The Unseen

by Roy Jacobsen

  However, usually Thomas on Stangholmen does this, or one of the oarsmen from the Trading Post. But if this were the case, what might this message be? News of someone’s death?

  Hans goes through the names of those closest to him who might have died, and comes to the conclusion that they wouldn’t send a stranger, but of course there are other types of message . . .

  Such as?

  Then they recognise the boat, it is the færing belonging to Adolf from Malvika, at the foot of the mountain on the mainland, and Adolf never lends his boats to anyone, especially not to people who can’t row and don’t know where they are. In other words, a wave of uncertainty precedes this new arrival until, on top of it all, they discover that he looks scary standing there in the rocking boat with his long black hair and beard and eyes that look in different directions.

  Their first impulse is to chase him away. But they are polite and curious and stand passively watching him step ashore and listen to him speaking loudly and rapidly in a dialect they are unfamiliar with. He tells them he has escaped from somewhere, from jail, he says, and begs them to take pity on him.

  “I can see you’re simple folk, who are not accustomed to people like me, I could do as I please here, but I have no wish to do so, I’d prefer to partake of your hospitality . . .”

  Hans is comforted to hear that the stranger seems cultured. And his voice is reassuring, maybe because it would have been worse with mere silence, in addition to his wild appearance. Hans nods to the rest of his family to set their minds at rest, but says to the stranger:

  “Tha can’t bide hier.”

  Then everything changes.

  “A tol’ tha A’m bidin’ hier,” he replies, mimicking their dialect with a snort, slings a kitbag over his shoulder and abandons the boat without mooring it, then walks up toward the houses, leaving the family there, gaping spectators to an invasion of their own kingdom.

  Martin wades out and grabs the mooring rope. They pull the boat ashore and exchange glances, rotate it half a turn so the broad painted side is visible from the sea, Adolf’s færing on dry land where it doesn’t belong, that is meant as a signal, a cry for help, which they don’t even believe in themselves.

  They walk up in the footsteps of a convict, all their eyes on Hans, he can sense it, and when they see the stranger going into the house as though he lived there, he knows what he has to do, he has to kill this man.

  There is a kind of gathering outside the door, in truth no more than collective hesitancy, Hans goes in first, then Maria and Ingrid and Barbro with Lars on her arm, even though he is four and squirming and wants to be put down.

  Martin stays outside and stands by the casement window, where he sees the family standing in a line against the wall inside, like beggars in their own kitchen, while the intruder has commandeered Hans’s chair and eyes them up one by one, considering what orders to give his servants next.

  “Hvo’s tha?” he says to Ingrid. They don’t know whether he is making fun of them or not. Ingrid lets go of her mother’s hand, steps forward and says her name. The stranger nods, but doesn’t appear to have hit on anything interesting to ask her to do, instead he turns his attention to Barbro and repeats the question. Barbro doesn’t answer.

  “Haven’t tha any grub?”

  They understand the words, but remain motionless, as if they don’t know where things are, the pantry door, the stove, the chimney pipe, the coffee grinder and the jars of salt, sugar . . . the tubs on the bench next to the sink that Hans had brought from Lofoten that spring, it is as if they haven’t seen these before, and the intruder not only looks as though he lives here, he even seems to feel at home. He repeats the word “grub”, they recoil, and only Ingrid has the presence of mind to ask what he would like.

  He answers in a loud voice, as if they are deaf, says they must have some bread, butter, meat . . . I saw some cows out there, calves . . .

  Maria opens the pantry door. The stranger shouts something to her. She stops and looks over her shoulder. And now Hans can’t stand there any longer. He leaves his three womenfolk and one nephew and goes out without heeding the words the new owner shouts at him, though they ring in his ears:

  “Where the hell d’you think you’re going?”

  He goes down to the potato field, where they broke off their work when the boat came into view, and sits down with his back to the house.

