The Sixteen Trees of the Somme

by Lars Mytting

  “What’s the name of the priest who confirmed you in Saksum,” I translated slowly.

  “Yes,” he said. “That sounds about right.”

  “Thallaug,” I said. “Magnus Thallaug.”

  He pulled up his key ring. The metal rattled for an eternity before he picked out a small key and led me towards a shed.

  *

  The warehouse was cold and poorly lit. We walked past old forklifts, a torn cardboard box of wellies, past outboard motors, ropes and fishing boxes before we came to some wire-mesh cages.

  A ceiling light cast a beam on a cage containing something covered in grey tarpaulin, four to five metres long and with an elevation in the middle. Someone had been in recently and left footprints on the dusty cement floor.

  “Heh. So she couldn’t have taken everything,” the guard said. “Well, I’ll leave you to it.”

  His steps receded and I walked into the light. The tarpaulin was covered in a thick blanket of dust, which had slipped off where she had lifted the cover to look underneath. I took hold of a corner and caught sight of a dull hubcap and a punctured tyre.

  A car.

  So that’s why. That’s why Gwen had smartened herself up, that’s why she’d thrown herself around my neck. She was happy that the walnut was not here, happy to avoid being dragged to the very depths by an inherited obsession. She had probably stayed overnight in a hotel. She had stepped out of the ferry terminal when the Aberdeen ferry docked, and she had actually been happy.

  So why had she taken off this time?

  I rolled the tarpaulin off the roof of the car, sneezing as the dust swirled. The car was worn and dented, and submarine-grey. Possibly from the early sixties. No emblems. The front pocked from the spray of gravel, the driver’s seat worn and sunken. The bonnet was long, with an indeterminate design. It would not stand out in a car park.

  The keys lay on the seat. The dashboard was crowded with instruments and rear-light switches and resembled the cockpit of an aeroplane. It was only when I saw the BRISTOL emblem on the steering wheel that I knew what make of car it was.

  *

  We pushed it into the sun, the guard and myself. It rolled heavily and reluctantly on deflated tyres, creaking with every movement, the wheel bearings sluggish with congealed grease. We straightened up to catch our breath and looked at it standing side by side.

  Its wounds were more visible in the daylight; it was scratched up as though straight from the breaker’s yard. The musty documents in the glove compartment showed that it was a 406 prototype with a V8 engine, “approved for road use” and sold with a certain degree of damage present. In the space for the purchase price were the words, “Shop-fitting work at 368 Kensington High Street, as agreed with the proprietor, Tony Crook.”

  “The steering wheel’s on the wrong side,” said the guard, pulling out a cigarette.

  I was about to disagree with him but then remembered where I was. It was left-hand drive, made for driving in Europe, to search for a child born in Ravensbrück.

  “So everything’s in order then?” I asked.

  “For our part, yes. You still have rent in your favour.”

  “Can I exchange that for the use of your rear courtyard?” I said. “I’d like to get the engine running.”

  He flicked the cigarette and gave me the thumbs up.

  *

  The Bristol was a combination of the best of American and English, a machine in aluminium and cast iron that would go on for ever. Stuck to the front air duct with yellowed tape was a note: Check brake fluid.

  Was this the only message Einar Hirifjell had left? And who had he left it for? Himself? Me?

  I opened the glove compartment and found a receipt for an oil change carried out somewhere in Germany in 1961. There was another from Czechoslovakia from the previous year.

  I pictured him arriving at ruined churches with his chisel and plane, repairing pictures and statues of a God he must have believed in less and less, and then more and more. The car must have driven many thousands of kilometres. Driven by a man who did not belong anywhere, who was restless everywhere but at the workbench.

  In the boot, wrapped in brown wax paper, were some spare parts and a tool box. My pulse quickened when I spotted the mouldy leather case of a camera. Inside was an Ilford Witness, good as new, but it contained no film. A tattered road atlas for France, Michelin 1948. I looked up Authuille. No arrows, no ring in pen around any city. Just equally thumbed pages.

