The Tempest

by Steve Sem-Sandberg

  It has surely been less than an hour since I first set foot in the Kaufmann villa, but here they come: all thumping percussion and hooting horns and trumpets. The procession is on the move. I crouch by the window and observe them through the binoculars. At first, the outside world is just light and rainsoaked air. Then I see the Yellow Villa, which looks as if it is about to collapse under the weight of dense garden greenery. A long line of parked cars stretches all the way from Brekke’s place to the Simonsens’ greenhouse. People who have come to watch are lined up several rows deep along the roadside. While some are already busy packing and unpacking cool bags and rucksacks to get at Thermoses and sandwich boxes, others stand around smoking or just stand, arms chummily around each other’s shoulders, as if to make sure of not falling over backwards into the overflowing ditches. A group of children lead the procession; they leap and tumble playfully, as children will, but most of the participants proceed at a solemn, measured pace along the road. Several men of substance walk behind the banner of the local Rotary Club. The orchestra comes next: a tightly organised troop of mostly middle-aged or older men and women in red and navy uniforms. Their instruments are swinging this way and that, and the valves of the trumpets and the bells of the tubas are gleaming in the sunlight. The music swoops in the air as if freed from the musicians. Sometimes it rises in waves, a heavy swell that reaches the farm, retreats in the next moment, driven back by an invisible wind, only to return with even greater intensity. The piercing, sharp notes from the flutes rise against the sonorous background of the brass, which grows denser and cracks deep down in the bass range, while all is reined in by the dark, rhythmic beating of the drums. Boom-pa-pa-pa! Boom-pa-pa-pa! Boom …! From where I am in the farmhouse, high above the crowd, I can hear everything: the laughter and merry shouting of families with children, the beat of the drums and the drawn-out, silvery blasts of the horns. A group of jolly, noisy fathers have taken after their children and made themselves up as warriors, with paint-smeared faces and pheasant feathers stuck in their hair. A horde of disoriented dogs follow, unsure if they are to hang back, or run ahead and bark, or form a rearguard, like sheepdogs, to drive the straying flock. I ask myself how Helga, stuck in the upper floor of the farmhouse, might have felt as she watched, year after year, the cavalcade pass by at its majestically slow pace. If, on an impulse, someone had broken out of the column to ‘have a go’, as people used to say, she would not have been able to get away. She was in exile up here, unable to leave, always at home to visitors. Perhaps that was exactly what he thought, the young Franz Lehman who had been brought to the farm by her father. Did he seek her out to court her, thrill and even energise her with his infectious, boyish manner and apparently inexhaustible vitality? If they were really related, however distantly, she would surely have been curious to know if anyone in his family had been afflicted as she was – after all, her father said that her condition was inherited. They might have mulled over certain ideas, as they hid behind the tangled wild raspberry bushes or in the deepening dusk down by the lake, while he was carving willow flutes for her: one idea was that this illness was, in a way, greater than themselves, than any one ailing person, and had left its shameful stain on the hearts of the family, an imprint that went deeper than the individual’s race, nationality and beliefs and must therefore be concealed, or one would be seen to be vulnerable and, if one’s vulnerability became common knowledge, someone might leave the set processional route and start to walk up to the farm, as people had done so many times before. It had to happen, because the herd has no intelligence and acts purely on instinct, which means that it is unfailingly drawn towards the part of one’s body that is hardest to defend. I stand at the window and watch as the procession proper marches past, and then its tail of chatting parents and playing children. All are contained within the rhythmic drumming that lies like an acoustic lid over the island, compressing all other sounds under its weight. And suddenly it occurs to me that the music and human noise are not so much surrounding the procession as camouflaging it, that these things help to rein it in and give it shape, and, by doing this, mask the burning hatred that the islanders feel and have felt for countless years but that by now is barely distinguishable from their usual ill will. That is why all the noises and the shrieking children sound so distant and muted. It is as if they are all moving through time as well as space: throughout the years, the procession has followed precisely this route, slowing down and walking more heavily until it finally reaches the crossroads and, drawing on its last ounce of strength, turns off the road that leads to the Mains Farm. At this moment, I spot him: the man from behind the counter in Langmark’s with the gross facial swelling that marks him out. Unlike the other onlookers, he is not watching the procession, as it moves down the slope to King’s Road in a tangle of waving club banners, but is staring straight at the farm. Instinctively, I make myself smaller, even though reason tells me he cannot see me. The boom-boom-boom echoes of the drums fade and are swallowed up into the roar of yet another plane, grandly indifferent to whatever is happening down on the ground, processions or whatever else, as it trails its enormous boom behind it through the stagnant midday heat and then slips slowly out of sight behind the forest on the far side of the NATO villa.

