by Linn Ullmann
The woman went on knitting.
“Is the restaurant open?” Erika asked. “Can I order something?”
The woman shrugged.
“I can make you a sandwich and coffee. We generally serve dinner from five. But not today. The restaurant’s closed today.”
Erika looked at her watch. It was just past two. She was cold again. She was sweating one minute and freezing the next. She wanted to sleep. She wanted to take off all her clothes and be naked, to have a hot shower, to lie in a properly made-up bed.
On the ferry over to the island, Erika had been the only passenger. The ferrymen had waved to her from the bridge and she had waved back. They were old and weather-beaten and looked just as they had twenty-five years before, but she knew they couldn’t be the same ones. The ferry was the same, the same throbbing yellow across the water as when she was fourteen, but the ferrymen were surely new.
“Is it possible to book a room, just for the day?” Erika asked. “I’m waiting for my sisters; we’re meeting here at Hammarsö Rooms and Restaurant and then driving all together to see our father, who lives here on the island.”
The woman shook her head. Erika pretended not to see and went on talking. She could pay for a full night if that helped matters. She just wanted to get out of her clothes, have a shower, and lie down in a warm bed for an hour.
“I’m so cold, I just want to rest for a bit,” she explained. “I want to shut my eyes.”
The woman shook her head again and said: “I’d gladly have given you a room, dear, but I haven’t got one.”
Erika sighed. “Don’t tell me you’re fully booked, because I simply don’t believe it!”
“No, not exactly,” said the woman. “The hotel’s closed.”
“I see,” said Erika, annoyed.
She felt like saying something snide and unpleasant. This establishment claimed to be open all year but clearly wasn’t.
“So! No rooms and no restaurant at Hammarsö Rooms and Restaurant?”
Her voice was shrill; she felt ridiculous.
The woman put down her knitting, raised her head, and looked at Erika. She was over seventy, with a thin face and long hair also thin and gray.
Once, thought Erika, her hair must have been her most beautiful feature.
“That’s right,” said the woman. “No rooms and no restaurant. But I can make you a sandwich and a hot cup of coffee. And you can sit in the lounge and watch TV or read a newspaper while you wait for your sisters.”
The woman indicated a door standing slightly open.
“It’s through there. You can leave your rucksack with me, if you like. I’ll keep an eye on it.”
“Is there a sofa there?” Erika asked. “In the lounge, I mean.”
“Yes,” said the woman.
“Would it be terribly improper of me to take my boots off and lie down on the sofa to rest for a bit?”
“No,” said the woman. “It wouldn’t be improper.”
Chapter 80
Erika’s eyes were wide open. Ragnar had his mother’s eyes. Everyone said so. He was the spitting image of his mother, Ann-Kristin. And he was Isak’s heel.
Erika turned over on the sofa.
They lay close together on the camp bed in the secret hut. He was holding up a mirror. They were comparing their faces.
“I’ve got my mother’s eyes, too,” said Erika.
“But you’ve got Isak’s mouth,” said Ragnar, “and Isak’s hair.”
“I don’t know whose nose I’ve got,” said Erika. “Maybe I’ve got my great-great-grandmother’s nose.”
“You’ve got my hands now,” said Ragnar, taking her hands in his and kissing them.
Erika removed her boots and threw her anorak over a chair and was lying on one of the red velvet sofas in the empty lounge. In summer the room would doubtless be full. People would watch television or have a drink and eat peanuts, or talk to other hotel guests. In front of each sofa was a table with chairs arranged around it. The television set was mounted on a wall bracket, high up, almost at ceiling level. Erika wanted to switch it off, or at least turn it down, but she couldn’t find the remote control and hadn’t the energy to get up. On the screen, a young girl was jumping up and down, screaming with delight. The audience was clapping. The girl had won something.
Erika opened her mouth and said: “Forgive me!”
She didn’t recognize her own voice. Its tone was different. It had something to do with the acoustics in the room. It was three o’clock and the winter light streamed in through the windows. The light was white, hard and bright. It was an ancient light. When Erika visualized her own death, it wasn’t dark, but light like this. Light and still. The stillness was also ancient. It had always been there and would always be there.
The girl on the TV screen had been set a new task by the emcee, and it didn’t look as if she would succeed this time. She frowned and shook her head. The audience clapped encouragingly anyway.
Erika turned on one side, pulled her feet up under her on the sofa, and cried.
The woman from reception opened the door. She was carrying a tray with some slices of bread and a steaming pot of coffee. When she saw Erika, she set the tray down on a table and put a blanket over her.
Erika took her hand.
“Thanks so much.”
The woman sat down on the edge of the sofa.
“If you can get a bit of sleep now, you’ll feel better,” she said.
“My sisters and I are going to visit our father.”
Erika was still crying. She squeezed the woman’s hand, wanting to assure herself that it was real, that it was alive, that she was not utterly alone here, left to the mercy of herself and this light.
