The Cabin in the Mountains

by Robert Ferguson

  Ole broke off and studied a fly that had landed on his wrist and was making its way up the back of his sun-browned thumb. He flicked at it but it buzzed away. I waited for him to go on, and when he didn’t I said:

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘Well, the branch broke. He told me about it afterwards. He said as soon as he kicked the bucket away and put his full weight on it, the branch snapped. He laughed when he told me.’

  ‘Did he try again?’

  ‘Not that I know of. I suppose he thought once was enough, if you know what I mean. He was very depressed at the time. He said he was tired of his life and he wanted his old life back. He called it his black and white life. His acoustic life. From the days before rock ’n’ roll.’

  Ole drank up the rest of his beer and we parted company outside on the pavement. Ole headed back to his office and I turned left onto Møllergata and then left again through the July 22 Information Centre, past the government buildings shattered by Breivik’s bomb back in 2011, emerging by the enormous concrete roadblocks that now limit traffic access between the centre of town and Akersgata. I turned down Apotekergata, past the only slightly larger than life-size statue of a businessman and publisher named Tinius Nagell-Erichsen, sculpted with typically low-key Norwegian modesty in a lounge suit, with walking stick, briefcase and spectacles, and waited at the end of the street outside Hansen and Dyvik’s interior shop on Pilestredet for a number 19 tram that would take me back up to Majorstua. We would need a complete new set of bed linen for our cabin and I saw in the window they had an offer of 30 per cent off all duvets. I wondered briefly whether I had time to go in and check them out, but a glance up at the electronic arrivals board told me the tram was due in two minutes. As I waited I was thinking about the cabin, and about Sverre, and what seemed to me his addiction to the past. I felt for him, so harshly rejected by the present, knocking and knocking on the door of a past into which he could see so clearly, but to which he could never gain readmittance. I could sympathise with that almost painful nostalgia. I’d suffered from it once myself.

  The long, sky-blue concertina-tram rumbled round the corner from Grensen and into Pilestredet, blocking the view across to the Herr Nilsen jazz club as it came to a halt. Boarding through the central doors, I was thinking that hanging was a strangely old-fashioned way to try to kill yourself but that, all other things being equal, it would probably never go out of fashion. The tram was packed and as I made my way to the centre and found a strap to hold on to I couldn’t help wondering if Sverre had remembered to ask himself, as the branch broke, ‘Am I dreaming?’

  * Cabin life on the Swedish skerries.

  † A word implying the pursuit of the happy medium in all things.

  ‡ A style of relaxation practised by middle-class Danes, usually involving candles and red wine.

  § A very different style of relaxation practised by some Finns, often defined as ‘drinking beer at home, alone and in your underpants and with no intention of going out’.

  ** Conservation law

  †† Outdoor recreation law

  4

  5 May 2018

  Thoughts on the nature of dreams – a second-hand bookshop – Malcolm Lowry and Nordahl Grieg – translation problems – street life around Majorstua – ‘Your cabin is being delivered today’ – the drive through the Numedal valley – the petrol station at Lampeland – we meet the builders – I resolve to find out more about wood as a building material

  ‘The discussion of making all things equal’, the second chapter of the fourth-century BC Taoist text Chuang Tzu, ends with a description of a dream in which Chuang Tzu dreamed he was a butterfly. He had no idea he was Chuang Tzu until he woke up. Thinking about it afterwards, it occurred to him that he couldn’t be sure whether he was a man named Chuang Tzu who had dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was a man named Chuang Tzu. For many years I had enjoyed thinking about the implications of this dream, that the distinction between what is real and what is dream can never be known for certain. But as the number 11 hummed along Pilestredet and up past the old Frydenlund brewery building, with traces of my conversation with Ole about Sverre lingering on, I was suddenly struck by the realisation that I had never had a dream in which I was anything or anyone but myself, and that to dream one belonged to another species was not merely unlikely but probably impossible. That dream of flying Sverre had described to me, and even my own fustian version of it: we weren’t birds or butterflies in those dreams, we were human. Otherwise, where were the feathers? Where were the gossamer wings?

