The Sixteen Trees of the Somme

by Lars Mytting

  I made it, Einar, I thought. I do not know if you actually wanted me to come. But I believe you did. You arrived at Hirifjell when I was ten, and I did not know about you then. I arrived too late, but I’m here now. So show yourself in any way you can.

  Shutters were fixed over the windows. I groped in the darkness, extended my arms and felt my way forwards along the walls. Aware of the faint smell of soot, I ran my hands along the brickwork of a fireplace. There, on the shelf, a small box. I shook it. The same reassuring sound as in Norway. Matches.

  The flame revealed a table and a couch. A bookshelf under a window, otherwise nothing. I gazed around in the light of the dying match. Struck a new flame and found a yellow candle, but nothing to get a fire going in the fireplace with, nor was there any bed or blankets. I was cold and searched the room for anything soft and dry, ended up tearing down a curtain and wrapping myself in it.

  Just as I was about to fall asleep, something jerked me awake.

  The boat. It was still moored where I had made my foray. I had no idea whether it was high tide or low tide now, or whether it might work itself loose. Quickly I pulled on my wet shoes, wet trousers and anorak and ran outside.

  It was rocking beyond the stones and seemed to be welcoming me back. On Unst, I saw the lights of a solitary car passing.

  With my last strength I rowed around the island. Barely avoided a jagged reef just in front of the dock. I tried to open the boathouse but could not find the right key, and ended up mooring the boat to a couple of rotting poles.

  *

  That night my dreams spun in circles.

  I stood in a large room with a woman in a dress. Light from high windows cast shadows across the floor. We stood quite still. As though we were waiting for music for a dance.

  We were the same age, yet she was grown up and I was not. We embraced but could not feel each other’s touch, it was as though she was air to me and I was air to her.

  There was something that did not feel right.

  And then her figure began to fade. The dress still held the shape of a person, but then the material lost its form, the thin fabric collapsed. I caught her waist with my arm, and stood with a dead woman’s dress, alone.

  I woke and wondered whether a dance was about to begin. Or would never end.

  Outside I heard the breakers pounding Haaf Gruney. I fell asleep again.

  *

  A hazy light filtered through the cracks of the shutters. My clothes were lying in a wet heap on the floor. The dream still trembled inside me, like a phantom etched on my retina, gradually expelled by daylight.

  The world outside was grey. The sun was attempting to break through. Some overgrown flagstones led down to the boathouse, and the rowing boat was where I had moored it. The wind was calm, but the sea was still broken up against the reef beyond the boathouse.

  I loosened the wing nuts that fastened the shutters from the inside, went outside and lifted them off. I could see the light enter the house, like when I had reconnected the electricity in the carpentry workshop.

  Then I walked over to the front door, grabbed the doorknob and told myself that I was Einar Hirifjell.

  A creak from a sluggish door. Small hints of life. Worn paint at the bottom of the wall where he had kicked off his shoes.

  Some of his daily rhythm became evident. Waking in a small bedroom beyond the kitchen, where an old spring mattress now lay bare on a single bed made of rough wood. A dented washbasin and a green metal ewer. A towel and a dried-up piece of soap.

  The coffee pot upside down. Breakfast alone. A solitary stool by the kitchen window at daybreak. A view of the nesting cliff on the neighbouring island.

  The furniture he had made, I could tell by the joints. But they were as simple as a carpenter’s bench. Enthusiasm for his own work, elegance, did not have a place in this house.

  He used peat for heating. In a box by the kitchen stove I found some dry, black clumps. The floor was worn in an arc between the kitchen and the living room, where he must have settled on a small couch and placed his cup on a low table.

  A Kurér radio on the windowsill. Smoked pipes in a brown latticed bowl. Nothing appeared to have been touched since he died.

  I sat in the dim light by the hall. The wind blew in through the open door.

  Einar Hirifjell. Between stone and sea. Rain and wind. A harsh sky above a haggard man.

