The Nix

by Nathan Hill

  Soon the door opens and Lillian returns, followed by her mother, and when Faye sees her it’s like she’s looking into a mirror—in the eyes, and the way they both hunch at the shoulders, and the way age has played out on both their faces. The woman recognizes it too, as she comes to an abrupt stop when she sees Faye and they stare at each other for a moment, not moving. It would be clear to anyone watching that they’re sisters. Faye can see her father’s features play out on the woman’s face: his cheekbones, his eyes, his nose. The woman cocks her head, suspicious. She has an unruly mass of gray hair tied up at the top by a ribbon. She’s wearing a plain black shirt and old blue jeans, both dotted with the evidence of many domestic chores: paint and spackle and, on the jeans, on the knees, mud. She is barefoot. She is wiping her hands clean with a dark blue rag.

  “I am Freya,” she says, and Faye’s heart leaps. Every ghost story her father told her, every one involving a beautiful young girl, this was the name he gave her: Freya.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” Faye says.

  “You are Fridtjof’s daughter?”

  “Yes. Fridtjof Andresen.”

  “You’re from America?”

  “Chicago.”

  “So,” she says to nobody in particular, “he went to America.” Then she gestures toward Lillian, “Show her,” and Lillian fetches a book from a shelf and sits on the couch. The book is an antique, yellowed brittle pages, two flaps of leather protecting its cover, a clasp on the front. Faye has seen one of these before: her father’s Bible, the one with the family tree on the inside filled with exotic names he used to show her and cluck disapprovingly at because they were all too cowardly to make a better life for themselves in America. And the Bible in Lillian’s lap is just the same sort, a family tree on the front two pages. But whereas her father’s stopped at Faye, this one shows the full blooming of the family here in Hammerfest. Lillian, Faye can see, is one of Freya’s six children. Grandchildren fill the next line down, a few great-grandchildren below that. It’s a flourishing that takes another sheet of paper to fully accommodate. And above Freya’s name are her parents’ names: Marthe, her mother, and another name, blacked out, inked over. Freya shuffles toward them and stands in front of Faye and bends to point at that spot.

  “This was Fridtjof,” she says, her fingernail pressing a crescent into the page.

  “He’s your father too.”

  “Yes.”

  “His name is erased.”

  “My mother did that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he was a…oh, how do you say it?” She looks at Lillian for help with the word. She says something in Norwegian and Lillian nods in comprehension and says, “Oh. You mean, coward.”

  “Yes,” Freya says. “He was a coward.” And she watches Faye, waiting to see what kind of reaction this will bring, whether Faye will be offended by this, and Freya is tense and maybe waiting for an argument she seems perfectly willing to have.

  “I don’t understand,” says Faye. “A coward. Why?”

  “Because he left. He abandoned us.”

  “No. He immigrated,” Faye says. “He tried to make a better life for himself.”

  “For himself, yes.”

  “He never mentioned he had family here.”

  “Then you don’t know very much about him.”

  “Will you tell me?”

  Freya breathes heavily and looks at Faye with what feels like impatience or disdain.

  “Is he still alive?”

  “Yes, but his mind is going. He’s very old.”

  “What did he do in America?”

  “He worked at a factory. A chemical factory.”

  “And did he have a good life?”

  Faye thinks about this for a moment, about all those times she saw her father alone, keeping his distance from others, desolate, in his own self-made prison, standing for hours in the backyard staring into the sky.

  “No,” she says. “He always seemed sad. And lonely. We never knew why.”

  Freya seems to soften at this. She nods. She says, “Stay for dinner, then. I’ll tell you the story.”

  And she does, over bread and a fish stew. It’s the story Freya’s mother told her when Freya was old enough to understand it. It begins in 1940, the last time anyone heard anything about Fridtjof Andresen. Like most young men in Hammerfest, he was a fisherman. He was seventeen and had recently graduated from the dockside work given to children, the cleaning and gutting and filleting. He now worked on the boat, which was an all-around better job: more lucrative, more fun, so much more thrilling when they’d drag up whole big nets of cod and halibut and the evil-looking, foul-smelling wolffish, which everyone universally agreed was better to catch than to gut. Whole days spent out on the water, losing track of the days because in the summer in the arctic the sun never sets. And feeling proud of the mastery he achieved with his trade’s various tools, the buoys and nets and kegs and lines and hooks stored in the hull just so. His favorite thing was sitting lookout atop the highest mast because he had the sharpest eyes on the boat. He had a gift; everyone said so. He spotted the schools of blackfish that steered into the bay all summer long, and seeing a boiling spot on the water he yelled “Fish-o!” and all the men would roll out of bed and put on their caps and get to work. They’d lower the rowboats, two men per craft—one to handle the oars, the other, the net—and they’d spread the net between them and he’d direct the whole operation from up top until the school reached them and they’d encircle the fish and hoist the whole churning mass of them triumphantly into the boat. There was power in that, their control over the wild sea, feeling unstoppable even while they sailed too close to jagged shores that would doom their ship to sinking if they weren’t such capable sailors.

