The Sixteen Trees of the Somme

by Lars Mytting

  “Are you still there?” Regine Anderson said.

  “Yes. Yes of course. Was the hairdresser’s number removed at the same time?”

  “No, it was in use until 1975. Then something interesting happened. Old numbers are normally placed in a three-year quarantine before they are reused, because many people memorise them and call, thinking the company is still operating. Unusually, this number never became inactive – it was transferred to a lady by the name of Agnes Brown on St Sunniva Street. She probably lives above the old hairdresser’s.”

  “She must have been the owner,” I said, imagining that she might have been married to Einar, and that he had later moved out.

  “Most likely. Because this Agnes Brown is still in this year’s directory. Same address, same number, just with another dialling code after the switchboard was automated. It’s odd that she hasn’t changed her number. As a pensioner, you would want to avoid being woken up morning, noon and night, wouldn’t you?”

  “Maybe she ’s expecting someone to call,” I said.

  “That’s generally why people have telephones,” Regine Anderson said. I could hear that she found that amusing. “Would you like the number?”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “You would have made a great detective.”

  “That I am, young man. I’ve been working for Televerket’s international enquiry service for thirty-nine years.”

  *

  It was the first time I had dialled an international number. There was a grainy whirring on the line, as though the signals were fighting their way under the North Sea. It rang at the other end, a loud jangling that sounded different from Norwegian telephones.

  I held the receiver, waited.

  No answer.

  I hung up, paced the room and thought about the telephone number. I went downstairs to Bestefar’s atlas and studied the distances. I knew that the Shetland Islands had once been Norwegian, and now I discovered why; the distance to Lerwick from Bergen was shorter than from Aberdeen.

  Then the telephone jingled again. I leaped up the stairs and snatched the receiver.

  “Yes,” I said in English. “Hello?”

  “What?” the voice at the other end said.

  “Hm?”

  “This is Rannveig Landstad. Is that you, Edvard? Listen, I’m sorry to have to tell you, but some complications have arisen.”

  She told me that the coffin could not be used for cremation. It was too wide for the furnace. Presumably it had been made according to English measurements, because it was exactly four feet wide.

  No enlightened nation measures in feet, Bestefar had said.

  “By the way, did you intend for his knife to be buried with him?” she said.

  “He would have appreciated that.”

  “We probably could have left it in the coffin, even though it’s not entirely by the book. But with cremation – well, you understand.”

  I walked around the farm for an hour, deep in thought. Wandered among the berry bushes, filled up on them and looked back across the fields at the carpentry workshop.

  Fire or earth. Nothing else.

  I called the funeral parlour.

  “Can we use the coffin for the church service?” I said. “And take him out before the cremation? Would that work?”

  “But then,” Rannveig Landstad said, “then we are left with a used coffin.”

  “You could drive it up here to Hirifjell. Leave the knife inside.”

  “Edvard, it is unusual in my trade to ask why, but today I believe it is necessary.”

  “There’ll be a need for the coffin later,” I said.

  *

  I knew that he lived in the blind alley near the agricultural cooperative, in a single-storey black house overshadowed with bushy spruce trees. They were probably just Christmas trees when he moved in; now they had taken over the entire lot. The felt roofing was overgrown with moss, the gutters filled with spruce needles. The Rover was in the carport, but there was no answer when I rang the bell. I went round the side of the house and found him in the back garden.

  “Who was Thérèse Maurel?” I said.

  He shifted in the sunken folding chair. “Your mother was your mother,” he said, and pointed to another chair leaning against the drainpipe. I unfolded it and sat down in front of him. He was drinking from a one-litre bottle and offered it to me. Out of politeness, I did not wipe the spout before drinking. Apple juice, thick and sweet.

  “Why didn’t you tell me everything at once?” I said.

  “Sorrow is most pure when it has a fixed point. I thought it might come out later. Funerals for the Hirifjell family have never been simple. The coffin you would have found out about regardless, but I wondered what you knew and did not know about your past. And how much you wanted to know. Sometimes the truth needs to bide its time.”

  The grass brushed against the flowered seat covers we were sitting on.

  “I think the time has come,” I said.

  “Your grandmother was named Isabelle Daireaux. She gave birth to your mother in Ravensbrück concentration camp, just before the capitulation. They must have been separated from each other, because your mother was adopted by a French woman, Francine Maurel, and grew up believing she was her real mother. When she was seventeen, she uncovered documents that revealed this was not the case. At the age of twenty she changed her name back to Daireaux, to Nicole Daireaux.”

  “Was it Sverre who told you this?”

  “No, it was your father. I had to write out your Norwegian birth certificate, and needed identification papers and personal identity numbers. Then the family history came to light. I saw her documents.”

  “What happened to her? My real grandmother?”

  “I was never told. But if she survived a camp like that, and lost a child, she could not possibly have escaped from there without great suffering.”

  I told the priest about the papers in the secretary desk and the photograph of Mamma. “What I don’t understand,” I said, “is why my mother came here, of all places?”

  “That is a secret they kept to themselves. Walter insisted that she was a tourist.”

  “In that case, she was the first person ever to choose the far side of Saksum as a destination.”

