by Lars Mytting
“Who is Ribaut?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” the priest said, pulling a hair from his nostril. “I may be punished severely for telling you this – because now I’m opening a gate your grandfather kept locked for twenty years, presumably with good reason – but if you look closely you’ll see one word repeated three times, there, there and . . . there.”
I followed the yellowed nail of his index finger across the faint impressions from Einar’s pencil.
The repeated word was “l’héritage”. Something to do with an inheritance.
“Whose?” I said.
The old priest cleared his throat to make me understand that, in this matter, he may well have been a little too tenacious in his role as spiritual advisor. On that day in 1967 he had sprinkled ashes over the parish newsletter and tried to decipher Einar’s message. Much to his surprise he had discovered that it was about an inheritance belonging to the Daireaux family. It seemed to be extremely valuable, either in money terms or because of its sentimental value, and the priest gathered that it was old, several hundred years old. But the words were laid over each other and it was not clear whether Mamma knew where the inheritance was, or whether Einar believed that she was its rightful heir. In any case, the priest realised that Mamma had intended to settle down on the farm, but Einar had awoken something inside her.
“I think Einar persuaded them to take the ill-fated journey to France in 1971,” the priest said, placing the parish newsletter back in the folder. “What this inheritance might have been, I do not know. But I overheard something Einar said to your mother under the plum tree. My comprehension of French is not exceptional, but it agreed with the sentences I had read on the sheet of paper. Einar said that the entire inheritance still existed, and that there was enough to fill a lorry.”
“So we were going back to the farm in Authuille? Where the Daireaux name originates?”
“It would seem so.”
“Do you think Einar is still alive?”
“Quite possibly. I’m still alive, after all. His body was wasted, but I saw an obsession so ardent that it could keep a man alive for a hundred years. He would not yet be eighty.”
“I still can’t understand why my mother came to Hirifjell, of all places.”
“Nor I. But I must send you away with one caution. Your mother’s surname was originally Maurel. Whether she changed her name in order to be taken for the true heir, or whether she became aware of the inheritance only through Einar, that I don’t know.”
*
Back home, a white Manta was parked on the unmowed grass. The bonnet was warm. She sat in the conservatory reading a textbook on feed concentrate for piglets. She wore ripped jeans and was scratching a mosquito bite on her tanned thigh. Grubbe was lying on a pillow with one paw over his nose.
“Would you like some blackcurrants,” she said, and nodded at the extra bowl and a one-litre jug filled with berries.
“Sounds good,” I said.
“The key was in the usual place,” she said.
“And now you’re the only other person who knows where it is,” I said, hanging up my denim jacket. I took in the sight of her, the possibility of Hanne Solvoll. For this summer. The rest of the year. The rest of my life.
Last night I had dreamed about her. She stood with her back to me, tanned and young and firm everywhere, her spine like brand-new rope, but when she turned, she was wrinkly and grumpy and resembled Alma.
I shook off the memory and opened a letter addressed to Sverre. It was from the agricultural control office. The annual inspection of the seed potato crops was to be next Friday at nine o’clock.
“The priest told me that Einar had been here, that he came to see my mother,” I said putting the letter down.
“When was that?”
“In 1967.”
She looked at me for a long time, then she got up, took my head in her hands and looked me in the eye.
“Dear, dear Edvard,” she said. “Get your calculator out. That was twenty-four years ago. Something dark and horrible resulted from it. Dear God, look around you! It’s summer, you’ve just inherited a farm and your woman is ovulating.”
“My woman?” I smiled crookedly.
“If that’s what you want.”
I kissed her and she filled my bowl with blackcurrants. “I have two things to say,” she said. “You have a habit of brooding and tormenting yourself. If you start searching and don’t work out what happened, you’ll spend the rest of your life looking as though you’re in the final of the world chess championship. Your parents are dead, Edvard. The truth is that they’re not coming back. No matter what, that is the most important fact, and you know it. You have to accept when something new presents itself to you.”
