by Lars Mytting
“But why didn’t you tell my grandfather about it?”
“The letter specified that he wasn’t to know about the coffin. That you should decide if it was to be used.”
“Me? Was someone trying to taunt him?”
“No, no. Heavens, no. Then we would never have accepted the request. Dear God, no. There is nothing tactless about this. On the contrary, it’s rather an extraordinary coffin. Without disparaging the others we’ve supplied over the years, this is the finest coffin anyone from Saksum has ever been buried in. It would befit a state funeral.”
“It was his brother,” I said. “Einar. I thought he was dead.”
She looked up at me. “My apologies if this has made the occasion even more difficult,” she said.
I released the air from my lungs. “Where’s the coffin now?”
“In the storeroom. I removed the sailcloth earlier this morning. To tell you the truth, it will be nice to settle this matter once and for all.”
“Do you have the letter?” I said.
She must have placed it inside the leather portfolio that morning. It was typewritten, single-spaced, and she handed it to me with the same look Bestefar got when we played cards and I was about to draw the Old Maid.
Coffin for Sverre Hirifjell. He has no knowledge of the gift and should not be made aware of it. Upon Sverre’s death, Edvard is to decide whether or not the coffin should be used. In the tragic event that Edvard dies before Sverre, I request that Edvard be given his final rest in it. Should this be the case, this letter can be shown to Sverre. If the coffin is not put to use, it is to be burned. With no-one present but the undertakers. The coffin is not to be painted or varnished. Fire or earth, nothing else.
“Did you show the letter to the old priest?” I said.
“No, there are limits to what we would share even with him. But of course we have maintained a certain level of . . . cooperation over the years. He used to invite himself round for coffee every other day. When the coffin arrived, he studied it carefully.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“How did he react?”
“Like you, he said, ‘It must be Einar. Only he could make something like that.’”
I followed Rannveig Landstad to the end of a corridor. The storeroom was chilly and smelled of concrete and stone. Old ring binders and a crate of tarnished silver-plated candlesticks. On deep shelves, two rows along each wall, were the coffins. Most with a white gloss finish, some made of pine, a couple of black ones. Leaning against the wall were the headstone samples. Like left luggage on the platform of the dead.
“The old priest is going to officiate,” I said as we walked through the storeroom. “The new priest is apparently on holiday.”
“Holiday?” Rannveig Landstad said, opening a door.
“That’s what he said. That the new priest was entitled to a holiday.”
“That may be. But he’s just got back from Rhodes.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I believe Thallaug sees it as his sacred duty to take care of your family.” She switched on a ceiling lamp, grabbed my arm and turned me in the right direction.
The coffin was resting on a large table covered with white fabric that reached the floor. I stood gaping.
The style was one thing; it was polygonal and had infinite facets that flickered in the light. But it was the woodwork that really bowled me over. The amber flame-birch scintillated. In the dimly lit room it was practically luminous. Over the intense base colour, yellowy-orange tongues twisted in long and unpredictable patterns. Dense structures changed shape, leaped out like claws, and were different from whichever angle you looked. Carved into the lid was a barely visible check pattern, embellishments that made the light and shadows continually give off new shades of colours and radiance.
I approached it. The angles of the wood were sharp enough to cut yourself on. The lid was so precise a fit that it was impossible to find the seam. At first glance I thought it was varnished. But the wood was waxed and polished.
The spring of 1979. The year after Bestefar refused Einar permission to see me on my tenth birthday. In response he felled four trees in the flame-birch woods. Enough for a coffin.
But it was no offer of reconciliation, I told myself. The coffin was a message. A precise, time-activated message. One that would reach me as soon as Bestefar was dead.
“An art-deco coffin,” Rannveig Landstad said. “Imagine that.”
I stared at her for a long time.
“Is there such a thing as an art-deco coffin?” I said.
“I suppose this is proof of that.”
“Have you ever opened it?”
