“Blair,” repeated my father—my angry, loving, beloved father. “Are you safe?”
Was I safe? Far had never threatened me outright, never even raised his voice. I had not seen him harm anyone. What could I say—that he looked at me funny? That he’d stuffed some snow down my shirt? He was an authority, and though I was open in theory to questioning authority, Far would first need to do something that I could unequivocally peg as wrong. But it was myself, not him, that I doubted.
Since childhood, I had held a panicked dread of getting into trouble. I so craved my parents’ approval that I wanted it to extend to things beyond my control: that my life be good, and devoid of sorrow. That was what they wanted for me—or rather, from me. I felt acutely what my mom often remarked: that a parent was only as happy as their least happy child. If I complained, they might be disappointed in me for more reasons than one.
Was I safe?
“Yes,” I said.
“Oh, good.” My father was relieved. He could chat, he said, but since I’d ducked out of class to answer the phone, I should probably go back. My father took school very seriously. We hung up.
It was quiet now, in the science room. I lay back, feeling the cold of the lab table through my shirt. I didn’t have to hear my father’s voice anymore. He was so far away.
A SOUND ROUSED ME FROM MY CLEANING—something repetitive, sharp and grating, coming from the direction of the shop. I locked the Old Store, checking the door behind me, and walked back toward the road. When I came around the corner I found Arild on his knees, sweat pearled on his forehead, sawing a large hole through the back wall of the shop. He the Rich One watched with his arms crossed. Behind them, resting on two pallets, was a shiny new freezer.
CHAPTER TWO
THE DAYS PASSED QUICKLY INTO A RHYTHM. In the mornings I sat at the coffee table, listening. The customers talked weather, or argued about the ways they were and weren’t related, or discussed the relative merits of Thai versus Russian mail-order brides. Often they made fun of each other. Mostly, though, they just told stories. “Remember that time he Trond lost a baby polar bear in Tromsø?” a man might say to the table at large, as if incanting a chant. “Trond, he was glad with the drink. He took a ship down from Svalbard with a baby ice bear in a cage, and he put the cage out on the dock—”
“He was going to sell it,” someone interrupted. “But when he went back to the ship to get his flask, the bear opened its cage and ran off down the street. A cop came over and started yelling at him to get the bear—”
“So he Trond, he handed the cop his spirits flask. And he left the cop standing there, with his thumb in the mouth of the flask!”
At which point, chuckling, the coffee drinkers refilled their mugs for another round.
“Wait,” I said. I couldn’t help it. “What happened to the bear?”
Six heads swiveled toward me. “I don’t know, girl,” the first man said. “That’s the end of the story.”
I learned quickly that the stories rarely ended on a conclusive note. They started and stopped on the terms that decades of retelling had choreographed them to start and stop. A century-old tale was fresh as yesterday, and yesterday’s news well-worn as myth: often, stories set two hundred years ago began with the words, “Remember that time—?” and people would nod because, in a way, they did. In their stories, time collapsed.
Sometimes the men glanced at me while they spoke, and I got the impression that they were performing, in part, for my sake. I started talking back to them, keeping pace with the teasing as best I could. There was a rhythm to it, and it felt good to catch on, like joining in the chorus of a song. One day a cocky man, upon learning that I was American, started speaking to me in ever-louder English, showing off for his friends. Everyone else knew that I spoke Norwegian, but I indulged the man, answering his questions demurely as the table grew quiet. Finally he asked me, with a wink, “Why you sit here and listen to all these boring manfolk?”
“Well,” I answered, in perfect Norwegian, “it’s good for weeding out the fools.”
The man gaped, then blushed red, as everyone broke into raucous laughter. They’d be reminding him of this moment for years, and with their laughter I felt a new welcome. “She’ll become a Northlander yet,” someone said, pouring me more coffee, and my own blush gave way to pride.
Sometimes Arild sat at the table, but more often he sat behind the counter and supervised from a distance, speaking up when he had some quip or insult or blandly cutting remark to add to the conversation. When customers asked where he’d found me, he was quick on the draw. “It’s one of those sex websites,” he said. Or, “She likes old men.”
