by Jon Fosse
My sister’s name is Guro, yes, Åsleik says
Yes, I say
and I think that that’s strange too, because the woman I ran into in Bjørgvin who kept Bragi for the night at her place was named Guro as well, and it’s not such a common name, but maybe it was a common name in the countryside at one point, I think
And the dog’s name is Bragi, yes, I say
What a nice little scamp, Åsleik says
and again he holds out his hand to Bragi, who goes over to Åsleik and licks his hand a couple of times and then Åsleik clutches Bragi’s fur and tugs a little and now they’re good friends, I think
Bragi, yes you are, Åsleik says
and he says if I need someone to watch the dog for me I should just call him, he says and I think that actually it’s kind of strange that in all these years Åsleik has only ever talked about Sister and almost never called her Guro, I think and we go into the main room and Åsleik says I keep it so cold in the room that he should probably go back out to the hall and put his snowsuit back on, he says, don’t I have a fire in the stove? I have plenty of wood in The Shed, last summer he drove a giant load of wood to my house and we stacked it all in The Shed, good dry birchwood, and a generous amount of kindling, and wood chips, he says, and now here I was without a fire in the stove, and not only do I have more than enough wood in The Shed, there’s also lots of wood in the woodbox, he can see that, and kindling, and wood chips, yes, so now things with me have reached the point that I’d rather sit there freezing instead of lighting a good fire in the stove, he just doesn’t know, Åsleik says and I don’t know quite what to say, because I do probably need to defend myself or explain myself somehow but what should I say? and why haven’t I lit the stove? yes well it’s probably just that I was too tired or something, I think, and that’s something I can say
I was so tired that I just lay right down, I say
Yes, well, that makes sense, Åsleik says
Back and forth to Bjørgvin three times in the same day and then again the next day to get back home, that’d tire you out, he says
Yes, I say
When I got home I lay down on the bench with the blanket over me and the dog was lying next to me, so I wasn’t cold, I say
If you’re wrapped in a good blanket it’s true you don’t get cold so easily, Åsleik says
and he says that your body heat stays trapped in the blanket somehow, and that’s how it keeps you so warm, but since I’m tired he can light the stove for me, that’s easy enough, he says and I see Åsleik go over to the stove and open the hatch and he starts putting wood in it and I go out to the kitchen and I see the six shopping bags I bought yesterday on the kitchen table, yes, I drove right back to Bjørgvin without even taking everything out of the bags, I think and I need to put the food away soon, there are already so many bags on the kitchen table that I need to put the lamb and fish Åsleik brought me in the pantry under the stairs to the attic right away, the same as I usually do, but it can wait, because both the lamb ribs and the lutefisk will be fine in the cold kitchen, I think and then I put the two shopping bags Åsleik brought me up on the table with the other bags that are already there and now there are no fewer than eight shopping bags there, I think, and I go back into the main room and I see the stove hatch standing open and Åsleik is there looking at the logs in the stove
It’ll catch in a second, Åsleik says
So we’ll be warmer soon, he says
and he holds out his hands to the stove and he says that the stove is already nice and warm
You’re probably freezing, you should come over here and warm up, he says
and to tell the truth I do feel a little cold and I go over to Åsleik and I stand next to him by the stove and I hold my hands above the stove and it’s good to feel the warmth coming up towards my hands, they really were quite cold, I feel
It’ll start to warm up in your stove soon, Åsleik says
and then Bragi comes slinking in and he lies down in front of the stove and then I just stand there not saying anything
And now I can take a look at the pictures, and pick out one for Sister? Åsleik says
Yes, I say
and Åsleik turns around and he says that the stack of finished big paintings is big now, but the stack of smaller pictures isn’t that big, he says, so I must not have been painting as many smaller pictures as I usually do, he says and I say that’s right, and I don’t know why, that’s just how it is, I say and Åsleik says well that’s usually how it goes, things turn out however they’re going to turn out, he says and then we just stand there by the stove and I feel warmth spreading through my body and it feels good and Åsleik again says that this year he wants a big picture, I’ve always, for whatever reason, given him one of the small pictures every other year and that’s fine, of course I need to be thrifty to get by, tubes of oil paint and canvases aren’t free now are they, no, and of course I get more money for a big painting than I do for a smaller one, he understands all that, but he’s been thinking for some years now that he really wanted to give Sister one of the bigger paintings, but I’d always taken him over to the stack of small paintings and shown him those and he’d decided among them and chosen a