“I think so,” I said.
“Listen,” said the voice. “I’m inviting you and fifteen young people to sail for five days in my wooden boat. There will be acoustic guitars in the evenings. We leave next Friday.”
“Who are you?”
“I’ve heard people talking about you.”
“I can’t go,” I said. “I have to work in the Old Store. Who are you?”
“Think about it,” said the voice. “You don’t know me, but you’ve probably heard of my former boat Vulcana.”
“I’m afraid I haven’t heard of a lot of boats.”
The voice paused. “Oh. Well, people have been talking about you. They say you’re fair, a fair person. That makes me interested.” Another pause. I wasn’t sure when to answer. “You’ll hear from me again.”
Dial tone.
I went into the living room, where Arild had come back from the barn and was watching the news. There was a close-up of a runner panting with his hands on his knees. Arild leaned forward, watching. The runner, explained a disappointed female voice-over, had been caught doping.
“Look at this,” Arild said, without turning from the screen. “Caught doping. And where do you think he’s from?”
“I don’t know,” I said, though I knew.
“. . . the American runner . . .”
“Oh ho!” said Arild. “America!”
“Arild,” I said, “I just got a phone call from a man who owned a boat called Vulcana.”
“What?” He reached for the remote and turned off the TV. “Helge Jensen called you? How did he get your number?”
“I don’t know. He invited me on a trip but I said no.”
“You know, if you fly Norwegian Air, you can look in the magazine on the flight and there’s an article about that boat. It’s—” He stopped. Helge Jensen, he said, was the closest thing to an old-fashioned cowboy that Malangen had ever had.
“You mean like a Viking?”
“No, like a cowboy. Once, his ship sank far out at sea, far past the islands, and he lay there alone in his lifeboat floating out to sea for hours and hours, all alone, shivering, and when finally he was rescued the reporters all asked him how it was, you know, and he said it was hell. Yes, they said, tell us more, how was it hell? And his lighter had got wet, you know, when the ship sank, so he couldn’t light his cigarette.”
I waited.
“That’s all,” said Arild. “That was his hell. Not that he was floating into the sea! But that he couldn’t even light a cigarette. Another thing about Helge Jensen is he has that hair.” Then Arild abruptly got bored with the subject and turned the TV back on. But the next morning he told every person who sat at the coffee table that Helge Jensen had called she Blair. Everyone had their own story, or a different version of someone else’s story, and all of the stories, it seemed, were secondhand. “Helge Jensen,” said Odd Jonny, a regular. “With the hair! You, that ship he has, it sank three times last year alone. Like the Titanic. It just doesn’t float. Once he was out to sea and had only this tiny little raft where his feet hung off the edge, and his boat was entirely gone, and he just lay there drifting with his feet in the water. They picked him up hours later and he said it was like hell—his lighter had gotten wet and he couldn’t light a smoke.”
“I heard that,” I said. “Arild told me.”
Odd Jonny didn’t slow down. “So the next time his ship sank, he swam to shore with his lighter taped on top of his head.”
“On his head,” repeated Rune.
“Uh-huh,” said Odd Jonny. “And another time in the middle of winter he sank in a fjord with three men and a dog. But the dog got stuck on a rock and couldn’t swim, so Helge Jensen swam all the way back out so the dog could ride on his back. The men on the shore said it looked like the dog was standing on top of the water.”
Arild was impressed. That was a new story for him.
Anne Lill was the only one who didn’t seem excited. “I’m glad you’re not going with him,” she said. “Those people use drugs.”
That afternoon, a storm like a black curtain slid up the fjord, and talk in the shop was of rivals: the shop in Sand was faltering. No one was vulgar enough to celebrate the competing shop’s struggles, but it was understood that those struggles would certainly not harm the business of Johannes Kristoffersen’s Descendants.
