by Lars Mytting
“Let it go,” she said. “You came back unscathed. You’ll find nothing but old memories to torment you. What can you uncover, nearly twenty years later, that professional investigators could not find at the time?”
It irritated me, her choice of words. Professional investigators. As if she were reading it aloud from a book. She blocked my path like a white picket fence, but still, I did not go to France when we broke up. I just started up the tractor and drove out to the fields.
The years had passed, but her telephone number still lived in my fingertips. Eighty-four for Saksum, then her number, diagonally opposite on the keypad. She would hear about it this evening at a party. Someone uncapping bottles of Ringnes and dropping hints about me. Girls gathered together on the couch, perfumed and half-drunk, sideways glances whenever my name was mentioned, the guy who made a fool of himself in the town centre, what do we think about him, would anyone defend him, can anyone defend him?
*
Yngve’s Ford Taunus appeared. He flashed his lights and we pulled up alongside each other by the fire station. I rolled down the window and found myself looking around, yes, hoping someone would see me with the chemist’s son. The guy who left sixth form with so many top grades that people called him Maxi Yatzy. While I dropped out of secondary school and that was that.
“Laugen is going down,” he said.
I had always liked that, sitting car to car around five o’clock on a Saturday, the raised rear end of a blue Opel Commodore GS/E next to the 20M chrome grille of a Ford Taunus, glistening after two tubes of Autosol. As long as there were locals in the village, five o’clock was a nice idle time. A time that did not differentiate between those who worked and those who went to school, a time when the only difference between us was that he smoked Marlboros and I smoked rollies. Yngve had been going out with a gorgeous girl from Fåvang called Sigrun, but had recently dumped her because she was “too fussy”.
“Sigrun was not fussy,” I said.
“No, but that’s how it was,” he said.
We were quiet for a moment.
“It’s just a bit odd,” I said. “Like not liking Bruce Springsteen.”
“I don’t like Bruce Springsteen,” he said.
We discussed whether it would be best to fish at the mouth of the river with rods, or if we ought to prepare for a longer spell on a boat with otter boards. I did not ask if he was going to the party later. I assumed he was. Yngve was the type to arrive late and draw a crowd.
“Seven o’clock, then,” I said and looked at the clock on the dashboard. “Just have to get some food in me.”
But he did not roll up the window.
“Heard there was a bit of a commotion in these parts,” he said, nodding towards the post office.
“Commotion?” I said. “All hell broke loose.”
He looked down at the car door and tapped his cigarette.
“What are people saying?” I asked.
“Just that he sprayed the car and you got angry.”
“Bah. That nasty Hirifjell kid beat up poor Noddy, that’s what they’re saying.”
“You didn’t beat him up.”
“How do you know that?”
“People are saying that you did not beat him up. That you stopped when you saw that it was him. Brushed him off and let him go. That’s what people are saying.”
I took one last drag and dropped the cigarette between the two cars.
“People know,” Yngve said. “People know who he is. That he spends his time at the day centre. That he gets up to things like that.”
“Meet you by the river, then,” I said. “We’ll go otter boarding.”
*
The water for the potatoes came to a boil. I took the pot off the hob, dropped in a spoonful of rock salt and grabbed some medium-sized pimpernels. A few extra for tomorrow’s breakfast. Always the same, fried potatoes with herb salt, salted pork and three eggs each. That would keep us going until the newspaper arrived, even if it came late.
In the living room, Bestefar was snoring on the couch with his feet up on a yellowed edition of the Lillehammer Observer. His Russian bayonet on the table. A dead cigarillo in the crystal ashtray. He must have dozed off before he finished smoking it.
I took the tartan blanket from the television chair and spread it over him, checked the pill box in the chest of drawers to see if he had taken his medicine. I went to the kitchen and took out some Wiener schnitzels, then fetched sugar-snap peas and lettuce from the garden. Parboiled the peas and set the table. When I shouted into the living room that dinner was ready he did not wake up. Fine by me. Conversation was not going to solve anything anyway. I finished eating and got up with my mouth full. I slammed the hall door to wake him.
*
I awoke with the Leica on my lap. The morning light was nearing. I was on the far side of the sun.
This was my hour. Leica hour.
I went outside. The smell of raw grass after rain. A magpie took off from the nettle where I had thrown the fish guts the previous night. We had spent four hours otter boarding on Laugen, close to the tall, dark mountainside the trout kept in the shadow of, then out into the current where the graylings might bite at any time. We had a good laugh and drank Coke, smoked and chatted in the blue exhaust of the Evinrude outboard, stopping only when the otter line twitched in our numb hands. At home I scrubbed my fingers under the tap until they tingled, sat down with the Leica and fell asleep.
Now I walked across the potato fields. Below, the farmyard appeared through the mist. The light outside the log house was on, I looked down at the barn and the tool sheds. Then I went on, into the flame-birches.
As a child I had been terrified of coming up here. I would hear loud bangs in the spring, like someone firing a shotgun. Bestefar heard the same, would straighten up and look towards the woods.
