The Sixteen Trees of the Somme

by Lars Mytting

  “Rannveig’s son let the cat out of the bag,” I said. “Had Bestefar already chosen a coffin?”

  “It has been ready for many years.”

  “He never said anything about it.”

  “That’s because he didn’t know.”

  I stuck the knife through the potato so that the steel clattered against the porcelain.

  “He didn’t know?” I said.

  Thallaug shook his head.

  “So who arranged it? Alma?”

  The priest rubbed the corner of his eye. “It was Einar. He made a coffin for his brother.”

  “In case Bestefar died on the Eastern Front?”

  “No, it must have been later.”

  Something slipped, he began to wipe his glasses with the same handkerchief he had used to blow his nose. I worried then that he was going senile, that he was going to bungle the funeral.

  “Tell me,” the priest said. “You take photographs, don’t you?”

  “Yes.” I couldn’t bring myself to ask how he knew. Could Bestefar have talked about me?

  “There’s a bit of Einar in you,” the priest said. “He could capture the form of something he had seen and use it in another context. Einar was completely different from Sverre in this respect. Einar interpreted everything he experienced, he was a thinker and a dreamer.”

  “But when did he make the coffin?” I said.

  His gaze grew distant. When he answered, it was as though he had not grasped what I had said.

  “Einar, he disappeared from us. Twice he disappeared. The village’s foremost cabinetmaker. One of the best in all of Gudbrandsdalen.”

  “Including Skjåk?” I said.

  “Including Skjåk.”

  “He disappeared twice?”

  “Hm,” Thallaug said. “This will take a while. What time is it?” He fished out his glasses case and put on yet another pair of spectacles.

  “Almost three,” I said.

  “I have to be back to take my pills at four.”

  “I’ll remind you.”

  “Please do. Otherwise my ministry will expire at a quarter past.”

  The priest began to tell me about the farm’s prodigal son, and when he talked about Einar, it seemed as if he was also talking about me. Not precisely, but about the boy I had often dreamed of being. Except that the sketching pencil was replaced by a camera, the cabinetmaker’s workshop by a darkroom.

  Einar could not be bothered to pay attention in lessons. In a notebook from his confirmation studies, his sentences would stop in the middle, but in the margins there were sketches of furniture, houses, cities, more furniture. “What could I say?” the priest said. “That he had to stop? A young man in Saksum in 1928 dreaming of craftsmanship? Luckily his parents accepted his talent, even though he held the allodial rights, and they sent him to the academy at Hjerleid to learn the trade of cabinetmaking. His talents were staggering, and his desire for experimentation was so exceptional that even his most ambitious teachers realised that they were holding him back.”

  The priest went on to tell me that, after a couple of years, Einar tired of acanthus leaf patterns and the country house style. So he went to Oslo to serve as an apprentice, but grew bored there just as quickly. By then he had long since begun to sign his pieces with a small squirrel hiding its nose in its tail, a mark he used for the rest of his life. In 1931, at barely seventeen, he raced off to France to find work.

  “We heard nothing more from him,” the priest said, “but later I learned that he had been at Ruhlmann’s for many years, one of the foremost furniture designers in Paris. Einar was one of his master cabinetmakers.”

  “Did he stay in France for a long time then? I thought he was there only briefly?”

  “No, Einar came to be considered a Frenchman. They did not use this term in those days, but he employed a style that was later called art deco. I thought, alright, Einar has found his place in this world. Meanwhile the farmer in Sverre grew, he and Alma were married and ran Hirifjell without the allodial right being clarified. Listen, Edvard: did Sverre tell you much about this time?”

  “Practically nothing,” I said. “For us, time began when I was four years old.”

  The old priest drank his coffee in the old-fashioned way. Allowed a lump of sugar to break the oily surface, waited until it turned brown, placed it between his lips and sucked it before pouring coffee on the saucer and taking a slurp. I noticed something similar happening inside him. The priest was separating things, so that only what tasted of sugar emerged.

