by Peter Geye
“What are you saying?”
Now Sarah paused again and dried her hands and pushed a wisp of soft gray hair off her forehead. “He’s a very nice man, Frans is. And handsome. Oh, my. We love him already, because it’s hard not to. But we don’t have to love him the same way as you.”
Greta might have been furious, but her mother’s observation instead made her feel relieved. Hadn’t she wondered about the fidelity of her love for him from the moment she’d accepted his proposal? A moment, incidentally, that required no tears whatsoever. In fact, she couldn’t remember any emotions accompanying her rather direct “Of course I’ll marry you.”
And she had, with not much trepidation but without enough exuberance, either. That was almost twenty years ago. She had been curious at the start, anxious if not exactly excited to see how their lives together would evolve. She wondered almost philosophically about the phases of their relationship, and gave them a thorough accounting as they passed. He worked. She worked, too, now at the StarTribune. They bought their first house, near her old apartment, and then five years later traded up to a much nicer house a block off of Lake Harriet. A beautiful home, large enough to raise a family in, large enough for her to finally have a home office, and Frans a suite of connected and finished rooms in the basement for his own work and assortment of Arctic collectibles. He traveled often and ambiguously, but he was devoted and she never doubted his faithfulness, nor did she doubt her own. They had Lasse and, two years later, Liv, and through the kids’ infancy and toddlerhood she kept waiting for other big changes to come. Despite the fact that Frans was a wonderful father and a doting husband when his heart was in it, she never felt her life moving as she’d expected it would, and by the time Liv was in preschool Greta realized that she was unhappy and probably depressed. Parenthood could not be life. Not her life. And her marriage to Frans, well, it hadn’t changed much since they’d had kids, a truth she woke up with one morning as though it were a racing heart. Was this going to be the sum total of the rest of life? It was a question she resisted asking too often, for fear of its answer. And she’d avoided it with astonishing success, until the day her mother died three years earlier.
On that morning, as Greta sat bedside at the hospital, Sarah looking better and feeling spry, she’d held her mother’s hand and they’d talked about Lasse and Liv, about springtime and making pickles and fishing the steelhead run on the Burnt Wood River, and when Greta was getting ready to leave, Sarah said, “I’m glad that you found your life. I didn’t know if you would, but you seem so happy and that makes me happy.”
Greta smiled and felt a tear come to her eye but then, a few minutes later, as she left to pick up Liv at a friend’s house, her stomach dropped out of her all at once. She rushed to her car through a drizzling rain and cried in the parking lot for twenty minutes. She was late picking Liv up. Her mother died that afternoon in the same hospital bed.
Greta got out of the hotel bed, went to the bathroom, and poured a glass of water. In the mirror above the sink, her silhouette took form in the dark. She couldn’t help thinking that this was just how she must appear to people. The shape of herself. Maybe that’s why she’d taken so much pleasure in working on the fish house, where rarely was anyone there to see her. She could simply be herself, sanding the canoe, listening to music, remembering to forget. What would her mother have said about that? That it was no way to live. And she’d have been right.
Greta went back to bed and distracted herself by returning to the fish house and her father’s canoe, on which he’d traveled the most perilous miles of his life back when he was just a teenager. He’d built it himself. Beautiful cedar strips, the thwarts hewn of white pine, the cane seat still tightly drawn some fifty years after it had last been used. Gus said many times over the years that he’d never put another canoe in the water and, once Greta started refurbishing the fish house, even told her that she should sell it if she could find a buyer. Looking at it that night after Thanksgiving, she was beyond glad it was there. As if it were proof of the quality of work that could be done in this place.
The thought of work had buoyed her then, and she’d pushed the canoe into the corner by the barn door. Last she turned out the lantern, as she had the night before, and crossed the dark room to walk out into the wind. The horizon over the lake was clouded again, its surface lit by the stars above. And even fifty feet from the shore, she could feel the spray of the waves on her bare cheeks.
When she got back to her father’s house it was after eleven. All the lights were out inside, but from the driveway she could tell a fire was still burning in the grate. Her father was sitting in his old leather chair, his chin on his chest, his eyes closed in peaceful sleep, a book open on his lap. He startled awake as she closed the door behind her, then looked at his watch and marked his page and closed the book and sat up, yawning.
“What are you still doing up, Dad?” She hung her coat by the door and stomped the snow from her boots. Six or seven inches had fallen since lunchtime.
“How are the roads?”
“The plow’s been up the trail and it stopped snowing.” She crossed the great room and sat on the couch opposite him.
When the wind quieted, she could hear the river in the distance. It sounded lovely with the snapping fire. “Listen,” she said, and cocked her ear.
Gus turned his own ear toward the sound and waited for the wind to pass.
“Hear it?” Greta said.
“Naw, I can’t. Christ, I can barely hear the phone ringing nowadays.”
“It’s rushing. The lake was up, too.”
“Rain and snow and rain and snow again. Almost every day since Halloween. The river’s just about topped off.”
She sat back in the couch and watched the fire.
“Speaking of the phone ringing, Frans called while you were in town. Said he couldn’t reach you.”
“No, he couldn’t.”
