The Unseen

by Roy Jacobsen

  But Hans has become more pensive since his daughter started school, the old disquiet is back, caused by the reticence she has acquired, and that strange gravity that has taken residence in her eyes. And while they are sitting on the pile of boards in a break from work, his gaze falls on the horse grazing in Rose Acre, and he asks his father, as though the time is finally ripe, do they actually need this creature, a horse?

  It is inside for eight of the twelve months and tucks away enough fodder for one and a half cows, it pulls the mower and the plough and a cartload of hay, but they usually carry the turfs of peat themselves, so is the horse actually just something they have got used to, like a bad habit, a ball and chain?

  It is old too, ancient.

  Martin can see that his son has moved towards his position, it is a kind of admission, since Martin was critical of this investment, so he says the horse was a wise acquisition when it arrived, even though it came by boat, how else would they have got it here . . .? And leaves the rest of the reasoning hanging in the air for Hans to draw his own conclusions.

  Hans goes into the Lofoten boat shed and fetches the gun, they lead the horse down to the marsh to the west – you don’t let the women in a house see that you are killing a horse – and shoot it and bury it where it falls, like a breeding ram. It takes them the rest of the day and a good part of the next. But they don’t let up, they say: bloody animal, and wipe the sweat from their brows and go back to the building site and carry on working, they have already started cladding the south wall and look forward to finishing this so that they are sheltered while completing the rest of the house.

  But Hans Barrøy still feels a disquiet when he looks at his daughter or casts his eye over the island and notes that everything is not as it was before. At all waking hours of the day he knows where the animals are, every single one, for there are eagles and steep slopes here, but now he keeps catching himself straightening his back and searching for the absent horse before he realises it is dead, before he carries on working.

  It happens again and again.

  He is reflecting on the force of habit and wondering whether he regrets killing the horse when he sees the sky fill with turbulence, this is the first storm, which is going to demolish the new building at any moment.

  All you can do is start again.

  After the storm has flattened the second building too, Hans Barrøy begins to read the Bible. He takes it with him to Lofoten and leafs through it on shore days and public holidays. When, in April, they steer the boat southwards again with the flag flying aloft, to signal to those waiting that everyone is returning safe and sound once more, he regards it as a lucky omen that the framework of the new building on the Hammer is still intact, just as he left it in the winter darkness four months previously, only a little greyer. In the hold there is a stack of slate tiles with which he will soon cover the roof.

  He doesn’t draw any grand conclusions from the bold new building having survived, but is filled with enormous relief, and on top of everything his daughter is standing on the quay holding a little boy’s hand and pointing to the flag on the mast and whispering something in his ear. Hans can see the old smile on her face, which almost brings him to his knees, even though she isn’t a son. This year he has presents with him from Lofoten as well, he didn’t have any last year, then he had tools and window materials, this winter he has had other things on his mind.

  There is also a present for Martin, a razor with an ivory handle. The others get dress material and sugar and Ingrid a music box and a book called The Good Samaritan and the Donkey. There is nothing for Lars.

  Ingrid also gets a mirror. This is the third time she has seen herself in a mirror. The first was on Havstein last year. In addition, she has been allowed to play with one her mother has in her chest and usually doesn’t take out, this was when she came home from school one day with red dots in front of her eyes and wouldn’t eat.

  Now she can look at herself as much as she wants.

  She also lets Lars look in the mirror, without him realising what is going on. And the cat and her grandfather, and her father shows her, when she is sitting in front of it writing, how her right hand becomes her left and the letters become illegible, she is the other way round, as though it were possible to be someone else while still being yourself.

  She goes upstairs and puts it away in the wooden chest she has in her room.

  All women have a wooden chest, they have had these for longer than they have had chairs. On the lid of Ingrid’s a name has been engraved, PETRINE, and a year. Petrine was Hans’s maternal grandmother. But it is Maria who sees to it that the contents are as they should be. If they aren’t, she may remove something.

  You don’t need that, she says, about, say, a headscarf or a cup or a tablecloth, and replaces it with something from her own chest. This too Ingrid will inherit one day. So the question is whether it is necessary to move anything from one chest to the other. But it is. This is all about time and age, about two family lines merging into one. Ingrid’s chest is more or less as it should be, she and Maria are almost in agreement about that.

  *

  When Hans and Maria walk around the island and he sees everything again, he doesn’t mention that he has thought a lot about the horse over the winter, but intimates he may have become a little more devout. He also says it is good to be home again, they even have a special word for this: home-loving. This isn’t necessarily a positive quality for a man, so Maria says he is assuredly neither more devout nor home-loving, only older, he has some grey hair on his temples.

  He feels a surprising relief, which has nothing to do with this matter, and notices that a few grey hairs have appeared on Maria’s head, too. But when they walk up the last slope on their way back to the houses, once again he catches himself feeling that there is something missing, an animal, a horse.

  He stops and asks how many lambs they had in spring and hears her counting and pointing them out. He walks in amongst them and counts himself and hears the names they have given them and knows that from now on nothing will be as it was. A year has passed, it won’t come back, and if he asks Maria how Ingrid is doing she will say what she always does, it is as if he still doesn’t trust what he can see with his own eyes.

