The Unseen

by Roy Jacobsen

  The extension has become a rainwater tank.

  Hans Barrøy hammers together some long boards, in a U-shape, and fixes them under both eaves, as gutters, then attaches two ducts which lead diagonally down and meet above the tank, in a funnel formation. He finds some planks and sets about making a lid. It looks like a floor, and is just as solid, they can sit and walk on it. Hans makes a hatch for it, hinged in such a way that it doesn’t obstruct the buckets that will be lowered and raised.

  Impressed, old Martin laughs.

  As the weather is good the evening they finish fixing gutters to the barn roof too, they have supper sitting on the tank lid. One wet July later the tank is full. The water is clear, crystalline, unlike the dirty brown liquid the animals will now have all to themselves. After the next Lofoten season Hans wants to get a hand pump as well and install it in the kitchen. It is not the pump itself which is the challenge but the copper piping which has to run under the whole house and will presumably freeze during the winter. Ideally, the tank should have been on the north side of the house, up against the kitchen wall. They sleep in the North Chamber when it is too hot in Maria’s preferred room or when the rain makes too much noise. Similarly they carry their eiderdowns to the South Chamber when it is too cold at the north end. The joys of life.

  9

  They and the inhabitants of other islands exchange breeding bulls and rams. If the Barrøy islanders have a ram it is kept apart from the ewes and lambs. It has an islet to itself, which is called Ramholm. It grazes there throughout most of the year eating grass and seaweed, and comes home for only a month around Christmas, when it services the ewes. When the time comes, Hans goes to get it, and Ingrid accompanies him.

  Ingrid is afraid of the ram, it is vicious. But her father corners it on a headland with a large stick, grabs its fringe, turns it over, ties its legs together and drags it onto the boat while Ingrid looks on in trepidation. There is a lot of life in the ram. It is a mad, raging beast. With long, shaggy, unruly hair, salty crusts of sand and soil flapping around its hooves and a swaying thick black armour coat that stinks of sea and cowshed. When they arrive on Barrøy Hans puts a rope around its neck and it is so sore and docile after the crossing that Hans is able to lead it up to the barn without any further resistance. After it has done its duty they transport it back to Ramholm, or, on the rare occasion, to one of the other islets, where no sheep are grazing at the time.

  All the islands have names. One of them is called Knuten. Once the ram tried to escape. It swam over to Knuten. When they discovered this they just let it stay there. Three days later it swam back. That taught him a lesson, Hans said. Ingrid thought it was frightening. If it’s lonely why doesn’t it swim to an island with sheep on? She also wonders if it might be blind. That would make it even more frightening. But even a blind ram can hear, can’t it?

  When the sun goes down in a sea of flames out there they can see the ram silhouetted against the red horizon, a tiny insect on a rocky raft afloat on the sea. And if the wind is in the right direction they can also hear it bellowing.

  “He’s cryen’ out t’ God,” Barbro said.

  It is the same for the ram as with other animals, it dies. But then it has to be buried. The ram is the only animal they don’t eat.

  10

  They don’t eat eider ducks either, but then the eider isn’t a domestic bird, even though they build small stone houses for it, in order to collect the down, and for years they have had one nesting under the porch steps. So the cat has to be kept indoors for weeks. It doesn’t like that because it is only allowed in Martin’s room, where there are no curtains it can tear to shreds. The cat is called Bonken, it is a tom, because they can’t have a cat that keeps having kittens, which Hans would have to kill, they say, but it is the same with cats as it is with all other animals on an island, how can they have young if there is only one of them?

  In late spring, when the weather is so bad that it’s not possible to do anything outside, Barbro and Maria set to work cleaning the down with their carding frame and comb. Down is the most valuable, mysterious material they handle. You can touch it and put it to your face and feel a distant, sacred warmth. You can compress it in your hand and it feels like nothing but air, and then open your palm and watch it expand into a grey cloud once more, as though nothing has happened.