small picture, and if he hadn’t been able to decide on one of those then I’d found some more pictures and put them on the living-room table, but always small ones, yes well what do I mean living-room table, it’s been years since you could call it a living-room table strictly speaking, a table you could sit around, could eat at, because there’ve been tubes of paint and brushes and a hammer and nails and a saw and cloths and rags and other junk and he doesn’t know how I can find what I need in that mess, but then again I do have that good long kitchen table, yes, it’s been there all these years, since long before when Ales and I moved into the house, yes, it was there when old Alise lived in the house, Åsleik says, yes, and that goes for the living-room table too, of course, all the furniture, yes, we didn’t change that much, because there’s also the round table with the two chairs that’s still in front of the window the same as it was when old Alise lived in the house, and the same bench in the same corner it used to be in, Åsleik says and then there’s silence
Yes, you and Ales, he says
Ales and Asle, yes, he says
Yes, I say
It’s so sad she got sick and passed away when she was so young, so young, and it was so sudden too, Åsleik says
and then we just stand there and we don’t say anything, it’s like we’re frozen in place and I see Ales the first time we walked into the kitchen together and she says she’d always thought they were so beautiful, old Alise’s old kitchen table with the old chairs, she said, and then when we went into the living room she said the same thing about the furniture there, and she especially liked the round table with the two chairs in front of the window so that you could sit and look out at Sygne Sea, that in particular she’d always liked so much, she said and then she’d sat down in the chair on the right and I’d sat down in the chair on the left, and that’s the way we always sat from then on, me in the chair on the left, where I still sit, and Ales in the chair on the right, I think and I turn around and I see Ales sitting in the chair on the right looking out at Sygne Sea, she’s sitting there at the window without moving and her long dark hair is hanging loose down over her back and I don’t want to see her and I don’t want to think about her, because it’s too terrible, the pain is too great, so I don’t want to do it, I think and Åsleik says he’s sorry, he shouldn’t have mentioned Ales, and I don’t say anything and then we just stand there by the stove and then Åsleik says the best thing would be, yes well, as he’s already said, if he could pick out a picture today, or at least look through them today so he can think it over, think about which picture Sister would like best, if he didn’t see it right away, he says and I say that’s fine, of course he can look at the pictures today, and I think that actually there’s no one besides Åsleik that I show my pictures to, before they’re shown at
The Beyer Gallery in Bjørgvin, and that it won’t be long before I have a new exhibition there, but I have enough pictures for the show, so now I just need to, actually as soon as I can, drive the pictures to Bjørgvin, yes, the thirteen pictures I’m going to show, or at least it’s going to be thirteen once Åsleik has taken one for himself, no more and no less, though that’s fewer than usual, usually I have thirteen big pictures and six small pictures, nineteen all in all, I really believe in the number nine and I always want it to be in there one way or another, or else it can be a number where the digits add up to make nine, or something, I think, but the woman supposedly named Guro told me that the number that brings me luck, yes, my lucky number, is eight, or four times two, as she also said, because that was the number she got to by adding up the digits of my birthday, she said, but I’ve stuck with nine, and also three, I think, and so now I’m not sure about the number thirteen, because I think that thirteen can be both a good number and a bad number, the same with eight maybe, I think, no, anyway, eight is a good number, I think, but usually I’ve always had it be nineteen pictures, some of them small, because The Beyer Gallery isn’t that big and Beyer told me that he doesn’t want any more pictures than that so I’ve never had more than nineteen, but one time I brought nine pictures and Beyer said it wasn’t enough, or barely enough, it couldn’t be any fewer than that in future, he said, it didn’t really matter much how big the pictures were of course, though the pictures I paint are never that big, they’re just bigger or smaller, and almost no pictures are long and thin like the picture with the two lines crossing each other, which, obviously, there’s no way around it, I think, I’ll call it St Andrew’s Cross, and I’ll paint the title in thick black oil paint on the top of the stretcher today and then sign it with a large A in the right-hand corner of the picture itself, like I always do, and if I was alone I’d do it right now, but I’ll sign the picture as soon as Åsleik leaves, I think, and then I’ll need to drive the pictures down to Bjørgvin soon, just get it over with, I think, but now I’ve driven to Bjørgvin twice without bringing the paintings with me and I guess the reason why I haven’t