by Jon Fosse
and he’s saying it as if to himself
Nothing, he says
I was born in Dylgja and I lived in Dylgja and I’m going to die in Dylgja and be buried in the ground and turn into the ground myself, he says
I’ve never made anything of myself, he says
I was baptized in Vik Church and confirmed there and that’s where my funeral will be, I’ll be buried in the churchyard of Vik Church and that’s where I’ll rot away, Åsleik says
and I think now he’s about to start saying what he usually says about how he’s remained a bachelor and Åsleik says that there’s no woman in the world who’d want someone like him, that’s easy enough to understand, why would anyone want a ridiculous guy like him? and so, getting married like a respectable man, he gave up on that when he was young, yes, he wasn’t yet old when he knew he’d be spending his life alone, in solitude, there wasn’t going to be any wedding in Vik Church for him, or any baptism of a child of his either, he said, and then there’s the farm, or piece of land really, it was more like a steep hill with stones as big as boathouses scattered across the fields, if you can call them fields, beneath steep cliffsides, and it happened pretty often that a stone came loose and tumbled down the rock face and came to a stop in the fields, almost every night he’d lie there before he fell asleep in fear and think now, now, soon, it’s coming, the big stone, or the big avalanche, that’ll take his house and farm and field and sweep it all together into Sygnefjord, yes, he’s seen it in his head so many times, he’s seen in his mind’s eye how a stone as big as a house would come loose, or maybe the whole rock face would come loose and turn into stones hurtling down faster and faster and picking up grass and dirt and smashing houses into boards and splinters and sweeping away everything he owned and the sheep, and him in the middle of it all, inexorably sliding down the mountain until it was all gone, until it disappeared into the water, he along with his whole farm, he along with everything he had, all disappeared into the water, yes, he would lie there like that and see it all in his mind before he fell asleep, it was like these thoughts were never satisfied, and lots of times this or that small avalanche had woken him up, and he’d inherited this fear of avalanches from his parents, especially Mother, but also Father, they used to talk constantly about the avalanche that was going to come one day, yes, it wasn’t just maybe going to come, it had to come, it was only a question of time, today, this morning, in a year, in twenty years, in a hundred years, or even longer, but eventually the avalanche would come, that was certain, they knew that, they just didn’t know when it would come, that’s the kind of thing Father and Mother would say to each other, while he and Sister were still little kids too, and listening, they’d talk like that, because did grown-ups ever think about how such talk would enter into a child? no, not back then, never once in all that time did they think that, and he and Sister, who were nearly the same age, he was two years older, and the heir, that word was always spoken as if there was something especially splendid about it, yes, the word heir was always given its own special emphasis, spoken with special respect, son and heir, he was the son and heir, it was he who would one day take over the whole small farm along with everything on it, the same way Father had taken it over from his father one day, and he from his own father, yes, no one knew how long people from his line had lived on this farm but it was a long time, yes, that much was known for certain, a very long time, yes, the farm had passed from father to son and obviously all the men before him had found a wife, since the farm had passed from father to son all the way down to him, which meant he was the first one to stay unmarried, a bachelor, yes, well, he’d tried, more than once, put himself forward a few times, but no, he’d had no luck, not a single old spinster wanted to have him, so he never got a wife, he stayed a bachelor and looked after things and puttered around, now he had these sheep, they brought in a few kroner, for the meat, and a little for the wool, not much, but then again he didn’t need much, and when he had a good catch fishing he’d dock at The Wharf in Vik, go from The Wharf to The Country Store in Vik, and that’s how he’d sell a little fish, yes, there were lots of people who didn’t fish themselves who bought fresh fish from him, and dried fish from him too, because he hung up pretty much all the cod he caught to dry, either in the attic of his house in the winters, or, in the summers, outside under the eaves, and it was always easy to sell the dried fish, and then there were crabs and lobsters, they were usually pretty easy to sell too, that’s for sure, he’d made quite a few kroner from those, it had added up to a tidy little sum over the years, that’s the truth, yes, and then there’s the woods, it was quite a number of cords of wood he’d cleared and sold over the years, at first to country people but after the country road got built it was mainly people from Bjørgvin who wanted to buy wood from him, there were knocks on his door so often, on weekends and holidays, that to tell the truth he’d started locking his front door, no, he’d