  “Don’t underestimate the rural community. Bethlehem was no metropolis either.”

  I looked for a stone or something else to fiddle with, but there was nothing like that around. I realised I was sitting with my hands tightly folded, and relaxed them.

  “I was wondering why she wanted to be called Nicole,” I said.

  “Go on.”

  “Mamma’s birth certificate indicated that the father’s name was unknown. Did she know anything more by the time you met her?”

  “Not that I was told, unfortunately.”

  “You are telling me the truth now, yes?”

  “I always speak the truth. It is just that sometimes I choose not to speak.”

  “I went to see the coffin Einar sent,” I said. “I think he came here on my tenth birthday and chopped down the trees it was made from.”

  The priest looked across the unmown lawn. “Did he so?” he said in surprise. “All I know is that Einar was back in Saksum the year before you were born. Here, have a little more apple juice. Yes, I certainly meant to tell you when the time came.”

  *

  Sometime during the summer of 1967, Einar had appeared in the doorway of the parsonage. Magnus Thallaug was sitting there with a newspaper and a coffee, believing that Einar had died in 1944. Had he not spoken with a Gudbrandsdalen dialect, Thallaug would never have recognised him, because Einar’s face was as furrowed as the bark of a holly tree. The lively and healthy young man who had repaired the crucifix and the altarpiece of Saksum church now stood ragged and trembling. Far too old for his age, his body looked like a cowhide hung over a post. The priest had seen suffering in him. Years without a good night’s sleep, unvaried food and too little soap. The only thing distinguishing Einar from a va
grant was his well-groomed hair.

  In the end he disclosed to the priest that he had been living alone in Shetland since the war. “I received a report that you had been killed,” the priest said.

  “I wish I had been,” Einar said. “But I had to meet the girl who has come to Hirifjell.”

  There was a grey car with English number plates in the courtyard, as dented and disfigured as Einar himself. The priest had thought Einar was in Saksum to visit his home town one last time, and asked him to repeat his request. Yes, it was Nicole he was looking for. He had been out to Hirifjell, but left because Nicole – my mother – had apparently been furious with him. The priest had asked why, and Einar replied that it was a matter between himself and God.

  “In which case I am the very man to help,” the priest said. “With me you’re as close to Him as you will get without being dead. Now, tell me how I can help.”

  Einar stood there irresolute. He had evidently not devised a plan, had just stopped by the priest’s office as if it were a lighthouse, where clever ideas came spontaneously.

  “Give me a pen and a piece of paper,” Einar said after a while. “I’ll write to her.”

  In Einar, the priest recognised something that was seldom seen in the village of Saksum. He had become religious. But the faith that filled him was not the sing-songy kind, with baskets of flowers by the door. His doctrine was rock-hard and filled with remorse and anguish. Yet Einar refused to speak of the desperation that plagued him.

  The parish council was meeting that day, and the priest offered him something from the tray of sandwiches before he went to put on more coffee. When he returned with the fresh pot, Einar had devoured everything, as though he had seen no food for a week. The priest considered this entirely possible. Einar settled into the priest’s office, wrote the letter and was gone.

  As a priest in Gudbrandsdalen, you see a bit of everything, thought Thallaug. But this incident had given him, in his own words, “a need to see if the Church ought not contribute a little extra to ease the poverty of its parishioners”. So the following day he had taken the Rover and driven out to Hirifjell. The farm was apparently deserted. Not a soul in sight. But the priest heard voices coming from the kitchen garden. Mamma and Einar were standing beneath a plum tree. They were speaking in French, and they were speaking loudly, in agitated voices, but it was no argument. When the priest arrived, they went silent. Mamma curtsied to him and exchanged a few polite words in Norwegian, and then she went inside the cottage. The priest strolled around the farm with Einar. He said that in the end Mamma had “realised what was in her best interests”, but the priest was none the wiser. The discord between the brothers seemed to persist, because Sverre and Alma had travelled into town with Walter.

  The priest did not learn much about Einar’s life, other than that he had settled on the Shetland Islands. It was unclear where, exactly, as the only two place names Einar muttered were Scalloway and Unst. Scalloway was familiar to the priest, its harbour had been the wartime base for the clandestine Shetland Bus, but later the priest had to check the atlas to discover that Unst was the northernmost island, a desolate and almost deserted place. Thallaug had hinted that Shetland was a strange place for a man who had been Ruhlmann’s master cabinetmaker, but he did not get much out of Einar about his life after 1942, nor about his connection to Mamma or why he had to write to her before she would speak to him.

  Einar was remote and somehow strange, and the conversation soon grew as stilted and reluctant as it had at the priest’s office. But the priest believed he had seen something between Einar and Nicole, something unresolved. The priest left Einar standing on his own in the farmyard, looking up into the woods. Then Mamma emerged again from the cottage.

  *

  “And you were going to keep all this to yourself?”

  The priest took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.

  “I thought you needed the truth in small portions,” he said, putting his glasses back on. “No-one jumps onto a wobbly ladder. But now I’ll tell you absolutely everything I know.”

  I plucked a blade of grass. “You said something about his hair. That he was well groomed.”

