The Unseen

by Roy Jacobsen

  32

  Martin had almost stopped working. Before, in the winters, he rowed around the local shores with a jig and some nets, now he was content to do one trip a week, with a trolling line. On these occasions he took Lars with him. Lars was wild and eager. Martin also brought in peat turfs when he had the energy, lit the cod-oil lamps, which no-one else was allowed to touch, saw to the fish and told Barbro how to do this or that, which was neither necessary nor useful. Otherwise he played with little Lars, the Swede, whom he had made his own.

  They crawled round on the floor and scrapped. Lars, robust with a strong grip, stood up and pulled his grandfather’s hair. Martin thought him too heavy-handed and was equally rough with him. He pretended to be hurt and to want revenge, and the young lad ran out chuckling with laughter. Pursued by his grandfather, all around the island. Until Martin got tired. And he didn’t want to play when he was asleep. Karnot, the cat, was still there, she was just as old as Martin and had begun to sleep on his stomach. When he had his midday nap Lars would come in with a wooden stick and poke first the cat, then his grandfather.

  “Oh, dammit, A’m not as young as A used t’ be,” Martin said, got up and went out and looked around to see if there was any work he could do. Usually there wasn’t. He chopped up some kindling and showed Lars how to do it.

  *

  Ingrid doesn’t want to chop wood anymore, she bakes crispbread, lefse, bread, she can milk the cows, separate the cream and churn and make gomme – sweet cheese and pickle – and spin and knit and row and swim. Ingrid can do almost anything. She can card eider down, arrange nets neatly in the tubs, bait lines, split fish – all men’s work – tie fish in pairs for drying – at a pinch women’s work – collect gull eggs, pick berries and lift potatoes, strangely enough both men’s and women’s work. But in the potato field it is like cutting peat, her father stands up and the women are on their knees. Martin is also on his knees. When he isn’t lying on his back.

  There isn’t a twelve-year-old in this world who can do more than Ingrid, she is a daughter of the sea, who doesn’t view the crashing waves as a danger or a threat, but as a means and a solution, for most things. One day after her father has left for his labouring job again, she tells Lars that they are going to take the færing and row north to Stangholmen, to visit Thomas and Inga, and see if they can get some tobacco for her grandfather, recently Martin has been whingeing so much about not having any tobacco or coffee.

  “A got th’ money,” she says.

  She got it from her mother for gilling and salting herring which they sold at the Trading Post. She has kept it in her chest ever since.

  They launch the færing into the sea, it is child’s play with the new windlass, set the sail and are well over halfway before her mother catches sight of them and comes running out. They pretend they can’t hear, her voice is lost in the balmy wind, and they are so near Stangholmen that they can see the houses and crags.

  But there is no natural harbour in Stangholmen, only a shallow beach, so they have to sail between some skerries, and as they round the last one and drop sail, Thomas is standing on the shore yelling, just as furiously as Maria.

  “Away home wi’ tha! Can’t tha see the heavens?!”

  Pointing to the sky, shaking his head and screaming with rage.

  There will be no tobacco or coffee, they don’t even row in, but Ingrid doesn’t want to go back empty-handed, besides, she can’t see anything wrong with the weather, neither can Lars.

  They hoist the sail again and cross between the islets towards the Trading Post and they are outside the harbour when the first gust of wind tears the sheets out of Ingrid’s hands and threatens to capsize the boat. Lars shouts and narrowly escapes falling overboard. Ingrid turns the stern into the wind, drops sail, almost all of it, and steers dead downward to a green patch on the rock between the Trading Post and the church, Ingrid hasn’t set the course but the howling gale and the sea, which is getting rougher and rougher, they are taking in water with every heave, and she screams to Lars that he should go to the bow and jump ashore with the mooring rope before they hit the rock, otherwise he will be sent flying.

  They don’t meet the rock but the green patch, and the færing, with a wet sigh, cuts into a soft cushion of grass and seaweed and comes to a halt with the rudder swinging like a door in the wind.

