by Peter Geye
I put the cup down and lifted the bread to my nose. If it had been honey on the Queen’s breath as she bent to kiss my hand, it wouldn’t have smelled so sweet. Before taking a bite, I set the plate beside the coffee on the floor and, despite the chill in the room, removed my coat and unbuttoned the collar of my threadbare shirt. I sat back down, took up the bread, and looked at it anew.
“Eat, for goodness’ sake. Drink.” Yet again she went back to the stove. “I’ll warm more water so you might wash.”
I already should have apologized for the state I was in. But I thought any energy taken to win her favor would be better spent regaining Thea instead. So I closed my eyes and dreamt of her. It might have been five minutes or an hour that I remembered my daughter. When I opened my eyes, Inger was sitting beside me on the floor, holding a cloth. Her dyeing pot had been filled with steaming water as though my dream had softened her. She said, “Wash yourself. I’ll warm your coffee.”
She then stepped away, poured it from the cup into the kettle, placed that on the stove, and finally came back. “Will you tell me what happened?” She gathered her dress beneath her and sat at my feet. It was only then that she noticed my boots, fine komagers made of the sturdiest reindeer hide. “You come home penniless, but sporting these?” She stood and crossed her arms over her bosom and stepped back. “You’ll explain yourself.”
“These boots once belonged to a better man than me, Inger.”
“You’ve said that about most men you ever knew.”
“Ay, but Mikkelsen, he was a true one. Strong and ready with a laugh to stay the cold. He knew where the seals were, too.”
Inger looked at me from across the room. I could see fog creeping down the hillside again. Was this day determined to conceal itself from me? I bent to untie the boots and slid them one at a time from my feet.
“How was it these boots came to be yours, then?”
“I’m reluctant to tell you, Inger. It’s not a story fit for a woman’s ears.”
She shook her head and walked to the bed and around it and came back with my duffle, which she dropped at my feet. I could see the sealskin coat and the woolen mitten liners tucked in the bag. What I wouldn’t have given for that sack and all it held as I traversed the perilous glaciers and landkall of the Krossfjorden. “A man came to me on Svene Solvang’s behalf and delivered these goods. I had no idea you had changed your employer. I had no idea you wouldn’t show up when the Lofoten next called in Hammerfest.” She returned to her seat and took her needles up and said, “You rise from the dead to tell me I can’t hear where your fine komagers have come from? Nonsense. I’m not only fit to hear it, Odd Einar, but I’m well deserving of the story. Now get on with it.”
She was right, of course. I had never been one to keep secrets from Inger. Our lives depended on each other. They always had. And I knew as soon as I thought about it that my reluctance was born not of wishing to start with secrets now, but from an intuition that what I’d endured could not be expressed in words. At least not words that I possessed. I took the plate from the floor and ate the bread under her watchful eye, then sipped the steaming coffee, which she’d returned to me. And though I felt anchored, I also felt queasy. The fog had come down full, and between it and the hour the view outside dimmed considerably.
The collar of Inger’s funeral dress pinched her neck. When I met her eyes, she seemed emboldened and her impatience disarmed me. So I looked into my lap and spoke softly. “A man named Svene Solvang hired me on his sealer. This was up in Hotellneset. On Spitzbergen. We were hunting, Mikkelsen and I, on the ice up there. And then came an ice bear.”
Even from half a thousand miles away, that beast bedeviled me. The fog might have been its long shadow, so much did the memory of him haunt me. When I looked up to see if my story was satisfying Inger, I could see it wasn’t. She plied her needles, her eyes flitting between me and her work, and I knew from her pursed lips that she was holding her tongue. I suspected, now, that any softness in her might be harder to find than my salvation on that distant fjord.
And what should a husband say to his wife at a moment such as this? What words will one day be invented to describe her distance? Or how it feels to be unwanted, to be thought better of dead? I felt the dread iciness creeping up my back and it took some kind of courage to say, “If you’d rather not hear more—”
“Rather not hear?” she interrupted. “You were going to speak of those boots. Surely part of your story will explain how they went from his feet to yours.”
