A House in Norway

by Vigdis Hjorth

  The Poles, however, appeared to like what they saw. It was late summer, golden afternoon light poured through the windows and outside the leaves on the trees rustled in the warm wind. The Polish woman had a slightly rounded stomach, she must be pregnant, Alma thought, but she pretended not to notice and didn’t want to think about it because the Polish woman smiled like a young girl and touched the flimsy, eggshell-coloured, almost transparent cotton curtains with affection. Alma had made them and put them up and they gave the room a dreamy quality. And she had mounted one of her less important works above the double bed; an embroidered picture of a tiny coltsfoot in bud and a Hans Christian Andersen quote: ‘Just living is not enough. You must have sunshine, freedom and a little flower.’

  The man asked where they could do their laundry and Alma’s eyes flickered. She had promised herself that she wouldn’t let her next tenants use the laundry room in her basement. In the past they had been allowed to use it; they could let themselves in from the garage, but it troubled her that it also gave them access to the rest of her house because there was no lockable door between the laundry room and her hall. It had worried her a few times when she had been away, the thought of how vulnerable all her possessions were. Besides, tenants did a lot of laundry, never once thinking of the cost of electricity. They could easily wash two, three loads at a time and at high temperatures, 60° or 90°, she noticed when she checked the laundry room once she had heard the garage door open and then close again. But seeing as the apartment had been empty for months when the Polish man asked about laundry facilities, she ushered the couple into the basement through the garage door and showed them the washing machine and the tumble dryer, and they nodded contentedly and the young woman beamed at Alma. From the basement they walked up into the living room which Alma had tidied for the occasion; she printed out two copies of the tenancy agreement and the man signed them and Alma signed them and money was counted and changed hands, keys were handed over, both for the apartment and the laundry room, and they agreed to sort out the deposit at a later date.

  The couple moved in the very next day. Or at least Alma saw the man and the car several times as he carried things into the apartment before driving off again. Alma presumed that the woman was inside the apartment as the lights were now on. They looked like a nice couple. One day she was invited in and the man showed her that he had painted the bedroom in anticipation of the new baby. It looked much nicer than it used to. The woman’s stomach grew. The leaves fell. From time to time Alma thought about the outstanding deposit; she had vowed solemnly never to let out the apartment without it because she had had her fingers burned before. But she never did address it; she had too many other things to do. The various commissions she had taken on to pay the bills, making banners for bands and trade unions, not to mention the prestigious tapestry that would be hung in the foyer of the new town hall they were building in her home town, how would she find the time? Then she had her children staying with her and when she didn’t have them, she often had a boyfriend around, but there was always work to do. She was hunched over it from morning till night, embroidering a banner while thinking about the town hall tapestry when she suddenly had an idea: stop work on the banner and rent a simple cabin in the mountains where she could work on the town hall tapestry without domestic distractions. Her tapestry would depict the forest from which the district had always made its living, but represent it as mysterious and beckoning, just as she had experienced it as a child, like an organism beyond human comprehension with its own form of consciousness. Frightening, yet also a safe haven. Faced with embarrassment or danger, big boys, angry women or drunken men, she would run to the forest and when she reached it, she would feel safe because she knew the forest and it told no tales. Whenever she roamed around the forest, she was always looking for places to hide. She was either outside the forest or deep inside it, swallowed up by the forest and a part of it, the sounds of birds and insects and running water and the smell of moss and rotting trees and new shoots and mushrooms and of animals that have only just disappeared. Thus every step into the forest was filled with anticipation, as all transitions are fearful, standing at the edge of the forest, being on the threshold, she could lose herself. But what she wanted to communicate was that the thought of losing the forest, indeed any forest in the world, of not being able to walk in a forest, was unbearable. At night when she sat bent over the canvas under the cabin lamp, she would sometimes experience a surge of inspiration and know that she was on the right track. Then she drove home. There was still much to do, but she had made a start.

