by Roy Jacobsen
“Has tha fish?” Bang Johansen says.
“Yes.”
“Tha from th’ islands?”
“Yes.”
“Well, tha’d bitter send tha father.”
Lars is about to say “A am my father”. But instead he waits until Bang Johansen once again realises he has said something stupid and says:
“Hvur much has tha got?”
“A don’t know reit nu.”
“O.K., just bring it.”
“An’ eider down? Does tha take down too?”
“Has tha down too?”
“Yes.”
“Hvur much?”
“A don’t know reit nu.”
“O.K., just bring th’ down an’ we can have a look at it.”
Lars is about to say that down from Barrøy is not something you look at, it is purer than gold, but he drops the idea too, he says:
“An’ eggs?”
At this Bang Johansen laughs out loud and says he would be happy to take eggs as well.
“But hvur in hell did tha get s’ black?”
*
On the way back home Lars is reminded of the question Hans once asked him while they were sitting in Scab Acre contemplating the new quay house and quay, one drowsy summer’s evening when thoughts could span the whole firmament, had Lars thought about what was missing on Barrøy? Lars thought Barrøy was exactly as it should be. A boat, Hans said. With an engine. A smack. A cutter. A motorised boat at any rate. A quay made of rock, with a new quay house, looks stupid without a permanently moored vessel.
“It’s a shi’e harbour,” Lars had answered, it must have been last year some time, or the year before, he had just been told why the milk-run boat couldn’t put in in stormy weather.
“But we’ve got rocks enough,” Hans had continued, “t’ make a mole five o’ six yards out fro’ the headland by th’ Swedes’ boathouse. That’d change th’ current an’ th’ waves in th’ sound.”
Lars had thought a lot about this since his uncle died, and about the ruins in Karvika, with all its rocks, and sat visualising it as he rowed back home that evening, his meeting with Bang Johansen also playing a part in his reasoning, the man with his hands in his pockets, who told him the price of stockfish. And even more ideas merged with the finely tuned rhythm of the oar strokes, the question of whether there might be other things that Barrøy needed, which it was now his job to discover, and do something about, if, for example, Barrøy was compared with other islands, or other places, the thought was mind-boggling, a whole winter’s accumulated ideas, and nothing tangible to compare them with.
50
While Lars is at the Trading Post Ingrid is sitting in the kitchen looking at her mother, who has found her chair and in turn glances out of the window at her daughter and at the others, while smiling with thin, white lips and far too prominent cheekbones and says yes, please, to some coffee, as though she is visiting a foreign country, and to a lefse, which Barbro serves on Polish porcelain.
Maria picks up the cup and saucer, scrutinises them and nods as if she has become even more of a guest in her own house, otherwise she sits with her hands in her lap.
Ingrid walks in and out of the room, weeping when she is outside and smiling when she is back in.
Karen Louise follows her and says they have to talk, not about Maria’s condition but about money. It appears that her father has a mortgage on the Barrøy property, farm registration number 55, title number 1, he has borrowed money before as well, on one occasion Pastor Malmberget has stood surety for a loan, he has always paid up, it isn’t that, but now another instalment is due to Sparebanken, on July 1, a sum of three hundred kroner, they also have a considerable bill to pay at the Store for items they received in the course of the winter, has Ingrid thought through what it would mean if the bank took over ownership of Barrøy, that may not be the worst option, they could buy a new plot on the main island, Karen Louise has already spoken to Paulus, he is no farmer and would be willing to sell, at a reasonable price, she says, blushing and breathless, and rounds off this grand plan by remarking what a terrible time they must have had this winter, she looks as if she is talking to a patient.
Ingrid cannot contradict this person, she is after all a sort of government in the parish, so Ingrid asks her to wait, goes up to the South Chamber and fetches three hundred of the kroner they were given by Uncle Erling, then goes back down, hands the money to Karen Louise Malmberget and asks if she would settle the instalment for her, with the bank, but as far as the bill at the Store is concerned it cannot be that much, they have paid cash all winter.
Karen Louise’s cheeks go a deeper red.
Ingrid braces herself and says she would like Karen to sign a note that she has received this money and that it is to be paid to the bank and no-one else. Karen Louise asks where she got this large sum from and mumbles that a receipt is hardly necessary, is it?
Ingrid goes in and sits down beside her mother and asks what the two scars on her temples are. Maria smiles. Karen Louise follows her in, sits down, takes a sip of cold coffee, says no, thank you to Barbro, who offers her some more, and focuses on Suzanne, who crawls up onto Ingrid’s lap and steals a glance at Maria.
“Hvo’s th’ lady?” Suzanne asks.
“That’s Mamma,” Ingrid says, and moves Suzanne over to Maria’s lap, goes to the chest of drawers in the sitting room, fetches paper and ink and sits down to write. Karen Louise reads the receipt disapprovingly and says she has forgotten the date, and what date it has to be paid. Ingrid writes the date. Karen Louise signs and says this really isn’t necessary, and, oh, now she can hear the sound of Paulus’s Bolinder.
