The Unseen

by Roy Jacobsen

  She got the shivers, too, and had to go to bed.

  Felix lay on the bench in the kitchen, delirious. Barbro sat at his side, during the nights, too, Suzanne wanted to as well. Ingrid noticed she was missing and got up and lay in front of the stove in the kitchen and said she was well again. Barbro made her go back up to bed, and she lay awake until Barbro came in carrying the sleeping Suzanne and placed her at her side, then sat on the bed and asked Ingrid if she was afraid of the dark. Ingrid said no. Had she had seen any ghosts, Barbro asked. Ingrid said yes. Barbro said that was because of the fever. But now she wasn’t feverish anymore. Barbro could tell that by her forehead. Ingrid nodded. When Suzanne woke up next morning she asked Ingrid to teach her how to knit.

  “Tha’s a wain,” Ingrid said.

  “That’s hva Mamma said,” Suzanne answered.

  “Hvo’s Mamma?” Ingrid asked. Suzanne looked at her blankly. “A thought it war me?” Ingrid said. Suzanne hesitated, and smiled. Ingrid said she could watch while she knitted, then she would get the hang of it faster when the time came. Suzanne thought that was fine. And then she could learn to count, not just on her fingers, but by keeping track of the stitches.

  48

  Lars didn’t fall ill. After the weather had eased he went out and found that he couldn’t budge the snow-covered færing. He fetched Barbro. They managed to turn it round and get it onto two trestles so that he could examine the hole in the hull from both sides. It was bigger than he had imagined, one of the ribs was broken too. Barbro shook her head. Lars asked whether Felix was going to die.

  Barbro said no, and added that now she bet he wished he’d paid more attention to Hans when he was repairing boats.

  “Hva does tha know about tha’?” Lars said.

  “It teiks two,” Barbro stated pointedly, and walked back towards the house, but turned and shouted to him that she could help and hold something against the board while he hammered in the nails, the rest he would have to do himself.

  Lars went into the Swedes’ boathouse where Hans stored his materials and found a few planks of knot-free spruce. He sawed off a suitable piece, ripped out the broken board in the side of the boat and used it as a template. Then he needed two more bits, so he had to run in and out a few times and take measurements, then saw and plane and run out and mark the position and measure up. When he had finished he couldn’t bend the board into position.

  Barbro came and said he should take the board home with him, wrap it in damp cloths and leave it in a tub under the stove for a day or two, to make it more pliable. Lars asked if she could do that, he didn’t want to be in the kitchen listening to Felix’s gurglings, he didn’t even go there to eat. Barbro said he would have to do it himself, she would find some old rags for him.

  Lars said in that case he wouldn’t bother.

  “No, no, no,” Barbro said. He had to eat anyway.

  He went in with her and did as she ordered and glanced at Felix, who was lying on the bench shaking and didn’t notice that Lars was there. Lars went back to the boathouse and searched for material to make a new rib. He couldn’t find anything. There were two windows in the building, one facing north and one facing south. He stood for a moment gazing through the former. The sea was black and smooth. Like lead. Like tar.

  He stood there surveying the view until he had seen enough.

  He went out and, unseen, walked behind the knoll to the boat shed and launched the other færing, it was older than the damaged one, it had been in there for a long time and was dry and leaky. But it was easy to row. He rowed around the northern point of the island and was heading south through the sound when he spotted his mother on the island. She was waving both arms.

  He wanted to row past, but the tone of her voice drew him towards the shore. He asked her what she wanted. She said he couldn’t haul in the lines on his own. He backed the oars and Barbro stepped on board, pushed him aside, took hold of the oars, rowed out past the Skarve skerries and grasped the first anchor rope. Lars pulled in the line while Barbro rested on the oars and bailed out the water. They worked in silence. They filled one and a half rib sections with fish, a lot of it old and half-eaten, but some of it usable. Then they hauled in all the tackle.

