The Cabin in the Mountains

by Robert Ferguson

  * Checking this reference recently I noticed to my surprise that the translator was Torstein Hilt. Hilt was an adventurous and popular man whose subsequent career included playing the part of Jappe Nilsen in Peter Watkins’ film Edvard Munch, and founding Hilt og Hansteen, a small but successful publisher of Mind, Body and Spirit books, where my wife worked with him for a number of years. After selling the company, Hilt emigrated to Colombia to start a new life. In 2018 he was robbed and murdered by an unknown assailant in the town of Minca, in the north of Colombia.

  † The suffix ‘gate’ means street or road in Norwegian. A number of street names in York, such as Coppergate, are historical reminders of the city’s existence as a Viking kingdom in the ninth and tenth centuries.

  ‡ Originally published as Verdens Gang but now universally referred to by its initials.

  5

  23 June 2018

  Midsummer’s Eve party near Oslo – the spirit of dugnad – the curious phenomenon of Norgesvenner (‘Friends of Norway’) – an argument concerning Bob Dylan and the Beatles – on translating Norwegian Wood into English – on wood as a building material – differences between loft and stabbur – courting customs related to the loft – a caseof mistaken identity – the drive home

  By the time of Hanne and Petter Næss’s annual Midsummer’s Eve party, however, I had more or less forgotten my resolution to try to learn something more about wood. I was reminded of it in an unexpected way that night, in the course of a heated discussion that arose about the relative merits of the Beatles’ song ‘Norwegian Wood’ and Bob Dylan’s ‘4th Time Around’. In the historical Christian calendar Jonsok (John’s wake) commemorates the death of St John, but it’s actually a pre-Christian feast celebrating the summer solstice throughout Scandinavia with bonfires, when people stayed up all night drinking and celebrating life, and the gathering up at Hanne and Petter’s was more in the spirit of this original feast. The Næsses actually always held their party on the Saturday nearest 23 June. In the early years of what had become a traditional gathering up at Siljuseter, a mountaintop farm Petter and Hanne bought back in the 1990s – when he was working as information officer at the American Embassy in Oslo and she was at Statoil – there would always be a bonfire at midnight of piled branches at the edge of the cleared ground surrounding their house, until some years back the local fire brigade put a stop to it, claiming the risk of a forest fire was too great. That meant the focus of the evening was entirely on the spit-roasted lamb that was slowly turned on a rusted and industrial-size trolley they brought out once a year and moored on the outskirts of the lawn in front of the house. The brown fleece jacket I was wearing that night carried a souvenir of the days of the fire in the shape of a seared black scar the size of a thumbprint on the left breast where some flaming scrap of debris had settled.

  There were usually thirty or forty guests at these Siljuseter gatherings. A hard core of Petter and Hanne’s friends and colleagues from work could be relied on each year to make the half-hour drive out from Oslo, with the rest a changing corpus of temporary acquaintances, often visiting Americans Petter came into contact with through his job, or people on temporary placement at Statoil whom Hanne invited along. Siljuseter is a difficult place to get to, even with a map. You have to know when to turn off the country road that passes through Mehren at Sjåstad church, which is set back on the left on a bend in the road, and after that you take a forestry track that twists and turns its way up through the pines of the Merenmarka, crossing sheep grids and passing farms on its way up.

  Petter and Hanne’s home is where the track runs out at the top of the hill. It’s a one-storey timber house built in the style of a Swiss chalet. Once it was a smallholding, so there’s a large red barn and a henhouse built on to the back of what used to be a small milking parlour. In the early days, when the Næsses ran it as a part-time smallholding, they had a dozen sheep grazing up there, as well as an old retired horse called Ramona who lived out her days in meditative solitude, grazing on the long grass around the back and along the sides of the log cabin.

  The party was always held on the cleared carpet of lawn directly in front of the house, which was built on a slight rise. Each year, seven or eight tables would be arranged out there for the guests at the Jonsok gathering. The roast lamb was the main course, and each year guests would be asked to bring a bowl of salad, or a dessert or a cake, and these would be laid out on two tables on the covered terrace of the house. People didn’t have to be told to bring their own drink.