  “Just before Christmas 1939,” he said, “Einar appeared at my door and said that he intended to move back to Hirifjell.”

  I stopped chewing. This was news to me. Einar must have stood right there, in the doorway. I pictured him carrying a suitcase and a select collection of tools, and how the couple must have gaped when their supper was interrupted.

  “Einar’s homecoming did not exactly please Sverre and Alma,” the priest said. “For one thing, the first-born son had returned, with no knowledge of farming, and hardly suited for it either. Einar had been bad at replying to letters and had not come home for the funeral of his father, the man who had actually paid for his training. Then there were his habits. Here was a boy who, already at the age of fourteen, had thought that this was a narrow-minded valley with no place for big ideas. Imagine it – nearly eight years in Paris in the thirties, then add a measure of dangerous cockiness on top. Not that he looked down on village life, but he wore a wristwatch that could be flipped so the glass faced down. People in Saksum did not realise that was what it was, they thought he was wearing a bracelet. His hair was styled into a kind of strange swirl with little curls across his forehead. And then there was Alma and Sverre, each with their own N.S. membership, slogging away for fourteen hours a day. Still, Einar made no great demands, he simply asked for a parcel of woodland to source materials from, and to be able to extend the cabinetmaker’s workshop.”

  “He got that,” I said. “Above the fields there’s a small plantation of birch.”

  “They are beautiful, are they not? He began cultivating trees like that when he was only thirteen. The office furniture at the parsonage is made from those materials. I ordered them in 1939. As a believer, I am hesitant to use the word ‘miracle’, but the radiance of those tabletops draws it out of me. And as far as profound sights go, there is little that can measure up to the deep patterns in the wood. It’s like staring into a fire. You always see a new face in the flames. I told Einar that when I received the desk. In response, he made me a chessboard, which I have to this day. Flame-birch for the white squares and walnut for the black ones. That is also how I view you, Edvard. Your father and your mother. The south and the north. Darkness and light. Your internal struggle.”

  “What do you mean by my ‘internal struggle’?”

  “It is clear from a distance but vanishes in a mirror.”

  All of these intimations. How deep inside me could he see? The only close contact with him was before my confirmation, and that was in the years when the loss inside me had been tearing me apart. At the time, I would hand in blank exam papers and cut class. I took the bus to Vinstra and left my rucksack at the bus stop. Hitch-hiked to Rockestugu in Otta and bought all the records I could afford. Or, if most of the cars were heading south, I would cross the E6 and catch a lift to the snack bar in Skurva, before trudging down to the business park and asking for car brochures, saying they were for my father. Went to Stavseth, Skansaar, Motorcentralen, all of the big dealerships. Invented a father who drove a Citroën D Special or a Ford Granada, depending on how I felt. Or went to Melby’s sports shop in Ringebu in the middle of the day and looked at air rifles, picked out fishing rods and said that my mother had promised me five hundred kroner for my birthday, and that I was just looking.

  All of this the priest must have seen back then, but that was water under the bridge now. I had struggled through. But clear from a distance?

  “What were they lik
e?” I said. “Einar and Sverre. When they lived here together.”

  “They were different from the day they were born,” the priest said, and poured himself more coffee. “But it only came to a head in the spring of 1940.”

  “When the Germans arrived?”

  He nodded slowly. “A long, dark column. Ugly, angular vehicles. They were sent to head off the British up near Kvam, but they were worried that the motorway had been laid with mines. So they drove along the upper village road at a frightening speed. They passed right by the church. I was sitting in the sacristy when the walls started shaking.”

  The priest waved his arms around and described how he had heard a tremendous crash from the choir room and that three hundred hymn books had fallen off the shelves. He thought that now he was going to rise up and meet his Maker. But out in the nave, he saw that it was the altarpiece and the great crucifix which had come loose and crashed to the ground. They had hung there for hundreds of years, survived the great Storofsen flood and the forest fire of 1748. Now the altarpiece was broken and the cross was snapped in two. The figure of Jesus was split at the navel, the face was crushed and the arm hung limply. He heard another column approaching and ran outside.

