The Blue Place

by Nicola Griffith

  The vindskap was dry and tidy now, nothing like the muddy, wet and cold room of my childhood winters when my mother and I pulled off boots, down jackets and sealskin hats, and leaned skis up against the wall. Even though it was dry outside, I wiped my boots carefully on the mat and Julia copied me. There was a large mirror on the far wall. I ran my fingers through my hair, more because it was expected than necessary. Julia shook her hair loose, combed it with her fingers, and tied it back again. Like Hjørdis, she looked impossibly young.

  The vindskap led into a hallway whose walls were lined with family photographs; a painted wooden staircase lay at one end and a single door in the middle.

  The sun would be up for another two or three hours but the living room blazed with candles. I smiled at the familiar warm scent of beeswax.

  “It must run in the family,” Julia said, pointing at the polished wooden floor and big French windows in the dining area that led to the back garden. The dining table was draped with a linen cloth and sparkled with three places of crystal and sterling flatware. I sighed.

  We nearly ran into Hjørdis in the kitchen doorway. She was carrying an enormous tray. “You take this one,” she said to Julia—in Norwegian, but her intent was perfectly clear. “Aud, you come in here and help me carry the rest.”

  I had told her we were on our way out to dinner, but she had laid out plates of geitost and crackers, home-cured ham and rømme and lompe, salmon and cucumber salad…. I followed Julia to the dining room table. Hjørdis brought homemade wine and fresh, very strong coffee.

  “When did you get here?” In English, this time, directed at Julia.

  “About four hours ago.”

  She handed her a steaming cup of coffee. “You don’t look tired.”

  “Aud persuaded me to take a nap.”

  “She’s good at that.” They both turned to look at me and I wondered how a person could become the outsider so fast. “So you want the key to the seter.” It was still in English but this time addressed to me.

  “Yes.”

  “When will you be there?”

  “Julia will be doing some business in the city tomorrow and perhaps the day after. Then we will go on to Lustrafjorden. If Julia likes it, we’ll stay for a week or two.”

  “Or longer.”

  Julia smiled and said, “No, I can’t take too much time away from my business.”

  “Oh, people always say that, then they see the fjord for the first time, they smell the sloping fjell and taste the water, and suddenly their very important job in the city fades to meaninglessness, and I nearly have to send in the army to evict them. So let’s say four weeks, just in case, and then I won’t have to be cross if you stay longer than you intended. Now, Aud, why don’t you explain to your polite friend what all this food is and I’ll go get the key.”

  We watched her stride out of the room. Julia smiled. “Better do as she says or she’ll eat you.”

  “A few years ago I believed she could. So. Pass me that plate with the cheese on it. This is geitost, goat’s cheese. You can put it on these crackers. It has a toasty, caramel flavour. I think you’d like it. The salmon you eat with the cucumber salad. You might find that a bit sweet. This ham you can wrap in lompe, which is that soft flatbread over there.”

  “And this?”

  “Gravadlax, buried salmon. A great delicacy.” Only Hjørdis would serve it along with geitost. “Try it if you feel brave.”

  “And this?” She lifted a dish of little, pale round things.

  “Rolled cod’s tongues.”

  The dish went back on the table with a bang, but then she picked it up again. “How do you eat them?”

  “With one of these.” I held up a long-handled silver fork with three tiny tines. “Pass the pickle castor. That crystal and silver thing on wheels.” She trundled it over. I used the tiny silver tongs to transfer a few of the silverskin onions to my plate, then skewered one with the fork, then a cod’s tongue and popped them in my mouth. I savoured the texture and bite. “You dip them in rømme, that sour cream there.”