“That’s my brother’s iron snapping,” he said and went back to what he was doing.
Never before had I heard him say the word “brother”. Later, I discovered that his name was Einar, and that there was hostility between them. They were on opposite sides during the war. Bestefar went to the Eastern Front and Einar went to Shetland. Little more was said, just trivial things that Alma mentioned, like when the living-room table got scratched. “Oh, it’s only something Einar made”, was how she put it, and when I asked, Alma said that he was a cabinetmaker who had worked in Paris in the thirties and had been killed in 1944.
He left behind a workshop. The building was a little isolated, a flaking, red, elongated cottage. The insides of the windows were covered in dust, and it was the only building around which the weeds grew wild. But back then, when this was all new to me, I did not ask about Einar, only what Bestefar meant by iron.
“My brother put iron bands around the trees,” he said. “They’re rusty now. At this time of year, the sap rises. The trees grow. The cracks you hear, that’s the birch breaking free.”
I could not comprehend why Einar would torment the trees.
“Keep clear of those woods,” said Bestefar. “Splinters can fly off. And if there’s one thing you don’t want to see, it’s flying iron splinters.”
Then he got that rare look, one that would startle me and simultaneously drain me of compassion, and I knew he had drifted back to the war. Often he would have second thoughts, so that it was followed by a strange, gentle and somewhat uncertain expression, and then he would climb down from the tractor and ask what I wanted for supper.
I said I was happy the trees could not shout when they were in pain, otherwise I would never get any sleep, since my bedroom window faced an entire screaming forest. But I said that only to make Bestefar happy. I never even asked why Einar had fastened iron bands around the trees.
Then I read Det Hendte 1971, and in the long hours when I was angry without knowing why, it was as if I had taken Einar’s side because he had fallen out with Bestefar. Right after the first thunderstorm, the time of year when the sap begins to flow, I lay waiting
for the cracks from the birch woods. And one night it was as if I wanted to see Einar. I crawled out of bed, sneaked past Bestefar’s bedroom and put on some clothes I had hidden down in the hall. Ran towards the woods, glancing back to see if a light came on in the window.
The ground was damp from the rain. The moon was large and cast long shadows where I walked. High on the hillside I glimpsed the spruce branches of the surrounding woods broken by green foliage. I crouched as I drew nearer. The undergrowth was thick and brushed me with dew.
Then I stood amongst the birch trunks. He had fastened some kind of withies around all of the trees. Flat, rusted iron bands braced against the white birchbark, while a sea of green leaves rustled in the treetops high above. It was a large parcel of woodland and there must have been a hundred birches with rings. Five or six on each tree, at various heights. He would have used ladders to attach them. The bands were meant to be adjusted as the trees grew, as there were long bolts with huge wing nuts on the ends. But he was shot in 1944 and never returned to loosen them. Most had rusted apart and hung loosely from the trunks, a few were ingrown into the tree, while others had fallen off and were poking up from the forest floor.
Why did he torment the trees? I stood there for a long time that night, between white trunks that seemed to be an infinity of flagpoles, rehearsing an anger towards a man who was dead, an anger which I soon set aside because I realised that I was merely copying Bestefar.
There was a crack behind me. I raced back down to the farmyard along the same path I had made on the way into the woods. I crawled back under my duvet and lay there, breathing rapidly, and then I did something I had not done in years: I slipped into Bestefar’s bedroom and lay down in his closet, staring up at the shirts and trousers on the hangers.
I was terrified, truly terrified. The crack in the woods had woken something inside me, a pervasive fear and a memory which stirred deep within. I thought I heard voices in the distance. Then, in the midst of all that obscurity and menace, a memory of a toy dog so distinct that I wondered if I had simply imagined it. It was made of wood, had drooping ears and could nod its head and wag its tail.
But was the memory real or just a wish I comforted myself with? I had never owned a toy dog. Maybe it belonged to someone we visited, and I had confused the memories. Because even we must have been places. Visited people.
Been normal before we died.
*
The following day I asked the woodwork teacher a question. He swept the wood shavings from his leather apron and said: “Flame-birch? The finest cabinetmaking material in the country. Comes from trees that are scarred in some way. The pattern emerges from the tree doctoring itself.”
That was his expression. Doctoring.
I had never heard the woodwork teacher talk that way. Usually he would go on about the importance of not wasting material, about making more precise measurements. Now he disappeared into a closet and came back carrying a small cupboard door which had a golden shimmer. The meandering pattern created shades of black and shadow play on the luminous, amber-yellow woodwork.
“What you see are scars,” he said. “The tree has to encapsulate the wound and continue to grow. The growth rings find alternative routes, extend across the wound. The pattern is unpredictable. Only when you saw parts off the tree can you see how it will turn out.”
I was good at woodwork, could make seamless joints and carve small faces freehand. “Cabinetmaking is in your blood,” he said thoughtfully, and I felt a tugging inside me, a connection that did not end at Hirifjell, but beyond.
