by Nicolai Houm
It wasn’t Lars Christian but Eva, his wife, who took the lead. ‘You must be tired. Have you had breakfast?’ Her hands moved about like little birds as she spoke.
Lars Christian’s light voice interjected with scraps of information that were more or less irrelevant. ‘If you’d like a cup of coffee, we’ve got some cake at home.’
‘President Obama had a tough time the other day!’
‘Camilla has looked forward so much to showing you our new house.’
The girl stood straight-backed, her eyes following the talk. All three of them were beautiful. They could have been sports stars, of the nice polite kind that answer the TV interviewer’s questions factually. Long-distance runners, for instance. Lars Christian’s face was so narrow, with crisply defined features, that the skin seemed loose here and there. Eva was just as slim, which gave her a youthful look. Her hairstyle was practical, her face freckled and her eyelashes so pale they were almost invisible. Their daughter was long-limbed and innocent: she made Jane think of perfect, green apples in a new, transparent plastic bag. Suddenly, she regretted not having hugged them all while there was still a faint chance. If only she could leave the hire car behind, join them in their Volvo and sit in the back next to the shy teenager and pick up faint traces of the family’s smell in her nostrils.
THE IDEA HAD BEEN to camp just inside the boundary of a national park and use it as a base for observing the herd of musk oxen, just like everybody else did: safari tours were laid on, there were authorized guides and sets of guidelines about the recommended safe distances – all that is required for potential encounters between large wild animals and modern people. But the day they arrived at the reserve, she in charge of the rucksack and Ulf of four aluminium boxes the size of coffins, the musk oxen had moved northwards. It meant that they had to drop Ulf’s plan to drive his all-terrain vehicle along the gravelled tracks that had been cleared by the Norwegian army during the time when the area had been used for ordnance training. Instead they had to prepare to proceed on foot. At first, she thought it was a good thing.
‘It’s all happening,’ Ulf muttered while they redid the packing, leaving the heaviest equipment behind in a shed near the railway track at an outpost called Hjerkinn. The air around them seemed to radiate darkness. What little she could see of the surroundings looked like nothing she had seen before – the erratic beams of the head torches fell on stacks of tar-coated timber, abandoned construction machinery, piles of gravel and stunted trees, bent and twisted by the wind. It didn’t look like a place meant for people.
Ulf led the way past a station building, older than the birth of railways by the looks of things. He walked three paces ahead of her, staring at his mobile phone, which he had used all day to stay in touch with local contacts who had suggestions about where to find the musk oxen. A few minutes later, they arrived at a building that had an outdoor lamp spreading a feeble light. Ulf unlocked a door and went inside.
‘Where are we?’ she asked once she had wrenched the rucksack through the doorway.
‘The wild reindeer centre,’ Ulf mumbled.
He crossed the room and found the light switch. They were in a large hall with yellowish wall panelling and a staircase painted moss-green. Ulf walked upstairs and waved at her to follow. Given how far they had gone into the wilderness, the first floor was absurdly modern – all glass partitions, name plates, computers. Ulf rolled out a camping mattress on the smooth carpet.
‘We’ll start walking at sunrise,’ he said, a taciturn Red Indian in the middle of an office landscape.
‘Do you think we’ll find them?’
He stroked her cheek and the gesture seemed simply reassuring.
‘Yes, I do. And the territorial groups are due to join up, which is precisely what we have come here to observe.’
She reflected on Ulf’s tendency to make technical observations and assume that she would know what he was on about. The conclusion must presumably be that he was an absent-minded professional nerd as well as, maybe, a fascinating lone wolf. So far, they had spent only one and a half days together.
When she phoned him at four-thirty one morning, she had been sitting in the hire car in front of the Askeland-Nilsens’ house. This moment, she had felt, was the nadir of her life. As the dawn lightened the air above the Oslo fjord, turning the world an insubstantial shade of grey, she sensed the weight of all she had drunk the day before, and all she had said and done. Ulf offered her a final option, her very last way out. She imagined Ulf as he had been. On the plane. The way he had looked at her when he thought she wouldn’t notice. She wanted to let herself topple over backwards and find herself supported.
