by Peter Geye
Then Inger did something I’d never seen her do before: she blushed and played coy. “It does sound lovely.”
“Ruth!” Bengt shouted, giving the table a hard slap. “Ruth, bring the aquavit!” He pushed his empty plate away. “I believe we have an agreement,” he told his guests.
His servant appeared with a decanter and filled tiny glasses around the table. Once the digestifs were poured, Marius Granerud raised his glass for yet another toast. “It will be my honor to bring your story to the world,” he said, taking a sip. Then he sat back and loosened his tight collar around his neck. He took another, longer drink and said, “Now all I need to know is how much it’s going to cost me.”
Inger set her glass down and reached over to touch my hand. “The question isn’t how much the story will cost you, Herr Granerud, but what will it cost my husband to relive it. Please do remember that.”
Part Two
THE FONN
[1897]
True to his word, Otto Sverdrup sought me out when next he called in Hammerfest. The last week in June, it was. Late morning. I rowed in from Muolkot, where I’d gone to fish, and saw a stately vessel at the dock. I’d never seen the Lofoten before, and I marveled at her lines and, once again, at the audacity of shipbuilders.
I tied my faering off and brought my catch ashore: three ugly wolffish, hooked from the bottom of the sound, that had cost me six hours of miserable chill. Out in the darkest morning hours to fetch only that pittance. As I walked up the Grønnevoldsgaden, I saw him striding toward me as if the entire world was his fiefdom. The wings of his beard fluttered up as he raised a hand in greeting.
“Herr Sverdrup?”
“I asked around the village for you. I went to your place above the bakery and Fru Eide told me I might find you coming in.” He peeked into my fish box and waved a hand under his nose. “My, aren’t those wolffish ugly.”
Looking down in the box myself, I saw three meals. Or two meals and a loaf of bread, should I trade one of the fish. “Ja, but with a little butter and a pinch of salt they’ll do for supper.” I shifted the box to my other arm. “What brings you back?”
“You must have seen the Lofoten?” Sverdrup said.
“She looks ready for whatever might come.”
“I hope so. I’m her captain.”
“Headed where?” I asked.
He pointed skyward. “Far north. Spitzbergen. I’ll be making regular runs this summer.”
“Spitzbergen,” I said, as though it were a fairyland.
“Halfway to the pole.” He took the fish box from my arm and set it between us. “Tell me, have you heard yet from your daughter?”
“Not a word.”
“For all that is holy, I’m sorry.”
I thanked him, and was strangely relieved that the enormous weight of her absence had not lessened since our last, our only, conversation about her. “Tell me, Herr Sverdrup, how does a man like you remember me, much less my daughter?”
He looked at me, genuinely surprised. Perhaps even insulted. “There are few people in this part of the world, Herr Eide. You made an impression when we met. It was a memorable evening. It’s hard to forget decent people. It’s harder yet to forget brave ones. You qualify on both accounts.”
I waved a hand at him, brushing that remark away.
“Modesty. Another righteous quality.”
Perplexed by his affection, I couldn’t help suspecting I was the fool of some ruse. This thought caused me to look for jesters up and down the street, which was empty but for one man walking toward the church.
“In point of fact, Herr Eide, I come with a question for you.”
I turned back to him.
“You’re acquainted with the sea?”
I toed the box. “I’m partial to these waters. My faering isn’t much beyond Sørøsundet.”
“But you know port from starboard, and how the wind blows and shifts?” He nudged the fish box himself. “You clearly know how to drop a line.”
“You’d have to travel some distance from here to find a man who didn’t know all that.”
“And a sense of humor, too!”
“I haven’t laughed in a long time, Herr Sverdrup.”
“But you remember how?”
“Beg your pardon?”
“To laugh, my friend. You remember how to laugh?”
I allowed myself a smile.
“That’s a start. I’m a man short for the season, Herr Eide. My bosun needs a hand. Lots of odd jobs, but if you can tie a knot and shovel coal, I could use you aboard my ship. The pay’s twelve kroner a month, plus board. I could advance your first month’s worth to leave with Fru Eide. And I’d outfit you, at no charge, for the weather and the job. She’s a worthy ship.” He nodded toward her. “And I know worthy ships.”
For the first time since I watched my daughter sail off, I felt an honest thrill. Then I tallied the numbers quickly in my head. A season of this and I’d have us out from under Bengt. And possibly enough to buy passage to America so I could go find Thea. Never mind the sheer excitement of venturing north—with Otto Sverdrup, no less. The chance to see the storied shores of Spitzbergen, to feel the magnetism of that last northern outpost.
“Herr Eide,” he said, gripping my shoulder. “You look about to faint.”
“I feel so,” I said.
“What say you?”
I gathered myself, and spoke slowly. “I’m confounded by your offer, Herr Sverdrup. Of all the men you must know—”
“I sought you out,” he interrupted. “I stopped here expressly for you.”
“Why should you do that?”
Now his eyes softened. “Some men spend their whole lives with strong beliefs. In possibility. In hope. In other things, too. When one of those men meets another, well, he can’t help feeling an affinity.”
“There are twenty men in this village better suited to your needs, sir.”
