The Unseen

by Roy Jacobsen

  She inserts her right hand into the belly of the biggest pollack, tears out the guts and holds them aloft with disgust in her eyes. He rows on, changing bearings as he goes, she hurls the guts over the side and watches the seagulls swoop down for them and splash and eat and fight in a kind of life-and-death struggle. She sticks her hand into the next fish, flings the guts over the birds, and then digs into the last one, leans over the gunwale and rinses the fish one by one, places them side by side on the floorboards, the biggest to starboard, the second biggest in the middle, and the small one to port, washes her hands, slowly and thoroughly, there are no flaws in this child’s mind he decides with his eyes half-closed, as he feels from the lie of the boat that she is still hanging over the side, she is drawing squiggles in the water, so he has to row a heeling boat home, he drags it only halfway up the landing place and jams the trestles under the gunwales, because the tide is going out.

  She walks in front of him up the path, dragging the catch with the last drops of blood running down her slender calves. On his shoulders the four lengths of wood, the axe under his arm, in his hand her dry clothes. He stops and looks at the sun in the north-west, it has become pale and hazy and will soon be a moon, night is approaching, and he wonders whether to repair the scythe at once or get a few hours’ sleep before the dew falls in Rose Acre next morning; the dew always forms first in Rose Acre, where a strange red grass grows.

  3

  Whatever is washed ashore on an island belongs to the finder, and the islanders find a lot. It might be cork or barrels or hemp or driftwood or flotage – green and brown glass balls to stop fishing nets sinking – which old Martin Barrøy disentangles from the piles of seaweed when the storm has blown over, then sits down in the boat shed to fasten new nets around, making them look like new. There might be a wooden toy for Ingrid, there might be fish boxes and oars, gaffs, bow rollers, bailers, poles, planks and the remains of boats. One winter night a whole wheelhouse was washed ashore. They used the horse to drag it onto dry land and left it there in the south of the island so that Ingrid could sit in the skipper’s swivel chair and turn the brass and mahogany wheel as she looked out over the meadows and stone walls that roll like waves across the island.

  There are no fewer than eight walls.

  They have been built of stones which rise through the earth like the glass floats in the sea, only much more slowly, it takes many winters for them to work their way up, they can collect the stones in the spring and make the walls even higher, these walls which divide the island into nine sections, or acres as they call them. South Acre is the most exposed, the sea crashes in here, with all its brutality. Then comes Bosom Acre, nobody knows how it got its name, but it might be because of the conical green haystacks and grass-strewn patches of protruding rock resembling large and small breasts, which the sheep chew at until they are nice and round after the haymaking is done. Next is Stone Acre, since it has more stones than the others, then Rose Acre because the grass there is as red as unripe rowanberries. Cowbarn Acre surrounds the buildings, the Garden of Eden faces north, but is nonetheless the most fertile, this is where the potato fields always are, then comes Scab Acre, North Acre and Needy Acre, which all have well-deserved names, even though Needy Acre is the greenest of them all and envelops the boat shed and the landing place like a thick green mitten.

  But mostly they find rubbish.

  They find dead porpoises and auks and cormorants full to bursting with stinking gases, they wade through rotting seaweed and find parts of shoes and a hat and an armband and a crutch and fragments of distant lives, testimony to opulence, laxity, loss and carelessness, and misfortune which has befallen people they have never heard of and will never meet. Now and then they also stumble across objects with stories behind them that they can never know, a coat with pockets full of newspapers and tobacco from England, a wreath on a watery grave, the French tricolour on a splintered flagpole and a slimy casket containing an exotic woman’s most intimate possessions.

