by Peter Geye
She hummed along even without knowing what song he was playing. Was it from childhood? One of the dirges her aunt used to play on her Steinway? Whatever the origin, it was beautiful. And it suited her mood. Wasn’t it strange how music could rest in you for so long without being heard, but still be called up from old stores of memory? Pondering this, she sat at the end of one of the pews and listened with her eyes closed. This song played on the church organ was loosening some hardness in her. It wasn’t unlike the warmth, which was now becoming almost too much. She took off her coat and hung it over her forearm and looked back up at the man on the balcony. He was wide-shouldered and lean and he wore a red sweater. His hair was shoulder length and straight and heavy as a bear’s and it moved as he played. She could see the profile of his face when he occasionally turned to the deeper notes, and his calmness brought the same to her as well. She watched as he finished the song and started the same one again. Low and slow and holy and right. The song grew clearer in her memory and once he finished the second rendition she was positive it was a song from her life.
After he finished a third time she glanced back at the altar and noticed a woman moving boxes around. She was stooped and wore a gray wool sweater and had her hair up in a bun. In the absence of organ music, she could hear the old woman humming the song that had just been played three times. The sweetness of her voice reminded Greta of singing her own children to sleep. But this woman might have been sixty or eighty. Her shoes were the type nurses used to wear—thick rubbery soles, the color of Silly Putty—and the leggings beneath her heavy skirt were less stockings than sweaters for her legs. From the box she took a candlestick and candles, arranged them along the edge of the altar, and hung garland dotted with holly berries on what Greta now realized was an Advent calendar, and that Christmas would soon be here. Christmas? she wondered. Her favorite time of year, and yet it hadn’t so much as crossed her mind. She hadn’t thought of a single gift for the kids or Frans when usually she’d not only bought them all by now, but also have them wrapped and hidden in the garage. She’d have planned the Christmas feast and written and mailed her cards. She’d have strung lights in the evergreen shrubs around the house and hung her own Advent calendar in the kitchen and cued up the Christmas CDs. She would’ve dug out the old krumkake iron from the bowels of her cupboards and fetched the lefse grill from its storage place in the basement.
The organ began again, and Greta saw the old woman smiling toward the loft. Greta turned around herself. The man with the blond hair was playing faster now, yet still the same song. Behind her Greta could hear the woman singing quietly along, the choppy Norwegian words made beautiful by the music and her own lilting voice. When Greta spun around to study her, she was alarmed to see in the soft lines of her face an older, more wizened version of Greta Nansen, and she couldn’t turn her gaze from her own future. Once upon a time she might’ve winced at such a vision, but instead she took comfort in imagining that in twenty or thirty years she might still be moved to sing. At this she closed her eyes and bowed her head and if she didn’t pray, she imagined something new.
When the song finished, she opened her eyes and put her coat back on and, with the image of the old woman gazing upward so kindly, started back down the aisle. It was a small church—only twenty-odd rows of pews—and in five or six strides she was halfway gone before she ventured a last look at the balcony. He stood there, his big hands clenching the rail, his shoulders thrust forward to follow his stare, which as far as she could tell was set on the atmosphere as much as anything in particular. As if he could see the music reverberating in the air and was taking stock of his performance. In his face she could see all the qualities of the music: joy and sadness and longing. But there was something else, too, that had nothing to do with the music. He was alone, and lonely. She was sure of it.
He was handsome, absolutely. Even more than that. Beautiful. His eyes were dark and deeply set. His face round. His chin wide. The sweater he wore, which she’d noticed earlier, was heavy like his hair, which from where she stood appeared almost white. She could see his teeth were slightly crooked. And that his hands, gripping the balcony railing, were large and strong and weathered. Oh my, those hands, they put a knot in her stomach. When had she last taken stock of a man like this? She knew she shouldn’t fix on those hands that had just played the song as though its purpose was to restore it in her. When finally she did look away it was to raise her gaze to meet his, now smiling down on her. She blushed, feeling it blaze up her neck and into her cheeks. Was she embarrassed, maybe just shy, or was she simply as scattered and indefinite as the song still lingering in the air?
“Hallo,” he said, his voice coming down from the choir loft like a snowflake.
Now Greta did smile, and she raised her hand to wave, and continued out.
[1897]
Tapt på isen—lost on the ice. What trail of missteps led me to that latitude where I was indeed to become lost, if not found again?
The story of my going is much long and complicated. If truth be told, it began with the courage of another man—the great Fridtjof Nansen. I watched the Fram lay anchor on our waters in eighteen and ninety-three, on the eve of his great voyage. I heard him rile the crowd gathered in awe. I listened to the town band’s tubas and trombones regale him. I watched children marvel at his crew of worthy men and that ship famous before she’d left Norwegian waters. I’d seen divers go under her hull to scrape clear the mussels, and saw, finally, her sails raised as she cruised up the sound and out to sea. And I thought it the most beautiful thing. Beautiful unto itself, as any ship at sail is, but also beautiful because of Nansen’s courage. That a man could be so undaunted and fearless!
