A House in Norway

by Vigdis Hjorth

  It was a strange autumn and winter. Alma worked with the ‘Latent fire’ in the breasts of the young people and spent most of her time alone. She hardly spoke to anyone. Possibly her children but only rarely, and her boyfriend, of course, but not often. She would go to her studio in her PJs in the morning and still be there in the evening, sometimes without having eaten anything all day. It wasn’t enjoyable as she had heard writers speak about their creative raptures; it was meditative, like floating on a slow, rolling wave. When the snow fell, she drove up to Sydmarksetra and skied the eight kilometre floodlit track. Even there she was mostly alone. Although several cars were parked in the car park, although cars pulled up next to hers while she put on her skis, and although several people skied past her on the first steep uphill slopes, she saw no one when she reached the top, turned right and followed the marker poles. She was all alone under the dim, yellow lamps, under the stars that seemed brighter in the forest, which was dark and heavy from the snow that lay like a lid over the dense spruce tree trunks and branches, as she passed the hare tracks. She didn’t see her girlfriends; she drove from Sydmarksetra to the public swimming pool and swam a thousand metres wearing goggles, so she could be more under the water than above it, so the sounds from the pool were muffled and everything around her was floating, pale blue, transparent. When she came home, she would work late into the night, she didn’t need to think about anyone else, that was the great thing about it, and the snow kept falling in the darkness during the day and especially at night and she was the only one to watch the large, slowly falling flakes before she went to bed, sometimes not until four o’clock in the morning. The snowfall prevented the cars from getting up the steep drive and Alma had to clear it. At times her car would get stuck in the snow anyway and she would have to dig out the snow around the tyres and try again and again, and would be on the verge of giving up, and every time she made it, she would thank providence, then drive to the petrol station where she would buy grit to scatter on the drive. But in the morning her car would be covered in snow again, as would the Pole’s car, and Alma watched her clear snow off the car one morning she had been up particularly late, worked until five o’clock, then drunk wine until six in order to come down from the elevated places she had inhabited while she worked. The Pole had started her car and was letting the engine idle to warm up while she scraped off the snow with a heavy broom, and it cascaded onto the ground, and then she scraped off the ice with something that looked like a spatula and planted in the snow next to her was the little girl, completely immobile in her snowsuit and hat and mittens, watching her mother brush and scrape. They looked like a grim painting in the morning darkness. They didn’t see her watching them because the light in the house was turned off; Alma had stared into candlelight for the last hour after her long, satisfying stretch of work knowing she could sleep for as long as she wanted to, twenty-four hours if she felt like it, and then get up when she wanted and carry on whether it was day or night. She was free to do what she liked. She had no commitments. It couldn’t go on for ever, she still had to go shopping, see the dentist, the doctor, go to the post office, but she was good at organising herself so that her periods of work became as long and as undisturbed as possible. She would rent a cheap cabin by the sea where there was no Internet, no television, where she wouldn’t be distracted by the burdensome practical chores she had to deal with at home, somewhere she wouldn’t have to clear snow. She would drive to it, her car packed with materials, create a cloistered life for herself in the cabin or at home, in the swimming pool, go skiing in the evening, working through the nights while the snow fell, and from time to time she would see the small, immobile child in the snow in the morning while her mother clambered around the car in her flimsy, high heeled ankle boots in order to dig it out, the exhaust fumes billowing out of the exhaust pipe, mixing with something that looked like night, but which was morning. The endless Norwegian winter, she thought, why didn’t they just go back to Poland; she supposed it must be even worse there.

  The temperature plummeted, the water froze in the kitchen tap and she worried the pipes would burst. More snow fell and settled on the roof, so the supporting beams groaned and she feared that they would break. She called the National Landlords Association and they recommended clearing snow off the roof, so she put on many layers of wool before her salopettes and ski jacket, so many that she could hardly walk, then she toddled like a child out into the darkness, around the house through deep snowdrifts to fetch the long, heavy wooden ladder from the back, she unhooked it and manoeuvred it up against the side of the house, walking in her own footsteps back to the garage in order to fetch a shovel; she climbed the ladder and reached the roof where she started shovelling and shovelling and the snow thundered down in front of the house and behind the house and added to the volume of snow down there which she would have to clear later. She spent several hours on the roof in the dark because she owned the house and she cared about the house and wanted to look after it, and when she was almost done, she went down and inside and heated some red wine which she poured into a Thermos flask and brought it with her back up the ladder and sat on the almost snow-cleared roof warming herself on the wine, looking across the neighbourhood and it felt good and serene to view it from above. And the wine and the sight of her neighbourhood, being so near the sky, revitalised her to such an extent that she climbed down and cleared the snow from the drive, so their cars which they’d had to leave down by the roadside the last few days and so had to carry their shopping and the Pole might have had to carry her child through the snow so their legs got wet, could finally be parked on the drive again. It was night time, it was dark, and the darkness was good, not being seen was good. She went to bed and when she woke up the next morning, the Pole had long since taken her child to nursery and gone to work, she could see their footprints in the snow, the little girl’s next to the petite woman’s high-heeled boots, it had snowed overnight and their cars had to be left on the roadside again.

