by Lars Mytting
Down at the shop she had said, “Fine, let’s go back. Let’s keep fighting this eternal battle against some shit that happened a long time ago.”
I never quite understood why she changed her mind. Doubt flowed inside me. Perhaps she would undergo this primitive humiliation in the wastelands in exchange for the possibility of finding the inheritance, the sixteen trees of the Somme.
She was an early riser, but I asked myself why she had not put on the kettle for tea. In Shetland it had been the first thing she did. Perhaps it was because Hanne was also in the room, the ghost from yesterday sitting golden-brown on the windowsill, dangling her bare legs.
She noticed that I was awake and turned. And we did what we had always done at this farm, to hold the big questions at bay.
We ate a huge breakfast and said as little as possible.
We smoked on the stone steps as the dew steamed from the grass.
We started up the old tractor and drove it out to the fields.
But she couldn’t do it. She wouldn’t do any heavy lifting, she just stood there with her feet apart, thinking about the incongruity between what she had to do and the clothes she did not want to get dirty. I showed her how the potato lifter worked and started the tractor. But she had never come into contact with soil in her life; the only thing she really knew how to handle, apart from a tea kettle and a record player, was Zetland. Up here she was helpless and apathetic, and she didn’t want to ruin her nails.
But in the end she gave it a go. The ploughshare dug down, the earth was opened up and small seed potatoes appeared like jewels. But she plucked them with her fingers not her fists, carefully placing the potatoes one by one in the crate, and it went unbearably slowly, she spent the whole time worrying about her clothes, shaking the dirt off her hands. After about five minutes I looked in the side mirror and realised that she was just standing there, staring.
I climbed down from the old Deutz and leaned against the tyre.
“How do you swear in Norwegian?” she said.
“Sorry?”
“How do you swear in Norwegian?”
“Well—”
“I mean it. Turn off that bloody tractor.”
The cackling of the diesel died.
“How do Norwegians swear? ‘Damn’ is no good here. Nor is ‘fuck’.”
A pair of crows circled above us and landed in the spruce trees.
“Well, faen is pretty much the universal swear word,” I said.
“F-ain?”
“Longer ‘a’. You sound like a foreign doctor.”
“Faan! What else? I need more.”
“Try i svarte helvete. Satan ta. Faen i kølsvarte helvete.”
She grabbed a clump of earth and threw it at me. “Fuck satan i svarte kølfaens helvete. FAAN! FAAN I HELVETE!”
“Dæven drite is good too,” I said.
She swore away, and suddenly tore open her blouse. Buttons rolled into the furrows. “Faan! Mosquitoes! So itchy!” She shrieked as she pulled it off and trampled it into the ground. With muddy fingers she scratched at her arm until it went red, then picked up the ruined top and marched towards the farm.
The crows took off and disappeared over the treetops. I sniffed the breeze. The worst that could happen now would be rain. Maybe Yngve would help with the rest. Another thought hovered close by: If I had come without her, there would have been a long row of full potato boxes here this morning, and I’d be resting under the plum tree with Hanne Solvoll.
The crop appeared to be fine, despite weeks without tending. Spring had been warm and the potatoes had been chitted before planting, but it was as though the ground trembled with suspicion at the risk this farmer of Hirifjell had taken.
As I walked down towards the houses I saw a strange figure stomping towards me. She wore a checkered apron, a headscarf and Wellies which were far too big and smacked against her calves, and only when she was thirty metres away was I able to accept that it was Gwen. Twenty metres, fifteen . . . it was both her and it was not. She was wearing Alma’s work clothes.
The memory flew at me like an arrow. Alma’s voice, the cautious glance out of the corner of her eye. Then the figure was torn away, as if in a sudden gust of wind, and Gwen was there in clothes she could work in. Her make-up had been washed off. She had been crying, and she was still sniffling as she ran her fingers through the earth and scooped up the potatoes. Dirt on her knees, dirt on her fingers, dirt on her mind.
