The Unseen

by Roy Jacobsen

  On the beach her father and Uncle Erling had lit a bonfire. The old rugs went up in flames. One of her aunts came with a bundle of old clothes, then her mother with Grandad’s bedclothes, the sparks rose skyward on the golden August day, there was Barbro with Martin’s palliasse, she had become the robust baby sister in a seven-strong bevy of siblings, who was hugged and pampered and teased, she beamed like the sun and had her hair combed in various styles as she sat on her chair in the open air like a queen. She no longer sat alone, either, all the chairs were outside, the parlour and kitchen tables too, there was coffee and food and cakes and spirits, those that didn’t have a chair lay on rugs or in the grass and ate and drank, enveloped in the buzz of voices and laughter and everything else that belongs to life and not to death.

  Ingrid wanted to go to the Hammer and be swept into the sea again. But there was no escaping her cousin Josefine’s stolid gaze. Now too she felt her muscles contract into an involuntary smile when one of her uncles fell flat on his face to the joyous applause of the others. She shed a few tears, but her smile held and she answered all the questions until night fell like gentle rain upon the infinite crowd of people that had transformed Barrøy into a town, a foreign town, it was enough to drive you crazy, and behind it all she constantly saw her mother as she had never seen her before. She didn’t understand her. It was as strange a sensation as feeling sorry for a grandfather.

  37

  It is a year and a day since the new quay on Barrøy was completed. Hans Barrøy has not only regarded it as a triumph and an architectural masterpiece but also felt obliged to continue the good work. He has also written several important letters and been to meetings with the Department of Transport and the dairy and the local council regarding his projects.

  To no avail.

  But after his father’s death he has to make another attempt, and this time he takes Maria with him to the mainland. The three left standing on the beach watching them disappear in light drizzle think something momentous is afoot.

  This is all about adding Barrøy to the milk route, which runs three times a week between the Trading Post and Havstein and two other islands, picking up milk churns, and which in emergencies also functions as a passenger ferry for the inhabitants of the islands, even if it is no more than a condemned fishing smack, moreover it alleviates all the hassle of getting the bull to the cows or the cows to the bull. Hans has also taken along a chart, which he unrolls on the chief administrative officer’s kitchen table to show him that a stop in Barrøy would not be much of a detour.

  But they are only met with more non-committal goodwill and some words about the local council budget, which has never been tighter, besides the admin officer has nothing to do with this case, he claims.

  Maria notices that no coffee is served, and that has nothing to do with the budget, and the conversation treads water for a while until it suddenly acquires a philosophical dimension, the admin officer remembers that for years Hans Barrøy has sabotaged the civilised world’s need for a seamark, a lamp or a beacon that ships can use to navigate, on Barrøy or one of its close-lying islets or skerries, after all his property lies right in the middle of the fairway, or more precisely, on its seaward side.

  Hans asks what this has to do with his case and is told that the admin officer has had an idea, perhaps they can strike an informal deal, you see, his son works for the Lighthouse Authorities, so what about three calls a week on the milk route in exchange for them being allowed to set up a beacon on, shall we say, Skarvholmen, what does Hans Barrøy say to that, to this rock being of use for once instead of just a skerry in the sea?

  He doesn’t know what to think.

  It ruins his sleep.

  *

  He would rather have a cairn than a light. But he would prefer not to have either, not to sit at the kitchen window staring at a black finger pointing up on his horizon, probably with a white belt around its middle and an iron pennant on top. And then there are the works that would have to be carried out, it would be months of people and coming and going. And how many cows will he be able to feed if he, for example, reclaims the marshland on Gjesøya, which is close to Barrøy, to grow more grass, it should have been done generations ago, and thirdly: when it comes down to it, does he really want this boat coming three times a week?

  In other words the question is turned more and more on its head as the threat of getting what he wants looms closer by the day.

  All of this is bound up with his father’s death.

  With the island’s continued existence.