  Fridtjof could spot the fish better than anyone in living memory. He had the sharpest eyes in town, and he bragged about this constantly, whenever they were in port. He said the ocean was a piece of paper only he could read. He was young. He had a bit of money. He spent time in bars. He met a waitress named Marthe. It might not be accurate to say he fell in love with her. More like they were both feeling certain common teenage longings and they made themselves available to satisfy them. The first time they made love it was in the hills near her family’s house, after he’d waited for the bar to close and walked her home and they lay in the tough grass under a gray-white sun. Then she showed him around the land, the big house painted salmon-red, the long pier over the water, the long line of spruce trees, the field of barley. She loved it here, she said. She was a charming girl.

  That was the summer the war came. Everyone thought Hammerfest was too remote to be of any concern, but it turned out the Germans wanted the city to disrupt Allied shipping to Russia, plus it would serve as an effective resupply base for their U-boats. The Wehrmacht was coming, was the word that spread up Norway’s coast, from dock to dock, boat to boat. There was talk on Fridtjof’s ship of escape. They could make it to Iceland. Start a new life there. Or keep going. There were ways to get from Reykjavík to America, some said. But what about the submarines? They wouldn’t bother their little fishing boat. But what about the mines? Fridtjof would spot them, they said. It could be done.

  Fridtjof wanted to believe what some of the older men said, that the Germans were more interested in the docks than in the city, that they would leave everyone alone as long as there wasn’t a resistance, that their fight was with Russia and Britain, not Norway. But rumors had been spreading about happenings in the south: surprise attacks, burned villages. Fridtjof didn’t know what to think. On their next landing in Hammerfest, the crew would make a decision: stay or go. Anyone who wanted to stay was free to do so. Anyone wanting to risk the voyage to Iceland would bring all the supplies he could manage.

  The only one who didn’t have a choice was Fridtjof. Or at least that’s how it seemed to him, when the older guys took him aside and said they needed his eyes. Only he could spot the mines that made the waters out beyond the islands
so treacherous. Only he could read the swirls and eddies that signaled the presence of a U-boat. Only he could see the shapes of enemy ships way out there on the horizon, far enough away to avoid them. He had a gift, they all agreed. They’d be dead without him.

  That night he waited for the bar to close and went to see Marthe. She was so happy to see him. They made love in the grass again and afterward she told him she was pregnant.

  “We’ll have to get married, of course,” she said.

  “Of course.”

  “My parents say you can live with us. We’ll inherit the house someday.”

  “Yes. Good.”

  “My grandmother thinks it’s a girl. She’s usually right about these things. I want to name her Freya.”

  They made plans for most of the night. In the morning, he told her he was voyaging out to hunt cod to the northeast. He told her he’d be back in a week. She smiled. She kissed him goodbye. And she never saw him again.

  When Freya was born, she was born to an occupied city. The Germans had come and removed most families from their homes. Soldiers lived in the houses now, while everyone else crowded into apartment buildings or schools or the church. Marthe shared a single flat with sixteen other families. Some of Freya’s earliest memories were from this time of hunger and desperation. They lived this way for four years before the Germans withdrew. On that day, in the winter of 1944, every living soul in Hammerfest was ordered to evacuate the city. Those who did fled to the forest. Those who didn’t were killed. The Germans burned the city to the ground. Every structure except the church. When the people returned, there was nothing left to return to but rock and rubble and ash. They lived through that winter in the hills, in caves. Freya remembers the cold, and the smoke from the fires they burned, smoke that kept everyone awake coughing and hacking. She remembers vomiting spoonfuls of acid and ash into her hand.

  In the spring they emerged from shelter and began rebuilding Hammerfest. But they did not have the resources to make it what it once was. That’s why the city looks in places the way it looks now, cheap and anonymous, a testament not to beauty but to resilience. Marthe’s family rebuilt their house as best they could, even painting it the same color, that same salmon-red, and eventually, when Freya was old enough, Marthe told her the story of Fridtjof Andresen, her father. Nobody had ever heard from him after the war. They assumed he fled to Sweden, like so many others did. Sometimes Freya would go out to watch the fishing boats, imagining him on top of one searching the ocean for her. She’d daydream about his return, but then the years went by and she grew up and had her own family and she stopped wishing for his return and started hating him, then stopped hating him and began simply forgetting him. Before Faye arrived, she hadn’t thought about her father in years.

  “I don’t think my mother ever forgave him,” Freya says. “She was unhappy most of her life, angry with him, or with herself. She’s dead now.”

  It’s just past seven o’clock and the sunlight pouring into the kitchen is slanted and gold. Freya slaps her palms on the table and stands up.

  “Let’s go to the water,” she says. “For sunset.”

  She brings Faye a coat and on the walk down explains that sunsets are a precious thing in Hammerfest because they get so few of them. Tonight, the sun sets at eight fifteen. A month ago, it was setting at midnight. In another month, it will get dark at five thirty. And one day in mid-November, the sun will rise at around eleven o’clock in the morning, set about half an hour later, and that’s the last they’ll see of it for two whole months.