  On rare occasions they find a message in a bottle, a mixture of longing and personal confidences intended for others than the finders, but which, if they were to have reached the intended recipient, would have caused them to weep tears of blood and move all heaven and earth. Now, in all their indifference the islanders open the bottles, pick out the letters and read them, if they understand the language they are written in, that is, and reflect on the contents, superficial, vague reflections – messages in bottles are mythical vehicles of yearning, hope and unfulfilled lives – and then they put the letters in a chest reserved for objects which can neither be possessed nor discarded, and boil the bottles and fill them with redcurrant juice, or else simply place them on the windowsill in the barn as a kind of proof of their own emptiness, leaving the sunbeams to shine through them and turn green before refracting downwards and settling in the dry straw littering the floor.

  But one autumn morning Hans Barrøy finds a whole tree that the storm has torn up and deposited on the southern tip of the island. An enormous tree. He can’t believe his eyes.

  Now the sea, in company with the wind, is calming down, and the tree lies there like the skeleton of a prehistoric monster, a whale carcass, with roots and branches intact, but devoid of needles and bark, the sea has consumed these, a ton of white resin, so useful all over the world as it can be used to coat the bows of famous violinists, enabling them to produce rich, pure tones. It is a Russian larch which through the centuries has grown strong and mighty on the banks of the Yenisei in the wilds south of Krasnoyarsk, where the winds that rage across the taiga have left their mark like a comb in greasy hair, until the time when a spring flood with teeth of ice toppled the tree into the river and transported it three or four thousand kilometres north to the Kara Sea and left it in the clutches of its briny currents, which carried it north to the edge of the ice and then west past Novaya Zemlya and Spitsbergen and all the way up to the coasts of Greenland and Iceland, where warmer currents wrested it from their grip and drove it north-west again, in a mighty arc halfway around the earth, taking in all a decade or two, until a final storm swept it onto an island on the Norwegian coast, where early one morning in October it is found by Hans Barrøy, who gapes at it in disbelief.

  A mightier tree has never been observed in these parts.

  He runs home to fetch his family.

  They set about dismembering the quarry, they lop off and saw up the roots and branches and stack them against the north wall of the barn, to be used as kindling, then pitch into the trunk itself, log by log. But suddenly they are confronted with a Roman column of solid wood, around thirteen metres in length, and, even using the horse and a pulley system together with the combined efforts of five people they can’t move it up to the farm. They secure it with a rope and go home and sleep on the problem, exhausted, empty and content. And at the next tide they manoeuvre it higher up, a few more metres, but there it remains, a fallen marble pillar.

  Hans and Martin cut off two more sections, it takes them a whole day, and they see that the resin-rich heartwood becomes redder and redder, the closer to the core they get, as hard as glass yet still amenable to the blade. They scrape it off and rub it between their fingers and breathe in the smell, which makes them realise that it is impossible to cut up this magnificent specimen only to burn it in a stove. The tree is an organic whole which has to be preserved, one day they will find a use for it, who knows when, or they will be able to sell it, it must be worth a fortune.

  With one final burst of energy they roll it up onto three skids so that it is clear of the grass, hammer four posts into the ground on either side, then drive iron pegs through them and into the wood. And there this pillar lies today, one hundred years later, a great white cylinder beside the sea. One might think someone has forgotten all about it, it might look as though it once had some function, as if in days gone by it had been indispensable.

  4

  Nobody can leave an island. An island is a cosmos in a nutshell, where the
stars slumber in the grass beneath the snow. But occasionally someone tries. And on such a day a gentle easterly wind is blowing. Hans Barrøy has hoisted the sail, a weather-beaten fore-and-aft rig, and it proves to be a fine crossing over to the Trading Post. The whole family has come along, except for old Martin, he has no faith in this venture.

  They are going to part company with Barbro. Barbro is twenty-three and the time has come for her to take up a position as a housemaid, they have found a place for her.

  After they have moored the boat beneath the wharf at the Trading Post Ingrid leads her up to the General Store and the village, where the trees reach up to the sky and the houses are painted and so close together that you can go from one to the other without a coat on.

  Barbro won’t hold hands with anybody except Ingrid, because she knows what is going to happen, she stops in front of the shop, with all eyes staring at them, these islanders, they are so rarely seen here. Ingrid is wearing a blue dress and a grey cardigan adorned with green ice crystals on the collar and sleeves. Barbro is attired in a yellow dress and a wadmal jacket that is too short for her, she says she wants some rock sugar.

