But something isn’t right, because again I hear from the attic what sounds like muted sobbing. This time I put on my pants, light a candle, and head upstairs. The draft is so fierce that the candle goes out. I stop midstairs to relight it. As I’m standing there, I clearly hear what I think is the sound of a woman whimpering, and it’s coming from the very back of the attic. There are supposed to be only two other people in the building. Hugo and Mette are asleep in their room, which is right next to mine. Neither of them would have considered going up to the attic in the middle of the night. Definitely not, because no one ever uses the attic for anything, especially not as a place to sob.
For long periods we’re so isolated at Aasjord Station that it almost feels like being on board a ship far out at sea. If Mette and Hugo were expecting other guests, I would have heard all about it long ago, and under no circumstances would any guest be up in the attic at night. Even an intruder, if such existed on the island, would hardly have found his way up here. The stairs are well hidden in a corner of the second floor in one of the big, pitch-dark buildings. It’s true that the doors are not usually locked, but if someone crept inside to seek shelter, they’d have about thirty rooms in which to hide. They wouldn’t have found the attic even if they tried.
It has to be an injured bird. Or maybe an otter? No, an otter would sneak in and steal dried cod from the ground floor so it could dive into the sea if anyone came. There’s no way an otter would climb upstairs. A stoat? Too risky for that type of animal too, venturing through room after room, from one floor to the next, with fewer and fewer options for retreat. Well, maybe it’s a bird. But that’s not what it sounds like. A bird would be beating its wings and not whimpering like an unhappy woman.
The first thing I notice is that the attic floor is slippery and wet, as if something slimy has dragged itself across the floorboards. The sound is getting clearer, and I’m absolutely positive it must be coming from a child or a woman. I decide it has to be a woman and now it sounds almost seductive. A melancholy humming carried in from the sea and almost drowned out by the wind. But it’s not the wind or the sea that is singing. There are no walls between me and the voice as I move farther into the attic. With only the faint glow of the candle, I have to be careful not to stumble on a seine or cut myself on a rusty barrel hoop.
The seductive song of the Sirens caused seafarers to run aground. Circe transformed Odysseus’s crew into swine. In the corner of the attic I can now make out a shape. I’m not scared, because something tells me that whatever it is over there, it won’t or can’t hurt me. The silhouette is hazy. I approach cautiously as I try to figure out what the shape in front of me could be. I see long, fair hair, a naked torso with breasts, but the lower body…it’s a fishtail, it’s a…
Then I wake up, bathed in sweat, as if I’ve been in the ocean.
The next morning I open my eyes, feeling as if I’ve been ill. Hugo says he heard me shout through the wall of my room in the night. I tell him I was about to drown in my own dark sea swells. Then he says that he also heard me get up and walk around. I tell him I don’t remember that at all.
18
Since we can’t go out to the fishing banks, the Greenland shark is living large in Vestfjorden, free of the threat that so often hovers above it in the form of two motivated men in a tiny RIB.
On the second stormy day (though the wind seems to have decreased to a stiff gale) I take a walk along the cliffs and shoreline on Skrova. The sea is gunmetal gray with big white breakers. During the night the water has been churned up and swirled around. On the headlands facing the sea, I come across lots of pollock that have been flung ashore by the storm. The currents must have whirled the fish up through the water column to the surface and then cast them onto the beach. They can’t have been lying there for long, since they would have been eaten by the wild otters, mink, fox, crows, gulls, or sea eagles. A short distance away I find a dead seal already bloated with gases.
On the Orkney Islands they have legends about selkies, “seal men,” who can swim like seals in the ocean. On land they take the form of ordinary men, except that they have unusually gentle features—something that makes them especially dangerous to young women. In northern Norway, people used to fear the draugen, the ghost of the sea, which was ascribed very different traits. The draugen was supposedly the phantom of a drowned fisherman, with dead red eyes and wearing an old-fashioned vest made of leather. His head was nothing more than a clump of seaweed. Whenever he appeared, in half a boat with tattered sails, he liked to pull alongside the boats of the living. If he screamed and carried on, it was crucial not to reply. The draugen was a portent of death for everyone who saw him, provided he didn’t take them down into the sea then and there. He could spell death even without being seen. In the night he would mess with the equipment on board while a boat was docked. If the oars were turned with the blades facing forward, things did not bode well for those who sat in the front of the boat.15
Throughout his life, Hugo has known many older fishermen who have very definite ideas about the draugen. They don’t consider the stories about him to be just folklore or mythology, but something much more real. If you asked them directly, they wouldn’t admit to believing in the draugen, because they know that would make them sound foolish. But this malevolent spirit of the sea still lingers in the mind of some fishermen.
—
At the end of the beach I have to climb over a pile of rocks. On the other side I come to a new stretch of shoreline. It has been completely washed clean, without a single trace of kelp or greenery. The sea has taken everything. At one end is an old boat launch with rusty rails that go down into the water. When I was a kid, I often saw railroad tracks laid down on sloping rocks and shores. They were used to move boats up or down from a boathouse or slip. But in my imagination they were built for trains going down to the ocean bottom, with watertight compartments from which fantastical sights could be seen.
