The snow melted and daylight flooded her studio, but it was still cold, winter in March, and she had to grit the drive when the melting snow froze again at night. By now she’d had enough of snow and ice and gritting, and so she booked the cheapest holiday she could find to a hot country, a fortnight in Tunisia, in order to work on the border. It was only possible because she could claim the trip as a business expense on her tax return, and she was always more productive when it was light and warm, and when she had no access to radio, television or the Internet. She worked diligently from morning till night; twice a day she would visit the dining hall and help herself to food from a strange cold buffet alongside limping and ailing pensioners who had travelled from Britain or Poland, so they couldn’t be that ill. During the day, if she looked up, she had a view of the sea; she would embroider using thin, matt steel threads and a few shiny silver threads, but mostly she used a linen thread as dark as the North African night when she returned to the hotel in the evening after visiting the bazaars to look at rugs and fabrics. Border after border, pattern after pattern until her eyes glazed over when she studied them closely, but which made up an ordered, harmonic whole, when she viewed them from afar. Woodwork inlaid with metal, camel bone vases and silver, pearls and stones decorating the necklines of traditional costumes, yes, this was the right place to make the border for the tapestry. It evolved slowly, and from a distance it resembled a wooden frame, only it appeared alive, as if the decorative lines were crawling like larvae or worms. And on the plane, which took off in the dark, with the border finished, rolled up and stored in the overhead luggage compartment, she asked herself what she had achieved, what she was saying with ‘Latent Fire’, which would hang in the entrance hall of the new sixth-form college in her home town, or rather, what emotions she wanted to evoke. That hadn’t been clear to her when she started, but it had become so along the way, and she visualised the space where it would be displayed and the students who would look at it every day. Teenagers aged sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, as yet to find themselves. As she had worked, her own sixth-form years had slowly come back to her, it had been a long journey. Walking to college every morning, up the steps, into the hall, up the stairs, down the corridor to her desk next to her friends whom she had known for ever, terrified of those above her in the pecking order, blind to those below. They came to her now with tiny flames flickering in their chests. The boy with the acne-covered face who had joined their class one day out of the blue and was given the desk in the last row by the window. Who never said a word, nor had anyone ever spoken to him, they didn’t even know his name. They were told it one day and had forgotten it the next. The clumsy, fat, ill-dressed girl with bad body odour, who sat on a bench in the changing room during PE lessons or at the first desk by the windows, and anyone sitting near her would pull their desks as far away as possible. The pigeon-chested, gangly Christian boy with the flickering gaze and the under bite, now it was as if he were coming to Alma on bended knees, which he had never actually done in real life because she was unapproachable, too busy staying afloat, don’t sink, don’t drown. That’s why the young are superficial, she understood that now thirty years too late, that’s why they tread water like crazy to stay afloat, struggling, fighting not to sink, extinguishing their smouldering fires of terror. Was that the reason she had never drawn people before, because she was too scared to look at them? But she had the courage now. She summoned up past fellow students in her mind, trying to represent them sympathetically, but also show her own timidity, her own fear and anguish, how they all, in different ways, suppressed their own energy, their own potential, out of sheer terror, and the catastrophic consequences that might ensue when people don’t realise that what separates them from each other is trivial compared to everything they have in common, that their apparent differences are nothing compared to everything they share, that what is at the heart of one is at the heart of all, as Gunnar Ekelöf wrote.