  One year has passed already, and some years are longer than others, he ties his body in knots and tosses his head, comes to a final decision and lets Maria pen the next letter, her handwriting is neater and she has a number of other linguistic merits. They sail to the mainland and deliver it together, again to the chief administrative officer, with a copy for the dairy, they are given a verbal assurance on the spot, and travel back home, Christ, that was quick, they are almost giggling on the way home, two youngsters who have opened themselves to the world, they have become a name on the map, they are visible.

  But when, two weeks later, the milk route makes its first call and all five of them are standing on the quay, where they grab the hawser – one is enough because the boat is only going to take one milk churn on board, and that is so little that the skipper, with whom Hans went to school, smiles condescendingly at both the freshly painted number on the churn and the fact that this was the cause of all the fuss, the other islands supply between ten and twenty – then Hans Barrøy realises that he has made a pact with the Devil, there was no going back, he will immediately have to reclaim Gjesøya, there is no way round it.

  He drops the railway job that autumn and rows Lars, who in fact should have started school, to Gjesøya and they set about digging drains. With a pickaxe and a spade. They make sure there is a fall and put rocks and brushwood in the trenches, there could be some big pastures here between the crags.

  But it is a colossal task, it is soul- and body-destroying, and after only two weeks Hans begins to doubt whether this is at all feasible. Not that he has any thoughts of giving up so soon. Barbro joins them for a few weeks, she is a dab hand with a spade. After another month they hire two unemployed youths from the main island. But they have to be paid, with money the islanders don’t have.

  When the frost finally comes, Hans Barrøy straightens his back and conducts a crucial conversation with himself: this new land lying in front of him, which he can contemplate with weary satisfaction, it is indescribably beautiful, no doubt about that, but is it actually his, in the same way as the other fields and pastures?

  It is almost a macabre thought, which indicates that he doesn’t like working with the soil, he is a man of the sea, more a fisherman than a farmer, more a hunter than a slave of the earth. What was once intended to be no more than a slightly extravagant extra piece of land is in the process of becoming an existential abscess.

  There has always been a conflict inside him between sea and land, in the form of a restlessness and an attraction: when he is at sea he longs to be at home and if he has his fingers in the soil he always catches himself staring at the sea and thinking about fishing. But there has been a balance in this toing and froing, an acceptable interdependence, which is now under threat.

  He can’t resolve his confusion, instead he goes over to Lars and tells him to forget the bloody brushwood he is toiling and moiling with, they are calling it a day, for this year.

  They gather up their tools and row home in the silence that always descends on them when Lars cannot bring himself to ask what is going on and Hans pretends he doesn’t understand what the boy wants to know, this time he doesn’t know himself, it is a natural silence. The two youths are paid and leave that same afternoon on the milk run. With one churn of milk.

  There it is again:

  Barrøy gets cheese in return for this milk.

  As well as butter, cream and sour cream, which they used
to produce themselves. Well, they still do, with the milk they keep, but is this progress? They need cash, for fishing equipment and boats and everything to do with the sea, not the same cheese that has been made elsewhere, by other people.

  He has never felt more wretched.

  But it is December now, the time of year when decisions can be postponed. He fishes along the seaward side of the island with Lars until Christmas and gradually reaches some kind of clarity about the situation. After another winter in Lofoten he comes home and goes to buy timber, four oil drums and a hundred running metres of solid planks so that they can build a raft south of Barrøy and float animals across the sound to Gjesøya, this is done on many other islands.

  So Gjesøya will not be used for growing hay but grazing. For calves. While the cows can stay at home. Now they can produce more milk. And raise more young animals.

  *

  When Lars starts school he arrives at Havstein on his first day accompanied by Maria and Barbro, not rowing but sitting on one of Barrøy’s two churns on board the milk run. He is still short, so no-one makes any fuss about him starting a year late. He is quick on the uptake as well, and he can read. And, at home on Barrøy, Hans feels once again that he has wasted a year.

  Nevertheless, it has been an important year. Much more important than the two previous ones he wasted. Even if he still isn’t clear in his mind how much more. He misses his father.