I continue on past the rocks as the storm rages, getting stronger the farther west I go on the island. The sky rushes blue black and low over the sea and islets. Cymbals and bass drums crash simultaneously. I was once in a hurricane, and what I’ll never forget is the sound. Ordinary storms whistle and howl. In a hurricane all these high-pitched, familiar sounds seem to disappear. What’s left is a deep, dark, penetrating sound, as if the soul of the universe were making itself known with a cold fury.
There’s a salty, fresh, but slightly rotten smell in the air at the moment, like when the bodies of two people have joined on a hot and humid night in a bedroom with the windows closed. The water is rushing in through small, narrow cracks in the rocks, shooting up like geysers when it reaches the end and collides with the mountain. Each time the water takes several tiny pieces of stone from the cliff, carrying them back out to sea. Maybe one day they’ll form a new beach along some faraway coast.
From the crests of the waves the wind grabs tiny drops, which then sweep like weightless rain toward land. When the waves slam against the rocks, they shatter and turn to spray. Water molecules dance around on the world’s oceans, dissolving, evaporating, cooling, and combining in new ways. The drops that strike my face have been in the Gulf of Mexico, in the Bay of Biscay, through the Bering Strait, and around the Cape of Good Hope many times. Maybe over the eons they’ve actually been in all the oceans, both big and small. In the form of rain they have washed over dry land; there they have been lapped up thousands of times by animals, people, and plants, only to evaporate, transpire, or run back out to sea, again and again. Over billions of years the water molecules have been everywhere on earth.
The sea slams against the cliffs and rocks with thundering crashes and sharp, hissing sounds. The wind dissipates the clouds, but the sun never makes an appearance. The horizon is saturated, and the light seems to be coming from the gray-green water, which is hammering the shore. I’m suddenly scared that the sea might reach to where I’m standing. No, that’s not right. I’m gripped with an irrational
fear that the sea is trying to do that. Even though I laugh out loud at such a foolish idea, I climb up onto a bigger rock. Even the seagulls have flown to higher ground to hide.
—
The sea is the first source. Waves from a deep, primordial past flow through us, like echoes of small splashes inside an inaccessible cave near the ocean. Sometimes, when we stand on shore during a powerful storm, it’s like the sea wants to take us back. A wave far out on the horizon slowly starts to build up extra muscles—you’d think it knew beforehand exactly where it wants to go and how it’s going to get there. The wind helps out; the movement and rhythm are perfect all the way to shore. Other waves give the first wave a shove, cheering it on and allowing it free passage. As it approaches land, it picks up speed and gathers its forces to leap.
On shore, let’s say that a couple, newly in love, are taking a walk. Or maybe we see a morose couple from the Czech Republic, a local amateur photographer with a new camera, or a bunch of inquisitive teenagers who are bored with being at home and who still haven’t discovered that they could die. All of these people left their safe, warm houses, their comfortable cabins and hotel rooms, to come out and feel the ferocity of the storm on their own bodies.
They walk along, shivering a bit but mostly enjoying the forces at play outdoors, though from a safe distance. Maybe looking at the stormy sea makes one of them realize how old the earth is. They take note of the whole vast surface in which the wind is creating furrows on the wave front, the foam whipped up like white hair, the low rumbling sound, and everything else that gives the sea its prehistoric face.
In the old days, people called big waves brimhester (breaker horses) because the crests as they raced to the shore reminded them of the manes of horses. Now the spectators see a huge wave—they didn’t realize the sea was even capable of producing such a thing. It’s headed for land, arching its back as it opens its mouth wide. A tongue of searching seawater stretches out, higher and higher, much longer than any of the other waves, far past the foreshore and over the steep slopes. This wave is like no other. It pushes past the barriers of boulders, rocks, and crags, then continues for many yards up onto what otherwise belongs only to land. Like the arm of an octopus, the wave shoots out from the sea, aiming for the spot where someone is standing, completely unaware of what is about to happen.
The current is so strong that it sweeps the people off their feet, even though it doesn’t even reach to their knees. If not for what happens at that brief moment, they could have stood in that very spot for the next fifty years or so without ever getting their feet wet. They came out here on a whim when they could just as well have stayed home and done what people do when they’re living their normal lives from one day to the next.
The wave topples them over. This could still have been just an amusing story to be told at lunch the following day if not for the fact that the water needs to go back out to sea, and takes along everything in its path. Hands fumble desperately for something to cling to as they lose their grip on the slippery boulders and slick rocks or are scraped bloody by barnacles. Kelp and sand fill the hands, but to no avail. The undertow is too great. First bewilderment, their eyes meeting for a tenth of a second, an inquiring look, wondering whether the other person has somehow devised this prank. Then both people realize it’s serious. Shock and panic race like white bolts of electricity through their bodies. Their brains experience this moment in several dimensions at once. Time freezes. Adrenaline pumps, and all their alarm systems go off. What was supposed to be a nice outing along the shore in rough weather, maybe in order to build up an appetite before dinner, is about to become a brief last act. The curtain rises, life unfolds on stage, not as a farce but as a revue in color and with the fast-forward button pressed down.
