by Peter Geye
“Sort of,” Stig said.
“When you go home tonight,” Ava asked, “where will you sleep?”
“On my bed, of course.”
“And where is your bed?”
“On my boat.”
“I think that means you live on a boat.”
“What kind of boat?” Greta asked.
“A sailboat. A forty-five-foot Hutting.”
“Wait! You live here on a boat?”
“I live now on a boat.” He took another sip. “It’s not just any boat. It’s fitted out for Arctic latitudes. This is only my second winter on her. I was thinking of heading down to San Sebastián after Christmas.”
“What kind of a man can just sail off to San Sebastián?” Greta asked.
Ava’s tone—until then teasing, almost sisterly—now turned solemn. “If Stig wants to go to San Sebastián, it is okay. Anywhere he wants to go it is okay.”
Stig peered into his glass again, sighed, and glanced up, as though he’d seen a ghost in the amber whirl of whiskey. “I am a lucky man, yes,” he said. “To sail around without a care.”
His voice belied a storm his eyes gave away. They went wet and pensive, and behind them Greta could see a kind of bareness. She knew the look well from studying her own sleep-deprived reflection in the bathroom mirror almost every morning. It took her breath away to recognize it so clearly in someone else.
“Why is it fitted for the Arctic?” she asked, not even realizing she was appraising him.
Now the faraway look came closer, and he said, “Because I like the North. I like the ice. And I like to see it when I am alone.”
“He also likes to be among the living,” Ava added. “But I’m going to go outside to smoke.” She flipped open the box of cigarettes and offered them as she stood. “I only smoke in the twenty-four-hour dark. I wish I could stop.”
Greta shook her head, and Stig said, “I’m going to steal another whiskey while you’re gone.”
Ava closed her eyes tight, miming that she’d see no evil, and Stig got up and followed her to the bar. Ava continued out into the lobby, and Stig scooped ice into a cocktail glass and poured a splash. Greta watched him, the easiness of his stride, the wave of his hair. Before he returned, he reached up to the stereo receiver and dialed the knob. He twisted another and the radio moved to a different station, and a song she recognized filled the restaurant.
She watched him walk back as she’d watched him walk off, the drink in his upturned hand. “I should have offered you one,” he said.
Greta lifted her wineglass. “I’m okay. I’ve probably had enough.”
“Ava,” he said, as though she needed no further explanation, but then quickly added, “She is a bad influence. When I am here, she sits and listens to me and pours me drinks. We are old friends.”
“I wish I had a friend like her,” Greta said, raising her voice and her eyebrows at the same time, hoping to glean what sort of friend Ava was, exactly. When he offered nothing, she asked, “Your boat, what’s her name?”
“Like the song I played for you. Vannhimmel.”
“Yes, but what does it mean?”
He pointed out the window into the dark night. “In the Arctic, when ships or men are caught in ice, they can use the sky to find open water. The water’s reflection in the sky is brighter than the ice’s. That is Vannhimmel. Water-sky.”
Yes was all she could think.
They traded long looks and though she’d never admit it to anyone—not even him, in the months to come—in that instant she felt that a water-sky was shining down on her and that under its light she herself brightened.
She took a deep breath and said, “Well, it’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard, that song.”
“Music is only as beautiful as the ear that hears it.”
“Seems to me that it takes two,” Greta said, not sure what she meant.
“A song is nothing without someone to listen to it.” He appeared to be thinking something through, his head bobbing slowly. “I have been trying to make that song right for a long time. Since I sailed the Vannhimmel up to Svalbard when I first got her.” He paused again. “Tonight is the first time it sounded right.”
The bottom of Greta’s stomach dropped.
“It was nice to have you listening,” he said.
[1897]
“What sounds do I recall?” I asked.
Marius Granerud nodded, his hands folded over his belly, his eyes heavy in their folds. Here in his office he appeared much older than he had at Bengt’s feast, and perhaps it was my perception of his agedness that made me ponder his questions as though they might reacquaint me with the power of belief. It was only the second morning of our interviews, and already I realized that my powers of description were inadequate to the memories themselves. He also knew this, and waited patiently in his chair while I attempted to conjure the echoes of my first morning as a castaway.