  Once she got back, the Polish man knocked on the door to ask if it was all right for him to tile the bathroom floor. Of course, Alma said, what could be better, the linoleum was unattractive. She gathered that he would do it at his own expense, for his and his little family’s sake, for the child they were expecting, but it also increased the value of the apartment. Consider that the deposit, Alma said, which more or less resolved the deposit issue. She rarely bumped into them. She noticed their car, of course, when it was parked next to her own or when it came up the drive and she was in the kitchen and saw one or both of them getting out with their shopping bags or leaving the apartment to get into the car, start it and drive off. The snow started to fall.

  One very cold night in February there was a knock on the front door and Alma opened it in her pyjamas. It was the Polish man waving his arms about, he seemed drunk. He had spoken for quite a long time before she realised he was telling her that the baby had been born and it was a girl, he was excited and animated. Alma congratulated him and they stood there a little awkwardly before he staggered back up to his own place. When she had closed the door behind him, she felt sorry for him or maybe it went deeper than that because she’d had a few drinks herself. There was something touching, but at the same pitiful about him coming to her with what was for him such life-changing news. She found a bottle of brandy at the bottom of a cupboard along with two shot glasses and walked up to the apartment. When he opened the door, she handed him one and poured brandy into them both, clinked her glass against his and toasted the new arrival. Again he showed her the freshly painted bedroom which had now been equipped with a cot and a hanging mobile with hearts and bows, and she smiled, handed him the bottle and walked back home feeling good about herself.

  So now there were three of them in the apartment. She rarely saw the woman and the baby and she wondered why they never went out for a walk. She would have liked to see the child who had been born on her patch, so to speak. On the rare occasions they appeared, at the weekends, they were always accompanied by the man and seemed to walk very quickly, Alma thought, past her kitchen window from where she could see them as they got into their car, almost as if they didn’t want to be seen. The man disappeared every morning wearing overalls, big and broad with a determined, forward leaning gait; somehow the chipped canine tooth made him seem more masculine. When the porch above her front door collapsed under the pressure from the heavy snow and had been lying broken in the snowdrifts for weeks, four Poles appeared one day and started rebuilding it. They were friends of the Polish man. He cared about the house and wanted it to look respectable and he understood that Alma couldn’t manage everything on her own. She realised that she wasn’t expected to pay for it because suddenly they were gone and the porch fixed. She drove to the off-licence and bought two fine bottles of brandy as a thank you, knocked on the door to the apartment and the man opened it, smiling, with just a towel wrapped around his waist and the woman was behind him, wearing only a dressing gown, and they giggled as if they had been drinking or were about to make love, or possibly both. We mustn’t get any more familiar than this, Alma thought. Every month the man would pay the rent in cash and she would write him a receipt. It was a carefree time.

