Else

Else, Simon Kefas’s wife, is the center of his private life and the person for whom he is willing to risk everything. Her progressive loss of sight brings the fragility of their shared future into the open: Simon searches for a costly operation that might help her, while Else confronts the limits of what medicine can offer in the time available. After Simon’s death, she undergoes the operation in the United States and tells Kari that it was eighty per cent successful. She also becomes the keeper of Simon’s history, explaining how his love, gambling, guilt, and eventual repentance are connected.

Identity and Life with Simon

Else lives with Simon in their house in Disen. Their relationship is portrayed through the ordinary intimacies of a long marriage: she strokes his thinning hair as he sits at the kitchen table, and he thinks of their home and her presence as the sources of his good fortune. When he leaves, he calls upstairs to ask her to tell him what the doctor says; even at work, their telephone conversations remain soft and intimate. Else tells him not to worry, says she will see him at dinner, and reminds him to stop fussing because he is at work. Their affection is neither new nor merely sentimental: Simon reflects that he has loved her every day of the more than three and a half thousand days they have been together.

The couple’s shared life includes difficult truths as well as tenderness. They had promised to tell each other everything and had tested how much truth each could bear. Simon’s gambling addiction and debts were among the truths that damaged their life together: he secretly mortgaged their house and lost the money. Else forgave him. She did not leave, issue an ultimatum, or make him endure the consequences alone. Simon remembers her forgiveness as the moment his shame helped him stop gambling; he never gambled again. Else later makes clear that she did not save him by repairing him from the outside. In her account, Simon chose to change, and his love for her helped him do so.

Progressive Loss of Sight and the Search for Treatment

Else’s sight deteriorates until everyday tasks expose the limits of her vision. When Simon is burned by coffee she has spilled, he blurts out the question he had been trying not to ask: whether she is blind. He immediately regrets it. They hold each other and apologize; Else worries that he could be with someone better, while Simon insists that there is no one better and that he will not let go. The exchange registers the practical danger of her condition and the shame and fear surrounding it without reducing their marriage to a simple story of helplessness and rescue.

The medical options are uncertain and expensive. Else tells Simon that a doctor has described a newer operation in the United States, one that may eventually help people who come after her once the procedure and equipment become standard. For her, however, the operation is complicated and costs more than a woman on disability benefit and a man on a police salary can afford. Simon responds that they own their house, have no children, and live frugally, and begins considering how they might meet the cost. He researches the Howell Clinic, studying its published results and the reported success rate for the procedure Else needs. The figure is well above fifty per cent but lower than he had hoped; its relative modesty makes it seem credible to him, while the unlisted price is one he already knows to be very high.

The urgency sharpens when Else’s doctor tells Simon that she has little time left if she is to have a chance of a successful operation: surgery must happen within days. He says that many blind people live full lives, but acknowledges that in her case treatment abroad may be worth considering despite the cost and uncertainty. Simon understands that the Howell Clinic is now an immediate possibility, not simply a future option. Else’s need also enters the criminal bargain proposed to Simon: his counterpart names money for her eye operation as what Simon wants, then asks what Simon has to sell. The medical crisis thus becomes entangled with the moral compromises Simon is prepared to make.

Marriage, Forgiveness, and Simon’s Past

Else’s importance to Simon is not confined to his efforts to pay for treatment. Their relationship is built on a pact of complete honesty, and their repeated telling of their own history has become part of the structure of their home. Simon recalls that Else forgave him after he secretly mortgaged the house to cover his gambling and lost everything. Her response helped him see that he could exercise self-control and be honest with another person; he stopped gambling and never placed another bet. He later credits Else with having been his medicine, but she corrects the implication that she cured him: he fixed himself, she says, by deciding to quit.

That distinction informs Else’s account of love and responsibility. She tells Simon that he knew how to love, and he attributes that capacity to her influence. Yet in her later conversation with Kari she rejects the familiar claim that being loved is what saves a person. Simon called her his angel, but she argues that it was his love for her, rather than her love for him, that led him to save himself. The account preserves both their closeness and their individual agency: Else’s forgiveness mattered, but Simon’s change was his own decision.

Else also becomes the person who carries Simon’s concealed history to Kari. At Simon’s request, she explains that before their marriage he had loved Helene, who later became Ab Lofthus’s partner. Simon’s gambling debts made his relationship with Helene chaotic, and he felt he was dragging her down; after Ab entered her life, she and Ab moved out. When Simon learned that Helene was pregnant, he gambled desperately, lost everything, and turned to the Twin with an offer to sell his soul. He then drew Ab into a similar bargain, using Ab’s fear that his son would grow up poor. Else describes Simon’s guilt over what he had done to Ab and how the Twin’s demand that his mole rise within the police eventually left no room for both men.

Change, Death, and Aftermath

Else’s account to Kari explains that Simon eventually repented, stopped being a mole, and spent the rest of his life making amends and pursuing corrupt officers. Helene’s death came after he had already lost much of what mattered to him; in Else’s telling, he then had little left to fear and treated loneliness as something he deserved. She recounts not only his wrongdoing but also the costly effort to confront it, giving Kari a history that complicates any simple division between Simon’s former corruption and his later pursuit of corrupt police officers.

At the final confrontation, Simon sees a raised hand and realizes there is not enough time both to warn Sonny and to act. His thoughts turn to the fact that he will not have time to give Else what she deserves; he then dives in an attempt to intervene. As he is dying, he says that what he wants is to give her the gift of sight. His words make explicit the private purpose that has driven his search for treatment, even as his death leaves him unable to carry it out himself.

Else does receive the operation afterward. Some weeks after Simon’s funeral, she tells Kari that the procedure in the United States was eighty per cent successful, adding that almost nothing is perfect—not life, people, or Simon—only love. The outcome is therefore neither a complete cure nor a simple tragedy: Else’s sight is much better, but the operation is not perfect, and Simon is gone. In the garden at Disen, she shares with Kari what Simon told her about Helene, and later shows her the photograph he had on him when he died. Through these conversations and objects, Else preserves the history that Simon asked her to pass on, linking his attempts at reparation to the love and damage that preceded them.