by Reif Larsen
Kermin refused the liquor, but Charlene warmed and opened with each glass. Radar gave a running commentary on the meal. With theatrical precision, Leif listened to the child’s words and nodded his agreement.
“Yes, yes, I’ll tell the cook,” he said. “I do apologize.”
Charlene smiled. She felt free. She wanted to tell this man everything. To kiss his bald head. They did not speak of Radar’s treatment. There was no need.
After dinner, they said goodnight to their host and walked into the strange, enduring daytime. On the path back to the cabin, they encountered an older man carrying a stack of books.
“Hello,” said Charlene, tipsy.
The man stopped. “You must be our guests,” he said and bowed. “Jens. Apologies for the mess. Although they seem to like it messy around here. They are artists, you see.”
“You’re Jens?” said Charlene. “Jens Røed-Larsen?”
He smiled at her mangled pronunciation. “I am.”
“Your son wrote to me.”
“Lars?”
“No, Per.”
He looked at her. “There must be some misunderstanding. I don’t have a son named Per.”
“Per Røed-Larsen.”
“I have a daughter, Kari. And Lars. That’s all.”
“But Leif said that Per was your son. He’s writing a history of this place. He sent me a telegram saying . . .” Her words drifted off.
Jens gave her a kind smile. “Leif says many things. You must remember this about him: he’s a born performer. He has a tendency to inhabit others. The Per who wrote to you was not my son. He is another Per.”
“What do you mean? Which Per is he?”
“This I cannot say.” Jens bowed again. “Goodnight. I wish you a pleasant night’s sleep. It can be difficult if you aren’t used to the light.”
After he had left them, Kermin shook his head. “These Norwegians are such bullshit. They do not look you into your eyes. They are like a cat.”
“A cat?”
“They never say what they mean.”
Despite being utterly exhausted, Charlene considered taking a sleeping pill when they reached the cabin, fearing the midnight sun might keep her awake. This proved unnecessary: within minutes, she and Radar were both asleep, his head nestled into her belly. Kermin lay down beside her and closed his eyes, but the light seeping in between the blinds pinched at his retinas. The skin of his eyelids was not thick enough.
He shuffled out to the porch and softly twisted the dial of his portable transceiver. The frequencies buzzed and chattered; he tuned the squelch, and his radio locked on to some distant signal before settling again and again into a wash of static. He had expected as much. They were at the end of the earth. He had not brought the dipole multidirectional antenna kit that could reach the horizons beyond the horizon. Perhaps he could tap into the Wardenclyffe tower before they left tomorrow and take a quick peek into the concave Arctic radio spectrum.
Then, somewhere at seventeen meters, a channel crackled. A sign of life. Humans carving out an existence on the pole. It was a garbled Russian weatherman. The Slavic gutturals popped and exploded and then evaporated into the churning shallows of white noise. He kept twisting the dial and caught a snippet of the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back,” Michael Jackson’s young voice rolling up through the sleeve of static, exercising its magnetic pull before the song fell apart beneath the weight of its own interference, disappearing back into the tundra.
Kermin sighed. He was about to put away the radio when he struck upon an eerily clear broadcast at twenty meters. A chorus of drummers. African, perhaps. The beats were syncopated, hypnotic, the sum of their collective polyrhythms emerging and converging, conjuring a high-pitched harmonic tone that sounded like a wet fingertip traveling along the edge of a singing bowl. The harmonics hovered and bobbed and faded away again into the continuous lurch of the drumbeat. Kermin found himself pressing the radio to his ear and closing his eyes. A vision of whales surfacing on a vast ocean, brackish spray exploding into the air. The weightlessness of the sea.
“They’re noaidi drums,” said a voice.
Kermin opened his eyes and saw a perfectly round head. Their host was leaning casually against the porch rail, like a cowboy in the late afternoon. In one of his palms he held a handful of orange berries. He casually tossed one into his mouth.