“All right. Well, I told him you’d call him back in the morning.”
“Thanks, Papa.”
Gus wrestled himself up out of the chair and went into the kitchen. She heard the cupboard door open and the faucet run and the ice-cube tray crack. Then the lid of a bottle being unscrewed and two faint splashes. He brought back a glass in each hand and she took hers and looked up at him.
“Is it that plain to see?” she asked.
“Not much is obvious in this world, kid. But I like to think I know my daughter.”
“So you waited up for me?”
“Like when you were in high school,” he said, and stoked the fire before he sat down and switched on the lamp beside his chair. “You used to sneak in past curfew all the time. You and your brother both. I always wondered what the hell there was to get into that late at night around here.” He took a sip of his drink.
“But now that I’m as old as this, I find the hours late at night or early in the morning to be the most productive. Why, the newspaper’s better read alone at night than in the morning at the Blue Sky Café. At least here my complaints go unheard. Don’t have to listen to those old fellas sticking up for our dipshit president. The other day—”
“You don’t have to talk to fill the air, Dad,” she interrupted. “We can just sit here. I’d like that.”
He took another sip of bourbon and settled back into his chair. After a minute he said, “I’ll be damned, I can hear the river after all.”
Greta counted to ten—a trick from childhood that her mother taught her to use when she knew she was about to say something she might regret—and then did it once more. “I think my marriage is over,” she said, though she wasn’t sure it was loud enough for her father to hear. Was he counting to ten himself?
“Does Frans know this?”
She turned her eyes from the fire to her father. “Are you kidding? Frans knows everything.”
Gus made a mirthless smile.
“It’s a hard thing to do, ending a marriage. I had a front-row seat for my parents’ coming apart.”
“I’m so lonely, Dad.”
“Is that all?”
“We don’t love each other anymore.”
“Oh, Frans still loves you, sweetheart. Any ninny can see that.”
“Well, I don’t love him.” She took a long sip and added, “He’s having an affair. I don’t even care.”
Gus tilted his head up and looked at her through his glasses.
“I can’t believe it’s come to this. I feel like a failure. I look around here. I see my childhood. I see your perfect marriage with Mom. How could I screw it up so bad?”
“Your mom and I, we didn’t have a perfect marriage. I don’t think such a thing exists.”
“It seemed perfect from my vantage.”
“I suppose Lasse and Liv think the same thing about you and Frans.”
At the mention of them, she lost her breath. She sat up and set her empty glass on the big coffee table.
“It took me about twenty years to learn how to be married,” he said. She could tell he was trying to help. Trying to carry the conversation until she got her bearings again. “Your mother had patience enough to wait all that time.”
“Mom knew he was wrong. She knew it from the beginning.”
“Your mother knew an awful damn lot, that’s for sure.”
Was that an admission? She looked at him hopefully. “She must’ve talked to you about it. Back then, I mean. Did you agree with her?”
“I like Frans. I did from the word go. He’s a good man. A tremendous father. He’s steady.”
She waited.
He looked down into the bottom of his drink before he said, “But he’s not running for office, is he?”
“I said the most horrible things to him. Before he left.”
“You’re not the first person to dress down their spouse.”
“The next time I talk to him, he’ll be four thousand miles away.”
He wedged himself up in his chair, looked hard at her. “Do you have any hope, Greta?”
“I don’t know.” She thought of the anger on Frans’s face as he walked out of the Burnt Wood Tavern. Of her own seething resentment. And their shameful fuck in the fish house. She thought of the kids. Of that woman, Alena. She pictured knocking on his hotel door in Oslo, thought of going that far to tell him it was all over. That he had to come home with her so they could take care of finishing it. And then without thinking she said, “Can I ask you a favor?”
“You know you can ask me for anything.”
“Will you take the kids home tomorrow? Get them off to school next week? I think I need to go over there.”
“To Norway?”
“Yes. I have to go see him.”
Gus shook his head slowly. Not approvingly, but as if to say he would. Of course he would.
“I won’t be gone long, Dad. Four or five days. Long enough to get over there and find Frans and…”
Her voice trailed off, and in its absence Gus spoke up. “And see what happens, right, kid?”
“Right. And see what happens.”
Well, she had gotten this far. Too far, she supposed. Into a country that seemed full of ghosts and dreams and memories. She curled onto her side in the down of the hotel bed, closing her eyes against all of it, and decided that the next day would come. She would see herself in the mirror. She would call Frans then.
[1897]
Even on the darkest nights, when the only proof I had against death was the wind and the distant booms of calving glaciers, when I stumbled on that gale-scoured scruff of land spongy beneath my feet where it wasn’t strewn with rocks or snow, when all I had was the thought of my wife and daughter to keep me from abandoning myself to the icy seas, I would sometimes see before me, at a distance I could never quite fathom, a sudden blossoming of light. It rose from the ground all golden and soft as smoke, and put before me someplace to go. It might linger for a second or a minute and in this span I hurried as if in that light I might find the warmth I so desperately imagined. Of course the light was only ever swallowed up, and the following darkness only ever more profound.
