The Sixteen Trees of the Somme

by Lars Mytting

  Only one thing stood out: I had to pay a visit to Rannveig Landstad and see the flame-birch coffin.

  *

  Hanne came to me and held my head in her hands.

  “Poor you,” she said. “It is not even showing on you.”

  “I feel it, though,” I said. “Deep in my gut.”

  “But you look just the same as before. Maybe you’ve been through so much suffering that you don’t have room for more.”

  That was all it took. I pulled away, sat with my head against the wall and wept. It surged upwards like a flooded cellar. How would things have turned out if I had had someone? What kind of a boy would I have become with parents, brothers and sisters even, with young people around me, relatives who thought I was worth spending time on?

  My hands and feet ceased to be a part of my body. I felt like one gigantic heart, a swollen shapeless lump pumping out tears that had waited for twenty years.

  *

  I sobbed and sniffled for an hour. When I had finished, I was as exhausted as if I had walked from the village up to the mountain pasture.

  She stood looking at me. No accusations. No fake sympathy.

  Just the question she had no doubt been fumbling for when she was at veterinary college. Whether a boy and a girl got together because they really suited each other, or whether in small biotopes like Saksum they chose whoever was available and simply got on with it.

  “Hanne,” I said. “I have something for you.”

  I opened the glass cabinet and took out the pearl earring.

  “Gosh,” she said, holding out her hand. “That. After such a long time.”

  She stepped closer to me, and her city ways and her distance were gone. I recognised the girl who had been with me at Hirifjell that summer, and I remembered one exception to her never dressing up. She had done it then. That summer when Bestefar took what he called his “office week”, and went to the annual meeting of the Norwegian Association of Sheep and Goat Breeders.

  Ever since I was thirteen, Bestefar had gone away for a week each year and I had to “run the farm on my own”. For me it was an adventure. I cycled to Laugen and fished for grayling, prepared my food, kept my promise not to drive the new Deutz, or play with matches. I only had to be sure to be home between five and six, when he would call to make sure the farm was still standing.

  During that summer with Hanne I wished that the annual breeders’ meeting could last for three weeks. She was fifteen and had done as she wished for the past year. I remember every single day, how they were bursting with us. She dressed up then. Alone on the farm. We woke with Flimre, the striped forest cat, lying between us. Without exchanging a word we would pretend that we had a child together – the size, the weight, the warmth.

  We were grown-ups when we felt like it and children when it suited us. We adopted ways of conversing, drank coffee in the morning and beer from the cellar in the evening, we bought proper cigarettes and took three drags each. Neither of us much liked smoking, we only did it because we saw it in the movies. And because it felt right to smoke a Pall Mall after sex. Rollies would have cheapened it.

  I remembered her, pure and beautiful, wrapped in a sheet in front of the window on the first floor, and I knew that she was taking in the view of Hirifjell, the vast sight to which only the eyes of a young girl or a Leica could do justice: redcurrant bushes dense with berries, the flag-stoned path leading to the swimming hole at the river, the creek which cut through the potato fields and disappeared from sight behind the barn. The fruit trees, the pea pods that dangled like half moons when we got close to them, so plentiful that we could fill up on them without taking a step. The dark-blue fruit of the plum trees, the sagging raspberry bushes just waiting for us to quickly fill two small plates and fetch some caster sugar and cream. The old tractor and the new tractor next to each other, their wheels freshly hosed down.

  I saw it then, how earnestly she viewed it. At Hirifjell there was no mess and none of the half-finished chores the farmers in the village waded through, year after year, until they were blind to the tractor tracks by the front door, the rusted hay forks left untreated for the tenth year in a row, the cracked slurry tanks that could be seen from the motorway. Hirifjell was a model farm with edged grass right up to the white foundation walls and a swing that swayed in the wind.

  A farm she could grow into.

  It was well into the third day before Hanne noticed that her earring was missing, no doubt because she was so unused to dressing up. Now she took it and rolled it firmly between her fingers.