After a moment I said, “I might better tell you about the sounds I didn’t hear.”
“What?”
“Birds. The birds were gone that morning. All their cawing and whistling. I had grown so used to their racket that its absence alarmed me.” I paused to consider this. “Their sound was like life, and without it, well…”
Granerud dipped his nib in an inkwell and scribbled a note, then looked back up at me.
“I’d never known such a strange morning,” I continued. “I woke nestled into that pile of rocks as though I were some gnarly old post planted into the tundra. The Krag-Jørgensen lay across my lap, and as I sat there in the dark—mind you, a darkness so complete I couldn’t see the nose beneath my eyes—praying for the dawn, all I had were my other senses. Touch and sound and smell. Which is why I noted there were no birds. Now that I think on it, the silence was as powerful as the blackness. Or so I told myself, to prove I hadn’t died in that long night before.”
There appeared on Granerud’s face a look of satisfaction. Like that of a father proud to have taught his son how to raise a sail. I might have felt condescended to, but in truth I felt much as that son might’ve, and so I kept on.
“It was something else to wake with even fewer prospects than I’d had the night before, but there I was. As the first light of day rose, I was a blind man. You’ve never seen fog the likes of this. And a cold fog it was. The snow was melting, I could hear it, which meant it had warmed overnight. But the fog, why, it gave the air an icy clutch. And it lingered, I think for hours, its smell like a fresh snow up on the fjeld.” I paused again, and in my mind could see that whiteness. “It was of a thickness I’d never witnessed before. Indeed I had never even imagined such a thing. And persistent. I’d always known fog to come and go, like steam from a kettle. But this, it was more like a tub full of cold milk.”
Granerud’s eyes widened and he jotted another note, then removed his monocle to study me from behind his desk. “Yesterday, you mentioned how afraid you were that first night. Trying to sleep. Worrying about the bear. And about who would find you. Well, I wonder if that fear lingered there in the fog that first morning?”
“What man wouldn’t be afraid?”
“Herr Eide, I make no judgments regarding your fortitude. I only ask because your state of mind is a part of the story here, and I want to be careful to get it down right.” He leaned over his desk as much as his belly would allow, and spoke as though we were conspirators. “I myself would’ve been terrified. You can believe that. As you say, any man would be.”
I lifted my teacup and sipped. My chair was covered with a plush cushion, crushed green velvet with a frill of golden silk. Never had I sat on a finer piece of furniture. I took another sip of tea and set the cup back down.
“As I sit here, it seems that where I found myself that first morning was like the journey’s end of all my foolishness. Or perhaps f
ailure is putting it better.”
Granerud’s expression was different now, as if I were an orphan on the streets of a mean city. He lay his pen down and laced his fingers behind his head and leaned back. His belly spilled out from under his vest.
“My people came to Finnmark during the time of Napoleon.”
“Your people?”
“My grandfather, Vegard Eide. My father, Olav, was born in the same hut I was. This out on an island called Muolkot a half hour’s row from Hammerfest. It’s where Inger and I had our daughter. Where we lived until she left. It was our home. My family’s home.”
“May I ask what your father and grandfather have to do with your sense of foolishness and failure?”
“They were good men, and taught me well. How to fish. How to handle a mallet and a saw and an adze. They were good providers. Their families were strong. As my father’s eldest son—I had two sisters—our home on Muolkot was mine. So were the sheep. The faering. The same resources my father and grandfather had, those too I was given. Yet I squandered them. Thea, my daughter…” And here I paused, realizing that even to call her name was to be back on Spitzbergen, alone in the fog.
“I was told of your daughter, Herr Eide.”
I sat up. “Told of her?”
“Only that she has not been heard from. Gerd Bjornsen has, as I understand it, been quite like a sister to your own wife in this respect.”
“Like a sister, sir?”
“They pray together. And Fru Bjornsen has become a confidante.”