  She spooned some onto her plate and was just dipping a tongue when Hjørdis came back. Julia, wearing her poker face, put the whole thing in her mouth and chewed. After a second or two, she looked relieved. Hjørdis laughed. “Such a pleasant surprise to see an American enjoy good, wholesome food. Now. Aud.” Julia heard the suddenly formal tone and sat up straight. “Here is the key. You’re lucky. Your mother phoned up yesterday and told me you might be wanting it. I phoned Gudrun at the farm and she will be airing everything out for you, so you will be comfortable, but next time try give me a little more notice.” She handed it over. It was big and made of black iron, and very cold. She probably kept it in the cellar. The business of the key to the family seter was purely ceremonial—the back door and windows did not even have locks—but Hjørdis took her duties as eldest family member quite seriously. “Now, eat, and Aud can tell me why she has stayed away so long, and you, Julia, can tell me all about this business of yours.”

  We never did get out to dinner. I listened for hours as Julia talked about art; about Atlanta and how she had come back to the city, where her mother now lived, from Boston. I watched Hjørdis absorbing Julia with those bright eyes; agreeing with sharp nods and the occasional emphatic ha! when Julia talked about discrimination against women in business in the South. We drank homemade tyttebaer wine with the meal, and Hjørdis’s face flushed, and Julia relaxed and talked with her hands. As the sun went down and left candlelight wavering over brow and throat, wrist and mouth, it seemed for a moment that they could be almost the same age: two women, enjoying a conversation.

  We walked back to the Bristol, but slowly. There was very little traffic, and a sharp breeze blew in from the fjord. No unusual sounds, no unusual scents. “You were quiet tonight,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  Sound of breath and boots. “I liked Hjørdis. And she seems to mean a great deal to you.”

  “She’s my aunt.” Hjørdis had always been part of my life, always there in her wooden house when my mother was busy and my father out of the country. When I was in England, I wrote to her every week, and every week she wrote back. “My father told me once that she had fought in the Resistance during the Second World War.”

  “You’ve never asked her?”

  “If she had wanted me to know, she would have told me.”

  “Is everything in Norway left so…unspoken? I’m glad you’ll be with me tomorrow when I go to Olsen Glass. You can tell me afterwards what each particular silence really meant.”

  “Nothing is unspoken in business. It’s all very straightforward. Telling the truth, and nothing but the truth, is the cardinal rule.”

  “What about the whole truth?”

  “That, too.”

  A momentary silence. “And do you believe in that, Aud Torvingen?”

  “It depends on who I’m talking to.”

  “You’re doing it again. I don’t think you’ve lied to me, exactly, but you keep information back.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “You’ve been tense all the time we’ve travelled. I hadn’t even realized that until this evening when I saw you relax at Hjørdis’s house. Do you think I’m in danger even here, in Oslo?”

  “I don’t know.” And that was what filled me with deep unease. “Reason tells me you are safe.”

  “But you don’t believe it, do you?”

  I had no idea how to explain that behind every tree, looming beyond every building I sensed the shadowy outline of Honeycutt’s puppet master, the blackmailer.

  We were walking a little faster now, and Julia’s shoulders were hunched. “Ever since Honeycutt’s house, you’ve been different. I’ve seen the way you eye the doors, gauging their sturdiness, the way you check shop windows as we pass to make sure we’re not being followed. I’ve noticed that you always walk on the curb side of the sidewalk, and you make sure cars have fully stopped before you cross a street. Especi
ally here, even though you told me I’d be safe in Norway.”

  Reason dictated that I say, You are, but what came out was, “I’ll protect you,” which puzzled me, because it was not the same thing at all.

  nine

  It was only a mile and a half from the Bristol to Vigeland Park but it was a sunny morning and our route along Bogstadsveien was lively with galleries and art shops. Julia seemed to find them amusing. Even so, we still had to cross traffic and tram tracks every few meters to look through yet another shop window: “If I’m going to design a sculpture park for a Norwegian corporation I have to get some idea of what Norwegians like.”

  She looked at the displays, I scanned the crowd.

  “A lot of Neo-Romanticism,” she said.

