worried. So worried that he often left the Deich­man during his lunch break and went over to a chain store that sold clothes for children and teenagers. It was called Hennes & Mauritz. There he walked among the racks as he listened to what the mothers and their daughters talked about when they tried on clothes and he looked to see what sort of clothing they preferred, and in this way he wrangled out of them some useful tricks, which would hopefully prevent Isabella from being dismissed. At least not because of her clothes. Or so he hoped.

  Sometimes he would be paralyzed with anxiety as he came home from his job at the Deich­man Library and stepped inside the silent apartment where the serious child was moving about, almost without a sound. What had he done? But there was no going back.

  At the library, his life proceeded as normal, Singer was immersed in his own work, and the hours flew by in all their tediousness, almost without his noticing. The same as always, without leaving the slightest trace of anxiety inside him. It was only when he came home and saw his stepdaughter that the anxiety returned. Now and then he had an urge to stop, to hold his hands in front of his own face, as if to hide, and scream: “No, no!” But only now and then. Mostly he was simply worried; he went around in the bewilderment of his own worry.

  But one day when he let himself into the apartment — and by the way it was still winter because there was snow on his coat — he heard voices coming from Isabella’s room, and he immediately went over to her room, pausing on the threshold. There he saw two quiet girls sitting next to each other, peering inside the dollhouse as they stuck their hands in to change the configurations inside.

  From that winter day forward, Singer’s life changed, at any rate in terms of the leaden weight in his heart. Now when he let himself into the apartment, he would occasionally find two quiet best friends, who often had their heads together and were giggling in Isabella’s room, or they’d be running around the apartment, where they both seemed to feel at home even though they, and particularly the friend, would be slightly more discreet whenever Singer showed up, in the sense that the friend would stop abruptly, in midjump, as soon as she caught sight of him, before once again running through the rooms of the apartment. After a while there were occasionally three quiet girls in the apartment when he came home from his monotonous library job at the Deich­man. Three classmates who filled the apartment with their quiet games. New activities, but little noise from them, and when there were three girls, the apartment was used more fully, in all its width and breadth, than when there were only two and the dollhouse was the focus of their attention. When there were three or four, they would crawl and run and stand everywhere, he found them standing on the sofa, hiding in cupboards, behind doors; once when he came home one of them was even standing on the dining table and holding on to the chandelier as if she were lifting it up so as to show it off. When she noticed Singer, she hurried to get down from the table, but she moved too fast and she tumbled to the floor and hurt herself, so Singer had to console her before she got up and curtsied, like the well-brought-up child she was.

  Such incidents made Singer guess that they played with a wild abandon whenever he was away and Isabella was home alone after school, though he saw scant signs of this. When he came home, they transformed into the well-brought-up and quiet little girls that they were. But as for what they did when he wasn’t there, he could only guess, based on little things that he found moved around. Once, for example, he noticed that the photograph of Isabella’s deceased mother, which stood in a prominent place on a table in the living room, had been moved a bit. He assumed that Isabella had taken it down and temporarily put it somewhere else, for example on the floor in front of her, as she told her friends about her mother. Although Singer had no clue what she might have said.

  Occasionally Isabella would now have overnight guests, from Saturday to Sunday, usually the first friend who had made an appearance, and sometimes Isabella would also stay overnight at her house, and then Singer would have a totally free weekend, though he didn’t quite know what to do with it. He went out to eat, but the restaurant scene had changed since he was a young man in Oslo, most of the places he’d known were long gone, and the ones that were left had a different clientele, or rather the same clientele, but the people had changed, they’d grown older and looked a little the worse for wear. Singer didn’t feel comfortable among them, even though he knew some of them from the past, and he might sit down at their table because there was something he wanted to talk to them about, but the names they’d each mention didn’t mean much to the other anymore. For that reason he didn’t really appreciate his free weekends as he probably should have — he wasn’t more than forty-two years old after all, and he should have been having adventures, and time passes quickly, it runs away, and before you can even take a breath another year is over, and Singer would be forty-three. No, he appreciated the times when Isabella had overnight guests more than when she spent the night elsewhere. Then Singer would let the money flow, as they say. One of the things that the serious child Isabella truly perceived as a great temptation, one that she couldn’t refuse and clearly found fascinating, was being allowed to get candy, purchasing it herself. When she held the little scoop in her hand, standing in front of all the candy bins in Storkiosken, Singer would notice a slight trembling in her otherwise purposeful introvertedness. He would send Isabella and her friends down to Storkiosken, with a fifty-kroner bill to share, and he saw how her eyes practically sparkled as they put on their coats and ran off. And half an hour later he’d hear their footsteps on the stairs, and they’d come bursting into the apartment, each carrying a bag of carefully selected candy from the bins in Storkiosken.