  “You’ve had it the whole time,” she said. “You have.”

  I shook my head.

  “It was in his chest of drawers. In Alma’s old jewellery box. He must have found it and thought it was hers.”

  “Edvard. You haven’t started sorting through his things, have you? Already?”

  “I need to have something to do.”

  “Sorry to be blunt, but that was quick.”

  “Put the earring on,” I said.

  She stepped back. Placed one foot against the wall so that her bare knee was pointing at me.

  “Don’t expect anything,” she said. Tilted her head, used both hands to fasten the earring.

  *

  “Hanne,” I said afterwards as we shared a Pall Mall. “You remember Einar? Sverre’s brother?”

  She sat up in bed, held the cigarette pointing upwards so that the ash would not scatter. Blew a lock of hair from her eye.

  “The one who built the workshop?” she said.

  “Yes. I think he’s still alive.”

  “That can’t be.”

  I told her about the coffin.

  “How old is the old priest?” she said.

  “Almost ninety.”

  “There you have it.”

  “No. He’s clear-headed. More or less. But he knows something about my mother that he won’t tell me. About Einar too.”

  Hanne handed me the cigarette and rolled out of bed. Got dressed with her back to me. It was hopeless to mention my family history to her. She was a girl for the good things in life. A girl for Easter sun and red skiing gaiters. For shiny Bunad brooches on Norwegian National Day in May.

  We stood outside. Hanne ran a finger through the raindrops on the boot of my Commodore. I looked up at the log house, the yellow light from the living-room window falling onto the blackcurrant bushes. A solitary light on the second floor. He must have forgotten to turn it off when he was up there.

  “You’re right,” she said. “Let’s start.”

  “Start what?”

  “Taking off his sheets.”

  “Right now?”

  “Well you’re not going to be able to do it. Let’s get it cleared out.”

  The log house already smelled dry and stuffy. The fridge was open and unplugged. It was the only sensible thing I had managed to do after the priest had left, taken the food and transferred it to my fridge, even though I could just as well have left it in his and fetched things as I needed them.

  In the living room the newspaper was still at the foot of the couch. There was dry sand from his shoes on the paper.

  She went upstairs. I heard the click of the turn switch, the creak of floorboards. Her steps. So much lighter than Bestefar’s. She came downstairs with the sheets gathered in a huge bundle, leaning against the banister because she could not see the steps. “I brought down a load of washing too,” she said. “Is the washing machine still in the cellar?”

  I began to think about her in a new way. About life with a girl who felt her way forwards with her hips.

  “Let’s throw them out,” I said. “No-one’s going to use them anymore.”

  “Use them? They were your grandfather’s.”

  “They are the bedsheets of a dead man.”

  She rubbed the material between her fingers. “This is fine linen,” she said. “If you don’t want them, I’ll take them.”

  “You can’t mean that.”

  “Sv
erre was always nice to me, even though he knew what we were up to. One time I came up here and you weren’t home, so he offered me a crushed nougat ice cream. Said that it was nice to see womenfolk at the farm. Even though I was only fourteen and driving a moped illegally.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “You haven’t been here for three years. And now you’re making yourself at home.”

  She shrugged.

  “You’re here because you feel sorry for me,” I said.

  “And?”

  “Stop it,” I said and carefully picked up the newspaper so that the sand trickled towards the fold. I pushed open the front door with my shoulder and tossed the grains outside, as if they were ashes from a cremation, as if the door frame was the gunwale of a boat, as if the farmyard was the Atlantic Ocean.

  *

  She brought fresh air with her. Undid the hasps on the bedroom windows. Opened doors, created a breeze, let in the fragrance of summer rain. It was not the work I took note of, but the way she filled the house. Her steadiness, which before had seemed staunch and old-womanish, now gave way to something freer, like a view that appears when tall trees are felled.

