by Dea Brovig
‘There,’ he said. ‘We haven’t finished talking. I hear your mother is hiring.’
‘She isn’t,’ Else said.
‘That’s not what I heard. Tenvik was asking Valentin about fixing a roof.’
‘She isn’t hiring,’ Else said.
‘Well, Tenvik seems to think so. Who knows, maybe she likes having help? Maybe we all come to live on your farm?’ He showed teeth yellowed by tobacco. He let her arm go and the milk swished in her pail. Yakov’s scar drooped from his eye like a tear. He spun away when Tenvik rounded the corner of the farmhouse. The strong man followed behind him, his eyes narrowed to the wind.
‘Is everything all right here?’ Tenvik asked.
‘Fine,’ Yakov said. He thrust his shovel into the snow.
‘You’ve finished with the cow?’
‘Yes,’ Else said.
‘Now, tell me. How is your father getting on with that roof?’
‘Fine,’ she said and glanced over her shoulder at the road.
‘That’s good to hear,’ said Tenvik. ‘But they’ve forecast more snow. How much time do you think he’ll need before it’s mended?’
Else tried to guess how her mother would want her to answer. Before she had settled on a reply, the farmer was talking again.
‘I’ve come to an agreement with Valentin,’ he said. ‘I’ll cover his expenses for fixing the barn – not a full repair job, mind you, but enough to keep it standing until spring.’
‘No,’ Else said. ‘I don’t think. Mamma wouldn’t …’
‘She will, though, once she sees the damage is bound to get worse. All she has to do is feed him dinner. He’ll get on with the rest. Tell her it’s all taken care of.’
Else stared at Tenvik, unsure of what to do next, suddenly reluctant to go home.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘shouldn’t you be getting to school? Valentin, maybe you would carry the bucket for her.’
The strong man reached a hand for her bucket and Else let him have it and turned to the gate. In measured strides, he kept pace with her as she hurried down the mountain towards the fjord’s mercury drift. Wind whipped the branches of the trees, shaking icicles from their pines which smashed like glass or sank through snow, leaving prints to be plugged with the next blizzard.
Else pulled up her hood when they reached the Bjørndahl property; she could sense the twitching of the curtains in the windows. The strong man gazed at the fjord, where two figures in yellow tossed fishing lines from a rowing boat. When they had passed the spit of rock where the house nestled by the water, Else peeked at his profile, the curve of his ear. She saw his throat working when he swallowed. Long lashes grazed his skin when his black eye blinked. He seemed lost in thought and it occurred to her that he had forgotten she was there. His indifference made her brave. She clenched her hands, squeezing the wool of her mittens in palms clammy in spite of the cold.
‘My parents don’t know about the paddock,’ she said. ‘They don’t know I’ve been there with Lars. They wouldn’t like it.’
She braced herself for his reaction, but the strong man continued to watch the water. Perhaps he had not understood, he only spoke his own language. Then, ‘All right,’ he said in a voice that was too soft for such a body. A snow shower fell from the mountain’s ridges and Else skipped out of its way. They took the bend in the road where she sometimes met Lars and climbed down the hill lined with birch trees to the farm.
‘There it is,’ Else said.
She pointed to the barn, which squatted like a sentry to the yard. She pushed open its door, revealing the wintry scene within. Valentin handed her the pail and unbuttoned his coat, then moved to the centre of the room. He kicked a log whose ragged end poked out of the snow.
Else left him contemplating the ceiling and plodded to the farmhouse. Since she had set out earlier that morning, her mother had swept a path from the barn, a narrow trench with collapsing walls. She found her at the sewing machine in the dining room. Steam rose from a mug she had prepared. She smiled when Else carried the bucket through to the kitchen.
‘How’s the cow?’ she asked.
‘Somebody’s here,’ Else said.
‘Oh?’
‘One of Tenvik’s workers. He’s in the barn.’
‘Whatever can you mean?’ her mother said. The pulse of the sewing machine’s needle failed and then Dagny was on her feet and darting into the kitchen. ‘Are you saying that one of those foreigners is here?’
‘Yes,’ Else said.