  27

  Lars was no more than seven months old when he pulled himself up by grabbing Barbro’s nets and after swaying for a few moments fell backwards and hit his head on the floor. This happened several times. A week later he could stand upright holding on to a cod net and look around the kitchen. Lars loved standing.

  Ingrid packed snow round the lower half of his body so that he could stand outside and wave his arms. He had blond, almost butter-yellow hair, brown eyes and chubby red cheeks. He was only eight months when he was able to stand up on the kitchen floor without any help and walk and fall and get up again and stand and walk and fetch something to eat from the pantry, because although he didn’t talk much he understood what they said and knew the difference between cup and spoon and the little tin box.

  When the snow was gone he could walk from the house to the barn and the furthest peat stack. In March the ground was covered with a sheet of ice. It rained, the frost returned, and a new coating of ice lay over the island, so they had to wear cleats on their boots. Ingrid pulled the toddler on the sledge across the flattest fields, she also threaded some fish hooks through some old lugg boots and made cleats for him too, it was like teaching him to walk again.

  At the beginning of April he went missing, first once, then again, both times they found him on Kvitsanda beach, where he sat digging the sand with a stick. At lambing time they had to attach him to a rope in the yard. But when Ingrid was home from school she would look after him from when he got up till when he went to bed. Otherwise he was with his grandfather in the boat shed playing with glass floats and fishing lines or sitting in a line tub eating dry bread. The day before Hans returned from Lofoten, Martin thrust the boy’s hand into a bucket of tar and got him to make
two prints on the boat-shed wall, two small right hands that resembled the heads of hares and would remain there forever.

  The tar remained on his hand, too, so before they rowed over to mass on Whit Sunday, Barbro scrubbed it so hard it turned bright red and had to be hidden under a mitten. Lars walked on his own from the boat up to the church. Afterwards they arranged with Pastor Johannes Malmberget for the boy to be christened on the first Sunday in August, although they had to admit he didn’t have a father.

  *

  “We all have a father,” Johannes Malmberget said. “We are the children of nature.”

  These words are actually lies that are intended merely to console, because everyone comes from two places, and Lars was, firstly, the son of a foreigner and secondly of Barbro, and therefore had a double cloud of suspicion hanging over him. But also some expectations and hope. However, as he grew in the course of the year, both the suspicion and the hope faded, only to reappear whenever he broke something or performed some great feat, and basically he did neither.

  He ran down from the churchyard to the beach and stood watching his grandfather, who had gone ahead of him and sat on a thwart with his back turned, his face hidden in his hands. The old man heard the boy splashing in the water, but didn’t stir.

  The others followed and found him sitting in the same rigid position. As Lars had waded out into the sea and was up to his waist in water, they realised something was wrong.

  Maria asked what the matter was.

  Martin muttered between his fingers that that was the last time he was going to church. They asked him why. He didn’t answer, but when they enquired whether it was because of Kaja’s grave, he nodded and replied that he didn’t want to read the writing on her headstone again, they should never have put that verse of poetry there, the priest was right, they had to remove it.

  Maria called him a silly old ass and told him to budge up. The rest of the family climbed on board and Lars was wrapped in a blanket. On the way home, Ingrid asked what all the fuss was about in connection with her grandmother’s gravestone, but didn’t receive an answer. She repeated the question. Maria asked her why she kept nagging her. Ingrid wouldn’t give in. Maria said she didn’t know, she had never known her mother-in-law, Ingrid would have to ask her father. Ingrid asked her father. He smiled and said it was a beautiful verse, Ingrid’s grandmother knew what she was doing. Ingrid nodded and looked in turn from her mother to her grandfather, who was sitting at the front of the boat with his back to them, staring down at his hands.

  When they landed by the boat shed he said what the hell was the point of that hulking great quay with the new building when they had only two færings and two rowing boats.

  Maria shook her head.

  Hans said nothing. Barbro held Lars aloft and tickled him. Martin walked up to the houses, and Ingrid felt sorry for him. This was a completely new sensation. She had no idea where it came from. The following day it had gone. But it resurfaced at times when she was preoccupied with quite different thoughts. On these occasions she recognised it as the sensation she experienced on that trip home from the churchyard, the strokes of the oars, and the faces. But she never got accustomed to it, and never told anyone about it.

  28

  Ingrid is sitting in the big reception room in Havstein Manor with a board on her lap, her knees together, holding a slate pencil and looking out of the window at a low February sun that will soon be leaving the uneven pane. She has finished writing. She knows that every word has been spelled correctly. She can feel the heat from the stove, she knows that her mittens are hanging up with the others’, her boots are standing with the others’ and her outer clothes are hanging in the hall with the others’. She is one of the others. She is from one island, and the others are from a different island. They are together. She no longer laughs when she is not supposed to, she has her hair plaited. She fixes her eyes on Olai, the teacher, until he can feel her gaze and looks up.