  On the floor mats I found shavings of white birch bark. A ferry ticket from Bergen to Lerwick with Smyril Line in 1978. My tenth birthday. Perhaps the car’s final journey.

  Take it easy now, I interrupted myself. Imagine yourself in his place. What would you have done when you parked the car? A letter, he couldn’t have left that. Not even here. Why? Because the plan had gone wrong; someone was still searching for the walnut.

  Gwen. I tried to invest her with what I thought she was, retrieved memories of our best times, days which until now had been mementoes, but which all of a sudden had changed their appearance.

  Think, I muttered. What kind of signal does it send, leaving a car equipped with spare parts and a road map of France. Perhaps the inheritance is not in the Shetland Islands after all.

  *

  I took the battery from the Commodore, filled the tank from my spare petrol can, and then I offered the engine some starting fluid. Evening had descended on Lerwick by the time the Bristol hummed to life. The air had turned chilly, my hands were filthy and I had not eaten for hours. I got into the driver’s seat and tried the gears.

  In the glove compartment was a white eight-track cassette: Glenn Gould Plays Bach: The Goldberg Variations. Bestefar had had the same, by another pianist. I pushed it into the player and climbed into the back seat. The fan gave out a nice heat, and the leather seats warmed around my body, emanating a scent that was foreign yet familiar.

  With a jolt I sat up. The warning came not from the brain, but from my senses, like an impending earthquake. Like the moment I knew that Bestefar was dead. Like the shock when I realised that Hanne had moved in to Hirifjell.

  This car. This smell. The pattern in the roof lining. The wear on the floor mats. The scent of leather and age. Glenn Gould’s piano.

  My gaze fell on the door of the glove compartment; it did not have a handle, just a small strap of braided leather. Why had I not remembered that detail before? Because I knew that strap.

  Suddenly I was back there, sitting in the back seat terrified, as terrified as the time I heard the cracks in the flame-birch woods. I was so small in the seat, and the car was going at high speed, and then I remembered something else, I remembered the thin back of a man in the driver’s seat. He said something which was meant to calm me, but the words had no effect, because I was looking for something. Something made of finely polished wood.

  My toy dog.

  I was looking for my wooden toy dog at the same time as a wall of dark trees passed outside. Then my hands remembered something else, the feeling of a thin fabric. The dress in the coffin out on Haaf Gruney. Had Mamma sat in this car?

  Had I lost the toy dog, or had I lost my parents?

  Then the memory faded, but the certainty remained.

  I had sat in this car before. During the four days of my disappearance.

  16

  A FAST DRIVE TO UNST IN AN UNINSURED BRISTOL. THE tyres were cracked, the steering wobbly and blue smoke blew out of the exhaust pipes. But something was happening, there was a connection between me and this car which grew stronger the further I drove. The needles on the instrument panel quivered, the passenger seat vibrated from the imbalance in the wheels and hazy impressions from the past raced by like animals in the dark.

  Quercus Hall towered in the night. Zetland was nowhere to be seen and Gwen’s stone cottage was still empty. No-one in the vicinity, and not even the baying of sheep, just the wind howling across the dry-stone walls.

  I rowed out to Haaf Gruney. Opened the
cellar hatch and groped for the shotgun bag, but it wasn’t there. Gwen had used her keys here too.

  The deception had been successful then, on the second attempt. In the outbuilding I dug up the coffin from beneath the peat, then washed my hands and moved aside the lid. I unwrapped the silk paper and stroked the dress. It was familiar to my hands, the memory was true.

  *

  I rowed back to Unst and slept in the Bristol. Let the smells seep into me, and with them the hope of more memories. Like a seed testing whether the soil is fertile. I woke to the sight of Haaf Gruney across the water. Low and dark, like a worn gravestone.

  For a long time I sat with my eyes closed. Further memories had not surfaced.

  The smell of the leather seats was familiar, but I could not remember more; it was like a drawing had been coloured in, but it was still the same drawing.

