by Peter Geye
Now he spoke in almost a whisper. “All I’ve wanted is for us to be a family. For us to talk like we used to.”
“What have you wanted to talk about, Frans?” She could feel the snow falling harder outside even though the afternoon was brightening.
“My God, you’re cruel.” He buttoned his coat. “I’ve been thinking,” he said, and she could tell his temper had changed. “About fixing up the fish house. You’ve got a real knack for improving things. You always have. I know why you’ve been working on that place.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“Now you be quiet.” He pulled his hands into his calfskin gloves. “No matter what you do to that place, it will remain what it’s always been.”
“And what’s that, Frans?”
“A place for wayward boats and heartache.”
“That’s very poetic,” she said.
“You have no idea how hard I’ve tried, Greta.”
If she stared at him long enough, would she go blind? Frans with his fine hair and square jaw. His big right hand raised in a fist and pressed to his lips.
“I’m sure it’s been hard,” she finally said. “I’m sure that woman in Størdal makes it very hard.”
His breath escaped him instantly and, as if in answer to his suffocation, the door to the tavern swung open and Lasse and Liv came back in ahead of their grandfather, all three of them carrying paper bags under their arms. They stomped the snow from their boots and Lasse brushed snow from his grandfather’s coat and Liv went to stand by Frans.
“Papa, where are you going?” she said.
Frans lifted his daughter onto his lap and hugged her. “I have a flight to catch. It’s time for me to go.”
“Don’t leave, Papa! Stay here and look at this!”
“I suppose you bought them books?” Greta asked her father.
“I suppose I did.”
“You spoil them, Gus,” Frans said.
“Yes, I do. But I spoil you too.” Gus handed him a bag from under his arm. It was a rock-pickers’ guide to Lake Superior, a book he’d given Frans at least twice before, the last for his birthday just two months earlier. Frans slid the book back in the bag and said thanks.
“I’m sure there’s not much to learn in there you don’t already know, but the pictures at least are beautiful,” Gus said. “You’ll have something pretty to look at on the plane.”
“Oh, I don’t know much,” Frans said, darting a glance at Greta. To Lasse and Liv he said, “What did you guys get?” Lasse held up a book of moose photographs. Liv had a book about wildflowers. “Those are fine choices. I hope you thanked Grandpa.”
“We did,” Liv said.
“Of course they did,” Gus said. “These two goofballs are as good as that snowfall out there.”
Praise always made the kids uneasy, and rather than face their blushing, Greta looked again out the window. Axel was tied to the streetlamp. He was covered in snow and even sitting on his haunches better than three feet tall. Not even full grown yet, and as wide in the shoulders as Liv.
“Can I have kisses and hugs?” Frans said, going to each of the kids and saying goodbye.
“It’s always good to see you, son,” Gus said. “Have a safe trip, eh?”
Franz held up the bag with his guidebook and said, “Greta was just saying this snow will stick. I hope she’s wrong. It’d be fun to put this to use next month. We could do a study of some Eide Cove agates.”
“Why, that beach hasn’t been picked in years,” Gus said, as though they might really spend an afternoon hunting for rocks outside the fish house. “We’ll get after them together. You and me and the kids.”
“You bet we will, Gus. Kids, will you wait for me outside with Grandpa?”
Lasse and Liv moved out the door in unison, dropping to their knees next to the dog and brushing the snow off of his long coat.
Now Frans and Greta were alone again. The waitress and bartender had stepped into the kitchen. Even the old Canadian couple had disappeared somewhere.
“Do you actually expect me to leave in the middle of this?” he asked her, gesturing vaguely out the window.
“It stopped snowing.”
He looked out at the kids. She could see the sadness overwhelm him. His whole body went limp.
“You think you’ve got it all figured out, but you don’t.” He took a deep breath. “Neither do I. Jesus, how I can love you so much? How did we get here?”
This scorned and weak side of him was one she’d not seen often. She knew he was holding back tears, which made her want to tell him they’d talked enough already. That what needed to be said could wait until he returned. Or more likely be forgotten altogether. But he kept on, persistence being a side she saw at nearly every turn.
“How long have you hated me?”
“I don’t hate you.”
“But you don’t love me.”
No, she thought. I don’t.
He must have read her conclusion now because he let out a groan, sounding like something you might hear unexpectedly up in the muskeg on a hot summer afternoon.
“Please, Frans.”
“Please what?”
“Don’t cause a scene.” She twisted the beer glass on its coaster and took a deep breath. “I don’t hate you. I’m angry and I’m tired and cold and I want you to go.”
“You think I’m going to see some woman.”
“You’d be smarter not to mention her. I don’t like it that you think I’m a fool. I’m many things, but I’m not one of those.”
Frans checked the time on his phone, leaned halfway across the table, and spoke plainly. “You make it seem like I had a choice. All your hatefulness—you think this is the first time I’ve felt it? I live under its bombardment, Greta. You’re relentless. But you know what? It’s your unhappiness that’s the cause of all this. I’ve done nothing except try to reach you. To talk to you. All I do—all I’ve done for God knows how long—is try to save us.”