  Because I do not know when, or even from which direction Mr Carsten is going to enter, I have shut and blocked all the doors to the house. I lifted the heavy marble top off the table under the hall mirror and upended it against the front door with its upper edge pressing from below on the door handle. In the drawing room, I hauled the massive oak desk across the room to obstruct the terrace door. In past years, there was a yard door that led into the basement. That back entrance was sheltered by the leafy walls of a pergola and wide cement steps took you down to a strong wooden door. It was intended for use by the farm workers who were housed in basement rooms. I remember that there was no doorbell but instead an old-fashioned iron clapper covered in flaking green paint. Only a few years after Kaufmann’s death, Sigrid Kaufmann had the cellar door bricked up and the pergola removed, which made that side of the house look almost obscenely bare. Where the steps had once taken you to the cellar door with its green-painted iron clapper, no grass grew, or anything else for that matter. The stairwell was filled in and all that remained of it was an absurd-looking remnant of the iron handrail that protruded a few centimetres above the flattened soil. However, though the door is no more, the cellar might still be in use. I get Johannes’s torch from my rucksack and direct the beam behind the stairs to the first floor. There is a space one and a half metres wide between the outer wall and the bottom of the stairs. A narrow door leads into some kind of storage area. The door is locked, but there is a trapdoor set into the floor in front of it. I grab hold of the two recessed handles on the trapdoor and the wood creaks as it comes up with a grating noise of unoiled hinges. The cement steps below are coated with a thick, crumbly layer of apparently undisturbed stone dust. I make sure that the heavy lid is securely propped up against the wall before starting to walk down the steps, moving slowly with the torch in one hand. The cellar floor is also made of cement, which makes sense if this was the area previously used to house the servants. Also, like the steps, a layer of grit covers the floor. It makes a crunching noise under the soles of my shoes. I hold the torch above my head: the cellar seems to have been partitioned into small rooms or pens that open into long, narrow corridors. Some of the partition walls are made of bricks and mortar but others look provisional, knocked together from unhewn planks or sheets of board. Even so, all the rooms, or pens, once had proper doors, although by now most of them have only holes to show where the barrels of the locks had been. There is a kitchen area in an alcove at the far end of the corridor. It is furnished with a long table, large enough for a dozen or so seated people, and, along the long wall, a sink fitted into a metal-covered workbench, with tins and empty plastic containers stacked next to it. I try the tap but no water comes. Along the walls on both sides of the kitchen alc
ove, hospital beds are lined up in rows or tipped upright. These are old-style cots from the 1940s or 50s, with head and foot ends of white-painted metal. The whole place has a worn, institutional look, something like an old-fashioned medical station in a military camp. Somehow, I do not dare enter any of the pens and instead go to lie down on one of the cots in the corridor to try to imagine what this place might have been like when people were living here. The solid walls surrounded proper rooms, perhaps whole apartments (the wooden partitions that turn the rooms into pens, as well as the hospital kit, were obviously added later). At least half a dozen families could have lived here, some perhaps permanently but others temporarily, when casual labourers joined the settled workforce at sowing and harvesting times. This must have been where Franz, as a refugee, was placed to avoid any unwanted suspicions, though I imagine that doors were left open and, at that time, stairwells and thresholds had not yet become markers of the impassable boundaries. The farm must have been full of children: the workers had families and others would have come to play. The air is filling with their light, shrill voices. And I remember my childhood summers: the dusty gravel roads and harsh scent from the verges where wild carrot and celery grew; the fields and pastures scattered with red clover; the strange, chalky heat that seemed to radiate from the bare shale rock surfaces, which split into flakes, sharp as needles if you scratched your skin with one of