The Tempest

by Steve Sem-Sandberg

  The island: it seemed as if it had always existed, full of wailing, enigmatic life forms, long before anyone set foot on it. The earliest arrivals must have crossed the strait either in boats or in sledges during the rare winters when the fjord was icebound. They went to the lake in the middle of the island, where they cut the ice into large, rectangular blocks and packed them in sawdust for transfer to one of the shipping ports on the mainland. Some time after the ice traders had stopped coming to the island, a few enterprising farmers managed to cross the strait. They tried to farm it but gave up soon enough and returned to the mainland: transportation of goods to and from the island was still far too expensive to make large-scale agriculture profitable. Kaufmann’s father, a minister in one of the pre-war Conservative governments, had bought a site on the Main Island’s rocky western side where he built himself a summer villa (it is still there) and, while he was at it, had taken the opportunity to purchase all the available land and hire tenants to look after it. Apart from buying up most of the Main Island he also owned land on the nearby West Island and Net Rock. His most important purchase was the Mains Farm, with the fields and large forests around it, which included a lake, or tarn, as the locals called it. Jan-Heinz Kaufmann senior was not particularly interested in farming but acquired land because he reckoned that if he did not, sooner or later another buyer would come along. In practice, the management of the tenancies fell to Kaufmann’s only son. The few resident families must have found Jan-Heinz Kaufmann junior an odd sight: a pale and shy youth but also a bafflingly arrogant copy of his father. He was tall and gangly, with a long, thin face, high forehead, pointed chin and small eyes, alert and curious behind his steel-rimmed glasses. Young as he was, he never stepped outside the house without his hat and walking stick, but he hardly ever put on an overcoat or jacket, and usually wore a rough linen shirt, wide and collarless, with his braces, later to be one of his trademarks, slipping off his sloping shoulders. Even though the two Kaufmanns looked so alike, mentally the son was his father’s opposite in almost every way. The older man was a conservative pragmatist who understood how money worked, while the younger one was a free-thinking idealist, impressed by foreign utopians and social thinkers such as Charles Fourier and the transcendentalist George Ripley, who founded Brook Farm. Kaufmann would, come time, set up his own alternative community on the Inner Islands, an unstructured association of reform-minded idealists, normally referred to simply as the colony. With his father’s tacit approval, Kaufmann started to experiment with new approaches to agriculture such as dynamic crop rotation and new or newly rediscovered types of grain, including emmer wheat, which turned out to give excellent harvests on the drier, relatively more exposed fields on the Inner Islands. To extend the harvest season on Main Island, he tried a late sowing with rapeseed once the autumn wheat had been brought in. On the islands, experimental seed types and oil-rich crops were unheard-of innovations and people laughed at him to begin with but Kaufmann obviously had good contacts and went on to sign a contract with a Lübeck company that produced cheap rapeseed cooking oil; it didn’t take long before the entire harvest was exported by ship and rail to Germany. Just a few years later, Kaufmann started to recruit a new workforce. Each one of the new employees was given an illustrated twenty-four-page leaflet entitled On the Nutritional Requirements of Nature and of Mankind written by Kaufmann himself. He left no detail unexplained, from the special growing conditions on the islands to the proper formation of a person’s character, and in order to make sure that people took his ideas on board, he ran regular house catechisms. The colony grew, not least because he was a decent employer: new workers were offered family quarters as long as at least two members of the household joined one of the colony enterprises. In the early 1920s, he followed Fourier’s recommendations and set up a phalanstery building on West Island, which housed up to twenty-five working families. A teacher came across from the mainland every morning to instruct the children. Kaufmann had wanted to found his own local school to make sure that the teaching would be in his spirit, as it were. The plans were quite advanced but the school never materialised or, more precisely, he never received permission to build. At this stage, the authorities had grown suspicious of his utopian ideas. The satirically inclined caricatured him as a wild and woolly eccentric, the very essence of an old-style feudal laird who promised everyone honest work but actually kept his workers in