“What do you mean, a confidante?”
Granerud sat forward and leaned on his elbows. “I see you’ve turned the tables, Herr Eide, and are now the one asking questions.” Though his tone was lighthearted, still I felt reprimanded. Even put in my place. But he must have sensed my discomfort. “It’s a good thing Fru Eide has come with you to Tromsø. You can clear this up with her over supper.”
I only stared at him, benumbed. So Gerd and Inger were intimates—and on the subject of our daughter, no less? That seemed more sensational and unlikely than the story Marius Granerud was coaxing from me.
“You were saying, about your daughter?”
“I was?”
“About Muolkot and your father and grandfather.”
“Would you excuse me, sir?”
“Of course.” He stood, and I did too. “Herr Eide?”
“Yes?”
“You needn’t be so formal. Please, call me Marius.”
I nodded, left his office, and by some instinct found myself in the midmorning bustle on the avenue outside. I packed my pipe and lit it and looked out on the passersby. My ignorance had betrayed me again. First Inger had told me she did not wish to speak of our daughter. If I’d abided by her wishes, it was only because I didn’t know how to deny my wife. But it was she who was denying me, preferring her whispers to God and—as I now understood it—the counsel of Gerd Bjornsen.
I smoked and watched a woman and her daughter stroll by, their dresses grand, their bonnets fine. It would rain today, I could tell that much. I thought of marching back up to Marius Granerud’s office and returning the kroner he’d advanced me, half of the total. I’d thank him and walk out. And I’d disappear among the shadows of these people on the avenue. I had all but resolved to do it, being of no use to anyone.
Yet when pocketing my pipe I felt the bladder of fresh tobacco there, and remembered how on that foggy morning at the Krossfjorden I would surely have traded my last bullet for such a luxury. It wasn’t my first thought up there that morning, but it couldn’t have been more than my third.
Now I was looking up and down the street in this strange city. Only a block away, high above the rooftops, the gulls were winging and calling and arched in mocking elegance over the harbor. Instead of disappearing among the throng on that Tromsø street, I flew back up to Granerud’s office.
He asked an assistant to fetch me another cup of tea, and for two hours I sat opposite that odd and charismatic man and told him about the first morning.
If on the interminable night previous I’d longed for my family, if my chief concern was that I would never lay eyes on them again or tell them one last time what a proud father and husband I was, if I cataloged and scolded and cursed myself for my shortcomings, if I then cursed that wicked scree and ice and sea, if I went from sadness to regret to anger and then action, it was because I knew as sure as I stood on that snow-caked slope of land that I would survive only by saving my own hide. So, once my blood found my feet and hands, I shouldered my rifle and went where I somehow knew I had to go.
My boots still sat beside Birger Mikkelsen’s feet. His were still on mine. In the light of that new day, this sight had a ferlie air about it—as though I’d once dreamt it and was now seeing that dream come to life. Whereas the night before I saw no sign of the ice bear, now there was evidence of him in abundance. I could see the contrast between the undisturbed snow—shimmering like a halo—and the trodden patches where whatever struggle Mikkelsen had offered had packed it all down and tinged it pink with his blood. The imprints of the bear’s paws marked the snow as if he’d measured off a proper slaughtering pen. Each track was the size of an oar blade, and I knew in an instant that if his thirst for human blood had been excited, he would get mine no matter how careful I was. This realization came as a relief, frankly, for it toggled my outlook from fear to fascination, and for the rest of my time on Spitzbergen I considered the bear as a moral animal, not some deranged murderer.
Another thing occurred to me and was instrumental to my survival: he was native to that savage place, and his intelligence and instinct were qualities to mimic as much as dread. Though I had no claws or woolly coat, was no great swimmer, and couldn’t smell blood from a mile’s distance, and had neither a powerful jaw nor sharp teeth, I could—indeed must—simplify my thinking. That was why I found myself at the scene of Mikkelsen’s death again, despite all the fear that place inspired. I needed concern myself only with the sorts of things the bear would. Hunger. Thirst. The instinct to live. Perhaps Mikkelsen had left me an inheritance.
