The Tempest

by Steve Sem-Sandberg

  So, Minna returned to us. All the same, it felt like a total stranger had moved into our home. What are you going up there for? I had asked her. She had been lying on her bed with her legs drawn up and the ashtray balanced on her stomach, staring at nothing, lazily or indifferently, while she dragged on her thin roll-up cigarette. After all, he’s dead now, I said, but she only carried on nonchalantly puffing out smoke. I can go there, can’t I? she said after a while. I mean, now that he’s no longer around. What’s wrong with you! I yelled at her. And then, to Johannes: What’s wrong with her? As ever, there was no point in asking him. I remember that last time, when she emerged from her room wearing a dress in cream silk that was far too large for her and so low-cut that half her chest was on show, and with a skirt so full she had to grab a bunch of the material to stop the hem from dragging on the ground. She had put on earrings set with blue sapphires and outsized high-heeled shoes that forced her to walk with her legs wide apart to keep her balance. It was touch and go whether she would fall over when she stood in front of the mirror to put on makeup. But Johannes said nothing, not even then. He sat in the kitchen and kept his mouth shut, silent as he had been all his life when something looked like trouble for him or others. From the window in my room, I saw Minna walk up the Mains Farm Road: a small, bandy-legged figure, tarted up in the clothes of a stranger. Of course, Mr Carsten was standing in the yard, looking out for her, although he probably did not stay there for the time it took her to reach the top of the road. For him, it must have been enough to know that, once again, he had persuaded her to come to him. He started walking slowly towards the paddock. The dog, on its long leash, ran barking towards its master and then towards the girl, as if it wanted its jerky, anxious movements to show the kind of bond that must already have formed between them, and while Mr Carsten was dragging his heavy dead leg behind him, he might well have stopped to have a few words with the men at work in the yard (that year, to make room for a new water tank, the large oak that had grown there since time immemorial had been felled and the yard turned into a huge pit, with a digger standing next to a ridge of excavated soil so tall it almost obscured the view of the main house behind it), a diversion that took just long enough for him to assure himself with a glance over his shoulder that she had not given up but had followed him across the yard. And then there they stood, perhaps twenty metres apart, he with his legs splayed in an attempt to hide his limp and a smile on his face that seemed to grow more awkward the broader it became, while she pretended to be cool, at ease and not breathless in the slightest, even though she had covered the last bit almost at a run, in the borrowed finery too, which looked even more outlandish here, among all the muck and horse shit; and: what was it you wanted to show me? she asked, and perhaps he felt he need do no more than glance at the main house, perhaps at the drawing-room windows where, surely, Mrs Kaufmann stood, her hand pulling back a corner of the curtain, or perhaps at the first floor where Miss Helga was taking in the view. It goes without saying that both women must have wondered what the manager wanted with that pathetic wisp of a girl. Or Mr Carsten’s plan might just have been to show Minna off in front of the two old harpies, as he called them, and use her presence on the farm to demonstrate to them and everybody else that now, after Kaufmann’s death, he had become to all the world the man he felt he had always been, in charge of the management and administration of all he surveyed: the real master of the island. For me, that night of intolerable waiting was like an open wound. I stayed awake, sitting at my window as the hours passed, but Minna never came home. Only pale sea mist came. As the darkness of the night began to thin out, the whitey rolled in and wrapped itself round the island like a duvet. I went outside then and watched as the parched field verges disappeared in the mist and saw the long shadows of the telephone poles lean in over the crossroads. It felt like an open invitation to sneak up the hill but, even though no one would have seen me in the fog, I did not dare to take even a single step. I waited outside the Yellow Villa until the dawn light cut through the misty air. Throughout the night and early morning, there had been no sound from the farm apart from the loud cawing of the crows as they erupted from the trees. By then, it was over and done with. At about six in the morning, the sharp blue light of a police patrol car slashed through the thinning whitey. Johannes and I stood together under the trees in our garden and observed the car turn right at the crossroads and drive up to the farm buildings at a slow, almost relaxed pace. It was just over an hour