  “There they came,” the priest said. “Grey trucks with caterpillar tracks and iron crosses on the sides. The church shook again, the chandelier rattled and Jesus lay there with a broken back. I took Our Saviour into my arms and raced outside. The soldiers were jittery and their rifle bolts were rattling when a flatbed full of infantrymen aimed their Mausers at me. I held out a broken Jesus and shouted in German that they had best slow down if they held out any hope that the words on their belt buckles – Gott mit uns – would still apply.”

  “But surely they were not bothered by that?” I said.

  “Oh yes. They were terrified, that goes without saying. They were only a few hours from the front. I knew already as a young priest that a cross has the power both to comfort and to frighten. So they slowed down and had soldiers guide the traffic more slowly past the church. But myself, I had to hurry. I believed that with the outbreak of war, even my parishioners were likely to turn to God. If people saw that the altarpiece of the church in which they were christened was crushed, they would lose all hope. I carried the crucifix back inside and locked up, then cycled here to Hirifjell in my vestments to find Einar. He and Sverre were sitting in the kitchen. Even then I could see the hostility between the brothers. They were talking in raised voices. Sverre was certain that the Germans had come to defend us against an English invasion. Einar said that he was going to follow whatever the King and the government recommended. I stood in the doorway holding a Jesus in need of wood glue. Einar followed me outside and I explained the situation to him. He filled a rucksack with tools and all the screw clamps he had in his workshop, and worked through the night in the church. The wood was brittle and many of the fragments could not be found. He cut tiny little pieces, coated them with glue and matched the colours. At an extraordinary speed he produced slivers of wood the size of spruce needles. He put Jesus back together and gave him his face back. Well. The Germans arrived on a Saturday morning. When we rang the bells for Sunday service, the altarpiece and the crucifix were in place. Einar slept in the sacristy while I conducted what I later realised would be my best-ever service. The only one not seen in church was Sverre.”

  I finished eating and pushed aside the empty plate. Felt more alone than ever. This was something I should have retold, this should have been my family story.

  “When did Einar go to Shetland?” I said. “What year?”

  “1942.”

  “Sverre was still on the Eastern Front at that time?”

  “Yes. Einar left the farm only a few days before Sverre came home. The plan was to join the resistance. Strange, I thought. Because Einar was no fighter. Nor an idealist. In debates he would stand in the shadow of his brother, a man who went to meetings and demanded action.”

  “Did you hear from him again over the course of the war?” I said.

  “Not a word. In 1944 I discovered that the rights to Hirifjell were to be transferred to Sverre. Then came a report from the Germans, that Einar had been shot in France. He was said to have joined the resistance there but was executed by his own people. I still have the letter, with the Imperial Eagle and all. The date of his death is written in the church register, the line where the ink is smudged. Yes, I cried. But in 1971 I opened the book once again to enter the death of your father and mother. That was when I thought back and began to dig through the archives. Two things have troubled me since that time. The first is that Einar Hirifjell was shot in Authuille, the place where you disappeared and where your parents died.”

  “What are you saying?”

  He wrinkled his brow and scratched his ear.

  “The second thing was, how he could have made a coffin after his death? Einar might have been shot in 1944. But the bullet could not have struck his heart or his brain. Because in 1979 a lorry parked outside the funeral parlour and delivered a magnificent coffin. It was made of flame-birch and had been sent from the Shetland Islands. Go down to the funeral parlour and you’ll see.”

  3

  A WHITE MANTA TURNED OFF THE COUNTY ROAD. AN entire summer with no visitors, and now that he was dead the cars were pouring in. Did they come because he was dead, or because he was dead?