“Yet I stand here with you.”
I took my pipe out of my pocket, thumbed a pinch of tobacco into the bowl, and lit it, then looked across the square at the Lofoten, unmoving beside the wharf. “I’d need a word with my wife, of course. And with Herr Bjornsen.”
“Herr Bjornsen?”
“My employer, you might call him. And my landlord, too.”
“What work do you do for him?”
“Oh, whatever he wishes. I muck his barns. I chop his wood and shovel his coal. Last month I put new shingles on his carriage house. I might better call myself his drudge.”
“Then sailing with me will be both liberation and adventure.”
No offer as overwhelming had ever come to me. I was so stupefied that when Sverdrup started toward the bakery, he had to wait for me to follow. As we walked, he said, “We’ll sail after the supper hour. I hope that will give you time to gather your things and say farewell to Fru Eide. And to arrange your affairs with Herr Bjornsen.”
“My goodness.”
“We’ll call again in Hammerfest in eighteen days, depending on the weather, and again eighteen days anon, and so forth, until some time in September. If the season cooperates, you should be back home for good no later than the end of September. Have you any concerns?”
“I reckon my concerns have most to do with my wife, sir. It’s possible she’d like better my declining your offer.”
“Of course. But otherwise?”
I shifted the fish box from one arm to the other. “I suppose Herr Bjornsen, too, might have an opinion about my departure.”
Sverdrup waited for me to say more. We had almost reached the bakery before I continued. “Not once have I been separated from Inger, never more, that is, than a few days on my faering.”
We stopped at the door, and he said, “It takes a woman with conviction to see her husband off.”
“H
er conviction I do not worry about.”
He put a reassuring hand on my shoulder. “Go up and talk to Fru Eide. The Lofoten will steam at seven o’clock. If you decide yes, come see me at Gunnar Hagen’s tourist office on Oscar’s Plads before three. We’ll sign you up and see to your wife’s advance. After three I’ll already be aboard my ship.” Then he looked toward the harbor, where the Lofoten’s two mastheads stood above her single amidships stack. “It’s no small choice, Odd Einar. And a season apart from your wife is hardly a trifle. But I will tell you that once the wind is in our face and we’re riding the cold waters north, once you feel the pull of the place we’ll be heading—why, time itself will disappear. You’ll be a new man before we make Bjørnøya. And once we sail up the Isfjorden, you’ll forget you ever owed that man a krone.” He bowed toward the door, as though urging me to hurry to Inger’s side. “The currents flow north in these seas. Men were made to follow them. What do you say to coming along?”
With that he was off, back toward his ship or Gunnar Hagen’s office or to speak to some other unsuspecting soul, how could I know? And how could I do anything to dispel his charms? Even walking up the narrow staircase to our humble room with my misgivings, I was certain that any man would accept his offer. As I would, for many reasons large and small, not least the money that could set us free. But I was also going to go for another kind of freedom, one I couldn’t name but surely felt. Now that Sverdrup’s destination was on offer, I realized why men lined up to risk their lives to get there. It had nothing to do with fame or fortune, neither of which was mentioned in his promise, only with how this journey tugged at my spirit. Why shouldn’t I feel drawn to those ocean waters, to a new and an unseen horizon? Even if I’d never known it, these questions were inside me. And now that I’d asked them, I knew I had to seek answers. And if these proved to be simple or worse, so long as they came with the midnight sun or an Arctic summer storm, they would be mine to call wisdom. Even more than money, those were the thoughts that spurred me to go with him.
My new prospects had put me in mind of older ones, and with Inger already toiling away on Bjornsen’s behalf, once in our room, I went to the small dresser, shuffled through the top drawer, and found the pamphlets and brochures and broadsides that Hege and Rune had sent from Minnesota. On one, a map of that place was rendered, the northeastern corner amputated from the rest of the state and set apart in its separate box as though that little triangle might belong to Canada. No towns dotted this box, only rivers spilling into a lake labeled Superior. The town our kin called Gunflint, nearby acres they’d cleared of pine, the log house in which we imagined Thea lived, the bed where she slept—was any of it real?
I’d by now stopped asking myself why neither our daughter nor her aunt and uncle had answered my letters. I had made it my practice to believe that Thea was simply too busy living on a farm to be bothered. This made the silence roaring from America easier to bear. But every time I pulled out this old map, I had the momentary sense that she’d simply gone to a place that did not in fact exist. That this was why none of them had written in such a long time. Again I dug through the dresser drawer, for the most recent one, from my brother-in-law, which was dated six months before Thea left home. He described a persistent winter colder and longer even than ours in Hammerfest. He described a wolf pack that harassed his livestock. He described the inhospitable soil. The onslaught of mosquitoes and blackflies after the snowmelt. How could we still have been excited to send Thea to a place that existed only as a series of complaints from our ornery Rune?
It was a risky business, rooting around in this drawer, so I stuffed all the papers back inside and shut it tight against my now sharper fears and thought instead about my new prospects. I would sail away with Otto Sverdrup. He would be my captain. He knew the uncharted places where he himself had made his fortune and fame.
