“He’ll have the borscht,” I told the waiter.
After we ordered we lapsed into silence, and I took the opportunity to pull out my cell phone. I’d sent a message to Bj?rnar earlier, but as far as I could tell, I hadn’t received a response yet. There didn’t seem to be any coverage here, either. The hotel claimed to have Wi-Fi, but I hadn’t been able to get it to work. I suppose it made sense that there was no contact between the outside world and this snow globe we found ourselves in, if you wanted to look at it that way.
My sensation of being in a snow globe was so strong that it was actually a little hard to believe that Bj?rnar and the kids even existed, as if I were a replicant and they were an implanted memory. Maybe this was what hell was. Finding out that you were actually something totally different. That there was no response to “to be or not to be.” That it was all just a sequence taken from someone else’s life. Or from a TV show.
Because who knew where the replicants got their memories from these days.
The evening ended with Ivan tasking Irina with taking us back to the hotel.
“Couldn’t you brighten our journey with your presence, Ivan Abarnikonovitch?” pleaded Ingvill.
“Abarnikovitch,” Irina corrected for the fourth or fifth time.
“No,” Ivan said brusquely. “I have to—”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Drive us around tomorrow.”
I felt four eyes glaring back at me, but was too tired to care.
“Well,” Peter said. “We look forward to being in your charge again tomorrow.”
Once we were back in front of the hotel, Peter turned to Irina.
“Farewell,” he said and kissed her hand. “We shall meet again.”
“In thunder, lightning, or rain,” I muttered.
Then our Russian comrade disappeared into the snow flurries without a word, while we walked just as quietly into the lobby.
21
That breakfast is the most important meal of the day was a fact apparently lost on Ingvill and Peter. They furthermore seemed to be solidly in the majority in this, because there weren’t very many guests who’d bothered to make the trip down to the dining room. Aside from me there was only one man in a shiny red shirt and a young couple compulsively holding hands over the table.
When I saw the buffet, I understood why there were so few guests. It appeared to be a mixture of continental and Russian food, and the only thing it all had in common was that it seemed well past the expiration date. The European contributions consisted of something baguette-like, a few slices of cheese with a greenish sheen, a couple of cookies, and a small bowl of muesli. The Russian portion consisted of some kind of porridge and potato pancakes.
I slowly chewed on the baguette, feeling it disintegrate and form an extra layer in my mouth, while the cheese immediately fell apart into small, hard crumbles that I washed down with a few gulps of fruit punch. The man in the red shirt, clearly on a different type of diet, had helped himself exclusively to sparkling wine. The couple persisted in their heavy petting activities.
Neither Ingvill nor Peter had come down yet by the time Ivan showed up in the lobby, and we ended up having to get one of the front-desk workers to call them.
“They overslept,” one of the amazons behind the counter informed us with an impeccable smile.
Ivan groaned and ran his hand through his hair, looking like he wanted to punch someone. Luckily he lit up considerably when Ingvill stepped out of the elevator a few minutes later.
“Good morning, my lovely,” he said and kissed her hand.
She giggled and looked at me, as if she were expecting a similar greeting from me. But I was speechless. Her hair was braided like Pippi Longstocking and accompanied by a wide-necked, floral blouse and pants that were a mishmash of zippers and pockets and what looked like parachute cords. On her feet she wore high-heeled ankle boots, which made her twice my height.
Pippi Longstocking meets Bride of Frankenstein, I thought, noting that the baguette and cheese had settled like rocks in my stomach.
“Do we have time for breakfast?” asked Peter, who was dressed for a manorial pheasant hunt. “I have low blood sugar.”
“No,” Ivan said tersely.
“Maybe we could stop somewhere on the way,” I suggested helpfully, “and buy a little food that Peter and Ingvill can eat in the car?”
“No,” said Ivan. “No food in the car.”
“But . . .”
“Didn’t you hear what he said?” hissed Ingvill, leaning over me from her great height. “No food in the car!”
“The breakfast wasn’t that good,” I said to comfort a pale Peter as we climbed into the backseat five minutes later.
“Maybe they have a vending machine at the university,” he muttered.
They did, but when Peter tried to insert coins into the machine, Ivan took him by the arm and led him firmly onward.
“The dean is waiting,” he informed us.
Shortly thereafter we stood squashed into a kind of antechamber, where three secretaries were doing their respective best to stack papers, type on a manual typewriter, and open the window. In the midst of all this, Ivan was trying to make our presence known, something which ultimately resulted in two of the secretaries each starting to flip frantically through their appointment books while the third shook her head just as frantically.
After a moderately large dose of roaring, Ivan stormed out of the room with Ingvill hot on his heels. Peter and I lingered uncertainly, until he bowed understatedly to the secretaries and led me out into the corridor, where we could see Ivan’s and Ingvill’s backs in the distance.
“Come,” growled Ivan.