“We haven’t been on the island since we were children. That’s why it’s affected me like this, I think.”
“I know,” said the woman.
Erika lifted her head and dried her eyes.
“Do you know him?” she asked. “Do you know Isak? Do you know my father?”
The woman smiled at her.
“No,” she said. “I can’t say I do.”
Chapter 81
She slept and woke and fell asleep again. From time to time, she heard the church bells chime. She had forgotten that. She had forgotten that the church bells on Hammarsö rang every half hour. Isak’s house was a fair distance from the church, but the shop was right beside it, as were Hammarsö Rooms and Restaurant and the community center with its distinctive vaulted windows.
Often when Erika and Laura went to the shop to get an ice cream or to pick up some things for Rosa, they would hang around there for a while, maybe lie on the heath with all the poppies, and wait for the church clock to chime. Then they could set their watches. Thin watches around slim wrists.
It was a contest to get the time as exact as possible.
Chapter 82
They should have been here by now!
Erika sat up on the sofa and looked about her. It was entirely dark, inside and out. The television had been switched off. She had slept for a long time, deeply and dreamlessly. She looked at her watch. It was almost half past five.
They ought to have been here ages ago.
She switched on a lamp, wrapped a blanket around her, and padded across the room in her socks. There was a cold draft around her feet. She located her mobile phone in her anorak pocket. She switched on more of the lamps. There were old photographs on the walls. Most of them were black-and-white. She called Laura’s mobile and got her voice mail. She called Molly and got no answer at all. She sent them both the same text message: Where are you? Let me know! Then she went over to look at the pictures on the walls. These were personal pictures, mementos of a summer long ago: adults and children on the beach, by the kiosk, with hot dogs and ice creams in their hands, at the community center and in the shop. There were many pictures of a wedding. The reception had been held here at the inn, after a ceremony in Hammarsö Church. The bride in white had flowers in her hair
. She was smiling for the camera. Erika went from photograph to photograph to see whether there were any faces she recognized, but she recognized nobody.
Chapter 83
Erika was lying on the sofa again, and the silence was older than the light, older than the darkness.
She sat up. I’ve got to call my kids.
Ane didn’t answer, but she sent a text. Hi Mum @ cinema cant talk now. Luv :-)
Erika dialed Magnus’s number—it didn’t matter if he was annoyed, as long as he answered, as long as she could live in his voice for a brief moment. She had wanted to ring him every day since he went off on the school trip to Poland, but she had restrained herself, put one hand over the other. Let him grow up; he isn’t yours twenty-four hours a day forever.
Magnus answered straightaway.
“Hi, Mum.”
He sounded almost pleased to hear from her, but she could have been mistaken. Perhaps he was just being polite. There was screaming and bawling in the background. The class wasn’t in Poland any longer. They had been in Berlin all day and now they were spending the night at a hotel in a town whose name he couldn’t remember. It was great in Berlin; he’d like to go back there again. Tomorrow they were going to two more concentration camps, Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück, and then they had the long bus ride home. Magnus paused for breath.
“Was there anything else you wanted?” he asked. “I’ve really got to go now.”
Erika wanted to hold on to him a bit longer.
“What was Auschwitz like?” she asked. “It must have felt terribly”—she searched for the right word—“it must have felt terribly powerful.”
“It was packed with tourists,” he said. “People all over the place, and somebody asked where they could buy something to drink. I couldn’t really take it in, everything that happened there. That happened there a long time ago, I mean.”
“It’s not that long ago,” said Erika.
“No, but I’ve got to go now,” said Magnus. “Bye.”
Erika put the mobile phone down on the table. Then it was all quiet again.
The church bells rang six. Erika went to the window and looked out over the dark landscape. It had started snowing again. It would be best for her to leave her car at Hammarsö Rooms and Restaurant and go the rest of the way with Laura and Molly in Laura’s car. Laura’s was the more powerful car and she was the better driver. The snowplow certainly wouldn’t have cleared the road all the way. Erika shut her eyes. She had never seen the white limestone house surrounded by snow. When she was a child coming to Hammarsö it was always summer, and she always seemed to arrive when the lilacs were in bloom. The lilacs bloomed later on Hammarsö than in Oslo, so every year she saw two lots of flowers; it was like having a double spring. And when she got to Hammarsö and the lilacs were in flower and it was a whole year since she had seen Isak, a whole autumn, a whole winter, and a whole spring, he would always be sitting waiting on the bench outside the house. Rosa’s car would turn in at the gate and rumble down the slope, and Isak would be sitting on the bench, waiting. He wasn’t waiting for Laura. He wasn’t waiting for Rosa. He saw Laura and Rosa all year round. He was waiting for Erika. And when the car finally came to a stop outside the house, she could wrench open the door and run into his arms and up.
“Daddy!”
Into his arms and up. Like running up a set of steps, up and up and up, and the steps just kept going up, never ending.