“You’re in a hurry, then? You have other obligations this evening? Is Bengt wanting his dinner? Is that it?”
Now she looked up from her knitting. “I was alone for some four months, Husband. And a widow for ten days. Now I find myself with a ghost.”
“You’re no widow, Inger. And I’m no damn ghost.”
She tossed her needles and knitting back into the basket and stormed into the same corner of the room where she’d fetched my duffle. From beneath her bed she pulled a glass jar and came and stood before me and uncapped it. “We’ll be ghosts soon enough,” she said, and dumped the few coins in the jar onto my lap. “That’s what we have. All of it. That and whatever charity Bengt bestows on us.”
I dropped the kroner—seven of them—back into the jar one at a time. “Bengt doesn’t pay you for your labor, then?”
“Where do you think those are from?”
If she’d asked I would have admitted it was a meager fortune, and that its threat of hard times was something to worry over. Quickly enough, I started to scheme for what new money I might find. “Svene owes me,” I said, though I thought it unlikely I’d ever see him again, or any of what he owed me for the seals I’d clubbed to death. “And I’ll find work myself. I’ll take the faering tomorrow and bring in a haul. Some to eat and some to sell.”
She only shook her head.
The darkness came swiftly now, and if not for the warmth of the stove across the room I might’ve been staring at that swath of land out there on the Krossfjorden. The lonesomeness of that view out the window kindled in me a feeling that was already becoming familiar, but the mere thought of trying to explain this to her filled me with dread. Yet her expression, that persistent look, suggested I had better try.
“Okay, Inger. Here, then: The bear got Mikkelsen. I didn’t know right away because we’d been separated. I would know soon enough, though.” I looked at her expressionless face. Thought of giving up, but continued instead. “Oh, Inger. I was alone in a way I cannot describe to you. I could spend the rest of my life trying and never get it right.” I drank the rest of the coffee and set the cup down on the floor. “After the bear had gone, after Mikkelsen disappeared, I came to a rocky shoreline below a glacier. I remember the sound of the wind. This was all that could be heard. It would’ve taken me another hour to get to the jut of land I saw down the shore, or a different hour to walk to the base of the mountains rising up from the glacier’s edge. It might have been a lovely sight if not for all that troubled me. Foremost in that thinking was that I would die. But you asked about the boots. And you want me to tell you plainly.
“I turned away from the shore. Headed away from the fjord up toward the mountain. I walked slowly. Fearfully. With no true plan in mind. What I was going in search of I could not imagine. But then I found it, not a quarter mile distant. First one boot, below the bloody stump of a knee. Then some paces more the other komager, still on the foot of a leg torn off just above the ankle. There was no sign of struggle. No blood but for that knee. No human claw marks. There weren’t even many bear tracks, though those that I saw in the permafrost were more than a foot from end to end. It was as if those boots and the feet still in them had been dropped by a passing bird.” I pointed at the boots. “A gift? Or taunt?”
I risked another peek at Inger, who finally seemed moved.
“I looked into the gloaming an
d fog and I thought, I was never alone before now. Except for the wind screeching up the fjord, no sound wanted to be heard.” I kept my gaze on her, and she didn’t avert it. “No cry of pain. No slavering bear. No ripping flesh. Just the wind and, behind it, that long and vacant land.
“Inger, what I saw was desolation in every direction, and miles of it. On my feet, alone in the darkness. I thought of how slowly it would go, and in unimaginable pain, given my own boots practically didn’t have soles. I saw myself hiking up that glacier’s edge and over the mountains behind it, or down the landkall ashore. I was so afraid, Inger.”
Now she spoke, with much solemnity. “Hereunto were ye called: because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that ye should follow His steps,” she said, quoting some scripture.
It took me a moment to catch her point. “You’re right,” I said. “If a time had ever come to take comfort in the Lord’s suffering, it was then. But I’ll tell you, Inger, that when I turned to Him I found not a fellow sojourner but a man I didn’t much believe in anymore.”