*
“Why are there ashes in the middle of the field?”
“I burned some furniture,” I said after a moment. “I had to do it out here so the sparks wouldn’t reach the buildings.”
I had been adjusting the potato lifter, and when I turned she was gone. I put down the spanner and caught up with her as she stepped into the circle of charred wood and ashes. The potato vines that surrounded it were taller than the others.
“They grow better here,” she said.
“Ash is a good fertiliser.”
She pulled up a vine and knocked it against her boot so the dirt trickled off. The pimpernel was bright red and fresh-looking.
“See how nice it is,” she said. “Can we have them for dinner?”
“We can take some from another field.” I turned to leave.
“But these look so good.” She pulled up another vine. “I want these ones.”
“Gwen,” I said and wiped my hands on my trousers. “It wasn’t furniture I burned here – it was a coffin.”
*
She stood with the potato vine in her fist as I told her about the flame-birch and Bestefar’s second funeral. She was quiet for a long time, and began to pick the potatoes off the plants.
“Why couldn’t you just say so,” she said. You’re one to talk, I thought. “But thank you for letting me know. I haven’t changed my mind. In fact, I’d like to eat these potatoes in particular.”
She put them into the pocket of her apron and again stepped inside the blackened circle, kicking at the charcoal of the flame-birch. Like Alma dancing on Bestefar’s grave.
“There’s something here,” she said. “The blade of a knife.”
I picked up Bestefar’s blackened bayonet. On the tang was a stamp which had been hidden by the flame-birch stock. With my thumb I rubbed away the soot, to reveal a number and a swastika.
Why had I thought it was a Russian bayonet? Was it something said an eternity ago, to satisfy a child’s questions?
I recognised the number, the same as on his Mauser, still hidden under the insulation in the attic. Was it his broken bayonet? Had he broken it himself, during or after the war, in anger at what he had seen?
That was our story, over and over. I expected the truth, but found only the ashes of truth. I stood alone, to judge fragments from the past.
*
We worked and worked. Gwen gave in to the grind, slept with tender muscles and awoke hungry. She would never be a proper farmer, we both realised that, but her get-up-and-go flourished and turned us into a team that worked well and quickly.
The lorry from Strand Brenneri collected the tonnes of seed potatoes sorted into large wooden boxes. The driver nodded and commented on the quality of the crop, offered his condolences and cast a surprised look at Gwen.
I watched the lorry rumble across the cattle grid and turn onto the county road. The drone of the motor receded between the spruce trees.
Autumn stillness.
Before long we would have to bring the sheep down from the mountain. Then winter would come, and I would be tied to the farm. I had been itching to travel to France, but like a slow poisoning, the days grew calmer. Einar’s workshop was like a gravestone I passed without thinking, and Haaf Gruney existed in my memory as a place I had left many years ago.
We never mentioned the walnut or Quercus Hall. Instead we drove the Star to the lake in the mountains, cast our nets with the sun glistening on the wet mesh and on the brown-spotted trout. I snapped their necks one by one while she rowed the old w
ooden boat, which was something she could do. She managed the rowing better than either Bestefar or I had, while I took off my sweaty flannel shirt so I stood wearing only a T-shirt for the next catch. I caught myself turning sideways to lift the net, so she could see my biceps. She rowed out to the river mouth, and I watched as she guided the boat through the water, its wake like fine calligraphy on the surface. It was not yet seven o’clock, and I wanted it to be just the two of us, a brand-new start, with no past, no family, born of ourselves.
3
BUT OF COURSE IT COULD NOT LAST. ONE DAY I WAS heading into the village to shop and had to turn back because I had forgotten my wallet. As I came into the kitchen I heard her voice on the first floor. I walked noiselessly up the stairs, stopped on the stair where I had heard Bestefar’s footsteps for the last time, and listened to her speaking on the telephone, to her mother, from what I understood. It was then that I knew our time was coming to an end.
“It’s nice and hot down here,” she said, and from the rest of the conversation I could tell that she was pretending to be on a train to France, but would be home before long.