The Sand Shop was nearly identical to Arild’s in size, wares, and even shopkeepers, who were only months apart in age, and grew up together. In fact, Egil and Arild had been good friends as boys, bonded as shopkeepers’ sons, before their family businesses pulled them onto parallel paths on either side of the small river. They had not laid eyes on each other in years. Their clientele, with loyalties passed down through generations, did not intermingle. With the exception of a few known drunks who bought beer at both shops to seem like they were buying less, anyone entering the “wrong” shop without an obvious reason was grounds for weeks of gossip. This peninsula-wide division struck me as a brilliant strategy for keeping alive two businesses that should not, in fact, exist so close to each other, but when I floated this theory by the men at the coffee table, they scoffed. Strategy? They stuck by their shop because it was better. Arild’s shop had the coffee table; Egil’s response had been to add some cafe tables and a coffee dispenser in the back of his own shop, but the beverages were more for caffeine than community, and the tables were usually empty. There were rumors that Egil ran a speakeasy out of his basement called the Nice Boys’ Club, but of these, none at the coffee corner would speak. “I wouldn’t know,” said He the Rich One sadly when I asked, but then he brightened—“Darling, does that mean you’re asking me on a date?”—and it took groans from around the table and a whack from Anne Lill’s flyswatter to dishearten him again.
Lately, there had been murmurs of change in Sand. Egil’s supplier was considering cutting off its northern stores, and it seemed unlikely that Arild’s supplier would cater to two competing shops in such proximity. Besides, Egil struggled with his health, and was perhaps already slipping. In fact, just last week, a number of strangers had come to Arild’s shop and purchased only bananas. “Aha,” said Arild, regarding with pleasure his full banana shelf, “he Egil has run out of bananas.” But his pride was too hasty. Soon the increased demand exhausted his own fruit, and he had to make an emergency trip to Tromsø to save face. If only one shop was to survive, fate would decide the outcome, but Arild wasn’t about to leave fate to chance.
There were murmurs of other change in Sand, too. Martin’s house had sat empty since his death, but no longer—his sister Martha had moved in, and she was American. Though she was born on the peninsula, she’d moved to Florida ages ago, fallen in love with a Mexican man, and raised three children on Cuban food. Now she was back, though no one had seen her yet; they gathered her presence through glimpses of a brown-haired boy on a bicycle and a little dog—“One of those carpet pissers,” Rune reported. Most recently, someone had hung a Norwegian flag in front of the house. The flag seemed like a message, and the men were suspicious. Why would the American hang a Norwegian flag? What did she want? What did it mean?
A boom of thunder jolted everyone out of speculating. The rain came hard and suddenly, pounding the street in a heavy wall, splattering through the open door. A moment later, a flash, and the lights went out; the buzzing freezers fell silent. The stunned quiet around the table only highlighted the noise of the storm—pouring water and a long groan of thunder that ended in a sharp crack. I peered out the dark window but could not see the fjord through the rain.
“The last such storm,” announced He the Rich One, “the water sucked all the way back off the beach. I ran down with a bucket and picked the fish off the sand. They were jo just flopping there. Fish for days.”
“Nah,” said Nils.
“You weren’t alive,” said He the Rich One. Another clap of thunder sounded, and he looked out the dark window and sighed. “What I don’t understand,” he said, “is why we all d
on’t live in Mallorca.”
Arild opened the ice-cream freezer and stuck his hand in, testing. The cold would hold, but what if it didn’t? He pulled out a handful of bars and passed them around the table. Ice cream for everyone. The Sailor preferred coffee, himself, and took the opportunity to pour the last drops from the thermos before anyone else could get to them. He handed his ice-cream bar to a little boy who sat at the end of the table, on his father’s lap. This was a tiny solemn child who did everything with great deliberation, and had the kind of pointy upper lip peculiar to small boys and certain reptiles. Now he had two ice creams. He held one in each hand and gazed up at the Sailor, paralyzed by choice.
“Wasn’t long ago,” said the Sailor, “that that trailer blew from Senja and landed in Roald’s yard.”
The island of Senja was just south of Malangen, closer to the open sea and weatherhard. The houses there were packed close together, their seaward walls protected with sheets of metal, their roofs tied with thick ropes to boulders to keep from blowing away. Tides churned through narrow passages, swirling into maelstroms. That a trailer should blow from a field in Senja and float away astonished no one, except for the man who found it in his yard.