“Even we are human,” Rannveig Landstad said, placing her fingers against one of the grooves. A horizontal opening grew to a black chasm. Effortlessly, she lifted the lid all the way up. Two chrome-plated balance springs held it in equilibrium. A shiny brass piano hinge was sunk into the entire length of the coffin, and I noticed that the hollow of every wood screw lined up, a level of perfection our woodwork teacher had exhorted us to aspire to.
The coffin was not lined with velvet, as I had at first thought. It was veneered with the same kind of wood as my shotgun. Similar to flame-birch, but even wilder, more unruly.
Like the fiery glow of hell. Or flowers bent over during a storm.
*
A mild morning. I woke up on the couch, fully clothed and sweating. Went into the kitchen and studied the papers I had gathered from Bestefar’s desk. Before collapsing the night before, I had sorted everything, arranged page after page across the floor until they covered the entire drawing room, but all I found were old letters from the agricultural control office and insurance contracts from Gjensidige.
He had been honest, my grandfather. Everything pertaining to the family was gathered in those envelopes. With one possible exception. In the corner of a drawer I had found a small bunch of keys. Three shiny padlock keys from O. MUSTAD & SON along with a weathered, wrought-iron key. The key ring was attached to a rectangular piece of wood. The keys might have been for a lock up at the mountain pasture, or for a boat, but something made me inspect the wood more closely. It was scored and reddish-brown, and when I held it under the light I recognised the pattern. It was walnut.
In Pappa’s envelope I had found only school reports and certificates. Pappa in numbers and letters, as he would have been seen by a tax official. As he was still seen by me.
Apart from Mamma, the papers breathed life only into Einar, despite there being only three items in his envelope.
A telegram from Paris dated July 12, 1938. MY BROTHER. RECEIVED NEWS AFT I MONTH AWAY FROM APTMENT. GRIEVING FOR FATHER. PLEASE LEAVE FLOWERS ON GRAVE. EINAR.
A tawny photograph of what must be him, standing next to an enormous country dresser with intricate carvings. He looked like the photograph of Bestefar on his N.S. membership card, but was slighter and had a peculiar half smile, as though he had been asked an unexpected question.
A form. Notice of death to the parish priest from the Probate Court. Full name of the deceased: Einar Hirifjell. Died: The night of 2 to 3 February, 1944. Place: Authuille, France. The field “burial or cremation” had been crossed out.
Attached to the form with a rusty paper clip was the German death certificate, no bigger than a fishing licence. Point 5 gave the cause of death: Hingerichtet. Executed. Stamped with a German eagle and a swastika.
*
I rounded the storehouse and walked over to the carpentry workshop. It had always been like this; completely isolated, with faded red paint, filthy windows and roof tiles covered with moss, as though it stood alone, with its own thoughts. The key had hung in a cupboard in the log house for all these years, accessible, but nonetheless forbidden. Once as a small child I had let myself in, but did not care for the darkness within, the hazy outlines of tools and materials. The layer of dust was so thick I thought the floor was carpeted.
Now the door was swollen, but y
ielded to a firm kick. I stood in the doorway. The workshop smelled withered. The windows were a greasy, yellowish-brown.
On the floor I could make out my footprints from when I was small. Much smaller shoes. There was a furrow in the dust on the lathe. I must have run my index finger along it and drawn out the underlying colour. There were no other signs of activity. If Einar had returned to the farm in 1978, he had not been in here.
I fetched a work light from the tool shed and unwound an extension cord in the grass as I walked back. The light gave the room purpose. The carpenter’s bench, hand tools on the wall, materials in the rafters, a half-finished chair in one corner. The layer of dust made everything resemble a sepia photograph.
I took two bottles from the windowsill and brushed off the labels. Linseed oil no. 8. Shellac no. 2. The solvent had evaporated and their contents had long since dried into bone-coloured layers, paint remnants in lines down the glass. The dust made me sneeze, my movements swirled up more dust and I sneezed again and had to force myself to stand still. Colours appeared everywhere I looked.