*
But it isn’t the milk run, it is the smooth oar strokes of Lars, who ties up the færing, comes up the slope, into the kitchen and looks around as though he has entered a tomb, and on the table he spots the receipt and the money.
“Hva’s tha’ thar?” he asks.
“Go an’ have a wash,” Ingrid says. “An’ teik Felix with tha’.”
“Hva’s tha’ thar?” Lars repeats.
Ingrid doesn’t answer. Karen Louise thrusts the money into a brown leather bag decorated with green pearls. Ingrid folds the sheet of paper and sits waving it until Karen Louise gets up and tells Lars to come outside with her.
Ingrid watches them from the window, Lars walking beside the priest’s wife towards the quay, stopping and opening his mouth and screaming something at her. Karen Louise covers her ears with her hands and leans forward. Lars continues to scream until she bends over further before straightening up and hurrying towards the quay while Lars turns and races back to the house, into the kitchen, grabs the broomstick and smacks Ingrid across the head with it, causing her blood to spatter over the table and the receipt. She reels. She hears his voice. And sees Barbro wrapping her arms around him. He struggles and fights and yells. Ingrid staggers to her feet and feels the wound on her forehead, sees the blood, reaches for the broomstick and hits him twice on the forehead. Then Barbro screams too, pushes the boy aside and clasps her arms around Ingrid, who squirms and bites. Felix looks on, his eyes wide open. Suzanne smiles, a finger in her mouth. And Maria puts Suzanne down, stands up, walks towards the sink, grasps the pump handle and moves it back and forth, tastes the water and pumps faster and faster, Barbro lets go of Ingrid, throws her arms around Maria too and stops the water.
“Th’ water, th’ water . . .”
There is silence.
And Lars remembers he has to see to the fish, it is getting too warm outside. He heads for the drying-rack with Felix hard on his heels. Felix asks if the wound on his forehead hurts. Lars licks off the blood he can reach with his tongue and crawls under the rack, squints into the belly of fish after fish and sees neither fly eggs nor anything else untoward. Felix repeats the question. Lars doesn’t answer, he makes a calculation, counts, and scans the island to make sure of something. He says:
“Let’s go in t’ Mamma an’ get some hot wate
r.”
Over by the buildings he sees Ingrid and her mother coming into the yard, Maria in a light-coloured dress, Ingrid in a dress too, she is holding her mother’s hand as though she were a child – who is the child? – there comes Suzanne too, they walk towards the south of the island passing through the Acres causing a commotion amongst the birds, which soar up and swoop above them like fluttering white paper, Lars can hear their voices, but not what they are talking about, let’s go in t’ Barbro an’ get some hot water, he says again to Felix.
51
They have two bits of business to attend to on the main island, the first is with the priest. Ingrid goes alone, against Lars’s wishes, he and Felix watch over the færing with the stockfish and gulls’ eggs while Ingrid sits in the rectory and receives a shock.
This is due to the priest’s gentle yet merciless run-down of Hans’s financial dealings over the years, not that her father had had a lot to juggle with on this earth, in Malmberget’s view, Hans wanted not only to live on, but also to develop Barrøy, just as any heir wishes to leave more than he inherits, it is a cycle this is, a chain of life, a law. But this means that what Ingrid, throughout her life, has assumed to be an immovable rock in the sea has in truth been a rotting raft, which her father only just managed to keep afloat.
Ingrid sits transfixed in her chair wondering whether her mother has been informed of this, she also asks about this. The priest says he doesn’t know, with a look that she interprets as indicating that she should ask others that question, whoever they may be.
To be on the safe side, Ingrid says no more.
Malmberget gets to his feet and walks around on noiseless carpets, serves her raspberry juice and himself coffee, sits down again, pulls out a drawer and gets to the point, namely that Ingrid is to receive a mortgage deed, some receipts and also her father’s death certificate, together with the deeds of the property on Barrøy. Hereinafter it is she who is the rightful owner of Barrøy, the sole heir, since there are neither sons nor spouses of sound mind, this is a solemn procedure, a hint of something greater than themselves, which also makes its imprint on the silent room, where a nameless apostle looks down on them from his niche in the wall.
Ingrid is terrified.
But she also grows, inside, and reads everything that is written in the deeds, the listing of all the smaller and larger islands and skerries in her kingdom, as soon as she comes of age, uncultivated land, cultivated land, the rights to water and peat and berries and fishing and timber and flotsam . . . Gothic script, dotted lines, blue ink, black, elegant handwriting, red stamp . . .
The priest asks how her mother is doing.
Ingrid looks up and thinks.
She says she doesn’t know, she doesn’t sleep in the same room anymore, but with Suzanne and the cat in the South Chamber, Maria is alone in Ingrid’s old room. In the daytime she sits in the kitchen or on a chair in the sunshine, the way Barbro used to do, and only occasionally goes to the cowshed, and very seldom cooks, slowly, they have to get her started an hour earlier . . .
The priest nods.
We have too many cows, Ingrid says, and too little land. And we need a horse. She has done her calculations, based on the fact that her father was a human machine, who was able to mow five acres with the scythe, last year Lars couldn’t even manage one, Barbro was hard put to do half an acre and Maria a quarter. They could harness one of the cows to the old mower, but it was a lot of work and they would lose the milk, they could also use a cow to pull the plough in the potato field if they only used the coulter and mouldboard, and then there was the relative proportion of pasture and cultivated land, it wasn’t as it should be . . .