  These sceptical mutterings troubled me. As the tram trundled up past the Natural History Museum on Tullinløkka I impulsively pushed the bell and jumped out at the next stop, in the shadow of the towering SAS hotel in Holbergs plass. My intention was to walk the rest of the way home up Bogstadveien and dispose of these objections along the way.

  There is a second-hand shop directly behind the tram stop, one of the small chain of Galleri Normisjon shops run by the mission church in Norway to support its work. Glancing into the shop window I recalled that my wife had asked me to look at a particular rose-painted cabinet she had seen there. She thought it might look nice on one of the cabin walls. I could see the cupboard through the window. It was standing on a low wooden table. It was about a metre high, and both its black-painted sides and the front of the door were decorated in garlands of once-bright but now faded traditional Norwegian rosemaling, a pattern of interlocking painted roses and scrolls.

  I pushed open the glass door of the shop and stepped down inside to take a closer look, unlocking and opening the cupboard door. Almost at once I noticed a distinctive carbolic smell, and made a mental note to refer to this when describing the visit to Nina, as a way of showing that I had given the matter of buying it considerable thought. Surely, I was thinking as I bent to peer at the back of the cupboard in search of the tell-tale pin-prick marks of woodworm, surely if a man was going to dream he was someone or something other than himself he would only ever dream he was another man? And that being the case, wouldn’t he dream of being a man who was in some way better than himself?

  Locking and closing the cupboard door again to leave the display as I had found it, I then made my way around the cluster of sofas and armchairs that occupied the centre of the shop to the rear wall, which was shelved from wall to wall with second-hand books. On a number of occasions since we had bought the plot in Numedal I had visited Oslo’s antiquarian booksellers, including Nordli’s just down the road, opposite the National Gallery in Universitetsgata, in search of the five-volume Rollag Bygdebok: Ætt og gard og grend (‘Rollag County History: ancestries, farms and hamlets’). I knew from the copies in the Reference Section of the National Library in Solli plass that the second volume contained several pages on the history of Veggli, including details of emigration to the United States from the area in the late nineteenth century – something I hoped to make use of in this book. A bare and pitiful footnote describing a brother and sister being executed for incest had also attracted my attention, as do all brief references to personal tragedy.

  It was a long shot that a Galleri Normisjon shop would have copies of the Rollag history, and once I had established it wasn’t there I looked around to see what they did have on their bookshelves. Almost at once I came upon a Norwegian translation of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, done for Gyldendal Norsk Forlag back in 1949 by Peter Magnus. Ever since moving to Norway in 1983 I had been in the habit of reading in Norwegian translation books that I had already read in English. Originally I did this as a way of trying to improve my grasp of the language, but I enjoyed the dislocating oddity of the experience and continued the habit even after I became fluent. The distinction is difficult to describe. It’s the same book, but in some subtle way it’s also a different book.

  Under the Volcano had been significant for me in a number of different ways ever since I first read it in my early twenties. One was the thrill of sharing with Lowry
a fascination with Norway and even the idea of being Norwegian. Opening the translation at random I came across the passage in which Geoffrey Firmin’s brother Hugh arrives to visit him in Cuernavaca in Mexico, on his way back from the Spanish Civil War. From Douglas Day’s biography of Lowry I knew that Lowry’s model for Hugh was the Norwegian novelist and playwright Nordahl Grieg, a distant relative of the composer, and that this Grieg had been a war correspondent in Spain during the Civil War in the 1930s.

  Like me, Lowry’s fascination with Norway had originally been excited by a novel. In his case it was Nordahl Grieg’s Skibet går videre, translated as The Ship Sails On by A. G. Chater in 1927, when Lowry was eighteen years old. He felt a bond with Grieg: both were the sons of wealthy fathers; both had been keen to see the world and attend what used to be called the ‘university of life’, both had gone to sea on long voyages and made novels out of their experiences.

