by Jon Fosse
Yes well you know, she says
That’s not the worst thing, she says
You need to be a good painter to do that, she says
Well anyway I already know you are, she says
and she gives a little laugh and she’s about to say more but I sort of quickly say painting pictures is what I can do in life, more than anything else at least, I say
Still, she says
And there are people who want to buy your pictures too? she says
Yes, there are, I say
and she says she knows that of course, that people buy my pictures, because she, yes, I didn’t know that, but she goes to my shows, and she herself has often wanted to buy a picture, she really admires my pictures, but of course there are some pictures she likes more than others, she says
It’s like pictures talk, the same as people, she says
A kind of silent language comes out of a good picture, she says
Yes, it’s hard to explain, but a really good picture says something all its own, something you can understand but that can never be said in words, she says
and I say she’s exactly right, that’s how I think about it too, I say, and she says she’s never been able to afford to buy a picture I’ve painted, and besides, yes, well, now that she thinks about it, she says, the way I support myself is probably not all that different from how she supports herself, not really, she just sits and sews this Hardanger embroidery of hers, these decorative bodices, and that’s how she makes a living, well a kind of living at least, more or less, yes, she’s been doing it since she was a girl, yes, since she was sitting in her Grandmother’s lap, she says, yes, because even back when she was sitting in her Grandmother’s lap she was watching how she was doing what she was doing, how she was sewing, yes, following along with her eyes while her Grandmother did it, and when she was older her Grandmother taught her everything she knew about Hardanger embroidery, and how to sew bodices, and then she started doing it herself, yes, when she was still a girl, and she’s kept doing it ever since, to this day, and during all those years she’s sold what she made to The Craft Centre, when she felt she had sewn enough she went to The Craft Centre with what she had, and she was paid well, cash on delivery, so that was nice, but especially after her husband left, yes well she calls him that even though they weren’t actually married, and she says that he left, yes, he just disappeared even though it was actually more like she threw him out, and she’s really regretted that
It was so stupid to do that, she says
and she says it’s painful to talk about it, because he was a good man, or had been one, she doesn’t like big words and doesn’t use them much but still she can say that they loved each other, but, yes, she says and she stops and we keep walking in the snow, trudging ahead, because it’s still snowing, but less now, it’s more like individual snowflakes, and I keep petting and petting the dog’s back and I’m holding him pressed to my chest and then she says she’s never heard anyone play the fiddle like he did, never, and when they lived together she always called him The Fiddler, just that, are you coming, Fiddler? it’s time to eat, is The Fiddler hungry? and he was such a talented Hardanger fiddler, and he won lots of national contests, first place, yes he sure could play, but, but, she says, but then there was all that drinking, she says and she stops and then she says that in the end she couldn’t take it any more, his drinking, his over-doing it, she threw him out, because it was her apartment, the apartment on The Lane that she’d rented for all these years, and she said she’d been supporting him for a long time, and he should at least pay for his booze himself, even though he actually did she said it anyway, she says, yes, she said one nasty thing after another to him, that she’d had enough, that she wanted him to leave, and then he did leave, The Fiddler, and he wasn’t slow to do it either, he just took his fiddle and headed out over the mountains to the east, and there, yes, no, she shouldn’t talk about it, but he was from East Norway, so then, well, I probably know what she means, the fiddle had disappeared and the rest too, yes, and he was sleeping away from home a lot, she’d heard it not from him but from other people, yes, I know what she means, she says, and so it was probably some woman or another somewhere in the east, in Telemark, who took pity on him and took him in, let him stay with her, she probably owned a house or some other place to live, and then she’s sure he stayed living there for some years and then he died, and he surely drank to the very end, but he was a good man, he was, and she missed him, yes, she really did, every day she missed him, not a day went by without her missing him, she said, and she’s often thought it was so stupid to do that, to tell him to leave, she’s so often regretted it, yes, she’s so often sat and cried over her own stupidity, she says, because he’d never just taken his fiddle and left before so she started to miss him, and that was how she’d felt every day since that terrible day when he skipped out, she says, because she hadn’t meant what she said, even though it was true, but she did ask him to leave and then he just looked at her and as drunk as he was he didn’t say anything, because in some ways he was never drunk, not in the usual way, just in his own way, he played the fiddle the way only he could play, even when he was totally drunk in his own way, at least he didn’t get drunk the way other people did, he was sober from drinking in a way, yes, he wasn’t like anyone else, and she had no idea how he got his booze, and how he paid for it, no, but somehow or another he always managed to, and it’s probably always like that with people who need to drink, with real drinkers, she says