When the rain slowed, the customers got up to run for their cars, calling after them—“Thanks for the ice cream!” and “I’ll pay for my groceries later.” Rune watched them go. He tried to pour some coffee and was disappointed to find the thermos empty. The boy had left his second ice cream behind. It was vanilla, in a sideways cone shaped like a boat—Arild’s favorite. Rune unwrapped it and took a bite. No sooner had the cars driven away than the skies opened again and the rain poured back down.
Now we were three. We sat and gazed out the window.
“He’s raining,” I said. I was practicing my dialect.
Rune beamed at me and stood up. “Yes,” he said. “That’s what he’s doing.”
A minute later, a flash and a boom, so loud that I screamed. The air seemed to ring with echo. A bolt of lightning—no, a web—had lit the sky, extending to the earth. Though its branches seemed to arc over the whole village, it did not strike the folk school, with its peaked roof, or the church on the hill, with its steeple, or even Rune, who had stepped outside and stood alone on the rain-splashed concrete, his first shower in weeks. No. With the precision of a curse, the lightning had touched its sizzling finger to the Sand Shop.
After the storm ended, I cleaned. There were branches strewn over the road, knots of seaweed on the front steps of the shop. Some sheep had come down from the mountains and crowded into the barn, and I chased them up the hill past the church, hoping they’d walk the rest of the way themselves. “Next time they come down,” Arild swore, “I’ll write down their numbers and send them for meat.” But he’d said that the last time, too. He had enough difficulty sending the lambs to slaughter as it was.
One morning, while browsing a history book, Arild found a picture of a millstone stand—a little table with a spout—and enlisted Rune to build a replica for the Old Store. But the picture was a line drawing, imprecise, and Rune built the spout without any downward tilt. When Arild suggested to Rune that perhaps the spout should angle downward to enable the flow of grain, Rune threw his hammer onto the grass and stormed away. This was typical of Rune, to abandon a project right before completion. Rune stayed away for three days, the longest he’d been gone in months, until I went to his house to talk him down. His house was recognizable by the careful heaps of firewood and sticks that adorned his lawn, steps, and—once indoors—his living room. “You have a lot of wood,” I told him, and he beamed, pleased that I’d noticed. I assured him that his millstone stand was excellent.
Mollified, Rune returned that afternoon, finding me outside the Old Store, where I was planting flowers by the entrance in a cast-iron pot. He reeked of beer and carried a stone in his arms. He was agitated. “You see the boat?” he said.
A small motorboat drifted in the water not far from shore, with three standing figures in it. The boat was blue and white, part of a fleet that belonged to the Brygger, an ostentatiously minimalist resort and conference center between Mortenhals and Mestervik. The resort was only five years old, and enormous—eighty cabins and hotel rooms, glassy by the shore, built to capitalize on business retreats and fishing tourism from Russia and Eastern Europe. But as it turned out, demand for luxury accommodations on Malangen was less robust than hoped.
“Yeah,” I said.
“They’re Germans,” he said, “watching us.”
“How can you tell they’re German?”
“Germans stand up to fish,” said Rune. “That’s why so many of them drown.”
There was nothing to do but agree with him. I asked about the stone in his arms.
“It’s an antique,” Rune said. “For to sharpen knives.” It looked like any old stone off the beach. He wouldn’t tell me where he’d found it. “No,” he explained, “because then they’ll take it, the folks from Tromsø. They think they should have all the old things that still exist.” His wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“I think it’ll be okay,” I said.
“No,” said Rune. “It’s from Malangen. What’s Malangen’s is Malangen’s.” He liked the way that sounded, so he repeated it, more forcefully: “What’s Malangen’s is Malangen’s!”
“Where should we put it?” I asked.
Rune’s face was red. He looked around the Old Store. Then he shook his head: it was too risky to leave the stone. The folks from Tromsø might find it. He walked away, hugging the antique knife sharpener to his chest. He was going to Martin’s grave, he told me, and I promised that next time I’d come along.