  A gust of wind swept through my hair. After the funeral Bestefar must have changed the locks here. But why did he take the photograph from Unst and not from out here, and why had the place not been sold?

  I was cold. In the hall I found a faded, greyish-green outer jacket, a pair of oil-stained work trousers and some mouldering, pale-yellow Dunlop wellies. Apart from that he was rather worn and frail, the priest had said. Wore ugly yellow wellies.

  I strolled around the small courtyard. It was like finding an abandoned summer cottage that I had discovered belonged to the family. Half mine, half another’s.

  I have to find the key to the boathouse, I told myself, to get the rowing boat inside. To avoid being discovered. Avoid speaking to anyone. Avoid finding out that the island in fact belongs to someone else.

  Beneath the gutters were wooden barrels filled with rainwater and I bent over and drank, spat out strands of algae and drank some more. Then I heard the motor of a boat.

  I dropped to the ground, hoping it was a fishing boat passing on the other side of the island. But the droning of the motor grew louder, and soon I glimpsed the bow of a boat rounding the reef. It slowed up in front of Patna and remained rocking in the sea.

  *

  She stood with one knee on the thwart and one hand on the wheel. A small, scratched-up wooden boat with an old forty-horsepower engine at the back. She was my age and wore a quilted vest. When she caught sight of Patna, she brushed the hair from her forehead and looked in my direction.

  I stood up and she gave a start. But she did not acknowledge me, just stood there watching, as though standing in front of a freshly painted house having wondered how it would turn out. Then she opened the throttle to take the boat in a wide arc, returned with the sun at her back, moored at the boathouse and climbed ashore.

  Mist rose from the surrounding grass. She was not very tall, quite sturdy, and with curly dark-brown hair. Not the type to stand out in a crowd, but still, there was something about her when she came up from the glittering sea. She did not smile as she walked towards me, nor when she stopped a couple of metres away and asked what I was doing here.

  “I came yesterday evening,” I said.

  “Yes, but what are you doing here?”

  Rolling Rs. Long, low O. Different from the Shetland dialect, she was speaking Scots. Her voice did not fit with her face. She looked defenceless, but had the tone of a bank director.

  “Looking around.”

  “Is that so?” She took a step closer. “Is midnight considered evening in Norway?”

  Had it been wrong to say evening? I searched for the right words. “What do you mean?”

  “It was past midnight when you rowed across. I was out for a walk and saw you when you were halfway.”

  “How do you know I’m Norwegian,” I said. “Is it the way I speak?”

  “Well,” she said, walking past me. “You sound like a foreign doctor.”

  “And that’s how you know?”

  “No.” She looked past me at the buildings. “I know because there’s a car with Norwegian number plates near the boathouse on Unst.”

  Her eyes were brown and steady, as though made to measure and not to admire. She had a habit of narrowing them slightly before she spoke. When I told her about Einar, that I was a relative of his, something dreamlike passed through her, disappearing the next moment.

  “You could have waited until daylight,” she said. “Got someone to take you across in a proper boat.”

  I shrugged.

  “So why did you come out last night?”

  “To let the river run its
course.”

  She chuckled, but in a patronising way, as though mine had been a clumsy but almost respectable response; stupid and pompous perhaps, but hardly something a foreign doctor would have said.

  “And you,” I said. “Do you come here often?”

  She shrugged and strolled towards the buildings without checking to see if I was following.

  Now what, I thought. Was I supposed to sit down and pretend I had something to do?

  “I come here on the odd occasion,” she said when I caught up with her again. “Wander around with a basket, see if I find anything attractive washed up on the beach.”

  “Do you? Find anything?”

  “Now and again,” she said. “But you won’t fit in my basket.”

  Her trousers hugged her broad hips. She had round thighs and small breasts. Her sensual face and her arrogance created an undertow that forced me to tag along after her, and the second I realised it, I was annoyed with myself.