Will you still be with me when I’m dead? she says
and she looks at me and I feel something give a little start inside me
That’s what he used to say to me, she says
Imagine saying that to someone, she says
and she says that he said that exact thing to her so many times, yes, when he’d been drinking, or at least in the last few years he’d said it a lot, because then he was almost never totally sober, she says and she laughs and she says that he played best when he’d drunk a little, but not too much, when he drank too much it was ruined and got confused, yes, one time he was so drunk that he got up and left the stage in the middle of his set and said no, it’s no good, and then walked off the stage, or more like staggered off, she was there, she saw it with her own eyes, she says
Right in the middle of a tune he got up and left the stage, she says
It’s no good, he said, and then he left, she says
and she says that it’s probably partly, at least before he was, well, an alcoholic, you’d probably have to call him that, it’s probably partly because he was shy that he drank, yes, it was from shyness, and then also his moodiness and sadness, but it worked out fine for many years, yes, that’s the truth, believe it or not, everything was balanced in its way, he earned some money from his playing, gradually more and more, he played at weddings the way fiddlers have always done, and then it got to where he would play almost every week at dances in Gimle, one gig or another would always turn up, but he drank, he was drinking the whole time, and it wasn’t too much, at least not until the drinking totally took over and there were lots of times when he wasn’t in any shape to actually play and his playing was nothing but a big mess of notes and screeches, yes, you know how people always say the Hardanger fiddle sounds like a cat screeching, now how can people who consider themselves fine upstanding Bjørgvin women bring themselves to say things like that, they know so little, these fine women, they understand so little, she says, yes to tell the truth she regrets with all her heart that she told him to leave, how stupid was that, she says again, because as long as he drank she never had that much trouble with him, he was always nice, and they used to have a drop or two together too, lots of times, because she liked a little something to drink too, it wasn’t that, she was no teetotaler, I knew that, I saw her with a glass of red wine in her hands today, she says, and the best moments she can remember, yes, the best moments in her whole life were while she was sitting and drinking red wine an
d he was playing, it was the most beautiful thing she’s ever heard in her life, it almost makes her cry just thinking about it, just hearing his tunes in her mind, she can’t think about it any more, she says, because in the end the drinking totally took over, but he was a good man, yes, even then, truly, and we shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, she says, anyway, yes, the first time she saw him it was at a competition, it was the first music contest she’d ever been to and he was sitting at the front of the stage and playing like an ordinary fiddler but then he played his way farther and farther into the music and sort of moved away from himself and from the others and it was like both he and the music and everyone listening rose up into the air and then he turned around on his stool and played with his back to the concert hall, his back to everyone listening, and everything kept swinging through the air, it was exactly as if the music he was playing just flew up and sort of disappeared into the air and into nothing and then he stopped and then he got up and walked right off the stage without turning around and the audience was clapping and clapping, yes, the applause wouldn’t stop, it was like the people in the concert hall had witnessed something like a miracle, she had never heard anyone play that well before or since, not him or anyone else, and that was, well, since she’s told me this much she might as well say the rest, that was the night when they became he and she, became a couple, she says, and then we walk silently on, step by step through snow no one has walked in before us
Yes, alcohol is both good and bad, I say
He used to say that too, she says
and then she asks if I drink and I say yes I used to, quite a bit too, but, well it’s a long and difficult story, I say, and in the end it came down to either drinking or painting, yes, drinking or staying alive you might say, and yes, well, somehow I got free of the alcohol’s hold on me, but it wasn’t easy, I say, and of course Ales, my wife, didn’t like that I drank, and if it wasn’t for her then no I don’t know what would have happened to me, I say