  We were never the first to arrive. By the time we had parked down by the barn and started walking up the grassy slope towards the house there would be a score of people already there, standing around between the tables, glass of wine or can of beer in hand, talking and swapping news in the friendly but slightly formal way of people who know each other only quite well and have not yet lost their inhibitions for the evening. There were always a number of young children there, very often belonging to families who were staying the night, the parents busy pitching their green or blue or orange tents on the edge of the lawn with the children already crawling in and out of them. They laughed excitedly at the prospect of the night ahead, some of them kicking a plastic football around, breaking off as if at some secret signal to rush across to where a slack rope was tied between two small apple trees at the bottom of the lawn, to see how far along it they could walk, screaming and waving their arms with delight, apart from the occasional girl or boy who took it with a deadly seriousness, already blighted by self-consciousness, already feeling that all eyes were upon them, following their least move and judging them.

  Nina and I had been guests at these Jonsok gatherings for most of the past twenty years and we always knew at least a dozen other guests by sight and often, though not always, by name. I was especially bad at remembering their names. Among Hanne’s regular guests were a group of women who, as far as I understood it, had become friendly while playing in the same football team. They always sat together at the same table and, as sometimes happens with tightly knit groups, it was not easy for an outsider to be completely sure which name belonged to which face. Even after all these years, I still have trouble with Norwegian personal names. On an almost daily basis, either in personal encounters or in the newspapers or on television, I seem to come across names I’ve never encountered before, and the problem of remembering them is made worse by the fact that so many of the first names are doubled, often in combinations that are highly unpredictable. It endows them with a kind of exoticism, which has not diminished for me over time, and which reminds me of something I am in increasing danger of forgetting, which is that I am not Norwegian myself, nor ever will be.

  Over the years, I had got to know the husbands of these football wives, and at a certain point in the evening all of us would find ourselves sitting together round a table. Our conversations tended to revolve around football and the rock groups of the 1960s. Occasionally, if a youngster in his forties was sitting with us, we might reach as far as Blur, Oasis and Coldplay. Sølveig’s third husband, young Kjell, was especially fond of Joy Division, and I remember late one evening he gave a memorable rendition of ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, accompanying himself on Petter’s guitar, an instrument more used in its owner’s hands to interpreting the music of seventeenth-century composers for lute such as John Dowland or Johannes Kapsberger. In general, though, our greybeard wisdom would always be that these later groups lacked originality, and could only be judged on how well they carried on the traditions established by the Beatles and the Stones.

  It was on this particular June night in 2017 that the conversation about ‘Norwegian Wood’ and ‘4th Time Around’ took place. On my left was Beate’s husband Per, a man with an encyclopedic knowledge of the Beatles and their songs; opposite me was Bjarne, whose knowledge of Bob Dylan was almost but not quite exceeded by his Mastermind-like grasp of the life and career of Frank Sinatra. It was a combination of tastes I respected but did not share. At the othe
r end of the table, out of reach of the conversation, sat a white-bearded man whose name I think was Bjørn. Each time I looked in his direction, he seemed to be concentrating deeply on the act of hand-rolling a cigarette. Next to him was a woman in a pink fleece jacket whom I recognised as a weather forecaster for NRK, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. Although nothing came of it on this occasion, I remember making a mental note to try to have a word with her later on that evening. I wanted to ask her about the habit NRK’s forecasters all had of referring to Norway as vårt land (‘our country’) as they slowly waltzed about the screen in front of the weather map. Was it policy? I wanted to ask her. Because they all did it. Each time I heard this modest but firm expression of pride in ownership I felt a sense of regret at not being Norwegian myself.