Rune wasn’t the only one with an artifact to share. One neighbor donated a yarn winder, another brought a box of carpentry tools. Later that week a car pulled up and a figure stepped into the doorway and regarded me. I recognized him from the shop—he was the customer I called the Sailor.
The Sailor was a thin man with a small, puffy face, who wore white T-shirts and clogs that were always at risk of slipping off. He sat quietly at the table for hours, exuding an air of exhausted relief, as if he had just received bad news that nonetheless lifted a great uncertainty. For thirty years he had traveled, an able-bodied seaman, through all the world’s seas and lands: dancing in nightclubs in Hong Kong, trapping seals on bergs in the Arctic Ocean, exploring the endless streets of New York City. Then seven years ago, in his fifties, he’d gotten epilepsy, and just like that, his sailing days were over. Now he lived alone near his childhood farm, stopped by the shop in the mornings, rode his motorcycle to the city if the weather was nice. I’d asked him, once, if he missed the ocean. He had turned and stared at me long enough for me to understand that the question had been a mistake. “Can you even imagine,” he said. I had to look away.
Now the Sailor smelled like beer, too. “I have something to donate,” he said. “I found it. To hang from the ceiling.”
I was experimenting with a new arrangement of stockings, and I put down the garter belt I’d been folding. “What is it?”
“A nail,” said the Sailor.
I was supposed to say something, but I couldn’t tell what, so I just waited.
“Nobody’s going to believe it’s a nail,” the Sailor said. He went to his car and came back with a rusty spike as long as his forearm. I climbed on a chair and hung it near the door with a piece of string. The Sailor watched approvingly. “Nobody will believe it’s a nail,” he said again, in case I hadn’t gotten the joke, and then he stood in the doorway for a while and watched me fold stockings. “You!” he said, after a long time, and when I looked at him he turned his gaze out the window, and opened his mouth, and left without saying a word.
My final task in the Old Store was to sort through the back room, which had been the shop’s storage room. I stacked children’s clothes with American-inspired labels—Cowboy Pants, Alaska Parka—on a shelf made of dynamite boxes. I hung sealskin-covered skis over a cr
acked window that overlooked the pasture. On the back wall I arranged a jigsaw puzzle of tools: scythes, nets, herring flashers, shoulder yokes. As a final touch I balanced some plywood on herring barrels, and on this makeshift surface I spread everything else: a carved butter mold and a sugar cutter, some baskets, a spindle. Then I stepped back.
It looked like a bunch of junk on a table.
It was as if something in my gaze had shifted. This was not a magical time-traveling world. It was a cluttered storage room, the back of someone’s closet. I closed my eyes and opened them again, willing the magic back. It was a well-organized garage.
“This is a museum,” I said aloud. “These are artifacts.”
Briefly, back in the States, I had volunteered at an Arctic museum in Oregon. I missed the north, and it felt good to be surrounded by stuffed polar bears and musk oxen, parkas and knives. I curated an exhibit about Sápmi. But it was disarming to arrange behind glass the very objects I had used for survival, to touch with white gloves the same kind of reindeer-skin boots I had recently used for slogging through the dog yard. In the end, the museum, which I had hoped would connect me to the north, only served to remind me of how very far away I was.
“She likes old things,” Arild told people when they asked about my work in the Old Store. And it was true, I guess; I liked the Old Store, liked the way it captured a time that felt close but absent, a sun just slipped behind a mountain. But my passion for the project was less about an inherent fascination with history than it was about creating a place to belong. I wanted to make the Old Store because I wanted to be part of the village.
Every day, Mortenhals felt more like home. When I walked past the barn, and the lambs, bleating, bumped into the backs of my legs. When Rune and Nils and He the Rich One wanted to talk to me. When I went for a hike in the mountain village and came back to find customers wondering where I had been.
And that was what made the magic: that in every decision, every scythe hung on the wall, I was building myself closer to Malangen. I had come and gone before. But now I was the museum director, albeit of a shack behind a barn. Now there was something here that wouldn’t exist without me. And if the Old Store was important for Malangen, as I believed it was, then so was I.
Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube Page 9