by Reif Larsen
“I was in Norway once,” he said after a while.
“Yes,” she said, brightening. “It might be nice for you to go back.”
“I don’t need to go back,” he said.
She placed a hand on his foot. “Kermin.”
A silence.
“You really want this?” he said.
She nodded.
“Just to talk to them?”
“Just to talk.”
“And then you are okay?”
“And then I’ll be okay.”
“And then no more?”
“No more.” She shook her head. “After this, no more.”
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
“All right.”
“All right what?”
“We can go.”
“Oh, Kermin!” She jumped up, hugging him, kissing his rough cheek. “We’re just going to find out, I swear. Nothing more. I’ll feel so much better then. And I was doing a little bit of reading. It’s supposed to be really nice in the summer. Land of the midnight sun and all that.”
She did not tell him about the telegram. In truth, she did not know what to make of it herself. So she decided to act as if she had never received it. She hid the telegram in the utility drawer. But soon the drawer felt as though it could no longer safely contain such a document, so she hid the telegram beneath a floorboard in their bedroom that she had pried loose with a hammer. Inside this hole she also put a binder of newspaper articles she had collected about Radar’s birth. And the clipped ad for the IFAC flavorist position that she had stashed away in the recipe booklet. When she could not think of anything more to put down there, she hammered the floorboard back into place and covered it with a rug from another room.
7
Kirkenes turned out to be about four hundred kilometers north of the Arctic Circle, the last town in Norway before the Russian border. On the flight from New York to Oslo, they watched an overexposed screening of Days of Heaven, in which a man murders his boss in a steel mill and then flees with his wife and daughter to the wheat fields of the Texas Panhandle, only to murder his boss again. At least this is what Kermin thought that the movie was about. There was no sound in his stethoscope-like headset, and he was at a bad angle to watch the dreamy images of the wheat fields burning. There was something uncanny about flying over an ocean while watching wheat fields burn. He looked out the window, trying to catch a glimpse of the ocean that he had once escaped across in the hull of a boat. It was hard to imagine that the small layer of blue far beneath them was the same sea that had borne him to the New World.
Maybe sea and land were not altogether different, he thought, touching the cold glass of the airplane window. Only a small matter of density.
Inside the clean and empty Oslo airport, they blearily drank a coffee and thumbed through a rack of chunky Telemark sweaters before catching a toothpaste-colored prop plane up to Kirkenes. People in line to board the plane stared openly at Radar, until Charlene glared at them, and then they stared at everything but Radar.
The airplane sputtered and bounced against the hidden pockets of turbulence that lay sleeping above the Kjölen Mountains. Radar threw up twice. The Norwegian stewardess smiled as she took the wet airsick bag from Charlene.
“Poor boy,” she said. “He is so far away from home, yes?”
They came down in a sea of fog. The airplane descended and descended, and suddenly there was the tiny airstrip. The sun glowing dimly from somewhere behind that suspended scrim of moisture. They collected their bags directly from the plane. Under a light breeze, the air smelled sweetly of wet moss. The handful of other passengers made their way into cars and a small bus headed for town, leaving them alone inside the one-room terminal but for a janitor mopping at a floor that looked as if it had already been cleaned.
“They are meeting us here?” Kermin asked.
“That’s what they said.”
“There’s no one here.”
“I can see that, Kerm. Maybe they got the time wrong.”
But as she stared out at the fog rolling in waves across the runway, she knew that no one was coming to meet them. There was no such thing as Kirkenesferda. There were no scientists and artists experimenting with electricity up here. There was only tundra and fog and an invisible sun that never set.
“This is Santa Claus house?” she heard Radar say.
“No,” said Kermin. “Santa Claus does not live here.”
“Jesus Christ,” she whispered to her reflection. Her shoulders slumped. They had come this far for nothing.
There was nobody at the ticketing booth. Charlene walked up to the janitor swabbing at the pristine floor.
“Do you know when the next flight to Oslo leaves?” she asked loudly.
To her surprise, he spoke perfect English. “Five hours, ma’am. If the weather doesn’t get worse.” He looked at Kermin and Radar, sitting on a bench. “Didn’t enjoy your stay?”
“No, no,” she said, embarrassed. “It’s beautiful. There’s just been a mistake. A mix-up. We weren’t supposed to come.”
He nodded. “Same thing happened to me. I’m Swedish. I came here for a woman, but the woman left. I ended up staying. Twenty-five years.”
“Is there someplace we can wait?” she asked.
He looked around the room, as if to indicate that this was the extent of the known universe.
It was at this point that a man in a yellow jumpsuit came dashing into the terminal. He appeared quite frantic, but when he saw them, his expression dissolved into relief.
“I’m so sorry I’m late,” he said, coming up, breathless. “There was a little problem at the office.”
The man was hairless—completely bald, no eyebrows. Charlene guessed he was in his late sixties, though his light blue eyes remained young and bright.
“You’re Leif?” said Charlene. He was wearing knee-high mucking boots over his yellow jumpsuit, giving the impression that he had just skydived into a manure field.