Back home the snow kept falling though it was nearly April. Her tenant had cleared the short stretch from Alma’s front door to her own, but hadn’t done the drive; her car was parked down by the road and Alma’s taxi didn’t stand a chance. Alma dragged her heavy suitcase, her tax-free bags and her precious hand luggage through the snow following her tenant’s downtrodden footprints and let herself into her cold house. She turned on all the radiators, lit a fire, opened a bottle of tax-free red wine and flicked through the pile of post that her tenant had picked up and left on the chest of drawers in the hall. Alma was content. She was in her own home, in front of her own fireplace, being warmed by the blazing logs; that was the great thing about the Nordic cold, people had developed methods to fight it, fireplaces and wood-burning stoves and the joy of a real fire was great, she had missed that in Tunisia. The heat of the sun during the day was welcome, of course it was, but when the sun set, the cold would linger in the brick walls which cooled her in an unfamiliar way and it took time before it passed. Whereas the Nordic winter cold could be expelled with the intense heat of the fireplace and red wine, oh Norway, she thought, and became very emotional or drunk as she sat there, feeling grateful for everything she had.
Slowly it grew milder, the light returned and melt water dripped from the roof and the branches of the trees. She had long since attached the border to the picture, but she was reluctant to deliver it. She would add a thread here, remove a stitch there, her deadline was coming up and she slept fitfully. She woke up too early in the morning, but didn’t get up because she was unable to work on only five or six hours sleep. She stayed in bed hoping for REM sleep, she would recall past dreams to lull her into dream sleep. And she dreamt that she needed the loo, but she couldn’t find one, she was in the middle of a town and there were people everywhere, but no open cafés, no open hotels, no courtyards or bushes, finally she wet herself at a crossroads. When she woke up and thought about her dream, she concluded that the border was wrong. The border had to go; the latent fire couldn’t be contained, of course it couldn’t. She rushed to her studio and removed the stitches one by one, feeling increasingly exhilarated. Of course, it couldn’t be contained, there could be no boundaries; one lucky day it would flare up and spread widely. At midnight she had finished and she emailed the chairman of the committee who had commissioned her, that she was ready. A meeting was arranged to hang the tapestry, as the construction of the school was nearing completion. The chairman asked if she could email him some digital pictures in advance, but she refused. Although she always dreaded people’s gut reaction when first encountering her tapestries, it was the only response that mattered. In her younger days she would occasionally dress up as a random visitor, go to exhibitions where her works were displayed and stand so that she could see how people’s faces changed as their eyes landed on one of her pictures. It was worst if a spectator’s face didn’t change. Best if something that looked like anguish flashed across it, if the spectator then took a few steps forwards and then a few steps back, tilted their head first to one side, then the other. It rarely happened, in fact it never had. It was wishful thinking on her part. At one time she had considered taking pictures of such spectator faces and putting them together into one big meta-work, but it was just a fleeting fancy.
The last working day before Easter, she rolled up the tapestry like the rug traders in Tunisia fold their rugs into small, compact squares for tourists to take home as hand luggage. It would never be assessed publicly, it would never be reviewed, at most there would be a note in the local paper, but that didn’t matter. The crucial moment was where she was heading now. When she would unroll it and hang it on the wall where it would be on display and spend its life, in the presence of the decoration committee.
As she lugged the heavy square into the boot of her car, the Pole arrived in her car so they were forced to exchange greetings. The Pole got out of her car, enveloped in a shiny, black puffer jacket, a leopard-print scarf around her neck and high-heeled presumably not very warm ankle boots, less Polish
-looking than she was a few years ago, but even so. She glanced at Alma and said a brief: hi, Alma. Then she turned away ostentatiously, Alma thought, and the daughter got out of the car on the other side, and stood there with a fearful or hostile expression under her pink hat. Her mother called out, she couldn’t get away fast enough, but the girl stared at Alma as if struck by lightning. The mother said something sharp in Polish, but the girl remained rooted to the spot and her mother stomped back, grabbed her arm and dragged her off, it was most unpleasant.