Chapter 84
When Rosa died, there was no one to comfort him. Isak turned around and around and bellowed. Where was relief to be found? Laura couldn’t cope with having anything to do with him just then.
I can’t do it, Laura told Erika.
Isak wanted to sit on the settee and hold her hand and stroke her face and tell her she was like her mother. She had her mother’s eyes and her mother’s hair. And that was the last thing Laura wanted.
“He was grieving for a woman and I was grieving for a mother, and we couldn’t both grieve together. The very thought of that sort of intimacy with him! Isak should have realized that.”
Erika could not comfort him, either. She went to visit him in Stockholm on one occasion and they went to a restaurant near his flat for dinner. The restaurant was virtually empty. Erika drank a glass of wine. He drank water. His hands were shaking, and it occurred to Erika that he could not carry out his work with hands that were shaking like that. The restaurant played the same song over and over again: a slow, mournful pop song. Erika knew the song and told Isak the name of the woman singing, but immediately regretted it. He did not care what the singer was called. They could hear laughter from the kitchen. Isak ate a few mouthfuls; it was like eating stones, he said. He put down his knife and fork, looked at Erika, tried to smile, and said: “It’s wretched, the whole thing.”
A few weeks later, he sold his flat in Stockholm and the one in Lund and moved to Hammarsö for good. He resigned his professorship at the university. It was over.
“I haven’t done anything practical with my hands for a long time,” he told Erika on the phone, “and now I’m going to put my house in order.”
After that, nobody heard from him. He moved to Hammarsö and fell silent. In the end, Erika rang Simona.
“Is he still alive?”
“Yes,” said Simona. “He’s renovating.”
“All on his own?”
“Yes. Basically. He’s getting a bit of help from a carpenter and a plumber. Two old codgers who’ve lived on the island all their lives. They all have coffee together. I think it’s because of them he’s taken up smoking. But he’s doing most of it by himself; basically, he’s on his own.”
“My father started smoking?”
“Yes.”
“What else does he do?”
“He goes to church every Saturday evening to listen to the summoning bell for Communion. But perhaps he’s always done that? He sits quite still in the back pew and listens to the church bells; then he goes out again.”
The door to the lounge opened.
“Erika, is that you?”
Erika turned. Laura and Molly were standing side by side in the light from the open door. Each wrapped in a big anorak. They still had their hats and gloves on. They were smiling at her, both with rosy red cheeks.
“You made it,” said Erika, feeling the relief wash over her.
Chapter 85
To start with, they sat together around the table in the lounge, surrounded by all the photographs.
The woman from reception brought more sandwiches and more steaming hot coffee.
“These are my sisters,” Erika said to the woman.
The woman set down the tray and said hello; then she went out, closing the door behind her.
“Who’s she?” said Laura in a low voice. “I feel as if I’ve seen her before.”
“She works here at the hotel; she’s the receptionist,” said Erika. “She put a blanket over me when I was cold.”
Molly stood up from the sofa and went over to the window. She stood there, looking out at the falling snow.
“One time, many years ago,” she said, “I stood by the window like this and, just like now, I was thinking I would be seeing him soon. I’d cooked a big dinner, bought red roses, but he didn’t turn up, of course. Canceled at the last minute.”
“Have you been in touch with Isak today?” Laura asked Erika.
“Yes,” said Erika. “I spoke to him this morning.”
“Is he pleased we’re coming?” asked Laura.
“No,” said Erika.
“Is he afraid we’re coming to confront him or something?” asked Laura.
“I don’t know. He says he’s too old.”
“Too old for what?”
“Too old to entertain three daughters, I assume,” said Erika. “He insisted that we should turn around and drive back home. Me and you and Molly.”
“And what did you say to that?”
“I said that we were coming regardless of what he thought
, and that he wouldn’t need to entertain us. I said I was bringing some videos and we could watch those if we couldn’t think of anything to talk about.”
Molly was still standing at the window. She turned to her sisters.
“But we’ve got lots to talk about,” she said.
“Yes,” said Erika, “but I think we’ll have to leave most of it unsaid.”
Erika and Laura got to their feet and went to join Molly at the window. They all looked out at the snow. The clock struck eight. Beyond the church lay the sea.
“Look,” said Molly, pointing. “There’s a light over the water.”
“It’s called something,” said Erika. “I can’t remember what. It’s a natural phenomenon here on the island. It glows, then it vanishes, and then it glows again.”
Then she said: “I remember it was Ragnar who first showed me. He said you had to make sure not to look away, or even blink, because you’re seldom lucky enough to see it. It was as if he thought you could keep the light there by looking at it.”
“Yes, right,” said Molly.
It was snowing heavily now. Perhaps they wouldn’t even be able to get through in Laura’s car. Perhaps they would have to walk the last bit, thought Erika.
“Yes,” said Molly. “I remember Ragnar. He had a mark between his eyes and a hut in the woods that he’d built himself. Yes, I remember him. His mother was called Ann-Kristin, wasn’t she?”
“Yes,” said Laura.