  They climb ashore and try to pull the boat up higher. But it won’t budge, and Ingrid knows what is going to happen: the sea will get rougher, the tide will continue to rise and the boat will slowly but surely be smashed to pieces, their precious boat.

  And she can’t bear to see that.

  She drags Lars up the rock with her. Towards the Trading Post. They are soaked from the rain and the sea and no-one can see them crying, not even when they enter the Store and stand in front of Margot, who is serving behind the counter, sturdy Margot, who recognises them and wonders what on earth they are doing out in this weather. She is amazed when she realises they are alone.

  “We wan’ some tobak f’ Grandad,” Lars wails.

  “Hva kind o’ tobak?”

  “F’ Grandad, f’ Grandad . . .”

  He is confused, snot runs. Ingrid has to stop herself crying and wipe his nose. He tears himself away and charges outside. She follows and catches up with him in a field where he has come to a standstill, as though his body has seized up, he is shaking and his teeth are chattering.

  She leads him back to the Store and they sit on the coke bin and there is nothing they can say. Or do. Now Ingrid can begin to cry again. They are on land, but they want to be on the sea. Then she notices that the wind is dying down, moves out from under the eaves and realises that the rain has let up too, the weather is clearing to the south, the sky is bright.

  They go back in, buy rock sugar and a tub of syrup, pay and go without listening to Margot’s warnings, run back down to the boat and see it tossing from side to side in the same place, still in one piece.

  They bail out the water and push it away on a wave and start rowing.

  Ingrid can’t believe it.

  They row against the swell, each with their two oars, Lars at first in sync with her, then more and more wildly, shouting something, he is counting, she thinks, and he pulls at the oars faster and faster, until she is unable to keep up with him. They are past the last islet. Lars is seasick, has to throw up, and loses an oar, they watch it wave goodbye and disappear. Ingrid rows. Lars goes down on his knees, curls up, lying in the water on the boards with his hands covering his ears. Ingrid is rowing and is hot and has red swirls in front of her eyes, her arms are trembling and her back burning, she rows on and with the last ounce of her strength waits for the final gust of wind, the proof that this will not succeed, because it cannot succeed, it is too far, the sea too frenzied, and the wind picks up, the waves around them are white froth, and she knows they are doomed when a jolt reverberates through the færing, it has hit a rock.

  But there are no skerries here.

  They have collided with another boat.

  She turns and sees their big rowing boat. Maria and Barbro at the oars and their grandfather standing up in the huge swell, white, rigid faces and soundless voices, Grandad puts a foot on the railing, waits, sinks, rises, waits and jumps like a youngster into the færing and tears the oars out of her hands, pushes her down into the space between the thwarts, where she lies alongside Lars, staring up at him, she watches him drive one oar like a lever into the next swell and turn the færing round, so that they have the sea behind them, then he sits down and bends forward with the oars like two black wings raised in the air.

  33

  When Ingrid awoke she was dead. She was lying on her back in a narrow bed in an empty room and saw light in the window, sun. Yes, indeed. But the bedcover wasn’t of down, it was as heavy as lead, and her back ached, her arms trembled and her mind was asleep.

  She managed to wriggle onto her right side and saw a white door. A room with a floor, walls and ceiling, all painted
white, and a bed, the one she was lying in, and a window, the one she was looking at, a door, which she examined. She wondered if it could be opened, where it led, if she could open it, when a distant noise penetrated all the whiteness, it could have been laughter.

  Her name was Ingrid. She was twelve years old, her hair was dry and combed, but not plaited, and lay like a wreath around her head. She held her breath. Exhaled and closed her eyes. Opened them again. Sunlight in the window. No wind, not a sound, the distant voices, the laughter.

  She pushed the heavy eiderdown aside and sat up. She could move her limbs, she could struggle up on unsteady legs and stand by the window and look down on a square-shaped meadow which had been grazed to the ground and looked like a green sheet of paper on a brown tabletop. There were some people on it. Two of them were lying back on their elbows, not moving. They were men, who were alive and talking to each other. Two other figures stood some distance away, they were women, they were talking too, though just as soundlessly, and between them a boy with a long stick was running about and drawing a figure of eight on the green sheet. The adults turned and watched him, laughed at him and shouted something.