  But he doesn’t say anything. They wait. For the others who are still writing. Then he asks in a whisper over three bowed heads if she has finished. Ingrid nods. He nods too and continues writing in the register while Ingrid returns her gaze to the window, where the sun glides from the pane and slips into a dark triangle on the sand-scrubbed floor, the sail of a boat drifting through the room and taking the day with it, soon Gabriel will be here with the lanterns, Gabriel is a silent kindly spirit and the oldest member of the family, it is Saturday and Ingrid is going home.

  But for the first time she is not eager to leave.

  She puts down the board, gets up without asking permission and walks over and places her slate on the teacher’s desk and sees his surprised expression, turns anyway and fetches her clothes and boots and takes her little bag and leaves the room, still without asking permission or so much as a glance.

  She puts on her coat in the hall and walks out into the cold, ten minutes before school finishes – she has seen the time on the big wall clock – and continues down to the harbour, where her grandfather is talking to two men of the same age and laughing at something or other. It is the first time she has not longed to go home. It is the first time she has not been afraid. She is nine. And she notices her grandfather is different with strangers from how he is at home. She is too, she thinks.

  She stands in front of him with a smile. He returns her smile. He pats her cheek. Then he drops his large hand and keeps on talking to the two men as though nothing has happened, so Ingrid goes down to the færing and sits waiting on the middle thwart. Martin doesn’t come, he is talking.

  Ingrid gets up and steps forward to untie the mooring rope, then sits at the oars, starts rowing and is well out in the harbour before her grandfather spots her and runs up and down the wharf shouting. He waves his arms and shouts that she should come back for him. But she doesn’t. Ingrid is rowing. There is no wind, the sea is dead calm, the islets are white with black edges, the water is green. She rows with long, powerful strokes, like her mother, and is halfway home before an unfamiliar boat with two oarsmen catches up with her, whereupon her grandfather jumps on board the færing, unsure whether to give her a mouthful or laugh, she can see that in his face, this old man whom she knows better than anyone else. He tells her that now she will have to row all the bloody way home, as for him, he is going to sit on the stern thwart and smoke.

  29

  When Barbro grew up on Barrøy girls didn’t have chairs. They stood at the table and ate. Of the women in the house it was only her mother, Kaja, who sat, and she didn’t start doing that until she’d had her first son. When Kaja died Barbro wanted her chair. But Hans wanted to give it to Maria, whom he had just married. Shortly afterwards, his elder brother, Erling, got married as well and moved to another, wealthier island. As a result both Barbro and Maria got a chair, at roughly the same time. And when Ingrid was only three her father made a chair for her too, with arms they could lay a board over, so that she could sit on it with her feet on the seat, until she was big enough to sit without it.

  An era was over.

  None of this was discussed. There is no knowing whether this was Barbro’s demand or an idea Hans had brought back with him from Lofoten, which led to the women in the house being able to sit as well. It was just done, the way people suddenly find a new way through the wilderness and like it and go that way again and after a while establish a path, which is just another word for a habit.

  But Barbro remembers what it was like not to have a chair, so, once she had it, she took it with her everywhere she went, to the old boat shed and the Swedes’ boathouse, and also into the fields, she sat on it and watched the animals and the sky, and the oystercatchers on the shore. A piece of furniture outdoors. That makes the sky a ceiling and the horizon walls in a house called the world. No-one had done this before. The others could never get used to it, either.

  So another chair had to be made, for Lars. Hans made it on his new workbench in the boathouse. Barbro kept a watchful eye on him. She took him coffe
e and food. He tried to chase her away.

  But she just stood outside and waited, and he couldn’t allow her to stand in the rain, so he told her to come back in and sweep up the wood shavings and put away his tools when he no longer needed them.

  It turned out to be the finest chair on the island. Like Ingrid’s, with arms you could place a board on, but also with some carvings at the top of the backrest, which looked like the petals of a flower no-one had ever seen. There was also an oval hole in the seat, which Lars could shit through, into a potty, it was both a chair and a toilet, until he was big enough to go to the latrine the others used, which was next to the barn.

  30

  Occasionally they receive visitors from the other islands. Then their guests are served food and coffee and talk non-stop and all at the same time, for words build up in the islanders and at some point have to come out. When they are empty they go home again and begin to collect new things to say. But no strangers ever come on casual visits.

  So what is this?

  It starts as a grey shadow distinguishable against the shimmering waves in the east and gradually taking the form of a boat. Hans sees it first, it has no sail, there is only one man on board, and it is still so far away that they have plenty of time to find out everything about him before he arrives. Firstly, he is in unknown waters, no doubt about that, and he is no dab hand at rowing, so he must be from the mainland?

  But there is something purposeful about his rowing, as if it is here, Barrøy, and nowhere else, that he is heading for, so they have to ask themselves whether he has heard something about them which has made him come, or whether he knows them or might be a distant relative.

  But they have no acquaintances or family on the mainland.

  So does he want to sell them something? This has never happened before, but it can’t be ruled out. Or could it be a message he has to deliver?