I knew as the world did that Nansen was to sail the Fram north and east until he found the currents that would take him and his crew right over the pole, with their vessel set in ice. By his reckoning, and an abundance of confidence, he believed his fame would arrive when the ice encasing the Fram set them free again in the North Atlantic. From there it would be a simple cruise home. Even now I shiver to think of his audacity. But back then, before my own travails and despair beset me much like my hero’s ice? Well, it gave me hope. A man should want a bigger life, I thought. He should want to make discoveries. To find a kind of happiness he could not find in his everyday lot.
So I vowed that even if I could not drift away, as Nansen had, if I could not myself feel the same pull of the sea beneath the keel of my own boat, I would at least help my daughter to do so. I would set her free of this cold desolation, this rocky shore of hardened, desperate people living in poverty and gloom. I would usher her out the door of our lichen-chinked hut built into the cold earth out on Muolkot, would row her to the town quay, and put her aboard an outbound vessel, and call this a grand opportunity.
Inger saw it wise, even if it crippled her own happiness. What mother’s daughter is not her own better self? My fair wife knew as much, and her countenance of our setting Thea on a better course was fresh proof of how much love could matter. Love all around, love sustaining us while we lived meagerly but with great anticipation. We fed our daughter twice what we ate ourselves. We sold what we could and worked endlessly. With our sheep and sorry garden and my faering and nets we labored so we might put our daughter on a boat bound for America.
And in the summer of eighteen and ninety-five—almost exactly two years after Nansen raised anchor and left our sight—I rowed her from Muolkot to Hammerfest harbor, where Thea boarded the schooner Nordsjøen. She was headed for Minnesota, to live with Auntie Hege and Uncle Rune. Almost exactly two years after Nansen raised anchor and left our sight, Thea did too. She departed with all she could carry, including a bag of pears I bought from Bengt with my last krone. She’d never eaten one before, and the first letter I wrote—the first of many, none of them, alas, answered—asked what she thought of its sweetness.
Now, two years later still, I would gladly trade all my r
emaining days for the answer to that question. As life goes, I might trade them all for another bag of pears.
* * *
—
Inger and I stood there above my grave, each grieving in our own fashion. Bengt surely had stabled the horse by the time I finally mustered any words. “No word from Thea, then?”
“None, Odd Einar.”
“And none from your sister or Rune?”
“That there were.”
I caught a glint in her eye, so I pressed. “I’m sorry, Inger. I thought, with all this time I’ve been gone…”
She wiped her eyes with her sleeve and then stared onto the village rooftops.
“All this damn time, and never a single word even from your sister. Is that too much to ask?”
She didn’t answer, this argument about Hege being one of our oldest and most persistent, so I studied the cemetery path then said, after a while, “When I saw you and the pastor here, I feared it was Thea brought home. That’s all I mean to say.”
Now she looked at me as a killer would. “Thea and Hege are no doubt well. Even Rune. But you were dead, Odd Einar. Don’t you understand? Dead for ten days. I waited this long.” She pointed at the ground, and her look turned from anger to sadness. “Thea is saying prayers for me right this minute. She’s singing God’s praise in a church in Minnesota. She’ll be boiling a fine kettle of fish for her husband this very night, and putting her young child to bed.” Now she waved me away with the back of her hand. “Your dark thoughts, they’re not for me.”
“I only asked, Inger.”
She covered her eyes and shook her head and for a long time I stood there watching my wife in much the same manner I’d stood on the Krossfjorden hoping for a ship to pass. My own thoughts had been this desperate, so wild that whenever I felt them coming to focus they blurred again. Like when staring too long on snow blowing across the fjord. Finally I could look at her no more, and turned again to my grave marker.
“What’s buried there then, Inger?” The earth was freshly turned.
“Bengt thought to offer your hardingfele. We put it in the ground.” These words came as cold as a Spitzbergen night, and her gaze as bitter. No trace of tears. Nor any forthcoming, no doubt of that. “Your hardingfele and my memory of you.”
I collapsed onto my rear end right there beside my grave, tugging at my beard as had now become habit. I fought the urge to shout or howl, and instead just sat there in my misery. Later, I rounded a ball of cold earth in my hands and said, “It’s just as well. There’s nary a song left in this godforsaken world.”
Inger stood unmoving while I mourned myself. Through all of our silence beneath the hillside there presided a stubborn heaviness even greater than the weight of my own body as I crossed Spitzbergen. Or than the despair of my lost daughter.
I knew all this, yet would not allow it to grieve me as those earlier burdens had. Not until Inger said, “You tell me what happened, I will listen. I’ll give you that.” She brushed her hands together as though wiping away her own worry. “But not here. I want to go home. We have a new one. Let’s walk there in silence.”
So we walked through the village, past the quayside and the stream and up the shore of Gávpotjávri and into the valley. I was alone again with my memories, despite having Inger at my side.