‘But why on earth …’
‘The big one,’ she said. ‘He has an agreement with Tenvik.’
Her mother’s face was grey as she swept through the dining room into the hallway. ‘We’ll just see about that,’ Else heard through the wall. She crept to the window to watch her mother swoop over the yard, her coat flying behind her. At least, she thought, her father had already left for the shipyard.
Else changed into her school clothes in her bedroom and lifted her satchel from the floor. She shouldered it to the bottom of the stairs, where she pulled on the coat whose lining still bore her heat. Her mother stood in the doorway of the barn, her arms folded as she shouted over the sound of Valentin’s spade.
‘I will not pay you an øre,’ she was saying as Else approached. ‘Tenvik must have lost his mind this time!’
‘I’m leaving,’ Else said.
‘Hurry up with you, then,’ her mother said, ‘before you miss another ferry.’
The scoop of the shovel faded as Else tramped to the top of the hill. She hooked her thumbs under the satchel’s shoulder straps and bowed her head to the wind that chased the snow over the road.
Else missed the ferry. The day’s German class was underway when she took her seat.
‘Else,’ Paulsen said. ‘Thanks and praise, you’ve decided to join us.’ He invited her to list the prepositions that require the accusativ. She stumbled through bis, gegen, um, while he scowled and shook his head at the class.
During lunch, Else sprang over the grit that studded the schoolyard’s ice to meet Lars at the shed.
‘Is it true?’ he called when he saw her. ‘Is the strong man working on your barn?’
‘Since this morning,’ Else said.
Lars whooped where he waited with Rune and Petter in a scrap of sun. He kissed her when she stopped beside him. She was too pleased to care who saw.
‘How long is he staying?’ Petter asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Else said. ‘Until the roof is fixed.’
‘Ask him what he lifts,’ Rune said. ‘I’d bet he could lift three hundred kilos.’
For the first time in months, Else felt the private thrill that united the boys in their dealings with the circus men. It had Lars twisting around during New Norwegian to share surreptitious smiles with her from his desk. At the end of History he walked her to the Longpier, suggesting questions she might ask the strong man if she had the chance. His approval soothed the worry that scratched behind her breastbone, distracting her from her mother’s distress, from fears of what her father would do.
When she arrived home, Valentin was still in the barn. She descended the hill towards the rasp of his saw. Her mother had abandoned her post by the door, though the snow told of countless trips she had made across the yard. Else tracked her footprints to the farmhouse, where she began to shed her layers in the corridor.
‘Else,’ called her mother from the kitchen, ‘is that you? Wait a minute there. Don’t take off your boots.’
Her mother bore a tray when she stepped into the hall and frowned at the puddle Else had dripped onto the floorboards.
‘Take this out to him,’ she said. ‘He can eat in the barn.’
She gave the tray to Else, who brought it outside. She took care not to let the meatballs roll off the plate as the water glass bumped a mug of chicory, releasing a gentle tinkling into the air. A lantern’s light seeped under the barn’s door in a weak challenge to the dusk. Else tapped the wood with her toe.
‘Ha
llo?’ she said. ‘I have your dinner.’
When the strong man opened the door, his brow was moist with sweat. He stood aside to make room for her to pass. He returned to his work while she stepped around the ladder he had raised in the cow’s pen and placed the tray on the milking stool. Valentin touched his saw to a log that balanced between two benches her mother had been saving for firewood. The lopped-off remains of a tree were piled in a corner of the horse’s stall. Pine needles and wet sawdust covered the ground in a prickly mulch.
Valentin sliced a strip of wood from the log with as much effort as Else used to carve the morning loaf. Chips sprinkled the leather of his shoes like snow. A streak of perspiration stained the spine of his shirt. Rings darkened his armpits and collar band. The space smelled briny and bovine, of bogs and sap and, now, of chicory.
‘Aren’t you going to eat?’ Else asked.
He cut another plank from his log before he lay down his saw. Once he had wiped his palms on his trouser legs, he looked around for the tray and moved over to the stool. Else edged away until her back pressed against the wall. He lowered himself to the floor and lifted the tray onto his lap. She wondered if she should go, but stayed where she was as he began to eat. Valentin picked up the knife and split a meatball in two. While he chewed, his eyes flicked from his plate to where she watched him from the shadows of the room.