Whatever. Things could not get any worse.
‘Do you remember saying something about a friend in Norway?’
There was no need to say anything else. She escaped further humiliation.
‘Can you manage to drive to Dombås?’ His voice was just as pleasant as she had remembered it.
‘Where is that?’ she asked.
‘Follow the E6.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘About how to get here?’
She thought he was trying to be funny and smiled with tears running down her cheeks.
On the way up the valley, she experienced the familiar feeling of having just learnt how to breathe, and that it was something she still needed to practise. As the day grew brighter and the sky bluer, her sense of alienation increased. She stopped a couple of times, climbed out of the car to take in yet another beautiful view, finding everything dizzyingly unreal. What was she doing here? Why was she standing in this place, alone, next to a car that wasn’t hers, just off a road she didn’t know in a country she had never been to before and staring out into its landscape? Had she really spoken with Ulf on the phone or imagined it?
He hugged her when she arrived. She leant her head against his chest and tried to make herself stop sobbing.
‘It will work out. Surely you remember that Inuit saying?’
Realizing how good it felt to be held by him, she suppressed the heightened sense of strangeness that came with his smell, his hands resting on her back.
Ulf was staying in a run-down motel, a wooden one-storey shack, once painted red. It had a reception area at one end. Every room had its own small terrace furnished with two plastic chairs and a plastic table with an ashtray on it. On Ulf’s table, there was also a dead pansy in a white pot marked Grand Jardin des Fleurs.
The evening was exceptionally mild for Norway in October, or so Ulf said. They settled on the terrace and started drinking beer – she drained the first glass in one go, as if she had just crossed a desert.
She told Ulf everything. She soon found herself using technical narrative devices and had little pangs of nausea every time she gave her story a touch of foreshadowing or a new plot twist. Ulf chewed nuts from a bag of chilli-flavoured peanuts, and grinned towards the sun that warmed them. He put his head empathetically to the side as he listened and said ‘oh, no’ or ‘yes, I see’ or ‘I see what you mean’. His beard wasn’t as neatly trimmed as it had been before. He wore glasses, which he hadn’t done on the plane, with frames made of transparent, bright-red plastic of the kind one might buy in order to look young but which no young person would have bought.
When she had concluded the last chapter in the tale of her five days in the house of the Askeland-Nilsens, Ulf asked, ‘So, you just left?’
‘I sneaked outside and set off down the drive.’
‘Why not tell them the truth?’
She shrugged and raised part of her upper lip, then realized how many of her youthful facial expressions had come back during the last six months or so.
‘Because you wanted to make a fresh start,’ Ulf went on. It was a statement, not a question.
But it hadn’t been that simple.
‘I didn’t want to end up being angry with them. And didn’t want to place them in a situation in which they’d be bound to say something idiotic.’<
br />
‘Like what?’
‘How are you? for instance.’
Ulf grabbed a handful of nuts and his forehead creased.
‘Or, even worse: You’re so strong, I wouldn’t have been able to carry on,’ she added.
The hand that was transferring the nuts to his mouth stopped halfway.
‘Did you contact them today, after you left?’
‘Goodness, no.’
‘But won’t they wonder where you are?’
‘Shouldn’t think so.’
‘So, they haven’t even called to find out how you are?’
‘No. I’ve only had one call. It was the car hire people, who wanted to know how long I wanted to keep the car for.’
Ulf’s lips moved as she spoke. It made for an oddly intimate impression. She really appreciated the way he hadn’t made a big performance about how eccentric it was to drive a whole day in order to pour out your life story to a man you had only met once and had nearly snubbed. It spoke well of his character, somehow.
‘What do you think the girl is feeling?’
‘I think the entire family is relieved that I left.’
‘Did you feel sad?’
‘Feel sad?’
Her tone of voice suggested that feeling sad was simply pathetic.