taken them to Bjørgvin yet is that Åsleik hasn’t chosen the picture he wants yet, even though I didn’t realize it, without thinking about it that way that’s what it was, I think, it’s after Åsleik chooses his picture that I’ll drive the paintings down to Bjørgvin, because Beyer always wants to hang the pictures himself, he says that it’s so important to hang them right, the whole exhibition is like a painting of its own, he says, and that, yes, that’s the painting that he paints, or assembles or however you’d put it, Beyer says, and really I have no opinions about how the pictures should be hung, which ones next to which other ones or anything like that, and before Beyer sees the pictures the truth is and has been ever since Ales has been gone that Åsleik is the only one who sees them, and he has an amazingly good eye for pictures, more often than not he sees the same thing that I see, and he almost always has the same opinion about a picture as I do, so he almost always picks one of the pictures that I would have picked myself if I had to choose one, so from one point of view Sister, this Guro woman, probably has the best collection of my pictures anywhere, limited to the small pictures, but truth be told I’m doing something different in the bigger ones, and she’s only been given smaller ones, that’s true
And you can take one of the big ones, of course, I say
Obviously, I say
I shouldn’t have said that about always being given one of the small ones, Åsleik says
and I think that it’s true, I’ve always offered him one of the small pictures, but it wasn’t on purpose and I feel a bit ashamed about it now, it’s not that I think he doesn’t deserve a bigger picture, or Sister for that matter, but for some reason I’ve acted like Åsleik would always prefer to give Sister a smaller picture and Sister would always prefer to get a smaller picture, yes, in a way I’d have felt like I was forcing it on her if he tried to take a big one, since she’d come to own a lot of paintings over the years, a new one every year, so I probably thought a big one would be too much, she wouldn’t have enough space on the wall for them all
Sister’s whole house is almost full of your paintings now, Åsleik says
And that’s all well and good, it’s not that, he says
and Åsleik says that Sister is still just as happy and just as grateful every year for the picture she gets, he says and then he goes over to the stack of the bigger paintings and I see him start to look through the stack and he looks closely at each picture, one by one, and I’m standing by the stove and looking in at the flames and I think that up in the attic, in one of the storage spaces, I have some pictures stored that I didn’t want to sell, and two of them are among the first ones I painted when I started painting the way I wanted to paint and not just pictures of people’s houses from photographs, and those two pictures are still two of the best I’ve ever painted, they’re pictures where I felt like I’d really accomplished something, yes, more than I’m capable of actually, more of something that’s bigger than life is, maybe you could put it that way? yes, even if that’s kind of a grand way to put it and it feels too big and grand, still, yes, but, in some of the pictures I’ve done what I wanted to do, I can see that, I know that, and obviously the picture can say what can’t be said in any other way except precisely how that picture is saying it, and I don’t want to sell these pictures, my very best ones, because I know that most likely no one else wants to see what’s in these pictures, but I almost always have one on display up in the attic room I don’t use for storage, and for a long time now it’s been a portrait I painted of Ales, I think, because there are two rooms up in the attic, with two storage areas, and I use one room for storage too, I keep a lot of wood I can make stretchers from up there and a lot of canvas and more than a few tubes of oil paint and a whole lot of turpentine, but in the other attic room, on the left, I have only a chair in the middle of the room between the two small windows in the gable and I always have one of the paintings I don’t want to sell sitting on that chair, and I don’t want to sell it because the ones I sell just go away to someone else and then they’re gone, like the two stacks of pictures leaning against the wall by the kitchen door are about to do, because even if Beyer carefully notes down the name and the address of the buyer of this or that picture, yes, he’s photographed every single picture since the very first exhibition and numbered them and written down the buyer’s name, even then no one knows what happened to the painting after that, if the buyer gave it away or sold it to someone else, yes, strictly speaking the picture vanishes into the unknown and there’s no way to find it again, yes, there are pictures I’ve sold and regretted selling, especially the ones I painted when I was going to The Art School before I realized that there are some pictures I’m just not willing to sell, and those are the ones up in the attic, I keep the pictures I don’t want to sell in the storage space in the room on the left, and then I put a new one out, in place of the one I have sitting on the chair, and sometimes, especially when I sort of