before it came back down the road, this time with the blue light turned off. Not long afterwards, the talk on the island was all about how Mrs Kaufmann had had it up to here with Mr Carsten and reported him to the police. Exactly why Mr Carsten had been arrested was unclear, though rumour had it that he was guilty of embezzlement. His tasks were taken over by another farm manager called van Martens, a Dutchman who, unlike his predecessor, had so little to say for himself that few islanders could remember ever having seen him by the time he left. Six months later, the local papers claimed that Mr Carsten’s crime had been more serious than thought at first. The police suspected him of having caused the sudden death of the retired sulky trotting driver Manfred Weiler. Just before his death, Weiler and Mr Carsten had jointly owned a horse called Boxer that was trained for trotting, or harness racing. It had died recently and Weiler had been saying in public that Mr Carsten had poisoned the horse, intending to pocket his part of the insurance payout. This allegation was proved, Weiler argued, by the fact that Mr Carsten had not wanted the prize-winning animal to be kept in Weiler’s stable and instead insisted on stabling the horse on the Inner Islands, on a farm belonging to Mr Carsten’s previous employer. According to Weiler, the poisoning had been done in stealth, over quite a long time. One evening, the two of them met in Weiler’s flat in the city. The idea was to settle their dispute, but the confrontation led to a violent quarrel that ended with Mr Carsten pushing Weiler down the stairs. As a matter of fact, none of the neighbours had actually seen Mr Carsten push Weiler but they had heard them argue. One witness also claimed that Weiler had been screaming the way you would if ‘you felt death was near’, just as the tabloids reported. When the police arrived, they found Weiler at the foot of the stairs with the back of his head smashed in, and Mr Carsten upstairs. He appeared confused and did not resist arrest, which may explain his relatively mild sentence. As for Boxer, it seems that early in the morning, as the fog was dispersing, Sigrid Kaufmann had seen the horse lying dead at the far end of the paddock. After trying in vain to rouse Mr Carsten (he did not answer on the farm manager’s telephone), she had contacted the police because she feared that some intruder might have got into the estate illegally to kill the animal and possibly Mr Carsten too. Where Mr Carsten actually was at that point in time was not stated; he might not even have been on the island. However, one thing is certain: Minna’s disappearance during the night before the discovery of the dead horse was never connected with the accusations of manslaughter and embezzlement which were later made against Mr Carsten, with the result, so Simonsen said, that the old farm manager spent several years in prison. I did not make any such connection either. At least, not until one evening (it must have been in the autumn after my return from the USA) when the doorbell rang in the apartment on Trondheimsveien, in Oslo, where I rented a room. My landlady knocked energetically on my door and shouted visitor! When I came into the hall, Mr Carsten was waiting for me. He had changed a great deal and was no longer the powerfully built farm manager I had known but an almost emaciated man, with what hair he had left cut very close to his skull. Also, he was unusually soberly dressed in a tailored if slightly less than clean suit in a blue-and-white striped material, and held with both hands an old-fashioned fedora hat whose top and brim were dripping wet from the rain. Seeing him after all these years, and in this state, surprised me so much that I could not think what to say. My confusion must have made him feel he had better introduce himself: Carsten Gerhardsen, he said, and held out his hand. Then he told me that
he was now employed in his former post as manager on the Mains Farm on the island. I did not ask how come he had been given his old job back after so many years in jail, or why he had left in the first place. I knew or thought I knew something about the circumstances from reading the reports in the papers. With a politeness that matched mine, as I refrained from referring to his alleged crimes, he asked me if I knew where my sister was and, if so, how he could possibly get in touch with her. Would you have an address, or perhaps a telephone number? he said. Today, I cannot recall what I said to make it clear that there was no way I could be persuaded to give out that information. All I know is that our encounter dragged on and must have been painful for him as well. Finally, he asked me to be kind enough to pass on a gift from him to Minna, and pulled a long, thin envelope from the inside pocket of his jacket. He handed it over to me, smiled again, his strange half-smile that used to frighten me but now looked simply anxious or even awkward, put his hat on and left, going back into the rain.