never done that before, but recently he’d actually started locking his front door and not opening it when people knocked, so he’d always managed to get by, and other than that? yes well he’d always liked to read, and he went into The Library in Vik almost every time he was in Vik, it wasn’t so far away from The Wharf, it was in The Town Hall, yes, I knew that perfectly well, I’d been there many a time myself, now why would he tell me where it is? so almost every single time when he was there doing business at The Country Store he went into The Library and he’s read almost everything they have, on any and every topic, or else poetry, yes, he even liked reading poetry, he enjoyed it, especially poems by the younger poets, what wouldn’t they think of next? those poems rarely meant much or had much connection with anything but there were sudden turns of phrase, quick bursts of wind, that were said in a new way, put in a new way, often in ways impossible to predict beforehand, and he liked most of them, but when one of them was too much like the others, when there was one you could hardly tell apart from the others, then it was hard to read it, a poem had to have some kind of quality of its own in it to be worthwhile, yes, that’s what he thought about that, it was just his opinion, nothing more than that now, yes, well, Åsleik said and then he fell silent
And so there’s a lot to do on a farm, the buildings need a lot of work, Åsleik says
and he says that he’s tried to the best of his ability to take good care of the buildings, the house, the barn, the outbuilding, the smokehouse, the boathouse, but in recent years he’d let things go a bit, so the house needed painting, well in fact all the buildings did, yes, they’ve needed it for a while, but the avalanche might still come, he was sure about that, and the time was approaching, the time was always coming closer and closer, and so that’s why he’d let things go a bit, since there wasn’t much reason to paint the house, or the other buildings, yes, or maintain them in other ways either, when the avalanche was going to come any day now, that’s how he saw it, but now thoughts like that weren’t exactly pearls of wisdom, no, really they were more like an excuse not to do anything, a kind of cover for his own laziness, it was crazy really, everyone before him had done so much to keep up the farm, and the buildings had stood there all that time and they were still there, the same as they’d always been, yes, the house, the barn, the shed, the smokehouse, the boathouse, and a lot of work had gone into all of them, done by both of his parents, his grandparents, his great-grandparents, his great-great-grandparents, however far back in time you wanted to go, but there wasn’t much point in going back too much farther than the grandparents, that’s what he thought, the rest was part of the great silence, he said, that’s more or less how he thought of it, and there’s not really anything that you can think about what’s part of the great silence, there’s no point, it’s just there, it just is what it is, yes, he says
Yes, I say
The great silence, he says
and I think I should say that God is in the great silence, and that it’s in the silence that you can hear God, but then I think that it’s probably better if I don’t say
that, and we stand there and I think that this too, like everything else, is something I’ve heard Åsleik say so many times before, because once he gets started he can go on and on about stuff like this, and it’s probably because he spends so much time alone, I think, and I think that even if he’s said it before it’s in a way new every time he tells me, I think, something about it is new, something’s different in how he tells it, how he looks at it, every time, I think and Åsleik says that the only thing that bothers him, yes, the only thing is, no, not that he never got married, not that, a female would’ve been a nuisance and a burden, when you came right down to it he was a born recluse, a hermit, as they say, but, he says and then he says nothing for a long time
Yes? I say
Yes, that, he says
Yes that what, I say
That there’s no one to take over the farm after I’m gone, Åsleik says
and again he looks down at the floor and then he looks up and looks at the stove and he says that it probably needs another log, a good dry birchwood log, he says and I see Åsleik go over to the stove and open the hatch and put a log in and he closes the hatch and I think I really should have gone to get a glass of something with Asle at The Alehouse in Bjørgvin, and even if where he really should’ve been taken was The Clinic he’d never have gone along with that, he wasn’t doing well these days, Asle, when he wasn’t drinking he was thinking all the time about putting an end to himself, it just felt like he couldn’t go on, so I should have dropped by, and so why did I just keep driving? I think, was it because I dreaded seeing him? because I didn’t feel like going to The Alehouse? I think and now Asle is just sitting there on the sofa, with his long grey hair pulled back behind his ears and tied in the back with a black hairband, and his grey beard too, and he’s shaking and shaking, I think and I see Åsleik go over to the easel and stop and look at the picture I’m in the middle of painting and I go over to the stove and I open