bondage. Still, it was neither police pressure nor bureaucratic obstacles that caused the final dismantling of the colony but mundane financial reality. In the wake of the depression, Kaufmann began to put pieces of land up for sale in order to raise the necessary capital to continue with agriculture in any form on the Inner Islands. By then, he no longer took any personal part in farming and instead spent his time in politics, having changed his party affiliation from the old Farmers’ Party to the newly launched National Front. From 1933 onwards, the people on the islands knew him above all as a passionate botanist. The wetlands and the noble deciduous, abundant woodlands around the lake on the eastern side of the Main Island were natural growing grounds for a great variety of plants that were not found elsewhere at our latitude. Kaufmann mapped the species and described the places where they grew in a book that is regarded as unique to this day, especially because of the beautiful illustrations, hand-coloured by Kaufmann himself. His passion for ordering, categorising, surveying and fencing off took many other forms. A small pumping station built by the lake sent the dark forest water to the new homes on the island. Everything that grew fascinated him, as did the potential for growing things to be improved or transformed into something else. As Johannes used to say, Kaufmann was something of a magician. Not that he ever changed. He was all of a piece, a committed idealist, if rather lacking get up and go; instead, he grew more introverted, capricious and despotic. And then the war broke out; before long, the Nazis occupied Norway, the Quisling government was set up and Kaufmann was appointed junior minister in the Department of Trade. To his enemies, and there were plenty of them by then, joining the new government was just the predictable next step after the elitist ideas that led him to found the colony. Others assumed that he acted on an opportunist impulse, probably also responding to pressure from Kaufmann senior, who was still alive (he lasted until 1942) and insistent that the land and buildings should not slip out of the family’s grip. As for Johannes, he always said that it was nothing but malicious gossip to call Kaufmann a Nazi. The colony, at least in its early version, was imbued with ideas of good will and mutual trust, the opposite of suspicion and hatred. And that much should be obvious to each and every one who looks up even a single page in On the Nutritional Requirements of Nature and of Mankind. Johannes argued that Kaufmann collaborated with the Germans only because he had no other choice and, besides, everyone should examine his or her own conscience before trying to decide if Kaufmann had made a virtue of necessity or acted to save his own skin. Then again, when he was convicted after the war, he bore the punishment as if it were a price he had to pay. Did any of the people who called him a traitor ever ask what he had done for his country? Johannes demanded. It was something out of the ordinary for Johannes to be upset, but this time he really was. He had removed his glasses and had been rubbing his forehead red and shiny with his fingertips. Once the crisis years began, he said, when our ports were under blockade and only ships in convoys could cross the Atlantic, Kaufmann had led a small delegation to Berlin on behalf of the government, and managed against the odds to persuade Germany to increase the export quotas for agricultural seed. It was in the autumn of 1942. The German army was victorious on all the fronts and the topic of the day was how to feed the growing population of the Third Reich by exploiting the enormous, newly vanquished territories in Belarus, Ukraine and further eastwards. Hitler was taking a personal interest in the subject, and Kaufmann, who had even been granted an audience with the Führer, used it to elaborate on the methodological hows and whys of improving different cereal seeds and increasing farm productivity. I rem
ember Johannes’s faraway smile when he spoke of Kaufmann’s German visit. Or perhaps he smiled just because he recalled how proud the old boy had been over his unexpected diplomatic victory. It was part of the story that Johannes had driven Kaufmann from the Mains Farm to the mainland airport, where the rest of the delegation was already waiting, and that he, Johannes, had stayed around for long enough to see the DC-3’s sluggish, croaking take-off into the fog. It was a late, damp evening in November, when all of Europe was sodden. Despite Kaufmann’s time being swallowed up by his work for the War and Food Supplies Ministry (this was its actual name), during the early war years he would often be seen out on solitary walks along the paths near the lake. Fifteen years earlier, his wife Sigrid had given birth to a daughter, Helga, who at the age of two had been diagnosed with the ‘type three’ form of spinal