  In the morning light I turned the car inside out, but found only dust and coins, all from the fifties or sixties: German pfennig, Czech haleru, French centimes. Until, between the seats, I found a familiar shape – a spool of film.

  *

  Laing’s Pharmacy in Lerwick opened at nine o’clock. I waited outside, studied the fishing boats by the pier and the passing workers.

  Gwendolyn, no doubt she was in Edinburgh, cashing in thousands of guineas for a Dickson Round Action, “Attractive to us, for a discreet transaction”. Her prize of the summer was an adventure in which she duped a stupid Norwegian, the fulfilment of a romantic plan she had formed as a teenager.

  The bell jingled. I walked inside and greeted the chemist, a fair-haired, strikingly good-looking woman in her fifties. The place was living proof of a time when a chemist was the closest connection between the chemistry of photographic processing and photography itself. She had a small shelf of Kodak and Ilford film, and a couple of Olympus cameras in a glass showcase.

  “Is it possible to get a film developed today?” I said, putting the film on the counter.

  “I’m afraid it would have to be sent to Aberdeen – we no longer develop ourselves.”

  “Damn,” I said to myself and shut my eyes. When I opened them again, the chemist was holding the film in her hand. “Hm,” she said. “An Orwo NP20. Seldom see these.”

  “It’s old,” I said.

  “I can see that.”

  “When would it be from?”

  She held it between her thumb and index finger. “Late sixties, maybe?”

  I looked at the black developing tanks on the shelf behind her. Paterson, the same as I had back home.

  “Do you have the right developing powder?” I said.

  She looked it up in a book. “Unfortunately not. The Orwo is rather particular. I have Ilford Microphen, but it won’t be very good. You could use Rodinal, but a freelancer at the Shetland Times bought the last bottles yesterday.”

  “I can mix it myself,” I said. “Do you have hydroquinone?”

  Perhaps I had not pronounced it properly. She took off her glasses and gave me a searching look. Seconds later my eyes had supplied the answer to a question she never asked. From a drawer she took a chart, then fetched some empty brown bottles and began to write out labels. “Natrium sulphate, we must have that. I also recommend calcium bromide, to reduce the haze of ageing. Don’t you agree?”

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  She drizzled powder into a small bag. “This is poisonous,” she said, sticking on an orange warning label. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

  “At least until the film is developed,” I said.

  *

  Out on Haaf Gruney I collected rainwater from a pool. I filtered it in the kitchen using a sieve, tasting it to be sure that no salt had blown up from the sea. I loaded peat into the kitchen stove and fired it up, then crawled down into the cellar, making sure that no light could come through the cracks.

  I felt the magic of breaking open a roll of film, the certainty that there was something fragile and alive on the light-sensitive silver. Invisible now, and locked in another time. I realised that was perhaps why I went numb whenever I had a film in my hands in the darkness, because it could capture time, and time was something I had once lost.

  I wound the film into the spool, placed it in the developing tank, opened the cellar hatch and climbed back up.

  This is important, I said to myself. You only have one shot at this.

  I heated the water and placed the thermometer I had bought from the chemist into the cooking pot. Too hot. A little more cold water. There. Twenty degrees.

  Quickly I mixed in the developer and filled the tank, knocking it on the worktop to get rid of the air bubbles. I sat down and waited. No way back. Eleven minutes, not ten, not twelve.

  I prepared the rinsing bath and dissolved the fixing salt. Kept an eye on the time. Every third minute I turned the tank and gave it a gentle tap.

  There. Time to pour it out. The developing solution was darker. A good sign.

  Rinsing bath, fixing bath. Another rinse.

  Then I took a breath and screwed open the tank.

  The film spiralled downwards, drops of water splattered against my hands.

  Dangling near the floor were some frames which contained images. They were diffused by a milky veil, but forms were still discernible, and when I held up the film to the window, I saw that the silver had been faithful to a light which fell in France in 1971.

