The Sixteen Trees of the Somme

by Lars Mytting

I heard her clothes fall to the ground, cotton on skin and the swish of silk, I heard her hold her breath and then exhale, before the whisper of finely woven material moved through the room.

  “Look at me, Edvard.”

  She stood over me as if about to straddle me, her face hidden behind a fine-meshed veil, her skin taut at the collarbone, white tulle against her breasts, her hair curling over her cheeks.

  I held back my confusion, disguised it as arousal.

  She straightened up, and I felt a tightening in my stomach because I knew she would stand like that one day, maybe soon. She was going to walk down the aisle of Saksum church, and the man waiting for her could be me. And from then on I would be the perpetual potato farmer, Edvard Hirifjell.

  “Put on the suit,” she whispered.

  We stood next to each other, me in an Andreas Schiffer suit, and she so absorbed with what she saw in the mirror that she would have remained like that even if the house had burned down.

  “Imagine,” she said. “We could have been them.”

  “No. I can’t cope with that.”

  “Yes, you can. This is you. As you could be.”

  I looked at the two of us in the mirror, at how she devoured this moment like a marzipan cake. My own eyes eating up my reflection.

  *

  It smelled of evening. I followed her tail lights from the upstairs window. Watched the twilight covering the farm buildings and fields. I had been the boyfriend of the caterpillar, and now the butterfly was soaring.

  I walked over to the secretary desk and fanned out the envelopes.

  Nicole. Resealed with yellow tape.

  Walter. Same tape.

  Alma. Resealed with fresh tape.

  Einar. Resealed with freezer tape.

  I took a look inside my own. Vaccination card. Report from primary school. Report of criminal damage after a fight at Venaheim community centre, where I wrecked a door. My birth certificate. The name impressed in typed letters, Edvard Daireaux Hirifjell. Could that be right? Hirifjell was the only name on my tax return, and whenever else the authorities needed to contact me.

  The signature I recognised. Our entire family history had passed through the fountain pen of the old priest.

  I began flipping through the documents for the farm. I wanted to find something Bestefar had written, something stating that Bestefar was Bestefar, and no more. A dependable man who kept his faith in orderly personal records and impeccable correspondence on an Adler typewriter.

  Tractor/equipment 72–75. User manual for a harvester we took to the scrapyard last year. The carbon copy of a complaint letter to Fron Traktorservice for the old Deutz. It started locking in reverse the week after the warranty expired.

  I was among the first to buy a Deutz from you, and have since been loyal to the brand, something I will continue to be if this tedious matter with the gears can be taken care of amicably.

  The potato harvester, every single litre of agricultural diesel, tractor equipment bought at Ottamartnan. Receipts for the sale of seed potatoes to Strand Brenneri. The desk was brimming. Were the hundreds of kilos of old documents intended as a barrier to my curiosity? Until he gave in and unlocked the desk last night?

  I cut open Alma’s envelope. A long history of illness told through letters. The results of an X-ray. A copy of a letter she had sent to the district physician.

  There was the bill for her funeral. Coffee and cakes for fifteen at the guest house in Saksum.

  A large almanac which she had used for almost ten years. She had begun it in April 1961, and the last entry was from 1969. I flipped through the years. It was primarily a journal for the farm, for sowing and harvesting, lambing and slaughtering. Some figures I did not at first understand, until I realised that it was her weight, month by month.

  I remembered her skin, the rough cotton of the apron she had made. Once she had been a woman who wanted to keep slim.

  On the final pages she had written birthdays and telephone numbers. Some names were crossed out with Deceased added in a different colour ink.

  When I got to the notes for 1967, I found one line which stood out. It was written crosswise near the margin, so close that the rusty staple had stained the ink.

  Einar. Lerwick 118.

  In 1967? There was no annotation of Deceased. Despite the fact that our entire family history had confirmed, time and again, that Einar had died during the war.

  Could 118 have been Einar’s post office box?

  I put the almanac aside, opened a drawer and took out some frayed bundles of paper. They were held together with twine, the years indicated in pencil on sheets of white paper wrapped around them. The same system from 1942 until now. Bestefar’s life did not fit into a notebook.