I can’t say why I was thinking of this as I walked down the hall to the Bjornsen dining room. The light spilling from the entryway proved to be entirely of fire—from the chandelier, from the candelabras, from the enormous hearth, all of it reflected in the blackened windows and reaching into the night beyond. As I walked into the room in my overlarge trousers and shirt, I hardly knew which of my senses to indulge first. The warmth of the fireplace? The sound of cheerful laughter? The bouquet of stewing meat and heady fish free for me to whiff? Or the sight of my beautiful wife, standing beside the hearth? She greeted me with a kind glance and turned down a hallway.
From the corner of the room a short man with a monocle and the belly of a fat seal wobbled over to me. Pocketing his eyepiece and looking me up and down, he said, “Well now, Herr Bjornsen, you said he was wasted to naught. What I see here is a man hale and hearty.” He winked at Bengt, then turned back to me and said, “The fish is fresh and the mutton’s been stewed in wine and sweet cabbage, my friend, but first, here—” And he gestured to a sideboard in the corner he’d come from, where on a silver platter sat heaping bowls of caviar and black bread and gherkins.
Bengt himself was spooning the fish eggs onto a piece of bread. He took a stein of beer from another silver-plated tray, handed it to this man, took a second and set it on the sideboard, and then offered me a third, as though I were one of his bosom friends and this our regular Saturday night social. “Odd Einar Eide,” he said, raising his own stein, “meet Marius Granerud, here from Tromsø to hear your story of coming back from the dead.” He now addressed Marius. “If our friend looks hale and hearty, it’s because he’s full of spirit.” And then, to both of us: “Gentlemen, it’s my pleasure to bring you together. We shall feast and parley and—before our supper’s done—have a plan to tell your tale, Herr Eide. But first, to your safe return, and to the happiness of your comely wife, and to settling old accounts. Skål!”
“Skål,” Granerud echoed.
I merely tipped my stein.
Granerud wiped the suds from his upper lip with the back of his hand. “I grew up with the makers of this fine ale down in Sigdal. The Ringnes brothers. It’s a beautiful part of Norway, Sigdal is. Nestled in the mountains just this side of Christiania.” He took me by the arm and crossed the room and stood before a painting on the far side of the fireplace. “Christian Skredsvig—the man who painted this—was one of our mates, too.”
I looked at the painting hanging in a gilt frame above a bookshelf. Two candle sconces flanked it, their fluttering light casting shadowy waves over a flock of sheep, some white, some black, scattered on a field of turf with trees barren of leaves and hills on the horizon. Two farmers, indistinct well beyond them, tended to their rakes.
I looked down from the painting and saw that Bengt now stood with us.
“From the time I was a boy,” he said, “all I ever wanted was a field of sheep. Sheep and a wife. I never cared to have children, even when I was still a child myself.” He seemed in love with this memory of himself as a boy, as if he wanted to walk into the painting and rake the hay. After a spell, he roused himself from his reverie and looked at me and said, “Most people, they have no idea how to make their lives what they wish. Most people, if you told them they could have anything, would ask only for the simplest things. A few more potatoes, a lump of sugar for their tea, a pair of mittens. The most imaginative might ask for a new faering, in order to cast their lines in deeper seas.” He took a long drink of his beer before setting it on the bookshelf and removing a pipe from his waistcoat pocket. He packed it and lit it and puffed and fingered his stein again, then finally said, “What would you ask for, Odd Einar? If you could
have anything?”
“Why, the chance to see my daughter again,” I said without a moment’s breath. “A whole Sunday with her laughter and sweetness.”
“You see?” Bengt said, to Marius Granerud. “He makes my case for me. You, man, have been to the polar seas and back. You have outfoxed the ice bears. Why, indeed you have risen from the dead!” He took another puff of his pipe. “Why not ask for what might come of that? Fame. Wealth. Immortality.”
What odd and quizzical remarks from a man who had always considered me insignificant at best. I hardly knew what to think, let alone how I might respond. I could have said, I’ve never cared for any of that.
But Marius spoke on my behalf. “A father’s love of a child is a powerful—”
“My own father,” Bengt interrupted, “was an irascible gambler and drinker. He lost everything and ended up dead before I was twelve years old. My mother would not abide us living in squalor, so she moved here the year he died. That was some thirty years ago, and do you know what has happened since?”
Of course I knew. Everyone in Hammerfest did.
He relit his pipe and continued. “I own the bakery and the dry goods. I have a share in eighteen fishing vessels out of this harbor. I brought the village its electric streetlights. I brought them the first electric ovens the world has ever used. I own forty-nine percent of Tora Jansen’s hotel. I paid for the bell in the church tower.” Now he stepped to the window, drew aside the curtain, and gestured outside. “And my flock is some forty sheep strong.” He let the curtain fall and took another pull off his pipe and rested a thumb in the pocket of his sealskin waistcoat. With one long draw he emptied his stein of beer. “Why? Because of my ambition.” He tapped his temple with the mouthpiece of his pipe. “Because I knew to pursue these things while others did not.”
We crossed back to the fish eggs and bread in grave silence, as though I had just been made to see the lever long enough to move the world. Bengt said he would now check on the feast and stepped into the kitchen, leaving Marius Granerud and me alone at the sideboard.