“Do you want one?” he said, offering a berry to Kermin. “It’s a cloudberry. Very important up here. Cures all ills—even those you didn’t know you had.”
Kermin shook his head. “No, thank you.”
“The noaidi is like a shaman for the Sami people. He plays the drum to transcend this world and enter into the spiritual realm of the gods. The skin of the noaidi drum is painted with a map of this alternate reality. The shamans use the drums to open the avenues to ascendance.”
“And they broadcast this?”
“The Sami are modernizing. They’re still the subjugated people up here, but they’re not stupid. There’s a lot of territory in the north, and not everyone can make the noaidi ceremonies. Radios collapse distance.”
“Radios transmit across distance. Distance cannot collapse.”
“I suppose it’s all in the perception, isn’t it? The world is as we perceive it. During the war, a radio was the most precious commodity. It was how the underground communicated. It was how a family could hear news from the mainland. The Nazis knew this—whoever controlled the radio waves controlled the means of propaganda. So they seized all the radios in Norway. Except we found ingenious ways of hiding them . . . Disguised as an iron. Or a bedpost. We would hollow out a log and put one inside and then stick it in the woodpile. You just had to remember which log contained the radio before you burned it.”
“My father was radioman in the war,” said Kermin.
“The most valuable man in the company.”
Kermin was silent.
“You don’t like me, do you, Kermin? You think I want to harm your child.”
“I don’t know you, so there is no way to like you or not.”
“I didn’t force you to come here.”
“You are not connecting Radar to your machine,” said Kermin. “So stop thinking about this.”
Leif smiled. “Would you like to go for a walk?”
“No, thank you,” said Kermin.
“Oh, come now, you’re leaving tomorrow, you came all this way—why not let me show you around a little? I promise, it’ll be worth your time.”
Kermin considered this. “I will only go for two minutes,” he said. “Then I come back.”
“However much time you can spare. Are you sure you don’t want a cloudberry?”
Kermin took the berry from his host. It had a sharp sweetness, a soft pinch on the tongue like the white currants back in Croatia, which he would pluck and squish between his fingers before popping them into his mouth. A wisp of memory he could not quite place sifted across his brain.
“It’s not so bad,” he said.
“Not so bad?”
“Comprehensive.” Kermin volunteered the word that Charlene often used with her smells. “Thank you.”
“Comprehensive? Okay. Kermin, I like it. You see? Would I lie to you? The cloudberry is comprehensive.”
Kermin followed Leif down a path lined with large triangular stones that looked like the oldest objects in the world.
“This place was so different during the war,” said Leif. “I used to think that war only changes us. But it also changes the land. It changes the rocks and stones around us.”
“I was child in the war.”
“Your father was a Chetnik, was he not?”
“Yes,” said Kermin. “So what?”
“I was simply stating a fact, not making a judgment.”
“My father was good man,” said Kermin. “He was fighting for hi
s home. He was radioman, not this general making decisions for all of Chetnik army. He did what they tell him.”
“I’m sure he did.”
“You cannot blame small people for big problems.”
“I’m not suggesting your father was a bad man.”
“If my father did not fight for Chetniks,” said Kermin, “we would not have to run, and we would not go to Bergen and I would not get on this boat to America and then I would not meet Charlene. I would not have Radar. So this all good things.”
“And there would be no RGBNN.”
Kermin stopped and stared at his host. “How did you know about this?” he said.
“You thought no one was listening, didn’t you? We are always listening.”
The RGBNN. Kermin had not thought about these letters in some time. A lantern was lit in the recesses of his memory. How we forget! How we forget everything!
Kermin had been in America only six months when his father, Dobroslav Radmanovic, brave radioman for the vanquished Chetniks, collapsed and died while waiting in line at the A&P, ground chuck in hand. A brain tumor had been slowly filling the soft space beneath his skull, an artery had burst, and Dobroslav had unceremoniously surrendered his ticket, at the age of thirty-seven leaving his son orphaned and alone in a strange land.