The men groaned, then glanced at me. But I would only smile.
At first Arild’s remarks had bothered me, but after a few days I decided they were innocuous. Arild only ever made such jokes in the shop; they struck me as somewhat clumsy attempts to impress the men at the table, a group he was simultaneously part of and separate from. I decided that the least I could offer was public loyalty, smirking rights before his customers. In the apartment, at night, we were friends, chopping meat for stew and washing dishes, sitting and regarding the news. There was none of the tension that I expected between an older man and a young woman, nothing of the sort that was reflected in Arild’s jokes, that I imagined crossing the minds of the customers and of Anne Lill next door. On my second night, as I’d walked toward my bedroom, Arild had remarked from his rocking chair, “Just so you know, I’m not like that.” It took me a while to understand what he meant. But when I did, I was grateful.
So it was no problem to play into the jokes, to flirt with the table at large, so long as I could slip away when I needed to. I sat and listened and teased, and in the early afternoons, when I’d drunk so much coffee that my knees were trembling, I went to work in the Old Store. I usually left around the time Anne Lill, who worked mornings as a janitor at a nearby retirement home, arrived at the shop to help out.
Entering the Old Store felt like entering another world, but not in the ways I’d anticipated. The air smelled like damp wood and carried a chill that even the warmest days couldn’t dissipate, so that stepping through the door felt like submerging in water. It was also strangely quiet: even with the door wide open, the outside sounds of seagulls and sheep and distant chainsaws were muffled to near silence. Instead the rooms seemed to shimmer with their own frequency. In the Old Store, even when I was alone, I never felt stillness. Things shifted in the corners of my gaze: dust rising before a window, a satin dress rotating on its hanger, a white moth caught behind glass. The floor wasn’t quite flat, and walking across it made me dizzy, as if I were at sea. Every interior sound was magnified, so that a broom against the floorboards sounded like wind through a field, and a record winding down in the next room was as insistent as breath in my ear. First I moved the cabinets, the boxes and bicycles, into the basement of the Old House, and then I started on the shelves, arranging wares and polishing off dust. The room brightened in color as it moved back in time.
“Did you lock the door?” Arild asked each time I came back from the Old Store. I assured him I had, though he’d never tell me what, exactly, he was afraid might happen.
When I finished with the Old Store for the day, I walked along the shore or through the mountain village, the cluster of farms a few kilometers inland from Mortenhals. Then I’d return to the shop and help Arild and Anne Lill close down for the night, clearing the table and hauling boxes of apples into the walk-in cooler. Sometimes Rune still sat at the picnic tables outside. “Rune,” Arild said, “go home.” Familiar words. Then he’d hand me a recipe for whale or reindeer stew or haddock and instruct me to meet him upstairs. I took my time in the dark shop, picking out all the ingredients, plus extra onions and margarine. We cooked together—me boiling potatoes, Arild dipping slabs of meat in flour and pepper. If Rune hadn’t left by the time the food was ready, I’d call out the window for him to join us.
There was a
lways plenty of food. Arild made extra and froze it in cartons to give to local bachelors, since otherwise, he noted, they’d eat open-faced sandwiches for all four meals of the day. Besides, he took great pleasure in feeding leftovers to birds, tossing scraps of meat out the window at the crows and seagulls that came to the sound of his voice. This in particular Anne Lill disapproved of. Seagulls were a nuisance, crying at all hours of the night. Their primary usefulness, as many believed, was that their bodies could be stuffed with foam and used as discreet buoys for illegal salmon nets. “In Lofoten,” she told Arild, “people steal their eggs, boil them, and put them back in the nest.” Arild thought this heinous—boiled gull eggs should be eaten on toast, not discarded. He had sympathy for the gulls, the crows, and the creatures of the land, and felt a kinship with his late mother, who had once in her final years waded chest deep into the icy fjord to free a seabird caught in a net that she’d spotted from her window. Anne Lill wasn’t unsympathetic; she was just practical.