  At times the feeling was so strong that I seriously considered applying for Norwegian citizenship. All that held me back was the certainty that it wouldn’t make any difference. A child of ten born here is more deeply Norwegian than I could ever be, even after more than thirty years residence. Belonging to a small country with a language understood by few outside its borders shapes the mind in a way that has nothing to do with passports. At a trivial level it might involve, for example, the existence of a clutch of Norwegian celebrities whose very celebrity will always be a source of quiet wonder to a foreigner who can’t actually feel their celebrity. This modest pantheon depends for its successful functioning on an agreement between star and admirers that keeps it well below the level of the hysterical adulation you get in larger societies. The bass guitarist in one of Norway’s biggest and most enduring rock bands, CC Cowboys, lives in our block in Oslo. Everyone in the block knows who he is; nobody pesters him for his autograph when they meet him coming and going, carrying plastic bags of shopping from the local Coop supermarket, on his way to the gym, or to pick up his daughter from the airport. Sometimes, at the height of the concert season, in the summer and around Christmas and the New Year, you’ll see him emerging through the front door looking rock-musician sharp in his tight black jeans and snakeskin boots and black jacket with silver buttons, his hair freshly dyed jet black. Then you’ll know the CC Cowboys are playing a gig somewhere that night, or maybe tomorrow night, in some far-off Norwegian town. But he’s always there in his old cord jeans when the annual spring dugnad comes around. In the context of our block, this almost untranslatable word* refers to the day when the tenants meet up on the central grass enclosure to weed the flower beds, prune the shrubs, plant flowers, hose down the bike stands, carry the furniture dumped in the lofts by previous tenants down four flights of stairs and toss it into one of the rented containers standing at each end of the driveway, and afterwards mingle on the grass for an hour or so, talking and drinking strong black coffee and eating Cecilia’s homemade waffles. The dugnad spirit is one of the most attractive expressions of the Norwegian communal imperative, and one of the strongest reminders of the country’s working-class roots.†

  Even here though, I begin to notice the erosion of affluence. For the first twenty years in which I lived in this country, tenants of each flat would take their turn at washing the staircases and corridors according to a weekly rota. This was never taken lightly. It encouraged a sense of responsibility for the general tidiness and cleanliness of one’s own immediate environment. Now the cleaning is done by external agencies, largely run by Eastern Europeans. It is only a matter of time before the culture of the dugnad goes the same way: for many years our tenants’ association in Oslo levied a fine of 300 kroner (about £30) on tenants who failed to participate in the dugnad. In 2018 this modest fine was dropped and the monthly rent raised by twenty-five kroner to cover the expected fall in income. In effect it means there is no fine, and the slight but entirely salutary sense of shame one always felt if, for some reason, one couldn’t make it, or simply didn’t feel like it one year, will inevitably disappear.

  It was about ten o’clock and still bright enough to read the labels on the tins of beer on the table in front of us. But it was cold in that special clear, late June evening way. There was a faint breath of heat from the roaster-trolley with what remained of the headless, tailless quadruped, but not enough to stave off the chill. Bjarne sat with an enormous black woollen scarf wrapped twice around his neck like a boa constrictor. Per’s padded orange puffer jacket was zipped up to the neck and he had a black beanie pulled down over his forehead to keep his shaven head warm. I had stepped inside the house and borrowed a thick Icelandic pullover from Petter, dragging it on over the fleece jacket. He had opened up Spotify on the outdoor speakers and had been amusing himself by playing a selection of music featuring that band of entertainers known as Norgesvenner (‘Friends of Norway’). It’s a self-deprecating term used to describe a handful of pop and rock acts whose flame has continued to burn brightly in Norway sometimes decades after it went out in their native lands. As a phenomenon it’s almost extinct now, its eccentric charms unable to survive the globalisation of all cultures, and the current generation of Norgesvenner will surely be the last. But it was an art in itself, knowing exactly who belonged to this exclusive club and who didn’t. We’d already had Smokie’s ‘Living Next Door to Alice’, Mungo Jerry’s ‘In the Summertime’, Dr. Hook’s ‘Sylvia’s Mother’, and now Petter was playing Bonnie Tyler’s ‘It’s a Heartache’. I had begun to run out of guesses as to what might come next. Nazareth’s ‘Love Hurts’ maybe? Nazareth were lifelong members. The last time we stopped at the petrol station in Lampeland I saw a CD of their greatest hits displayed right next to the cash register. Or maybe something by Johnny Logan. I couldn’t see him playing Leonard Cohen, even though Cohen had been a Norgesvenn throughout the years of polite recognition that preceded his sudden rise to superstardom in his seventies. It was a loyalty built on ‘So Long, Marianne’, a song that turned out to be about a Norwegian girl Cohen had stolen from her Norwegian partner, the novelist Axel Jensen, when all three of them were part of a literary-hippy commune living together on a Greek island sometime in the 1960s. But you can’t belong to the world and be a Norgesvenn, and I knew we wouldn’t be hearing from Leonard Cohen.