the hatch and even though Åsleik has just put a log in I put another log in anyway and I stand there with the hatch open and I look at the firewood and I see Asle sitting there on the sofa and he’s thinking that food no longer tastes good to him, he knows he needs to eat but he doesn’t want any food, it disgusts him, to tell the truth, he tries to eat but it makes him want to throw up and he spits out the food and goes looking for something to drink, but he can’t drink without eating, that is one rule he’s always stuck to, and it’s already long since daylight and he needs to stand up, no matter how hard it is to get to his feet, no matter how hard it is to put one foot on the floor in front of the other he has to do it, yes, even while he’s shaking all over, and his hands are shaking most of all, but even so he needs to get himself something to drink, a little glass of something, Asle thinks and he gets up and puts one foot down on the floor and then the other and he feels himself shaking all over and he thinks he has to get to the kitchen and pour himself a drink, and he leaves the main room and goes to the kitchen and unscrews the cap from a bottle that’s on the kitchen table next to a glass and he holds the round bottle in both hands and sticks the opening into the glass and manages to pour a glassful without spilling any and with both his shaking hands he holds the glass tight and raises it to his mouth and empties it in one gulp and he puts it back down on the table with trembling hands and then supports himself on the edge of the table and shuts his eyes and he breathes in deeply and then breathes out slowly, he does that many times, and then he puts both his shaking hands around the bottle again and even though he’s shaking all over he fills his glass and he feels a gentle warmth spread through him, and he feels his hands shaking less, and immediately he feels the warm gentleness inside, Asle thinks, and then he thinks he should roll himself a proper cigarette now, and he takes the tobacco pouch out of his pocket and now he can roll a cigarette and then he lights it and it’s so good to feel the smoke spread through his body, he thinks, there is such a big difference between hand-rolled cigarettes and packaged cigarettes, Asle thinks, and he thinks he should drop by The Alehouse and he sees himself sitting there in The Alehouse alone and reading a newspaper, and there aren’t many people at The Alehouse, and then the street door opens and a woman about his age, somewhere around forty or fifty, something like that, walks in and she has medium-length blonde hair and Asle sees her as it were come to life when she sees him and she comes over to his table and he looks up and he too as it were comes to life, his eyes sparkle
No, is it really you, Asle says
Yes, she says
and she’s a little shy
Are you waiting for someone? she says
No, no, he says
and it’s quiet for a brief moment and then Asle says she should just sit down, if she wants to, if she’s not doing anything, he’s here alone, as she can see, yes, just with his glass, he says and he raises the shot glass and she says it’s sure been a long time and that it’s great, really great, to see him again, she says
Have a seat, if you want, he says
You and me, we’re old friends, he says
You and me, Guro and Asle, he says
and she doesn’t say anything and they’re quiet and Asle thinks that Guro’s hair is the same medium-length blonde hair it’s always been and she’s still standing there and she turns a little, slowly, and Asle looks at her and he feels like they’re right back where they’ve always been, they’re exactly the same as they used to be, they’re in the same place, they are the same place, their place, they are still each other’s secret, they are still each other’s own beautiful world
It’s so great to see you again, she says
You too, he says
And things are still the same with you? she says
Yes, not much new with me, he says
But I’m so happy to see you here, she says
It’s great for me too, that you saw me, he says
and I see her sit down at his table and I see Asle standing there next to his kitchen table pouring himself another glass of something strong and I think he’s going to make it, he’s about to stop shaking now, I think and then I see the dog come walking up to him
Here you are, Asle says
Good boy, good Bragi, he says
and he says the dog must be hungry and thirsty too and he fills the dog’s water dish and takes a handful of pellets of dog food from a bag on the floor next to the kitchen table and puts them down in the dish on the floor and Bragi goes over to the dishes at once and starts eating and then there’s a knock on his front door and he just stands there, he stands with his glass in his hand, there’s another knock, and he puts his glass down and puts the cigarette in the ashtray on the kitchen table and goes and opens the door with Bragi at his heels and two little girls are standing there and looking at him with their eyes wide in surprise and one of them asks him if he’ll give them some money for this or that cause and he says he’ll see what he has and then he goes back into the main room and over to the black velvet jacket that’s on the chair by the coffee table and he finds his wallet in the inner pocket and finds a few coins there and with the coins clutched in one hand and the wallet