It was along this divide—practicality versus sentimentality—that most of the couple’s differences hinged. Anne Lill was soft-spoken and scrupulous, with a keen sense of justice, and loath to indulge the drunks and bachelors whom Arild tended. When she disliked someone it was difficult for her to contain herself, and she often opted to leave the room rather than be falsely civil. She kept order in the shop with an air of fierce resignation, patrolling the aisles with a flyswatter; and, when amused, she broke into a brilliant, contagious smile that turned down the corners of her mouth. When she could, a few times a year, Anne Lill engaged in the Norwegian tradition of South-trips, escaping with friends for a few days on the sunny beaches of Turkey and Spain. Once she’d made it as far as Florida, where she visited Disney World. It was there that she encountered the most beautiful sound of her life: crickets singing in the grasses outside her hotel window, day and night. She found their music oddly moving. After her South-trips, Anne Lill returned tanned and fortified, ready for a few more months of dreary work and cold.
Arild’s escape came closer to home: he liked long drives, and he invited me along. Almost anything was a worthy reason: a half-empty sack of lamb formula, a question for an acquaintance, a particularly clear sky. He’d send me to the shop for ice-cream bars and sodas and we’d drive along the winding roads and get to know each other. I was surprised by how comfortable I felt, sitting cross-legged in the passenger seat, bumping over the potholes and gaps in the neglected roads, watching the fjords flow by and open into new fjords. Wherever we went, people knew Arild, and he knew them even better. He stopped to check in on widows and widowers, bringing surprises of frozen fish or packaged cake. He’d brief me on their lives before knocking on the door. “This man,” he whispered, “doesn’t like to go to the outhouse in winter, so he shits in grocery bags,” pulling from his pocket a handful of bags that he intended to leave behind as a surreptitious gift. Or, “He still thinks the Nazis are here.” He liked everybody, but he liked knowing their dirt, too—who was a liar, who was a thief. And he was unabashed in his admiration for folks he deemed competent—the women with their hand-spun sweaters and homemade lefse, the men who built their own grillhouses or repaired vintage cars. “One has to admit, she was talented,” he would say for days after a visit, over scrambled eggs or across the coffee table or as we chased escaped sheep back into the pasture. During visits he kept careful track of what people needed, whether it was a new belt or a refrigerator or just human company, and he did what he could to provide it. He was the shopkeeper. That was his role, as surely as he never denied his customers their groceries just because they couldn’t afford them.
At one time, shopkeepers in the Northland had been neskonger—kings of the small capes that peppered the fjords and isles, their shops simultaneously gossip mills, welfare systems, and meeting places for travelers along the sea road. In communities without a school, the church a day’s row away, the shop was everything. Arild’s great-grandfather Johannes Kristoffersen built his eponymous shop at the age of nineteen, after the land’s previous owners drowned en route to a baptism; he later passed the shop on to his son, who changed its name to Johannes Kristoffersen’s Descendants. Arild inherited the business from his own father, Kristoffer Kristoffersen. At that time, the shop was one of many; before cars became common, villagers traveled between any number of markets on tractors and horseback. But now shops were dying, closing, as business grew too thin, as loyal customers and owners died off and their children moved on to more interesting lives in the cities.
Often, on our drives, Arild pointed out dead shops. They were everywhere once you developed an eye for them. There was a dead shop burned on a hillside, a dead shop crumbling by a dead ferry dock, a dead shop perched on a rock by the sea. They were squat buildings with peeling paint, their windows cracked and dirty. Sometimes Arild pulled over and peered through the edges of the glass to look for equipment or wares that could be used or sold. Dead shops were depressing, but they could be a boon. It was from dead shops that Arild had gotten his grocery signs and industrial shelves and, most recently, a thousand pairs of shoes from Finnmark. Arild thought that particular shop had died because it was too far from the Russian border, where there happened to be a lively trade in shoes: “Those Communist countries, if they made an ugly shoe in 1945, they’re still making it now.” He arranged the shoes around the coffee table so that visitors couldn’t help but admire them: soccer cleats, gladiator sandals, disco-glitter stilettos. A few women came back multiple times a day, just to see if they’d missed anything.