  They took one oar apiece and rowed back to the quay, where they landed the fish. Lars split them and Barbro packed them in crates, fetched some snow and sprinkled it on top. After they had finished Paulus came round the headland and drew alongside the quay, took the milk on board, what little there was of it, and also the fish, which he said was O.K., although it wasn’t much of a catch and the splitting was perhaps a touch amateurish. Lars said he wouldn’t be getting any more for a few days and was about to explain why when Barbro butted in and told Paulus they had to repair the færing.

  Paulus nodded and went back on board.

  *

  That evening Felix stopped gurgling. His eyes were red and bleary, but he smiled over the edge of the eiderdown and asked for something to eat and drink. He didn’t eat much, soon fell asleep, but slept peacefully. Lars asked once again if he was going to die.

  The answer was the same.

  Next morning Lars was the first up, he lit the stove and noticed that Felix was breathing heavily. Felix opened his eyes and looked at him. Lars asked if he could talk. Felix nodded.

  “Hvur’s it goen’?”

  “Not s’ bad.”

  Felix wanted to sit up, but couldn’t. Lars asked how he was now. Again Felix mumbled “Not s’ bad” and remained on his back while Lars explained that he was going to row to Skogsholmen to see whether he could find some wood to make a new boat rib. Felix nodded. It should really be pine, Lars said, but juniper would do. Felix glanced over at the window where snow lay on the glazing bars and asked what the weather was like. Lars said it was good. Felix blinked. Lars went down to the boat shed and rowed off in the old færing. It was still leaky, so he had to take breaks and bail out, but he found the inlet on the landward side of the islet and moored the boat to the peg Hans had fixed there, climbed onto the rock armed with an axe and saw and began searching. By then day was breaking.

  He searched until it was fully light.

  Then it turned dark again as a snow shower passed overhead, silent and heavy. The sea still looked like tar. When it was light once more he found an old crooked juniper tree, used the axe to loosen the coarsest roots from the frozen slope, cursing as he blunted the cutting edge, chopped the roots off one by one and sawed the trunk roughly a metre above the base, it was as thick as an arm, a young man’s arm.

  He walked back to the boat, bailed out and rowed home. As he rounded Moltholmen he saw Barbro waiting. Lars asked what she was doing there. She asked whether he had been fishing. He said no and wanted to know how Felix was doing.

  “Not s’ bad,” Barbro said.

  They pulled the boat ashore. Lars took the piece of juniper into the Swedes’ boathouse and began to whittle it into shape. “It has t’ be dried first,” Barbro said.

  “Hva?”

  She explained that he couldn’t use green timber for ribs, though juniper was better than spruce if there was no other option. He asked why. Barbro explained that juniper shrinks less, and also expands less, it is resinous and tough. Lars asked what she thought he should do. She said he should probably have a go with the juniper, then walked back to the house as he hammered away at the broken half-rib, using it as a template, and worked until darkness fell.

  When Lars came in to eat, Felix was sitting upright under the eiderdown on the bench, coughing. His eyes were still red, but he swallowed a few morsels and asked in an almost inaudible voice whether Lars had got hold of any suitable wood. Lars said yes and added that he was going to clinch the pieces the following day. He asked Barbro if she had put any water on the wood in the tub under the stove. She said yes. Lars went out and worked until it was time for bed. By then Felix was alone in the kitchen, asleep.

  When Lars got up next day it was dark outside the window. He dressed and wen
t downstairs and saw that Felix was still asleep; he could tell by his breathing that he was alive and not dead.

  He had something to eat, went to the boathouse and got out some nails and two hammers and practised clinch-nailing on the anvil. He found some tar and hemp, heated the tar in a bucket on a primus and cut two lengths of hemp. After dinner Barbro joined him and lay on a rug beneath the boat holding a rock while Lars lay inside it and hammered the clinches home. The boat now had a light-coloured plank and an equally light-coloured half-rib, contrasting with the other timber which was black with tar. They launched the boat, jumped on board and drifted in the wind. A few drops seeped in. Barbro said they had done a good job. What about the rudder? Lars said he would fix it the next day. They rowed around the headland, pulled the færing ashore and wedged it in an upright position. Barbro walked home. Using a bucket, Lars collected some seawater and poured enough into the boat to cover the repair so that the boards would expand. By the time he had finished a wind had blown up. He went to the quay house where he disentangled and repaired the line they had saved. He wondered whether to wash it as well.

