Grace by Linn Ullmann Page A

fiddled with a sleeve and laughed at him. “I found it in the attic.”
    “We don’t have an attic!” Johan protested. “There isn’t even an attic in our building.”
    “You know what I mean. In one of those old trunks in the storeroom in the basement.”
    “I see. So that’s what you meant.”
    She looked down. “I spoke to Andreas again. He’d like to come see you. Are you up to it?”
    “Yes.” Johan stared at her. The earrings were new too, red stars dangling from silver threads. “You mentioned reconciliation,” he said.
    “Yes.”
    “He’ll inherit everything, you know, Mai, one hundred fifty thousand kroner plus twenty years’ interest. It was Alice’s money. I can’t leave you anything except debts.”
    She looked at him and stroked his cheek. “Did you have a bad night, Johan, my love? You look tired. You’re having a hard time of it, aren’t you?”
    He knocked her hand away. “I had a very good night. I feel fit enough to run a marathon. Do you have any idea what kind of a man Andreas is?”
    “You know I don’t really know him that well. He seemed nice enough on the phone this time around.”
    “He’s unbearable. He’s the kind of person who always has to set people straight: friends or strangers, young or old, everybody! He has no qualms whatsoever. Say, for example, that somebody mispronounces a word. Andreas will purse his thin little lips and promptly correct him. The problem is that, almost without exception,
he’s
the one who’s wrong.”
    “Oh, dear,” said Mai.
    “He was in a restaurant once with some new friends,” Johan continued. “Take note of that, Mai. Always
new
friends. There is no one on earth Andreas can point to and say, That’s my
old
friend so-and-so; we were at school together . . . no one—”
    “You don’t know that, Johan,” Mai interrupted. “You haven’t seen him for eight years.”
    “He’s my son. I know.” Johan took a deep breath. “Anyway! He was in a restaurant with these new friends, and one young man announced that he was going to have
chèvre.
Whereupon my son smiled and said, ‘It’s
chevré,
with the stress on the final
e.
And an
accent aigu.
So.’ He pursed his lips and raised his hand slightly. ‘
Chevré!
Simple, right?’ No one told him he was making a complete fool of himself with his absurd French pronunciation. They just let him ramble on, indulged him, and seemed to hang on his words. They asked whether he spoke French, and Andreas said, Oh, yes, he spoke a little. Not much, but
oui, oui,
absolutely. In that case, had he perhaps read the works of Marcel Bavian, a much underrated French writer whose short stories were enjoying something of a revival? It was a young woman who asked the question. And naturally Andreas had read Marcel Bavian. Loved his work, especially his short stories. In fact, he said, Marcel Bavian wrote the most perfect short stories: spare, yet rich, devoid of literary pretension, and aimed straight at the reader’s solar plexus.”
    Johan looked at Mai.
    “That’s the kind of man he is. Not until later does it dawn on him that when they laugh, they are laughing at him.”
    “But how do you know all this?” Mai was smiling. She was caught up in the conversation. They were chatting; he liked that.
    “He told me about it, but not quite the way I just told you. Oh, no! Triumphantly, Mai! Telling me how he taught this charming new friend of his how to pronounce the name of a French cheese . . . and asking whether in all my years as a critic I had ever come across a writer by the name of Marcel Bavian. Had he been translated into Norwegian, by any chance? No?
Really?
Too bad.”
    Mai lowered her eyes. “He might have changed,” she said. “That was a long time ago.”
    “Do you think people can change, Mai?” He remembered his last day at the newspaper, face-to-face with Dolores, the gorgeous summer intern. The looks. The sniggers. The degradation.
    “I don’t know,” Mai replied. “I