  But when she opened the sliding door of the wardrobe in Bestefar’s bedroom, the one that covered the whole of one wall, it grew cloudy inside me again. The darkness of the wardrobe suggested something dusty and dim and old. Clothes without a body.

  A sudden sensation emerged from within me. A memory, I could not tell whether it was real or not. Of my mother dressed in something blue.

  Hanne reached into the woolly shadows of the wardrobe and pulled out the smell of being old. Piled a bundle of clothes onto the bare mattress. Faded shirts, string vests, work clothes. Grabbed another armful. Wrinkled her nose, leaned further inside and unhooked a black suit cover with a zip.

  “What in the world . . .” she said.

  Even I could see that it was an expensive suit. Tightly woven fabric without a wrinkle. Light-grey pinstripes on dark-grey worsted. A cut that could make a man look like he owned a bank. She looked at the label on the inside pocket and pointed at the name of the tailor: ANDREAS SCHIFFER, ESSEN.

  “Edvard,” she said. “Could this have been your—”

  “No,” I said quickly. “My father was taller. And all skin and bone.”

  “This is an expensive suit,” Hanne said. “I mean, really expensive.”

  She took the jacket off the hanger and held it up to me. I stepped back and shook my head.

  “Are you sure it wasn’t meant for you? As a present?”

  “Neither of us had any interest in clothes. You’ve said as much yourself.”

  She checked the pockets. The lining shone faintly in the lamplight as she pulled out a light-blue ticket. I leaned over and we read at the same time:

  Bayreuther Festspiele.

  Vierte Nacht: Götterdämmerung.

  Samstag, 30. Juli 1983

  A shudder passed through me, through both of us. She recognised the date, it had meant something to her too. The summer we were alone while Bestefar was at his annual meeting.

  Or not. I had never wondered why the Association of Sheep and Goat Breeders had to have such lengthy annual meetings. When he telephoned me I might have wondered why the line was so bad, but back then I probably thought that the meeting was so far away that a little rustling and crackling on the line was nothing out of the ordinary.

  Götterdämmerung. I remembered when he had picked up the enormous box of twenty-two records at the post office. It had cost thousands of kroner. Carefully, with the sharp edge of his bayonet, he had slit open the wrapping paper from Norsk Musikforlag, put the box on the living-room table and said:

  “You see, Edvard. ‘Der Ring des Nibelungen’ is the only piece of music which can stand alone.”

  Now I grabbed the suit, as if tearing the jacket from a thief, and went through the pockets to see if there was anything else.

  There were more tickets in the other side pocket. “St John Passion” in Hanover. “Tannhäuser” in Munich. “Missa Solemnis” conducted by Karajan, five movements by Bach on the Hildebrandt organ at Sangerhausen. The dates coincided with an empty chair at the annual meetings of the Association of Sheep and Goat Breeders.

  Amongst the concert tickets was a crumpled receipt written in copperplate on thin paper. The letters were smudged with moisture and the only thing legible was HOTEL KVELDSRO. It sounded like a guest house somewhere near the coast.

  “Maybe he went to a funeral,” she said, as if to gloss over the quiet deceit we had discovered.

  “Someone he shared a trench with on the Eastern Front, you mean?”

  She rubbed her eye. “Does that matter?”

  “Why didn’t he just tell me?” I said. “To my face. That he felt like seeing a Karajan concert, and that he’d be away for a week?”

  “Maybe he wanted you to feel that the farm was yours,” she said. “Give us some time alone.”

  “Or he just wanted to hear ‘Tannhäuser’ in peace,” I said. “What do you mean?”

  “It’s so peculiar. Everything we did, we did together. But that was just farm work. Never any trips. It’s as if he was worried I might find something to take me away from him.”

  “Is there anything that could have taken you away from him?” said Hanne.

  Was she pretending to be blind? If that was the case, she was about to take on the role of the one who had bound me to Hirifjell.

  “Sverre could have been away for three weeks as far as I was concerned,” she said, stroking my arm.