  “Two months of darkness,” Faye says. “How do you bear it?”

  “You get used to it,” she says. “What choice do you have?”

  They sit on the dock in silence drinking coffee and feeling a cold breeze coming off the water and watching a copper-colored sun set over the Norwegian Sea.

  Faye tries to imagine her father sitting high above the water, perched on the uppermost mast of a fishing boat, the wind reddening his face. What it must have been like for him, in comparison, at the ChemStar factory in Iowa—turning dials, recording numbers, doing paperwork, standing on the flat, dull earth. And what would he have been thinking as they left for Iceland, as he watched Hammerfest recede from view, leaving behind a home, a child. How long would he regret it? How big would that regret become? Faye suspects he regretted it forever. That the regret became his secret heart, the thing he buried most deeply. She remembers him as he was when he thought no one was looking, staring off into the distance. Faye always wondered what he was seeing in those moments, and now she thinks she knows. He was seeing this place, these people. He was wondering what might have been had he made a different decision. It was impossible to ignore the similarity of their names: Freya and Faye. When he named her Faye, was he thinking about the other daughter? When he spoke Faye’s name, did he always hear the echo of this other name? Was Faye just a reminder of the family he left behind? Was he trying to punish himself? When he described the home in Hammerfest, he described it as though he’d actually lived here, described it as though it were his. And maybe, in his mind, it was. Maybe next to the actual world was this fantasy, this other life where he inherited the farm with the salmon-red house. Sometimes those fantasies can be more persuasive than one’s own life, Faye knows.

  Something does not have to happen for it to feel real.

  Her father was never more animated, never happier, than when he spoke about this place, and maybe even as a child Faye recognized this. She understood that part of her father was always somewhere else. That when he looked at her he never really saw her. And she wonders now if all her panic attacks and problems had been elaborate attempts to be paid attention to, to be seen. She’d convinced herself she was haunted by ghosts from the old country because—even though she didn’t understand it in these terms—maybe she was trying to be Freya for him.

  “Do you have children?” Freya asks, breaking the long silence.

  “A son.”

  “Are you close?”

  “Yes,” Faye says, because, once again, she’s too embarrassed to tell the truth. How could she ever tell this woman that she did to her son what Fridtjof did to her? “We’re very close,” she says.

  “Good, good.”

  Faye thinks about Samuel, and seeing him in the airport a few days ago, saying goodbye to him. She had found herself, at that moment, overcome with a peculiar need: to press herself into him, to feel him physically there. It turned out, the thing she missed the most was his heat. Those long years after she left the family, what she longed for more than anything was that human warmth, how Samuel would climb into bed on those mornings when another of his nightmares terrified him, or how he’d press into her when he was running a fever. Whenever his need was great, he’d come to her, this little cauldron, this hot humid ball. She’d press her face into him and smell his little-boy smell, like sweat and syrup and grass. He ran so hot her skin would dampen where it touched him, and she imagined his core burning with all the energy his body would need for its growth to manhood. It was that warmth she craved suddenly in the airport. She has not felt such a thing in a very long time. Mostly she’s chilled—maybe because of the pills, her anxiety drugs, her blood thinners and beta-blockers. She’s always so cold these days.

  The sun is down now and they’re staring at a purple sky. Lillian is in the house lighting a fire. Freya sits listening to the rushing water. To their right, up the coast, is an island where in the gathering darkness Faye can see a bright tongue of light.

  “What is that?” she says, pointing.

  “Melkøya,” Freya says. “It’s a factory. It’s where they take the gas.”

  “And that light?”

  “Fire. It burns all the time. I don’t know why.”

  And Faye stares at the smokestack venting its orange flame into the night and all at once she’s transported back to Iowa, she’s sitting with Henry on the shore of the Mississippi River and she’s looking at the fire coming out of the nitr
ogen plant. She could see that fire from anywhere in town. She used to call it the lighthouse. That was so long ago it feels like a different life. And at the sudden recall of this long-dormant memory, Faye begins to cry. Not a hard cry, but a light and delicate one. She thinks about what Samuel would have called it, this crying—a Category 1—and she smiles. Freya either does not notice the crying or pretends not to notice it.

  “I’m sorry I got him and you didn’t,” Faye says. “Our father, I mean. I’m sorry he left you. It’s not fair.”

  Freya waves at her, dismissing it. “We managed.”

  “I know he missed you a great deal.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I think he always wanted to come back. I think he regretted leaving.”

  Freya stands and looks out at the water. “It’s good he stayed away.”

  “Why?”

  “Look around you,” she says, opening her arms to the house, the land, the animals, to Lillian and the fire she’s building and the Bible with its exhausting family tree. “We didn’t need him.”

  She extends her hand to Faye and they shake, a formal gesture declaring the end of this conversation and the end of Faye’s visit.