* * *
—
As I stared down on my faering—caked in the shit of the harbor gulls, so plentiful they made their own, forever-dark sky—I wondered if I would ever make sense of this life, much less find any wisdom.
There had been a time when I’d stand above my little boat and ponder simpler things. Where could fish be found this morning? Was the wind suitable for raising my mast? Did those clouds over Sørø threaten snow? But those questions seemed meager now, so paltry beside the one that plagued me this morning. Should we go to Tromsø with Marius Granerud? Again, there was but a single response: yes, of course.
But Inger had a gift for gauging new prospects more clearly than I ever did. The day Otto Sverdrup asked me to join his crew, she said only “Have you ever seen a whale who thought he was a tern?”
When I cocked my head quizzically, she just pursed her lips and said she guessed we did need his money.
Then again, last night. Back in our little room above the bakery, I said, “I’ll have to tell the story somehow, whether to you or to this Marius fellow. But those hundred kroner do make his a different proposition.” She studied the reflection of the candle in the window for a long time before saying, “Why do we keep having to move our lives around in order to live them? First we send our daughter to America, then you go up to Spitzbergen, now we’re being summoned to Tromsø. Why can’t we make our lives here, at home? Where do we go next, Odd Einar? What happens after you give everything to Marius and people start mistaking you for someone you’re not?”
“Better for me to decline his offer? For us to stay here, living in this drudgery?”
She stared at the window for another long while. When finally she faced me again she said, “If you tell that man your story, you’ll no longer have it to tell to me. And then I know you less. Much as any man or woman in any village from here to Trondheim would. And then what? Then who are we?”
She blew out the candle. And tucked her hair into her nightcap. And went to sleep without so much as a glance.
Though I knew she would sleep in peace without me answering her questions, for half the night I had no rest at all. And once I at last got there, it was to an uneasy dozing fraught with bad dreams. Near dawn I woke to an empty bed, but forced myself back to sleep by thinking it was better to lose Inger in a dream than wide awake. When I awoke again, in full light, she was still gone, no doubt off to Bjornsen’s for work, though her nightcap sat there neatly. I arose and rinsed my mouth, then dressed and walked down here to the docks, befuddled by my riotous thoughts and great fatigue.
Two empty fish boxes were wedged beneath my faering’s middle thwart, atop which I’d coiled some rotten line. There was only one oar—the other gone missing—and my ten-foot mast showed cracks at its top end. Brackish water sloshed in the bilge. My God, what a sorry mess. I could see the hull beneath the waterline, and all the mussels that had attached themselves to my little vessel. It would take a week’s work and several kroner just to get her ready to cast my first line. How many kroner were in that jar beneath our bed? Not enough. There never would be.
“I might’ve taken better care of her,” Inger said.
I turned, surprised, to see her there in her old house clothes again, her sweater buttoned up to her chin, the hems of her skirts speckled with mud from the long walk along Gávpotjávri.
“What to do first?” I said.
“It’s just, how could I get her out of the water? And where to keep her? Where to put the oars and mast? The sail at least is stowed above the bakery.”
All at once the weight of my failure beset me. In the raw shine of my wife’s eyes I saw only that once more I had let her down.
“It’ll take some getting ready,” she said.
“Ja.”
“And some money, no doubt.”
I nodded.
“Is it worth it, Odd Einar? Fixing her up? Will we make it back in fish?”
“How long has it been since fish bought us anything besides just another day?”
“I al
most set it free.” She pointed at the boat. “It looks sad and tired there.”
“I guess we’re all tired,” I said. “Inger, where did you go last night?”
She kept looking at the boat while fooling with the top clasp of her sweater. And just when I thought I’d get no answer, she said, “The glogg didn’t sit well. I needed to take in some night air.”
I didn’t see it so much as feel it. Her lie, that is. As I gazed at her blue eyes now cast down, I knew she wasn’t telling the truth. “How were the stars, then?”
She glanced up at me with the expression that I know meant I couldn’t possibly understand, but instead of answering my question merely said, “How much would it cost to get the boat ready?”
Was that how it would be? Would we start feigning honesty? I didn’t like the feel of it, but since I wasn’t yet certain that she would have me back, I answered. “An oar. Some tackle. I could do without the mast for a while, and hope against wind. In truth I don’t know how much. Certainly more than we have.”
Inger gathered her skirts about her and sat on a crate there on the wharf. “Should we sell it and pack our things and move to Tromsø? Maybe we need to make a fresh start.”
This idea wasn’t without intrigue, and no small part of me wanted to say yes. But what of our daughter? Imagine that, Thea coming home without us here to greet her. And anyway, what would be easier in Tromsø, where we didn’t know a soul? “Do you suppose the fish are more plentiful down there? The winter less bitter and their prayers closer to God?”
She didn’t say anything for a long time. Just stared out over the harbor as if some other ship were about to sail in with a new cargo of opportunity. She must have read my thoughts because she said, “Odd Einar, if Otto Sverdrup returned in the Lofoten this minute and offered you that same job would you—knowing everything you’ve been through—accept it all over again? And if you had another chance with Thea, would you still put her on the Nordsjøen?”