Burned

He sits down in the kitchen. He listens to the fridge. It hums and whirrs noisily. He thinks it is on its last legs. Just like him.

He hasn’t been there for many, many years, but the groaning from the fridge reminds him of the family’s summer cabin. It is just outside Stavern, by Anvikstranda Camping. It is plain, simple and small, probably no more 30 square metres. Fantastic view of the sea. Loads of adders.

His grandfather built the cabin as cheaply as he could, just after the war, and to Henning’s knowledge, the fridge is still the original one. It moans and carries on almost like the fridge in Henning’s flat.

He hasn’t been to the cabin since he was a child. He thinks Trine goes there sometimes, but he doesn’t know for sure. Perhaps the fridge is still there. It was only a half-size and they always had to kick the bottom of the door after closing it. If they didn’t, the door would swing open again. The flap to the freezer compartment was missing. The shelves in the door were loose and cracked, which meant heavy items such as milk and bottles had to lie inside the main body of the fridge.

But the fridge worked. He can still recall how cold the milk would be. And he decides it’s all right to grow old and still be in working order. He has never tasted milk so cold, never experienced brain freezes like the ones he used to get on summer holidays in their tiny cabin. But it was fun. It was cosy. They went crabbing, played football on the large plain at the camping site, climbed rock faces, learned to swim in the sea, barbecued sausages on the beach in the evenings.

The age of innocence. Why couldn’t it have stayed that way?

He wonders if Trine remembers those summers.

*

He thinks about sharia again. Allah-u-akbar. And he recalls what Zahid Mukhtar, the head of the Islamic Council in Oslo, said in 2004:

As a Muslim, you’re subject to Islamic law and, to Muslims, sharia takes precedent over all other laws. No other interpretation of Islam is possible.

Henning interviewed a social anthropologist at the Christian Michaelsen Institute shortly afterwards, and she explained that most people in the West have a distorted image of sharia. Though there are traditions going back a thousand years and a certain consensus exists on how to interpret the laws of Allah, sharia isn’t a single unambiguous set of written laws. Religious scholars, who interpret the Koran and Hadith texts, decide what is right and wrong, and their reading is influenced by whatever culture affects them. In Norway, most people associate sharia with the death penalty in Muslim countries. And this ignorance is deliberately exploited.

The social anthropologist, whose name he can’t remember, showed him a website in Norwegian that listed sharia law in bullet points and the punishments for breaking them. ‘This is very simplistic,’ she said, pointing to the screen. ‘Few people will understand what sharia is really about from this. It’s people who aren’t scholars who might post a page like this. They use a fluid concept to gain power and influence. Most people don’t realise that hudud punishments are quite low key in the Koran. A few scholars even think they should be ignored completely.’

The interview made an impression on Henning because it challenged his own prejudices against Muslims in general and sharia in particular. And now, when he thinks about hudud punishments and links them to the murder of Henriette Hagerup, a number of things fail to add up. She wasn’t a Muslim. Nor was she married to one and, as far as he knows, she hadn’t stolen anything, either, and yet her hand had been chopped off.

He shakes his head. A few years ago, he might have been able to come up with a credible explanation, but now he is increasingly convinced that it makes no sense. And that’s the problem. It always makes sense. It has to. He just needs to find the common denominator.

Chapter 21

Henning’s flat reminds him of a garage sale. He doesn’t like garages. He doesn’t know why, but they make him think of cars, idle engines, closed doors and screaming families.

Back in Klofta, the Juuls’ garage contained tyres that should have been thrown out long ago, ancient and unusable bicycles, rusty gardening tools, leaking hoses, bags of shingle, skis no one ever used, tins of paint, paintbrushes, logs stacked against the wall. Even though Henning’s father never tinkered with any of the cars he owned, the place always smelled like a garage. It smelled of oil.

The smell of oil will always remind him of his father. He doesn’t remember all that much about him, but he remembers his smell. Henning was fifteen years old when his father died suddenly. One morning, he simply failed to wake up. Henning had got up early; he had an English test later that day. His plan was to do some last-minute revision before the rest of his family stirred, but Trine was already awake. She was sitting on the bathroom floor, her legs pulled up to her chest. She said:

He’s dead.