  A few years passed. The baby grew into a toddler, Alma could see because in the spring and summer, mother and child would occasionally sit on the terrace furthest away, under the t
rees where it was difficult for Alma to see them properly. She could tell that the child was growing from its clothes which she would sometimes take out of the washing machine and put in a basket when she needed to use the machine herself. And Alma’s own children grew up, turned into adults, moved away to study and moved back, they came and went, swapped rooms. Her younger daughter, who now used the bedroom that shared a wall with the apartment, complained that the tenants took long showers late at night. The gurgling from the pipes kept her awake. Alma was reluctant to mention it, but fretted about the cost of all that hot water. The tenants were probably using it without giving it a moment’s thought because they weren’t the ones who were paying for it. One day, she thought, she would have to arrange for the tenants to pay their own utility bills. But at the moment her finances weren’t too bad. She had finished and delivered the town hall tapestry and attended the inaug-uration of the town hall along with some quite prominent people, and several of them had remarked that they thought the tapestry was fine even though the forest looked rather forbidding. It’s almost as if you don’t want to ruin it, a woman had said, and Alma had been pleased that she had succeeded in making the forest come alive and seem worth preserving as she had with all the creatures that live inside it and which people never think about. It was good that all this was clearly communicated in Alma’s picture. After that tapestry she received several lucrative and interesting commissions and was offered the chance to express her views on a variety of issues. Alma was doing well for herself. Whenever she bumped into the Polish woman she would smile and the Pole would smile back, but rather stiffly, Alma thought, and the child would look away as if it were shy. Alma’s boyfriend had commented on the Polish woman once saying she was pretty, but very Polish-looking; he was referring to her heavy make-up. Alma could see what he meant, but didn’t like him thinking about her in those terms, like an object, like a woman. And the child was beautiful, he said, and that was true, with long, blonde curls like a princess, only she was dressed in a rather fussy style, in Alma’s opinion. A girl aged twelve or thirteen emerged from the Polish car for several days in a row, as if she was staying in the apartment from time to time. The man’s daughter from a previous relationship, Alma assumed, visiting from Poland during the school holidays, she came at Christmas and Easter. When Alma pressed her ear against the kitchen window through the curtain, she could hear them speaking Polish. In the summer an elderly woman arrived, the Polish woman’s mother, she was told, because she introduced them, almost proudly: I have a mother. Which Alma didn’t because her parents were dead, and it probably seemed as if Alma didn’t have any friends either, given how rarely she had visitors; she was on her own most of the time and probably lonely, they might think because they didn’t understand that this was Alma’s choice, that she liked it this way, working alone on her tapestries, feeling the canvas between her hands. But anyway, for several weeks at a time five people would share the small apartment; they would sit on colourful plastic chairs outside on the terrace under two big parasols, barbecuing. The apartment was packed to the rafters, but Alma didn’t say anything – what could she say? When she had been for a swim, had a beer and sketched pictures on the jetty in the twilight, she would be in high spirits as she walked back in her towelling robe. If she happened to bump into them, she would tell them that the water was lovely, that they ought to go for a swim, but they never did, they never went down to the sea like she did. She guessed they came from central Poland and weren’t comfortable with salt water. But she only rarely bumped into them, they tended to avoid each other. She didn’t know why, but their meetings were usually accompanied by a sense of unease. Then again, she felt uncomfortable meeting most people, apart from those she knew very well, which wasn’t many. She wouldn’t go down to her letter box to collect her post if her tenants were about to get into the car, or had just parked it and were about to get out. Was it because she owned what they rented? Because the power balance was unequal, that is if you could talk about power in such cases, and you probably could. Or that they were so different, lived so differently, had such different tastes, and yet because they lived cheek by jowl, they couldn’t hide from each other and were ashamed of the sides to themselves they involuntarily revealed? The Polish woman’s dependency on the man whereas Alma appeared independent? Or that she was a smoker? The Poles smoked. Alma worried that the smell of smoke would linger in the curtains and the cushions and the walls and the carpet in the apartment. But perhaps they didn’t smoke inside the apartment because they were in the habit of standing outside on the front steps smoking, she would see them when she drove up and when they saw her car, they would stand close to the wall so they wouldn’t have to say hello. There was a big jam jar filled with old cigarette butts on the terrace, she would see it whenever she happened to take a stroll around the garden. The moment they got out of the car they would light up, so they probably didn’t smoke in the car because of the child; it was possible that at least some Norwegian values had started to creep in, or perhaps they also had smoking bans in Poland? They would smoke on their way to the car and if the Polish woman was going to the laundry room, then she would smoke there, Alma would step inside her own hall and detect a whiff of smoke and would know that the Pole had been in the laundry room. But what did Alma reveal about herself that she was ashamed of? The messy laundry room, overflowing with