  She got through Christmas with its endless practical chores, its ludicrous expense, its traffic jams, its shortage of parking spaces, its crowded shopping centres and to do lists, nothing but tedious repetitions which she executed with her heart in her mouth due to lack of time, without experiencing any deep human intimacy or the mystery of the world. When she spoke to a girlfriend who was celebrating an alternative Christmas with the Salvation Army, she felt guilty and remembered her vows in the sixth-form college schoolyard, and wondered whether to invite the Pole and her child over for Christmas. But her children rejected the idea; besides it would have been an empty gesture because Alma didn’t actually want her there for Christmas, and the Pole wouldn’t have accepted anyway because she didn’t like Alma, she didn’t like that Alma knew so much about her and hadn’t been a charitable pushover. Then her many chores made her forget all about the Pole and on the hectic Christmas Eve itself, she didn’t look towards the Pole’s windows once, and so didn’t know whether or not the lights had been on, if her car had been parked down on the road, if there had been other cars down there, if the Pole had had a visitor or been away or home alone with her child. As always before dinner Alma read aloud Rudolf Nilsen’s poem about the black town and the young birches that grew on stony ground, stretching their branches bravely towards the sun and rustling their leaves as if they breathed spring air in a forest rather than chimney smoke and street dust, but the children didn’t sit there wide-eyed, like they used to when they were little, there was nothing heavenly about the Christmas dinner, but thankfully it was soon over. January brought more snow, they were snowed in, the snow crept up and covered the window in her studio so she sat as if in a cell, working with no contact with the outside world, burning chunky logs on the fireplace which she would go to the woodshed to fetch when it was dark so that no one would see her. Helpless, human-looking figures with tiny glowing chests appeared in large numbers between her fingers, one after the other, lonely although they were clustered in grou
ps. The smallest people with very big heads stood near the bottom and away from each other, she drew their faces and their anguish horrified her. And in the chest of each and every one: tiny embers that could flare up if you blew on them and turn into a bonfire, if only they would open themselves up to one another and make real contact, but they were unable to do so and that was their tragedy because they were facing great danger, a huge wave was building and it would hit them indiscriminately, wash over and drown those at the very bottom, before rising and reaching those higher up, yes, it would swallow up everyone, unless they realised that they were all in the same picture and had to work together.

  She had harboured her own ‘Latent fire’ when she was a sixth-former. She visualised the school hall she had walked through every morning. If there had been a work of art displayed there, Alma had never noticed it. Most days for three years she had approached the big, low brick building, which rumours had it the Germans had occupied during the war, entered the hall and then gone up a staircase, down some corridors to various classrooms. She knew she must have had German and English lessons though she couldn’t remember them, but since she spoke tolerable English something must have sunk in. She couldn’t recall her Norwegian lessons, but she did remember how disappointed she had felt before accepting the reality of the situation because she’d had high hopes for those lessons; she had loved the poems they had read in secondary school, she’d had her finest literary experiences discovering poetry, hymns and the ballads of Alf Prøysen. But the literary canon she was now presented with was turgid and impenetrable, and disseminated dryly and without musicality in a language stripped of excitement and gravity. Alma couldn’t see how the short extracts from the Edda and Snorri’s sagas, and the four major writers, Ibsen, Bjørnson, Kielland and Lie had anything to do with her life. They were told to read the works of the four giants, but she never went to the library to borrow their books. She missed the textile and woodwork lessons from secondary school because sixth-form art lessons were all about drawing from life and the canvases were small and square, and any letters or graphics – other than the student’s own signature – were banned. She missed fabric and threads, even the needles on which she would prick herself so the blood would drip onto her work, reminding her of the effort invested in it, even if it was just a washbag, an apron or an oven glove. Because fabric, she thought, felt, linen, silk, cotton, had a closeness to the body, because all human beings wear clothes, even corpses are swaddled. And she would embroider text on the fabric, she believed that text and textile were connected and so would always embroider the name of whoever would wear the apron along with, say, a recipe. She had chosen humanities over the sciences, and she had never regretted that. She remembered only one scientific insight from those three years, and that was from the social sciences. And that possibly because the subject was new and thus not steeped in tradition, and was pretty much without a canon; it was taught in a fresh and experimental way. It was an observation about violence. About how violence features most frequently in two types of societies: the small, close-knit and local, and the distant and loosely connected. Firstly in the small, close-knit and local because people there are interdependent and see and experience each other as whole entities. They like or dislike one another, they love or they hate one another. Yet they remain closely connected by permanent ties. Conflicts have to be resolved or accepted, they can’t be ignored because there is no other reality, no other arena. Secondly in societies that are distant and loosely connected because people there view each other as transient, like ships passing in the night, and tomorrow another ship will arrive before sailing on to the next port, the next arena, from one possibility to another. If anything goes wrong, people just move on, which means they never invest much in personal relationships. As a result, they share few values with others and regard their fellow human beings as so remote that the rules about doing unto others couldn’t possibly apply to them.

