Burning Boy (Penguin Award Winning Classics), The

by Gee, Maurice

  His orchard was cut in two by the road. A creek ran through the lower half, where Red Delicious and Gala apples grew. John had planted a row of fig trees too but had never harvested a saleable crop. To a Norwegian, he said, the fig was as magical as snow and ice to a tropical islander. When he had grown a perfect fig he would be ready to surrender.

  ‘You grow perfect mushrooms,’ Norma replied. ‘Give me mushrooms any day.’ In autumn she picked buckets of them from the paddock beyond the fig row where John ran a score or so of sheep, and put those she could not use in the school staffroom for anyone to take. It was the most popular thing she did.

  John did not like the taste of corruption in mushrooms.

  Ready to surrender? Curious phrase. It troubled her. First, she did not like to think of anything beating him. Second, he was already beaten in some way and approached that event or place or time with a language of endings, light for other people, for her, but with another meaning for himself – kept in view a failure he had known. She could not imagine it, but supposed, on no evidence, it had to do with a woman. And could not imagine a cruelty or carelessness in him that might force self-banishment – for wasn’t it a kind of banishment? Wasn’t that what he hinted at? – ‘From one tiny country to another, eh? From pole to pole, Norma, how I travel’ – with a Nordic dying fall.

  John Toft worried her, obsessed her. She felt very tender towards John – a feeling she would not classify except to consider what it was not. It was not maternal. Not sexual. She did not want to mother or sleep with John. She did not want to be his daughter either, although their ages fitted them for that. She wondered if they were simply achieving friendship. Would that account for her tenderness? It certainly wouldn’t explain obsession. Wouldn’t she, in friendship, simply accept, not engage in searching out his wound? For he had some wound – or perhaps some weighty thing inside that leaned him off true centre. She longed for simplicity with John; and sometimes seemed to achieve it, to be as whole and simple as – well, bird in the air; but then was nudged out of true herself. Nudged by what? What shift in him? Where did he move to with that step? And what was the need? Tell me, John.

  She never spoke her questions aloud. How far they were from knowing each other, Norma would think as she drove home. But going there, up that metalled road, creek in the gully, apple trees – bare, in leaf, in blossom, in fruit – possessing the hill, she was confident of finding ease. She never felt freer from care or closer to joy. His house and sheds were on the upper side of the road, among the Gravensteins and Golden Delicious. As she urged her car up the little knoll into his yard she felt a painful lifting of her heart.

  He came from one of the sheds, with lifted oily hand, Redskin salute. His Habsburg smile – that Habsburg mouth one came across in Scandinavians – marked his strangeness, put it before her once again. A smile that was misleading, for it had the figuration of bitterness yet was his free and open sign of welcome. He was a big old man with knobbly joints that looked arthritic and outsize hands, work-flattened finger pads, and feet in sandals he had cobbled himself; untanned leather as hard as wood – made, Norma complained, to torture feet. He had blue, faded eyes and silver lashes and wore half-glasses down on the knob of his nose and a blue towelling hat stained with grease pushed back on his head in a young man’s way.

  ‘More of the little brownies. What a baker she is.’

  She left them on the car seat and climbed the hill with him to the back of the orchard; a walk that was ritual, giving her a view of his land and marking her acceptance in his place – so it seemed to her; but when she put it to him that way once he only smiled and said she had a heightened view of affairs, and drama and ceremony were not a necessary thing in life. She had shrugged and kept silent, but quarrelled with him in her head; and made the walk still, whatever the weather, alone or in his company, it did not matter which.

  ‘How much did you lose in the storm?’

  ‘I wish you had been here, Norma. It was the sort of thing you would have admired.’ He smiled at her. ‘It was very orderly but full of nature.’