The sea sucks in its tongue, licks its lips, and closes its mouth. Only a few short-lived streaks of white foam are left on shore. In the ocean the people tumble around as if inside a washing machine, until they can’t tell up from down. Maybe they get slammed against the rocks and are already unconscious before they drown, as they’re dragged farther out, farther down. Maybe their bodies will never be found. Gone. Forever. These kinds of accidents happen every winter and fall, when storms rage along the coast.
—
Toward evening, the sea thunders from the west. Big black patches of cloud glide in over Skrova to cover the moon. When the power goes out, it’s pitch-black. A bottomless night comes racing in with the storm, forcing its way into everything and everyone.
19
By morning the storm has calmed a bit, but our little floating island is still in the midst of a churning sea. According to the weather forecast, it will take days before we can even think about venturing out on the water. So I stay inside, reading and taking notes, while Hugo continues with his carpentry work on the Red House. Fortunately, he’s far enough along that he can work indoors as he listens to the radio. He’s wearing his headset, which he has a tendency to take off and leave in the strangest places. He’s constantly trying to remember where he put it.
The bad weather gives me the opportunity to read the books I’ve brought along. I get out a massive volume with a white cover, which was first published in Latin almost five hundred years ago. I know that the author, Olaus Magnus, wrote about the exquisite monsters that, in his day, were found in the oceans, especially off the coasts of Norway and Iceland. It so happens that he drew the sea monsters he describes in his book on a map, and I’m familiar with that map: Olaus Magnus’s Carta marina from 1539.
Olaus Magnus was the Latin name of the Swede Olaf Månsson, from the town of Linköping. He was a Catholic bishop, but he was forced into exile—first in Gdansk, then in Rome—when Sweden became Lutheran. In Rome, he worked on Carta marina and his epic history of the Nordic peoples, which was published there in 1555, under the patronage of Pope Julius III. The history is divided into twenty-two books and 778 chapters. In my Swedish edition it comprises more than eleven hundred closely typeset pages, all in one volume. The book proves to be a sumptuous treasure trove. Olaus Magnus was an eminent humanist, in the sense that he was extremely learned and sought knowledge from all kinds of sources, turning in particular to the classics of antiquity.
In keeping with the tradition of his day, the full title of his book says a lot about the nature of the contents: A Description of the Northern Peoples, Their Various Relationships and Circumstances, Their Habits, Their Religious Practices and Superstitions, Their Skills and Occupations, Societal Customs and Ways of Life, Their Wars, Buildings and Tools, Mines and Quarries, and Wondrous Things About Nearly All the Animals Living in the North and Their Natures: A Work of Diverse Contents, Replete with Far-Flung Knowledge and Partially Illuminated with Foreign Examples, Partially with Portrayals of Domestic Things, Intended to a High Degree as Amusement and Entertainment, and Meant to Leave the Reader in Delighted Mind.16
Olaus Magnus wrote an important work, which, over the course of the next centuries, was translated into English, German, Dutch, and Italian. His goal was to collect everything he could possibly discover pertaining to the north. By the second book section, he already begins describing “the great quantities of wondrous phenomena that belong to the water’s element, especially in the endless ocean that touches the northern part of Norway and the area’s countless islands.” In this section the author discusses, for example, Iceland’s volcanoes, where for him the spirits and shadows linger from those who have drowned or suffered particularly violent deaths. Their ghostly figures can assume forms so they can’t be distinguished from the living, though they avoid shaking hands if you meet them. Among other things, Olaus Magnus also describes the horrifying sounds issuing from some beach grottoes, the stench of dried fish, the strange nature of ice, the kayaks of the Greenland Inuit, the mysterious cliffs of the Faeroe Islands, the fathomless deep off the Norwegian coastline, and the rivers of northern Sweden.
Parts of Olaus Magnus’s work function as a supplementary description of all the fantasti
cal creatures depicted in detail on his famous Carta marina—in particular the monsters. Today the map is celebrated, but sometime around 1580 all known copies disappeared. Not until 1886 was a copy discovered in the national library in Munich, Germany. And in 1962 another copy was found in Switzerland and acquired by the university library in Uppsala, Sweden. It’s painful to think that this treasure might have been lost forever.
—
Olaus Magnus had done extensive research while making lengthy trips on both land and sea, within Scandinavia and beyond. It’s uncertain whether he personally visited the coasts of Norway, though he writes so much about them. But his work is encyclopedic, and many descriptions are undoubtedly based on the stories of fishermen and seafarers. And, to an even greater extent, on everything that was written by antiquity’s numerous known and unknown authorities regarding various phenomena and forms of life in the sea, which possesses “a heavenly and eternal fecundity.”
Like other learned men of that time, Olaus Magnus believed that all animals found on land have their counterparts in the sea. The same is true of plants. For all those found on land, including coltsfoot, there is a similar variety in the sea. According to Olaus Magnus, the ocean also has its own variations of birds, plants, and animals—everything from lions to eagles, as well as swine, trees, wolves, grasshoppers, dogs, swallows, and so on. A very long list. Some animals grow big and fat by breathing in the south wind; others by inhaling the wind from the north.
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