* * *
—
Thea sailed in August of eighteen and ninety-five. One year later, I stood on the wharf myself. The summer evening rising as if from the water, which was still as ice and dark as a winter dawn. A boat called Otaria lay at anchor not more than a furlong offshore. It had been the most festive week in Hammerfest since Nansen and his crew sailed north on the Fram in ’ninety-three. It was lively again now because he had returned, a Draugen himself. He was aboard that well-appointed schooner with his beloved wife, Eva. The town had been draped with Norwegian flags and every living one of us lined the harbor. We waited like schoolchildren for the man to show his face, his story already known by all.
With his comrade Frederik Johansen, Nansen had been north of the eighty-sixth parallel. They had put their boot prints farther north than any man before, and news of their accomplishment granted their return a tidal holiness. And though I’d lately begun doubting my faith in God, Nansen’s return helped me believe in something. I can’t exaggerate how that relief washed over me, kindling a new hope that my Thea might be fine out there in the wilds of Minnesota.
On that particular night I watched the Otaria for a long time. She sat silent on the harbor. The cabin windows alight, softly, and reflected on the water softer yet, like a dozen portholes of promise. I fell to still more thoughts of Thea. Imagining her—healthy and happy and missing me—had, for so long, been the only thing that proved I was still alive. I pictured her with her aunt and uncle, living quietly in a log home on the shore of that river I’d heard so much about. It was said to run to a lake that was even colder than our own harbor. I saw her sitting quietly by the hearty fire. I heard the coo of a child. And when I imagined her looking at the face from which that coo came, I believed she might love me all the more. If these were foolish dreams, if they were untethered or imprudent, Nansen’s safe return made them less so. He had suffered his years of Arctic winds and utter dark and ice. He had done it honorably, and with such magnificent purpose. And now he was sitting in the light behind one of those shining windows, right before my eyes.
As if my thinking of him had the power of a summons, his dark form emerged on deck. He seemed to be looking out to sea, up the sound toward Sørø and beyond. I saw the flare of a match and thought he must be lighting his pipe. In his honor, I lit my own.
“Our national hero,” came a voice. A man stood next to me as though he’d materialized from the weathered boards of the quay itself. I flinched but was quick to compose myself. I didn’t recognize him, but when his own pipe was packed I offered a match and together we smoked.
“I wonder how he could spend a single minute on deck with a wife so beautiful below,” I said, as if I’d been thinking of anything except my daughter.
“That man, he’s got his nose to the north no matter where he is.” He puffed his pipe thoughtfully. “Three years, ja? Three years apart, those two. Husband and wife.”
I stole a sidelong glance in time to see my companion flatten his mustache.
“You’ve a wife?” he asked.
“A fine and loving one.”
“Then you can understand how long those three years must have been. Like ten for Eva, no doubt. I too would be shy in the company of my wife after such a long absence.”
This man seemed notably sturdy. His beard was long and strangely shaped, but his hair beneath his hat shorn above the ears. He was well dressed and appeared at peace with himself. Like nothing could rankle him. Like he was heavy of keel indeed.
We stood there smoking silently until I said, “Me, I’d point my own nose west.”
“West?”
“Two years ago, on this very day, we sent our daughter to America.”
“That takes another kind of daring.”
I studied him once more. “You’re not from here.”
“Born in Helgeland, but just arrived last night from Tromsø.”
“Come to see Herr Nansen?”
“The one and only.”
“It’s because of him I sent my daughter off.”
Now this man turned to me and raised an eyebrow.
“I watched the Fram leave here in ’ninety-three. I was inspired by his courage.”
“His courage is epic.”
I squared up and looked at him directly while he turned his eyes back onto the harbor and the Otaria out at anchor. After we finished our pipes we pocketed them together.
“How is your daughter?” he asked.
“We’ve had no word from her.”
“That’s a bitter
thing, friend.”
“The bitterest.”
“How can it be?”
“Her boat from Christiania landed in New York. We know that much. But as for her trip to Minnesota, where her aunt and uncle have settled, we’ve no news. Nor any since she might have arrived with them.”
Now he turned again to me. I could see he felt sorry. And that he measured his words before saying, “Three years the world waited for Fridtjof Nansen. Three years and now here he is. There’s a lesson there.”
“I’ve been thinking the same.”
Now a tender came knocking against the quay, a lantern lit against the gloaming. The man on the dock with me raised his chin toward Nansen, who had just ducked back belowdecks. “Another man’s courage is a fine start. And if Nansen’s buoyed you once, it can do so again.” He jumped down into the tender and grabbed hold of the gunwale to steady himself. “But I will pray for you to find your own courage. I truly will. Tell me your name?”
I was by turns taken with his garrulousness—this steady man minding me, his suit a fine worsted wool, his kindness something I was actually measuring as he spoke—and curious about his audacity. To pray for my courage? What a thing! Before thinking better of it I said, “My name’s Odd Einar Eide. Born in this very town. I make my living from my faering.”
“It’s a pleasure to know you, Odd Einar.”
“Where are you going?” I asked, suddenly desperate to hold his attention.
“Nansen is expecting me.”
“Expecting you?”