  She liked that very much and laughed aloud. The simplicities of his speech delighted her. He told her the storm had come up from the south, advancing like a wave, grey and black and heavy at the top and looking as if it might turn over and drown the valley. But its margin, he said, was drawn to the accuracy of a metre or two, and the world was divided in half – half in the sun, it sparkled, John said, and half in the cold and wet and dark. The hailstones cut his orchard in two. It was as clean as scything. He stood beside his house and one, two, three raindrops fell in the dust, and a handful of hail on his roof, and that was all. The storm followed the line of the creek. Here was sun, there was ice coming out of the sky like knives. Puffs of cold struck him on the face but the sun kept on shining, warming him. ‘Two worlds, Norma. It was most symbolical.’

  She ignored that. ‘What about your Galas and Delicious?’

  ‘All gone. Some will be for juicing, that is all.’

  ‘You’ve still got your Coxes and Golden Delicious.’

  ‘Everything that grows on the top side of the road. The Sturmers and the Gravensteins and the Granny Smiths. My neighbours say a miracle, I must thank God. I say an interesting phenomenon of nature.’

  They went down to the house and drank tea and ate peanut brownies, talked and played some records, and John cooked a meal of meatballs in sauce and potatoes with anchovies, baked in a casserole. They ate and washed up and sat and talked again like a couple very used to each other, and when it was dark enough John carried his telescope into the yard – the refractor, not the big reflecting ’scope he used for searching deep into space – and for half an hour they looked at the nebula in Orion’s sword, and the double star in the pointer to the Cross, and Mars and Saturn. The rings made her cry out and John said, ‘Norma, you are good for me.’ He laid his hand on the curve of her shoulder, she felt his flat abrasive finger pads, and did not know what sort of touch it was, it did not seem important to classify.

  ‘I sometimes think it’s forbidden to see. We look at our peril,’ she said.

  ‘That is just a game you play with feelings. Do not waste your time with games to play.’

  He was not telling her she must not feel. He left his hand touching her.

  Lars-Johan Toft. Forenames Swedish and surname Norwegian. It is not a good or likely mix, names or blood. There’s no love lost. The fitting together defies convention and history. John has explained it to Norma, who, like most of us, had no idea.

  ‘Norwegians do not like Swedes or Swedes Norwegians, they think we are the real turnip-heads. And nobody likes the Danes, and the Danes do not like anyone. It is a prickly time we have up there.’ He told her the reasons: who had ruled whom, the tyranny of language over language – an old story, imperialism and nationalism and the winning of home rule. She was surprised to hear it had gone on in that old way; would have supposed reason to have had more influence, up in the cold.

  ‘You say “we” when you say Norwegian but you’re really half and half.’

  ‘In my left brain I am Norwegian. The right brain is my Swedish side and would like to rule …’

  ‘But you feel Norwegian, in your bones?’

  He evaded her. ‘Man of the north, marooned in the south.’

  His father was an engineer from Bergen working on Swedish railway construction. He met a girl, one of the dark Swedes from Sodra Lappland, and married her. ‘Dark’ does not refer to complexion. There is a melancholy in the north, a part of the nature of people there. Perhaps it comes from generations of living with long winters and the cold sun. They have a springtime gaiety too. John Toft remembers his mother’s gaiety. It flashed out in her dark and then was gone. He cannot recall any time it lasted more than an hour or two. The lasting thing was her unlovingness. She was a beautiful woman but he remembers her with narrowed shoulders and her elbows clamped in at her sides. He has his bitter Habsburg smile from her.

  ‘The
re is a kind of jolly Norwegian,’ John went on. ‘He likes to drink a lot and have a good time and make jokes.’ That was his dad. John gets his big flat hands and knobbly nose from his dad.

  When he was a small boy the family left Stockholm for Bergen. Stockholm is summer swimming in Lake Mälaren, baking on the glaciated rocks while steamers throb by to Drottningholm. And holidays, winter and summer, on an island in the skerries standing only a metre out of the sea; skating on the ice in the channel; reeling in big-jawed gädda hooked by his father, while evening yachts sail by to Saltsjöbaden.