  “You should look in museums, not these tourist traps.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong. You need to look at both sides. I couldn’t learn about Americans’ taste for art, and that art’s history, by touring MoMA. To explain sixties pop art, for instance, I’d have to know about Disney World and Coney Island and network television as well as the formal canvases that hang on museum walls. That’s what helps me understand what will become valuable in a few years, what will be a good investment.” And then she was distracted by a collection of dolls dressed in bunad, bright red traditional costumes with tiny silver buckles and earrings. “They’re all different.”

  “Each region has its own traditional dress.”

  “Do people really wear them?”

  “Sometimes. On national holidays.” I didn’t like standing here with people brushing by on both sides.

  “Did you have one?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you wear it?”

  “When I was confirmed.” She wasn’t going to move along until I gave her what she wanted. “I was thirteen. I wore it once. Lutheran church though, no, I’m not particularly religious. It was and is more of a cultural event. I have no idea where the bunad is now.”

  “Did you have long hair?” She fingered the doll’s braid.

  “Yes.”

  “And did you wear it in braids, with ribbons?” She was grinning.

  It took us ninety minutes to reach the massive wrought-iron gates of Vigeland Park. Julia stood there for a while, just looking. “I’d like to look at this on my own for a while, I think.”

  She was wearing a peach shirt; easy to keep track of in all the green. “An hour, then. Back here.”

  The centrepiece of the park is the monolith. Standing before it, I understood why, when Vigeland was first working on these monuments, half of Oslo hated him. It is huge, made of whitish granite probably sixty-five feet tall, and depicts more than a hundred human figures twined and writhing about each other, some standing on and others clambering over their neighbours to reach the top. Not a very Norwegian sentiment. Around its base, on plinths on the steps leading up to it, are Vigeland’s vision of humanity teaching, playing, fighting, loving, eating and sleeping: a woman combing another’s hair; a man with children; a child having a tantrum. Massive figures, all naked, all gazing down at Norwegians with truth in their eyes.

  I was still there when Julia climbed the steps. “I’ve just read in the museum that that piece of granite weighed two hundred and sixty tons and in 1926 took three months to transport to here from the harbour through the streets of Oslo.”

  “Another reason for them to hate it.”

  She gazed up at the figures, shading her eyes from the sun. “Hate it?”

  “The primary tenet of Norwegian social life is something called the Jante Law: Don’t believe you are better than anyone else. We’re all equals.”

  “I don’t see what’s so bad about egalitarianism.”

  “You didn’t go to school here in the early seventies. They were ruthless: Don’t do better than anyone else. Coming here was such a relief to my eleven-year-old self. Vigeland may have been an egotistical monster, but at least he sometimes showed the truth.”

  We studied it silently for a while. “The earlier work in the museum is quite different,” she said. “There’s one particular wall relief of emaciated figures. It’s disturbing, very powerful.”

  “I like this better. You can see emaciated, tormented people anytime, in any city, especially the civilized ones.”

  “Why do you suppose his work was so large?” she said to herself as we descended the steps slowly. She stopped before the woman washing another woman’s hair. “It’s intimate, almost sexual, and yet quite ordinary. I suppose that’s what he was trying to say: everything is ordinary.”

  “He was saying everything in life is special. Every moment is a gift.”

  She looked at me for a long, long time. Her eyes were sunlit, the colour of bluebells, and still shadowed very faintly with fatigue. She turned away. “We should get moving.”

  We caught the number 2 tram back down Bogstadsveien.

  The meeting with Edvard Borlaug of Olsen Glass was on the ninth floor of their new corporate building in the heart of the revitalized eastern side of Oslo. I briefed her on the way up.

  “Don’t ask about his family. That will be seen as intrusive. He probably won’t indulge in small talk but will want to get right down to business. He will speak English, but may not always understand what you’re saying, though he’ll be too proud to admit it. I’ll do my best to step in when I think that’s happening.”