  “Who owns the island?” I said when we reached the buildings. She frowned and stared at the wrought-iron key in the door, the rest of the bunch swaying back and forth in the wind.

  “I mean, now,” I said. “Since he died.”

  “The Winterfinch family owns this island,” she said. “Always have done.”

  “Do they live on Unst?”

  “In Edinburgh. They’re sometimes here during the summer.”

  “Do you know them?”

  “Everyone knows the Winterfinch family,” she said absently and peered into the hallway. Then she stepped back and pointed at the roof.

  “Do you know why it’s so sturdy?” she said.

  I had not noticed it before. The roof was covered with thick slabs of stone which had wire netting stretched over them.

  “The netting protects against the sea spray,” she said. “So the roof tiles don’t get torn off. I wonder what it’s like here during a storm. The tallest waves probably reach all the way to the windows.”

  She was so close to me that I could read what was imprinted on her buttons. Cordings. I had never heard of Cordings but imagined they were priced in the Leica range. I searched for something that could place her, explain her. It was as though she was older than me. Not in years, but from another era.

  At last I found a suitable term: she was ladylike. Her calm, steady movements, the way she had elegantly climbed out of the boat, something endearing hidden behind the controlled expression on her face.

  She went over to one of the outbuildings and tugged on one of the padlocks. “How is it that you have keys?”

  “I found them back home,” I said. “I think my grandfather changed the locks when he was here to bury him.”

  “I don’t think they’ve been out here for years,” she said. “The Winterfinch family, that is.”

  “Did my great-uncle lease the island from them?”

  “I think so, somehow. Why are you wearing his clothes?”

  She was so confrontational. Parrying with questions. She seemed like someone who had to fight to get ahead, and one of her weapons was to make others feel simple. “Mine got wet,” I said. “This was all I found.”

  “Not so strange. Those were the only clothes he wore.”

  “So you knew him?” I blurted. “You knew Einar?”

  She repeated his name. Pronounced it Aainarr. “I saw him now and again when I was younger. An unken body.”

  She realised I did not understand.

  “Unken. Eccentric. Recluse. One you do not visit.”

  “I met a woman,” I said. “The superstitious locals apparently believed that the Devil lived here. That he rowed across with a coffin in his boat whenever someone was going to die.”

  “Not the Devil. Death.”

  “Death?”

  “Yes. Because of the coffins. Aainarr made coffins. Rowed them over to Unst, and the funeral parlour in Lerwick transported them from there. The story came about because to begin with he had such a small boat that the coffins stuck out at an angle. Of course people around here realised that it was not the same coffin each time, but it was worse with the tourists. Then he got that one.” She looked in the direction of Patna. “Plenty of room for a coffin.”

  “Did he have any friends?” I said. “Other than at the funeral parlour?”

  “I really have no idea.” She strolled towards the rowing boat but stopped at a distance, as though something was keeping her from getting close.

  “Probably a dory originally,” she said.

  “A dory?”

  “Yes. See how sturdy it is? They have to be, so as not to get crushed against the side of the ship. Good for whale hunting as well. Typical for a Shetland boat of that size. There were hundreds of them left here on Unst after the old herring catch ended.”

  Her gaze did not leave the boat.

  “Imagine that he died under it,” she said.

  That stung. Not just what she said, but that I had not given it any thought, how he died. I had pictured him dying in his sleep like Bestefar, one day the candle was simply extinguished.

  “Didn’t you know?”

  I shook my head.

  “He was family, wasn’t he?”

  “Of course he was,” I said. “But he and my grandfather didn’t speak after the war.”

  “Why was that?”

  “They—” I cut myself off. “Tell me how he died,” I said.

  She pulled the puffa vest more tightly around her. “A fisherman passed by here some five years ago. Saw that the boat had been dragged ashore. He assumed that Aainarr was repairing it. But when the fisherman returned with his catch, the boat had dropped and the steel cables of a winch were twisting in the wind. The boat had toppled over and fallen on top of him.”