haven’t been painting for a while, when it’s stopped, I’ve gone up to the attic to look at the picture I have on display on the chair or else taken one of the other pictures out of the storage space and put it on the chair and then I also have a chair a few paces back from the chair with the picture on it and I sit down on it and then sit and look and look at the picture, yes, I can stay there for a long time, I don’t know how long, and I try to see why I actually keep painting pictures, and I sit and silently fall deeper and deeper into what I’m seeing, into what’s bigger than life, maybe, but that’s not the right way to say it, because what it is is, yes, a kind of light, a kind of shining darkness, an invisible light in these pictures that speak in silence, and that speak the truth, and then, once I’ve entered into this vision, or way of seeing, so that it’s not me who’s seeing but something else seeing through me, sort of, then I always find a way I can get farther with the picture I’m struggling with, and that’s how it also is
with all the paintings by other people that mean anything to me, it’s like it’s not the painter who sees, it’s something else seeing through the painter, and it’s like this something is trapped in the picture and speaks silently from it, and it might be one single brushstroke that makes the picture able to speak like that, and it’s impossible to understand, I think, and, I think, it’s the same with the writing I like to read, what matters isn’t what it literally says about this or that, it’s something else, something that silently speaks in and behind the lines and sentences, but, yes, this is what happened, the pitctures I keep in the attic are only some of the bigger pictures because Åsleik chose all of the truly good smaller pictures and took them to give to Sister, yes, it’s a bit ridiculous, but he must see the same way I do, or pretty close, anyway there are lots of pictures Åsleik picked out and gave to Sister that I really wish I had in my own collection up in the attic, not all the ones he’s bought, or rather traded for lamb and fish and wood and clearing the snow, there aren’t many of the ones he took that I wish I still had, but all the small pictures I might have imagined keeping in my collection up in the attic are ones Åsleik took and gave to Sister for Christmas, yes, it’s almost unbelievable but it’s true, her collection of my smaller paintings is a collection of the best smaller paintings I’ve ever painted, or even the best pictures I’ve ever painted altogether, that’s how I see it, not counting the paintings I have up in the attic, and the one I’ve had out on the chair up there for quite some time, I don’t remember exactly how long, is the portrait I painted of Ales, and I can’t bring myself to put it away, to swap it out for one of the other pictures in the storage spaces there, I think, and it would be nice to see the best smaller paintings I’ve ever painted again, just once, and anyway it’s a good thing that I know where they are, because it doesn’t matter so much whether I have them here in my house as long as I know where I could go see them, I think, but I’ve never gone with Åsleik to visit Sister, the truth is I’ve never even met her, even though I’ve driven past her house every single time I drove to or back from Bjørgvin, and it’s a pretty, old, small house, even if it does need a little paint, a grey house, but a bit rundown, it’s true, and obviously it’s never occurred to me to go knock at that woman named Guro’s door and ask if I could take a look at the pictures, but still, it really is a bit strange that I’ve never met Åsleik’s sister, because she drops by to see Åsleik now and then, to come see her childhood home, as they say, but she’s never spent the night there, Åsleik has said, she takes the bus round-trip the same day, yes, because there’s a bus connection once a day between Dylgja and Bjørgvin, to Dylgja in the morning, from Dylgja in the afternoon, it’s a small bus, because there aren’t many people who take it, I think, it’s basically empty past Dylgja more often than not, but some people do travel to or from Bjørgvin, I think and I think that Åsleik said that Sister doesn’t want to spend the night in her childhood home, he says, and he doesn’t understand why she doesn’t want to but anyway it’s high time we met, what with all the paintings of mine she has hanging in her house, I think, so maybe I will go with Åsleik for Christmas at Sister’s house this year? after all, Åsleik asks me every year if I can’t go with him to celebrate Christmas with her, and he says why can’t I come? because it would have to be much nicer for me than spending Christmas alone in Dylgja? he says and I always say no, I’d rather be alone, I say, but now, this year, maybe this year I can go with Åsleik and celebrate Christmas at Sister’s? because then I’d get to see all the good smaller paintings I’ve painted, if nothing else? and Åsleik said it’d be easier for him, too, if I came along, because then he wouldn’t have to go to Øygna alone in The Boat, and it’s always so much safer in a boat when there are two of you on board, but he’s always alone, Åsleik said, and I see that he’s pulled a picture out of the stack and now he’s looking at it and he’s not saying anything