“That’s not Santa,” said Radar, and then hid his face in Kermin’s jacket. “Santa has a beard.”
“No, I’m sorry to report that I’m not Santa. He was otherwise engaged.” The man smiled, extending his hand to Charlene. “Leif Christian-Holtsmark.”
“We weren’t sure if . . .” she trailed off.
“If I existed? I do. I very much do. My apologies,” said Leif, turning. “And this must be the famous Radar. How old are we, little man?”
Radar burrowed into Kermin’s jacket.
“How old are you, Radar?” said Charlene.
“Dis many,” said Radar, holding up a hand that showed a varying number of fingers, anywhere from two to five.
“He’s four.” Charlene apologized. “He knows he’s four, but he seems to insist on presenting a range of choices.”
“It’s understandable. One can never be sure,” Leif said, and laughed. “But four years old! Now, that is something. Well, Radar, velkommen til Finnmark. You are now on top of the world.”
He drove them in his battered Land Rover out into a light boreal forest of pine and downy birch. The road hugged the bank of a fjord and then turned onto a small dirt track that wound around several kettle-hole lakes thick with summer algae. The trees began to thin, and they found themselves on a long, flat plain.
“We are right on the edge of the tree line,” Lars explained. “To the north is tundra, to the south is the great taiga, which stretches two thousand kilometers into Russia.”
The fog burned off. Charlene could see that the ground was marked by splashes of bright lime-colored lichen. It was unlike any landscape she had ever seen before.
“There,” said Leif. He pointed up to a raised kame terrace. A herd of bone-white reindeer were tracking their progress. Leif stopped the car and rolled down his window. He was silent
.
“Do you hear it?” he said finally.
They listened.
“What?” Charlene asked.
“The reindeer,” said Leif. “They have their own frequency. About fifty-eight hertz. Listen.”
They listened. After a while, Charlene could hear it, or at least she could imagine hearing it. Something like a moan that had not quite escaped the lips, but rendered simultaneously by hundreds of animals. The sum of a sound never fully finished.
“Santa’s reindeer!” Radar yelled.
As if in response, several of the reindeer began to run over the terrace, and soon the whole herd, sensing some unspoken signal, was thundering away as one.
Radar looked heartbroken.
“Don’t worry, honey,” said Charlene. “It wasn’t you. They had someplace to go.”
“The Sami have a saying: ‘En rein som står stille, er ikke en rein.’ ‘A still reindeer is not a reindeer,’” said Leif. “Migration is a part of their being. To move is to exist.”
They drove further into the wilderness. Charlene noticed telephone poles running alongside the dirt track, which surprised her, given the remoteness of their surroundings. The poles carried a black cable that was as thick as a grown man’s leg. Gradually, a tower became visible in the distance. The top of the tower was bulbous; it looked like a mushroom-headed rocket ship.
Fig. 1.3. The Wardenclyffe Tower at the Bjørnens Hule, Kirkenes, Norway
From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 148
“What is that?” asked Charlene.
“It’s our Wardenclyffe tower,” said Leif.
“What’s a Wardenclyffe tower?”
“Nikola Tesla invention,” said Kermin, craning his head to get a look. “It makes free electricity for whole world. But how did you do this?”
“So you know about Tesla?” Leif said into the rearview mirror.
“Of course. He was Serb,” said Kermin.
“And a poor businessman. But he was also the greatest mind of the last two hundred years.”
“Wait—free electricity for the whole world?” said Charlene. “Is that even possible?”
“Yes, well, it’s all in theory right now,” said Leif. “But Tesla’s design was quite genius. The towers use the earth like a battery, drawing electricity from deep currents—”
“Intra-crustal telluric currents,” said Kermin.
“That’s right.” Leif paused. “And then the tower transmits this current through the atmosphere. The idea is that everyone has a small antenna on their roof and receives their electricity almost like a radio wave—”
“How deep into ground do wires go?” Kermin interrupted.
“Three hundred meters.” Leif smiled. “Deep enough.”
The road ended at the base of the Wardenclyffe tower, where there was a cluster of a dozen or so traditional wooden lodges with sod growing on the roofs. Lying between the buildings were large piles of mechanical equipment—ten-foot diesel engines and generators and strange, loop-de-loop electrical transistors. Wires ran from each house into the tower, then back into the transistors, then into totemlike wooden carvings of animals frozen in ferocious poses, their eyes replaced by lightbulbs. They disembarked from the jeep and stood, blinking.
“Welcome to home base,” said Leif. “We affectionately call it the Bjørnens Hule, or ‘the Bear’s Cave’ in English. We’re somewhere between the Finnish-Norwegian border.”
“What do you mean, between?” Charlene asked.
“Borders are complicated up here. Especially now. The Cold War has made everything a bit testy. You can’t spit near the Russian border without being picked up. But borders are not natural things. Birds do not listen to borders.”
“But we’re in Norway now?”
“Well, something strange happened. A cartographer made a mistake. The Finns thought the border was one line, the Norwegians thought it was another. Normally when this happens you get a big argument and maybe a war or two because someone is claiming too much, but, typical Scandinavians, both countries have claimed too little. And now there’s a space, like this.”