  Ingrid can see him from the window. Her grandfather follows Hans and sits down at his side. They talk. It has started to rain. Barbro settles down in the rocking chair with the large child on her lap, eyes the stranger, who eyes her back, aping her, Barbro rocks back and forth, pinches Lars to make him sit still, while the interloper looks as if he is about to explode as Maria places food on the table. Now Ingrid cannot bear to be there any longer either.

  She looks down at her hands, blackened with soil, but can’t bring herself to leave without asking for permission. And she doesn’t ask her mother but the stranger, who has been given bread and cold fish and butter, she asks if she can go.

  He says she can do what she likes.

  She curtsies, goes out, down to the potato field, and stands in front of her father, who is on his knees between the furrows furiously tossing potatoes into a box, which she has never seen him do before. Hans Barrøy is not a man to kneel, the women lift the potatoes, he transports the boxes to the cellar. Now he seems to be praying. Ingrid stands there until he asks her what she is staring at.

  He repeats the question.

  Behind him she sees her grandad sitting with his hands on his knees. He is shaking his head. Her father struggles to his feet and raises his hand as if intending to hit her. She feels no fear. He lowers his hand and casts a sidelong glance at his father, who comes over and stands at his side.

  They exchange a few words. Ingrid blinks.

  They leave the Garden of Eden shoulder to shoulder, walk across to the quay, disappear into the Lofoten boat shed and re-emerge, Hans carrying the harpoon gun they use to shoot porpoises, his father a sledgehammer shaft, after which they return to the house and go inside.

  Ingrid wants to stop them, but cannot utter a sound, runs after them and stands outside the kitchen window peering through the rain-wet pane, unable to see anything. She is walking towards the porch when the door opens again and out comes the stranger, backwards, suddenly he seems smaller.

  After him comes first her father, with the gun to his shoulder and the kitbag in his hand, he flings it at the stranger. Then comes Barbro, still with Lars on her arm, and finally her grandfather, who takes an unsteady stride off the doorstep, falls forward and hits the stranger in the face with the hammer shaft causing him to fall, too, with a loud cry.

  Ingrid sees her father rest the weapon against his shoulder and close one eye. Maria places a hand on his arm. Grandad gets to his feet again. The stranger has blood on his face, he is cursing, and then there is something about his clothes, which they hadn’t noticed before, he is smartly dressed, in an expensive suit, a waistcoat with shiny buttons, trousers with a sharp crease, a gold chain dangling from one pocket, a rich man backing off southwards through the meadows with the whole pack of them after him.

  When they get to the boat they stand around looking at one another.

  He wipes a hand over his face and gives a shrug. They watch him slide out the boat while Hans keeps his gun trained on him. They watch him climb aboard, sit at the oars and begin to row with the same clumsy strokes that brought him here, heading first towards Malvika and the mountains, where he came from, then north-east towards the Trading Post. He disappears in a grey shower of rain, reappears and vanishes for good in even more rain.

  They are drenched. They know nothing about him, what his name is, where he came from, nor where he is going. All they know is that he has been there. Ingrid looks at her father, who doesn’t return her gaze, but walks arm in arm with Maria back to the house, the gun under his arm, with Martin wielding the hammer shaft, while Barbro finally puts Lars d
own so that he can run about as he usually does.

  *

  The following night Ingrid is woken by the sound of boats coming from all directions, it is no use turning over, it is no use looking away, closing your eyes, forgetting, breaking into a run, for her feet move as little as her eyelids.

  She goes into her parents’ room and wakes Maria, sees from her mother’s face that she will tell her to go back. But she changes her mind and gets up, goes to Ingrid’s room and lies down beside her, Ingrid and Maria, she asks if the man will come back.

  “No,” her mother says.

  That was what she said when Barbro left.