  In his biography Day describes a trip Lowry made to Norway as a deckhand aboard a Norwegian-registered merchant ship called the S.S. Fagervik, bound for Ålesund on the western coast. Lowry jumped ship or signed off when the Fagervik docked and took the train east. By his own account he had no idea where Grieg lived, only that it was somewhere in Oslo. After registering at the Parkheimen Hotel on Bygdøy allé, the long tree-lined avenue that stretches from the National Library in Solli plass all the way down to the roundabout by the Bygdøy peninsula, he went out into the street and asked the first person he met if he knew, by any chance, where the famous young writer lived? The man replied that he did indeed, it was just a little further down Bygdøy allé, at number 68 – he was headed that way himself, would Lowry care to accompany him?

  Lowry goes on to describe how he took the lift up to Grieg’s apartment, how Grieg opened the door to him looking distracted and dishevelled (he had just returned from a walking trip in the mountains), but gave him a friendly greeting and invited him in. Grieg was struggling to finish a play commissioned by the National Theatre and Lowry quickly realised that he had disturbed his hero at work. Although invited to sit down he did not remove his overcoat, and stayed only long enough to down a couple of whiskies with Grieg and to tell him how much he had liked and admired The Ship Sails On. It seems he suggested that Grieg dramatise the novel for the stage. Grieg himself was not interested, but he encouraged Lowry to go ahead and make the attempt if he wanted to.

  They had lunch together the next day at Jacques Bagatelle on Bygdøy allé, visited the Viking ship museum, and dined at the Red Mill in the Grønland district of Oslo. Lowry then spent a few days exploring Oslo on his own, taking long walks through the city streets, and a metro ride up to Frognersæter, the magnificent old restaurant perched high above the city from which, on a clear day, you can see up the fjord almost as far as Drøbak. He also visited the cemetery at Trefoldighetskirken, halfway up St Hanshaugen. Lowry’s main purpose was probably to visit Henrik Ibsen’s grave, an austere black slab with a simple carving of a miner’s hammer on it. In his wanderings through the cemetery, however, he came across the grave of the Hilliot family and duly renamed the hero of his novel Ultramarine ‘Dana Hilliot’, turned him into a young man ‘born of Viking blood’, and even provided him with a ‘brief education in Oslo’.

  For a few moments I stood there, turning Lowry’s novel over in my hands and wondering whether to buy it, but decided not to and slipped it back onto the shelf. You never know; in my early days here, still trying to improve my grasp of Norwegian, I bought a translation of J. D. Salinger’s short story collection For Esmé – With Love and Squalor at a Steiner school jumble sale. There’s a scene in the title story where the narrator, a US serviceman stationed in England during the Second World War, glances through the windows of a Red Cross recreation room. He decides against going in because he sees soldiers standing there ‘two and three deep at the coffee counter’. Salinger’s Norwegian translator* rendered these words as i dype tanker ved kaffebaren, meaning ‘deep in thought at the coffee bar’ and making it sound like some weird abandoned sketch for Hopper’s Nighthawks.

  On my way out of the Normisjon shop I stopped and took three or four pictures of the cabinet. There was no accompanying card with details, only a price tag (a hefty nine thousand kroner) and I had no idea whether the stylised flowers and scrolls and tendrils were typical of Numedal or not. When we bought the land, and once the contract was signed, Jørgen had presented us with an illustrated book on the subject of Numedal’s ‘rosemaling’ and I guessed that consulting this in conjunction with the photographs might give us an answer. It hardly mattered to me whether the pattern was local, but I felt that if it were, hanging it on the wall would bring a valuable touch of authenticity to what Sverre had described as our ‘IKEA-hytta’. Although even there, something in me resisted: what is it anyway, this longing for an authenticity that almost always turns out to be in some way compromised? What is this enduring and even awed respect we feel for the past? All this wandering in and out of junk shops and flea-markets and second-hand bookshops, in search of what? The artefacts of the dead. Their rubbish.