  Ingrid’s fingers were claws.

  She tried to straighten them. She knew who the people were, her mother and Barbro and her grandfather, the little boy was Lars. And one man was a stranger. Now an unfamiliar woman also came into the picture. The others turned and smiled at her. She gave them small white cups, filled them from a jug, they drank and talked, and Ingrid now recognised Stangholmen, the man was Thomas, and the woman was Inga. Ingrid had been here before, a handful of times, but they had often waved to each other across the water. When she raised her eyes she could make out Barrøy in the distance.

  She was on the wrong side of the sea.

  *

  The bad: she was able to straighten her claws and saw that the knuckles were red and chafed. She looked down at her knees protruding from under the edge of her skirt and the blood that ran in a thin line over her kneecap and down her calf, another stream down the inside of her other knee. She opened her mouth to scream and heard nothing. Down on the green sheet of paper everyone froze and stared up at her, she saw her mother open her mouth, close it again and start running towards her.

  *

  The good: they rowed home together, Maria and Ingrid in the færing, Barbro and Lars, each taking an oar in the rowing boat. Martin sat on the aft thwart laughing at them, pointing out all the things they couldn’t do, above all else row properly. The sea was calm with a long, lazy swell. It was October. They competed to get home first. Her mother had explained to her about the blood. Ingrid was told not to row harder than Maria. Lars and Barbro came first. Lars cheered. The cows were bellowing in the barn. The sheep lay in the Garden of Eden eating potato haulms. From the roof of the quay house an eagle alighted. From one drying rack, another. But blood had flowed. And when Ingrid turned she could see Thomas and Inga like small chess pieces on Stangholmen’s southernmost headland.

  “Nu tha can wave t’em,” Ingrid’s mother said, winding in the færing. “So they ca’ see we’re heim.”

  Ingrid went to the top of the crag and waved, thinking of everything she would have to forget, the man who came and stole something they didn’t know they had. And on the other island they waved back with a green scarf, they called it the signal scarf. They also had a red one, which they used when they needed help. Behind her, Maria said she should go with her to the cowshed while Barbro cooked dinner. She also asked:

  “Hva’s this hier?”

  A brown lump on the floor of the færing. The rock sugar. But the tub of syrup was still intact. Ingrid lifted it up, weighed it in both hands and could feel how important it was, the weight of it, it was undamaged, and she carried it up to the house.

  34

  Nelly is visiting. It is Easter, Good Friday and low, low tide, the short period of the year when the island is at its biggest and they can walk on snow-white sand around the whole kingdom, apart from below the Hammer and the new quay, where the water is always so deep that Lars can dive into it, the others don’t. But Ingrid has once swum all the way around the island, at high tide, when the island was at its smallest, that was in the middle of a hotter summer than all the others.

  Now she does the round with Nelly, who is here because her mother is visiting family. Nothing is said about her father, nor her siblings.

  Nelly asks questions that have never been asked on Barrøy: Why don’t you have any keyholes in doors? Who is Lars’s father? Why haven’t you got any brothers or sisters? What does your grandfather say to that?

  Ingrid knows which questions she mustn’t ask her mother. But she ruminates on the most important one, reviews it continually, the question of why she is an only child, children on other islands have nine or even thirteen siblings. Nelly has six brothers, and on Stangholmen Thomas and Inga raised five girls and three boys, who left one by one when they had finished school and now are only there to help in the busy season, otherwise the two parents are alone, they have been alone for as long as Ingrid can remember.

  But they have two scarves to signal with, one green, the other red.

  Nelly also has a few criticisms of Barrøy: first of all, there is no-one else here, not like on her island of Lauøy, where there are four whole families. And aren’t there any dogs here? And the houses aren’t painted. Nelly’s house isn’t painted either, but one building which doesn’t belong to her family is red, it is the only building they can see from the school on Havstein, Nelly can point it out, her neighbour’s barn.