She emptied the thick, pale-yellow cream over the blackcurrants. After a few seconds they popped up and floated on the surface, bursting with red.
Grubbe recognised the smell. He stretched his forelegs and yawned so that his canines were visible.
“Cats shouldn’t drink milk,” said Hanne when I took the carton of cream and poured a little in a bowl.
“What about cream?” I said.
“Same thing. It gives them stomach ache.”
I gave it to him anyway. He lapped up the fatty cream and swept his tail slowly across the ground.
“I need to go to Authuille,” I said. “And to Reims.”
“Reims? Where’s that?”
I told her about Francine Maurel.
“Good God, Edvard. Sverre isn’t even in the ground yet. If we’re going somewhere, can’t we at least go somewhere enjoyable? The fixed point in your life is gone. Why would you burden yourself with even more misery?”
“But she’s old. And she’s the only one who can tell me about my mother.”
She twisted a lock of hair around her middle finger.
“That I can understand,” she said. “But you could start with a letter, at least.”
I had more to say, but it was too much. Because it encompassed a word that had been jotted down three times on a parish newsletter dated 1967. Inheritance. As well as another word, as far from this warm, Norwegian summer as it could be: Ravensbrück.
“Listen,” she said, putting her textbook down. “The sheep are all in the mountains. Grubbe can take care of himself. What if we go for a trip after the funeral?”
“Where to?”
“Somewhere warm, naturally. Or to our cabin in Sørlandet. Sun and swimming, it could be worse. Come on. That’s what people do.”
*
“Come outside with me,” I said the following day when the sun was at its peak. “I want to show you something.”
We walked out to the plum trees. The unripe fruit was no longer hard but hung densely from the branches with the promise of a sweet autumn. We stared at the green foliage and at the plums that would soon be bursting red and rich. But Hanne was thinking forward and I was thinking back.
She lay down in the grass.
Oh, Hirifjell. With you. Fertile as the ground you lie on.
But I could not remain here.
I took her by the hand and led her up to the flame-birch woods. Led her over to the largest tree, a rough trunk shackled with iron bands that had been tightened to such an extent that not even the metal knew the limits of its tolerance, and we both laid down there and looked up into the canopy.
Hanne arched her body from her neck to her heels so that she could loosen her clothes and pull them off, and soon she was naked in that same arch.
“You too,” she said. “Now.”
*
Now and then I had imagined the funeral had already taken place. I had always pictured it in the winter, during the mild period before Christmas. I would stand next to the Star, alone in the car park outside Saksum church, scraping the ice off the windscreen with one of his Karajan cassettes. A snow flurry would blow through a dusty old black suit and I would be the last to leave, standing for a long time with a view of the grave as
the snow covered it with a white blanket.
Instead it was a hot summer and I was wearing a new suit we had bought in Lillehammer. Hanne to my left, wearing a grey dress she had bought at the same time. Yngve to my right, he had plenty of suits to choose from.
The flame-birch coffin rested in the nave in a meadow of potato flowers. I had been out before sunrise, spent two hours cutting flowers with a sickle. Every type of potato from his fields followed him to the grave, the colour of the flowers a little different for each variety – even Beate was represented. The polished wood sparkled and cast new reflections with every candle the sexton lit.
It was ten to one. A window was open, and while the trio sonatas drifted through the church I began to listen for steps on the gravel. One thought paid regular visits: what if the improbable happened and Einar appeared in the doorway? Every morning and every evening I had tried to call Agnes Brown, and every time I had hung up without anyone answering. I could send a letter, but my plan was already clear: that was not going to be necessary.
Then I heard a bicycle bell and the crunching of tyres, through the window I heard laboured breathing and something banging against the wall of the church, and when I turned towards the door, there he was.
Noddy.