  It was an austere office, good furniture but quite plain. Borlaug was younger than I had expected. Even though she had been warned, I think his briskness took Julia aback. He strode out from behind his desk, shook Julia’s hand firmly, and announced in basic English that he was a vice president of the corporation and fully empowered to make final decisions and that the corporation hoped to open the park next spring. I suspected he had been made vice president last week.

  Julia introduced me as her “associate.” He stepped back behind his desk and gestured at the two chairs in front of it. I sat between Julia and the window, and turned my chair to have a view of the door.

  Now it was Julia’s turn. She became grave and deliberate. “I don’t know if it’s possible to open the park by spring. A lesser project, perhaps, but if as you indicated in previous communications you want a lasting monument to the corporation’s importance and achievement, it may take longer.”

  He seemed to relax: she was not some silly American out to make impossible promises. “How much longer?”

  “I think we should leave estimates about time and money until later in the discussion. Right now, we need to know what ideas you have had about what you want.”

  He pulled out a file folder. Opened it, closed it. Nervous behaviour, for a Norwegian.

  Julia became even more steady and deliberate. “Why don’t we run over several possible avenues of approach and see if any of them seem appropriate?” He assumed the half smile people do when they don’t want anyone else to know they’ve missed something, especially when they think others might think they are too young for their job.

  I cleared my throat. “Perhaps,” I said in Norwegian, “you will allow me to translate the more abstruse concepts.” He appreciated “abstruse.” No one would speak to him that way if they thought he was stupid. I repeated it in English. They both nodded. I translated.

  The meeting lasted two and a half hours. Julia was very patient. She explained to Edvard Borlaug the various options: monumental outdoor parks, like Vigeland; indoor installations; traditional or interactive; representational or abstract.

  A great deal depended, she said, upon their client base. “Who is it that you want to come and see the sculpture?”

  “Everyone. All of Oslo.”

  “Fine, very commendable. But let’s start from the beginning. We’ll need information on who uses your building—corporate clients, the general public, others?—and how they use it—which doors and so forth. Where would the most natural installation be? How would we funnel people there? How long would you like them to stay? We’ll need to know if the park is
intended purely for enjoyment or whether its proposed function is more educational. For example, would you like to see schools bringing busloads of children to trample through the installation”—her prejudices were showing; I changed “trample” to “wander”—“or would they be under the feet of your corporate clients?”

  I translated with half my mind, and used the rest to assess the room. The chairs were solid Norwegian pine; awkward as weapons, not strong enough for a shield. The desk, though, was probably a good inch of heart-of-pine, which would offer some protection from a small-calibre handgun.

  He pulled pieces of paper from his folder: plans, columns of figures. Julia read them with approval. He started to warm up. After forty minutes he seemed quite enthusiastic. They started to talk about glass—how a vitreous sculpture might hold up under the extremes of the Oslo climate. They got into maintenance questions: long-term care of the individual items of the installation; short-term care, such as keeping the grass mowed—if they decided they wanted grass because they could, of course, go with gravel. With glass and granite sculpture a gravel surface would be very evocative of the ruggedness of the Norwegian landscape. If he wanted representation of Norwegian sculpture, then, naturally, he would want something from the abstract pioneer Haukeland. And what did he have in mind for children?

  He became almost animated. Perhaps representations of figures from myth and legend—a bridge, complete with troll and billy goats Gruff; Sampo Lappelil, the little Lapp boy who defeated the king of the trolls, with his reindeer; The Woman Against the Stream. I obligingly gave Julia condensed versions of each tale. Edvard drew sketches. They were surprisingly strong-lined and clean.

  “Edvard,” Julia said suddenly, looking at one, “where did the idea for this sculpture park come from?”

  He blushed, and spoke in English. “The company made a big, a large profit last year. Which is good. But it was so large, it felt…it was felt we should not keep it all. We talked about giving it to a charity, but there are so many. And then we thought we could…” He pulled his thoughts together. “This part of the city is being built again. For a long time it was…”