The Unseen

by Roy Jacobsen

  “And hvo’s tha?” Lars said.

  “Suzanne,” Ingrid replied.

  Lars put down the pail of fish on the bench beside the water buckets, where he knew his mother wouldn’t want it. She told him off. Lars grinned. She asked if it had been plain rowing. He said yes.

  “Well, the weither’s fair nu,” Barbro said, starting to rinse the fish again, which wasn’t necessary as Lars had done it. He stood watching her with the same grin.

  “Hva’s tha grinnen’ a’?” Barbro said.

  “A’ tha,” he said, going into the hall and taking off his coat and boots. When he came back in, Felix was standing in the middle of the floor looking at him. Lars sat down at the table. Felix went up to him.

  “Tha’ll have t’ get th’ taters nu,” Barbro said.

  Felix gave a start and went out, returned with a bucket and gave it to Barbro. She looked into it and appeared to be considering whether to say something.

  “Hva’s wrong, Mamma?” Lars said. “Aren’t thar enough taters?”

  “Ya.”

  “So hva’s wrong?”

  “It’s nothin’. Hva’s tha babblen’ about?”

  “A see hva A ca’ see.”

  “An’ hva ca’ tha see?”

  Lars didn’t answer. He glanced over at Ingrid waiting for her to ask if he had seen Nelly on Havstein. Lars had a think and then said yes. Ingrid knitted and asked hvur Nelly war doen’? Lars shrugged and looked at her knitting, asked her what it was going to be. She held it up and showed him the sleeve of a jumper. He reached a hand across the table and felt the knitting between his fingers.

  “Hvo’s it f’r?”

  “F’r me.”

  Ingrid put her arm in the sleeve and showed him, clenched her fist and spread her fingers like petals, the way Zezenie did when she tried on dresses, there was ribbing round the wrist and a star pattern around the top of the sleeve, the wool was blue and the stars white, she had dyed the yarn herself. Lars nodded. Ingrid knitted. Maria came in from the barn and spotted Lars, she put down a bucket of cream and went to the pantry for a sieve, looked at Lars again and said:

  “Tha’ll have t’ row th’ boat in. Th’ weither is goen’ t’ bluster.”

  “After somethin’ t’ eat,” Lars said.

  “Nu!” Maria said, and went back out.

  Lars eyed Felix, who was still standing there, staring at him.

  “Tha comen’?”

  “Ya,” Felix said.

  43

  The day before Lars was due to start school again, the milk-run boat was unable to put in at Barrøy, but it could two days later. Lars was still there, weather-bound.

  And Hans Barrøy stepped ashore on his own island, having come home from his labouring job a month early. He had a black pipe coiled around his upper body, like a bandolier, a wooden crate was hoisted onto land together with his kitbag. No-one knew why he had returned now.

  But they were happy.

  Her relief at a husband coming home alive, even though his return is so unexpected. The country and the world is in crisis, bankruptcies and tight budgets, people are forced to leave their farms, others lose their jobs, and the blasting crew he had been the foreman of has been laid off with no more pay than he has already spent, on this:

  The pipe was a hose meant for oil, but it was new and clean and could be used for water just as well as oil, and here is a pump and a filter and connectors. He had them in the crate, together with dies for cutting threads on copper piping, so that they could finally have water in the kitchen, this should have been done ages ago, so now was the time, before the frost got into the ground.

  “Hvo’s tha?” he said to Felix who came and took Barbro’s hand, looking more like Lars than any of the others had noticed, a copy of Lars, and what was more he was wearing Lars’s clothes.

  At his side stood the real Lars, a man of twelve years, who looked up at his mother and asked if he could stay, he didn’t want to go back to Havstein. He shot a glance at Paulus, who was standing on the deck with his hands on his hips, hva’s it goen’ t’ be then? He wanted his hawsers back.

  Before Barbro could answer Lars dropped his bag on the quay and set off at a run in a southerly direction. They stood there watching him. Hans laughed and said to Paulus:

  “Tha’d bitter go then.”