  When it is time to sell the down they pack it into canvas sacks, attach a label to a cord and tie up the sack. On the label they write the year the down was collected, the name of the island and one kilo. A kilo of down is amazingly voluminous and unimaginably light. So even the high price it commands is ridiculously low. That is why they keep most of it for themselves. This is Hans’s idea. They use it in their own eiderdowns like the genteel folk in towns, or they store it in the driest loft above the cowshed, until prices pick up and they can sell it for twice as much as they get on the market in the summertime, or from Tommesen at the Trading Post, since the price of down is lowest when people want to sell and highest when only Hans wants to sell. He is the sole islander to have any success with this policy. This may be because the Barrøyers are slightly better off than others, since Hans receives a full catch share in Lofoten, but it might also be due to his family being more patient. Islanders need to be more patient than everyone else.

  Barbro doesn’t like carding down, her hands are not nimble enough, so from the summer when Ingrid turned four she had to pitch in and help her mother. Ingrid loves down, at first she just wants to play with it, and makes a mess on the tiny bench where they are sitting. But then she discovers that if you hold a ball of uncarded down in one hand and a ball of carded down in the other you cannot bear the thought of not cleaning it all, it would drive you mad if you didn’t remove the small bits of twig and grass and shell, you would rather die than suffer that.

  It is her mother who has taught her this. Telling her to sit still with her eyes closed and feel the two fistfuls of down, one carded and one uncarded, while she counts aloud, and she only gets to ten or eleven before she sees from her daughter’s smile that she has realised what this is all about. Then she says, now you have learned something you will never forget.

  From that day on Ingrid cards much faster than Barbro, who is thereby relieved of this drudgery and can be in the barn or the boat shed repairing fishing nets like a man.

  11

  Barbro can also make new fishing nets, cod nets and herring nets and flounder nets, she can even make trammel nets. This is how she spends the major part of the winter while Hans is in Lofoten. The nice thing about new nets is that they are clean and dry and don’t stink, you can sit in the kitchen with floats and needles and sew, and sew, with the murmuring heat from the stove at your back, no matter how cold it is outside.

  But Martin doesn’t like it, having the kitchen full of work, fishing gear should be outside, in the open air or in the boat shed.

  Cleaning and repairing nets in the freezing cold is the worst job in the world, it is the type of work that has ruined all the hands up and down the coast because it is the only kind that cannot be done with mittens on, Martin sees it as a luxury to be able to handle dry, new nets, unless of course it has to be done indoors in front of a stove full of glowing peat, it is not only unnecessary, it is stupid, and he doesn’t need yet another reminder that his youngest daughter is the way she is.

  Barbro couldn’t care less what her father says.

  Nor could any of the others. It must have happened only a few years ago, although none of them can put a finger on exactly what it was that caused it, but from one day to the next, Martin stopped being the person who decided everything on the island, from then on it was Hans.

  But if no-one else can remember, Martin can: it was the time when they found the Russian tree trunk and didn’t know what to do with it. He and his son were in the process of levering it onto a skid with a crowbar, but when he applied his strength, his powers deserted him without warning, as fast as a steel rod being thrust into soft, wet ground. A
short circuit in his brain. He had to sit down and get his breath back, gasping for air, while his son was left bearing all the weight.

  From then on the tone was different.

  The others noticed as well.

  Even Ingrid has begun to develop bad habits. For example, she won’t put up with being told not to do something by her grandfather, she goes to her mother who will often allow her to do whatever it is Martin wants to stop her doing. Maria sometimes sides with her father-in-law, according to her mood, as though she simply does not give a damn about whether he is there or about what he says.

  Martin has accepted this. But he has become angry. When he was young, as a man is for many years, he was never angry, now he is all the time. No-one cares about that either. In the late spring nights the cat sleeps on his stomach in his small room. Through the thin wall they can hear him snoring and the cat purring. It is laughable. When the eider duck beneath the porch steps has finally hatched her eggs and guided the tiny fluff balls down the long path to the sea, the cat is let out again and sleeps for the rest of the year under the stove in the kitchen, unless he is out catching mice and fledglings.