‘Ill at ease?’
‘If I did, it would have been an entirely natural emotional response to the situation.’
The sentence was problematic. Sitting at the table, she occupied more space now. Her mouth had become broader. She had lost track of how much she had drunk. And how many tablets she had taken.
The view from Ulf’s terrace could have been magnificent if it hadn’t been for the building that stood in the way. It had apparently been erected in the same joyless spirit as the motel. The windows were boarded over and the text on the wall said Dombås Cinema. The ridge of its roof was almost exactly level with the tops of the mountains.
Ulf flicked the last nut into his mouth.
‘I shall have to go up into the mountains tomorrow.’
He nodded in the general direction of the tall pickup truck that was parked in the yard in front of the motel. There was a snow scooter on the truck’s trailer and the ATV as well, squeezed in between jerrycans and large boxes.
‘How long will you be away for?’
The question sounded intrusive but he replied, ‘I figured you might like to come along. Sleep in a tent. See something completely different.’
She emitted a sound somewhere between a snort and a curious ‘what?’
‘I mean it. It would be good for you,’ he said in a low voice. ‘And good fun, too.’
Then he got up and started to fire up a barbecue grill that stood on the grass.
‘Can you guess what musk oxen do if a train manages to brake in time?’
It sounded like the introduction to a joke.
‘No?’
‘They turn round and head-butt the locomotive.’
‘It’s not true!’ Jane said and giggled.
‘It’s the truth,’ Ulf confirmed without moving a muscle in his face.
He had sprayed the charcoal with lighter fluid and stood still with a match in his hand before turning to her, as if she had demanded an explanation.
‘It’s got to soak in for a few minutes.’
She nodded.
‘Look, I bought something special because you were coming.’ He rooted around in the truck and pulled out a bottle. ‘It’s the local aquavit. Called Musk Ox.’
She examined the hairy animal on the label. It looked like a Star Wars creature.
They sat down with a tumblerful each. The smell of warm lighter fluid rolled in over them in waves. Just like the shame and guilt she felt, being here with a strange man.
Ulf, too, seemed to become affected by the alcohol.
When she said ‘Are they a bit like buffaloes, then?’ he burst out laughing and slapped his thighs.
‘Buffaloes belong to a completely different group! Musk oxen are more closely related to sheep… Think of them as giant sheep,’ he advised.
She had a vision of an implausibly large, bad-tempered sheep. And they were both laughing now, though not exactly at the same thing.
Abruptly, Jane became very still. She realized that she had laughed for the first time in seven months. She stood and strode out onto the grass.
‘Did I say something wrong?’ Ulf asked.
She speeded up as she came closer to the charcoal grill and then focused all her strength into her right leg. Her foot struck a point low down on the lower half of the sphere. For a brief moment the whole thing floated in mid-air before the grill hit the ground. The lid shot off to the left and a cloud of ash and embers rose against the backdrop of the darkening sky.
*
Towards the end of the evening, Ulf told her about a remarkable ethological phenomenon. The playlist on his phone, which he had connected to two small loudspeakers placed on the window sill, was running through its loop for the fifth time and had reached the marvellous hymn from The Lion King. She had reached the stage of hard drinking where you feel more and more aware of yourself and hence more lost than when you started drinking. Her left elbow was forever slipping off the smooth white armrest of her plastic chair, as if one of her arms were shorter than the other. She glanced sideways at Ulf while he talked. She was ready to like him for being a traveller, a rootless person who accepted no responsibility for others, even though such descriptions were often euphemisms for asshole. But, in Ulf’s case, everything indicated that he was a good person. There was nothing in it for him when he spent time listening to her, cooking and putting on thick workman’s gloves to pick up glowing lumps of charcoal. Or when he reached out his hand to her that day in the airport.
Ulf was telling her that if one approached a herd of musk oxen closely enough for the animals to feel threatened they would form a circle around the calves.
‘The calves are kept inside the circle?’ Her consonants were slurred.
‘That’s right. The heads of the adults are all turned outwards, and their horns are lowered.’