empty bottles? The unkempt garden? The fact that every now and then she would stumble out of a cab, drunk, and tip her handbag upside down to find her keys so that when she went outside the next day, her make-up, notebook, pens, hair slides and loose change would be scattered across the steps, something the Polish man must have seen when he left for work earlier that morning, and so she avoided them. The fact that on a few occasions she had lost her bag when she was out, or her bag had been stolen, or she had lost her keys and the spare key wasn’t in the garage as usual, and then she’d had to smash one of the smaller windows in the bedroom that shared a wall with the apartment. They might have heard her outside in the middle of the night, Alma using a rock to break into her own house. When she told her son, who happened to be stopping by and had wondered about the missing windowpane, he said that she could have asked to borrow her tenants’ basement key to let herself in. The thought had never even crossed her mind and it was a non-starter anyway. They would have seen that she was drunk and she would have had to explain herself and then she would be indebted to them because she had woken them up in the middle of the night, needing their help. Smashing a window, taking out the frame the next day, driving to the glazier and getting him to fit it with new glass was a much simpler option. Who cared if they saw her climb through the hole where the window used to be for several days in the middle of winter? Sometimes she would bring home a man, and they would play music half the night and make love loudly. Her tenants must surely hear that, if sounds really travelled as her daughter had claimed, even though Alma closed the door to the bedroom and also the door to the living room before she put on the music, but then again, it was a rare occurrence these days, and the all-night partying was also on the wane. No, it wasn’t the partying or the love-making, but all of Alma’s life, all of Alma herself that must come across as strange and bizarre, contemptible even in their eyes. The fact that she lived alone in a big house with a large garden that she failed to look after properly due to time and money constraints; the Poles clearly had no idea how much work it was to tidy a garage, how expensive it was to paint a house or how much a lawnmower cost. The fact that she stayed up late with the light on in her studio all night. And later, at dawn, she would be in such a state of nervous tension that she couldn’t sleep so she would sit in the living room watching stupid things on the Internet. Perhaps the Poles might notice that if they ever glanced up at Alma’s dining room window when they cleared snow off their car. And that she sometimes slept late so that if they rang the doorbell, in the morning or afternoon, to discuss some issue, she might not answer it although there was every indication that she wa
s at home because her car was outside and it had snowed that night and there were no footsteps leading from Alma’s door. Or she would appear in her pyjamas or old long johns, a woollen jumper and woolly socks and her hair all messy because sometimes when she was on a roll, she might work several days in a row without a change of clothes or a shower, and if they rang the doorbell during such a period and she opened it, they would see piles of clothing and bin bags full of rubbish in the hallway which she hadn’t found the time to take out, half-empty coffee cups, dirty wine glasses and suitcases on the floor and stairs waiting to be unpacked, piles of unopened post and unread newspapers on the chest of drawers and on the chair. Like in the run-up to the delivery of the town hall picture when they had knocked for some reason and she didn’t think that she had time to open the door, but did it anyway and the Polish man had taken a step back at the sight of her, as if Alma were mad or dangerous. She remembered at the time, during the run-up, how she had envied painters, especially the Expressionists, who could change a picture with one brushstroke. One strong, decisive sweep of the arm and hey presto! A line like that in one of Alma’s works took a thousand hours. Needle up, needle down, stitches close together, one after the other, a stitch in time did not save nine because she needed to make a forest of stitches, she could see the finished picture in her mind’s eye, but the path taking her there was long. What made Alma’s work so demanding was that she simultaneously had to be close to it as if she were short-sighted and at the same time view it from a distance as if she were a long-sighted person, in order for the tiny stitches to merge into a huge, living forest, a cascade of trees filled with insects frozen in time, but the road to the cascading moment took for ever, at times it was unbearable, she grew impatient, scared of losing her vision along the way during this laborious process. On the other hand, once the stitches were in place, the moment would last forever, that was the paradox in Alma’s work, which she loved, and which the Poles knew nothing about. How Alma’s identity was linked to the tiny movements of her hands, her indefatigable efforts on the canvas with wool and silk thread, the Poles knew nothing about that. How Alma’s self-esteem was linked to requests for banners from trade unions and bands; no matter how insignificant they might seem to others, they were of great significance to the people involved. Not to mention commissions where she chose the image and the text, such as the decoration of the entrance hall at the new sixth-form college back in the town where she was born and bred, and which she had undoubtedly been asked to do because they were so pleased with the town hall picture. When working on that she hadn’t gone back to her childhood home. She hadn’t been there since her parents had died and their house had been cleared out and sold, and she didn’t want to go there now. However, when she was asked to design a tapestry for the new sixth-form college, she did get into her car and drove to visit her home town, although she had mixed feelings about it.