them; the unvarying pulse beat of the tractors and harvesters working on fields that darkened afterwards, as if scorched by the August heat; air as dense as syrup and clouds of wheat chaff and powdery soil so massive that behind them the sun, though still high in the sky, had shrunk to a thin disc, pale and emery-brown. In this unreal, dusky half-light, I see my father standing in a field of wheat that has not yet been cut. His torso is bare and he holds a bow in one hand. The bow is made of willow that he has cut and bent into shape himself. I see Helga, sitting on a tree stump at the edge of the field. Her eyes are following his movements. She has draped her full skirt across her thighs so that her callipers won’t show. Lots of twigs and needles are caught in the folds of the cloth. When she speaks, her broad jaw is constantly moving from side to side, almost like a puppet’s. But she smiles at him and calls out to him in German, launching her questions out over the field. Wo in Deutschland hast du deine Familie? – Wie heisst deine Mutter? – Wie ist sie gekleidet? Seht sie schön aus? – Sagst mir etwas auf Norwegisch – Nei, denne veien må du ikke ta. He carries her home on his back. She is the bigger and stronger of the two, and is very aware of it. She pretends to protest, noisily thumping his shoulder blades and upper arms with her large, helpless fists. When the harvest workers hear Helga’s light, happily bubbling laughter, they turn to look. Perched high up on the tractor seat, Mr Carsten, too, removes his cap and wipes the sweat off his forehead when he catches sight of the two of them dancing around in the wheat, the lad so small beneath the hefty girl that she is the only one to be seen, her half-paralysed body turning left, then right, then round again like the hands on a crazy clock face. Deep inside the sun-scorched dusk, horses pull haywains piled high with dried meadow grasses towards the barns. Swallows are twittering as the evening cools. A rough scraping noise as the lid of a well slips and hits the ground; water rushes briskly from a hosepipe against a bare rock face. From the farm kitchen on the hill: lengthening echoes of rattling pots and pans. Cows moo, geese chatter. And then, suddenly, it is dark. August darkness enfolds everything like a thick padded cloth. But inside its black folds: a glittering chain of flaring torches. The torches are placed some fifty metres apart on both sides of the Mains Farm Road, across King’s Road and all the way down to the jetty at Horse Strait. I never let a single German cross by the bridge, Kaufmann assured everyone on the island. Instead, they came by boat. The old longboats that the nuns once used to get to and from West Island have been repaired and painted. The boats, too, are lit by torches placed fore and aft. Long before the boats touch land, the torches, glowing points in the dark, loom into view and their reflections in the still water make it look as if covered in molten crude oil. Johannes is waiting with the old horse-drawn carriage down by the beach. There is no moonlight; perhaps the moon has not yet risen. Only the creaking of the rowlocks and the splashing sounds as the blades of the oars cut the surface are heard through the black night, against a background of the guests’ excited voices and the clanking of bottles and glasses passed from hand to hand. Then the journey up to the Mains Farm begins. The hilltop farmhouse is illuminated and shadows of people can be seen moving past the windows. Some guests have been shown around the island earlier today and were also taken to West Island to visit the phalanstery, where hundreds of healthy blond children smiled at the foreign dignitaries. Now I see Helga stand in her room upstairs and pull on her evening outfit: first a white vest over her already tanned shoulders and then a cream silk dress that she buttons with rough, hurried movements. In the room next to hers, the boy is putting on his best trousers and tightening his braces. They have already been ordered to come downstairs. The boy arrives on his short, stumbling legs and is escorted into the hall and then into the drawing room and along to the open fireplace. Over it hangs the painting of the St John’s Eve bonfire. Kaufmann puts his arm protectively around the boy’s shoulders and introduces him to the guests at the table of honour. Quisling dominates. By now, his heavy face has dissolved into a big grin; he has obviously already treated himself to several glasses of something stimulating. I would very much like to introduce my nephew Franz, zum Besuch aus Deutschland. I try to