  It was strange, listening to those songs. I could remember disliking most of them first time around, but with the years they had transcended the boundaries of taste and become a part of my own personal Norwegian history. Now I actually enjoyed listening to them. I knew of old that taste is an enigma; I remember one night at the age of about eleven simply deciding to like Paul Anka, even though I knew I didn’t enjoy the sound of his voice, which I thought too nasal. But as an experiment, as the first notes of ‘You Are My Destiny’ emerged, budgerigar-faint, from the speaker of the tiny transistor radio under the pillow as I lay in bed, I had decided to see if I could like Paul Anka as an act of will. I succeeded with an ease that was almost frightening, and that can still make me uneasy when I think back on it, for what sort of shallowness did it reveal about me as a person?

  As the acoustic guitar figure that opens the Beatles’ ‘Norwegian Wood’ waltzed out across the chilly night air, I realised Petter had either got bored or run out of Norgesvenner. Per at once put down his beer can, closed his eyes in bliss, and held out his hands, palms downwards, in a plea for silence. His head was tilted back and his new beard jutted out over the table. It was one of those braided Viking beards about a foot long, like a stub of rope. He must have been growing it all year. The rest of us humoured him for the two minutes plus of the song, and as the last strains of the sitar died away he announced that the Beatles, as ever, were the originators; they had started everything; nothing had happened in popular music since then, and the best proof of it was ‘Norwegian Wood’, because this little song had started the whole sixties school of raga-rock.

  ‘That’s crap,’ said Bjarne. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. There was never any school of raga-rock. I was there, I would’ve noticed. Listen, if it hadn’t been for Bob Dylan the Beatles would still have been banging on about she loves you yeah yeah
yeah yeah. He made it okay to be intelligent.’

  Per took the bait. ‘The Beatles copying Bob Dylan? Excuse me. I presume you know “4th Time Around”? It’s a complete rip-off of “Norwegian Wood”. Waltz-time, storyline, everything.’

  Bjarne tried to claim that the Bob Dylan song came first, and when Per triumphantly read him the Wikipedia entry on ‘4th Time Around’ to prove his point, Bjarne didn’t back down but instead claimed that, in that case, it was highly likely that Bob Dylan had sung his song to the Beatles before he recorded it, or sent them a tape of it. Bob Dylan was a poet. He deserved to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Beatles were just a pop act.

  ‘Å vær så snill,’ Per said with a groan. ‘Please – a poet? What’s that line from “Hattie Carroll”? “Lay slain with a cane”. And what’s that he sings in “Blowin’ in the Wind”: “How many ears must one man have before he can hear people cry”? How many ears?’

  He grabbed hold of the tips of his ears and pulled at them.

  ‘Two, Bob, same as everybody else,’ he crowed.

  ‘It’s not “ears”,’ Bjarne said angrily, ‘it’s “years”.’ But he looked unsure of himself, and decided it was best to go on the attack again, denigrating the Beatles in general and in particular John Lennon. According to Bjarne, John Lennon was a talentless big-head whose one great break was bumping into Paul McCartney.

  As I recalled from the conversations of previous years, Lennon was a special hero of Per’s. To my surprise he didn’t respond. But when I looked at him I saw the blood darken in his eyes and suddenly realised that these two middle-aged men were on the verge of coming to blows over this quite trivial matter.