“Alena,” she whispered. “That’s her name. She’s proof of how hard you’re trying?” She couldn’t imagine why she brought this woman up again. She didn’t care about Alena from Størdal any more than she cared about whether the snow would melt or stay. But now she couldn’t stop. She leaned forward just as he had. “Last night, in the fish house, right before you finished, right when you threw your head back and moaned, I could practically see her there with us. Alena with her big tits and her long blond hair and flat stomach. You can’t even fuck me. How can you save us?”
“Go to hell.”
“Go to hell? That’s priceless.”
“You’re cru—”
“Oh, Frans, you asked for this. You keep pushing and pushing.”
He stared at her but didn’t speak, though his sadness and anger and guilt were all plain to see. What was he waiting for? She was done talking. She was sorry she’d said a goddamn thing.
“I’ll call you when I get there,” he finally said.
“Don’t bother.” The thought that this was what she truly wanted occurred to her only as she said it. “Just go do your business. Let me have some quiet. I’ll be here when you get back. Here, I mean.” She pointed outside. “Right here.”
He took a last hard look at her and then walked out onto the sidewalk, where the snow came up again in the wind as he hugged Gus and Lasse and kissed Liv on the forehead. Before he reached the street corner, he was invisible to her. Now she was gazing onto the Hammerfest harbor, willing the memory of her husband farther into that hoary Minnesota winter. On the wharf outside the Hotel Thon, there was a sculpture of a sailboat beset in ice, its sails furled, its bow pointed out to sea. If she focused on her reflection in the window, she almost appeared to be a passenger aboard that boat. Was it a ketch or a yawl or some other type she couldn’t name properly? It didn’t
matter, she guessed. Any boat would do just fine.
* * *
—
She might have felt lonesome or heartsick—probably should’ve, given the quarrel she was trying to forget—but the pleasure in having disappeared to this tiny Arctic town, in sipping a second aquavit from the cordial glass with the thought of that man playing the church organ coming over her like the tide, well, it all left her feeling flustered instead. Maybe even a bit reckless. She wondered if the sculpture were in fact a real boat, and ready to sail out to sea, would she go? Who would she want on board with her?
She looked at the sculpture again. It seemed to be made of steel, since she could see the patina of rust in the glow of the streetlamps. At least the triangles of ice were white. Wood, maybe. Or painted steel. The boat was as seaworthy as she was to captain it. Had she ever once been on a sailboat? Could she even imagine a place to go?
She finished her drink and said good night to the woman behind the reception counter and took the elevator up to the seventh floor. It was afternoon, early or late she wasn’t even sure, but for as tired as she’d been since landing in Oslo, she was now wide awake. The drinks. All the thinking. Outside her room’s window, across the town’s rooftops, she saw the church and the music came back to her and roiled her even more. She went to the bathroom and brushed her teeth and started humming the song. For a second she believed she knew the words, though this was impossible. She rinsed her mouth, washed her face, and rubbed cream into the lines around her eyes, then went back out to the bed—pillowy and sleek and made for two—and sat on the edge and had a spontaneous memory of Christmas Eve mass at home in Gunflint. Of course. That’s where she knew the song from. The eight-person choir performed a handful of Norwegian carols each season and that man had played one of them here.
She was still humming as she undressed, laying her clothes over the chair in the corner. He had played it beautifully.
His hair. She could picture it, and his welcoming look down to her, and his aspect as he watched the invisible lineaments of his performance. Only someone who’d lost something could play like that. And his hands, Jesus.
She folded down the comforter on the side of the bed closest to the window and turned off the lamp. Now there was just a strip of faint light in the middle of the window where the curtains didn’t quite meet.
She hummed. And sighed at the strangeness of it all coming together and thought of him again. She pulled the comforter up and fluffed the pillow and turned on her side and then closed her eyes and saw him holding the railing. She could well imagine him reefing a sail, his gaze fixed on the horizon. He probably could look at the sculpture on the harbor and know exactly where a boat like that should be headed, know exactly how to grip the wheel and steer its course.
She didn’t even realize that her own hands were searching herself out. One on her breast, the other on her lower belly. Now she heard the halyard lines whistling on the real sailboats docked in the harbor. Such a sweet, sweet sound. Why did she feel so easy? Was it because no one on earth knew where she was? This thought didn’t startle her, as it might’ve once upon a time, but rather set her very much at peace.
She closed her eyes and rolled onto her stomach now, raising herself just enough to slide her fingers farther down her body. The hand down there was not her own anymore. No, it was not.
[1897]
Bengt’s farm was built along one of the streams that fed Gávpotjávri. A stately three-story of cog-jointed birch logs built before the fire of eighteen and ninety, and so one of the oldest buildings in Hammerfest. He kept his fjord horse in his own stable and his Dala sheep on his dekar of land, where he put the sheep up at night in a hillside barn. He also had a shanty for his carriage, cog-jointed to match the barn and house.
Inger and I stood at his fencerow, the sheep flowing toward us.
“I don’t understand,” I said again.
“You were dead, Odd Einar. I hope if I were dead you’d take care of yourself.”
“But to be more fettered to this man?” I spread my hands before Bengt’s estate.