“Blasphemy, Odd Einar.”
“Ja,” I admitted, “it’s blasphemy of a sort. But I was less concerned with my soul than my feet, which is why I took Mikkelsen’s boots one at a time.”
“That’s why they said you were killed by the bear. You and Birger Mikkelsen both.”
“Who said that?”
“Solvang’s man. They searched for you. They went up that fjord the next morning and found your boots by Mikkelsen’s feet. They found him and his rifle on the glacier.”
“They found Mikkelsen?”
“What was left of him. Much else of him was also missing.”
I reached down and rubbed my ankles and then my toes. They were right where they should be. “You say they looked the next morning?”
“The killing boat was floating on the Krossfjorden. With your duffle. They knew where you were hunting and they looked. That’s when they found you.”
“Solvang’s man, he came here? He brought you my bag?”
“I already told you that, Odd Einar. Yes, he came and brought me your bag.”
Now she blanched, which hinted at some admission if she was still the wife I’d left in the springtime.
“What is it, Inger?”
She fixed her gaze on the window. “Solvang’s man, he also paid me your share. I used it for your lot in the cemetery.”
“That’s rich,” I said, and would have laughed if my anger weren’t on me as suddenly as that bear had been. “And so you hate me for the folly of it? As though I summoned the bear? That it was a lark for me to wander that island wondering if I’d ever be found? Christ, Inger, do you think I’m some man you’ve never known or ever seen?”
As if she hadn’t heard me at all, she said, “So that was all, then? You took his boots and started walking?”
“Ja.”
What more was there to say? I would not tell her what it was like to remove those boots from the severed feet of my friend, that his leg and ankle were like bowls of some meaty soup, that what I’d found of him, apart from the boots, weighed no more than a dogfish, and felt much the same slathered as they were in his blood. I would not, I decided just then, Inger’s head now bowed as if in prayer, speak again of the boots or how they came to be sitting on our floor. I would keep the darkest parts to myself.
As if my memory and my resolve had coupled in me and rendered me harsh—more than I’d ever been toward her—I said, “Tell me how it is I could have walked where I have walked, could’ve trundled through that darkness wanting for all that I did, as afraid as I’ve ever been, Inger, only to sit here in the warmth of this fire with a hearty crust of bread in my belly and be more fearful now, in your company, than I ever was at the top of the world.”
I waited and when she said not a single word I simply rose from my chair and rewarmed the water for a bath. It took as long for her to speak as it did for the pot to steam, and then I heard her coolest words yet.
“You think you’re the only one who’s grown tired or been afraid? Hardly, Husband. Hardly at all.” She stood up and came to my side at the stove. “First I watched Thea go. My only child. To a place I could never see. Then my husband disappeared. Or was killed and eaten by a bear, in another impossible place. I’ve also been alone and afraid.” She took her apron off a hook and hung it around her neck and tied it behind her back. Then she put on her mobcap and tucked her hair up under it and lit a small lamp. “And now I will go make my master and his wife their supper.” She stepped to the door. “I will learn to be here with you again. I suppose that’s true. But when I woke this morning you were dead. I might need some time to find my bearings, too.”
With those words she unlatched the door, walked out, and left me to my bath.
* * *
—
I stood over the simmering pot on the stove, letting the steam rise across my face. One minute, then two minutes, my hair and beard growing damp and droplets already trickling back into the pot. After the third minute, I stepped away and undressed. What foulness. What filth. I strummed my ribs and took measure of the umber tint of my feet. My toenails were half of them missing. I could feel the ache of my feet up my back and into my shoulders.
I dipped a cloth into the scalding water and wrung it out and started washing myself, first my face and then on down. It felt more like a skinning. By the time I reached my feet the cloth was mottled gray. When I finished, I poured the brown water out the window and filled the pot from the bucket and washed my hair in merely warm water and then rinsed my whole body again. Last, I emptied the pot again and set it aside to be washed in the kitchen, then snuffed the lamp and stepped over my pile of clothes and walked through the darkness to lie down in my wife’s new bed.