muscular atrophy, a slowly progressive condition that with time would confine her to a wheelchair. If you ask me, Johannes said, this was a terrible blow to Kaufmann, as it would be to anyone of his mental outlook and character. Did you ever meet her? I asked. Helga? Johannes replied. Oh yes, many times. Father and daughter were very close, he would have done absolutely anything to make her well and did all he could. He failed simply because nothing worked. After all, it is an inherited condition. He had the trait himself. Now it comes back to me: a swarm of Johannes’s bees had escaped from the hive and built a nest for themselves under the roof ridge, so Johannes had propped the ladder against the wall to get close enough to smoke the bees out. It was summer again and the dust-laden air hanging over the Mains Farm Road trembled in the heat, making the farm building at the top of the slope look vaguely blurred in the warm haze. I asked: Then what happened? And he said: What, with Helga? Or Kaufmann? And I: With everything? And Johannes: Well, you know, it was peace-time then, the Germans were gone and NATO had come to take over, here as everywhere else, the airport was in their hands and civilian air traffic was expanding, so the old flight paths were redrawn and came to cross the island. Sigrid Kaufmann protested against the aircraft noise, the level was unhealthy, she claimed. But no one bothered about what she said, she had sided with the enemy, of course, he said as he reached the last few rungs of the ladder, with the bee smoker in one hand and the mask covering his face. The insects were swarming around him and around the opened windows. In the summer, the bees often took off from his rather neglected hives, swarmed and then settled on branches in the trees or under the roof tiles. Next, Johannes removed the waxy comb and held it with his gloved hand. The bees were crawling along his arm and I remember how unbelievably alien his net-covered face looked as I stood at the foot of the ladder, looking up at him: a mask of restlessly crawling insects.

  I am not sure what I expected, but most things in the Yellow Villa stand exactly where I remembered: Johannes’s room was the one he had claimed while Minna was living at home and, in later years, he slept there except when he withdrew to the attic to get pissed. His narrow iron bedstead is still in the far corner by the door where the bedside lamp is, and next to it, the three-legged stool where he would keep a pile of books and assorted medicines. My room and the room that was Minna’s are both untouched, except for a lot of stuff that would normally have ended up in the garage: large, brown cardboard boxes full of discarded clothes, a folding ladder smeared with white paint, pots of paint and bottles of turps and paint thinner. Into the room that became mine once Minna moved out, Johannes had dragged the TV set from where it used to stand in the Small Room, as we called it, a cubbyhole between the sitting room and the hall, and the set is still there, plugged into a socket even though the electricity supply was disconnected ages ago, and looking absurdly coquettish thanks to its top being covered by a small lacy runner, presumably crocheted long ago by one of the housekeepers, and quite out of keeping with all the heavy objects piled up around the room; mostly outdoor furniture, loungers and other stuff that someone (surely not Johannes?) must have hauled in. Everything that used to be outside in the yard before, and in the garden and the garage, seems to have been slowly and steadily transferred into the actual house. The rugs are in the same place as always in the hall and the sitting room, as if to give the place at least an aura of respectability, and in the front room, lit by bleak daylight filtering in through the flimsy curtains, the old pieces of furniture stand in pools of shadow. There is the large armchair covered in studded, oxblood-coloured leather that Johannes was so proud of but had never been seen sitting in. Scattered everywhere, in every single room, there are garishly coloured plastic buckets. They smell as if they once contained rubbish or leftover scrubbing water. From the toilet and bathroom next to Johannes’s former room comes a thick stench of mouldy wood, bad drains and dried urine that makes my stomach churn. I do not dare to enter the kitchen but have a quick look to make sure the old drop-leaf table is in its usual place in the nook by the larder and Johannes’s well-thumbed black address book with telephone numbers is still on the table, next to the wall. His stack of neatly folded newspaper pages, grown enormous over many decades, is also in the kitchen. He kept items like the reportage of the inauguration ceremony for the bridge across the strait, in 1923 or 1924 or whenever it was: an event recorded for posterity in a photograph of the team of construction workers against the backdrop