  Bonken, the cat, comes to a tragic end.

  He was snatched by an eagle. It happened during the haymaking season. They heard screams, looked up from the drying racks and their rakes and saw a blurred ink blot beneath a sea eagle’s immense wingspan. He was squirming and clawing and hissing and for a moment they thought he would succeed in breaking free. He did too. But it was only as he began to fall that they realised how high up he was. They saw him kick out his legs like a bat taking to the wing, and plummet into eternity, then for no apparent reason he suddenly pawed the air, perhaps because he was tired of falling and wanted to start running, but instead he flipped over and hit the rock face by the Lofoten boat shed, spine first.

  It was too high, even for a cat, Hans said. And that became a catchphrase on the island, which he always returned to when something exceeded even an islander’s powers.

  Ingrid and Barbro buried Bonken at the far end of Rose Acre and placed some shells in the shape of a heart on his grave. Barbro sang a hymn. Ingrid cried. And a week or so later Hans brought home another cat. It was a female and was named Karnot, after a man Hans had gone to school with and who he thought looked like a cat, they called him Catman when he was small, too. Karnot was brown and as lovely as freshly made caramel pudding, graceful and cuddly, and was allowed to sleep on the kitchen table when the menfolk were out. At night she slept at the foot of Ingrid’s bed. They called her a day cat as she slept just as long as and at the same times as humans. But Karnot also had to stay inside when the eider duck waddled over next summer to prepare its nest under the porch steps. The eider is a sacred animal.

  12

  Winter begins with a storm. They call it the First Winter Storm. There have been earlier storms, in August and September, for example, bringing sudden and merciless changes to their lives.

  But as a rule these storms are short-lived. It is during one of them that the trees lose their leaves. As mentioned before, there are not many trees on the island but there are plenty of fruit bushes and dwarf birches and sallows – whose leaves in the course of late summer turn yellow, then brown and red at varying speeds – making the island, on some days in September, resemble a rainbow on earth. And so it looks until a sudden storm is unleashed upon them, sweeping the colours into the sea, transforming Barrøy into a whimpering, brown-furred animal, which it will remain until next spring, when it will no longer resemble a white-coated corpse beneath heaps of snow and slush, and the driving snow comes and goes, and comes once more, forming drifts, as though trying to imitate the sea on land. But they have experienced these storms many times before, they can even remember the last time, a year ago.

  The First Winter Storm, on the other hand, is quite a different matter.

  It is violent every single time and makes its entrance with a vengeance, they have never experienced anything like it, even though it also happened last year. This is the origin of the phrase “in living memory”, they have simply forgotten how it was, since they have no choice but to ride the storm, this hell on earth, in the best way they can, and erase it from their memories as soon as possible.

  Now they are in the midst of one such storm, it has raged with undiminished fury for more than a day and a night, with wispy flakes of snow swirling like tufts of wool above the island, rain as hard as hail and spring tides that do not ebb. Hans has been out three times to tie down things he didn’t even consider it possible to tie down. He has seen one of his sheep being blown into the sea before he had time to lock the others in the boat shed, they haven’t done the slaughtering yet and they have no room for all of them anywhere else, and inside he tethers them to the færing which he also ties down with its own mooring rope, it is unbelievable what men get into their heads when the First Winter Storm strikes.

  He has also attached guy ropes to the new rainwater tank cover, a task which took him several hours. And he has to gather up the new roof gutters that are strewn all over the ground and place heavy rocks on top of them before he can crawl back home, by which time he is so drenched and his face so contorted that Ingrid can hardly recognise him.