I tiptoed back downstairs, and from then on Einar, and the four days of my disappearance, never lost their hold on me. I began to search the attics for the letters he must have written to Mamma, to no avail. Settled down with the things I had brought from Haaf Gruney: the chessboard, the shotgun, the dress. The newspaper clippings. Looked for some connection. Took the roll of Orwo NP20 into the darkroom, switched on the red light and put the film in the enlarger.
Us in the lay-by. Me with my toy dog. Mamma and Einar.
I made prints of all of them. Slowly the images appeared as the chemicals sloshed about, the contrasts intensifying on the paper. Features emerged, and I could see how happy Einar was, standing there next to Mamma. In another photo, the boy who would grow up to be someone the dead could rely on.
Afterwards I developed my own films from Shetland. Bestefar’s face on the first frame, then Haaf Gruney, a few of Gwen. Finally, a detailed image: the war map from Quercus Hall, creased and dog-eared, frayed by wind, sodden with rain and dried again.
I made a large print. My hands shook a little as the map of the Daireaux woods appeared in the developing tray. I could see the ponds beyond the river.
Outside I heard Gwen call: “Where are you?”
“In here!” I said.
“Can I come in?”
“Give me a minute, I’ll be finished soon. I have light-sensitive paper in here.”
I switched off the red light. The war map was still imprinted on my retina. I hung the prints to dry under the bench and came out with only one, of Gwen rowing Patna.
“Hm,” she said and studied the photograph for a long time. “Is that how I look?”
“You did then, at least.”
“I’d be happy with that,” she said. “Being like that.”
“Come on,” I said. “Come outside with me. I’m going to show you something.”
She put on her coat and we went up to the flame-birch woods. We had walked past the previous day, but now the dew had taken hold of the twigs protruding from the ground and hundreds of delicate spiderwebs shone white in the sun.
“Do you see?” I said.
She was amazed. Shook her head slowly.
“They weren’t here yesterday,” she said. “Or we didn’t see them. It’s like an entire world, an invisible world which has become visible only now.”
She crouched down by a stump, carefully touched a spiderweb.
“Are you going to take a photo?” she said, coming back to me.
“No. I don’t need to. I’ll remember this.”
*
A name from the newspaper clippings had stayed in my head. J. Berlet. The policewoman from the investigation in 1971. I imagined myself in France, going to the police station and asking for her, then driving to a private address written on a slip of paper.
No, I told myself. It would be nothing more than a wild goose chase: bad French and misunderstandings, endless driving on three-lane motorways, reticent locals. Much better to call upon an old ally.
I went out to the log house and picked up the telephone. “Televerket’s international enquiry service, how may I be of assistance.”
“I need to get hold of Regine Anderson.”
“Which country, which address?”
“No, it’s not like that. She works for Televerket.”
A little later I had a number with a 33 prefix for Jocelyne Berlet. Regine Anderson had told me in a whisper that she was now living in Péronne, not far from Authuille. That same evening I dialled the number from the log house.
“My name is Edouard Daireaux,” I said in French. “I’m calling from Norway about a police case from twenty years ago, a search for a boy in 1971.”
She did not answer and I could hear her shifting her grip on the receiver. I reminded myself to use the polite form.
“Is this the Madame Berlet who investigated the disappearance?” I said. “I was the boy who—”
“Edouard?” she said suddenly. Her voice sounded maternal.
“Yes.”
We were silent for a long time.
“In 1971—” she began, and then stopped herself. “No. As a matter of fact, this is highly inappropriate.”
“I was wondering whether I could meet you,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” she said rather sharply. “I no longer work for the police. I retired in 1975.”
“Yes, but—”
“Tell me, what is it that you actually want?”
“If I were to come to France,” I said, “would you meet me and tell me what happened back then?”
“The case was never solved; it would be against regulations to talk to you.”
I was stretching the boundaries of what I could say in this foreign and yet strangely familiar language: “Perhaps, but will you talk to me anyway?” I hoped I did not sound too abrupt.