Wearing a grey Catalina jacket and shiny nylon trousers, he gasped for breath, sweating and mumbling. Yngve and Hanne exchanged glances as Jan Børgum stood in the aisle with twitching eyes. He wiped the sweat off his face, then stuck one hand in his trouser pocket and adjusted his balls.
Music surged from the organ pipes.
More footsteps outside. Jan’s mother hurried into the church and grabbed him by the jacket. Jan pulled away and came forwards. I closed my eyes.
“Yngve,” I whispered. He leaned towards me. “Can you take care of that?”
“O.K., I’ll get rid of him.”
“No. Tell his mother he can sit up front.”
But they had already sat down, there were plenty of empty places to choose from. A few came for the sake of appearances, including Alma’s nephew. Then the bells rang out, the organist turned the page and the old priest strode from the sacristy, his bible filled with loose sheets. Wearing a black kirtle, stately and pale, he walked slowly towards the coffin.
My gaze fell on the altarpiece Einar had restored in 1940. I could not believe that it had been shattered, because every line continued unbroken.
I listened to the priest’s sermon, tried to hear if a crack could be found there, as Thallaug gradually built it up and told of how Sverre Hirifjell “was a man who God subjected to the most arduous trials”, and closed by addressing sin and soul-searching, hate and mercy. His words rang out through the almost empty church.
I began to think about the unkempt grave of my parents, how dismal it looked, covered with brown twigs and moss, and I did not notice that the priest had finished until the silence settled in, a tangible silence.
*
The coffin was so heavy that it took eight of us to carry it. Hanne, Yngve and the sexton on my side. On the other, Rannveig Landstad, her son and two hired hands from the funeral parlour in Harpefoss.
We stepped outside, walked past Jan’s blue bicycle, and when we rounded the corner and stepped out of the shadows, a burning summer sun met us and the beams of light penetrated the flame-birch and made the wood flicker, as though we were carrying a mirage.
We did not have to walk to a grave, but to the funeral parlour’s old hearse, a Mercedes they no longer used. Bestefar had to take a detour, to Lillehammer to be cremated.
Then everything began to fall apart, as my senses had when I rubbed at the swastika with Lynol. My legs faltered as we passed through the tarry smell coming from the wall of the sun-baked church, or perhaps it was the smell from Mamma and Pappa’s funeral that caught up with me, and I felt myself lift away when I saw their grave up on the hill, so withered and dry, stolen by the Devil. It was as though I were split in two, one part carrying the coffin, the other tumbling through his own life, and I dropped down in front of two chiselled names and a date, knowing I had to answer for them.
5
“SHOULD I BOOK?” SHE SAID. “THEY SAY THERE ARE ONLY two seats left at that price.”
I stood holding the telephone receiver and felt torn in every direction. But finally I realised the purpose of having the photograph of my parents by the telephone. It was more than a photograph, it was a question waiting to be asked. Did I want to swim against the current in order to find out how they died?
“No, Hanne. I can’t do it. Not yet.”
“I’m coming out to yours,” she said. “You’re not yourself.”
“No,” I said. “I’ll come by your place tomorrow. Don’t come here now.”
*
I hung up, went outside and closed the gate. In the old Deutz I drove over to the woodpiles to fill a trailer with wood. Spruce and aspen cut to sixty-centimetre lengths. I drove up to the pimpernel fields, hopped out and sized up the place while the tractor rumbled in idle. A little further up, in the middle of the field, was the stretch of land that offered the best view of the farm buildings. Underfoot, down in the soil, there was life. Sunlight, water and mould, a process as infinite as counting the stars.
It was there that I unloaded the wood and began to build, grabbing more and more armfuls. It had to be high, so high that in the end I had to stand on the trailer to reach the top. By twilight it was done, a level, solid plinth of criss-crossed wood.
Back at the farm, I carefully positioned the front-end loader under the pallet with the coffin and drove slowly, turning straight into the field like it was a plough. Potato grass brushed the sides of the wooden coffin. The wood creaked as I lowered it onto the plinth.