  I sat on the cold drawing-room floor, flipping back through life at Hirifjell. The years grew ever darker. Rejection of compensation for fire damage at the mountain pasture. Verdict of treason in 1946. I cut open the war years. Membership cards for Nasjonal Samling. Envelopes with dried-out elastic bands around them. Swastikas, eagles and censorship stamps. Hundreds of them probably. Several had large, red postage stamps depicting a soldier wearing a German helmet and the words DEN NORSKE LEGION. A denomination of twenty plus eighty øre. Twenty øre for postage and eighty øre for the good fight. I skimmed through a couple of the letters from his fellow soldiers. Feldwebel Haraldsen thanked Sverre for his contribution.

  *

  Downstairs I heard Grubbe meowing. He padded around the house and came into the living room. Hopped up on the couch.

  “He’s dead, you know,” I said, lifting him onto my lap and patting his belly. Grubbe was the only animal here now, the big forest cat with such long fur I worried the game committee would mistake him for a lynx. Before, we had hens and pigs and rabbits, but as I began to make more decisions about the running of the farm, I gradually cut down on the soft toys, as I called them.

  I went back upstairs and went on searching. Came across a will from 1951. He had barely mentioned that year to me. Some sort of operation must have concerned him so much that he wanted to make his intentions clear: All my possessions to Alma, the farm to Walter when he is of age. Would prefer cremation, if possible.

  He had never mentioned the last bit. Nor was it something that had come up in our chats at the kitchen table. All in all, the thought of Bestefar dying had been so remote. But this request was something Rannveig Landstad needed to know about.

  I stood up and looked outside. It was half past twelve. I needed food and I needed cigarettes. The Texaco in Otta was all that was open in the valley at this ungodly hour. A forty-five-minute drive for two packs of Pall Mall and a microwave hamburger?

  No. I might fall asleep behind the wheel, and besides, I wanted to be at the funeral parlour first thing in the morning.

  It was time to sort out the difficult matters.

  On an empty stomach, I slit open Mamma’s envelope. In it was a gossamer-thin sheet of paper so brittle that it almost tore when I unfolded it. A birth certificate from March 1945. Issued in Malmö for a girl named Thérèse Maurel. The woman Mamma had borrowed the book from. Her birth certificate, here? And who was she, to have shown her birth certificate so many times that it was as thin as a cigarette paper?

  The date of birth was given as January 15, 1945. The same birthday as my mother’s. My head was muddled. I wondered whether she could have been Mamma’s travelling companion, but deep down I knew that was not the case.

  The next line revealed that Thérèse’s mother was named Francine Maurel. Father unknown. The place of birth was Ravensbrück, Germany.

  A child born in a death camp.

  I felt a trembling unlike anything I had ever experienced before. Something tugging and pulling at my point of anchor. I searched for something fixed, something unalterable, and picked up my mother’s passport. It had been cancelled after she died. One of the holes went through her photograph, through her cheek, but I could see both eyes.

  The passport was issue
d in Paris in 1965. There it was, in black and white, my mother’s name – Nicole Daireaux – with an address in Reims.

  Reims? I had always thought she was from Authuille.

  Mamma was photographed looking straight ahead. She had short hair and a deadly serious expression. Twenty years old. Why such a severe look when she was going on holiday to Norway, where she would end up meeting my father?

  I met her eyes again as I glanced down at another document. My hands were shaking. An unfamiliar guest had entered the room: the truth, in the form of a sheet of paper with three stamps. A certificate from a French registry office detailing a change of name.

  Thérèse Maurel was indeed my mother’s travelling companion. A constant shadow from the past. Just before the passport was issued, she had changed her name to Nicole Daireaux.

  *

  My mother was born in Ravensbrück, the concentration camp for women north of Berlin. Images swirled inside my head. Grainy black-and-white photographs of emaciated, half-naked people. Father unknown.

  Until now my image of Mamma had been fixed. She had been a figure in blue, a goodness and a warmth that just was. She was part of a time, a chapter that had ended early, but it had been good.