  Wash fishing gear in mid-season?

  He decided not to, and instead slung the floats with the rest of the tackle on the baiting bench. It was dark and snowing heavily as he wended his way home. In the kitchen window he spotted a face. It was Felix, who had got up and was waiting for him.

  49

  The sun is high in the sky and the birds have resumed their cacophonous riot of activity, the streaks of drifted snow across the island glitter, giving it the appearance of a zebra. Barbro is sitting outside on her chair again, making nets. And Suzanne doesn’t stray an inch from Ingrid’s side, Ingrid who has made a discovery in the first light of day, the notion that not only her father but also her mother has gone forever, this notion which is so unbearable, which strikes her like a blast of wind, then leaves her again, and her parents are still there when she thinks about something else, her eyes wandering across the island, which is as it has always been.

  She made another discovery, too.

  She had fallen asleep in the sun near Love Spinney, woke and found herself alone.

  She got up and looked around, Suzanne was nowhere to be seen. She started searching but to no avail. She broke into a run, to the north, then south, like a horse that has bolted. She began to scream. She gasped for breath and ran and shrieked Suzanne’s name until her insides were in her throat and she didn’t know who she was or what she was doing. And found Suzanne in the south of the island, sitting on the beach beside the raft collecting shells, she held up a horse-mussel shell, a large one, as white as snow and bigger than two children’s hands, it was perfectly round.

  Ingrid discovered she had become a mother.

  It was a terrible feeling.

  She collected the shells in her apron and walked Suzanne home, it would soon be feeding time in the cowshed. Ingrid said she thought shells were money when she was small, on an island they are the most perfect things you can find. She had collected huge piles of them and put some on all the windowsills of the house and barn until one day her mother told her she would have to find a place to bury her treasure. She took Suzanne with her and tried to find it again. Suzanne must have turned four this winter, she reflected, and it struck her she didn’t even know when the children’s birthdays were. When she thought about Suzanne and birthdays and this treasure that they didn’t find she forgot her other problems, and once again the island was as it should be.

  *

  Everything changes on an island when there are only children left. Plus Barbro. Barbro has never grown up completely. In a way she has, though. And is Ingrid a child? No, she has been an adult for ten years. While Lars has been grown up ever since he was born. There are three adults and two children. Now they have fifteen new lambs and have had to bury only one, it was black and the mother had no milk, the second one had to be bottle-fed. They also have three calves, Barbro delivered them. Ingrid says they will have to carry on digging the ditches on Gjesøya, resume the work Hans set in motion. But Lars remembers the silence between him and his uncle when they left the place and Lars also has his eyes firmly fixed on the sea, like Hans, Felix has too, so when are they going to start transporting rocks across the island, from the ruins in Karvika to build a mole south of the Swedes’ boathouse?

  Ingrid doesn’t listen.

  They plough up the old potato field again with Barbro as the horse, sometimes with Lars. But there won’t be any carrots grown here, they don’t know what to do. They wash down the fishing gear and repair the eider-duck houses. And still there is no ditch-digging done on Gjesøya, they talk about when it should be done. Ingrid and Suzanne collect eggs, test them in water and lay them in wet sand in big and small barrels. Ingrid gives Suzanne two handfuls of down and teaches her the difference between what is merely wonderful and what is a God-given miracle. While Lars and Felix cut peat until they drop dead with exhaustion and tedium and Lars exclaims that this is the shittiest job in existence. It is hot and wet even though they are down in a cool pit, and looking as if they are working with coal, or else it rains and they are wet and caked in mud down in the same hole doing battle with Hans’s old cutting implements and throwing lumps of peat up onto the grass where there is no-one to stack them, every so often they have to climb up and do it themselves.

  But then they hear the sound of Paulus’s Bolinder motor and lay down their tools and climb up and make their way towards the quay at the same time as Ingrid and Barbro and Suzanne leave the house, they arrive together and discover that beside the empty milk churns on deck there are two ladies wearing capes and dresses. They recognise one of them, she is the priest’s wife, Karen Louise Malmberget, as usual a delicate and radiant light in the Nordland day. But they don’t recognise the other lady, she is Maria Helena Barrøy, who has returned from hospital with ashen hair and skin that looks as if it has never seen the sun as it belongs to a corpse in a grave.