I was forever returning to the woods, but never told anyone that I went. I would sit there looking at Einar’s trees in shackles. It became our place, Einar’s and mine, and when I had a row with Bestefar, I was quick to think of Einar. I would imagine him coming down from the flame-birch woods to argue my case. I sat up there watching the birds, listening to the rustling of the leaves. Dreamed up explanations as to what might have happened in France. That Mamma and Pappa were alive down there. That I had been swapped with another child and brought back here. That I was infected with a dangerous illness, which Mamma and Pappa did not have the strength to see in full bloom.
Later I killed off my fabrications one by one. Over the passing years there were fewer cracks, most of the withies surrendered to the trees and ruptured, and the false visions gradually disappeared.
Bestefar shied away from that parcel of forest. It would have been natural for him to fell the trees for firewood, thin the woods and keep them tidy, but he never went near them, and he made it clear that he didn’t like the idea of me going in there with a saw either.
But then something happened that I could not explain until many years later. The night before my tenth birthday, I was woken by a noise and I got out of bed and went down the hall. I heard Bestefar downstairs; he was angry and said something I did not grasp word for word: I do not want to be haunted by that, or, spare him from being haunted by that. The rest boiled over into an outburst filled with hate, and when I heard his step on the stairs I hurried back to my room.
From the window I saw a car I did not recognise, heard voices and the humming of the engine. Then the car turned, its tail lamps leaving red streaks in the darkness as it left. The next morning, Bestefar said that some travellers had shown up at the door, bothering them for directions at an absurd time of night.
On the kitchen table there was a layer cake and enough food for two days up at the mountain pasture. It was supposed to be a surprise, we were going to celebrate my birthday.
But on the drive there, I had the feeling that Bestefar and Alma were afraid of letting something slip, and that night I dreamed that I was surrounded by a crowd of people who were laughing at something written on my back, but I was unable to take off my jacket to see what it was.
A few days after my birthday I took one of my usual walks up to the woods. But when I stood amongst the tree trunks, the place felt disturbed, haunted almost. Then I saw the stumps. Four trees had been felled and limbed. The sawdust was yellow and fresh, the shorn edges were bleeding sap and there were flies buzzing around.
I got down on one knee and let the sawdust trickle through my hands. Large, round grains, from a coarse-toothed bow saw. The limbed branches formed silhouettes of the trunks, and judging by the distance between the piles of chips, I saw that the trees were cross-cut into two-metre lengths. In the grass I could see the trails the trunks had left; they had been dragged over to a slope, then rolled down to the county road. This was not illegal felling for firewood, because there were trees closer to the road. Whoever had been there had known what he was looking for.
*
Now I stood amongst the tall, white pillars of birch with rusted rings, this time gripping the Leica. Some had broken free of their shackles since I had been here last, others had succumbed in their battle with the withies and allowed them to become embedded. I shifted my position, studied the direction of the shadows, my eyes searching until they found the theme.
The sun arrived. I lay on my back and looked up. Through the wide-angle lens I saw the trunks reaching for the heavens. That would be a good one. I saw exactly what I wanted to see. The foliage, the clouds, the trunks and the foreign element – the iron – which would make this a photograph and not a picture.
The shutter emitted its brief whisper, the Leica capturing something in the now and allowing it to become something from the past.
As I stood up I pricked my finger on a jagged iron withy. I sucked off the drop of blood and walked back to Hirifjell.
He was not at the kitchen table. That was the first thing I noticed.
Because Bestefar should be sitting right there, wearing his dark-blue work jumper, fried eggs on the hob, two coffee cups on the table, glancing up from yesterday’s edition of the Lillehammer Observer. He should be sitting right there, as steady as the log walls behind him, folding up the newspaper when I came in.
But the table was still set for supper. The water in t
he jug was cloudy with air bubbles. The peas in the bowl were shrivelled. In the frying pan there were two dry Wiener schnitzels.
I walked slowly into the living room.
He had the same tartan blanket over him, his feet up on the newspaper. I stopped in the middle of the room and thought, Now it begins.
Bestefar was lying on the couch, and Bestefar was not sleeping.
2
I HAD THOUGHT HE MUST BE ALREADY IN HIS GRAVE, OR at least no longer able to drive. But it was him, Magnus Thallaug, the old priest, driving the matt, dark-blue Rover I remembered from the time of my confirmation studies. The car wound its way down from the gate and rattled over the cattle grid.
I tucked my shirt in. Ran my fingers through my hair.
The priest was peering through the grubby windscreen, both hands on the steering wheel. The Rover stopped in the middle of the farmyard, where the hearse had stood. The door opened, the priest tested the ground with his walking stick, set down one skinny leg. The patch of skin between his socks and shabby suit trousers glistened, pale as skimmed milk. He hoisted himself out of the car and looked around.
“You have to eat, Edvard,” he said when his eyes came to rest on me, as though he had checked on the status of the barn and storehouse in turn. “Otherwise there will be no farmers left at Hirifjell.”
Hesitantly I shook his hand. His skin looked two sizes too big. When he opened the back door, the smell of a hot old car seeped out. On the cracked leather seat there was a threadbare bible, some pages of which had come loose.