  ‘We had a little house there with two rooms and two beds and a gädda that could have swallowed your arm stuffed on the wall. Oil lamps, and a pump for water in the yard. Outside the door, I remember’ – his face lights up – ‘a wind-gauge with a woman pumping water, a Dalarna woman in a peasant skirt, and the harder the wind blew the harder she pumped, while her husband stood hands on hips and laughed.’ And a sauna house and a smoke-box for smoking fish. ‘We had to row to the big island for wood. Or drag it home by sled on the ice. Our own trees were ten birch trees and four pines. They have their roots in hollows in the rock, shallow like a saucer, and when they blow over you must stand them up again and tie them so they take a new hold. I wonder if my trees are growing still.’

  Norma has been to Stockholm during a breathless European holiday. She spent her time – two days – in the Old Town and in Skansen and does not remember a lake with steamers, finds it hard to picture John’s low island with ten trees. She was in Bergen too, one afternoon, catching a ferry to Newcastle, but remembers Bergen better, for it reminded her of Wellington. Oslo was like that too, a provincial city, outside time. Many things about Norway reminded her of New Zealand.

  John agrees. But won’t admit that is why he chose New Zealand to settle in. In Bergen he and his mother lived in a little house by the harbour while his father went away north to work – Tromsø, Narvik, Bodø, Mo. He made the language-shift, an easy thing, but was Swedish in behaviour from loyalty to his mother, who could not change, who became more closed-in and darkened in her thoughts. She had no friends and spoke to no one but her son for weeks on end. One day she wrote a note saying goodbye, said she loved him (the first time), and left while he was away at school – went back home to Sweden, to Storuman where she was born, and never left that town again. (It lies only a few miles over the border from Mo, where his father worked, but John thinks his parents never met again.)

  ‘She closed the door quietly and left. That is how I see her. No bang crash like Nora Helmer, eh? She was not getting out of her cage but going back home to lock herself in. I think she must have been happy again, in her way. And I could be Norwegian after that. It was marvellous, to find it out.’

  He boarded with an aunt, roamed the town and fishing quays and market with his cousins – if there is a name that can make him draw his breath in sharp it is Bergen – and sailed in steamers on the road north to holiday with his father in Narvik, where the ore trains from Sweden’s iron mountain at Kiruna dump their load. He hiked and skiied on the rock plateau and fished in the rivers with his father, and went north on steamer runs to Tromsø and Hammarfest, and west to Solvaer in the Lofotens. The whole arctic coast was his ground. He will maintain no place in the world is so cold and beautiful – ice and stone, the natural conjunction – and hears the glaciers grinding on bedrock. Hand on stone, warm hand, cold stone, that too was a happy pairing. He was natural to that landscape, he believed.

  Then after Bergen, Oslo and the university, where he studied to become a marine biologist. It was either that or he would be an explorer. Nansen and Amundsen were his heroes, and Sven Hedin in warmer latitudes. ‘You have heard of Sven Hedin? No. The British do not like him. He was pro-German in both wars, like many Swedes. The last of the great explorers though. I dreamed of deserts of sand and ice, interchangeably.’ Until that day in April 1940 when an Oslo student could dream no more – the German fleet at the Drøbak Narrows, German troops in Carl Johans Gade, marching three abreast in iron hats.

  Lars-Johan Toft did not know what to do. He was a simple boy and scatter-brained – ‘Yes, Norma, these are words I use to pin myself out flat, so you can see. I am simple still, and scatter-brained.’ Revulsion mounted in him as foreign soldiers marched into his street. He knew no politics but knew that some unnatural thing had happened, felt unclean; but made a sensible decision. He took his skis, his pack with clothes and food, and travelled through the forest of Nordmarka into the countryside to see if it was war or occupation. War he would join. Occupation he would escape from to Sweden, if he could, and see what fighting could be done from there.

  He found a train going north. He found units of the Norwegian army, who would not take an untrained student. He made for Bergen, turned north when he found Germans there, and reached the coast at Namsos with the idea of picking up a boat and getting to Narvik to find his father. He was in time to see the British land and the Germans strike from the air, and was lucky to get out of the smashed town. Now he took his second choice and made the run for Sweden. Hunger and the mountains turned him back. He joined two young men like himself – ‘country boys, they did not like my city ways’ – looking for an army to fight in. Others, better organized, pointed them at the coast; and there they found a fishing boat that could pack them in, and out they went into a sea with waves like Telemark mountains, and came to Scotland in three days, sick and bruised and hungry.

