The Sixteen Trees of the Somme

by Lars Mytting

  I shook my head.

  “They rowed over from there,” she said, pointing to the neighbouring island. “It’s called Uyea. Then the wind got up, they drifted out to sea and ended up in Norway.”

  She told me that Haaf Gruney had been grazing land for cows at the time. It was on the return trip that the girls were carried out to sea, and they survived because they had milk to subsist on. The storm carried them across the North Sea and they stumbled ashore in Karmøy, where they ended up getting married and having children.

  “That’s why,” she said, “when you have to cross the strait from Haaf Gruney, look to both sides, as if you’re going to run across a motorway. Jump in the boat and row as quickly as you can. Otherwise you’ll end up married in Karmøy. And that would be a shame.”

  Then she accelerated suddenly, got the boat to plane and turned towards Unst.

  *

  My thoughts kept turning to her as I continued my search. But you won’t fit in my basket. Said with a playfulness that echoed inside me.

  The power of attraction has many forms. In her it took the form of self-confidence, the way she appeared like a righteous messenger with hundreds of longships at her back.

  Incomprehensibly, she had awoken something inside me. A desire to show my true self, that I could do more than stand there fumbling for words.

  I unlocked one of the outbuildings. Crude tools for the soil. Shovel and pitchfork. Crowbar and sledgehammer. Steel wire, misshapen from being stretched and coiled many times. The pitchfork was missing a tine, the potato-grubber had a new handle. He must have grown a few vegetables to keep the scurvy at bay.

  Along the wall was a huge stack of peat, black and greasy and cut into brick-sized blocks. Apart from the radio, there was nothing on the island that had been invented after 1900.

  The exception was a strange contraption in the corner. The motor of a Norton motorcycle was bolted to a pallet. A cracked drive belt was stretched between two wheels and hooked up to a dynamo: a homemade generator. The wire ran along the ground and out through the wall. I followed it to the other outbuilding and unlocked the door.

  *

  His workshop, fitted out just like the one at Hirifjell. The same positioning of the lathe, the wall with the hand tools set out in the same way, with the same pencilled outlines. The same codes on the bottles of linseed oil. Frayed brushes in jam jars of turpentine. Screws and nails in round tobacco tins. He had smoked Dunhill Early Morning Pipe and nothing else.

  Still, the workshop was different from the one back home. Everything was in the same place, but the layout was more precise. The wood chisels hung so straight and even that they could have been the marks on a ruler. The templates for the wood-cutting machine were stacked like expensive porcelain plates in the service cabinets of the rich. No spontaneity, no small wooden figures, none of the playfulness I had seen in his sketchbooks back home, where he did not accept any design for what it was without twisting it into a series of variations.

  I swept the dust from the carpenter’s bench. I too had had regrets and torments, and I had kept them at bay through hard work. This simple, spartan location had not been home to a man who gorged himself on profits. Rather, it was the altar of someone doing penance.

  The electricity from the generator was used to power the work lamp, the lathe and other tools for which hand power would not suffice. Nothing else. Not even the house had electricity.

  The shelves along the side wall held his timber. Oak, pine and a number of varieties I did not recognise. A crate of off-cuts from a dark species of wood, the shattered stock of a gun. On the floor were some light, almost gleaming planks of wood.

  I reached for a hand planer, fastened a piece of wood to the bench and made a few strokes. Watched the wood shavings curl away. I wet my thumb, rubbed the wood and saw the grain appear.

  Flame-birch. Hirifjell birch. The veined patterns flared up, but not all at once; it was a second or so before the moisture penetrated, as though the flames were chasing my hand.

  I tried to determine how he worked. How he thought.

  I managed to acquaint myself to some extent with the first, but what he thought was a gaping black hole.

  This had been his life, waking up every morning to the sea and weather that changed in an instant. A life with Dunhill Early Morning Pipe and a mystery.