  “Yes, it was something I noticed. Apart from that he was rather worn and frail. Wore ugly yellow wellies. The last time I had seen him, when he came back from Paris in the thirties, he was pompous and gallant.”

  I told the priest about Agnes Brown and St Sunniva Hairdresser’s.

  “What do you think his conflict with Bestefar was about?” I said. “It was more than the war, wasn’t it?”

  The priest emptied the bottle of juice.

  “First let me ask you about the four days in France,” the priest said. “Do they torment you because you are afraid of what happened, or because you don’t know what happened?”

  “Is there a difference?”

  “Oh, yes. Some people survive best by nailing together some kind of truth. Even if it’s crooked or full of cracks, it might still hold. For many people it blocks out life.”

  “I want you to tell me everything you know.”

  “To begin with, the feud between the Hirifjell brothers was most probably about allodial rights and politics. I believe the dispute was renewed after the accident in 1971, and the tone must have changed. Because blood is thicker than water, and that is at the heart of the matter. Forgive me for speculating, but I think Einar knew what happened to your parents, he just wouldn’t talk about it.”

  A twitch travelled across my forehead and lodged itself in my eyelids, then spread downwards until it had taken hold of my entire body. My stomach knotted up until something seemed to snap and sorrow coloured every new thought I had. What a foolish curiosity I had succumbed to. It was as if I had taken apart something expensive just for the hell of it, only to realise I couldn’t put it back together again.

  The priest straightened up.

  “You asked me to tell you everything, Edvard. That is how it feels. And I am not finished yet. You have to accept it: you have to transfer all the stones into your rucksack.”

  “But what,” I muttered, “what makes you think Einar knew?”

  “He didn’t come to the funeral. Either he was not wanted there or he could not bring himself to come. Both would suggest that he was involved, because previously he had been obsessed with meeting your mother.”

  “Maybe nobody told him,” I said.

  “I don’t think he needed to be told,” the priest said, and then described how Bestefar, normally as quiet as salt lick, had requested that Mamma and Pappa share a coffin and a headstone, even though they were not married. When finally they were lowered into the ground, both he and Alma fell to their knees bawling.

  “It was a good, healthy reaction, in fact. But I heard Sverre repeating Einar’s name as he sobbed into the ground. He said something about ‘those damned woods’, mumbled it over and over. Anger and compassion mixed together. As though he wanted to both punish his brother and accept him.”

  “Did he really say ‘those damned woods’?”

  “Several times.”

  “Did he mean the flame-birch woods?”

  “No. It sounded as though he was referring to the place where they died, where you disappeared.”

  I got up and walked towards the fence. The twitching in my eyelids had stopped, but I knew that from now on, nothing would be the same again.

  “Did he not come to the churchyard later?” I said. “Einar, I mean.”

  “No. I kept an eye on the grave, but only one person ever visited it.”

  “Bestefar?”

  The priest shook his head. “He wasn’t made like that, you know. The snow arrived early in 1971, and throughout the winter only a narrow set of footprints led to their grave – Alma’s.”

  “That was how Sverre dealt with things,” I said. “Took it out on his work.”

  “And you?” the priest said. “How are you dealing with it?”

  I swallowed. Realised there are very few turning
points like this, when you stare up at the clouds and promise yourself that everything will be different from now on. But even the most stringent resolutions loosen their grip over time, so the oath must be sworn while it still hurts. In my head and out of habit, I steered towards Bestefar, towards me becoming the salt lick. But my body wanted something else. It wanted breakdowns and tears, lightning bolts and reckless acts, if only to prove that I was not numbed and hardened. Because I realised that what I longed for most of all was to feel real loss.

  *

  A minute went by, maybe ten. I stood by the fence. The old priest still sat in the folding chair, staring at me as if I were a beloved farm animal ripe for the slaughter. As if reluctantly assessing how much I could take before I toppled.

  “There is only one stone left now,” he said.

  “Out with it,” I said, and ambled towards him.

  “The problem is that this is the weightiest and roughest of all. It concerns an unresolved matter relating to your mother.”

  “Unresolved?”

  “I mentioned that Einar wrote a letter to Nicole in my office. He used the parish newsletter as a blotter. At the time, we were splashing out on thick, glossy paper. When I tidied up after him, I saw that he had pressed so hard that some words were visible on the paper beneath.”

  The priest heaved himself up out of his chair and I followed him into the house, through a musty kitchen and into a narrow office. Its four walls were filled with bookshelves, and typewritten pages with a multitude of corrections and notes poked out from between book spines and archive folders. He got down stiffly on one knee and pulled out a brown file. Inside it was an old parish newsletter.

  “I have kept it here,” he said. “In the unlikely event that someone from the Hirifjell family might want to plough deep into the past.”

  The sunlight entered the room at a slant, casting tiny shadows on the letters. The paper fibres had straightened over the years, but when I held the sheet flat up to the window, I recognised faint traces of Einar’s meticulous handwriting. The lines crossed one another and words blotted out others, but some were still legible. On a blank area beneath the drawing of Saksum church I saw two names. Oscar Ribaut, with the year 1944 written next to it, and Isabelle Daireaux.