  But now her past had opened up and advanced its claims. All that was left in the envelope was a faded and creased identity card. A prisoner’s card from Ravensbrück of a woman by the name of Isabelle Daireaux, from Authuille. Again that place. A magnetic field I could never escape. A burning vanishing point.

  What had become of Isabelle? A prisoner’s card like that was not something you left lying around. Either you burned it or you locked it deep inside a vault.

  Or deep inside Mamma’s envelope.

  Mamma must have grown up without her parents, I realised. Like another person I met in the mirror every morning. Regardless, I now had a clue. Francine Maurel in Reims.

  But something Hanne had once said stirred inside me. You’ll find nothing but old clues to torment you.

  I sat down with Bestefar’s pile of letters. Censorship stamps and swastikas. I felt the urge to burn everything, to go to the fields and tend the potatoes. When was I going to discover who I was, the real me? It was as though everything inside me flowed into an enormous pool of water, with a film of soldier’s blood and used gun oil on the surface. A membrane so thick that if I did not manage to force myself up through it, I would drown.

  I found an out-of-focus photograph, streaked with green. My mother and Bestefar on the stone steps of the cottage. They did not seem to know they were being photographed. Mamma was wearing a kerchief and she was terribly thin, almost emaciated.

  I held it up to the lamp, noticing that a piece of paper was glued to the back. I slipped in the knife and Alma’s handwriting appeared.

  The French . . .

  The paper tore and snagged in the glue. I tried from the other side. The fragments of paper resembled stubborn heaps of snow in the spring. Carefully I scraped them off with my nail.

  The French drifter. April 1966.

  What had she meant by it? That Mamma was some kind of fortune hunter?

  Someone had glued paper over the comment. Bestefar? Or had Alma had second thoughts?

  I looked again in the envelope but found nothing more about Mamma’s past. Just copies of Bestefar’s letter to the police chief in Saksum, in which he referred to “The Act concerning the entry of foreign nationals into the Kingdom.”

  “Nicole Daireaux continues to live and work here at Hirifjell and is in no way a strain on the public purse, thus the Immigration Act gives her the right to reside in Norway, also in future years.”

  I took the magnifying glass and studied the photograph again. Her clothes were grey and shabby. Her hair was straggly beneath her kerchief and she was clinging to a bulging plastic bag.

  She was much skinnier than in the passport photograph. Who was she, arriving with her clothes in a plastic bag from a French grocery store? As far as I was aware, Alma barely knew which way to hold up a camera. Yet had she been the one who had photographed Mamma, in secret? Or had Pappa taken the picture?

  No, he had been working in Oslo at the time. Alma would not have called Mamma a drifter if she had met Pappa in Oslo first and come with him. She would not have stood like that either, as if she had been walking along a railway line for days. The only explanation could be that she had come to the farm before she met Pappa.

  That raised a bigger question.

  Why would a French girl, an impoverished adoptee, seek out a remote farm in the mountains of Norway?

  4

  I WASHED THE STAR WITH THE HIGH-PRESSURE HOSE and drove to Saksum. It was half past eight and probably too early, but all my life it had been impossible to tell whether H. Landstad and Family was open or closed. No movements had ever been discernible behind the curtains, not that I had paid much attention. I had shunned the silent unpleasantness of the funeral parlour like the plague.

  The door was locked. I got back into the car and studied the documents in the glove compartment while I waited. Punctual service stamps from Lillehammer Motorcentral. How much could the car be worth? A black S-Class driven less than four thousand klicks a year. With one exception. In 1971 it had travelled nine thousand kilometres.

  I know that Sverre held Nicole dear, the old priest had said.

  In fact so dear that it had made its mark in the service log-book. Bestefar had known their travel plans, lent them the new car.

  I turned and looked at the back seat. There I had sat. The night before, I had found Bestefar’s aeroplane ticket to France, one way. The Star’s registration number was listed on a ferry ticket dated four days later. On the trip home, only the two of us.