of the bridge, where, among the men, a very much younger version of Johannes can be spotted furthest to the right in the front row, his arms crossed and a sweater carelessly knotted around his shoulders. Then there is the story written fifteen years after the inauguration, on the occasion when a sergeant in the Norwegian air force flew his biplane fighter, a Gloster Gladiator, under the span of the bridge without having told anyone except a photographer on the local paper, who watched the derring-do from a strategically located seaside rock, took photographs and wrote it up. The published picture shows the plane flying so low over the strait that the two wheels in front almost touch the surface of the water, its twin wings elegantly angled to make sure of passing cleanly under the bridge. A thin layer of snow covers the ground and the bridge is abandoned apart from an anxious-looking guard leaning over the railing to watch from near the shelter. As it happens, the very same flight sergeant, flying the same plane, was shot down over the Oslo Fjord on the morning of 9 April 1940, after having been ordered out on a reconnaissance flight when it had become clear that the German invasion forces were taking the fjord route. Johannes had of course not saved any cuttings about that. I notice how easily I find my way around the Yellow Villa, as if I were still a child. As soon as possible, I go to the room that became mine once Minna suddenly left us, after the long night she had spent up the hill in the Mains Farm. The room is next to Johannes’s and the window looks out on the broad field that slopes up towards the farm, where the lamp on the stable wall usually burns all through the night, in summer as well as winter. I remember being frightened by the light and also by the large damp stain on the ceiling that I thought at first was a monster, then some kind of god and later realised was a horrible animal, breathing as it was moving across the ceiling in the dark. I imagined how the animal woke every time the light moved as it fell on the curtains. When it rained and the wind blew and the light swung and rocked in time with the swaying motions of the trees, I dreamt that its black, shadowy body mounted Kaufmann’s white horse and rode away. One night, the dream was so vivid that I climbed out of bed, or perhaps it was a sleepwalking version of me who got up and ran outside to walk through the rain along the forbidden road all the way to the horse paddock, where the large enamelled bathtub seemed to shine as white as the stable lamp in the darkness, and opened the gate to let the horse out. Or was that really what happened? Am I mixing my memory of the dream with the time the procession circled the island and Minna suddenly came running down from the Mains Farm with one of Mr Carsten’s hunters at her heels? Minna always inflamed me and made me do the wildest things: like that time she forced a group of us to take all our clothes off in the Simonsens’ playhouse, or several years later, when she told me to lie in wait in the forest
for Kaufmann coming along on one of his botanical and entomological rambles. The idea was to make him stumble on the partly overgrown path by the lake, and then hit him with a stone until I killed him, an act I very nearly managed to complete. Later, shortly after Kaufmann’s death from other causes, a doorbell rang – at the front door, for a change – and Mr Carsten stood in the doorway, his bulk and height almost filling it, talking to Johannes in the manner of the master addressing a farmhand or, rather, deputy master and stand-by farmhand, since Mr Carsten by then had taken over the running of the Mains Farm in every practical sense. Now, Johannes, Mr Carsten said, this devilry must cease, somehow you’ll have to get rid of that girl, and Johannes said nothing or, if he did, it was in such a low voice I couldn’t hear it, or else I didn’t want to hear because however badly Minna behaved towards me, to live in the house without her was unimaginable and that night, the stain above my bed had grown to twice the size and covered almost half the ceiling. When Johannes came in, he smiled in that absent-minded way of his and told me that the stain was not a monster, and not a god, and, if it was special at all, it must be an axolotl. An axolotl is a Mexican salamander that is awake at night. It can walk and swim equally well, breathing with proper lungs when on land but with gills in the water. It lives practically forever if you give it the right things to eat and isn’t one gender or another but has many different shapes, which it can change any number of times. Then he went on to speak about the great German explorer Alexander von Humboldt, who returned home from his travels in South America with one specimen of these strange creatures of the dark. Or probably two specimens, Johannes said, the shadow on the ceiling in my room being cast by one of them.