by Peter Geye
She could no longer understand anything he was saying. She could no longer see the clouds or feel the chill of the wind. She didn’t know where she was. She had a drag off the cigarette and held the smoke in her lungs until she had to breathe, then blew it out all at once and took a deep, catching breath.
“I do not talk to Jorunn anymore. She drinks to have no feelings. Sometimes she drinks a lot. And then she blames me.”
Greta shook her head as though she already knew all this.
“But I do not blame her. Jorunn. It makes no sense. Kjersti Anne. Like the cosmos.” He appeared ready to weep, but then he shrugged again and rose and took a last pull from his cigarette.
“Are you still married?” The wrong question, she knew. The right one—the only question—was to ask what happened to Kjersti Anne, but this wasn’t a question she could ask. No, she needed to know about this woman named Jorunn in a town called Bodø.
He rubbed the cigarette out on a rock and put the butt on the edge of the bench. “Yes.”
“Where is Bodø?”
“Nordland County. Maybe seven hundred miles down the coast? It is a nice city.”
Now Greta thought of her husband, another seven hundred miles beyond Bodø. Or was it even farther? She thought of Alena, too. Of the perfidy. The sinning. She looked at Stig, whose face offered nothing. Was he thinking of his daughter or his wife?
She should leave. She even scooted to the edge of the bench and started to pull his sweater from her shoulders.
“Jorunn, she is not happy, but she is a good Christian, so she does not want to divorce…”
And again she was left wondering about this woman. She settled back on the bench and watched as more clouds gathered over the sound and the islands, then turned toward the steep hills above Hammerfest and saw clouds on that horizon too. “I wish these clouds would bring snow,” she said.
“Sometimes the snow comes off the fjeld,” he said. “Even when the stars are out over Sørø.”
“Like a sun shower,” Greta said, “only snow.”
“A sun shower?”
“When the sun is shining and it’s raining at the same time.”
“Ah, yes. Soldusj.” He appeared delighted by learning this new English word. “Yes. Like that. It is possible for snow.”
For too long he hadn’t looked at her, so she touched his arm and said, “How long have you lived apart?”
“Now it is two years. Almost. When I bought my boat, she moved home to Bodø. With her mother.”
His face was framed with the stars that then started falling all around him, landing on his wild hair and his big hands. He leapt from the bench and craned up his head and opened his mouth to catch them on his tongue. An enormous laugh barreled from his wide-open mouth, and it took all of Greta’s self-control not to rise and join his frolic.
Feeling them land like needle pricks on her own hands and face, she felt charged and couldn’t help laughing herself. But it wasn’t her laugh, not as she knew it now. Instead, it was her laugh from childhood.
“It is perfect!” he said. “You have made it snow!”
Snow? Had she really mistaken these flakes for stars? Should she be embarrassed or delighted? After all, how long had it been since such a whimsical notion crossed her mind? Was this possibility really still inside her? She held his eyes and felt a thousand things—none so pronounced as wonder—and realized she was already making this man into something permanent. Fated. She hadn’t understood anything so simply since Lasse and Liv were born and she knew she loved them.
“I mistook the snow for falling stars,” she said, standing up and laughing. He laughed too, and together they stood on the beach unable to gather themselves.
When finally she stopped gasping, she said, “You’d better walk me back to my hotel.”
“May I buy you a drink when we get there?” he asked, wiping his cheeks with the cuff of his shirt.
“I’d like that,” she said, and they walked up the narrow staircase to the street below the church and then on through town.
* * *
—
What happened in the next hour she would later think of much as if the stars had turned into snow, something chimerical and beautiful that she’d called into existence. The two of them now drank aquavit sitting at the hotel bar, overlooking the harbor. He told her more about his boat and the fugue he was writing, but nothing else about Jorunn or Kjersti Anne. Nor did Greta ask. She told him about Lake Superior and the winters there, and the fish house. She’d decided over that first aquavit that she wouldn’t bring Frans or Lasse or Liv into the discussion.
When last call came, she got up and ordered another round. They grew quieter, more serious. They talked about their mothers. About the persistence of grief. They both admitted feeling too sober given how much they’d drunk. They could hardly look at each other for what was happening between them.
At half past one, Greta excused herself and went to the bathroom. As she washed her hands she asked her reflection in the mirror a very simple question: You know what this will mean, right? She shook her head, then took a mint from her purse and tousled her hair and walked back across the bar telling herself, People will judge you differently than they judge Frans. I hope you know that. But she’d never felt so aloof and so certain.
Stig was looking out the window, his back to her, his empty glass still in his hand. When she touched him on his shoulder, he turned to her and said he’d walk her to her room. They rode the elevator up and turned down the narrow hallway.
“It was so nice talking with you,” he said when they reached her room. Then he appeared nervous, unsure of himself. “I have never met someone who can make it snow.” She could smell the aquavit like licorice on his breath.
She put the key card next to the lock on her door, then pushed when it clicked. “The snow follows me everywhere,” she said, meaning this as a joke, but it came out sounding grim.