  Hans has caught them up and says yes, she can have some. But, when they come out of the Store, Barbro doesn’t want to go on to the farmstead where the lady of the house, Gretha Sabina Tommesen, has agreed to take her in as a housemaid on condition that it will cost her no more than the price of food and a bed. Hans and Maria have to drag her there, while Ingrid brings up the rear of the procession and casts stolen glances at the herd of children following them at a distance. She has seen some of them before, briefly, at church or the Store, she knows the names of two of them, recognises four other faces, but none of them is smiling, and she doesn’t stare for long, she runs after the others into the garden surrounding the white house, which has a heavy, dark panelled door that opens and admits them into another world.

  But then Gretha Sabina Tommesen manages to call Barbro “the imbecile” three times as she shows them the room Hans’s sister is to share with the other maid, who is also from the islands, only much younger than Barbro. The mistress of the house explains that the imbecile also has to reckon on being called down to the Post when the herring boats come in, even in the middle of the night, just like the other women in the house.

  “Can she gut?”

  “Oh, yes,” Maria replies. “She can cook, too, an’ card an’ spin an’ knit stockin’s.”

  “Is she clean?”

  “Tha can see that.”

  “Do you understand what I’m saying, Barbro?” she shouts at Barbro, who nods and gazes up at a crystal chandelier hanging above her head, a starry firmament her eyes sink so deeply into that they remain there, and her neck locks. When Gretha Sabina Tommesen then tells Maria that her sister-in-law cannot expect to be supplied with any more clothes than those she has brought with her, Hans looks at his sister – who is still standing with her eyes fixed on the new solar system – and makes a decision, takes her in one hand and the small suitcase in the other and strides out of the house, once again making his way to the Store, where he waits for Maria and Ingrid to catch them up. The husband and wife look at each other. He nods towards the door. She nods back. They go in for a second time and buy sugar and coffee, two packets of four-inch nails, a bucket of tar, some pearl sago, cinnamon, a barrel of coarse salt, and also order three large sacks of rye flour, to be collected in four days, then leave the Store, go down to the wharf again with their purchases, climb aboard the færing and set sail.

  A fair wind takes them home.

  Hans can’t look at his sister, Barbro. He sits on the opposite side of the tiller so the sail is between them. But this does not mean that he has escaped Maria’s gaze, she is twenty-seven years old, strong and comes from another island, she has attended a home economics school and could have found a placement anywhere, but she is on Barrøy, with him, Hans Barrøy, who is thirty-five and here he is, hiding from his own sister and a vexing sense of shame, they are two sides of the same coin, the shame and the hiding place, but still he is exposed to Maria’s eye, it does not relent until he admits he has been a fool, a nod is sufficient. Then she diverts her gaze to the waves and adopts that irritating smile, which makes her even more indomitable.

  Old Martin is waiting on the beach and receives them with a guffaw.

  “Hva did A tell tha!”

  He wades out and carries the suitcase ashore, then leads his daughter up to the house with Ingrid running alongside telling him about the visit until her voice is drowned by the shrieks of the gulls. Maria and Hans stay at the landing place discussing whether to fetch the cart or carry the goods up to the house in their arms.

  “It’s not too much f’r us t’ carry, is it?”

  She leads the way. He drops what he is carrying, grabs her by the hips and pulls her down into the tall grass, where not even God can see them, nor hear her half-stifled cries, and she calls him all kinds of names as her smile reappears, the smile that only a short while ago she shot at the waves, he has as good as brought it back to her lips. And afterwards they have no desire to resume their homeward trek, they lie there on their backs staring at the sky as she tells him about her childhood at home on Buøy, a cowshed collapsed as a result of too much snow on one side of the roof. He listens and wonders where this is leading, as he always does, what is Maria thinking and what is she getting at? Until Ingrid is suddenly looking down at them, asking hvar they’ve been, Barbro wants to know what they are having for supper, herring or pollack or the halibut her father caught in his seine net yesterday.