  The headlamps shone through the grey weather and made the wet clumps of grass along the verges glimmer. The rain was falling once again. Actually no, it could not be the same rain. Thoughts like this had crept into my mind ever since the priest left, and I paced around the log house, my head reeling.

  I leaned against the door frame and wondered what he wanted here. It was only when the Manta got closer and the wipers swept across the windscreen that I could see that she was driving her brother’s car. He was now doing his national service in the north. The headlights dimmed, she opened the car door and sat there with the music spilling out. Cowboy Junkies. “Blue Moon”. I knew that trick. Her way of expressing her mood without saying a word.

  She was even more attractive, wearing a light-yellow dress. That was not like her. When she lived in Saksum she rarely dressed up. Just threadbare Levi’s that accentuated her nice, slender bottom. No hair dye, never any make-up. Sensibly dressed, usually from the spring collection when it went on sale. But she had firm thighs from handball practice and the hollow of her neck would glisten in the summer sun, and she could be tough as nails when necessary.

  “Just come inside,” I said. “Don’t sit there showing me how easy it would be for you to leave again.”

  She strolled confidently into the living room, stood and looked at the framed photographs above the couch.

  “Is that from this year?” she said, pointing at the picture of street lamps in Saksum at night. I had strapped on my skis one evening and herringboned up to a steep overhang on the hillside, a tripod and camera in my rucksack. I set up the Leica, sat there until it got dark, and when a lone vehicle appeared I set the exposure time for thirty seconds. The town centre was bathed in a yellowish light and the rear lamps of the car became one long, red streak heading south.

  “I took that two years ago,” I said. “You can see the new building at the school isn’t built yet.”

  The television was on. She switched it off and walked out to the conservatory.

  “Who told you?” I said.

  “Someone sitting next to Garverhaugen at the café. He’d been out fishing for grayling and had seen the police chief, then the doctor, and then Rannveig Landstad driving down the road on the far side.”

  “But he didn’t see the old priest?”

  “He must have already settled himself in the café by then. Tell me, Edvard, how are you doing, really?”

  “Surviving, I guess. The worst part was that bloody mess with the swastika.”

  “I thought you had grown out of all that,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t throw a punch someone said ‘Nazi�
� for the third time.”

  We had been through this a number of times. At village parties I would defend Bestefar, and that would end in a row with the two of us yelling at each other, arguments in the fireweed at the side of the motorway in the middle of the night, after we were forced to walk home because I could not stand the people who had offered us a lift.

  We went our own ways that spring when she finished upper secondary. I went into the potato fields, she went to Oslo. Made new friends. Did well in her exams.

  “What are you going to do now?” she said.

  “He’s not even in the ground yet, Hanne. Don’t start. Not now, at any rate.”

  I knew that if she did not stop, the old argument would start up again. She would repeat the same thing she had gone on about on so many occasions. That I would never go anywhere. Would never get anywhere. But what about her? Oh yes, she changed when she went to Oslo, but that consisted largely in buying boots with metal caps on the toes and heels and wearing tight jumpers under a leather jacket. Inside was a girl who had always set her sights on returning to the village. Her education took her only far enough to reward her with a steady job back home.

  And who was I to criticise that? Was I supposed to go around moping, demanding everything of others and nothing of myself? She was right to ask me the same question I had asked myself earlier that afternoon when I put the coffee on and made a full pot by force of habit. What do I do now?

  Well. All I had to do was look out of the window.

  Go over the potato fields with a ridging plough. Change the diesel filter on the new Deutz. Jack up the sagging wall of the outbuilding. Drive into the mountains with salt lick for the sheep. Change the gutters on the south side of the barn. Clear the weeds from the vegetables. Find out why the rotovator wasn’t starting in the heat. Arrange Bestefar’s funeral and spray the fields to keep the blight at bay. I should have done all this during the week, because next week was the only chance I would have to change the windows up at the mountain pasture, if the weather held up.