The departure for the Shetland Islands had not been hurried. The workshop was tidy, there were no wood shavings in the nooks of the workbench, the tools all hung in their place.
Then I looked outside at what had been Einar’s view.
At first I had thought that the layer of dust on the windows made it impossible to see in, but now I realised that it was the farm which had become blurred behind the caked windowpanes.
I fetched a dust mask and broom and swept out the worst of the mess. Washed the windowpanes and positioned a ladder next to the electricity intake below the eaves. The cables had been severed and pointed skywards like crooked fingers. I stripped the extension wire and hooked up the power. Through the window I saw the lights come on.
There were tools inside that we could have used on the farm. A bandsaw with a dark-green hammer finish. An electric planer. A complete set of hand tools. Wood chisels, screwdrivers, saws. The lathe rumbled to life when I switched it on, an enormous mechanism with a heavy fabric strap and a flywheel worn smooth, powdery old wood chips caked in dried grease. A gentle nudge to the spindle, a singed smell for a few seconds, then it spun into action and whistled through the air.
Once, when I was playing, I had broken the leg of one of the nice chairs. I said that I could fix it if only I had a lathe. Bestefar said there was no need for a lathe, and an hour later he had swapped the round, straight-lathed chair legs with two rough, square ones.
That was Bestefar’s idea of carpentry. Nail heads poking up. A little too sturdy. As though he was trying to escape from somebody’s shadow.
*
In a cupboard there was a row of old books. L’Art du menuisier ébéniste. Anatomie du meuble. Working drawings of furniture, elaborate constructions with a myriad of details. Chests with forty small drawers. A round cupboard with sliding doors.
The most worn publication was a catalogue from a furniture exhibition in Paris in 1925. It was in French, and my stomach fluttered when I realised I understood most of it. On the front cover was a drawing of a girl – or was she a faun? – wearing a loose-fitting dress and carrying a basket of flowers, running with an antelope across a meadow.
I sat down in the heat of the rising sun and read. A crow cawed and flapped off towards the woods.
Here he had sat. Right here. Perhaps had heard the crows taking off from the pine wood he was condemned to build plain wooden furniture with. Birds from the same family that were here now. He had dreamed of this, magnificent furniture of a style I had never seen before, and over the course of my life I might never see, let alone meet someone who owned anything like it. The designs, the decoration and the patterns surpassed one another with each page. And in addition there was someone attempting to outdo them; on every centimetre of free space, Einar had added his own ideas. He had set aside a style that was already audacious, shaded in another type of wood, changed the pattern on the frosted-glass doors, swapped in some etched tulips with an intricate check pattern.
On a loose sheet of paper were his plans for the flame-birch woods. The distance between the trunks. How the withies were to be moved. Loosen A, D and E every other year. B and C every fifth year.
I opened Anatomie du meuble. On the first blank page was written “Einar Hirifjell, Paris 1933”. Such handwriting he had, upright and straight, and with a cross stroke on the “H” that ran through the length of his surname. An “H” which was also mine. My surname, which previously I had heard tainted in war stories, stood here proudly, and painstakingly made.
We could have been a family. We could have had Christmas parties enveloped in cigar smoke, with tales of great voyages. We could have played under the table, tugged at the shirts of the grown-ups who stood at the window waiting for out-of-county cars to arrive in the farmyard.
What would it take for me to be able to write “Hirifjell” with such pride?
I put the book down. Bestefar’s reality was to wake up each day and till the soil. Why would I not be like him?
I savoured the possibility. That the envelopes in the desk did not exist. That no coffin had arrived from Shetland. That I could continue to see the meadow spring up, drive out every morning in the Deutz which I had hosed down the previous evening.
Perhaps lies are like alcohol, I thought. You have to drink regularly to hide from yourself the fact that you drink. But perhaps there is a similarity with the truth. You have to drink until the bottle is empty.