  But if they don’t recognise her, she certainly recognises them, including Felix and Suzanne, who don’t remember her. She walks slowly up onto the quay and lays a hand on their heads and smiles wearily, reacting with the same wan smile to the sobbing of Ingrid, who has buried her, together with her father, for good. Even Barbro has to turn away and see to the cart and churns.

  Then Paulus steps onto the quay too, and asks if they have dried the fish and whether he can buy it at almost the same price as they pay at the Trading Post.

  “Hvafor no’ th’ same?” Lars asks.

  “Transportation,” Paulus says.

  “It’s no’ tha who pays f’ th’ oil,” Lars says.

  Paulus says he may well be right.

  “Is it top quality, though?”

  “Yes,” Lars says.

  Paulus says it is the graders who decide that.

  Lars glances over at the unrecognisable Maria and sob-racked Ingrid, the homecomer has a nimbus around her no-one dares to encroach upon, then Ingrid takes her hand and leads her up to the house with the others in tow, Lars hears Karen Louise Malmberget tell Felix he – looks like th’ Prince o’ Darkness himself.

  “Hvur did tha get s’ black?”

  Lars hears Felix laughing and turns to Paulus to say they will transport the stockfish themselves and sell it for what they pay at the Trading Post.

  “Oh yes, has tha got money then?” Paulus asks, with a knowing look. Lars says they got a full catch share for the fishing gear they had in Lofoten in the winter. Paulus asks if they have already received the money. Lars says yes, Erling came over about a month ago and settled up, they have got the gear back and will repair it ready for next winter.

  “Cash?” Paulus says in disbelief.

  “Yes,” Lars says, thinking the conversation is beginning to drag, he wants to follow the others and see whether he might be able to recognise Maria after all. But Paulus takes off his cloth cap and says he probably only has second-grade fish on his own drying rack.

  “Blueb
ottles?” Lars asks.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s too hot o’er thar.”

  Paulus steps on board with a strange expression on his face. Lars lifts off the hawsers and has something to ponder, he realises there is something he doesn’t know, about the world and prices and not least the new owners of the Trading Post. So he doesn’t go up to the house but to the boat shed where he launches the færing and sets off rowing in the direction of the main island and arrives at the Trading Post just as a coaster from Bergen docks, which creates a hustle and bustle on the wharf where people have actually left for the day.

  He goes up the steps and loafs around like an inquisitive kid until he finds out that salted fish is to be loaded and that the new owner is a very young man, in his twenties. Lars has caught a glimpse of him once before and is surprised to see that he is dressed like one of the workers, whereas Tommesen always wore a tie and waistcoat, and that the only difference between the new owner and his workers is that he talks more loudly than them and has his hands in his pockets.

  Lars seizes the opportunity as the grader walks between the stacked boxes of salted fish pointing out those the workers have to pull out and spread out across the floor of the salt house so that he can calculate what proportion of the fish is second-grade, a percentage which is applied to the whole consignment, a spot check. Lars has seen this before and knows it is a critical moment, for the finances of the Trading Post, the hazardous calculation at the end of a whole winter. Nevertheless he asks the owner of the Trading Post – Bang Johansen, he remembers he is called – whether he buys stockfish and, if so, at what price.

  Bang Johansen peers down at Lars, but doesn’t catch what he says, his attention is focused on the grader who has pointed to a stack, and it seems to be a favourable selection, seen through Bang Johansen’s eyes, a private smile flickers across his face, and he asks Lars to repeat the question, which he does, and Bang Johansen mumbles a sum and adds, as though reciting by rote, or reeling off some business patter, these are difficult times and transport is expensive, etc. But the price he gives is higher than Lars had dared to dream of, based on Paulus’s information. He asks when he can deliver. Bang Johansen finally focuses on him and asks what he is talking about. Lars waits for him to ask the next question: