“You’re right, but I just wanted to take leave of the town while I fetched the last items. Then I caught sight of you walking up here.”
Karine didn’t ask why he had followed her. She wasn’t interested in knowing that.
He asked her quietly: “Has somebody been nasty to you?”
“No,” she mumbled. And then: “They don’t understand me.”
“At home?” the man asked gently.
“They’re kind enough, that’s not the problem. But my mother has such strange ideas.”
He put his arms gently around her shoulders. “Would you like to tell me about it?”
Karine reacted vaguely and instinctively as he touched her. She had never liked physical contact with other people, and her distaste had grown worse in the past two years. She didn’t remember why.
He understood her. “Just remember that you have a friend in me. I’ve always felt that you were a very special girl, Karine.”
His words warmed her heart, but she was pretty embarrassed because he was staring at her breasts as he spoke. Her body had changed dramatically over the past few months and to her mother’s surprise, she had begun to need a bra. Karine was a child with a woman’s curves, which is quite a dangerous combination. There will always be men who are turned on by little girls. Lisen’s father was such a type.
He was an electrician. He had coarse features but was pretty good-looking and regarded as a nice chap. His wife probably knew quite a lot about his escapades with other women, but she knew nothing about his sickly desire for girls like Karine.
Karine suspected nothing at all because she had forgotten the terrible incident two years before, and Lisen’s parents had always been kind to her. She didn’t know them all that well, but the other girls in her class thought that Lisen had the handsomest father of them all. Karine didn’t think so: she thought that her father, Vetle, was better looking.
Suddenly, she felt that her small problem with her clothes and the photographer was ridiculous. She wanted to go home.
But Lisen’s father kept on squeezing and patting her in an extremely kind manner while he told her how well he understood her.
What was it he understood? Karine hadn’t said anything. She didn’t want to expose her family to ridicule.
In fact, he was so kind that she couldn’t interrupt his breathless monologue, didn’t get a chance to do so either, because he talked incessantly. He talked a lot of nonsense, something about always seeing her when she was out walking or in the garden. They had lived next door to the Voldens’ house, but now they were moving. Far away, Karine didn’t know where.
Suddenly, Karine discovered that she actually liked the idea that somebody was looking after her. She dared to lean her head a bit more comfortably against his shoulder. At home, they rarely showed emotion through caresses. Vetle and Hanne had more of a friendly relationship with their children. Being with Lisen’s father made her feel at ease. She felt as if she was four years old again.
That was until he began stroking her breast. Then she felt vaguely uneasy. Of course, Karine had learnt more about so-called life during the past two years, but the incident in the flowery meadow had been erased from her memory. Now she experienced an irrational sensation that something was wrong; she had flashbacks about something frightening, something she absolutely mustn’t think about, because then she might go mad with grief. But these sensations were so weak that she didn’t do anything drastic, she merely stiffened when the man’s big work-hardened hands glided over her.
He had begun to pull her blouse over her head.
That was when something awoke in Karine.
A fear of something that had happened in the past, something she had desperately tried to hide from herself. She didn’t recall it now either, but she remembered her immense anxiety and horror.
She screamed and broke loose, with the result that the man was left sitting with her blouse in his hand. But he was up as swift as thought, and grabbed her. Karine stumbled on the slippery cliff, trying to grab hold of roots or hold onto crevices in the rock. The man was over her; she felt him pull her trousers down; she tried to crawl away but he held her firmly, forcing himself into her from behind. She wriggled away, turned around and kicked and bit and tore and pulled, so that the moss flew around in large tufts, and she got a taste of earth in her mouth. There was no danger that they would fall down the slope because there was a bank of earth below them, but a cliff isn’t the best surface on which to fight. Karine’s hair was full of moss and earth. She spat earth up into his face, because now she knew what was happening, more because of what she had learnt from others than what she remembered herself.
She was in utter panic. She hit and hit and bit and kicked for her life, or so she thought. She knew it was something awful she had experienced that time, and it mustn’t happen again.
He managed to enter her again, and this time she was trapped. Her screams were subdued by his hand, while her fists banged pointlessly against his back.
So humiliated, so grubby, she just wanted to die ... Never would she be able to look people in the eye. Stigmatized, worthy only of being despised by all.
He had finished. He got to his feet and quickly put his clothes on.
“Don’t you dare tell anybody,” he panted. “Because I’ll deny it. Nobody knows I’ve been here today.”
Then he was gone.
Karine was unable to get up. She lay huddled like a fetus, sobbing and trembling.
She managed to say pathetically: “You mustn’t do this. You mustn’t do this.”
The photograph was terrible. Her mother said: “You look a mess!”
Karine never told anybody about what had happened. Not because he had forbidden her to do so, but simply because she banished it from her consciousness. She imagined that it was nothing but a bad dream.
Otherwise, she wouldn’t have been able to get on with her life.
Nevertheless, it had a hidden impact on her. It really did!
Karine became lonelier and more introverted than ever. She took great care not to walk on lonely forest tracks, always seeing to it that she was surrounded by open space. Or that she was close to places where people lived. She always sought solitude, because that was a part of her nature.
Nevertheless, she yearned desperately to be among people. But it wasn’t possible now.
Often, she felt like Shira in the grottos. She had read about her in the chronicles of the Ice People. When Shira stood in a void with empty space all around her.
Karine’s distance from her fellow humans was enormous.
She was laying the table that day when her older sister returned from meeting her One and Only Love. They had visitors from Linden Avenue. Mari, overjoyed, impulsively gave her Karine a hug as she passed. As always when somebody touched her, Karine would be shocked and draw away. But Mari was too overcome with joy to notice it.
Mari continued into her room to write down the day’s events in her diary, which was very secretly hidden behind a chest of drawers. Today, he saw me, she wrote. He looked deep into my eyes and said “Hi.”
Her hand happened to flip a page in the book so that an old page appeared. She read it quickly: Today, he saw me! Oh, I’m the happiest person in the whole world!
Mari stared at the page in surprise. But that was about a totally different boy! One that she had finished with ages ago. Oh, bother! He was nothing to write home about!
She quickly returned to today’s boy, but she was no longer quite so enthusiastic. She didn’t know what to put down on paper, because she had thought of writing: I’m the happiest person in the whole world!