  “Well, now he’s in the concert hall for good,” I said.

  *

  I stood looking at his suit in my hands. As if I was holding his shell. All at once I remembered his footsteps. “He was doing something upstairs last night,” I said and put the suit down.

  Then we were there, in a drawing room that was alien to me. The hallway on the second floor had been dark as a mine shaft for as long as I could remember. The curtains drawn, the light bulbs dead. But now a yellow ceiling light shone down on the barren room, and on an open secretary desk in the far corner.

  “All those papers,” said Hanne. “He must have been looking for something.”

  She leafed aimlessly through the sea of envelopes and documents. Receipts for tractor equipment, old tax returns. “There are some slides here,” she said and handed me an orange plastic Agfachrome box.

  “They’re just empty boxes,” I said. “He always transferred the pictures onto glass plates. They’re down by the projector.”

  She held up a transparency to the light. “There are pictures in this one, at any rate.”

  I was taken aback. Bestefar had no particular interest in photography, even though he helped me through all 230 pages of Leica Technik. He was content with a Rollei and used exactly one roll of film a year, always twenty-four exposures. But from each box Hanne now picked out twelve slides in cardboard frames. I took my pocketknife, broke loose the film itself and looked at the numbering.

  Bestefar had used one film a year sure enough. But thirty-six exposures, not twenty-four. The other twelve were taken during his secret week abroad.

  So that was why we never looked at the year’s slides straight away. When the Agfa package arrived from Sweden at the end of the summer, he always told me I had to wait, and then he would go up to the box room and slot the pictures into glass frames. Then we would draw the curtains, switch on the projector, and in the dusty cone of light between us and the screen, we would view the year we had just spent together.

  Hanne handed me one transparency at a time. Bestefar’s extra pictures tallied with the concert tickets. Freshly swept pavements and half-timbered town halls. Opera houses, the coulisses in Bayreuth.

  I imagined him in the one week of the year when he could stroll about and either understand or feel understood in Germany, a proud man in his sixties in a charcoal-grey suit from Andreas Schiffer, alongside all the others who had lost the war.

  We star
ted on the rest of the boxes. All the photographs seemed to be of Germany, and one stood out. It was numbered 18b and was so different that it could have been taken by a different photographer. One year, impossible to tell which, Bestefar had taken a single photograph of a bleak, insignificant coastline with a small island on the horizon.

  “Edvard?” Hanne said quietly. “Look at this.”

  I got up from the floor and reached for the five envelopes she was holding. Written in Bestefar’s calligraphy. Walter. Nicole. Alma. Einar. Edvard. They were sealed, all except for mine. Like mystery bags for the dead.

  “Should we open them?” said Hanne.

  It felt as if I was holding five rounds of live ammunition. Mamma’s envelope was thin, Pappa’s even thinner. Something slid around in Alma’s envelope, a small book, perhaps.

  “You’re sweating,” Hanne said. “Are you alright?”

  I was aware of her touch, but all I could think of were the five names. Bestefar had a long time ago prepared these envelopes, and then waited until I was old enough.

  Or until he was.

  “Let’s go downstairs,” I said, and put the envelopes back.

  She turned in the doorway as we left the room. It was as if she were looking for an excuse to stay longer. Down on the first floor she went back into Bestefar’s bedroom.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I have a hunch,” she said, and began to rummage through the wardrobe. I heard a cardboard box being moved, the rustle of tissue paper.

  “Look at this!” She held up the wedding dress. “Look at the lacework. What craftsmanship. My goodness!”

  “Must have been Alma’s,” I said.

  She pinched one sleeve and stretched out the fabric, arched backwards and held the dress against her chest, stared down at herself, at the way the material curved over her breast.

  “Close your eyes,” she said.

  I was about to say no, but sat down on Bestefar’s bed with my eyes closed all the same. It was as if I had set out on a journey, the course set in stone, and I could sense something knocking in the far reaches of my memory. Something was not right, something to do with the two of us.