  Again I attempted to see him, as though I was holding the Leica and searching for the one detail that might tell me who he was. This rocky speck in the sea, tormented daily by rain and storm. This snug workshop with its yellow lamplight, warmed by a small iron stove.

  Einar Hirifjell alone here.

  I continued to explore. Looked under a rag rug, opened the cellar hatch in the kitchen, looked behind cupboards, searched for loose boards – and found nothing. Not until I went out to the carpentry workshop again, looked behind a few tins of lacquer and varnish and discovered a pile of letters. Addressed to me.

  Every birthday and every Christmas I had received a letter from Einar. And, just as regularly, Bestefar had returned them.

  The fine handwriting I recognised from his Parisian sketchbook had become drawn out and rougher, but just as upright; it was as though every sentence had been made with a scalpel and a ruler, cutting off the top and bottom of the rows of letters. Once or twice he had spelled my name the French way.

  Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, Edouard. I hope you like the present. Best wishes for 1976. Greetings from Einar.

  The present? I had never received any present.

  The letters were more or less the same each year. Neutral, no reference to anything we might have in common.

  There was also a parcel wrapped in tattered, shiny paper, with a checked pattern showing through. A chessboard. Hinged in the middle, with room for the pieces inside. The white squares in light flame-birch, the black squares in dark walnut. The transitions were sharp and precise, the woodwork gleamed with polished wax. Along its length a row of letters had been carved, so precise that it could have been a line in a printed book.

  To Edvard from Einar on the day of your confirmation.

  On the parcel there was an address slip with Norwegian stamps. It had been returned from Saksum on April 12, 1982.

  A brother’s name in a brother’s handwriting.

  Einar Hirifjell

  Haaf Gruney, Shetland.

  Inside the chessboard, amongst the pieces, there were three newspaper clippings. As I took them out, a rectangular piece of cardboard fell to the floor.

  A French identity card from 1943, issued by the occupying power. A swastika stamped over a stapled passport photograph. Einar as I remembered him from the picture in the envelope back home. He had a peculiar hairstyle, a side parting with flat curls hanging over his forehead.

  But the name on the identity card was not Einar Hirifjell. It was Oscar Ribaut, born in Paris, with his profession listed as ébéniste – cabinetmaker.

  *

  Ribaut. I had seen that name once before, on the tracing of the message Einar wrote to my mother in the priest’s office. Next to the name Isabelle Daireaux.

  I studied the picture again. It was Einar, but the question of his name soon gave way to another that was even more pressing. Why had Einar, living out here on Haaf Gruney, saved a clipping from a local French newspaper, Le Courrier Picard, dated September 1971. In the days following Mamma and Pappa’s death.

  Taking up three columns, the headline read “TOURISTES DÉCÉDÉS À AUTHUILLE. UN ENFANT DISPARU.” Tourists dead in Authuille. A child missing.

  I was reading the news about Mamma and Pappa’s death at the time it happened, as interpreted by a local journalist and without the benefit of hindsight found in the summary in Det Hendte 1971. This was from Friday’s paper, barely twenty-four hours after they died:

  A child of three was reported missing near Authuille yesterday morning. The parents, Norwegian tourists, were found dead in a wooded area north of the village. The couple had drowned in one of the many
ponds of the Ancre. Judging by their injuries, they stepped on an unexploded gas shell and fell into the water unconscious. The child, a boy, is believed to have become lost either before or after the incident, and extensive search parties spent yesterday looking for him.

  The accident is likely to have occurred at night or early in the morning. The woods were well marked with warning signs, and it remains a mystery as to why the couple were there. The dangers are widely known, as it is the third time this year that undetonated shells from the First World War have claimed lives in our district.

  The next clipping was from the Saturday and reported that, at the time of going to press, I was still missing. A relative had arrived from Norway to identify the deceased.

