A House in Norway

by Vigdis Hjorth

  But she didn’t want to draw Norwegian soldiers in Afghanistan, Norwegian bombs dropping on Libya destroy-ing the infrastructure and killing civilians while apparently saving them from Gaddafi, who hadn’t introduced demo-cracy; and having removed Gaddafi and destroyed the infrastructure, would in all probability pull out and leave the clear-up work to random strongmen with weapons, who had no intention of promulgating democracy. It was too simple. Too simplistic to draw wealth on one half of the globe and poverty on the other, although it was the truth, it had become trite. Artists had already done so countless times without it changing anything, so why repeat it? At the same time knowing this, it was impossible to celebrate Norwegian independence and Norwegian democracy and Norway as a peaceful nation, to sketch sentimental log cabins on green meadows with grazing chocolate milk cows and fluttering Norwegian flags in the landscape, no matter how much she valued it and wanted to preserve it untouched. Some of the houses would have to have filthy windows and she would need to sketch cowpats and all the methane rising from the cows’ rears, but it felt wrong. The more she thought about it, the more she realised that she wouldn’t be able to do it unless she chose an abstract approach. But that was the coward’s way out because it wasn’t the way she worked. She should never have accepted the commission, but she couldn’t go back on it now because she had as good as spent the 200,000 kroner advance and she had no hope of paying it back. While she agonised over these depressing thoughts, the sun had set, fortunately, so no one could see her filthy windows any more. Perhaps she could depict that? The dark time that turned people into shadows. The long Norwegian winter that made people blissfully invisible to one another. She put on something dark with no reflective stripes and sneaked down to her letter box. It contained, she saw when she came back, a bill from the tax office for an advance payment. She had blanked it out. If she were to make that payment, she would have to ask for another advance. She did so the next day and she got it, although she sensed reluctance in the voice of the chair of the committee. That same afternoon she boarded a ferry to Kiel, her car crammed with dark materials, her daughter would have to fend for herself. When the ferry departed, she was able to breathe more freely and her fear dissipated. Fortunately there was hardly anyone on board, it was winter and midweek. She found a window seat in the bar at the stern of the ferry. From there she watched her homeland slowly dwindle as she drank sparkling wine and felt with all her being that her decision to go abroad had been a good one.

  It wasn’t until the next morning, in Kiel, that she called her boyfriend who was pleasantly surprised to hear that she was up so early because it was only nine o’clock. When she told him where she was, however, he became upset and said she could have asked him. When are you coming home, he wanted to know, but she couldn’t say, only that she wouldn’t be able to make the trip to Spain, which incidentally she couldn’t afford anyway. She told him about her tax bill and the Constitution tapestry, how she was desperate for inspiration, how she had to observe Norway from afar. He heaved a sigh, but fortunately he respected financial arguments.

  There was no snow on the Continent. On the Continent it was spring. On the Continent the sky was high and light blue and the roads stretched wide towards the south. There was little traffic. She took the directions to Hamburg and just a few hours later she approached the city and followed the signs to the railway station. Her car was on the train before six p.m. and Alma explored the streets of Hamburg in order to eat Bratwurst and drink beer. She found a greasy spoon near the station where other travellers were eating smoking hot sausages with mustard and drinking beer and cider from fat tankards; she felt at home and present and very free. She took out her sketchpad and drew the travellers, took out her mobile and wrote an affectionate text message to her boyfriend saying that she missed him. It wasn’t true, but it was easy to be charitable when she was feeling good, when there was anticipation in the air, when she was on an adventure. She called her daughter and said that she loved her and her daughter told her she had found a flat and would be moving out soon; the future looked bright. About ten o’clock she returned to the train, found her compartment and settled in, then went to the restaurant car and drank wine, while Germany rushed past in the night. She awoke in Munich the next morning, drove across the Alps in a sunny and inspiring dawn light and reached the Italian border. And then, only hours later, she saw the sea, magnificent and turquoise. She drank coffee at a roadside café with a view of the sea and wrote a text home that she could see the sea and that the mimosas were in bloom. She remembered that she hadn’t cancelled her newspaper so she did that, and texted the Pole asking if she would please take in her post while she was away. She received a text back saying ‘OK’, but no smiley.

  One Saturday morning she drove to Trieste, found a hotel by the harbour and explored the city. There was a demo in progress on the square in front of the town hall. She stopped, as did others, in order to have a look. About thirty people, most of them young, but a few desperate older ones with posters and banners, shouting slogans with clenched fists. She asked the young man next to her, in English, what they were protesting about. The financial crisis, he said, unemployment. Again she looked at the protesters, then her gaze shifted towards the people standing on the pavement on the other side, watching, as she was. What kind of people were they? Why weren’t they protesting?