imagine Mr Kaufmann’s voice and his long, slender fingers that make strange sweeping gestures in the air while he speaks. Even in German, he expresses himself in soft, polished and slightly solemn turns of phrase, just as when he spoke to me that evening I called. As the guest of honour, Mr Quisling must have stood up at once and reached out his hand across the laid table to greet the newcomer. The boy would probably not have taken the offered hand and instead looked down at the floor, but Kaufmann will already have placed his fingers under the boy’s chin and resolutely lifted his face up while announcing: now, this boy will sing for us! And so the boy sang Schumann’s Wanderlied ‘Wohlauf! noch getrunken den funkelnden Wein’ and, after the song was finished, Quisling rose to lead a standing ovation, so overwhelming that it felt as if the ceiling would lift, and the boy stood there, his cheeks red with shame, while the host (who had also remained standing) smiled, with moisture gathering in the corner of one eye, his pale cheeks flushed. Then one of the servants shepherded the boy along the corridor as if he could not get away quickly enough from the presence of the guests. But Mr Carsten: he would have seen everything, that goes without saying. Watched, as Kaufmann played his duplicitous game: the way he made everyone see what wasn’t there. Was that how it happened? Lying on the cot in the dark cellar, I become certain that this was exactly what happened.

  *

  Mr Carsten is back. Minutes ago, he seemed wiped off the face of the Earth but suddenly he has materialised in the middle of the yard, looking towards the road, with the dog at his side and his feet planted wide apart, as self-importantly as ever. He must be feeling safe now. For one more year, the procession has marched past without incident and the farm is just a farm again, as shut off from its surroundings as ever, while once more the usual grumbling stinginess rules on the island. It is late afternoon now: cars are crawling, side by side, in the queue on the only slip road to the bridge; school children are walking home, a steady stream of them with rucksacks on their backs are coming down King’s Road; a shop assistant in his Kiwi supermarket uniform is out on the new empty parking lot shoving one abandoned shopping trolley into another until he has got a stack of at least fifty of them, and then, with back-breaking effort, he is pushing it along, swaying and bending his upper body, until the whole lot are chained up at the shop entrance. The parking area at the back of the supermarket, connected to King’s Road by a wide tarmacked ramp, the place where Minna and Morten used to hang out, is covered by rubbish left behi
nd after the big procession: burst balloons, torn banners and placards, empty plastic cups and pizza boxes. I remember how, in the weeks and months after Minna had been exiled from the island, I used to drift around the shop, so anaesthetised by my anguish that only the details I saw in close-up have stuck in my mind: the cracks in the cement of the ramp and the painfully rough-looking black lumps of tarmac around the base of the iron fence, almost eaten up with rust, that guarded the edge of the rock face rising straight out of the fjord. Then, I believed her exile would last forever. But just eight months later, as if by some miracle, Minna was back home. The same Minna – and, simultaneously, another person. I watched her stand in front of the mirror in the hall, trying on clothes that were not hers: tight skirts with plastic belts in baby pink or pale blue and clingy sweaters over bras that made her breasts look cone-shaped. And when I asked, where did you get all these clothes from? all she said was, the people I stayed with gave them to me. I knew she was lying but only asked, are you going out to meet the lads? and, the lads? was all she said and then she laughed, a long, snorting laugh through her nose as if she couldn’t think what I was on about, so I asked, where are you off to, then? and she said, get lost, you little toad, it’s none of your business. I followed her, as I had followed her ever since I could use my legs for walking, always unconvinced that her assurances were the truth and that she could manage for a second without me. I saw her cross the school yard, it was a shortcut for the benefit of anyone who was watching her, and then take the long way round past the supermarket and onto King’s Road, then up the Mains Farm Road towards the farm, where Mr Carsten stood waiting for her, feet apart, stiff-necked, with the dog at his side. In fact, his posture then