Northernmost

by Peter Geye

  * * *

  —

  No man ever dreamt who wasn’t fast asleep. But how else to explain what it was like to lie there with Inger beside me? The moon was gone to shine into some other window, but through ours fell the incandescence of stars, and in their light the curve of her hip and the peak of her shoulder showed faintly through her linen shift. Her face was nestled into the pillow we shared but I could hear her soft breaths.

  I closed my eyes tightly and thought of the faraway places I’d been and reminded myself that I’d not slept much lately and so might be dreaming of myself in that bed, yet when I opened my eyes and rolled over Inger was still beside me. I ran my hand down the slope of her shoulder and arm while I sent one foot burrowing through the covers and found her leg and touched her gently with my aching toes. She stirred and found my hip with her hand. I watched her eyes open and take measure of me, no doubt dubious herself.

  “It’s you, Odd Einar.”

  “Is it?”

  She stretched her legs and arched her back and then settled closer and said, “I wasn’t dreaming, then?”

  I pointed at the window. “Look, Inger. Those stars high up? They’re shining on the Krossfjorden even as they’re shining on us. I looked for you among them. I chased after you. And you brought me home.”

  She turned and pressed against me, her hand playing up my bare back and resting on my cheek. “You sweet man,” she said. She kissed my face and tugged the eiderdown from between us and let it fall on the floor before reaching down for me. “You certainly are here.” Now she rose to her knees and lifted her nightdress and sat astride me.

  She put her arms on my chest and took my face in her hands and whispered my name and moved slowly, her breasts lolling in the falling collar of her shift, my own skin thrilling at her touch. When I let out a small groan she said, “Shhh,” and held a finger to my lips. She went slower and let out her own gasp and shook her head and said, “We must be quiet,” and then closed her eyes and lips.

  I strummed my fingers down her sides and scooped the folds of her nightdress into my hands and lifted it over her head and dropped it on the bed beside us. I let the backs of my hands graze her nipples before sliding my palms around her. What I felt was not the stock of the Krag-Jørgensen or the hakapik or a coal shovel, but the lissome curve of her hips as she rolled them into me.

  She untied her hair and it fell in a veil as she whispered that she loved me. Gentle Inger. She whispered it a hundred times. I closed my eyes and tried to wake myself once more. When I looked up she was still there, her head thrown back now, the starlight glazing her throat. She moved faster, her hands gripping my knees, her body like a wave coming ashore. I held her fiercely and moved my own hips to meet hers and good lord it was not long before she folded over me again, her hair splashing across my face and her breath heavy in my ear. Sweat pooled in my belly as we softened, holding each other, before she collapsed onto her side.

  Out the window I could see the valley across the lake. The luster of starlight appeared as snow on the hillside, which meant clear skies above. I thought of the pleasure of studying the night through a glass window, and of all the nights I’d spent with nothing between my eyes and the heavens except the bitterest cold.

  I felt myself settling too, my eyelids growing heavy, and realized that I had slept and woken and made love to my wife. I knew it hadn’t been a dream. And I knew that sleep would come again and with a new kind of weight. I felt gluttonous and ready. And then I noticed a new light in the window, dull and sputtering, and saw in it a face that at first I mistook as being outside. It was a face I recognized as surely as I’d known Skjeggestad’s daughter on the street just the day before. If I didn’t flinch, it was only because I was too tired. But then I put a name to the face and turned to the doorway, where Gerd Bjornsen, Bengt’s wife, stood, a candle guttering before her, her hair wisping from under a nightcap. I again glanced at her reflection in the window and then back at her face in the door.

  Though apparently not realizing I was awake, she kept her body hidden in the darkness of the hallway, but I could see the hem of her nightdress swaying as she rocked from her heels to her toes. If my guess was right, she seemed to be focusing on Inger’s backside. I wanted to ask what had brought her to this corner of the house, yet when opening my mouth I found I had no voice. So instead I lifted the eiderdown from the floor and spread it over Inger. Only then did Gerd look at me. Her hollow, bespectacled eyes darting across my own for just a second before she turned to leave. I watched as the candlelight went down the passageway with her.

  * * *

  —

  I had finally roused myself from bed and first dug in my duffle to retrieve the Krossfjorden chart and then to the window to study it. Some combination of fog and snow had slunk down the valley and laced the shore of Gávpotjávri in white. I listened to the baaing of sheep somewhere in the brume, a sound that brought me happiness.

  At the stove I put more water on for tea. While waiting for it to warm, I unfolded Mikkelsen’s old chart and tried to locate the spot where I’d spent my first morning. Shivering and hungry, the loneliest man alive. Just the thought of that spit of land made me uneasy. Yet I couldn’t put the map down. Even when the kettle blew, I just stood there guessing at where I’d been.

  It was Inger who finally rescued me from that reverie.

  “You’ll burn the place down, Odd Einar,” she said, grabbing a mitt and removing the teakettle from the stove. “And what’s this?” She took the chart from my hands and inspected it and, when she realized what it was, folded it quickly and stowed it in a basket on the counter. “I suppose you have better things to do than woolgather over that old map.” She was already busy making me a cup of tea.