He seemed boyish standing there. Lost, perhaps even scared.
“Good night,” she said. “Maybe I’ll see you at the church.” And with that she stepped into her room and heard the door bump closed behind her.
His sudden absence was dizzying, so she rested her head on the doorframe and listened for the sound of his feet padding back down the hallway. A second, two, three, but no footsteps. And then a soft knock. She opened the door at once and before it closed behind them he had taken her face in his hands and pressed his lips into hers. Her hands went to his hips, seizing him there. They parted and came together twice more, only their lips and fingertips touching each other. And even lost in the clamor of desire, she knew this: finally her private universe was expanding, as magnificent and mysterious as the cosmos swelling beyond the stars they’d witnessed and, farther away still, the stars that were not yet born.
She wanted to take him in and undress him. She pressed herself against him and felt the broadness of his firm body against hers. She was overwhelmed, and could tell he was too. And his want alongside her own made her catch her breath. She clenched her legs to stop their quivering, and felt an ache and wetness between them, every part of her warming and loosening.
How long did they stand inside her doorway? Long enough to imagine seeing his face as he made love to her. Long enough to feel herself hollowing out. Long enough to realize that she had not been mistaken about this man.
She pulled back, put her hands on his chest, looked up at his eyes in the dark room. He appeared dazed, almost injured. And before she could go further, she opened the door and pushed him out.
Again she rested her head on the inside of the door, waiting for another knock. She stood there for a minute or two and then hurried across the room and saw him down in the square, his hair like a lion’s mane in the street light, looking up at the hotel.
His sweater still hung over her shoulders and she could smell him on it. She
lifted her hand to wave, but he was turning and walking off, then gone around the corner.
The stars were still falling.
[1897]
Every second or third evening, Svene Solvang—the Sindigstjerna’s captain—would join his crew in the galley for dinner, his long hair slicked back with bear grease, matching the sealskin vest he wore for such occasions. His arms were colossal, and two of the fingers on his starboard hand a knuckle short. He wore his beard long and unkempt and if the rest of us carried the fetor of our rotten boots, or worse, Svene was meticulous in his personal hygiene and left a sweet smell behind. But most notable about him were his eyes, which flitted around as he spoke but were piercing while he worked, whether at the wheel of his boat, shooting his gun, or inspecting a sealskin. More than once we gathered in the mess and speculated on their milkiness—in hushed tones, mind you, never knowing when he might join us for one of his sermons. Mikkelsen speculated that the captain’s proclivity for taking the overnight watch was because the brightness of day offended him. Another at our table, Terje Andreassen, a God-fearing young man from Skerjvøy who’d recently lost his wife and infant in childbirth and was a gleeful killer of seals, likened Svene’s eyes to the foxes on Spitzbergen, whose pelage morphed from season to season: mottled brown and gray for summer, and pure white for winter. “Except the captain’s eyes stay white all year, what with staring out at ice all the damn time.” When I first laid my own eyes on his, I thought he was blind.
Now, Svene was a sober man who had been on the polar seas for most of his life. He had no wife. No children. No home. His only concerns were his boat, which he owned outright and had helped build, and his wealth, which was rumored to be considerable. The Sindigstjerna was unlike most vessels in the Arctic fleet. The sealers around Greenland—largely up from Newfoundland and the Maritimes—were often proper ships, some as long as two hundred feet and powered by steam engines. Whereas the Norwegian boats that stayed close to home were wooden schooners used for both seal and herring. The Sindigstjerna fell in between, some eighty feet long and twenty feet abeam. High up on the foremast was a glassed-in crow’s nest where he stationed a barrel man whenever ice was near, and this was a vessel well acquainted with the floes. Svene had been as far east as Severny Island and the Kara Sea, as far north as Kapp Flora in Franz Josef Land, and as far west as Disko Island on Baffin Bay, where he had wintered in eighteen ninety-two. All of those travels—more than thirty years of them, the last ten aboard the Sindigstjerna—had been spent hunting seals. Svene estimated that under his charge the Sindigstjerna had brought more than twenty thousand skins to market.
When he appeared in the galley, it was often to take measure of his crew. Were we hale? Were our guns oiled? Were the killing boats—a term he invented and employed with relish—shipshape and ready to launch? Was the tea strong and hot enough? But sometimes, especially as the days shortened, he became more contemplative, and he instead would expound on more ethereal topics. He’d give whole hours over to the cause of the tides, infinity, or his belief in suicide, if it meant an end to suffering either physical or spiritual. He seemed, in the throes of these sessions, like a preacher of impossible things.
