The Sixteen Trees of the Somme

by Lars Mytting

  “Graylings won’t bite when the water is this green,” I said.

  The spruce trees closed around us and the river disappeared until we reached the asphalt. We rumbled down the steep hill and I felt a flutter in my stomach, as I always did when approaching Saksum. The train station, the secondary school, the sawmill, the barns on the sunny side. The people.

  Cold river air poured in through the window as we crossed the wooden bridge.

  “Agricultural co-op first?” he said.

  If he went in there, he would be some time. Bestefar did not go in for window-shopping, so we rarely left without a tail-heavy Mercedes and a receipt half a metre long.

  “As a matter of fact,” he said. “Why don’t we pick up your package first. Let’s do that.”

  *

  We had just come out of the post office and I was examining my brown cardboard box when I noticed a strange falter in Bestefar’s step. When I looked up I saw the clumsy swastika sprayed in red paint on the door of his Mercedes.

  That had been my exact thought. His Mercedes, now that it had a swastika. Earlier that day, and in all the years prior, I had considered the Star ours.

  People were staring. They stood by the noticeboard for the athletics club with their hands in their pockets. Børre Teigen and his old lady. The Bøygard daughters. Jenny Sveen and the Hafstad boys. They were staring at something behind us, as if the post office had new roof tiles.

  Thin streaks of paint trickled slowly down the car door.

  One of the Hafstad boys glanced up at the corner by the draper’s. The flapping of a coat tail, someone slipping away. The only movement in a few frozen seconds on this Saturday in Saksum.

  Bestefar lowered his arm in front of me like a boom.

  At that point I still had a choice. The village was watching and waiting. Again I chose Bestefar. As I always had, not lacking for opportunities. I broke past his arm, dropped the package and I was off, running as I had my entire life. Swiftly past the glare of the villagers, across the road, towards the gravel playing field behind the Esso garage. I caught up with him there. A teenager running awkwardly with his arms pinned to his sides, his grey nylon jacket fluttering behind him.

  Obviously I should have used my advantage, my speed, to pull ahead and stop him face to face. I should have taken him with my size, slowed up like a footballer after scoring.

  But instead I stretched out a leg and sent him sprawling head-first into the gravel. He screamed as he fell and kept screaming when he was on the ground. I grabbed him by the jacket and spun him around.

  Noddy.

  In fact his name was Jan Børgum, but he nodded incessantly and talked to himself. There was dirt in the grazes on his hands and sand in his hair. Tears flowed into his bleeding nose, and pink bubbles spluttered as he sobbed. He had spray paint on his fingers and on the sleeve of his jacket, and he was clutching a piece of wax paper with the clumsy outline of a swastika.

  I cursed to myself.

  “Jan,” I said. “Did somebody pay you to do this?”

  He gurgled something unintelligible.

  “Speak clearly, Jan.”

  But he could not speak clearly. I knew that.

  I tried to help him up. He pulled away, fell on his backside and cried even more loudly. His trousers were torn at the knee. A pair of grey trousers, the kind old people and taxi drivers wore. Jan’s mum had been dressing him all these years. He had been two years above me in primary school and had worn the same clothes back then, when he wandered around with the special needs teacher, cross-eyed and his mouth agape. When I began secondary school, Jan did not progress to Year Nine. Jan went somewhere else.

  People were coming. They gathered by the oil-change ramp at the Esso.

  “Come on, Jan,” I said. “Get up.”

  He sniffled and wiped the blood off his lip. Struggled to his feet. I asked if he was hurt and he nodded. I gave him some money for the ripped trousers. “Who told you to do it?” I said.

  “It was in the book,” he said.

  “What book?”

  He mumbled something.

  “If they come back, tell them I want to talk to them. Can you do that?”

  “Do what?”

  I brushed the dirt off his back. He stood gawping. I headed towards the Esso. The Bøygard girls turned away. Then the Hafstad boys, and finally the rest of the crowd broke up. They strolled back to their shopping and their cars and their hot refill coffee.