  “I suppose I do.”

  “You might start by getting dressed. But here’s your tea.” She handed me the cup and hurried across the room to the wardrobe, from which she pulled a new pair of trousers and a shirt and waistcoat. She brought the trousers back to where I stood and held them up to my waist. “I believe these are cut right. Why don’t you freshen up and try them on?”

  “What’s the hurry, Inger?”

  “There’s a man wants to meet you.”

  “What man?”

  “A man Herr Bjornsen sent for. A Herr Granerud. Marius Granerud. He came up from Tromsø, a newspaperman from Aftenposten.”

  “What could he want with me?”

  She had crossed the room and back and now held the shirt up before me. “This might be a little long in the sleeves, but it will work.”

  “Where are these clothes from, Inger?”

  She was now heading for the waistcoat. “Herr Bjornsen sent me to get them this morning. He wants you presentable.”

  “Presentable? And when did you get down to the village for all of this?”

  Now she stopped and, with my new outfit hung over her arm, said, “Herr Granerud would like to hear about what happened to you. He thinks your story might sell some newspapers.” She took the teacup from my hand. “We’re having dinner in one half hour with the Bjornsens and the newspaperman. You must get dressed.”

  Without waiting for a response, she handed me the soft clothes and nodded toward the wardrobe. “I have to go help prepare the food. Come down to the dining room when you’re ready. There will be lamb and potatoes to eat, and butter for your bread.” She took my face in her hands and kissed me on my whiskery chin before turning to leave as suddenly as she’d surprised me.

  Lamb and potatoes? The mere thought of this set my mouth watering. I could picture the butter shining on the bread, the lamb soaking in its blood. On Spitzbergen and my return home hunger had become an essential fact of my existence. Just yesterday morning, I tried to eat a rotten potato. And now mutton and bread and butter and sweet warm wine were soon to fill my cup.

  [2017]

  Greta slept and wok
e and slept again and woke the second time from a dream of this small Norwegian village more than a hundred years ago. The streets were hazed with fog, and the voice of a man she surely knew called her name. In the dream she walked toward him, his face as ghostly as the fog. Only tripping on a cobblestone saved her from meeting him, and she bolted upright in bed in the dark hotel room, breathless and completely disoriented. She tried to go back to sleep, but found herself in another kind of dream instead, recalling the Saturday after Thanksgiving.

  At her father’s house, she’d made leftovers—shredded turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, corn, asparagus, and gravy all baked into puff pastry and served with more gravy over the top. They ate at his kitchen counter, the same place she’d had breakfast nearly every morning until she left for college. After dinner, the kids played three-handed cribbage with Gus until bedtime. They went off and brushed their teeth and came back to the great room to kiss her and their grandpa good night and trundled up to read, both of them, before falling asleep. It was only eight o’clock, and she asked her father if he’d mind if she went down to the fish house. He of course didn’t, so she drove the snowy trail to town and through it and to the lake and parked right outside. The waves on the lake boomed through the darkness and she felt better before she even lit both the lantern and a cigarette with the same match.

  She found her bottle of Maker’s Mark in one of the fish boxes and grabbed a coffee cup, stepped outside and filled the cup with new snow and then poured in a little whiskey and sipped while she smoked. Grandma Eide had once said the only good thing that ever came of a North Shore winter was a Whiskey and Snow, and sitting there in the dim light with only the waves for company, she might have agreed. Not that the winters at home were much better.

  Frans had called three times before his plane departed at nine, when he sent her a text: Really? You won’t even take my call? She didn’t answer his text, either. Instead she put a new piece of sandpaper on a rubber block and started with the gunwale on the bow of the old canoe, slowly and steadily sanding it smooth. She wanted not to think, and this was a perfect job for that. After a few minutes, she paused and tuned the battery-powered transistor radio on the windowsill to WTIP and listened to an Erik Koskinen song while the smell of old cedar rose from the dust.

  Lying in the dark in the Hotel Thon, she was as much back at home as she was here under a warm duvet.

  She’d sanded the whole gunwale smooth, up and down the port and starboard sides, changing the paper twice. Sawdust had settled on her arms and hands like a second skin, and she brushed it off before deciding to make herself another drink. When she stepped out for a second cup of snow she noticed the sky had cleared in the east and with the stars came an even more raucous sea.

  Back inside, after a sip of her drink, she held the lantern right beside the canoe and studied the fine grain of the wood. She thought back to what it must’ve been like for her dad to stand in this place working silently beside his own father. It was a thought that filled her with a comfort she couldn’t articulate exactly, neither on that night over Thanksgiving nor even now, more awake with each new breath, but it came as an enormous relief on both occasions. Maybe it was because all the jobs she’d undertaken thus far in the fish house had come with unforeseen troubles. Whether it was replacing panes of broken glass in the windows or tuck-pointing the foundation or hammering new shingles on the roof, everything had been more difficult than she’d expected. Her father might have said that was how things went, and she supposed he was right.