  38

  That same autumn the cairn is to be put up. But it is done in Hans Barrøy’s absence, for now he has to take a labouring job again, the railway and cash. It is also done in Ingrid’s absence, she is to be confirmed and have preparatory classes with fifteen other young people from the islands, she will be staying with Karen Louise Malmberget for the duration, and be looking after the priest’s two sons when she isn’t studying, learning how to be a maidservant, moreover together with Nelly and Josefine and another girl, does it get any better than that? What is more, Karen Louise is pregnant again, it will be the priest’s eighth child, and none of them has died.

  This means that only Maria and Barbro are on Barrøy when the Lighthouse Authorities arrive. The workforce consists of eleven men, they have their own boats and rafts, and are dressed like a mixture of labourers and foremen, a superior class of worker, with cloth caps, waistcoats, shiny bucket boots and woollen sweaters which make them look like engineers. They are well-mannered and polite when they want to buy meat or fish or crispbread, and also spend quite a lot of money. They sleep on board an iron-reinforced boat by the name of Glunten II, which is moored at the new quay when it can’t anchor right by their workplace, which it does in good weather.

  But there is a misunderstanding on the very first day, which Maria doesn’t clear up, or else she doesn’t care. They don’t start work on Skarvholmen, as agreed, but on the southern tip of Barrøy itself. It isn’t a cairn either but an iron construction, four upright T-beams are driven down and cemented firmly into the rock and they support a lantern on top, about six feet high, a white lighthouse with a red hat which from a distance looks like an insect or a circus clown hovering in the air. It will be fired by paraffin, which is drawn up via a pipe from a tank bolted to the rock beneath, and it will burn from October 1 to March 1, and be turned off – though easily visible with its red and white colours – for the rest of the year.

  Now it will soon be November.

  So there has been a pulsating light on Barrøy’s southernmost tip for more than a month when the navvy comes home and hits the roof, a permanent garish Christmas tree on his island!

  But he is not met by any sympathy, neither from Maria nor Barbro. They show him one hundred and twenty-two kroner, which they have received as ground rent and tell him that for the rest of their lives they will also receive a small though regular income for looking after and maintaining the light. They have become not only milk producers and a name on the map but lighthouse keepers and wage earners, in the service of the state.

  Hans Barrøy can’t stomach this.

  He is not going to be in anyone’s service.

  He goes on the milk run to the mainland the next day, without Maria. And even before Barrøy fades into the sea behind him, he considers the fact that he isn’t rowing or sailing but making his entrance on a new route, wearing his best clothes, as though there is some weakness in the complaint he is planning to lodge and this unorthodox “deal” they have entered into, perhaps it is not as easy to complain after all, and to which authority?

  He stands in the wheelhouse with his old school friend, Paulus, who has had this cushy job for decades, a fixed income for doing nothing more than sailing in safe waters between the Trading Post and the islands and taking shore leave whenever he wants.

  In Havstein Hans helps to take the milk on board, all twenty-one churns from the five farms, which they lower into the hold and secure to ballast blocks before continuing to Skarven, where they take on fifteen more, and another eleven at Lutvær, before arriving at the Trading Post late that evening. By then it is too late to sail over to the mainland to visit the admin officer, so he goes straight to the fishermen’s shack which is there for all island folk, lights the stove, makes coffee and sleeps on the matter.

  He doesn’t go up to the houses the next morning either. The steamer, the island’s connection with the mainland, is moored at the Trading Post wharf. And something stirs in him. He goes on board and sails to the town, goes to the fishing-supplies store and purchases four new line tubs, eight coils of rope, buoy line, hooks, hemp yarn and knives. Then he buys coffee, a sack of sugar, a sack of peas and a bucket of smoked sausages, a Christmas tablecloth, three Christmas magazines for children, two bottles of aquavit, eight metres of blue-flowered dress material and a dresser with six drawers plus a framed picture of a sailing ship.

  He takes the steamer back the same afternoon, spends the night in the fishermen’s shack, carries his purchases to the milk-route boat and is home on Barrøy exactly two days after he left.