  If only they would attack me, lay hands on me, yell at me. Then I could have responded, taken up this argument in the centre of Saksum, in the middle of a shopping day.

  But how would I have responded? Besides, they were done with their staring – at the rabble who settled things amongst themselves – and now that everything was over, they had two fewer halfwits to worry about.

  *

  Bestefar was in the passenger seat. He said nothing, did not wind down the window. He just sat there like a wax figure in a German fighter plane, pointing at the steering wheel. He had not touched the spray paint. You did not have to be a fortune teller to know that Sverre Hirifjell would never give anyone the satisfaction of asking for a rag. Or go into the paint shop to buy Lynol while maintaining an appropriate level of anger, mumbling something about juvenile pranks. I am not even sure he knew what that meant.

  I opened the car door. People at the general store were taking their time to park.

  “We are not driving like this,” I said. “I’m going to wash it off. Or cover it up.”

  “Drive,” he mumbled. “Straight to Hirifjell.”

  My package was on the back seat. One corner was crumpled.

  “Just get in and drive, dammit,” he growled. “Straight through the village. Up to Hirifjell.”

  He offered no objections when I took another route. I drove down to the grain silo and took the gravel road along the river. Six kilometres longer, but nobody lived there, and the swastika faced towards the mountainside.

  “It was Noddy,” I said.

  But he just stared at the river, and I realised that he was fully occupied with the one thing he truly was good at: forcing himself to forget.

  *

  The sky behind the barn had grown dark. I strolled across the farmyard and sat on the front steps of the cottage. The Mercedes was under the barn ramp. Bestefar was inside the log house.

  I have never liked seeing people mope. Almost anything can be fixed. Tobacco and coffee help. That, and putting my cards on the table. If you have a two of clubs and a three of diamonds, then fine. Today, you lost. The only grounds for complaint is if you are dealt four cards when you should have had five.

  There was rain in the air and I wanted it to come. Rolling down from the hillside with a strong wind. I wanted this rain, I wanted to put on some coffee, go out to the conservatory and hear the raindrops drumming on a roof I had built with my own hands, while I sat nice and dry with my mug and a cigarette.

  I went to the storehouse and pulled a tarpaulin over the circular saw. That week I had changed the gable board and rafters, now all that remained was the painting and I could do that after the weekend.

  The rain was close. Good rain. I recognised its smell. Not too hard or heavy, but one that would last a long time and give the ground a good soaking. I had been planning to take the irrigator out to the north field this evening, now there was no need. Instead I kicked off my shoes and put on a pair of thick, woollen socks. While the coffee machine gurgled, I cleared the kitchen table. Wiped it down with a cloth and reached for the package.

  Oslo Camera Service knew their trade so well that their reputation had travelled all the way to Saksum. Tightly wrapped, brown-taped corners. My name typed out, themed postage stamps, C.O.D. slip filled out with no abbreviations.

  I cut open the package, found another box inside and pulled out a lens wrapped in tissue paper.

  Leica Elmarit 21mm. A wide-angle.

  The weight of it. The resistance of the focus ring. The inscrutable c
olour shifts on the glass coating. The silky matt lacquer, the engraved numbers indicating distance and aperture.

  Bestefar gave me the Leica for my eighteenth birthday. An M6 camera body, a Summicron lens and ten rolls of film. There was no better camera for miles around, unless someone owned a Hasselblad. The only thing that spoiled it for him was that the lens had distance markings in both metres and feet.

  “There’s no need for that,” he said. “No enlightened nation measures in feet.”

  I bought myself a new lens every year, for a sum most people would consider too steep for a television. The world was made new with every focal length. A telephoto lens that brought the subjects closer and left the small detail in a haze. The macro lens that made the corolla of a flower fill an entire planet. And now, a wide-angle lens to expand the horizon outwards, making medium seem small, and bagatelles into a speck in the eye. It demanded a different subject matter, new ideas about foreground and background.

  But that day I did not look through the Leica’s viewfinder, because I would see only the usual. My collection of Asterix books. The door to the darkroom. The stereo with the speakers I built. The glass cabinet with the rest of my camera equipment. A still of Joe Strummer from the filming of “Straight to Hell”. The huge poster of The Alarm, from the cover of “68 Guns” where nobody looks into the camera. On the wall, a long line of my nature photographs.