  Having read the passage, she had pondered on it for days. It made sense to her, she found it relevant, and never threw away the book, which was entitled ‘Norwegian Society, volume 2’ in a chapter by Nils Christie. She found it on a shelf with her childish signature from her second year at sixth-form college on the first page and the name of her form: 2a.

  Was that all she had to show for those three years? Then again what if it wasn’t knowledge itself that mattered, but the process of acquiring it? People had to learn to reason, to contemplate, to object, to question, she thought, and to develop critical thinking as she had done, in their own way. And yet she would like her tapestry to inspire the students to think, just like the chapter about violence had prompted her to think, and possibly been the match that lit her latent flame, or at least caused it to flicker.

  February brought milder weather, the snow melted, February brought cold, the drive froze and became as slippery as an ice rink, Alma worked and the Pole devised a sort of path from patches of frozen grass around the large birch tree, around the old spruce and near the big rocks down to the old car with the Polish plates on the road. Then it grew milder and the ice melted and both cars could go back up the drive and often there would be cars with Polish number plates parked there and the bonnet of her tenant’s car would be up and men in overalls with tool belts would be bent over the engine, and Alma was reluctant to go outside in case she had to say hallo, it annoyed her how loudly they spoke, how they revved the engine over and over, never thinking she was sitting just a stone’s throw away trying to work. The Pole had Polish friends. The Poles stuck together, of course they did, but were they friends of the Polish interpreter or Alan? She wondered about that, although it didn’t matter. She got her rent money each month and posted a receipt in return, then one day she received a text message from the Pole saying she had discovered mice in the apartment. Alma would sometimes have mice in the basement during the winter. She would set out mouse traps in the evening and in the morning she would flush the dead mice down the lavatory, and after nights with a substantial haul, they would be gone. She went up to the apartment with her mousetraps, knocked on the door because it didn’t have a bell, and when it was opened, the faces behind it looked scared as usual, as if they continued to expect something bad to happen, perhaps they were still frightened of Alan or Alma. The door was opened just a tad and that special smell from inside wafted towards her, as did the heat, the little pink girl cowered behind her mother’s legs with big, anxious eyes. Alma offered the Pole the mousetraps, but she shook her head frantically, no, no, she said, no, no, she could not or did not want to explain herself, she shook her head vehemently and the girl looked horrified at the traps; finally the Pole closed the door and a mystified Alma had to walk back to her own house. The next day the social worker rang and said the Pole was so scared of mice that she was incapable of using a mousetrap. The mere sight of a mouse would give the Pole panic attacks. Alma said that she would be happy to empty the traps in the morning, although she couldn’t quite imagine how, given how early the Pole got up. No, the social worker said, this was a really serious phobia, and Alma got annoyed at how her tenant’s mouse problem was made to be her problem and now she had to drive to the ironmonger’s and buy mouse poison and then try to explain to the Pole how to use it, something which was a challenge in itself. Besides, it was disconcerting to be given an insight into the Pole’s emotional life, it created unwanted pictures in her head. She had visited Poland a couple of times, and she remembered the rundown, grimy tower blocks she had zoomed past on her way from the airport in the coal-polluted air, which the Pole probably had come from because if she had come from a farm, she wouldn’t have been scared of mice. But Alma preferred not to think about the Pole’s past, town or country, which must have a strong hold on her and come back to her in dreams like Alma’s home town haunted her at night, because it would make it more difficult to deal with her tenant in a professional manner as she must. Theirs was a practical and financial relationship, like a doctor to a patient, and if doct
ors started empathising with patients and feeling sorry for them, they couldn’t possibly do their job. Then again she had heard that doctors were now required to improve their communication skills, but there is a difference between empathy and communication, she thought, and decided to try harder to communicate with the Pole. Besides, she couldn’t be sure that there was more pollution in Polish towns than in Norwegian ones; perhaps it was just a myth created by the unique smell of coal, which had its own charm, and moreover, the Polish economy was picking up these days, she knew that because she would sometimes read newspaper articles about the Pole’s home country, though the Pole herself didn’t subscribe to any newspapers, Norwegian or Polish, or Alma would have seen them in her letter box or in the bin because she threw her cardboard and paper in with her household waste, although Alma had asked her to sort her recyclables and put them in the green bin, but she supposed she could always read them online. She bought mouse poison and knocked on the door with the mouse poison, determined to communicate well about how to use it, and the door was opened cautiously and the smell of the apartment wafted towards her and she noticed how hot it was inside, how flimsily the Pole was dressed in the middle of winter, while Alma as always wore a jumper on top of her jumper and was still cold, but she wanted to save electricity because energy prices were going up. She must put up the rent, she thought to herself, or at least encourage the Pole to use electricity more responsibly, and not throw paper and glass into the household waste bin, which invariably overflowed long before it was due to be emptied. But she couldn’t communicate that now, she could barely convey the information about the poison, make it clear that it was harmful to people and that the child, who was standing there peering just as nervously at the box with the picture of a mouse as she had looked at the traps and at Alma, as if Alma were the evil mouse queen herself, must not eat it. They were relieved when they let her out, and Alma was relieved to be out. She would have to write a restrained letter about electricity and recycling in English and use a translation program to turn it into Polish, once she had finished her tapestry.