22:10 - Part II - Asymmetrical Pieces

Chapter 11

Lena revealed herself only in small, asymmetrical pieces and never when Eli asked directly. Even then, she spoke of few people in her life narrative; she herself was rarely anything more than a fleeting shadow in her stories. So far, Eli had put a few of these pieces together to form a vague and rambling puzzle.

Lena's grandfather, Per Eirik, was one of the fishermen who helped the Norwegian king and queen escape to London when the Nazis invaded Oslo at the beginning of WWII. Per Eirik, apparently, was a sheer brute of a guy, even by Scandinavian standards. A fearless man, who clearly felt Viking blood pouring through his veins, he regularly volunteered to sail back and forth between Norway and Britain in small off-shore fishing boats during punishing ocean gales and storms. Because in the rough open sea, he knew the odds were better for slipping by Nazi submarines and coastal patrols to smuggle people, supplies, or whatever the Norwegian Resistance or British Intelligence dared him to deliver or bring back.

Later in the war, Per Eirik had been sent to Aviemore, Scotland, where a special paratrooper training camp was set up to patch together a Norwegian commando unit. This small but hardened group of soldiers parachuted into Norway with the mission to attack and destroy a Nazi facility hidden in the icy Norwegian wilderness that was producing critical nuclear materials. The operation was successful, and the Americans beat the Germans to the atomic bomb, in no small measure thanks to a handful of men armed with only machine guns and their skis.

However, while in Aviemore, Per Eirik became romantically entangled with a Scottish nurse, and, after the war, he decided to remain in the U.K. A marriage certificate would have sufficed to obtain British citizenship, but he applied for it on his own merits instead. For Per Eirik's wartime services, His Majesty's government was obliged to repay its debt with gratitude and a passport. The two courted properly, settled in Aberdeen, and lived out their days among rolling Scottish pastureland. Toward the end of his life, Per Eirik had bought a stake in a North Sea oil-exploration venture and died very wealthy.

Lena's father, Andreas, was the second of four children and the only boy. He took the combination of his Norwegian appearance and his softly rolling Scottish accent to Cambridge, where he completed a degree in finance followed by a doctorate at the London School of Economics, more commonly known as LSE. Lena described her father as a quiet, stiff man with noticeably thick glasses; but, she added, there must have been a side to him she never saw because her English mother, Chelsea, was a rebellious and audacious feminist artist from Kensington.

Money had not been a problem in Lena's youth. Not only did both sides of the family have a bit of wealth, but Andreas followed Per Eirik into the oil industry and worked his way up through the management echelons of British Petroleum, which is branded now simply as BP. His career kept him busy and frequently travelling, but their lifestyle allowed Chelsea to immerse herself in London's neo-Bohemian art scene, to which she felt irresistibly drawn, essentially leaving Lena to be raised by her Scottish grandmother. Lena said her earliest and fondest memories of childhood were typical: her grandmother, Helena, taking care of her and telling her bedtime stories. As for her parents, Lena believed it had been a happy partnership and marriage.

However, there was a point in time, as definite as the ledge of a cliff, beyond which Lena said scarcely more about her family and youth. Both her parents died in the early 1980s when Lena was eleven. The two had taken an anniversary holiday in Egypt, where they suffered carbon monoxide poisoning in a freak accident at their luxury hotel; it had killed forty-three people in all. Lena was devastated, and in the following months, her grief was compounded by the rapid onset of the final stages of her grandmother's Alzheimer's disease. The last remaining person who could give Lena familial love no longer knew who she was.

So as an only child, Lena then moved to Oslo, where she lived with an Aunt Beatrix through her high school years.

Eli surmised that Lena probably inherited her mother's defiant artistic streak, but when she moved to Norway, it submerged deep within her and amplified exponentially in the absence of an emotional balance. She said nothing about her teenage years in Oslo, except that they were uneventful and she had few friends. After finishing high school, she told Eli, it simply felt natural for her to follow in her father's footsteps to Cambridge and then the LSE. However, she differed from him by studying international politics with a focus on languages. Nevertheless, she was also reserved about her time at university, recalling little more than she studied a lot and spent a good deal of time in London, retracing her mother's artistic footprints on the weekends, but still making very few friends.