  I knew where I should go to take photographs: the flame-birch woods. But not until early the next morning.

  *

  I moved into the cottage when I was sixteen. The house had been empty since I lived here with Mamma and Pappa. Back then, I kicked open the swollen door without thinking that now, now something historic is happening. I just began to use it, put up new panelling inside and built a conservatory from which I could see the edge of the forest.

  The house was mine, and at the same time it was ours.

  A little of the two of them remained. The Mixmaster, Pappa’s wellies, the bedclothes. I left the photograph of the three of us in the log house. I still felt that I should stop each time I passed it.

  When I was younger, the photograph was a hope. A hope that Mamma and Pappa might not be dead after all. Later it became a reminder that they were never going to call. For a long time I wondered why Bestefar had placed it by the telephone instead of hanging it on the wall. Was it in order to remember them, or was it so that the picture would have an effect on us when we spoke to others? Or to remind us that those who phoned here also had Mamma and Pappa’s story in mind when they expressed themselves?

  My grandmother’s name was Alma, and I never called her anything else. She was quiet and guarded, like an old floor clock. An illness left her bedridden, she moved to Kløverhagen nursing home and was laid to rest when I was twelve.

  But now and again she shared small details about Mamma. She told me that her family had been killed during the war. That was why the issue of adoption rights never arose, that was why they never expected any French relatives to visit. She talked about her little, but that did not surprise me. Because my father’s side was not big either, only a few second cousins. We never went on trips, just to the occasional funeral, and we would always leave before coffee was served.

  All the same I was surprised; even if Mamma’s family was gone, surely not everyone around her could have disappeared?

  Those were my thoughts when the two of them took an afternoon nap on their respective couches, and I opened the atlas and studied France. Told myself that somewhere there must be someone who remembered Mamma, because she had lived for almost twenty-seven years. I looked for Authuille and read about the Somme and the First World War in Bestefar’s encyclopaedia. Imagined a village and a war.

  Every so often we went to the churchyard. The smell of tar from the stave church followed me to a gravestone made of blue Saksum granite. WALTER HIRIFJELL. NICOLE DAIREAUX. Mamma born in January 1945, Pappa in 1944. Both died on September 23, 1971.

  But I turned back before I stepped too close. When I asked myself how Mamma and Pappa met, I curbed my curiosity. I didn’t want to allow them to appear before me. You cannot miss something you haven’t had, I told myself. Bare ground must not lie open; all black earth was a wound. It attracted weeds which grew and covered it.

  Even now, here in the cottage, they occasionally stepped out from the shadows. Once I found an L.P. of French songs for children, and when I put it on, there was a glimpse of my mother.

  I knew all the songs. I had sung “Frère Jacques” instead of “Fader Jakob”. And I understood the lyrics to “Au clair de la lune” and “Ah, vous dirai-je maman”. The busy language came easily to me, and I realised that I must have spoken French when I was little. Mamma had sung with me, our voices had filled this house.

  French was my mother tongue, not Norwegian.

  At secondary school, it was either German or French as an option. It was the first time I felt I had to choose between my parents and Bestefar, and I kept it from him that I chose French. Mamma’s language was awakened within me, so rapidly that my teacher wondered if I was messing her about.

  Later I found more traces of them, in a large cardboard box in the loft. A make-up bag, a razor, a wristwatch. The way the belongings were thrown in together told me that it had been painful to sort through them.

  At the very bottom there lay a book. L’Étranger by Albert Camus. I flipped through its pages, studied the sentences, pictured Mamma sitting there reading. Then I got a shock, followed by an expectation. Like seeing a fish leaping, out of casting range. On the first blank page, written in blue ink, the words Thérése Maurel, Reims. They must have been friends. Once their hands had held this book, at the same time, or almost the same time.

  I was no longer the only proof that Mamma had existed.