in the other he goes back to the two girls and one girl holds out a box with a slot in the lid and he puts the coins in, one by one, and the girls say thank you at almost the same time and then he sees them turn around and go to the door across the hall, to the neighbour’s apartment, and Asle shuts the door, locks it, checks to see that the door is locked, and then thinks about Bård, the neighbour boy who drowned, he and Bård were the same age, they hadn’t even started school yet, he thinks and then he goes back to the kitchen and he thinks he’ll just drop by The Alehouse, or maybe he’ll go knock at Guro’s door? or maybe she’s even at The Alehouse? Asle thinks and he sits down at the kitchen table and stares emptily into space and he picks up his glass and drinks and looks, yes, what is he looking at? he’s looking at something or other, but it doesn’t matter what because it’s like he doesn’t see anything, he just feels the warm intoxication fill him up and he pours himself ano
ther glass, and drinks it all down, but not as fast as before, more gently, sip by sip, and with more time between the sips, then he pours himself another glass and watches the level of liquid in the bottle go down and he needs to save a little for tomorrow, he thinks, because how else will he be able to stop the shaking? he thinks, so maybe he really should go out for a bit, to The Alehouse, buy himself something to drink there, since he has to leave some of what he has here until tomorrow, and maybe he’ll drop by Guro’s in The Lane and knock on her door on the way to The Alehouse? or maybe it’d be better on the way back? he thinks, it’s been a long time now, he thinks, and maybe he can spend the night at Guro’s at her apartment in The Lane? yes, like so many times before, the first time he did it was many years ago when he was living with Liv, but then a man moved in with her, a fiddler, in any case Guro always called him The Fiddler, and then of course he had to stay away, and Guro and The Fiddler lived together for many years, but then The Fiddler just disappeared one day, just went away, he moved to somewhere or other in East Norway, it was certainly somewhere a long way east of Telemark, Asle thinks, and since then he’s often thought he should go drop by Guro’s place, but it’s never happened, he thinks, and he thinks that he needs to go buy some more to drink tomorrow, the quarter bottle he has left will be enough to last him till tomorrow morning, he thinks, so he’ll just put on his warm clothes, because it’s cold out, it’s snowing, and go to The Alehouse, or maybe he should stop by Guro’s place in The Lane? like he used to do so often, no, she probably doesn’t want him to come by so he’d better just go to The Alehouse and then he’ll need to buy himself more to drink tomorrow morning, because sitting in his kitchen drinking beer until the shaking goes away, no, he can’t do that, his hands’ll be shaking so much that it’ll be all he can do to get a shot glass up to his mouth, but now that he’s managed to get a couple of glasses down yes he’s calmed down little by little, the shaking’s gone away, it took a little while but he’s stopped shaking, and now he won’t need that much to drink for the next several hours, just a little beer, yes, there were lots of times, before he needed to drink something strong to get the shaking to stop, Asle thinks, and he thinks that he’s alone, and that it’s good to be alone, if only he were better, if only he didn’t have to drink all the time, he thinks, this horrible shaking, he thinks, and aside from those two girls in the hall he probably hasn’t talked to anyone in a week, for sure, barely a word or two when he went to buy something to drink or a little food when it wasn’t like it was today, before, when he wasn’t lying there heavy and unable to move and shaking all day, yes, on days when there wasn’t that weight and things were easy and one day disappeared into the next and neither day existed on its own then everything was good, floating along, then it was good to be alone, yes, everything was a floating picture then, in a way, Asle thinks, and then he painted, and when he started on a picture he could totally disappear into the picture, but that was before, now he can’t paint any more, he can’t do anything, it’s all too big and heavy for him, and he shakes all the time, and he’s tried to call The Boy, who lives in Oslo, but The Boy didn’t answer, and The Son and The Daughter live somewhere in Trøndelag, and he hasn’t seen Liv even once in many years, or Siv either, and these weights inside him, his stone, and these shakes, because if he doesn’t get something strong to drink he shakes, and sometimes he shakes even if he has drunk quite a bit, he thinks, the only thing he can do now is have a little drink when he wakes up, and then a few more times throughout the day, but he often can’t get rid of the shakes even then, or else he needs a lot to drink before he can stop shaking, which means he’ll need more to drink by tomorrow morning, Asle thinks, so he’ll go buy some more tomorrow morning and by evening he might feel so much lighter that he can think about going out, the same as today, yes, drop by The Alehouse, the same as now, because it’s like he’s feeling a little stronger again, yes, and if he doesn’t have the strength for anything