  Bestefar must have brought a photograph with him too, because the newspaper showed a picture of me in front of the storehouse at Hirifjell alongside another of a woman in police uniform. The caption said that her name was J. Berlet, and in the article she was quoted as saying that a team with specially trained dogs had been searching non-stop for the Norwegian boy since Friday, and that they had also dredged the pond in which my parents had drowned. The search had been complicated, she said, by muddy water and by the shells on the forest floor.

  The last clipping was from the Tuesday, when everything was over. At least for the search crews.

  The missing Norwegian child was found Monday morning at a doctor’s surgery in the coastal town of Le Crotoy. The police believe the child must have been abducted but will not go into the details of their investigation. They have made no further comment. Apart from minor injuries, the boy is unharmed.

  I shuddered. It was as though everything had happened all over again. I had imagined the Ancre to be a large, clean river, like Laugen, but now the truth had emerged, and it was definitive. They had died in a muddy pond.

  At first I tried to reassure myself with a harmless explanation; that Einar had heard about their death and ordered the French newspapers later. But the pages were crumpled and yellowed, with small tears along the edge, and the articles were heavily outlined with a pen.

  He had been there. The question now was whether he had been searching, or fleeing.

  Or had killed a family in France.

  The woods north of Authuille. I had thought they had died in an open meadow, a battlefield preserved as an outdoor museum. But according to the newspaper it sounded like a dense and impenetrable place.

  Maybe there had been more to the vague accusation Bestefar had mumbled at their grave. Those damned woods, he had said, and they were real. They must be close to Authuille.

  *

  I pushed these thoughts away. Eventually I found the key to the boathouse, cleared some space between manky coils of rope and unravelled fishing nets, and moved Patna inside. The weather changed constantly. The heat gave way to prolonged gusts of cold wind and rough seas, followed by sunshine and calm. Then a heavy downfall and more sun.

  Occasionally a fishing boat passed, but always on the other side of the island.

  I spent a long time simply standing in the workshop, following different trains of thought and exploring possibilities. One moment I was hungry for revenge, the next, I felt pity.

  The priest said that Einar had become religious. His doctrine was rock-hard and filled with remorse and anguish.

  But that was in 1967, I thought. Einar had been a tormented man long before he met Mamma, that is, before she died in 1971.

  Greed of a kind.

  I did not detect the slightest trace of greed here on Haaf Gruney. This place was like a monastery.

  4

  I RAISED THE OARS AND LOOKED BEHIND ME AT UNST. She must live near the coast, unless she was in the habit of going on long walks at midnight. Here during the summer, she had said. Lived at home, presumably. I had precious little interest in knocking on her front door and meeting her parents. Besides, I did not see any house which seemed likely, just the homes of old bachelors with diesel drums and crab pots in the garden.

  Patna groaned. It was sickening to be using the boat that had crushed Einar to death. A couple of gulls followed me as I rowed across to the boathouse and pushed the vessel inside. I unlocked the Commodore, put on a pair of dry trainers and slung the Leica over my shoulder.

  The weather changed again. Suddenly the daylight faded, as if wax paper had been placed over the sun. A milky fog settled in. It came and went, letting in blinding rays for a few minutes at a time, and I lost all connection with the landscape I was walking through. One moment I stood by a collapsed stone house, the next I stood on a narrow verge between a fence and the road. An orange Vauxhall rumbled past.

  Now and then I raised the Leica and took a photograph. But I no longer had that desire, that need to capture the world on camera as if nothing should go to waste. Everything I encountered out here was so changeable, and it was almost as if I did not want to know what was real and what was not. I was reluctant to have the answers stored in photographic emulsion, waiting until I came home, and perhaps contradicting how I wanted to remember things.

  Then I saw something, clear as crystal, glimpsed between breaths of hazy mist. A wooden house, the first I had seen on Shetland. Tall and wide, three storeys high and in a style that broke with its surroundings. Flat roof, large windows. Painted a light yellow, the entrance was framed by tall pillars, and at the end of a broad staircase, sheltered by a covered veranda, there was a generous set of double doors made of gleaming brown wood. A tall, sagging fence made of rusted wrought iron ran around the property. The view from the top windows must be formidable, as the house stood at the very edge of a cliff that plunged to the sea.

