The Orange Girl by Jostein Gaarder

Author:Jostein Gaarder [Gaarder, Jostein]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2010-07-14T23:00:00+00:00

When she accompanied me to the airport bus, we saw a white dove lying dead in the gutter. Veronika stopped and shivered. I thought it odd that it should have such an effect on her. But then she turned towards me, put her head on my chest and cried. Then I began to cry too. We were so young. We were caught up in the midst of a fairytale. A dead dove shouldn’t have been lying in the gutter. Not a white one, anyway. Those were the rules. We wept. That white dove was an ill omen.

Back in Oslo I concentrated on my studies. I had a lot to catch up on as I’d missed several important lectures during the previous week, and some work was outstanding owing to all the skiing trips and urban ramblings I’d been going on during the past few months. But I saved a lot of time now that I didn’t have to traipse round town looking for a mysterious Orange Girl. Nor did I need to expend a lot of effort getting a girlfriend. Many of my fellow students spent a lot of time on that sort of thing.

I would still sometimes start when I caught sight of a woman’s black coat, or a red summer dress when the weather got warmer. Each time I saw an orange I thought of Veronika. When I was out shopping, the orange display could send me into a reverie. I’d got much better at seeing that no two oranges were identical. I could stand there calmly scrutinising them. And if I was buying oranges myself, I took plenty of time and always selected the very finest. Sometimes I would squeeze the juice from the oranges, and on one occasion when we were playing bridge at the flat, I made orange mousse which I served up to Gunnar and some other friends.

Gunnar was a second-year political science student, and he was the real cook of the two of us. He was always dishing up beef or cod dishes. And although he never looked for any return, it was nice to be able to surprise him with an orange mousse. I put a lot of soul into that pudding. Mum, your Grandma, helped me find a recipe in an old cookery book. She even offered to make orange mousse for me. She couldn’t know that the whole idea was that I should make it myself. I don’t think she had the slightest inkling that this project of mine had anything to do with Veronika.

Then she returned home to Norway, Georg. In mid-July she came back from Seville. I went to Fornebu airport to meet her. Many were the witnesses to our great reunion when she emerged from Customs with two large suitcases and a big portfolio of paintings and drawings. We stood for about half a minute just looking at each other first, perhaps to demonstrate that we had sufficient strength of character to wait a few more seconds for one another.

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