  He is received there by his family, who are standing on the quay with two churns.

  The dresser doesn’t make the greatest impression on them, what interests them are the Christmas magazines and the tablecloth. But that is before they take a closer look at the piece of furniture and see how perfectly it fits into the parlour. Maria can see that something isn’t quite right about all this. She opens the drawers, they glide like oiled wheels on greased rails, it has inward-curving legs with tiny cat’s paws, carvings on the front of all the drawers and four rounded corners, and on a brass plate at the back she reads: KOFOED & SON, CABINETMAKERS, NIDAROS.

  She asks her husband what on earth he was thinking of. Doesn’t she think it is wonderful, he says. She wants to know how much it cost. He says he can’t remember. She asks him if he got a receipt. He says no. She pulls out the drawers and pushes them back in and catches a fragrance of camphor and hibiscus and cherry, she doesn’t know what it is, she recognises the scent of something exotic and looks at the man with his back to her, holding a hammer and nails, hanging up the picture of the sailing ship beside the east-facing window. He makes sure it is straight, goes to the kitchen and sits down in his father’s rocking chair, then pours himself a dram and lights his pipe and says that tomorrow they are going to slaughter the pig. They haven’t always had pigs on Barrøy, but this year they have one. Tomorrow it is going to die.

  Across the table sit Ingrid and Lars reading their Christmas magazines. Barbro is reading one too, it has pictures. Maria gets started on the dinner. They eat, drink coffee, and Barbro tells Lars to write some Christmas cards to their relatives on Buøy and Gjesværet, which they can send via the milk run. She is mute with admiration at his handwriting.

  When the children have gone to bed Hans pours three more drams and gives Maria and Barbro one each and pushes the one hundred and twenty-two kroner back across the table so that this winter they won’t have to go shopping on the slate while he is in Lofoten. Maria says it isn’t necessary. He says, yes, i
t is. She says that actually he doesn’t have this money to give. He loses his temper, jumps up and goes to bed. The money is still on the table. Then Maria gets up too and goes to bed. Barbro hears voices in the South Chamber. Then silence. She knocks back her dram, and Maria’s, stokes up the stove and takes the money with her up to her room. Barbro has a chest, too.

  39

  After confirmation classes at the rectory on the main island, Ingrid thinks Barrøy is boring. It doesn’t help that there is a light there to guide ships through the darkness. Not that she yearns to leave, what she yearns for is a different Barrøy, or she would like to take the island with her into the outside world and fill it with everything it lacks, and this everything amounts to quite a lot, bursting as she is with her yearnings, for it is a grind to fetch peat and go to the cowshed and potato cellar and pull in the nets with Barbro and gut fish, this is not something real women do, they stand in front of mirrors and sing in choirs and wait for a letter to arrive, they laugh with other women and go for walks in groups wearing the same clothes, beneath an azure sky where the sea cannot be heard, not even in the distance.

  Strangely enough, even less happens on Barrøy in the following winters, the nights are so sleepless that she wonders whether she is ill, and stays in bed until her mother forces her to get up, she has nobody to love here, Barrøy is unrecognisable with the monotonous murmur of the water and the wind, which she never noticed before, it is driving her insane, as is the screeching and squawking of the gulls, the oystercatchers and the eiders and the stupid cormorants, which stand like coal-black monks out on the skerry and turn their cowls to catch the wind, she will have to leave to work as a maid, she will.

  But the world doesn’t want her.

  Suddenly the world has acquired a surplus of people like Ingrid. Maria searches and enquires, both with and without her daughter’s knowledge, but it is as it is, and her father says she can go with him to Lofoten as a cook. But Maria won’t have any of this, she has been a cook in Lofoten herself, that was where she met Hans, that is enough. And it is even more difficult when Lars is at home and wants Ingrid to go fishing with him and she has become far too much of a woman. She goes nonetheless and rests on her oars while Lars stands legs akimbo pulling in the nets and bleeding the fish in a crazed fury, in the hell where he belongs.