What was the Pole upset about? That Alma had been away. That Alma had left the snow clearing and gritting to her. That she’d had to collect Alma’s post and put it in the hall, but that wasn’t too much to ask, surely. Had the fuse blown yet again, so that she had been forced to go through the cold garage to replace it, possibly without a torch. Alma brushed it aside, got in her car and drove the short distance to the town where she had grown up. She listened to the radio to get the incident out of her mind and distract her from where she was going, but soon forgot the headlines about protests in North Africa, where she had just been, and the other news about more dead refugees found in the Strait of Lampedusa, because of where she was going, because she was about to unfold and reveal the tapestry. She knew what she had made and that it was good, that wasn’t the problem. Nor was it that the committee might reject it although she knew that she had done a good job, because the committee lacked insight into the tradition in which she was working. No, it was the revelation of her own, youthful barbarism. That members of the committee might recognise themselves in the figures battling the waves in order not to sink and recognise Alma among those standing along the shore or on dry land, not caring, not helping, who beat their breast to extinguish the tiny flames inside them, while the flames of those struggling in the deep, the drowning, had long since been extinguished by the water they swallowed.
When she saw the church tower, she left the main road; she had plenty of time and took a detour around her old sixth-form college where she had lain on the wall many, many months ago in an unsuccessful attempt to connect with her past. She felt nothing now either because all her emotions had been transferred from her to the tapestry. It was the transfer itself that was the point. Find something deep inside herself, get it up and out through her hands, then up on a wall, rid herself of it, but be the wiser for it. This was pretty much what she was thinking as she drove past her old college and onwards to the new one three kilometres away. She didn’t want to arrive a second before she was due, so she sat in darkness in the car and listened to the radio, getting cold in the process. She watched as other cars parked, and people got out and made their way to the entrance.
She left her car at seven o’clock exactly, cold but focused, opened the boot and eased out the heavy square, carried it up to the main entrance of this very modern, very functional building. From the architect’s drawings she knew where the staffroom was, and she went there with her burden. She opened the door and was met with smiles and pleasantries and a certain tension. They were crossing their fingers. They were responsible for picking the artist and didn’t want any complications with the council. She was given a cup of coffee, they fell silent; when everyone had arrived, the chairman of the committee called for attention and said ‘we might as well get straight to work’, and everyone looked at the plastic-wrapped square on the floor between Alma’s feet. The head teacher said he was terribly excited about what Alma was about to show them, could Alma possibly tell them something about her inspiration? Alma could see that he was scared of not being able to understand her work and wanted some words to lean on, should he feel pressured into commenting. But Alma had no such words. The chairman of the committee, who knew about art, came to her rescue by announcing that it was time to go. They rang the caretaker who came and carried the parcel into the entrance hall. The two stepladders she had requested were there, one at each end of the long wall, and above them hooks had been inserted according to the measurements she had sent him. Alma laid the tapestry parcel on its side, cut the plastic with a craft knife and unfolded the tapestry with its back facing upwards. The caretaker took hold of the ring in the top left-hand corner while Alma took the one in the right; they went to their separate stepladders, climbed the three steps and hung ‘Latent fire’.
Then they stepped down and back. This was the moment. Every member of the committee as well as the caretaker and Alma herself stepped back several metres and a strange silence descended upon them all. Alma saw now how brutal it was, how apocalyptic. The suppressed vulnerability of school days. ‘Oh,’ the head teacher said. ‘It’s good,’ the art expert quickly interjected. There was another silence, quite a lengthy one. ‘Yes,’ the art expert said, ‘that really is very fine.’
And it was true. The caretaker nodded in shock. And, as one person stepped closer, so another also summoned up the courage, a third mumbled the title, which had been embroidered diagonally with Alma’s name going diagonally in the opposite direction. The head teacher said nothing, not that it mattered.
The chairman of the committee thanked Alma and said the tapestry could hang there until they found a permanent solution, the school had yet to be officially opened, but they had excellent alarm systems. There was another silence. She might as well leave. ‘Yes, there’s a lot for us to look at,’ the head teacher said, as if he was being conciliatory; the chairman of the committee thanked her again, and Alma left. On her way home, she was overcome by that strange sensation which always follows the completion of a major commission, a mixture of emptiness and gratitude.
A House in Norway Page 6