  By the time she finished her second drink she’d made another pass around the gunwale with a finer piece of sandpaper. “Girl from the North Country” was playing. Her father’s favorite song, her song, he always insisted. She figured he’d be asleep by now, nestled on his side of the bed, the side his wife had occupied for forty-odd years still reserved for her. Greta often checked in on him late at night, as though he were one of her children. Now that it was turning winter, he wore a stocking cap to bed just as her grandfather had. Lately, she’d wondered more than once what it would be like to love someone as much as her parents loved each other. What it would be like to lose someone after such a long life together. Though she ought to have taken comfort from this speculation, it only made her own loneliness more profound.

  What had she expected, really? If she was being honest with herself—and those hours alone in the fish house were fertile times for honesty—she should’ve seen how little she trusted her feelings for Frans from the outset. They’d met at a fund-raiser he was attending at the Sons of Norway, when she was writing features for a Minneapolis weekly. After his talk about climate change in the Arctic and how the apocalyptic, long-term effects of melting ice caps and glaciers would wreak havoc on coastal areas all around the world—standard rhetoric, but delivered with panache and an old-world authority by a descendant of a polar hero and patron saint of Norway—she introduced herself and asked a few questions.

  She could still remember how he’d answered them, seriously, thoughtfully, and in an academic manner, passionately. In this, he was like most of the people she met and talked to about this science, their vehemence measured and calculated. The only thing notable about Frans was his inflection, for which he apologized at least three times. Finally she said, “Please, don’t. You speak better English than anyone I know.” This was true, even if his accent was unmistakable. After her brief interview, she said thank you and good luck and good night and thought nothing more about him. Not until the next evening, when she was having a drink with a friend at a place downtown called the Times. She might not even have recognized him in his corduroy pants and leather jacket if he hadn’t come up and introduced himself.

  Greta’s friend, whom she worked with at the weekly, excused herself soon after Frans joined them. They ended up ordering something to eat and had a couple drinks and everything about him that had been formal the night before was now easy. He had a deep laugh he was quick to use, and a powerful curiosity. He asked many more questions than she did, and by the end of the evening he said he was sad to be leaving, that she was the most interesting person he’d met in the week he’d been there. And that he hoped someday to get up to Lake Superior, it sounded so beautiful.

  “Next time you’re in town, I’ll take you up there,” she said, figuring that this would be the last time she’d ever see him. “Come in winter, though, okay? It’s the best season by far.”

  That had been in October, and right after New Year’s the phone rang on her desk at the weekly. She couldn’t say she’d thought much about him but he had crossed her mind, and when she heard his voice she felt a surprising thrill.

  “I’m here in Minneapolis,” he said.

  “Spreading more doom and gloom?” she teased.

  He laughed and said it must’ve been a false alarm, given the cold and snow that greeted his return to Minnesota.

  “So what are you doing here, then?” she asked. “How long will you be staying?”

  In her years as a journalist she’d developed the ability to tell when people were lying, and even on the phone she could hear untruth in his story about meeting with climatologists at the university. Then he said, “I’d love to have dinner.”

  This, too, sounded like a lie, though why else would he call her? So she agreed, and they met that evening at a place in Uptown near her apartment. It would take most of that winter before he admitted he was here, and kept coming back, not for climatology but simply to spend time with her. Not knowing whether to feel flattered or just embarrassed for him, she mostly laughed it off. He’d stayed four days the first visit and by early March had returned three times. For the last they made plans to drive up to the North Shore so he could finally see the big water and—why not, she figured—meet her parents.

  Naturally, up in Gunflint, Frans charmed them with his intelligence and manners and stoicism. He’d done his research on the glacial history of Lake Superior
and the North Shore and was soon telling Gus and Sarah about Lake Agassiz, the river Warren, dire wolves, and the Holocene. He did this without arrogance or condescension and even realized, halfway through their first meal together, that perhaps he was talking too much. He checked himself and by the end of the weekend was fast friends with Greta’s mother and father.

  They ventured north a couple more times in the coming months and on Thanksgiving, after dinner but before pie, Frans announced their engagement. As she sat in her usual seat at the big dining room table, watching him raise his wineglass and declare his happiness in knowing them all and having the chance to become part of their family, she felt—and there was only one word for it—unmovable. Here was this steady, handsome, considerate, quiet man. Who liked to laugh. Who wanted children. Who was worldly, with an air of nobility, especially in Norway, which she’d seen firsthand that summer. But there was no arrogance in him. He was a good man, a very good man indeed.

  Yet why had Greta’s mother asked, while they were washing the Thanksgiving dishes later that night, if she was happy?

  “Of course I’m happy, Mom. Don’t I seem happy?”

  Sarah had put her hands back in the dishwater to scrub another plate. In answer, she said, “When your father asked me to marry him, I cried for ten minutes before I could say yes. I cried because I loved him so much and couldn’t wait to be his wife.” She paused, rinsed the plate, and handed it to Greta, who started wiping it dry. “But that was a long time ago. In a different era. A different place.”

  Feeling defensive, Greta said, “The times aren’t all that different. And our life in Minneapolis isn’t very far away.”

  “Oh, I know that, sweetheart. That’s not what I’m saying.”