Burned by Thomas Enger

was going, he stepped between the ropes, lost his grip, fell forwards and sideways and smashed his face and mouth into a post. Henning leapt up, ran over to him, turned the boy’s head to examine the extent of the damage, but all he could see was a black, sooty face. Jonas’s mouth was gone. No teeth.
    The only thing that wasn’t black was his burning eyes.
    He wakes up and finds himself blowing, blowing desperately on Jonas’s burning eyes to put out the flames. But they never go out. Jonas’s eyes are like those birthday candles which reignite themselves; you can try, but you’ll never succeed in blowing them out.
    The dream throws him for a loop every time. When he wakes up his pulse is racing, and he closes his eyes to block out the image that makes him nauseous. He visualizes the ocean. Dr. Helge has taught him to do that, concentrate on a favorite place or activity, whenever he gets flashbacks.
    Henning likes the sea. He has happy memories of saltwater. And the sea helps him open his eyes again. He rolls onto his side, sees, from the clock on his mobile, that he has slept for nearly three hours. Not bad, for him. And he decides that will have to do.
    At least for today.
    There isn’t much he can do in the middle of the night. He ignores the matches and gets up. He goes into the living room, glances at his piano, but keeps on walking. His hip aches, but it is a little early for pills.
    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 than thirty square meters. 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 cozy. They went crabbing, played soccer 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. Allahu 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 Michelsen Institute shortly afterward, 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