  He let go of the ropes. Paulus pulled them in, shook his head and disappeared into the wheelhouse. Then they walked home with the crate and kitbag and an oil hose and two empty milk churns, it was a veritable clock, this connection they now had with the rest of the world, a clockwork mechanism, if not particularly well oiled.

  *

  Next morning Hans sent the children off around the island to collect moss in peat baskets. He knocked a hole in the foundation wall under the pantry, and for the next few days he and Lars lay on their backs beneath the floor constructing a narrow, ten-metre-long wooden box below the joists. Felix and Ingrid stood outside and passed in materials whenever they shouted for them, since the rainwater tank was at the southern end of the house and the kitchen in the north. Then they knocked a hole in the tank wall and fitted the filter a metre below the water level, threaded the hose through the box, drilled a hole in the floor and pushed it up into the kitchen, it was only half a metre too long. There they installed the pump above the sink and connected the pipes.

  But the moss wasn’t dry yet. It had been spread out across the floor of the barn loft and was to be used as insulation around the piping in the box. And there was still no frost.

  The question was whether this job was urgent.

  It was. Hans dried the moss in the kitchen, in eight fish crates which he hung from the ceiling above the stove. The house smelled of summer, haymaking, especially up in the room Felix and Lars now shared, the North Chamber, it too had a hatch in the floor.

  *

  Hans rowed over to the Trading Post in the færing and tried to talk to the old owner. He found him in the house of an elderly married couple where he was being taken care of for money they no longer received and muttered that a tragedy had befallen his son. He had heard about the children, yes, he wept and said:

  “They should bide hvar they ar’.”

  “Hvar?” said Hans. “On Barrøy?”

  The old man stared at the wall.

  Hans had known this man all his life, he was a prince and a chieftain on this coast, and he had cursed him countless times, a man who lived off others’ labour, but the sight of him lying here as the wretched result of his own privileged life gave him no satisfaction.

  Hans left and went to see the priest, who was back again after an autumn in the neighbouring parish.

  Johannes Malmberget had also heard about the children and Ingrid’s plight, but excused the local community, saying they were afflicted by the same view of the rich as everybody else, life is hell. There was also good reason to believe that young Tommesen had taken his own life, Malmberget added in hushed tones. And his wife was at an asylum in Bodø, there had to be limits to people gloating over others’ misfortune, he was going to mention this in his sermon on Sunday, which he was working on at this very moment, would Hans care for a dram?

  Yes, please, he wouldn’t say no.

  He had three. And they got no further than that they would have to wait and see, maybe Zezenie had family and they would make their presence known, though the priest rather doubted it, Hans was unable to work out why. Then, out of the blue, Hans said:

  “Can’t tha teik ’em in?”

  “Hvo?”

  “Th’ kids.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, tha.”

  Johannes Malmberget looked down at his lap, his eyes wandered along the walls before returning to Hans Barrøy, then he lowered them apologetically and mumbled that the local welfare system wasn’t up to much, it was no more than poor relief, and these children were rich, or had been, this was what their two gazes were fighting a silent duel about, what to do with the rich when they are reduced to povert
y, logic inverted, history in reverse, it is as nonsensical as claiming that water flows upwards.

  Karen Louise came and stood in the doorway, looking as though she was planning to offer them some refreshment, but then she was gone again, and they sat for a while longer until Hans Barrøy got to his feet and thanked the priest for the dram and shook him by the hand.

  The priest returned the thanks.

  Hans Barrøy went to the Store and did some shopping, more than he could afford, as usual, but he could still rely on his good name, and sailed out of the fjord in a rosy evening light which augured a change of weather, an easterly wind and frost. He thought about the moss in the crates in the kitchen and mumbling as he did so:

  “Matutinum, matutinum . . .”

