The Sixteen Trees of the Somme

by Lars Mytting

  Lars Mytting

  The Sixteen Trees of the Somme

  Translated from the Norwegian by Paul Russell Garrett

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Also by Lars Mytting in English translation

  I: Like Ashes in the Wind

  II: Summer Solstice

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  III: Island of the Storm Petrels

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  IV: Unexploded Shells

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  V: Isabelle

  About the Author

  First published in the Norwegian language as Svøm med dem som drukner by Gyldendal Norsk Forlag A.S. in 2014

  First published in Great Britain in 2017 by

  MacLehose Press

  An imprint of Quercus Publishing Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © 2014, Lars Mytting

  English translation copyright © 2017 by Paul Russell Garrett Published by agreement with agentur literatur Gudrun Hebel

  This translation has been published with the financial support of NORLA.

  The moral right of Lars Mytting to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  EBOOK ISBN 978 0 85705 605 4

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  www.quercusbooks.co.uk

  Also by Lars Mytting in English translation

  NON-FICTION

  Norwegian Wood (2015)

  The Norwegian Wood Activity Book (2016)

  And take me disappearing through the smoke rings of my mind Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow

  BOB DYLAN, “Mr Tambourine Man”

  I

  Like Ashes in the Wind

  FOR ME MY MOTHER WAS A SCENT. SHE WAS A WARMTH. A leg I clung to. A breath of something blue; a dress I remember her wearing. She fired me into the world with a bowstring, I told myself, and when I shaped my memories of her, I did not know if they were true, I simply created her as I thought a son should remember his mother.

  Mamma was the one I thought of when I tested the loss inside me. Seldom Pappa. Sometimes I asked myself if he would have been like all the other fathers in the district. Men in Home Guard uniforms; in football trainers at old boys’ practice; getting up early at the weekends to volunteer at Saksum’s local association of hunters and anglers. But I let him fade away without regret. I accepted it, for many years at least, as proof that my grandfather, Bestefar, had tried his best to do everything Pappa would have done, and that he had in fact succeeded.

  Bestefar used the broken tip of a Russian bayonet as a knife. It had a flame-birch handle, and that was the only real carpentering he had ever done. The top edge of the blade was dull, and he used that to scrape off rust and to bend steel wire. He kept the other side sharp enough to slice open heavy sacks of agricultural lime. A quick thrust and the white granules would trickle out of their own accord, ready for me to spread across the fields.

  The sharp and the dull edges converged into a dagger-like point, and with that he would dispatch the fish we caught on Lake Saksum. He would remove the hook as the powerful trout flapped about, furious to be drowning in oxygen. Place them over the gunwale, force the tip of the blade through their skulls and boast about how broad they were. It was always then that I would raise the oars to watch the thick blood trickle down his steel blade, while thin drops of water ran down my oars.

  But the drops flowed into each other. The trout bled out and became our fish from our lake.

  On my first day of school I found my way to my desk and sat down. On it was a piece of card folded in half, with EDVARD HIRIFJELL in unfamiliar writing on both front and back, as though not only the teacher but I, too, had to be reminded of who I was.

  I kept turning to check for Bestefar, even though I knew he was there. The other children already knew each other, so I just stared ahead at the map of Europe and the wide chalkboard, blank and green like the ocean. I turned once more, concerned that Bestefar looked twice as old as the other parents. He stood off to one side in his Icelander, and he was old like Fridtjof Nansen on the ten-kroner note. He had the same moustache and eyebrows, but the years did not weigh heavy on him, it was as though they multiplied one another and made his face look full of vigour. Because Bestefar could never get old. He told me that. That I kept him young and that he made himself young for me.

  *

  My mother’s and father’s faces never grew older. They lived in a photograph on the chest of drawers next to the telephone. Pappa wearing flares and a striped waistcoat, leaning against the Mercedes. Mamma crouching to pet Pelle, our farm dog. The dog looks as though it is blocking her path, as if it does not want us to leave.

  Maybe animals sense these things.

  I am in the back seat, waving, so the photograph must have been taken the day we left.

  I try to convince myself that I remember the drive to France, the smell of the hot imitation-leather seats, trees flashing past the side windows. For a long time I thought I could remember Mamma’s distinct scent on that day, as well as their voices above the racing wind.

  We still have the negative of that picture. Bestefar did not send the film for processing straight away. At first I thought it was to save money, because after this last photograph of Mamma and Pappa, Christmas Eve, midsummer net fishing and the potato harvest were still to come.