“Where else would I go? I have nothing. No money. No hope. You’d rather I froze to death in that room above the bakery? Bengt’s charity—Herr Bjornsen’s charity—is all that’s saved me.”
The sheep gathered at the fence, stopping and starting again in unison, dispersing like a cloud breaking up. Our old Steigar sheep, the one we’d sold to Bengt before Thea left, came limping up apart from the others. Ever since Bengt had him castrated, he’d been a hobbling thing. I’d seen the Dala rams come after him more than once. I dropped my hand over the fence and let him take my scent. He sniffed twice and gave a little buck.
“You’re keeping his house, then?”
“He’s given me the maid’s quarters, but I’m not his house servant.”
The Steigar sheep trotted back up the fencerow. I watched him climb the hill and pause at the knoll atop it. “Then what are you?”
“I’m alive, Odd Einar.” She sounded exhausted, possibly even more so than I did. “If I’m anything, I’m still alive. I cook their dinners. Sometimes breakfast. I tend the bakery twice a week. I help the lady Bjornsen with her trips to market. When her spells come on, I play nursemaid.”
It seemed a rotten lot, that. I knew Gerd Bjornsen to be a difficult, mean woman whom I never could imagine caring for. I wanted to tell Inger that we would get back on our own feet, but the distant and troubled expression still hanging on her face gave me pause.
“You seem little joyful I’m home, Inger.”
“I prayed most nights, Odd Einar.”
“That’s something.”
“It’s what I could do.”
“Should I thank you?” I squatted and picked a stone and threw it down the hill, toward the Dala sheep. “It wasn’t your prayers that carried me those nights.” I threw another stone. “Not those many miles, either.”
She would not so much as glance at me.
“And now I find you living with this man? And standing over my own grave? Find you colder than any wind I ever felt on Spitzbergen?”
Now she did look at me. “Our life was so warm before, Odd Einar? All this coldness is why you left in the first place. The only thing changed since you got aboard that ship is that we have even less. If I’ve found a warm place to lay my head, if I’ve found a chunk of bread and a regular cup of coffee, you’ll have to forgive me.”
“There were days I would have traded my life for a cup of coffee.”
Inger put her hands together as if in supplication. “First I prayed that no harm would come to you. After you died, I prayed you went without suffering.” She unclasped them and turned to me and very suddenly put them on my cheeks. “And now? What do I pray for now?”
Everything about her—the tone of her voice, her hands limp on my cheeks, her tearless eyes as she gazed out at the sheep—told me what I must have feared all along: my cherished wife was sad to see me home. I picked another stone and tossed it from one hand to the other. Finally I said, “Well, I suppose now there’s a cup of coffee to be had that we needn’t even pray for. What say we share a cup?”
* * *
—
So we did. We crossed Bengt’s rocky land and entered his house and walked down a long, dark passageway. I’d been in his home many times, though never beyond the kitchen. In a room new to me, a window overlooking the hill was open to the afternoon light. A coal stove stood in one corner, Inger’s dyeing pot next to it along with a batt of sheep wool in a basket and a large bucket of water. There was a shelf beside the stove with basic foodstuffs and a plate and a cup and saucer, one of each. A chair and her spinning wheel sat under the window opposite a rocking chair. Another basket sat next to the wheel, overflowing with yarn and needles. A single bed and a chest of drawers and an armoire with a mirror on its door completed the furnishings. Atop the chest on
a stand was Thea’s portrait, taken by my friend Toralv Hagen two days before she left. It had been a gift to us, so we could always picture her.
But to see her face stunned me now. She was different in the portrait than she was in my memory and it chilled me to think I’d misplaced her. I stared at her for a long time, righting her in my mind, recalling her lilting voice and quiet laughter. I saw her bobbing head on Friday nights, her hand tapping out the time as I ran the bow up and down my hardingfele. I saw her easy stride as she walked ahead of me up the Grønnevoldsgaden with her mother on Sunday morning, going to church. Great Christ did this almost bowl me over. How I missed my sweet child. I would gladly suffer all of my indignities a thousand times over could I but see her standing next to me, the golden down of her hair under my chin. I would gladly suffer them again to simply know she was well.
“Put that down,” Inger said. “Come sit.”
I turned and saw her at the stove. I could tell she’d been studying me while I gazed upon the portrait. Her arms were crossed and her chin jutted out as it did when she was angry.
“How is it possible she’s not sent word?” I asked.
“It’s what happens,” she said, and took the kettle from the stove and filled a teacup.
“Not with my daughter,” I said, holding Thea’s portrait up as evidence of a greater benevolence.
“Oh, Odd Einar.” Her tone changed abruptly and was, if not kind, at least singed with resignation. “People go off. The world gets bigger. They forget where they come from. They forget who they are. They change. They change all the time.” She put the teacup on the saucer, stepped away, said “Please,” and gestured at the rocking chair.
I started over with the portrait but Inger said, “Leave that. Come, this will warm you up.”
I sat in the rocking chair and Inger handed me the coffee. She went back to the stove, cut a chunk of grovbrød from a loaf, then laid it on the plate and brought it to me. “I haven’t anything else to give you. No butter, even.”