Jocelyne Berlet cleared her throat. “When were you thinking of coming?”
This is it, I thought. Now I’ll settle it. I fix a date, and then I’ll set out.
“Quite soon. But how well do you remember the case?”
“Remember? I remember it as though it happened . . . well, not yesterday, but last week anyway.”
4
AN EARLY FROST.
A thin layer of rime in the courtyard as I walked across to fire up the griddle in the baking cellar. The thinly chopped aspen burned quickly and fiercely. Baking lefse today. She enjoyed the simple life here, the little rewards for everything we did with our own hands. Like on Unst, where the effort of taking a bus to Lerwick in the pouring rain was repaid with a new album and an evening spent on a comfortable sofa drinking sugary tea. Brief periods of work and instant gratification, without the whole world gawping from the stands.
All of a sudden I felt afraid of a time when I might be alone, standing at this rusted griddle, thinking back on the strange period when someone had been here with me.
I went through the side door and recognised a familiar smell. It was the room with the deep freezer, the one we used for meat. I pulled open the lid a crack, and from it came a waft so disgusting that I imagined I could see it, bursting with decay, heavy as burning oil. The room was in darkness, and when I flipped the switch, nothing happened. The fuse must have blown.
It was there, in the stench, that something struck me.
The letters, Einar’s letters to Mamma. Where would you hide them here on the farm? Somewhere that was accessible. A freezer. I fetched a sack trolley and pulled it outside, wedged open the lid to let out the air.
Gwen came across the courtyard with a bucketful of lefse dough and some almond potatoes. “What is that horrendous stench?” She stopped and grabbed her nose.
“Spoiled meat.”
She stood with the bucket. “Now I know what he meant.”
“Who?”
“Grandfather. He told me that hundreds of soldiers fell
in front of the trenches. They hung there on the barbed wire and rotted in the sun. He said the smell was like that coming from a broken freezer. But we never had a broken freezer so I didn’t know what he meant. Not until now.”
“Do you still want to fry some lefse?” I said. “Or should we forget it?”
She looked at me. “I want to. More than anything, I want to fry lefse. Just put that lid down.”
*
While I rolled out the dough, I imagined how I would have hidden the letters. I might have wrapped them in plastic and tied it with twine, then put flat stones around it to get the right weight and hardness of frozen meat before wrapping it again. Marked it “Elk heart – 1967” or similar.
Later that day, after Gwen had declared that she had never tasted anything better than fresh potato lefse with goat’s cheese, I went back to the freezer. I slit open the packages on top, but found only minced elk meat which I threw in a wheelbarrow and wheeled to the edge of the woods to bury it. Three trips later I got to the bottom. Bloody water had pooled in one corner. The stench was overwhelming.
What foolishness, I said to myself. Bestefar would have thrown out any old meat. I found a package with my writing on yellowish-brown freezer tape. “Mallard – 1981”. I tore off the Lillehammer Observer from August 20 of that year, the day the hunting season opened. The first time I had been alone in Laugen with Pappa’s 16-calibre.
There were no letters in the freezer. Of course there weren’t. I had pictured it so clearly in my head, me surrounded by the nauseating odour of decay, cutting open packages as blood-pink water seeped through onto the paper, recognising Einar’s writing and hurrying because the words were blurring, disappearing as I watched, a life story trickling away in an interplay of blood and ink.
But these were just imaginings.
I now felt embarrassed to have read her letters. Had I learned so little from them? Where did she prefer to sit when she wrote to her father? Where on Hirifjell did she feel closest to him, and away from the others?
The answer was right in front of me.
*
I found Einar’s letters hidden between the materials in the cabinetmaking workshop. Planks of wood that neither Sverre nor Alma would ever touch, left to be the indulgence of the prodigal son and heir. It was as if they said: Come here and look! I may be no good at farm work, but look what I can do with a chisel and a plane, with lacquer and linseed oil.