Arild’s shop was still alive, which was about as optimistic as the old man got, at least publicly. He’d fallen on hard times before, about a decade earlier, when his oldest son, Henning, was helping him and they hadn’t kept track of the books. Things got so bad that he couldn’t afford shipments: each night he’d count out the cash from the register, then drive to the city to buy milk and bread to restock what he could. But the customers had saved him—they’d stayed loyal even when his shelves were nearly empty. Now the shop comforted him. Along with the sheep and a small RV park behind the barn, it made a meager living but a respectable legacy.
We got back from our drives late, usually when one of us remembered that we needed to nurse the lambs. The bright sky gave no hints to the hour, but sometimes a wall of fog would be rolling down the fjord from the north. I’d heat milk while Arild tinkered in the barn. They were solid things, the lambs, already fat and whining, and sometimes they murmured in their throats while they drank. Afterward, Arild and I nodded good night to each other, and I’d curl into my small bed with my sweater for a pillow and wake in the morning as if I’d only blinked my eyes.
Most of the customers trickled in later, but Nils sat at the coffee table first thing each morning and drank a glass bottle of Coca-Cola. He was young, thirty-five, with a buzz cut and a cheerful red face, and he’d lean back in his orange jumpsuit and cross his arms and grin and stare at my breasts. Nils was going to Thailand soon. When Arild saw him, he congratulated Nils’s upcoming marriage. “No,” Nils objected, blushing. “No . . . No. That’s not why I’m going. No.”
“It’s not the worst thing, a Thai girl,” observed a man I didn’t recognize. He wore a shirt with the logo for Kvitebjørn, the White Bear oil rig.
“You see that shirt?” Nils said. “He wears it so people will think he makes good money.”
Arild turned to me. “You know how much money Nils made in six months?”
I didn’t.
“Five hundred thousand kroner,” said Arild. “In six months.”
“But then I was driving trucks twenty-nine hours in a row. That’s not legal,” said Nils. He was always grinning. He seemed happy that Arild had said it.
As Nils told it, his best friend had gone to Thailand a few years ago and come back with his very own Thai boy. The couple had lived in Tromsø for a while, traveled back and forth to Thailand, but then the boy started sleeping around. He even went to Oslo for sex—he didn’t w
ant to be held back, even after all his boyfriend had done for him. So now they were breaking up, and Nils’s friend had to get some belongings from the boy’s family in Thailand. Nils had said he’d go along, that maybe the sunlight would help his skin, which, like that of many of the villagers, broke out in open sores that were exacerbated by lack of light. He wasn’t out for a girl, he promised, when everyone at work and at the coffee table teased him. He wasn’t looking for a girl to bring back.
But the truth was, he wasn’t not looking for a girl, either. He made decent money and owned his own farm but had no one to share it with. He could have met someone online, but he didn’t speak English, and besides, he was too dyslexic to write letters. And although he’d had girlfriends before, and brought them to Malangen, the girls went on to leave him for neighbors. Nils was nice, people agreed, almost too nice—the guy who’d stay sober at a bonfire and drive everyone home after, pull over on turns so that seventy-year-olds could puke out the window, drop them off with a smile and call them the next morning.
Everyone was hoping that Nils would come back with a girl, just so they could say they told him so. But if he wanted a Thai girl, he wouldn’t need to go far. The Thai girls around Malangen were all related anyway. No one remembered where it started, but one man got a girl and the next thing he knew she had set up her sisters and friends with other bachelors. Then they brought their sisters and friends—a whole community of Thai girls, imported one by one, and it was the girls already here who did the recruiting. An enlistment campaign, Arild called it; he had received some offers himself, after his first wife left him. He was, he liked to say, still considering.
For their part, most of the Norwegian women on the peninsula viewed the whole process with disdain. They thought men who went for foreign girls couldn’t handle a woman with opinions. The men responded that local women, with their short hair and broad faces, looked like men themselves.
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