  *

  I began that day to form a plan, to visit the place where Mamma and Pappa died, see if it would awaken something in my memory. Because there had been an eyewitness: me. It must be somewhere in my memory, like photographic emulsion that has once been exposed to light.

  Sometimes it ached inside me, the urge to leave. But the world stopped in Lillehammer. South of Helge Menkerds Motorsenter, everything was alien, I had no experience of travelling and I had no explanation for Bestefar, his eyes would take on that familiar wounded look; was he not enough for me, had he not done everything he could?

  As a young boy, it was I who needed Bestefar and the farm that needed him. Then I got older and was given my share of the work at Hirifjell, and soon the farm and the sheep needed me. The longer I waited, the older he got, and when I was around twenty, these needs converged, so that it was just as difficult to leave as it was to remain, and from that day everything settled in the path I took, a path which gradually grew deeper and more habitual.

  *

  It came off with Lynol.

  The swastika dissolved and disappeared into the rag. Pink waste water looking like something infectious. I got dizzy but moistened another cloth. Picked some grit from the enamel and rubbed harder. The fumes, thinner than air, crept into my lungs. I dropped the rag and ran out into the rain, stood looking at the Star under the barn ramp. The outline of the swastika was still visible.

  I returned to the stench of Lynol. Rubbed and rubbed. Somewhat woozy, I walked across the farmyard, up the stone steps and into the log house.

  “Managed to get it off,” I shouted.

  No answer.

  The cuckoo clock showed half past four. I could tell by the smell of tobacco that he had been standing by the door. I went up the stairs, stopped halfway. Heard his steps on the second floor. What kind of fresh incursion was this? We never used the rooms up there, they were cold and dusty. I stood by the map that marked out our parcels of woodland.

  “Driving into the village,” I said, as though speaking to the stairs.

  His footsteps paused. Then he shuffled on.

  *

  The town centre was dead. I knew it would be, nobody was out in the
languid hours between closing time and suppertime. Nothing more than through traffic winding past at fifty. They glanced out of their car windows, pleased not to be living in Saksum.

  But they did not know what we had.

  Because there was room for us here. Room for me, for Carl Brænd, the electronics freak who lived with his mother at the age of fifty-five, who built ingenious amplifiers and drove to the convenience store five minutes before closing time to buy anaemic hot dogs at half price.

  Our shortcomings were visible here. We knew about them, used them to torment each other, but local gossip kept us together. There was a hole in each of us, and we searched for the hole in our self-righteousness because that was the common thread that held the village together.

  I drove round the town centre and back down to the Salvation Army, seeing nothing more interesting than my old moped outside the Norol station and two children running up from the football pitch. I drove back to Laugen. Rolled down the window as I passed the secondary school, noticed that the air was getting cooler.

  I heard the roar, saw the water. Inside the glove compartment, I found the Bob Dylan cassette Hanne had left. “Knocked Out Loaded”. It had disappointed both of us, apart from “Brownsville Girl”. I played it anyway. She was in the village, and when the song came on it was O.K. to admit that I was driving around looking for her. A few days earlier I had seen her outside the draper’s. Wearing a light-brown suede jacket. Like an antelope, with her chestnut-brown hair and her long legs.

  Her presence, so typical. She must have seen me first and then slipped into the clothes shop where she knew I could not follow her because I was wearing grimy work clothes. One second we were looking at each other. The next she was gone.

  Hanne was one of those girls who was grown up from the day she was born. When she was fourteen, she borrowed her brother’s moped without asking and drove out to see me. She stood by the postbox flashing her lights. Like a smuggler on the shore signalling to a fully loaded ship in the middle of the night.

  We slept together long before the official threshold, but gradually she gave me the feeling that she had to rescue me. That I was the mangy puppy she was bringing home. She harped on about the word I despised: “education”, this compulsory ski run that passed through Oslo or Bergen or Ås, as though we were all obliged to collect something and return with it to the village so that it did not fail. I did not want to be filled up like a thermos. As I saw it, I had no obligation to anything or anyone. Apart from travelling to France. But when I said that to Hanne, she countered with a “Why?”