I showered, shaved and changed into black. Drank from the outdoor tap, so cold that my temples ached, and glanced up at the field where the coffin glistened in the evening sun like a gigantic gemstone.
It was eleven o’clock when I picked up a small, sealed cloth bag from the living-room table. After the cremation I had asked to be left alone in the urn room. I had emptied his ashes into the bag, my ice-cold fingers shaking as a cloud formed in the air and I realised that it was him I was moving, then I had grabbed another bag of ashes from my coat pocket.
The colours were not identical; the one I had brought with me was darker and a mixture of flakes and powder, but it would do, Bestefar and I were the only ones here in the thin light from the high windows, surrounded by the cold scent of holy stone. I had wondered which book would be big enough. His favourites were Thomas Mann and Günter Grass, but there was another that was even more worn, and I had carried it over to the fireplace, read and burned one page at a time, then gathered the ashes into a metal pail.
It was not my grandfather who was buried by the old priest and Rannveig Landstad. In the grounds of Saksum churchyard, we had placed the ashes of 640 well-read pages of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden.
*
The birds were still singing as I walked with Bestefar in my hands. In this state he weighed one kilogram, but I bore the weight of a boulder. When I raised the lid of the coffin, there was a faint glimmer from the balance springs once installed by Einar. Where my grandfather’s chest would have been, I placed the suit sewn by Andreas Schiffer of Essen, with the Russian bayonet at his hip. In the remaining light I opened the cloth bag and scattered his ashes inside, dust only, but to me it was as if he took shape again, held my gaze one last time and looked pleased, and he was both alive and dead, dead like the frame in the Leica, alive because I knew he would have liked this. Finally I took the concert tickets and let them fall inside the coffin, dropping them like loose feathers that search for the place on the ground where they will rest.
I lit the pine roots at each corner of the pedestal and they crackled as the flames began to rise towards the cordwood above, which in turn ignited taller flames that licked the sides of the coffin, flame-birch that had been ablaze since the day I was born.
Suddenly
I spotted a carved motif in one corner, a squirrel hiding its nose in its tail. The bonfire caught hold and the squirrel disappeared in the fire that crept upwards and framed the coffin. It was enveloped by the fire which now shed light across the potato fields and grew fiercer and fiercer, forcing me to step back so as not to singe my eyebrows.
The wood groaned, tongues of flame rose and flickered above the birch, a golden pattern reflecting another golden pattern until the coffin suddenly turned black with soot, a cloak of mourning that caught fire the next second, then there was a prolonged groan as the fire employed its full might and the flames burned the flames.
And then I made a deal with my grief; I would be someone the dead could rely on.
III
Island of the Storm Petrels
1
I WAS NOT WOKEN BY THE SUN, BUT BY THE SHETLAND Islands. By half four I was out on deck. The white railings were dripping wet; we must have passed through a rainstorm in the night.
A few small fishing boats crossed our path. Otherwise nothing, until a strip of land revealed itself in the sea mist and Lerwick grew out of its contours. Colourless slopes became green fields. Small clusters became houses and cranes at the harbour.
I had one week. Until the farm would make its demands. And Hanne hers. I had driven round to her place with the car packed, and when I arrived, she thought I was surprising her with a trip to Sørlandet. Our parting was muted and confused, with unspoken bitternesses and everything hanging in the air.
“Don’t get lost,” she said sharply.
A jolt announced the docking of the ferry. I followed the lorries, past a sign that read WELCOME TO LERWICK. REMEMBER TO DRIVE ON THE LEFT in both Norwegian and English. As if we had a colony here.
I moved over to the British side of the road, and only after several kilometres was I confident that I was not going to have a head-on collision. At a vantage point I noticed that the landscape was similar to the mountain reserves back home, only greener. The same heaths. The same sheep. The fields sloped evenly downwards. The only difference was that the landscape was cut in half and plunged to the sea.