  I shut my eyes and tried to conjure up memories of those four days, but nothing came. Sometimes I had a feeling that something terrifying had happened in a car, a hysterical voice with the smell of exhaust and old leather, but it could not have been this car. The Mercedes, with its synthetic leather seats and the sombre humming of the motor, I associated only with something safe. If I remembered correctly, that is.

  Inside the funeral parlour, the lights came on.

  *

  No doorbell. My footsteps were deadened by a dark carpet. The light was monotone and subdued, perhaps a quarter of a second on a 2.8 stop. Four chairs around a black table. Apparently there was little need for furniture when you had a monopoly on death in the village.

  She emerged from the back room wearing dark-grey office clothes. Walked around the counter, shook my hand and did not let go. She said nothing, but gave me to understand that I had been expected. At first I thought that this was a silence meant for all types of bereaved: parents who were broken for life, having had to order a small coffin; the spouses of tyrants who were happy that the bastard was finally gone. But Rannveig Landstad’s silence flowed inside me like a sedative, and all at once – for the first time in ages – it felt as if I had something in common with others in the village. Other people had stood here and felt the same way, stood here shaken and destroyed in the antechamber of the churchyard, and I was not ashamed that I was red-eyed and out of sorts having wandered around the entire night burrowing through papers before lying sleepless, staring at the clock.

  She released my hand before it got clammy and asked me to sit. She lifted a leather portfolio, slipped a ruled sheet of paper under the clip and pressed the end of a gold-plated pen.

  “The coffin,” I said.

  She looked unsure. Clicked the pen again.

  “The priest told me,” I said, “that someone sent my grandfather a coffin.”

  “Yes. It . . . there is a coffin here. Or rather. Of course there are. Coffins here, I mean. What I mean is that I cannot remember us ever having this kind of, well, arrangement. But I suggest that we take care of practical matters first.”

  Then she was back on track, practised. She began with the simple things, so that those in mourning would not keel over and find the task insurmountable. She nodded a
s she jotted down the request for cremation. The gravestone was also straightforward; we were a frugal and prudent family, we had left space on Alma’s stone. It was the same as Mamma’s and Pappa’s, a greyish-blue Saksum granite found only on a mountain knoll down by Laugen, beneath the railway bridge.

  “Flowers,” I said. “There should be flowers around the coffin, right?”

  “Absolutely. We will also place wreaths around it, from friends and family.”

  “There is hardly any family to speak of,” I said. Someone from Alma’s family in Ringebu would presumably send a wreath, and that was it. It was unlikely that the Sheep and Goat Breeders would send anything to an inactive member in Saksum.

  Rannveig waited a few seconds, twiddled the pen in her hand. “We can organise some lovely flowers. Jarle’s do good work. When there’s a well-chosen arrangement, with nice colours, it doesn’t matter if it looks a little sparse.”

  “It’s not going to look sparse,” I said. “What do you think of having potato flowers around the coffin?”

  “Potato flowers?”

  “There are loads of them right now, I could fill the boot. Red and violet flowers from the pimpernel, and white from the almond potatoes.”

  Rannveig Landstad shifted her grip on the pen. “I see nothing wrong with that. In fact, that could be quite good.” She paused. “Do you have anyone staying with you? Anyone . . . close?”

  Had the nosiness of the village even worked its way in here? Was she curious about me and Hanne?

  “I have friends over,” I said.

  “Keep them close. It will be difficult for you to face this alone. The next few days will probably be the worst.”

  Suddenly I longed to return to the practical matters, to talk about Bestefar, and not about Hanne. Because I remembered that she charged for this gentle voice, it was all included in the price, and when she had done her job and Bestefar was lying in his grave, she would no longer be paid to comfort me.

  Rannveig Landstad twirled the pen in her hand. Small ripples ran down her freshly ironed blouse.

  “In the spring of 1979,” she said, “a vehicle arrived from a freight company, loaded with a large wooden crate. Inside, wrapped in sailcloth, was a coffin. Tied to one of the handles was an envelope. We found a letter and a sum of money to pay for storage. It was all rather . . . unusual.”