  And next day, when Ingrid sees her father casting his eye around in the potato field, as if on the lookout for a boat, or a horse, and he says that he is sorry he didn’t kill the bastard, it was stupid of him to let him escape in a boat that didn’t belong to him, Adolf’s boat, she can’t understand why they didn’t do it. Nothing has been taken from the island, nothing has been stolen or destroyed. Yet the stranger has robbed them of the most important thing they had, which they can never regain. Ingrid believes it has something to do with the different ways they reacted, those who left the kitchen because they couldn’t bear to be there, and those who stayed. Ingrid is a sentimental child.

  31

  Hans Barrøy treads on a nail and injures a toe, it turns septic. He limps more and more with every day that passes and has to go to a hospital on the mainland and have it amputated. On his return, he walks with a stick, they have cut off not one toe but two, because he left it so late, and now he can’t travel to Lofoten, Maria decides.

  “Hva a we goen’ t’ live on?”

  “Tha can’t go t’ sea with a stick,” she says.

  Uncle Erling completely agrees when he drops by in his boat at the start of the New Year. Hans will have to let one of the men see to the fishing tackle this winter, he says, take a half-catch share in payment and stay at home, fish close to the shore, with tha stick, ha ha.

  Hans acquiesces and sends Erling off with half of his gear, he remains on the new quay with his family watching the Barrøyværing depart without him for the first time in fifteen years.

  This happens on the morning of January 3.

  Those who have to go to work in the barn, go to the barn. While Hans stands looking around him. It is a curious situation and there is nothing to look at. There is the horizon, here is the land. He can hear the sea. But that is it. Now he walks away to collect all the materials he can find and starts making benches in the new boathouse. He continues without a break until he is finished the following day. Two benches. Then he tells Barbro he wants to teach her how to bait lines.

  “A know hvur t’ do that already,” Barbro says.

  “But tha’s got t’ bi able t’ mend ’em too,” Hans says. “And coil ’em up neat.”

  Barbro can’t do that. Barbro likes to put bits of herring onto the hooks and tries to wind the lines carefully into the tub, but the tangles get worse the more she struggles. But Ingrid can do it well, when she isn’t at school. And Maria too, when she isn’t in the cowshed or cooking.

  *

  It was a strange winter, a winter without emptiness, loneliness or gravity. The finest winter in Ingrid’s life, nothing short of a summer. Even the weather was as it should be. Hans and Martin got up at the crack of dawn every morning, as in the busiest periods of the year, ran four tubs of line across the water between Barrøy and Havstein and fished on the seaward side of the island whenever the weather permitted. They also fished with nets.

  More and more nets.

  In the middle of January the first fish-drying rack saw the light of day. They hadn’t had a rack on Barrøy before, apart from the one where they dried the nets. First there was one, then a second. By the end of March they had three, all on the hills in the west. There they dried the twelve tons of fish they caught in the course of these months, and that is not bad for two men and two and a half women in the baiting room, that amounts to almost three tons of dried fish. When the weather was bad they were forced to stay on land, and it was Maria who had the final word on what constituted bad weather. Things were going so well that they could stay home at the merest hint of a gale.

  But again Hans regretted he had got rid of the horse, because they had to carry the pairs of tail-tied fish to the rack by hand.

  He gave this a lot of thought. Having a horse still wasn’t economically viable, with all the fodder it consumed. The family carried the fish in crates which Hans strapped to their backs, and Lars dragged fish after him in the snow, a pair in each hand. It was a terrible slog. But can’t we move the racks to behind the quay house where they clean and tie the fish, for Christ’s sake? No, we can’t, a drying rack has to stand on bare rock and not above grass and marshland, which sends fumes and flies and Armageddon up into the fish.

  Hans also went into the cowshed, a man in the cowshed.

  Martin had never heard or seen anything so ridiculous.

  Ingrid began to miss being at home again as she sat on the school bench on Havstein learning arithmetic and reading Bible stories and singing, even though she had friends, whom she missed when she was at home. And during this winter it became abundantly clear to her again, she belonged on Barrøy, an island that no longer had seasons, which was always with her even when she wasn’t there.