  This is Latin and means tomorrow, tomorrow, he had seen it in a prayer book at the railway site, and the words had stayed with him, like pearls in his mouth. It was rare for him to be struck by a sense of solemnity at being home again on his own island, this man who knew all there was to know about longing for home without going to pieces, now at last it was proved beyond all doubt, at the priest’s too, that when everything else fails, the island is a rock, he already knew that of course, but had never felt it so religiously as now when the world was askew and he had a greater burden on his shoulders than ever before, he thought as he dropped sail off the coast so the færing could glide the last few yards until iron bit into wood.

  But he didn’t go up to the house.

  He lifted out his purchases, winched the boat into the shed, sat on the step, got out his pipe and noticed that he wasn’t able to straighten the fingers of his right hand, as if he were still holding the tiller. He smoked and looked north at the rosy sunlight, which slowly turned blue. And that was where they found him, dead.

  By that time he was so stiff that it looked as though he was sitting even when they laid him down. They were unable to straighten him out, and they couldn’t look at him, so they threw a blanket over him, and the one person who had the strength to launch the færing again and sail back to the Trading Post to bear the news was Lars.

  44

  It was the most pointless of deaths on a very long coast. Hans Martinsen Barrøy was no more than fifty, and as strong as a bear. Pastor Malmberget came to the island with his mouth full of words such as stricken and suffering, and also some maritime terms, he never forgot the context of his duties, and he was just as petrified of the sea as he had always been. Is there anything more terrifying than waves, he thought, as he arrived, exhausted, in a heavy shower of rain and with his eyes swimming only to find that Maria had placed her hands in her lap and been struck dumb. As had her daughter Ingrid.

  And what was it about that look in Lars’s eyes?

  Barbro stood with her back turned, scolding the little girl, and avoided looking at the priest, their whole existence had been turned upside down, and Johannes Malmberget had to make all the arrangements himself, having the body shipped to the main island and organising the funeral.

  When the day arrived, Adolf from Malvika and Thomas from Stangholmen took it upon themselves to bring the family over on yet another day of stormy weather to the most basic of funeral services the priest had ever officiated at, whereafter he pressed his hands together and mumbled his rituals. He would come over to the island and see how they were doing at regular intervals, and also attend to the matter of the children. Maria replied with the only words she uttered in the course of those days, was he thinking of taking the children away from them, too?

  *

  The day after the funeral Lars got up and lit the stove, cut down the fish crates which were hanging over it, woke Ingrid and told her to brew some coffee for Maria and Barbro. Ingrid didn’t want to get up.

  Lars said she had no choice.

  There was something about that look in his eyes.

  For the rest of the day he and Felix lay on their backs beneath the floor stuffing moss into the piping box and nailing it up again. Then they bricked up the hole in the foundation wall. Lars was finished with school, that much was plain for anybody with eyes in their heads to see. He took the boat and rowed over to Moltholmen with some tools and hammered an anchor bolt into the rock face. Felix was with him and had to hold a rag around the chisel so that chips wouldn’t fly out when he hit it with the hammer, he asked what Lars was making.

  Lars told him to wait and see.

  They rowed back to Barrøy and went into the quay house and fetched five nets, rowed out to Moltholmen again with a pulley block and an anchor rope, fixed the pulley, threaded the rope round it and rowed back to Barrøy with it, where they also hammered in an iron bolt. Then they drew out a string of five nets, closing off half the sound, and pulled it a little further so it was suspended midway.

  Barbro had been watching them from the house and came to ask them what they were doing. Lars said that now they could fish from the land. Even in bad weather, cod and pollack swam through the sound, and flounder, in the summer they could catch salmon too. He was also going to put nets across the sound between Barrøy and Gjesøya, and Barrøy and the nearer of the two Skarvholmen islets, that would make fifteen nets in all.

  Barbro shook her head.

  Lars said it was something Hans had talked about doing when he was too old to go out in a boat. Barbro went back to the house and told Maria what they were doing. Maria didn’t react, she and Ingrid sat with their knitting in their laps, looking as if they were imitating each other. Barbro started cooking. Now Suzanne was big enough to stand beside the table and sink her teeth into the edge. No-one laughed at her. She fell and got up again and held on with her teeth and stayed there. Ingrid wept and knitted until Lars came in and told her to go with him to Gjesøya, the sound was too wide, the weather too bad and Felix too small.