‘How was school?’ he asked.
Else shrugged. She heard the water in his gullet as he sipped from his glass. ‘When are you leaving?’ she asked.
‘We’ll see,’ he said. ‘There’s a lot of damage. It’ll take a few days.’
‘I meant,’ Else said, ‘when do you go back to the circus?’
‘In the spring,’ he said. ‘The season starts in Haugesund.’
Else nodded as if that meant something to her. She made a note of the detail to tell Lars tomorrow.
When he had finished his meal and drunk the chicory, Valentin cleaned the grease from his lips on his hand. He stood and offered the tray to Else, then took up the lantern that hung from a nail sticking out of the wall. He held it high to brighten the snow once he had opened the door.
‘Thank your mother,’ he said.
Else ducked under his arm. A candle shone in the dining room window, guiding her to the farmhouse through the dark while, behind her, Valentin’s saw left the peace of the night in tatters.
The strong man left in good time before Johann was due home from the shipyard. In the kitchen Dagny fried more meatballs and peeled the skins from boiled potatoes, scraping the shavings that curled on her knife into the bucket under the sink. Else unscrewed the lid from a pot of lingonberry jam and put it next to her father’s plate on the table. She saw him through the window, a shape in the dark that could easily have been mistaken for a deer.
The front door opened and shut and she hurried to the kitchen to carry the potatoes through. She judged her father’s movements according to the corridor’s protests: the groan of the bottom step when he removed his boots, the floorboards that creaked when he crossed to hang his coat, the quiet when he paused to crack the tension from his back. By the time he arrived in the dining room, she and her mother had finished preparing the dinner table. They took their seats while he washed his hands and splashed his face in the kitchen.
His jumper was spattered with water when he joined them and heaped food onto his dish and mashed his potatoes with the tines of his fork. He poured the sauce and helped himself to several spoonfuls of lingonberry jam. Else watched him chew and thought of Valentin eating his dinner in the barn, sitting in sawdust as he swallowed meatballs without gravy. Her mother watched, too. Her jaw was hard, her knife and fork idle in her fingers. She blinked and seemed surprised to discover that nothing was on her plate.
‘About the barn,’ she said.
‘Now I’m tired,’ said Johann. ‘I don’t want to hear more about the barn tonight.’
‘Tenvik has loaned us a worker. He’s been here today. He’s made some progress.’
Johann’s eyes moved slowly. He spoke through a mouthful of potato. ‘A worker?’ he said. ‘What the hell do you mean, he’s loaned us a worker?’
‘One of the men from his farm.’
‘The circus apes? He’s brought one here? And who’s paying for that? Hm? Who’s paying for that?’ He gulped down his food. ‘Send him away,’ he said.
‘The barn needs fixing.’
‘Send him away,’ he said. ‘I don’t need Tenvik’s goddamned charity.’
Johann speared a lump of meatball, raised it midway to his lips, then flung his fork onto his dish. He slammed a palm on the table top, sending a shiver through the crockery. Dagny flinched and shrank back in her chair. Fear froze Else’s breath to splinters of ice that numbed her lungs and pricked her throat. Through the window, the sky was moonless. The night gobbled the stars.
Her father was up and headed for the boathouse without another word about the barn. Else stayed where she sat and did not dare to look at her mother. After some minutes, Dagny stood and carried the plates into the kitchen. She moved to the oven to add a log to the fire.
‘I might go and lie down,’ she said and padded from the room, leaving Else to clear the rest from the table. She washed the dishes, dried them, dried the pots and glasses and put each piece in its place on the shelf.
HER MOTHER DID not send Valentin away. Each morning when Else passed him on the road to Tenvik’s farm, she would nod her greeting and his eyes would skip from the fjord to acknowledge her. When she returned, her bucket full and her hand sore with lugging it, his saw would be grating in the barn, a hammer pounding. She never knew if her father had seen him in her absence, if, face to face in the yard where the snow crushed itself in its thaw, they exchanged words. What would her father say? Whatever it might be, Valentin did not leave.