  But if this winter was different, the next summer was too. At the beginning of May Uncle Erling came by with the fishing tackle, the pickings were lean, the season up north had been poor. Likewise, the price they received for their own dried fish at the Trading Post was poor, for here around the islands fishing has been good, claimed Tommesen, the proprietor.

  “Tha can row t’ Åsværet with tha tiddlers an’ see hva tha get thar.”

  Besides, it wasn’t top quality. Tommesen maintained there were too many second-grade fish.

  So there were no new buildings on Barrøy that summer. But during June Hans and Martin scraped peat from the bare rock south of the Hammer and moved one drying rack there, so it wasn’t quite so far to carry the fish, and the others begin to wonder what this might mean, is Hans planning to be at home for another winter, settle down here, be like them?

  Is that even a possibility?

  Hans and Maria decide it is, they are free people, they are strong, and together.

  But now Hans has no fishing gear to send north with his brother, he needs the rest of the line himself. In addition, they are struggling to get hold of enough bait, herring, small pollack, so throughout January there is more net than line fishing, also on the seaward side of the island. But there the weather is suddenly close on impossible. A lot of the nets Barbro made are lost. She is working her fingers to the bone to make new ones. They too are lost. In February a storm destroys one rack, full of fish. They have to wash them and hang them up again, and Hans wakes in the night more and more often and has to go down to the kitchen and take peeks at the weather and light the fire and pace to and fro and be reminded that he has no coffee, look at the boats and the drying racks, driven by the same disquiet that the stranger left behind, the curious regret. If he had killed him he would never be able to return. He can’t see a trace of him now, it is true, but he still won’t go away, and Hans wonders if he would have had other spectres in his mind if he had done as he should have done, taken the man’s life.

  Anxiety can merely be dulled by exhausting work. Now he has both.

  *

  The frost arrived and the storm subsided, and fishing was good in the weeks leading up to Easter. Then it turned out to be a year without a spring, one of those years when spring doesn’t come until one afternoon at the beginning of June; before then there is just ice and slush, and then cold, slanting rain that has more of a deadening than liberating effect on crops and animals and humans.

  Things got so bad that Hans Barrøy began to wonder whether his island was too small, whether these two winters at home had been of any value or whether he had met his destiny, for let
’s face it, he concluded, first there is one good winter with one good excuse for being at home, then a poor one, of sheer idleness. On top of that, it would take at least another year to remedy the wretched state of affairs, as now he had neither nets nor line. All because of a toe. Two toes. At any rate he wasn’t a home-lover any more.

  *

  They were building a railway on the mainland, the Nordland Line. It would be the saving of many a poor devil. Now it would be Hans Barrøy’s saviour. He was a good ganger and rock-blaster with a sharp eye for the secrets of the mountains. He left for the site as soon as the hay was on the drying racks and didn’t come back until the middle of December, hollow-cheeked, straight-backed and as sleepless as a summer’s night, but with new equipment, lines, anchor ropes and hooks, bubbling with Lofoten fever more than ever before.

  He spent Christmas in the quay house setting up the equipment, eight tubs. And he had brought another novelty with him, as Martin had become so old and Lars was still too young, a windlass, which was installed at the back of the boat shed, so they had something to assist them when the boats had to be pulled in or go out, all you had to do was turn the crank, like on a grindstone.

  Maria and Barbro baked and filled another chest of basic provisions for four months, organised his bed linen, clothes . . . and in the small drawer inside: spectacles, razors, camphor drops, pencil, sugar lumps . . . And on January 2 they were there again, seeing off a father and a brother and a husband and an uncle, they waved and shouted to deaf ears while Uncle Erling’s aft lantern swung in the winter darkness and it all resembled a funeral. Afterwards they went home and resumed the loneliness and gravity, Barbro, Maria, Ingrid and Lars, a population of four. Martin lay at home in bed on this memorable day, he was only half a man now, ancient and decrepit after the two hardest winters in living memory. In the coming months he would sleep, with a vengeance, may his son stay in Lofoten for a long time, may fortune be with him.