Luckily, the bureaucratic beast that was the Bergen County Department of Human Services had sent Kermin to the Simics, a well-meaning Serbian-Australian couple who lived in a diminutive row house a stone’s throw from exit 13 of the New Jersey Turnpike.
Luka, Kermin’s new foster father, was quick to denounce the “Chetnik savages,” who he believed had given Serbs a bad reputation abroad.
“No offense to your father, but those men are wicked,” he said in Serbian. “The only reason to grow your beard this long is because you are shipwrecked. Otherwise, you have something to hide. The Chetnik is the devil sitting on the Serb’s shoulder, whispering everything we do not need to hear.”
“In English,” said Weema, Luka’s wife, emerging with cocktail and spatula in hand. “Otherwise, the little rooster will never learn.”
“In English, in English,” Luka agreed. “Everything is clearer in English. Do you know, my little rooster, that it is impossible to tell a lie in English even if what you say is not true? The opposite is true in Serbian: everything you say is a lie, even if what you say is true. And that is the truth.”
The Simics had done their best to give Kermin a Normal American Childhood. They had indeed taught him English. They had sent him to school. They had brought him to St. Sava’s each Sunday. They had tolerated his strange radio habits. And yet, as Kermin tried to settle into this new life he had inherited, he could not help feeling a great chasm opening up around the question of his father’s legacy. Until the day he died, Dobroslav had never once spoken a bad word about either Dujic or the Chetnik cause. Such unequivocalness left his son balancing a degree of cautious reverence for his father’s memory with a growing mistrust for the Chetniks themselves, whom he had increasingly come to understand as collaborationist, disorganized, and potentially genocidal. How, then, to reconcile the participation of someone you loved in what was most probably a very bad thing? Could his father still be a good man who had also participated in evil deeds?
Kermin had resolved this, at least in part, by founding the Ravna Gora Broadcast News Network (RGBNN) when he was sixteen years old. Transmitting from his bedroom in Elizabeth, using a homebrewed radio setup, the RGBNN was a short-lived exercise in making right what was once wrong: it exclusively broadcast elaborate (and one must say, incoherent) anti-fascist manifestos that Kermin had penned himself. He would read these aloud over Luka’s old Serbian records.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we are all equal rights,” young Kermin intoned into his microphone. “No one can tell us how to make difference from others. We are all made from same branches of trees. We are all human branches. Past is past, future is future, man is man, woman is woman.”
Any self-consciousness about the clumsiness of these sermons was mitigated by the knowledge that no one was listening to his frequency, and even if they were, they certainly wouldn’t know who was speaking. At least this was what he had assumed.
• • •
“YOU ARE JOKING ME,” Kermin said to Leif, shaking his head. “Truly—how did you find out? No one knows this.”
“You know what your problem is, Kermin?” said Leif, smiling. “You keep wanting us to be different, but the more you get to know me, the more you realize that we are exactly the same.”
They walked in silence. The light in the sky had grown soft and casual, like the back of a hand. The drumming popped lightly through Kermin’s radio.
Leif stopped. “Tell me, Kermin, are you familiar with Heinrich von Kleist?”
“No.”
“Kleist wrote an essay called ‘On the Marionette Theatre.’ Not an essay, really—more of a dialogue . . . in the Socratic tradition. You know Socrates, yes?”
Kermin shook his head. “Not personally.”
Leif laughed out loud. “That is a good one. ‘Not personally.’ I must remember that one.”
Kermin smiled at his unintentional humor. For just an instant, he felt like the smartest man alive.
“Well, I don’t know Socrates personally, either,” said Leif. “Nor Kleist. But in his essay, two men discuss puppetry, which at the time was seen as a petty craft, performed by unskilled peasants for children and criminals. In many ways, not that different from how it is perceived today, yes?”
“Puppets?” said Kermin. “Like Pinocchio?”