*
“I’m sorry, but that name is not in the directory. There is no Einar Hirifjell in the Shetland Islands.”
The answers from Televerket’s international enquiry service came calm and prepared.
“Of course,” said the lady at the other end, “that does not mean the person does not exist. Or didn’t.”
“He may have had a post office box in Lerwick,” I said. “Number 118. Does that help?”
“When would that have been?” the lady said. She had an Oslo accent, with a hint of Trøndelag dialect.
“1967.”
“That’s more than twenty years ago,” she said without sarcasm. I imagined there was a hierarchy where she worked, something like the distinction between the amateur and professional departments at the camera shop in Oslo.
“Let me investigate,” she said. “I’ll call you back. It may take some time.”
I replaced the receiver and picked up the photograph of Mamma and Pappa; I should move either the picture or the telephone to the cottage. I sat on the stairs and opened a small photograph album I had found in the carpentry workshop. Street scenes from Paris.
A ticket to “Nosferatu” at Le Grand Rex. A vast cinema, apparently; he had sat in seat 48, row 60.
A photograph of an immense workshop, four men in work clothes standing around a colossal cabinet. A close-up of a young man wearing an overall coat, putting on airs and holding up a wood chisel. Charles B. The next image was of a man wearing round spectacles, his hair parted down the middle. Ruhlmann. On his desk was a set square and sketches of a divan.
The photographs on the next page showed two men in sweat-stained shirts sitting on a raft. Bonsergent and E. Hirifjell in Gabon, 1938. Concluded agreement with Lacroix for annual delivery of 30 m3 of bubinga wood.
A small sketchbook dated 1926. How old would he have been? Twelve? Even then he had been drawing street scenes and splendid houses, as well as living spaces with magnificent furniture. On the back cover he had written a checklist:
– Clean the barn before they have to ask.
– Ignore Sverre when he goads you.
– Spend 30 min. practising calligraphy and technical writing.
– Help out if Mamma is left with the heavy work.
– Carve something elaborate freehand.
– Spend at least an hour practising dovetailing or bridle joints.
– Be more polite at the table. Clear up.
– Suggest repairs at the farm before I make som
ething new.
I pictured the two of us at the farm. What it would have been like if we had been brothers. An hour later the telephone rang, harsh and metallic.
“This is Regine Anderson from Televerket’s international enquiry service returning your call. My apologies that it took so long. Now, are you certain that Lerwick 118 has a connection to the man you’re looking for?”
“Quite certain.”
“The problem is, this cannot possibly have been his address. In 1967 there were only eighty P.O. boxes in Lerwick. Most letters were delivered according to name and street number. But I did discover something else. Lerwick 118 was the telephone number of a hairdresser’s on St Sunniva Street.”
“A hairdresser’s?”
“Yes. St Sunniva Hairdresser’s. Near the crossing with King Haakon Street. I’ve studied the map.”
“Hm,” I said faintly. “Well, thank you for checking.”
At that moment Regine Anderson paused dramatically, a prelude to a performance that must have compensated for days filled with sullen, ungrateful enquiries.
“I sensed that this was important to you,” she said. “So I had a colleague at British Telecom in Aberdeen search the archives. He discovered something interesting.”
“I see.”
“The hairdresser’s had this number since 1937. But for twenty-one years, from 1946 up to and including 1967, the directory for Shetland had two entries for Lerwick 118. One was St Sunniva Hairdresser’s. The other was a certain E. Hirifjell.”
I felt a tingling in my stomach. “So if you looked up under H in the Shetland directory, he was listed with that number?”
I heard paper shuffling at the other end, notes from routine fourteen-digit enquiries for international numbers. “Yes,” she said, “but not after 1968.”
Alma must have tracked him down in 1967, I thought. By the following year, when I was born, he had removed his entry from the directory.