else then at least he has the strength to pour himself another drink, at least he feels that, he thinks, and that’s something, he thinks, but thinking things like that, yes, drinking’s helped him a lot, he thinks, but now the drinking is taking over, after it got to the point when he was so heavy that everything felt too heavy, even speaking a single word, drinking was the only thing that could make things a little lighter, so that he could move his hands, get up, say anything, and he takes another big sip, and again he feels the warmth spread through his body, because on these days when there’s nothing moving inside him, when he’s just heavy, yes, he has always been heavy, heavy of spirit as they say, melancholy, as they put it, but never before has he been so heavy that it was hard to say a single word and the only thing he wanted to do was go outside and down to the water and go out to sea and disappear into the sea and do it in the light that shines now and then from the darkness, when the darkness is most impenetrable in a way, he thinks, but now he doesn’t want to be alone, he wants to go out, and he wants to go to The Alehouse, and maybe he’ll run into someone he knows there, someone or other, someone he can talk to? maybe Guro’s there? it’s been so long since she’s gone there, but maybe he could meet someone he’s never talked to before? someone he didn’t know before today? and tomorrow he has to go buy more to drink and since he has to save what he still has at home to drink in the morning he needs to go out, go drop by The Alehouse, or The Last Boat as it’s called, Asle thinks and I see him put his wallet back in his inside pocket and put on the black velvet jacket that’s hanging on the back of a chair by the coffee table and then he goes out into the hall and puts his long black overcoat on, then he puts on a scarf that’s hanging on a hook there, then he feels his coat to make sure he has his wallet in his jacket pocket, and it’s where it should be, and he has money in it, he knows that, and he’s been carrying in his wallet for all these years a little reproduction of Bridal Procession on the Hardangerfjord, of all things, he saw the painting in a schoolbook back when he was a boy, in a school textbook, and he thought it was so beautiful, so beautiful, he knows some people look down on this painting but he still thinks it’s wonderfully fine, yes, people can say whatever they want, it’s an exceptionally good painting, he’s never painted anything like it himself, far from it, yes, what he’s painted himself can’t compare to that painting in the least, but ever since he was a boy he has always kept the little picture he tore out of the school textbook in his wallet, yes, he tore out the page with the picture from the textbook they used in his school and then cut out the picture and then put it in the wallet he had at the time, because he already had a wallet then, even if he rarely or never had any money in it, anyway he had this little reproduction of Bridal Procession on the Hardangerfjord in his wallet, and since then he has always kept this picture in his wallet, yes, he’s changed wallets many times of course but he always transferred the picture of Bridal Procession on the Hardangerfjord from the old one to the new one, and now the picture was so worn that you could barely see that it used to be Bridal Procession on the Hardangerfjord but in a way that just made the picture even more beautiful, not that he looked at it very often, but still he did take it out sometimes and to make more room in his wallet he’d folded it in quarters, folded it once and then again, and so over time the picture had obviously come apart into four pieces, the folds had torn of course, but he’d taped them back together on the back once a long time ago and the tape had lasted well so that’s why the picture was still in one piece, more or less anyway, and so he went around with this picture in his wallet, the same as before, and even if it was basically impossible to see what the picture showed any more he still sometimes took it out and looked at it, never at home, but sometimes when he was sitting alone at The Alehouse or somewhere else and had nothing else to do, it wasn’t all that often that he looked at the picture but sometimes he’d look at this old photograph of Bridal Procession on the Hardangerfjord, torn out of the textbook from his schooldays, yes, cut out on one side and torn out on the other, Asle thinks and then he thi
nks that now he needs to pick up his keys from the bureau in the hall and then go out to the front door, and now he just has to not run into anyone, any of the neighbours, as long as no one comes up to him on the stairs, Asle thinks and he sees Bragi standing there looking at him and Asle thinks that he needs to take the dog out but he can’t do it now, he’d rather do it when he gets back home, it won’t be too many hours till he’s back and then he says to Bragi now be a good boy and watch the apartment and the dog just looks at him and then Asle unlocks the apartment door and then he goes down the stairs and he walks past the bicycles and pushchairs down in the hall and he thinks that as long as he doesn’t run into some neighbour or another, he thinks, and he goes to the street door and he opens it and he sees someone walking towards him