  It was not obvious at the time, but I think he waited because you never know how a picture is going to turn out, not until it comes back from the lab. You have an idea, an expectation of how the subjects will settle, and within the emulsion, Mamma and Pappa would live a little longer, until the developing bath fixed them for ever.

  *

  I believed Bestefar when, as my tantrums came to an end, he repeated that he would tell me everything when I was “big enough”. But maybe he failed to notice how much I had grown. So I discovered the truth too early, and by then it was too late.

  It was soon after the beginning of Year Three. I cycled down to the Lindstads’ farm. The door was open, I called out a greeti
ng. The house was empty, they were probably out in the barn, so I went into the living room. A stereo and a record player stood on the dark-stained bookcase, collecting dust. Norwegian Automobile Federation road atlases, condensed novels from Reader’s Digest and a row of burgundy yearbooks, with Det Hendte in gold letters on their spines. Each contained a summary of the most significant events of that year.

  It was no coincidence that I selected the one marked 1971, it was as if the yearbook wanted me to look inside; it fell open on the month of September. The pages were shiny with fingerprints. The edges of the pages were worn and there were threads of tobacco in the gutter.

  Mamma and Pappa, one photograph of each of them. Two simple profiles with “(Reuters)” printed under their names. I wondered who Reuters was, and thought I ought to know since it was about my parents.

  It said that a Norwegian–French couple, “both domiciled in Gudbrandsdalen”, had died on September 23 while on holiday near Authuille by the Somme in northern France. They had been visiting a fenced-off First World War battlefield and had been found dead in a river. The autopsy revealed that they had been exposed to gas from an unexploded shell, and had then lost their footing and stumbled into the water.

  The yearbook went on to state that there still were several million tonnes of explosives along the old front lines, and that many areas were judged impossible to clear. At least a hundred people, tourists and farmers, had been killed in recent decades by stepping on unexploded shells.

  I knew this already from Bestefar’s economical explanation. The part that he had omitted came next:

  “From items discovered in their car, the police established that the couple had a child with them, a three-year-old boy.” But he was nowhere to be found and a search party was organised. Dogs helped to scour the former battlefield with no success, while divers dragged the river and helicopters were deployed to widen the search.

  Then I read the sentences that extinguished the child in me. It was like putting newspaper in the fireplace; the writing was still legible despite the paper catching fire, but with the lightest contact it would crumble to ashes.

  “Four days later the child was found at a doctor’s surgery 120 kilometres away, in the seaside town of Le Crotoy. A police investigation yielded no answers. It was assumed that the boy had been abducted. With the exception of minor injuries, he was unharmed.”

  Then the article returned to the truth I knew, that I had been adopted by my grandparents in Norway. I stared at the pages. Flipped forward to see if anything came after, flipped back to see if I had missed anything that came before. I picked out the bits of tobacco from the gutter. People had talked about me, taken out Det Hendte 1971 when the neighbours were over for coffee, recalled the time someone from the Hirifjell clan had made it into the papers.

  My anger had a long way to go. Bestefar said he had told me everything he knew, so I carried my questions into the flame-birch woods opposite the farm. Why had Mamma and Pappa taken me to a place filled with unexploded shells? What were they even doing there?

  The answers were gone, Mamma and Pappa were gone like ashes in the wind, and I grew up at Hirifjell.

  *

  Hirifjell lies on the far side of Saksum. The larger estates are on the other side of the river, where the snow melts early and the sunshine caresses the log walls and the squirearchs who live within them. It is never called the true side, occasionally the sunny side, but most often nothing at all, because only the far side needs a name for its location. Between us flows the Laugen River. The mist rising from the river is the border we must cross when we go to secondary school or shop in the village.

  The far side lies in shade for most of the day. There are jokes about the people who live here, that they fire their Krags at the travelling fishmonger’s van and tie together the shoelaces of drunkards who fall asleep under the haycocks. But the point is that even if you come from an estate in Saksum, you cannot adopt Parisian habits, let alone those from Hamar. Norge Rundt has never broadcast a bulletin from Saksum. You find the same things here that you find in other villages. The agricultural cooperative, the draper’s, the post office and the general store. A road high above the village where the ambulance always gets stuck. Peeling wooden houses inhabited by people who fiddle their taxes.

  Only the telephone engineers and the local agricultural officers knew that the sun actually shone all day where we lived. Because Hirifjell is situated just at the point where the hillside slopes back down. The sunny side on the inside of the far side. A garden in the woods, closed off by a gate, wherein we kept ourselves to ourselves.