“You see? You think of puppets and you immediately think of children. You have been corrupted by a lack of imagination. Kleist’s essay addresses this exact problem. . . . In his piece, one of the men proposes that the puppet, without any awareness of self, is more graceful, more true, in the Kantian sense, than any human actor can possibly be. This astonishes his partner, who, like you, has never before considered the puppet as anything but a child’s toy. But here, then, is the problem: a human cannot move without also observing his own movement, and in observing it, he corrupts it. A puppet doesn’t suffer from this same condition. It’s free to inhabit only the movement asked of it, nothing more, and in doing so, the puppet tempts perfection—and, indeed, God himself.”
“Without observation, there is no life.”
“But how do you know? This is an assumption on your part, yes?”
Kermin turned off his radio. “You are a crazy man.”
“No, Kermin, I’m a puppeteer. There’s a difference,” said Leif. “Come, I want to show you something.”
They walked down some steps, through a gate, and to the door of a large house that Kermin had not seen before. Leif paused with his hand on the doorknob.
“Don’t be alarmed by what you’re about to see,” he said. “Your life will never be in danger. Do you trust me?”
“No.”
“Fine. Probably better this way,” said Leif and opened the door.
The entire house was one large room, with high ceilings and a dimly lit stage at its center, surrounded by several rows of empty chairs. In the middle of the stage stood a bear, perhaps nine feet tall. At first Kermin thought the bear was merely a taxidermied statue, but then he saw its head twist and one of its paws shudder and he realized the thing was alive. He took a step back against the wall.
“Don’t be afraid,” said Leif. “We’ve controlled Gunnar thoroughly. He only knows his task.”
“He is real bear?”
“As real as you or I,” said Leif. “Now I want you to fight him.”
“Jesi lud.”
“I assure you, there’s no danger. Gunnar will never fight back; he has been trained only to defend.” Leif picked up what looked like a fencer’s rapier. “The point is not sharp, so have no fear about injuring the creature. Your on
ly objective is to try and tap the pendant attached to the bear’s chest. If you do this, the alarm will chime and the fight will be over.”
“I’m not fighting a bear. He will kill me.”
“The bear won’t kill you. The bear cannot kill you. For this I give you my word. The only person who can defeat you is you.”
“I don’t take your word.”
“All right, then. We stand at an impasse,” said Leif. “If you don’t believe another man’s word, then what do you believe?”
The question caught Kermin off guard. He had come to Norway hoping that the trip alone would cure his wife of the strange sickness that continued to consume her. He did not know what had gone wrong between them; he could not point to a piece of their life and say, “This is the part that is broken.” He knew only that at some point, during some brief, quiet moment when he had not been paying attention, they had drifted off course, and they were now in uncharted waters. Kermin never claimed to know much in this world, but he did know that he must never lose Charlene, that without her he would never be whole again. And so he had tried to come to this place with an open mind, even if he knew in his heart that he had relinquished some vital part of himself by even setting foot here. Maybe this was what love had become: the slow act of giving up more and more until nothing of yourself remained. Yet when Leif had described the procedure to treat their son, something inside of him had snapped and recoiled—not because he believed the procedure wouldn’t work or that Radar might be harmed, but because he knew that there was a very real possibility that it would work, and that afterwards, nothing could ever be the same.
Through the shadows of the room, Kermin looked at the bear, who had not moved since their arrival, save for bobbing his head back and forth ever so slightly, giving him an air of reluctant wisdom.
Again the lantern of memory was lit, and Kermin was suddenly taken with a forgotten scene from his past: Once, when he was very young, he was walking through the woods alone, gathering white currants into a thrush basket for his mother’s preserves. He had not told his mother where he was going, because he knew she would never have let him go. The war had already been raging for two years, and she had forbidden him to wander, but he had wanted to surprise her with the basketful of currants, to make her smile again, just like she had done before his father left to go fight in the hills. Together they would dip the jars into the boiling water, mash up the berries, and make her famous preserves.