You don’t drink any more? she says
No, I say
and there’s silence
And Ales, your wife? she says
She died, she’s gone, I say
and there’s a long silence and then I say that I haven’t drunk at all since I stopped drinking and she says good for me that I could do that and I say no, no, it wasn’t about me, I just did what had to be done and I had help, and without help from both earthly and heavenly forces, yes, why not say it, it’s true, from heaven too, I’d never have been able to do it, but most of all it was thanks to Ales that I could do it and once I’d managed to stop drinking it wasn’t hard at all to not start again, but stopping in the first place, weaning myself off drinking, well that was hard, yes, that was a struggle, I say and she says that her husband, yes well as she mentioned she calls him her husband anyway, yes, The Fiddler was never able to stop drinking, and he didn’t really try either, she knows that, and then that woman in Telemark took him in to live with her, but she was a big drinker too, yes, she almost had to be, or else she wouldn’t have been able to stand him, and so it happened the way it had to happen, he wasn’t an old man, no, she doesn’t want to think about this sad and unpleasant situation any more right now, she says and she raises her face and look, she says, and she raises her arm, look there, there, on the, on the other side of The Bay, you can see The Country Inn, there it is, you’re saved, she says and she chuckles a little and I say thank you so so much for helping me, and she says it’s no problem when you know the way, she says, but if you don’t know the way that’s a different story, she says and she says she didn’t mean it in a bad way when she laughed just then, if there was any reason at all for her to laugh it was just that she recognized herself, country folk in Bjørgvin, she says, but yes, well, as she said, if they don’t have a room for me at The Country Inn I can always spend the night at her place, she says, anyway there’s more than enough room in her apartment, all too much room, she says and I think that I’ve never really liked going into other people’s homes, I’ve always been shy about that, yes it was like I was doing something I had no right to do, like I was intruding, forcing myself into other people’s lives, like I was getting to know more about their life than I had a right to know, like I was disturbing their life, or at least I felt disturbed by their life, their life intruding on mine, yes, like another life was sort of filling me up, I think, and for someone to come into my house, well that’s one of the worst things I know of, yes, I get so nervous and uneasy then that I don’t know what to do with myself, no, it doesn’t happen when people I know well come over, like Åsleik, nothing happens then, it’s just normal, yes, everything’s the way it should be, that’s how it is with friends, they sort of belong there in a way, and I also don’t think it’s hard to go into the houses of people I know well, friends’ houses, but there aren’t many of those people, I think, strictly speaking there’s just Åsleik now, I think, yes, Åsleik and no one else, not many, and when he comes over it’s almost not like someone else is coming over, and when I go to his house it’s not like going to someone else’s house, because Åsleik and I have known each other for so long and it’s like you no longer have much of anything to hide from a person like that, well of course we have some things, but it’s like we both know what we’re hiding or like we know it but don’t want to know it, and don’t dwell on it, don’t think about it, it’s like we just leave it alone, leave it in peace, let it lie, without waking it up or shaking it, without disturbing it, but it’s not like that with people I don’t know, and visiting people? earlier in my life? yes, strictly speaking it was only when Ales and I were living in Bjørgvin that we had people come over, after we ran off to Dylgja it was just Ales and me, and then, while she was still alive, yes, the only person who came and visited us in Dylgja, aside from her mother Judit, and Åsleik of course, was Beyer, but only once, no, I can’t think about that, about Ales, it’s too much, I’d just sink and sink into it and disappear, I think, but the day Beyer came to see us Ales didn’t want to stay home, she wanted to be at her mother Judit’s house in Bjørgvin instead, so the day before Beyer came I drove her to Bjørgvin, yes, to The Beyer Gallery, and the day after I went to get her from The Beyer Gallery, because if I didn’t like getting visits from anyone Ales liked it even less, I think
I think I know you better than you realize, Guro says then
and I don’t understand what she means, she knows me better than I realize, what’s that supposed to mean? it’s true I’ve been interviewed a few times by The Bjørgvin Times, I’m afraid so, but that can’t be what she’s talking about
My name is Guro, she says then
and she says it emphasizing the name like she’s sort of trying to remind me of something and then she says now at least I know her name, in case I’d forgotten it, she says, so if my memory’s so bad that I can’t remember much more about her at least I’ll have to remember her name now, she says, and she says it’s about time we said hello properly, she says, and she shakes my hand