  She sat down in the nearest of the many cafés in the square, took out her sketchbook and drew the people who were looking on with pale faces, wrapped up in their Saturday clothing. They hadn’t walked on, but stopped and were watching without moving. What was it about them? What were they thinking? The next day she drove further down the coast, rented a room in a small, cheap hotel in a small, sleepy village by the sea, and turned the room into her studio. She put aside ‘How it should be between people’, now determined to draw the spectators at the demo. She embroidered them in dark threads and they looked gloomy. Their arms helpless, useless, long and paralysed along their bodies. She could see the sea if she looked up, and some strange, wooden contraptions rising from the sea, which probably had something to do with fishing. When evening came, they became impossibly black against the dark blue sky, they looked like heavy, home-made aerials stretching up for something out of reach, which would explain why they looked so depressed; she added them to her tapestry. As her work progressed, she started having nightmares. Always about houses whose floorboards gave way or were missing, so that they were uninhabitable, even dangerous to live in. Anyone who moved around in them had to take great care. In one dream, a whole balcony collapsed and there was no way to get down because the ladder had missing rungs and rails. She couldn’t stay there, but was trapped; she had to ring some builders and have it repaired once and for all, shore it up, regardless of the cost. When she woke up in the morning and wrote down her dream in order to calm herself, she understood that the house represented her, her own unstable, practically uninhabitable interior, carelessly cobbled together in her youth, now run down, in need of total renovation, to be rebuilt from the ground up because tarting up the front when the supporting beams are missing or could collapse at any moment, was pointless. Once she had finished writing, however, it felt less urgent and she asked herself if the dream was in fact telling her about an actual defect in her very real house, if her subconscious had registered a building defect or a problem in the electric installations that might prove fatal. And now she was in Italy with no control over her house and the electrics. The Pole was in charge and she didn’t own the house and tended to treat it quite irresponsibly. As did the children, her daughter also behaved irresponsibly and turned the thermostat controlling the bathroom heating to maximum, although it increased the risk of the pipes being damaged, she washed three garments at a time, and ran the dishwasher when it was only half full, and always turned on every light above the cooker and when the bulbs blew, Alma had to go to a specialist shop to find new ones and pay good money to replace them, and they were really fiddly to
replace. She would leave the light on in the laundry room when she left, so that sometimes it would be on for days at a time. And if the fluorescent tube were to go, Alma probably wouldn’t be able to get a new one, given how old it was, and her daughter also forgot to turn off the light in the garage when she had been there and where the fluorescent tubes were just as ancient. And she visualised the garage and wrote a reminder on her sketchbook that she must remember to get the hot water pipes, which passed through the garage, insulated before next winter so the hot water wouldn’t freeze before it reached the kitchen, as it had done this winter. That’s what comes with owning a house, she thought. In the summer, you have to prepare for the coming winter. People in the North have always had to do this, that’s why they evolved and became innovative; they could never live in the moment like the Italians because they knew that winter was coming. And talking about winter, she ought to install a heat pump because the house wasn’t insulated and every single radiator would be turned on to maximum when the children came home for Christmas because they wanted to walk around barefooted and in sleeveless vests, while Alma automatically put on thermal underwear when she got up because she knew how much electricity cost and she was paying for it. Before going to bed at night as the last person, she would turn down the radiators to at least 25°C, but when she got up the next morning as the last person to get up, they would be turned up again to 30°C which was the maximum, but had the maximum been forty, they would surely have been turned up to that because her children weren’t paying the electricity bills, and nor was the Pole. She decided to have a separate meter installed to measure the electricity consumption in the apartment, and added it to her to do list. And she was about to call her daughter and ask her to please remember to turn off the radiators and all the lights before she moved out, but stopped herself. It was just a house, she reminded herself, it was only money. And we only live once, she said to herself, and we live on a star.

  She had gone abroad to observe her home country from a distance, but what she saw most clearly in Italy was her own house in danger. It was always thus. When she explored a topic, she ended up exploring herself. In order to understand what she was facing, she first had to realise something about herself. This was most unpleasant because what she learned about herself was usually embarrassing and unflattering, such as her identification with the impotent spectators on the pavement in Trieste. And that the probing antennae sticking up from the sea, reaching for the sky, in the bay outside her window, were Alma herself yearning for greatness, rather than participating in the here and now, the ordinary, earthly life. And because she only rarely came anywhere near greatness, she was fundamentally dissatisfied. Added to her underlying discontent was the unease of exposing her weakness, and also a nagging feeling of being self-obsessed. She had set out to examine the constitution and democracy, and ended up fretting about her own personal possessions. And she knew that if she didn’t get through this process, then the tapestry would ultimately appear narcissistic. Crossing the finishing line was difficult. But she also knew, and this was crucial, that if she managed to cross the finishing line, her work would be a way of participating.

  One day she was having lunch at the local café where the television was always on, and it was showing the world cross-country skiing championship. Alma knew about it because her boyfriend sent her a text every time it was won by a Norwegian, and that was all the time. That morning it was the women’s 30 km classic and it was reaching its climax, Alma gathered from the Italian commentator’s voice. Marit Bjørgen was in the lead, of course, and Alma had paid and was about to leave when the voices from the screen rose in pitch as a woman came up behind Bjørgen at great speed, and suddenly she was parallel with Bjørgen and the finishing line was less than a hundred metres away and Alma, who wasn’t interested in sport and had often railed about how many column inches a minority sport like cross-country skiing was given in Norwegian media, cheered Bjørgen, because you do, don’t you, but it was no use, Bjørgen was beaten into second place at the finishing line. And, of course, Alma’s boyfriend didn’t text her. On the screen the winner celebrated with her countrymen, she was Justyna Kowalczyk from Poland, who looked like her tenant, Alma could see, only she was grinning more broadly than Alma ever remembered seeing the Pole do. Alma became anxious as she sat there, imagining the Pole and her daughter sitting in front of their television, how they would cheer Justyna and hug each other when she crossed the finishing line as the winner, the victory being all the sweeter because she had beaten the Norwegian Bjørgen. She thought about texting them her congratulations, but decided against it, it was too much.