Thirty paces beyond the red rainbow of trodden snow, I found his hakapik and his mittens. My own gloves had gone down the sound with the killing boat, so I was mightily glad to have his. I also found his shoulder pack, sliced open as with a sharp boning knife, but an outer pocket still held his flint and steel and a pouch of tinder, a box of soaked-through matches, his eyeglasses, and his pipe. There was, too, a small leather sack for tobacco, empty except for its heady scent.
Each of these discoveries proved essential, though none matched my last unearthing. After I’d pocketed the booty, I returned to the edge of the fjord and stood on rocks cleared of snow by the tide. Fog still shrouded the eastern view, but to the west the three-mile-long spit of towering and snow-covered mountains shone brightly under a white sun. Possibly, I thought, if I could get to the end of that land, where the Krossfjorden met the wider waters of its main artery, I might signal a passing boat. That spot would be like the palm of the hammered, five-fingered hand fabled by the late Birger himself.
I looked out to sea and considered the ice, more of which had flowed into the fjord overnight. Much more and no boats would be able to break through. I wondered how persistently it would come, that ice. How soon before I’d be able to simply march across the sea. Mikkelsen, one night on board the Sindigstjerna, had described how suddenly the waters changed up there. Like the winds and the weather. Having spent plenty of hard seasons in all of it, he had a story for every occasion. I lifted his tobacco pouch to my nose and sniffed.
The only sensible thing to do was to cross the plain and attempt to traverse the moraine at the base of the glacier. Once across, I would trek to the foot of the mountain along the sea line until I reached the headland, where I would await my fate.
Once more I passed the site of Birger’s death. Th
is time I didn’t stop, just continued on across that snowy mile headed for the base of the glacier. I might have missed it altogether if not for a flash of the sun, which caused me to look down and shield my eyes. There at my feet was Mikkelsen’s knife.
Most of those nights, after our evening tea Birger would unsheathe his knife from his belt, wet his stone, and sharpen the blade. It had a whalebone handle, the head of which was scrimshawed into the blunted face of an ice bear, and a blade of thick, hard steel he claimed had been forged from a retired ship’s anchor. He spoke lovingly to it there in the mess, and when finished with his sharpening, he’d slide it gently back in the sheath and say that a sharp knife and the love of God are all a man really needs.
I picked the knife from the snow, wiped it clean on my pants, and held it up to the shimmering sun, which seemed in a hurry to cross the sky: already it had moved several degrees. That knife would prove one of my most vital finds. Even standing there on the plain, the sun growing almost warm up off the snow, I felt for the first time that I might actually make it. Such was the power of that handful of bone and steel. Its weight in my palm renewed me and put a purpose in my stride.
This feeling was short in lasting, though. The glacier there didn’t meet the water. Instead it crumbled, and together with the melting snow it became a slurried river between myself and the cape I’d planned to traverse. I might as well have been standing along the edge of Gávpotjávri during the spring melt. Yet that rushing water was no harbinger of longer, warmer days.
I knelt on the shore of the unfortunate slough and scooped handfuls of water into my mouth. It was good for that much. After a final drink, I stood and tramped north along the glacier’s edge, thinking there might be firmer ice closer to the snout. But all I found for the trouble of that amble were two enormous tunnels in the head of its craggy face, each of them thirty feet above my head and pouring meltwater in waterfalls. At least I would not die of thirst.
During our long row up the Krossfjorden the prior morning, Mikkelsen spoke with authority and childlike wonder about the shrinking hours of daylight this time of year. As the season of darkness drew nearer, so did the rate at which each new day grew shorter. But the sun was here for now, racing toward an ominous southwestern sky. I reckoned I had four hours more of passable light, and again looked at that godforsaken watercourse now spread out before me, almost equal to the plain I’d crossed to get here. It would take me an hour to get back to where I started, which suddenly seemed my only course of action. There was simply no hope of crossing that water. I took a few last, long drinks and retraced my steps back to the place I’d woken on that same cursed day.