Pastor Malmberget feels he can discern a calculation here, whereby the pluses and minuses of different strategies have been carefully weighed up, Ingrid has been seeking the golden formula for running Barrøy, the optimal ratio between animals and land and people and sea, a delicate balance which has to be tended with care so that a certain number of people are able to live there, no fewer and no more, exactly the number of people who live there now in fact, and he smiles.
They arrive at a kind of summing-up. He praises her maturity and opens the drawer once again – by way of a concluding exhortation – and slides some more documents across the table – duplicates of two birth certificates, Felix’s and Suzanne’s – and adds that she will have to make sure that Felix starts school in the autumn, on Havstein, he, Johannes Malmberget, has already taken the liberty of enrolling him.
Ingrid gets up and agrees, even though she knows it is going to be difficult, if she has become a mother in the course of the year, Lars has become a father, and how! And he himself has no plans to go back to the classroom.
But her stature has not diminished as a result of this meeting.
She curtsies, reflecting that even though she hasn’t dared to bring up the most difficult issue, and the priest didn’t either, a resolution of the children’s future, it hasn’t come any closer as a result of these two duplicate birth certificates, which she puts into the envelope together with the title deeds and the proof that her father is dead.
*
Lars and Felix have walked up from the Trading Post and are sitting on the coke bin outside the Store, and Lars thinks he can see a spring in Ingrid’s step as she comes down from the rectory, the envelope squeezed under her arm, she looks like a schoolmistress. He jumps down and asks whether they’ll be getting the boat then, with the engine, whether they can they afford it now, will the priest be a guarantor . . .?
Ingrid says they aren’t getting a boat, they’re getting a horse.
“A horse?!”
Lars has never heard anything so stupid, they have had a horse before, it worked for one month, then stopped and stuffed its face for eleven.
“Is tha goen’ t’ mow all Barrøy?” she says. “Wi’ a scythe?”
Lars has no answer to that. Ingrid says they are going to borrow a horse.
“One o’ Adolf’s in Malvika. He’s got three.”
“Hvur’s it goen’ t’ get hier, swim?”
Ingrid explains that Paulus will ship over the horse the same way he transports cows and breeding bulls.
“An’ tha’ won’ cost much, will it,” Lars says.
“But we’re only haven’ two cows.”
“Hvafor?”
She explains that two cows produce just enough milk for the milk run to keep coming to their island, they are dependent on this now. But she fails to mention that the boat can also be used for school transport, and also omits to inform him about another part of the calculation, with only two cows there will be less to do in the cow barn, Barbro can make nets and Ingrid can prepare them and pick berries and . . . all the rest, while Maria . . . she doesn’t mention her mother either.
“An’ we’re goen’ t’ have meir sheep.”
From now on the sheep will be grazing for a shorter time on Barrøy, and longer on Skogsholmen, Knuten and Gjesøya, from when the snow melts until as long as possible after the snow returns.
Lars hasn’t much to say about this either, they have arrived at the Trading Post and are about to attend to their second business matter.
Lars manoeuvres the færing under the crane. The barrel of eggs, which is a ton weight, is hoisted ashore, and then the dried fish. Bang Johansen hears the clatter on the wharf and comes out to see what is going on.
He also wants to test the eggs in water, so he removes the barrel lid, scrapes a little sand aside and picks out four black-backed gulls’ eggs and two eider-duck eggs, and all of them sink as they should, but he has put them in a rinsing tank, not a bucket, it is almost a metre deep, he has to lean over the edge and plunge halfway down to get them out again, so the top part of his body gets soaked. They laugh at him, he smiles and asks:
“Hvur many eggs has tha in th’ barrel?”
“Eighty,” Lars says.
“Has tha meir?”
“One meir barrel. Comen’ tomorrow.”
“Bastard,” Felix says.
“Hva war that?”
Felix is about to repeat it. Ingrid cuffs him round the ear.
“He doesn’t e’en know hva it means.”
“A do too,” Felix says, and gets another cuff. Lars smiles down at the planks on the wharf and Bang Johansen shakes his head and says little brat and casts his eye over the fish again and asks what it is going to be. Ingrid asks him to weigh the fish and make them out a chit, and also a ticket for the eggs. He weighs them with all eyes on him and arrives at the same number of kilos as they had, with their steelyard. And he gives them the two receipts.
“But hva about th’ down?”
Ingrid keeps her composure and tells Bang Johansen they can talk about the down later.
“Hvafor?”
The manner in which he asks, his eyes and face. Does he really want the down, she asks. He says of course. She has seen this before, with her father, then the merchant would just give a fixed price, which her father said yes or no to, then left, empty-handed if necessary. She asks what the price of down is this year. Bang Johansen tells her. She repeats that she will think about it, first they will have to bring in the rest of the fish, which will take three or four days, and the eggs. Bang Johansen nods.
“Yes, reit, th’ eggs.”