In the afternoons when Else came home from school, her mother would dispatch her with his dinner tray. She would wait until Valentin had eaten his meal, always arranging himself on the floor as he had that first night, blowing on a spongy cube of fishcake or dipping his bread into a stew. From her seat on the milking stool, Else would marvel at the barn’s transformation. A network of planks boarded up the ceiling. Three posts seemed to grow out of the ground to support the roof. She watched one evening as he manoeuvred a fourth into the sawdust and hoisted its other end to the swelling above, the tendons popping in his neck as he heaved without uttering so much as a grunt.
For some reason, she felt comfortable in the strong man’s company – perhaps because she seemed to concern him so little. He left her in peace, only speaking to answer her questions about the circus, or about his travels. He had driven through Europe, through Germany, East and West, seen Denmark and Sweden, the northern lights. The winters were too long up north, he said. Someday he would go south, he would settle in the sun.
Else parcelled up these trifles to present to Lars in the caretaker’s shed, where he would kiss her for her troubles.
‘Find out more,’ he would say. ‘Find out if he needs anything. How much homebrew can he handle, anyway?’
A blizzard swept in from the northeast, wiping out the mud a milder temperature in recent weeks had laid bare between cakes of ice. On Else’s journey home from town, snow clouded the ferry’s windows, mottling the view of the coastline to the shipyard. She stepped onto the pier at the public dock and battled her way to the farmhouse through whirling flakes, her legs plunging into powder, pulling her in as far as her calves.
Else’s eyes were streaming when she arrived at the yard. Wind scoured her cheeks as she struggled past the barn, where Valentin’s hammer thudded softly under the howl of the weather. She thought of him there in the lantern’s light, warming his hands in his own steamed breath. His coat was not thick enough for this cold. His toes would be frost-bitten in his boots.
Else did not go straight to the farmhouse for his dinner but instead stole to the edge of the garden, hiding behind the bowed branches of the redc
urrant bushes in case her mother should happen to glance from the dining room. On the fjord, the pier jutted out of the ice, a bleached gangplank into the storm. She mounted the boathouse stairs and shoved its door until it yielded. The snow shrugged a grey light onto the room, onto the ropes and nets and the rectangle of the trapdoor, onto fenders that hung from hooks in the wall over Norges jars and cans of oil. Else climbed over the rowing boat’s oars splayed on the floor and set down her satchel beside her father’s makeshift bed. With the mute distillery as her witness, she unbuckled the straps of the satchel.
She fished out the flask she had used that day to carry Ninni’s Tenvik’s blackcurrant squash to school for her lunch. She took off her gloves, rubbing the worst of the chill from her fingers before she unscrewed the flask’s cap. From her father’s Norges jars, she chose one that was three-quarters full of his clear, stinking liquid and decanted three centimetres of homebrew into the dregs of her drink.
The flask sloshed its contents in her coat pocket as Else ploughed to the farmhouse under the white crown of the morello cherry tree and through the back door into a heat that scalded her skin. She shook her hat and brushed the snow from her arms.
‘Mamma?’ she called.
‘I’ll be right there,’ her mother said.
Else stamped her boots on the doormat. Her mother laughed when she saw her.
‘Go on,’ she said, passing her Valentin’s tray, ‘stop soaking my floor and get back outside with you.’
Else carried the tray to the barn, her eyes slits against the snow. Valentin opened the door when she knocked, letting her in to melt a stream into the sawdust. The space was bitter with a draught that seeped in from the window and through the cracks between the door and its frame. A new fence closed off the cow’s stall. Else deposited the tray on the milking stool.
While Valentin finished up with his hammer, she poured a measure of homebrew into the mug of chicory. Her fingertips tingled as she tightened the flask’s top. She had placed it back in her pocket before he stopped his work to eat.
‘It looks good,’ Else said, pointing at the fence as he sank to the ground and reached for the tray. He clasped the mug in his palms and she waited for him to drink but, after some moments, he put it down and considered his dish. Dinner tonight was a vegetable casserole – a recipe Solveig had given her mother after the last bedehus meeting. Valentin extracted a carrot chunk from a pool of white sauce and popped it into his mouth.