‘All pointing outwards?’ She grew smaller where she sat.
‘Yes, outwards. The cows decide how to form the protective circle. The mothers, in other words. And the massed horns form an impenetrable wall. Nothing must harm the calves behind this barricade. Not the wolves. Nor the bears. Nothing!’
‘Nothing?’
‘Nothing at all.’
‘SO YOU HAVE NEVER WANTED to put together a family?’
Presumably, language differences explained this kind of thing, set phrases that simply didn’t work in translation. Jane imagined a family-making kit, a penis and a vagina screwed together, eventually creating a complete doll’s house.
‘Well, no, what with writing and so on…’
Eva’s eyebrows rose almost imperceptibly as she lifted the teacup level with her self-confident, girlish breasts.
The explanation was too feeble and Jane tried again.
‘I have never met the right man.’
‘Of course, yes. No, I see,’ Eva smiled towards Lars Christian, who was seated in a svelte angular armchair, tapping on his phone.
Jane clutched the edge of the seat cushion.
‘But it’s not too late for you,’ Camilla said.
‘Thanks, honey,’ Jane said and winked to her.
Camilla was sitting next to her mother on the sofa. They didn’t look alike.
Camilla had her father’s eyes with the flecked, blue irises of some husky dogs and cool, symmetrical features. She practised rhythmic gymnastics four days a week. In America, she would have been the prettiest girl in the school.
Jane turned to look out through the window, meant to offer a view across the lake and, beyond it, Oslo’s low skyline, but blocked for the duration of her stay by the yellowing side of an old trailer. The Askeland-Nilsen house had been finished only the previous month: it was a Scandinavian dream home in glass and untre
ated timber, and so soberly designed that one forgot just how comfortable it was, with one bathroom for each family member and iPhone-mediated temperature control. The trailer housed a young Polish couple, who so far had laid the rolls of turf, fenced the entire site, wood-stained the wall timbers and were now putting down the terrace flags. He was called Andrej or, probably, Andrzej, and, confusingly, she was Eva. Jane had taken note of bottles of vodka on a shelf above the gas cooker in the trailer. She watched the Poles from the guest room (where she slept better than she had for the last half-year) as they changed their small seating area into beds every night.
The hardest thing about staying with the Askeland-Nilsens, Jane had found, was to simulate normal breathing behaviour: she couldn’t groan whenever she felt like it or keep holding her breath until she had to inhale desperately to rise to the surface. Also, she mustn’t kick objects left on the stairs or howl with rage if the toothpaste didn’t come out easily.
Camilla slid down from the sofa and sat instead on the rug near her father’s chair.
‘I can’t help thinking that there are American men who feel threatened by women who… in all modesty… have got something done,’ Jane said, sounding thoughtful.
Eva looked at her and sighed. For a moment, they shared a worldwide state of female anger. Then Jane turned away to observe Lars Christian.
Her visit was quite obviously Lars Christian’s doing: he was responsible for the invitation – not Eva. Jane also had a suspicion that Eva minded the intensity of that initial exchange of emails. When Lars Christian wanted to take her to the National Library in Oslo to show her the Letters from America collection – the bound volumes were not available for borrowing – something else suddenly came up and, taking Eva with him, he went off in the Volvo.
Jane and Lars Christian had rounded off her second evening with several glasses of red wine while watching a Norwegian variant on Curb Your Enthusiasm – Lars Christian did simultaneous translation and it was enjoyable. Jane was on her way to the bathroom when she noticed that the door to Camilla’s bedroom was open a bit. The corridor light made a straight, narrow line that seemed to guide one’s steps across the carpet all the way to the bed where it lit up Camilla’s face on the pillow. Jane stopped and watched through the crack. It felt as if she was standing in the drizzle outside a huge generating station and sensed its power despite the stillness. For a long time, she stayed there with her hand on the door handle but her mind moved elsewhere in time and space. Someone came along and Jane said, unthinkingly, ‘She is breathing.’