  Nelly is not too keen on boiled pollack or liver, either. But she is obviously exaggerating because she eats as heartily as Lars. And there is a lot of food she likes, whether she says so or not: cinnamon biscuits with butter, last year’s rhubarb jam, fresh milk, crispbread, the eiderdown she sleeps under beside Ingrid in the North Chamber, they don’t have down on Lauøy. She also appreciates having her own chair, which she sits on at meal times. It is Hans’s chair, he is in Lofoten as usual, so she sits at the head of the table, like a queen, and she probably hasn’t sat there very often, looking straight at Martin, who sits at the other end. And walking around a whole island at low tide, like on the brim of an enormous hat, and collecting gulls’ eggs in small net baskets, you can’t do that on every island.

  In addition, Nelly is a good worker, even though Maria says they should take time off and do what they want, which is also something new for Ingrid.

  Nelly has plaited her hair, which swings between her shoulders like a rope when they tease Lars, making him run after them across the sand dunes. Lars is a stocky lad, and hot-tempered, but not very tall. They throw eggs at him, the yolks run like gleaming honey down his furious face. Ingrid enjoys being naughty. And Lars is stupid enough to wipe himself down in the dry heather and looks like a lumpsucker when he comes home. Ingrid is given a bigger tongue-lashing than she has ever had before, those precious eggs. But Nelly gets the same treatment. While Lars takes a run-up and punches Ingrid in the face, so hard that Maria has to stuff rags up her nostrils to staunch the blood.

  Problems arise with Martin too, such as when he can’t sleep, he walks around and feels like a stranger in his own world, since Lars only runs after the girls.

  On top of that, he is grumpy, and talks in a mumble, that is why Nelly asks what he is saying, this too is a question there is no answer to, even if Ingrid understands everything he says, also everything he doesn’t say.

  But what about her not having any brothers or sisters?

  At the beginning Nelly says she is homesick. But as the day for her return approaches she starts to sob and expels short bursts of air through her nostrils. Maria says that Barbro and Ingrid don’t need to go to the cowshed with them, Nelly is enough, and talks to her in private. And when they emerge Nelly is almost like she was when she arrived, although she still doesn’t want to go home, she wants to live on Barrøy for the rest of her life, it is the best place she has ever been. />
  Over dinner, Martin asks if she has been to that many places.

  Nelly says she has been to both Havstein and Lauøy, and once to the Trading Post with her father, but actually they deliver their catches to another trading post, in Åsværet, and she has never been there.

  Martin laughs. Nelly does too. He asks her what her grandfather’s name is, and it transpires that Martin fished with him for many winters, in Træna. So he asks more questions, which Nelly understands and answers.

  Then Lars also asks a question, how many brothers has she got?

  She counts up the whole impressive collection, and Lars asks yet another question, to Barbro this time, why hasn’t he got any brothers?

  And there is a silence.

  Lars glances at Ingrid, from her to Maria, and his eyes stop there, he is thinking so hard they can hear the cogs creaking, then he opens his mouth as Martin gets to his feet and says, well, he has to go out and see to the calf that was given soot yesterday, it has a bad stomach, and Ingrid asks Lars if he wants another egg in his face.

  Everyone laughs at that, except Lars.

  He gets up and follows his grandfather.

  *

  After they have gone to bed, Ingrid hears Nelly sniffling in her sleep and mumbling words she doesn’t understand. But she feels a deep gratitude at being able to hear the unconscious groans of someone who doesn’t ever want to leave Barrøy and who used to plait her hair when it hung down to her waist.

  Maria and Barbro row them back.

  Ingrid is sitting in her best clothes, with a sore nose, next to Nelly and watching her grandfather and Lars on the Hammer at home, an old man and a little lad on her island, which is becoming smaller and smaller, while Nelly sobs and coughs and makes no attempt to hide her tears, as though she can at last cry to her heart’s content and doesn’t want to miss the chance to make up for lost time. When they arrive on Havstein she is pale and composed. The girls walk up to the Farm and turn and wave to Maria and Barbro, who are already clear of the harbour. Barbro raises an oar and waves back. Ingrid is at home both here and there. She is a sentimental child. And very happy.