How long had I slept before waking to the sound of Inger hanging my trousers and shirt from a hook beside the bed? I could smell the lye she’d used to launder them, and could also smell the tea sitting in a cup on the table next to the bed. Tea and a cake made of lavender and lemon. Seeing me awake, she stepped bedside and handed me the teacup.
It was warm, and I drank half of it in a long, tight-lipped gulp.
“The cake will please you, Odd Einar. Here. It’s Bengt’s favorite, but I thought of you while I turned the batter.” When she handed me the plate, I took a bite and my mouth began to seep because I’d never tasted anything so delicious. I finished the cake in three bites and drank the rest of the tea and collapsed again.
She sat there the whole time, and as I lay back she put her hand on my ribs, her palm warm against my cold skin, and said, “You’ll need many cakes. You’re as thin as Thea was the day she left.” Her eyes were damp and she held her gaze on me while she stood up, removed her apron, and reached back to unbutton the long string of eyelets running down her spine. “I’ll not wear this dress again.”
“It suits you,” I said.
I could tell she was appraising her own mood.
Finally, the corner of her lip turned up and she said, “Well, you were a long time without seeing any women.”
Now she removed her stockings and her legs glowed in the darkness. Crossing the room to the basin, she combed her hair out, washed her face, rinsed her mouth, removed her knickers and camisole, and then donned her linen shift. When she reached the bed, she slid under the eiderdown and lay very still, her eyes closed. I could feel her warmth, as I earlier had the stove. She whispered, “I have been faithful to you and to my love for you, Odd Einar.” She opened her eyes but was looking only at the ceiling. “I missed you all summer. I waited for word from you. I wondered where you were. And how you were.” She turned to look at me now and I could see her eyes wet again, this time with tears. “I prayed for you every day. I prayed for you and longed for you and, oh, I missed you dearly.”
“Inger—”
“Shush,” she said soft
ly, then continued. “I can’t describe what happened when they said you were dead. And how you’d died. I don’t remember how it felt. But I was scared, too. Just like you must have been with that bear. I was scared because I couldn’t imagine you gone.” She took my hand under the eiderdown. “When you came back today—when I saw you walk up the cemetery path—I didn’t know what to do. You were alive. Imagine it.” Now she wept quietly. She squeezed my rough hand with her soft one and cried just like she did on the night we said goodbye to Thea. “And here you are,” she managed. “Here you are in my hand again.”
I rolled onto my side and laid my arm between her breasts so my fingertips rested in the curve of her neck. Her tears shed onto the back of my hand and I held her until she began to settle. Outside, the moon came over the hill and shone through the window. It filtered through her hair and pooled in the soft valleys of her shoulders as though it had risen just for her—never mind the tides, never mind the howling wolves. I felt myself warming against her. I measured my contentment with the slowing of her heartbeat.
The moon over Spitzbergen illuminated only its desolation. The fog had gone out to sea as I traversed the landkall along the shoreline, feeling nothing save the vacancy of my sorry life. Well, and terror too. The shadows and the fact of all this cold and snow and ice already in October, and of the bear, its appetite surely whetted. Where was that beast? Each glance back, at the behest of any tiny sound, brought an eclipse of the rising moon. Was it the ice bear? The shadow of the bear? The bear’s ghost? How could I know? How could I do anything but walk into the night? And so I did. But as the moon rose higher, my own shadow grew strangely longer before me.
By the time the moon outside Inger’s window set at night, she would ask again about the ice bear and all that came after, yet the simplicity of her questions did not make the answers easier. That’s not how it works. No, the more direct the question, the less certain its answer. Would I be wise in keeping to myself the profundities those days offered? Would I admit to my wife that I was still trying to step into the shadow of myself? Or that this was the best I could hope to do in what life I had left?