  *

  Bestefar liked to sit up all night. I would lie on the sofa while he smoked cigarillos and rearranged his books and vinyls. Bach’s cantatas, boxes of Beethoven and Mahler symphonies conducted by Furtwängler or Klemperer. Shelves full of books, some tattered, some new. There were so many slips of paper sticking out of Andrees’ World Atlas and Meyer’s Konversations-Lexikon it looked as though new pages were growing from them.

  This is where I fell asleep at night, in a haze of music occasionally interrupted by the crackle of his lighter, and, half asleep, I would hear him put down Der Spiegel and then feel his arms around me. When I peeped through half-open eyelids, the walls and ceiling were spinning, as if I were the needle of a compass, before he laid me down, straightened my arms and legs and pulled the duvet over me. Every morning his face was there; with the light in the hall shining on his stubble and his curved moustache, yellowed from smoking, he stood with a smile revealing that he had been watching me before I woke.

  The only unreasonable thing he did was to refuse to let me collect the post. When it was late it messed up his routine, and every morning at eleven he would watch for the red car up by the county road. Later he switched to having a P.O. box down in the village, saying that some strangers had forced open the lock on the postbox.

  Enclosing postage stamps, I sent off for catalogues for do-it-yourself speaker kits, Schou’s hunting weapons, the A.B.U. catalogue, photography equipment, fly-tying materials – I learned more from them than from any of my textbooks. My only contact with the outside world came through Bestefar, heavy envelopes on a warm car seat from his trips to the village. It was like that for an eternity until the year he returned from the annual meeting of the Association of Sheep and Goat Breeders and, out of nowhere, said that we should switch back to the postbox, it was such an effort going down to Saksum to collect everything.

  Even before then I remember us sawing off the stock of Pappa’s shotgun and going duck hunting. It was a 16-calibre Sauer & Sohn side-by-side, given to him for his confirmation, although in all likelihood he had never used it. As I grew, we glued slivers of the severed stock back on, and when my own confirmation came the orangey-brown walnut stock was marked with thin rings, a measure of my childhood with Bestefar.

  But I knew that if a spruce grew too quickly, it formed wide growth rings, and when the tree was big enough for the wind to take hold, it would snap.

  All my life I had heard a whistling coming from the flame-birch woods, and one night in 1991 it grew into a wind that made me falter. Because there was something about Mamma and Pappa’s story that was still stirring, quietly, like a viper in the grass.

  II

  Summer Solstice

  1

  THAT NIGHT DEATH RETURNED TO HIRIFJELL. IT WAS obvious who was going to be collected, because there were few to choose from. I was twenty-three years old, and when later I thought back on that summer, I realised that death is not always a cruel, unseeing killer. Sometimes it leaves the door open on the way out.

  But being set free can be sheer torture. The day it happened was not the usual day of hard work and evening sun, a day that Furtwängler’s baton slowly lays to rest. The fact is, the day before Bestefar died someone painted a swastika on his car.

  I had been waiting all week for a delivery from Oslo, and now the delivery slip was in the postbox. I took the shortcut to the house, racin
g past the stinging nettles and across the farmyard. I opened the door to the tool shed just a crack and said I had to pick up something, that I was leaving now. He straightened up at the workbench, set down the pair of pincers and said we should drop in at the agricultural cooperative.

  “Why don’t we take the Star?” he said, and brushed the wood chips off his jacket. “Save you money on petrol.”

  I turned and closed my eyes. So it was one of those days, when he thought it embarrassing if we drove in separate cars.

  Bestefar ambled stiffly across the yard to fetch his shopping jacket. The villagers did not like it that he carried a knife, so he usually wore a hip-length jacket when we drove in.

  We set off in the heavy, black Mercedes he bought new in 1965. The paint was scratched from driving along the overgrown pasture road and there were patches of rust around the lock for the boot, but it was still a car that stood out in the village. We drove slowly past the potato fields, inspecting the blossoms on either side.

  We were potato farmers, Bestefar and I. Yes, we had sheep, but potato farmers was what we were. He would lose weight waiting for them to sprout, even though the fields of Hirifjell were 540 metres above sea level and insects that spread disease rarely made it this high.

  Bestefar was one hell of a potato farmer, and he made one out of me, too. We supplied both seed potatoes and eating potatoes. Almond potatoes were the most lucrative, even though Ringerike were a better quality. Beate was a potato for idiots. Large and flavourless, but people had to have them. Pimpernels were what we kept for ourselves, for meal after meal. They matured late but had a firm flesh, and with their bright violet skin there was nothing more beautiful to pluck out of the soil.

  The car rattled as we drove across the cattle grid, and he turned onto the county road without checking for traffic. The woods opened near the Lindstad farm and as always we studied the river.

  “Laugen has gone down,” he said. “We could go fishing past the campsite.”