  ‘So, in that way, I found the war.’

  He did not have what the British call ‘a good war’. He tells it to Norma sketchily. She does not press him, taking his word for it that it was a boring time: long cold days, and waiting, always waiting, for action that never seemed to come. He was one of the first to join the Norwegian Independent Company, Company Linge, but, half-Swede, was not among those returned on missions to Norway. He missed the first Lofotens raid but was on the second in December 1941, and the joy of returning to his stone mountains and icy fiords overwhelmed him. Connections like the knitting of wounded flesh – Lars-Johan Toft and that cold land, the two were flesh and bone. We are here, he said, and will not go away. Everybody, British and Norwegian agreed. It was hoped to establish a naval base on the islands. But German bombers raided and the occupation lasted only one day. The islanders spat on the troops as they withdrew.

  A small event in a small corner of the war. He marched with his fellow soldiers to the loading place and heard the cries of fear and rage and knew what would happen to these people when the Germans came back; kept his head down, hid his face, climbed the plank into the boat. What was taken from him? He would never come back to these islands where he had meant to spend the rest of his life. He took his step into exile and could no longer have a home.

  That, John says, is to dress it up. I am a tiny thing in all that war, I do not count – and this he arrives at with no pity for himself; ‘no groans and weeps’. Others had to kill. Others died.

  ‘So you sailed back to Scotland? What happened then?’

  ‘Oh, training to blow up and shoot guns straight.’

  ‘Did you ever fight?’

  ‘I chased along behind when the Germans ran away. Up in Finnmark. Nothing to tell.’

  ‘Did you go back to Norway after the war?’

  ‘For short times, now and then. I came here. Roundabout ways.’ He’ll say no more than that.

  Norma understands how painful that retreat from the Lofotens must have been but still thinks he’s hiding a woman somewhere.

  She drove home at close to midnight. The lights were out in her brother’s house. In Darwood two cars were locked together and men and women argued in the street. She drove slowly over shattered glass and went into Saxton by the port, where police were bundling young men into a Black Maria. One of the girls in the shadows was Shelley Birtles – was that Shelley? – with a beer flagon under her arm. Let me take you home, you silly girl, Norma thought. She stopped along the road, but Shelley had vanished into the dark, an
d fighting broke out between two men. Norma drove on and drew up at her parents’ house. She let herself in and looked at them. Her father shouted in his dreams – ‘Give the buggers a taste of cold steel’ – but her mother slept with a smile on her face. Norma closed the bedroom door softly. Her father charged night noises, broke vase and mirror and door panel with his stick. She slipped out of the house. ‘Neighbourhood Support Area’, a sign at the mouth of the cul-de-sac said; but no one had spotted her. She could get away with all the cash and jewellery in the street and not a question would be asked. Principal of Saxton College for Girls, what a cover for crime!

  She drove past the school and cemetery and into her garage. The cat came from its bed of sacks to welcome her. ‘Hallo, little devil,’ she said, and picked it up and rubbed her cheek on it. ‘Haven’t I got some funny friends?’

  A skinny black dog and a fat yellow one faced her on her walk to the door. ‘So that’s why you’re nervous,’ she said to the cat. She bent as though to pick up a stone and the dogs ran off into the park through the gate Belinda had left open. Norma closed it. She shone her torch to see if her vegetables were fouled – or, as Tom Round would have it, shat upon. Those Rounds are so damned careless, she thought, they just don’t care about anyone else. Anyone not a Round was a square. She couldn’t be cross with Belinda though. And with Duncan normal judgements shouldn’t apply.

  John said, ‘Ah, this binomial habit of yours! I love these tales you tell, they are like science. Damaged girl and crippled woman, eh? And rudimentary man. And now you bring me burned boy.’

  He said, ‘Doesn’t modern physics teach that matter and spirit are the same?’

  ‘But he’s got all this stuff stored in his brain and he doesn’t know meanings. He doesn’t even know what most words mean.’