  Felix came in and screamed that he wasn’t too small.

  All three of them went, hammered an iron peg into the northern tip of Gjesøya and one on each of the two Skarvholmen islets and set three nets across the last sound. By that time it was evening. They went into the quay house and cut up a few salted fish and got some potatoes from the cellar and went back to the house. About time too, Barbro said.

  “Bitty Suzanne ca’ stand nu,” she said, washing the potatoes as the others sat watching Suzanne. Lars glanced at Maria, who looked as if she was sleeping with her eyes open. He commented that this was the first time they had enough chairs on Barrøy.

  “No, it’s not,” Maria said.

  That was all she said that day.

  The following day she said nothing.

  Lars, Ingrid and Felix pulled in the nets and filled three crates with cod and pollack and gutted the fish in the quay house, tied the tails of the cod together in pairs, carried them over to the drying rack and hung them up, filleted the pollack and took them home, they were big ones. Barbro minced them for fishcakes, and fried them, and boiled potatoes and carrots, and Suzanne could walk three steps before falling. And so the days passed. Without Maria saying a word. Ingrid slept with her in the South Chamber, Felix and Lars in the North Chamber, Suzanne with Barbro. Ingrid’s room was empty. No-one slept there.

  When ten days had passed, Lars asked Maria whether they had any money, they needed to buy some provisions. Maria didn’t answer. Ingrid heard what he said and took him up to the South Chamber, showed him what they had in the small drawer in her mother’s chest, told him they were due some money from the dairy before Christmas, but it wasn’t much. He replied she would have to go to the Store with him before Christmas and repeated he didn’t want Felix going.

  “Hvafor?”

  “Th’ sea meiks ’im sick.”

  “An’ tha an’ all.”

  Lars countered that he was used to it and Felix wouldn’t sit still in the boat and had sores on his hands that wouldn’t heal because of the salt and the frost. Ingrid said she would have a look. They went down to the kitchen and asked Maria what they needed from the Store. She didn’t answer. She had also begun to smell. Ingrid de
cided to force her to wash, knowing that she would fail. She asked Barbro what they needed. Barbro reeled off a number of items, carrots, sugar . . . Lars wrote them down on an old Thursday he tore out of the calendar and stuffed it in his pocket. Then they heard the boat horn, and went out to meet the milk run.

  They exchanged milk churns. But on the deck was a trunk which Ingrid immediately recognised as Paulus wrapped straps around it to hoist it ashore, it was Zezenie’s. She pulled Paulus aside, and said:

  “Mamma’s teiken sick.”

  “Hva’s wrong w’ her?”

  “A think she’s suff’ren’ fro’ bad nerves.”

  Paulus fastened the other rope, and helped them to carry the trunk up to the house, they put it on the bench in the kitchen and he began to chat to Maria, who still didn’t answer, she didn’t realise that he was in the room. He stood there looking around. Lars and Felix were staring at him with bloodshot eyes and salt-streaked faces, long, wet, straggly hair. Paulus asked them if they were getting any sleep. Lars said yes, a bit. Suzanne stood unsteadily next to the stove with one hand holding Barbro’s skirt and the other in her mouth. Barbro had her back turned to him, she didn’t seem to be aware that he was here either, this milk-run skipper, he was never here. Then she shouted at the wall that they weren’t getting any sleep, they were out fishing all the time, it was terrible, they were going to pieces.

  Paulus said that Ingrid should go back to the boat with him, he had something for her. She accompanied him and was told that it was serious with Maria, he was going to report it, and someone would come to help them.

  He went on board and came back with a letter, scrutinised her face and asked whether she was getting any sleep. Ingrid looked at the letter, then up at him. He shook his head and untied the mooring ropes and said she should keep the boys away from the sea, under the present circumstances, Barbro was right, he said.