will have been precisely the same as now; he has probably stood like that all his life, patiently waiting for something which would, at last, make up for the injustice inflicted on him. Which is what is about to happen now. I use the binoculars to see what he is observing on the road. It is late in the afternoon and the last shreds of the morning cloudbanks have vanished behind the tree tops. The fields and the overgrown areas round the houses, the farm road and the rain-swollen ditches, everything is merging in a haze of moisture and sun-dappled greenery. I note that the cars left along the field verge have driven away and that only two vans are still there, parked on either side of the drive to the Yellow Villa as if guarding it. They look a little like the vans that turned up when the water board men came along to inspect the pipework. Half a dozen older boys are hanging out down there, wandering aimlessly along the road, as if they had been part of the procession but dropped out and are left without any idea of what to do next. Every one of them has smeared his face with something I cannot make out, possibly paint but it might just as well be soot or mud, and they all carry heavy rucksacks or shoulder bags. Then the boys turn round in unison, leap at the fence, climb it with practised speed and, crouching under the weight on their backs, run towards the Yellow Villa. Some of them try to take cover behind the trees, but this is nothing but a sham diversion: I can already see the backs of two of the boys on the terrace and, less than a minute later, the upstairs windows open and some of the gang are leaning on the sills, waving energetically at those who are still in the garden. It is hard to tell which emotion causes me most pain: humiliation or fury. Or the realisation that they must have kept me under constant surveillance. For how else could they have known when to get inside the house? Why show themselves and their intentions off so shamelessly? As if breaking into somebody’s home was the most natural thing in the world. Despite it all, I cannot help being fascinated. There is something hypnotic about watching complete strangers as they invade your own space, and especially when they display the calm, untroubled familiarity of people who are reclaiming what is properly theirs. But this is not only about the right to ownership. Soon, furniture is hauled outside and piled up on the terrace: first, the oxblood-coloured armchair, the one with studs, and two elegant chintz-covered chairs that used to stand at what Johannes called the ‘smoking table’ (a round table on a solid pedestal, with a sheet of glass on top protecting a lacy, crocheted tablecloth). Next, the sitting-room sofa, which is toppled over the terrace balustrade and hits the garage drive with an ear-shattering bang. Half an hour later, the kitchen and bedroom furnishings have also been carried out and thrown over the balustrade, including Johannes’s bed and bedside table, the clothes left in his wardrobe and the ancient TV set. Now they start on the contents of the garage. Two of the boys empty out the boxes and crates full of spare parts that Johannes had kept back from cars and buses he had worked on over the years and had not had the heart to get rid of afterwards. Cutlery and broken glasses, everything ends up in a shambolic pile on the drive. To make the carnage worse, one of the young men comes along with an axe and sets about thrashing everything that comes his way. Chair legs break, table tops are chopped to pieces and odd bits of wood are turned into kindling. The destruction is barely complete when almost the entire gang, once more as if on command, head for the road. Only three boys stay behind. While two of them stand guard, the third one writes something with spray paint on the cement wall by the garage door. FUCKING NAZI, it says in large letters. He adds a carelessly drawn swastika. I direct the binoculars at Mr Carsten, who, like me, has been watching the vandals at work but presumably without batting an eyelid. The dog is the first to make a move. It slowly, almost hesitatingly, leaves Mr Carsten’s side and sets off across the yard with its nose close to the ground. Next, Mr Carsten himself turns and starts walking with the exaggerated swinging or swaying movements forced on him by his stiff leg. It is only when he is halfway to the farm manager’s house that he stops and looks towards the drawing-room windows where I am hiding. The moment is brief but quite long enough to let me know that we have been watching the same thing and that he has been aware that I am up here.