  As I approached, I saw through the next break in the fog that the house was abandoned. The grass around it was tall and stiff. Two windows were broken, a side door was boarded up.

  The iron gate creaked as I passed through it. Once a broad and geometrical grid of gravel had lain around the house. Now the grass borders were overgrown and unkempt. The stone steps had shifted slightly, and small plants were growing in the cracks.

  The fog was dissipating now. I tilted my head back, looked up at the top floor. The house was so wide that it would have been impossible for the innermost rooms to get any daylight.

  Something tingled inside me, a queasy feeling that my enthusiasm had got the better of me. I turned. On the hillside behind, a man and a young boy stood staring. Farmers. Wellies, raincoats, a sheepdog on a lead.

  I nodded and held up the Leica in an attempt to bluff a reason for being there. But they did not react, just continued walking up the hillside.

  How quickly rumours spread in a place like this. As quick as the wind and far and wide, out to everyone. All of them would pass a blue Norwegian-registered Opel Commodore. A dead man’s rowing boat was set afloat again. Someone was nosing about on an island that had been inhabited by an unken body for decades.

  And now that someone was snooping around here too. I went over to the wall of the house. The rumbling of the sea grew louder with each step I took, and soon I could no longer hear my footsteps on the gravel. By the time I rounded the corner of the house, the noise of the sea crashing against the rocks thirty metres below was deafening.

  Then she was behind me.

  “Where did you come from?” I asked.

  She did not answer, simply signalled with her thumb that it was time to turn back.

  “This is private property,” she said when we were on the leeward side of the breakers. She was wearing a different jacket today, a rather tight, greyish-green tweed jacket with red lining under the collar, taken in at the lower back to accentuate her bum. She seemed in more of a hurry than yesterday, buttoning up her jacket as she walked.

  “Whose house is this?” I said.

  “This is no house. This is Quercus Hall.”

  “Qu—. What?”

  “Quercus. Oak. The structure is made of oak.”

  “Do you live here?”

  She shook her head. Kept walking, until we reach
ed the gate.

  “I’m just taking care of it,” she said, shutting the gate behind us. “It belongs to the Winterfinch family.”

  I turned, did not want to lose sight of this immense, weather-beaten house.

  “So where do you live?” I said. “Since you saw me coming.”

  She nodded towards a path in the grass. It led to a small stone cottage surrounded by a stone wall.

  “Why didn’t you tell me that yesterday,” I said, “that you live with them?”

  “It’s not something one blurts out to strangers,” she said. “I’m given use of the stone cottage and the boat in return for looking after the manor.”

  She wore an antique men’s watch on her wrist, and she glanced at it impatiently.

  “How did the rumours go about Einar?” I said. “More precisely, which year was it that he was supposed to have killed someone?”

  “I don’t know more than that,” she said. “I’m heading to Lerwick. Have to catch the bus.”

  Just like the previous day she kept walking without checking if I was following, and just as before I shuffled after her.

  Something was jarring with me, something she had said. A crackling fuse. It was like being in the mountains and being surprised by a huge reindeer out of hunting season, that feeling of excitement.

  “I can drive you to Lerwick,” I shouted after her, “if you like.”

  *

  Her name was Gwen Leask and she wanted to go to Lerwick to buy the Runrig album “The Cutter and the Clan”. She had grown up in the north of the island, but her parents had moved several years ago. As I understood it, the Winterfinch family would spend the summers here, and then she would prepare the house, clean and go grocery shopping. The only task she had at this time of year was to regularly check the entire roof with a torch and notify them of any leaks.

  “So of course I can only do that when it rains,” she said as we stood on the ferry. “And it does that every day. I like the rain.”