  After the morning when the police were called in to investigate a possible break-in on the farm and to search for Mr Carsten, many years passed before I met Minna again. I ought to be more precise: I knew where she lived and a little about what she was doing but that was more or less all. She had consistently turned down all my attempts to contact her. At the time, I had a job in the Deichmann Library, where I was tasked with registering and classifying newly acquired books and deregistering the ones sent away to be scrapped. I wrote to Minna in my spare time: long, detailed letters about how Johannes was and about neighbours and mates from school and what had been happening out there on the islands. It was a little absurd, given that she had made her lack of interest in our past so very clear, but I felt that if she shared, at least in writing, everything that happened to me, it was a way to hold on to her. I wrote to her about my travels in the USA for the same reason and sent her at least one letter from each stage of my journey. I wrote to her from the emergency clinic the day when Johannes tripped on the stairs, fell and broke the neck of his femur. It was Mrs Simonsen who found him that time, too. He had been lying on the floor at the bottom of the stairs, too weak to reach the telephone extension I had had installed for him not long before. That summer, I stood in for Johannes, who still moved around on crutches, doing local voluntary jobs. I wrote to Minna to let her know what we were up to. The hull of an old ship had been found in the muddy bottom layer in Horse Strait. It took several days to haul it up on land. An antiquarian and a marine archaeologist joined the enterprise to make sure that the hull did not dry out, which would have ruined it, but on closer inspection the wreck turned out to be uninteresting: an old barge from the days when coal was shipped regularly to the Inner Islands. That year, or perhaps it was the next one, I told Minna that Carl-Anton Brekke, grocer Brekke’s grandson, had been on TV for a season’s run of Jeopardy, the programme presented by Steinar Brage. And that during the winter, Morten Skov’s youngest boy had dug a cave in the wall of snow along the road down by South Meadow, but the council’s new snowploughs were too wide for the narrow roads on the island; it was only afterwards that people spotted the bloodstained snow and the remains of the lantern the boy had placed outside the cave as a ‘warning’. I have no idea what Minna did during all this time. After her death, I signed for her personal belongings and found among them several of my American letters, unopened. There is of course no way of telling if she had read the letters I did not find or simply thrown them away. When I had tried to get in touch with Minna again, she had a more or less steady male Chilean partner, Javier Montéz or possibly Martinéz, though everybody seems to have called him Chico or Chicuelo. Chicuelo means ‘small boy’, but at 190-odd centimetres Javier was unusually tall for a Latin American. His skin was mottled with scars, possibly smallpox pits, which he tried to hide beneath a big, black beard. When I realised that Minna would not return my phone calls or answer my letters, I thought at first it was because of Chicuelo. I told myself that he might be jealous, or maybe that Minna’s stories had made her boyfriend distrust or even despise me. Later on, I thought of another explanation: if Minna had agreed to talk to me, even for just a few minutes, she would have had to accept that the evil of the past was still part of her, much as she wanted to leave it behind, and that it not only still existed but could be named and touched and, above all, shared. And the only one to share such things with – the only one from whom she could have the slightest hope of understanding – was me. This, I think, was the first time I grasped that meeting with me would have caused her an almost physical pain. But, in the end, she did all the same. One day, when I came home from work, there was a message for me on the answering machine. Minna asked me to meet her by the clock on Jernbanetorget at four in the afternoon of the next day. I caught sight of her from quite far away, smoking as she paced up and down near the tram stop. She was wearing a large, wide skirt in a colourful red-and-ochre pattern, a thick grey wool coat and a long scarf, wound so many turns around her neck and face that only the narrow slits of her eyes showed below her fringe. But she looked as I remembered her, only older, her body a little heavier now. How’s Chicuelo? I asked, mostly to say anything at all. She looked me over with critically appraising eyes, as if she doubted every word I said and was fully prepared to defend herself in case I should, against all expectation, try to touch her or come close to her in any other way. She had a part-time job at Duplotrykk over on Bryn, where The Class Struggle was printed. I knew that on weekends she sold copies of the paper from various pitches: I had seen her at Youngstorget, outside the parliament building and down by the river. But I could not tell her that in case she thought that I was still following her about. In fact, as I realised in that moment, there was nothing I could ask her without giving away that I knew more about her than she had agreed to tell me. Anyway, there would have been no point in asking her anything much. As soon as I tried to open my mouth, her eyes impatiently scanned the street for her tram, and when it finally arrived, she just stepped on board without so much as a word to me. I had hesitated for too long. When I finally decided to get on board, dozens of passengers had already had time to push past me and we ended up far apart, with me standing in the aisle and Minna seated several rows further back. I have a letter for you, I shouted above the heads of the passengers who separated us. From Mr Carsten, I added. He gave it to me. She sat there, apparently unmoved, staring out through the window. I manoeuvred closer to her and leaned over her shoulder. You hang on to it, was all she said. He turned up at my place, I said, the doorbell rang and, imagine, Mr Carsten stood outside, he wore a suit, and a tie and a hat as well. I don’t want to listen to this, she said, and stood up, pushed through to the exit and left. This was how it began, the last time we spent together. We met in trams. Sometimes she did not come. Sometimes she boarded the tram at an earlier stop. If I caught a glimpse of her through a window, I had to leap on board at the last minute. Sometimes she would be accompanied by Chicuelo, and then I did not even approach her. On several occasions, I noticed that she had been drinking. Once she was so intoxicated that she could hardly stay upright. You vile creep, she shouted as soon as she saw me. And when I tried to calm her, she hit me in the face with her fists and howled loudly enough for the whole carriage to hear: fucking stop following me about! One of the other passengers, probably someone who often used the same tram as her and had drawn his own (mistaken) conclusions, threatened to kill me if I didn’t immediately stop pestering the lady and get off the tram, and, when I refused, he and two other righteous citizens shoved me towards the exit and threw me out. Enough to make anyone give up. But, then, I had watched over my sister for many years, through days and nights, and would never give up. Now, least of all.