He used his fingers to demonstrate:
“It’s where we get our emblem. The eye.” He pointed at the base of a totem pole, where a stenciled eye watched them without comment.
“Over there,” he said, waving his hand vaguely, “is the Treriksrøysa. A point where Norway, Finland, and Russia all come together. You aren’t allowed to walk around this point fully, like this,” he said, promenading his fingers, “because you would violate international law. Wandering in and out of countries. But how about this: at this point, if such a point could even exist, time fluctuates. Norway is on Central European time, Finland is on Eastern European time, one hour ahead, and Russia is on Moscow time, two hours ahead. One point, three times. How can that be? And yet we’re okay with this being true.”
Charlene looked at her watch, suddenly feeling as if she were losing her bearings.
“What time is it right now? I forgot to set my watch.” She fiddled with the dial, spinning the hour hand forward.
He shrugged. “In the summer, when the sun never sets, time becomes quite relative.”
“Twelve thirty?”
Fig. 1.4. The Treriksrøysa
From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 140
“As you wish.” He smiled. “But I’m sorry, I’m being a terrible host. You must be exhausted from your travels. Would you like a sauna? I find it’s the only way to cure jet lag.”
Caught between a haze of weariness and the urge to follow local custom, Kermin and Charlene, against their better judgment, found themselves stripped and sweating alongside Leif inside a small sauna cabin on the outskirts of camp while Radar slept outside on a blanket in the grass.
The ticking of the sauna’s furnace and the resonant smell of the baking cedar planks overwhelmed Charlene’s fragile system. She tried to let the heat perform its restorative magic but found it difficult to relax while naked inside a small, sweltering room alongside this stranger. She peeped out through the little window in the door to see if her son was still there, then she cinched the towel tighter around her breasts.
“So how do you know Brusa Tofte-Jebsen?” she asked.
“Brusa and I taught together in Bergen before the war,” said Leif. His hairless body glistened pink, his small penis a little mole rat of a thing, which she tried to avoid with her eyes. He did not seem to be sweating.
“I have been to Bergen,” said Kermin abruptly.
“Oh?” said Leif. “A beautiful place, isn’t it?”
“I don’t remember,” said Kermin. “It was night and I am sick. We escaped to America. We were not tourists.”
“Ah, well, that’s a shame. It’s funny how beautiful towns can turn very ugly in difficult times. You forget to look at the views, you know what I mean?”
“Then you moved up here?” said Charlene.
“When the Nazis invaded, I had just started my first year teaching physics and chemistry in high school. You can’t imagine what it’s like to be occupied. We all wanted to join the resistance but didn’t know how. It was like a slow death. A silent death. We did simple things, stupid things, like wearing paper clips on our lapels as a sign of protest. We started underground newspapers, declaring all kinds of things. Suddenly you had a newspaper, so you had to have radical ideas to go in the newspaper. Many people think the idea comes first, but it’s usually the other way around. You need a place to put the idea before you can have the idea, you know what I mean? But the real turning point was when the quislings wanted all of us teachers to sign a declaration of allegiance. The declaration stated we could only teach Nazi-sponsored topics and such. So we saw our chance—we would take a stand and break our silence. We refused to sign the document. All of us. Without even co
nsulting each other. Seven hundred teachers were arrested, rounded up, and sent up the coast on a small boat. It was packed to the ceiling. Many of them got very sick on the journey. Some even died. Brusa and I worked for a year in the camp up here in Elvenes. Heavy labor. It was freezing; terrible conditions, you know. But we started a few interesting projects in secret, and after they released us, a couple of us ended up staying. And now I have been here for over thirty years.”
“Brusa lives here, too?”
“No, he ended up leaving. A disagreement over language.” Leif dipped a wooden ladle into a bowl of water and poured it over the stones. A great wall of wet heat rose up and enveloped them.
“Ay,” said Charlene. Her head felt as if it were compressing.
Leif did not seem to notice her distress. “You see, here in Norway,” he said, “there are actually two languages, two different types of Norwegian—Nynorsk and Bokmål. To an outsider, the differences between them might seem minimal, but there have been years of turmoil and cultural warring over who should speak what, and which is the true language and which is not. It’s all a bit silly—I can say this to you now—but back then it mattered a great deal whether ‘I’ was jeg or eg. Somehow everything else depended upon this distinction. Did you say jeg? Or did you say eg? There could be no compromise.”
“So what did Brusa say? Jeg or eg?” she asked, trying to breathe normally.
“Without boring you with the specifics, as a group we chose to speak Nynorsk, which was the language invented for the people, not the elite, who all spoke Bokmål. Bokmål is really a kind of bastardized Danish. And Brusa didn’t like this decision, even though we took a vote and it was all done completely democratically. He thought Nynorsk was one man’s fantasy. So he left. To tell you the truth, I don’t think he ever wanted to stay. He was a different breed than I was. He wanted to be a writer. Some people are meant to do things, and some people are meant to write about these things from a great distance.”