  But with people it’s different. The dead we love don’t die to us. Leaving the Normisjon shop on Holbergs gate† I crossed Tullinløkka and walked through the old university buildings in the centre and took a 31 bus up Drammensveien. Although there were vacant seats, I remained standing so that I could follow the numbering as the bus turned into Bygdøy allé, looking out for number 68, all the while half-expecting to see Lowry slouching down the road in his overcoat. Just past the junction with Thomas Heftyes gate I spotted it. I got off at the next stop and walked back up the road a few metres.

  Opening the door, I stood in the stairwell. There was a lift with a black metal door and brass-rimmed porthole, and a floor-dial set into a brass plate on the wall beside it. By the look of it, it was the same one the young Lowry rode to the top floor of the building to meet Nordahl Grieg eighty-six years previously. Nordahl Grieg was the man Lowry dreamed of being, the man of action, the idealist, a writer who dedicated his life and work to the pursuit of social justice for all. Grieg died young, his RAAF Lancaster shot down during a bombing raid over Berlin in December 1943, his body never recovered. In the days after the Breivik murders in 2011 his 1936 poem ‘Til ungdommen’ (‘To the Young’) became an anthem of solace to the relatives and a moving tribute to all of Breivik’s young victims.

  That was all. I just stood in the lobby for a minute, sensing the presence of these two dead men, hearing the sound of their voices as they stepped out of the lift and walked past me towards the door, talking energetically about the paper Grieg was writing on the poet Rupert Brooke. I watched as they headed up the rise towards Solli plass, in the direction of Jacques Bagatelle, and when I could no longer see them I set off, walking up Thomas Heftyes gate. At Frogner plass, at the top, I crossed to the park side of the road and headed up Kirkegata. It was hot. The playground next to the wrought-iron entrance gates to Vigelands park was teeming with children, laughing, crying, swarming about on the rigging of the big wooden schooner at its centre. Turning into Slemdalsveien I stopped for a coffee at Baker Hansen’s, a café where the background music was always jazz. As I took my mug of flat white outside to the pavement seat with its unimpeded view of the pedestrian crossing, Charlie Parker’s version of ‘Just Friends’, from the album Charlie Parker with Strings, fluttered light and breezy from the overhead speaker.

  I sat there so regularly at this time of day that I had become familiar with certain sights: the young couple who always crossed the road together, stopping to kiss outside the entrance to the Metro and then going their separate ways, the young woman to board a train, her boyfriend mounting his bicycle and riding off down the pavement in the direction of the park; the tall, bald-headed barber standing smoking outside the door of his shop thirty metres up the road from the café, often talking on the phone at the same time – I noticed that he’d lost some weight and made a mental note to mention it next time I went in for a haircut; the woman wit
h cerebral palsy, always with a wine-red rucksack and wearing black cotton trousers that showed the upper few inches of her backside. She was a librarian at the main Deichmanske library. She’d once helped me get hold of a recording of On the Heights, Delius’s setting of one of Henrik Ibsen’s greatest poems, Paa vidderne (‘On the heights’), but I could tell she didn’t remember me.

  I watched her slow, tortured progress over the crossing and up the slope to the side entrance of the metro station. Each dragging step she took in the hot sun cost her a huge effort. Charlie Parker’s serene alto glided across the blue sky. How could such airy lightness and beauty have survived the booze and heroin-shot awfulness of his personal life? He died at the age of only thirty-four, but the doctor who signed the death certificate estimated his age at ‘between fifty and sixty’. I thought of his incarceration at the Bellevue mental hospital in New York. And all the other great jazz musicians who spent time there – Thelonious Monk, Tadd Dameron, Bud Powell, Charlie Mingus – maybe every last one of them would have swapped their genius for a life of ordinary and unspectacular happiness. I recalled that Lowry had spent a few weeks there too, an experience he describes with hallucinating clarity in ‘Lunar Caustic’, one of the early sketches for Under the Volcano. For most of the six years he spent writing that book he lived in a simple cabin by the waterfront in Dollarton, Canada. He wrote about the experience with a bewildered and loving warmth in ‘The Forest Path to the Spring’, a short story in which his intention had been, he said later, ‘to write of human happiness in terms of the enthusiasm and high seriousness usually reserved for catastrophe and tragedy’.