  My stomach tensed. I could almost hear the creaking. Wood on stone. Wood on bone. Nobody else on the island, only the wind. A monotone funeral march for Einar Hirifjell.

  All of a sudden I could see him. A young man who felt ill at ease in Hirifjell. The dependable employee at a world-class cabinetmaker’s, who was sent to Africa to secure the best, the very best bubinga blanks.

  “So he died alone?” I said.

  I said it because I had to say something. A fondness had flared up within me, but it had nowhere to go. Like a stunned bird trapped in a house.

  “Aainarr was always alone,” she said. “That much I can tell you. Someone called for the priest, got the boat back in the water.”

  I glanced at the stones, looking for specks of blood. Absurd, since I knew they would have been washed away by the first rain shower. Just below the waterline I thought I glimpsed some brass nails. The repairs had been completed. The final blow of the master cabinetmaker’s hammer.

  “Why was he considered . . . what was it you called him?”

  “Unken?”

  “Yes, that.”

  She set off towards her boat. When we were some distance from Patna, she said in a gentler voice: “I don’t like to speak ill of people. But he’s dead now, and since you’re asking—”

  “Yes?”

  “There was a story about him. They say he killed a family in France.”

  “He did what?! Why?”

  “Greed of a kind. They said that it was over something that was worth a fortune.”

  *

  A man dies. He leaves behind tools and books and clothes. But he also leaves clues.

  In a wardrobe I found a box of shotgun cartridges. To shoot the occasional seabird, presumably. The weapon was not to be found. On the bookshelf were some yellowed issues of Aftenposten from the late seventies. The poems of Olav H. Hauge. Some old novels in French. One of them apparently read so many times that the cover was worn to tatters: Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad.

  Below the novels was a row of dictionaries from French into just about every European language. Polish, Hungarian, German, Czech, Romanian. All printed in the years immediately after the war. I pulled out the French to Russian Dictionnaire Larousse. Well used, threadbare cover. But no f
orgotten slips of paper, no notes in the margins.

  I looked out of the window. The wake from her boat had subsided. Even though I liked the company, I could not wait to get rid of her. She had seemed so rooted here, made little comments that clashed with my right to be here. Because I was the one with the keys. An emissary sent to Haaf Gruney by the dead.

  The radio sputtered to life when I turned the knob. Above the crackling, a voice began in Norwegian:

  And now a weather warning for the Lindesnes coast—

  The batteries lasted a few seconds before the voice of the meteorologist disappeared and left a whistling sound which died too. The tuning knob was stuck. A radio fixed for ever on N.R.K. long wave.

  I was faint with hunger. In the larder I found some rusted tins of food. Jenkins Cod Cakes. Perhaps what he had been planning for dinner before the boat tipped over.

  Her words were still ringing in my ears. Greed of a kind. It must have had something to do with the inheritance.

  I fired up the kitchen stove. The peat burned sluggishly, but I began to get warm. Boiled some water and added the fishcakes, and sat staring out of the window.

  I think Einar knew what happened to your parents, he just wouldn’t talk about it, the old priest had said.

  I might be sitting in the kitchen of the man who murdered my parents. But I knew how local gossip travelled, always spiralling to the worst conclusion. Lurking somewhere nearby were the shadows of what had actually happened.

  I went outside. Even though the buildings were not visible from Unst, and on Fetlar there was nothing living apart from seabirds in the cliff, it still felt as though I was being watched by someone, either at a distance or quite the opposite. Like an eye within me, without me knowing who was looking through it.

  We had not offered our names, the strange girl and I. But she told me that she had grown up on Unst, studied on the mainland and spent the summer holidays here.

  “I’ll drop by tomorrow,” she had said, “and we’ll see what happens. In the meantime I’ll keep quiet about you poking around out here.”

  She started the outboard motor, but immediately switched it off. “Be careful,” she said and nodded at Einar’s boat. “Out here, a storm can arrive in minutes. You’ve heard what happened to the two girls in 1745?”