  She doesn’t like these storms, the creaking of the house and the trumpet blasts from the chimney, the whole universe in turmoil, the wind that tears the breath out of her lungs when she goes to the barn with her mother, that drives the moisture from her eyes and sweeps her into walls and bowed trees, and forces the entire family to camp down in the kitchen and sitting room, and even there they don’t get a wink of sleep. Martin too sits still when the winter storm ravages his island, with his woolly hat on his head and his great hands resting like empty, immovable shells on his knees. Unless he is holding them around Ingrid, who perambulates between him and the table and the oven and the pantry, and sits on the peat bin, dangling her feet, after which she goes back to Grandad and plays with his hands as if they were teddy bears.

  The adults’ faces are chiselled in stone. They whisper and knit their brows and make attempts to laugh but see through their own play-acting and revert to a more serious mood, the buildings on Barrøy have withstood everything so far, it is true, but that is no more than proof of the past: once there was a house in Karvika, there isn’t any longer.

  The sight of her father is the worst. Had Ingrid not known better she might have thought he was afraid, and he never is. Islanders are never afraid, if they were they wouldn’t be able to live here, they would have to pack their goods and chattels and move and be like everyone else in the forests and valleys, it would be a catastrophe, islanders have a dark disposition, they are beset not with fear but solemnity.

  This solemnity doesn’t disperse until the head of the family has been outside once more and returns with blood on his face, remarking with a grin:

  “Lovely weither out thar nu.”

  It takes them a while to realise that this is meant as a joke, and after they have wiped the blood off him and see that he has only a small cut on his chin, at which point he asks for a cup of coffee and says that th’ old rowan has started t’ lean t’east, they understand that the wind, once again, has changed direction from the terrible south-west to the west, which is the first sign that another hurricane is about to subside into an ordinary storm, and then turn into a northerly and drop to a moderate gale before finally abating enough for them to be able to carry water to the cowshed without arriving with empty buckets. Barbro and Maria can now manage to get them to the animals almost half-full, while Hans stands in the kitchen musing and fiddling with the cut on his chin; suddenly, however, he is struck by a sudden thought and tells Ingrid to go out with him to look at the sea, so that she will learn not to fear it, now, while it is at its most tempestuous, at its most instructive.

  He doesn’t know why this idea occurs to him.

  She doesn’t, either. But he puts on her coat, Martin is shaking his head, and ties a rope around her waist. They g
o out, the raging firmament above them, drag themselves southwards, wade against the current in a river of wind and water, struggle over three stone walls and crouch down behind one to catch their breath, clamber over another, Ingrid’s father laughing at every obstacle, she has to hold both hands in front of her face to breathe, up to the knoll behind the Russian tree trunk, which constitutes the last bastion against the roar that comes to meet them – foaming walls of water towering up in the black night and crashing down towards them, smashing against rock and beach and stone, causing sand and shell and ice to lash at them, this is something no-one can face, or comprehend, or remember, the trumpets of doom, all you can do is rid it from your mind.

  “It won’t hurt tha,” her father screams in her ear.

  But she doesn’t hear. Neither of them hears. He screams that she has to feel with her body that the island is immovable, even though it trembles and both the heavens and the sea are in tumult, an island can never go under, although it may quake, it is rock solid and eternal, it is fixed to the earth itself. Yes, at this moment it is almost a religious belief he wants to share with his daughter, since he doesn’t have a son, and with every day that passes he becomes more and more convinced that he will never have one and he will have to content himself with a daughter and teach her the basic principle that an island can never founder, never.

  *

  Later, Ingrid will reflect on how strange this evening was, something I’ll never forget, she will say, but this is long after the storm has passed, and only that which is unshakeable remains, the question of whether an island is more than a grain of sand. These thoughts are prompted not by her father but by her mother, who, after they have struggled home again, receives them with a barrage of reproach, complaining that she cannot even go to the cowshed without this idiot of a husband endangering the life of her daughter, if he gets any more of these crazy ideas, A’ll divorce tha an’ bi gone.