  *

  I had no darkroom and no photographic paper, not to mention an enlarger. But I did have a cellar, glass shards from the windowpane smashed in the storm, a torch and an objective lens I could turn upside down. Holding a precarious pile of shards and expensive German optics, I tried to sharpen the images by projecting them onto unplaned wood. The woodgrain was like a watermark beneath the images, which were clear only when I managed to keep my hands steady. They existed only in the moment, a piece of reality from September 1971.

  Einar could not have been a skilled photographer, because the first pictures were either overexposed or blurry, or both. The first I could make out was of the Bristol on a ferry quay.

  Fourteen pictures from the trip to France. Mamma, Pappa, Einar and me. They must have taken turns using the camera. Us in front of the Mercedes, then in front of the Bristol, perhaps at a meeting point they had agreed.

  In the next photograph we were in a lay-by. They must have got someone else to take the picture, because we were all together there, the four of us. A family beneath a parasol with a Cinzano ad. Simple, genuine holiday pictures.

  At last, a close-up of Einar and Mamma together. An infinity of torments had lodged in his face since the passport photograph from 1943, but it was him, furrowed and scored like a workbench, but the eyes were calm, and he had a hand placed warily on Mamma’s back. Mamma smiled thoughtfully, some of her hair hung loose at her cheeks, her gaze directed at the camera.

  The next was of me and Einar together. My hand in his, but I was looking at my other hand.

  At a toy dog.

  So it was real. My memory tried to connect with what I could see, but never grew clear. But still it was something I sensed, a bony hand, stubble against my cheek.

  In the next I stood alone in front of a brick wall. Holding my toy dog and smiling. A photograph intended for Einar’s barren living room, perhaps. Could I have got it from him?

  I shifted my weight and tried to keep still, leaning against the cold stone. It was like sitting inside an empty grave, looking at photographs of the dead. Just fourteen pictures of a simple trip. On a 24-exposure film. Perhaps the trip was not intended to be very long. Or it was interrupted.

  When I came to the last picture, I was unable to hold the glass, lens and torch all together any longer. I lost my grip, and the image disappeared.

  But I had seen enough.

  Mamma and Pappa. I could not make out anything other than the grey tones of their clothes, but the contrast was good: she was wearing a dress with white edging at the collar.

  *

  I pac
ked up to leave. I fetched the dress, the chessboard and all the documents. Rolled up the film and placed it in the inside pocket of my anorak.

  Then I sat looking at the empty walls.

  Gwen had ploughed ahead, oh yes. But it was my fault that Hanne had been left in the ditch. And yet without Gwen, I wouldn’t have got anywhere. I wouldn’t have met the gunmaker, nor would I have discovered why Winterfinch was so desperate to find the walnut.

  These were perhaps growing pains that I could feel, along with the loss of the Dickson Round Action with a stock worth the price of a new Jaguar.

  One thing was certain, though. I also felt loss, it itched intensely within me. I had to get away from here, I had to get to France and discover everything that I did not yet know. But first I would have to make a necessary detour, to Hirifjell, to prepare for the potato harvest. And perhaps show my face to Hanne and ask her what could be read in it.

  I threw the rest of the goose to the gulls, washed up the two plates and lay down to sleep. The Bergen ferry would leave the next morning, giving me just enough time to pick up the Commodore. Outside, the wind had picked up; I hoped that the last rowing trip in Patna would not be too perilous.

  *

  In the middle of the night I sat up in bed, woken by a nightmare in which the entire potato crop had failed.

  I thought I heard a boat engine near the island, and then the sound disappeared. I lay down again but continued to listen. For as long as I had been alone on Haaf Gruney I had heard nothing but my own footsteps, the wind and the breakers on the rocks.

  Now I could hear footsteps. Someone was opening the door in the hall.

  I lit the paraffin lamp and pulled on my trousers.

  She came in and placed the shotgun case in the middle of the floor. Her hair was wet and flat against her head. Her clothes were crumpled, her fingers black. A patch of oil was spread across her jacket.

  I walked past without touching her, out to the front steps. Zetland was moored at the pier.

  She sat down heavily on the kitchen stool with her back to me.

  “Who do you want to be?” she said.

  “What do you mean?”