  “A’ll see t’ th’ halibut,” Hans says, getting up, and he fetches the cart after all and loads it with the things they bought at the Store, and Ingrid, and wheels it up the hill while Maria stays put. She is the philosopher on the island, the one with the oblique way of looking at things, since she comes from a different island and has something to compare with, this might be termed experience, wisdom even, but it can also give her a split personality, it depends on how different the eyes or the islands are.

  5

  They have three sallow trees on Barrøy, four birches and five rowans, of which one is scarred and as big as a barrel around the middle and is called the Old Rowan, and all twelve lean in the direction nature has bent them.

  There are also some smaller, wispy birch trees on a crag to the west, they stand as if embracing one another and are known as Kjærlighetslund, Love Spinney, but spread out in all directions when the wind blows.

  In addition, they have a hefty sallow tree which seems to lie along the ground and has existed like this for as long as anyone can remember, on its knees, on the boundary between Rose Acre and Bosom Acre. Their forefathers built the stone wall around it rather than cut it down. It is presumably the only tree on the island that cannot be felled. Not that they would fell the others either, even though wood is both precious and necessary, so the thought does occasionally cross their minds. But no-one ever considers chopping down the sallow on the boundary between the two Acres, in a way it has already been felled where it is, and is thereby consecrated, like a grave.

  From the largest rowans around the houses hang large magpie nests. The islanders often curse the magpies because they steal and shit, and they talk about destroying their nests. But that doesn’t happen either. So when the immense constructions in the branches sway in the battle against yet another storm and survive once again, the islanders observe with stoic relief that nothing has been damaged this time either, although often enough this is not the case.

  On the very rare occasions the rain or snow falls vertically, a dry circle forms in the grass beneath every nest in the Old Rowan. Then the sheep huddle together there. Especially the lambs dislike the rain, and they relieve themselves as animals do, so there is a black, muddy circle of life beneath every nest, everything is interconnected, just as humans do not divide into two separate parts even though they bend forward.

  This is how it is on the thousand other isla
nds in the archipelago as well.

  The ten thousand islands.

  As the terrain is so open and exposed someone might well come up with the bright idea of clothing the coast in evergreens, spruce or pines for example, and establish idealistic nurseries around Norway and start to ship out large quantities of tiny spruce trees, donating them free of charge to the inhabitants of smaller and bigger islands alike, while telling them that if you plant these trees on your land and let them grow, succeeding generations will have fuel and timber too. The wind will stop blowing the soil into the sea, and both man and beast will enjoy shelter and peace where hitherto they had the wind in their hair day and night; but then the islands would no longer look like floating temples on the horizon, they would resemble neglected wastelands of sedge grass and northern dock. No, no-one would think of doing this, of destroying a horizon. The horizon is probably the most important resource they have out here, the quivering optic nerve in a dream although they barely notice it, let alone attempt to articulate its significance. No, nobody would even consider doing this until the country attains such wealth that it is in the process of going to rack and ruin.

  6

  It is spring again and the sky is high above the islands, the winds are cold and confused and bring along gusts of warm air. The oystercatchers have returned to the beach and strut about like black-and-white chickens, nodding their heads and boring their long red bills into the sand, drilling and drilling and cheep-cheeping, unable to do anything else, oystercatchers are idiotic birds, but they come with spring.

  In mid-fjord the wind suddenly drops.

  Hans Barrøy has to lower the sail and start rowing. Maria grabs the oars too, sits down behind him and keeps jabbing him in the back with her knuckles until he shouts stop, that hurts, and womenfolk . . . know next t’ bloody nothin’ about rowin’. Barbro and Ingrid, squeezed into blue and yellow dresses, laugh, sitting on a sheepskin in the stern with a little suitcase and the idle tiller between them.