The sermon I remember most clearly came two nights before I was lost. We were steaming north toward the Isfjorden and Hotellneset, where we would rendezvous with a coal supplier before continuing to the Krossfjorden for our last hunt of the season. By that night I had already been in Svene’s employ for more than a month. We’d circumnavigated Spitzbergen and had over four hundred pelts in the hold, despite our share of fearsome weather. Off the coast of Nordaustlandet we’d met a gale that stirred the seas some thirty feet above us and left the killing boats empty for two days and nights. We sheltered in a bay protected on three sides, yet still found ourselves rocked as though in open seas. When finally the storm passed, we discovered that passage over the top of Spitzbergen would be impossible thanks to the ice pack, so we reversed course and headed south and west, between Edgeøya and the Spitzbergen mainland, where we were then stalled by an unrelenting fog that lasted half again as long as the gale. Those three days passed in a silence so eerie that one of the men, Eivind Hushovd, went on deck with his rifle and threatened to shoot himself. Svene spent an hour sitting there on the shrouded deck, coaxing him to live, fog evidently inadequate grounds for taking your life.
But our most treacherous delay came soon after we weighed anchor off Edgeøya. Though remnants of the fog remained, we’d been able to steam south for six hours when, near the Kapp, the skies took an ominous turn, and by the time we were passing Point Lookout a tempest of otherworldly might came straight out of the west across the Greenland Sea. For two days further it snowed with such spirit we were again stranded, in the shelter we’d found in the last bay on the bottom of Spitzbergen. By midnight of the first day, a foot had fallen. Enough water had lapped onto our decks that fangs of ice hung sharp from every line and railing, and the mainmast shroud, and the bowsprit.
Svene had been fine with the gale and unworried by the fog, but the blizzard and its steady western wind made him both uneasy and downhearted. The snow he took personally and I often saw him staring into its teeth from his spot in the wheelhouse. As though he might divine from its whiteness the source of all malevolence.
On the evening I speak of he entered the galley with his hair coiffed and his skin ripe with that floral bouquet. “Gentlemen,” he said, then ladled himself a bowl of stewed seal meat and took his seat at the board. He stirred the steam up out of the crock, scanned the faces around the table, and settled his milky gaze on Birger. “Mikkelsen, you were with me last year this time, ja? On the Greenland coast?”
“There was a blizzard.”
“Indeed there was,” Svene said, now blowing on a spoonful. “Six days and nights.” He took his first bite of supper. “It was the longest storm I’ve ever beheld. Lashing winds. Bounteous snow.” He took another bite, so now both cheeks were filled. “For many years I’d wondered what drew me to these places. I mean, a man might choose any labor. He might choose a wife and family. He might choose a church to pray in. Why had I neglected the domestic life in order to wait out a six-day snow on the cold waters of the Greenland Sea?” He took yet another bite. “Why didn’t I choose a wife and a church? Surely there were easier paths to riches. Why didn’t I work in a Tromsø packing house?” He set his spoon down and knuckled the sauce from the corners of his mouth.
“You,” he said to me. I’d been sitting there, studying his missing fingers, hoping to escape his attention.
“Sir?” I said.
“You’re from Hammerfest, ja?”
“I am, sir.”
“A fisherman, I was told.”
“You were told true.”
“Why have you chosen to be here? Why are you not sitting on the Sørøsundet hauling your nets?”
He might as well have asked me to explain the stars and where they slept, for all I knew about how I’d ended up at that table, and my expression must have betrayed my ignorance. But he would not relent, and soon the others turned to me, all of them awaiting my answer. “As you know, Herr Sverdrup recommended me—”
“That’s not the question! I know when I took you on. I even recall what Otto said in his recommendation. But a man doesn’t end up on this northern edge of the world without having looked first into the very depth of his soul. You, man, what did you see there?”
In the greasy light of the lamp swaying above the table, our eyes met. He grinned, but not kindly. Or perhaps it was the vacancy of his gaze, of its whiteness, that made him seem unkind. In any case, I saw in the absence of any reflection one thing that had led me there, and I admitted it at once. “Why, I was failing to provide for my family. It’s true. And though I don’t think I ever looked into the bottom of my soul, sir, the fact of my failure weighs heavily on me, and were I able to see down there I suspect I’d discover shame.”
&nbs
p; “Yes!” he said, pounding his fist on the table.
“And so I’ve come here to make right not only my purse but also my pride.”
He raised his hands as though offering a blessing. “Our purse and our pride,” he whispered, and then looked around the table. “My purse and my pride,” he said again, his gaze shifting from man to man. Once it got back to me, he nodded and took another spoon of stew. “When I was a boy in Trondheim, my father was a pastor. And an ardent one at that. I used to spend my Sunday mornings in a prayer so earnest and searching that I was often accused of absentmindedness. To this day I can still recall my urgent pleas. I wanted God to shine on me. I wanted to know that He loved me. I wanted to know that salvation would be my reward. Yet I never felt it. All my life, I prayed for the wisdom to understand. I prayed for the touch of God’s love.” He took the last bite from his bowl, ran his fingers around inside it, licked them clean, and then looked up into the lamplight with his snowy eyes. “I prayed in churches and in taverns. I prayed in schools and in shipyards. I prayed in bunks on twenty different boats, and until that storm off the Greenland coast I prayed without answer. But there! During that six-day storm! There I found my answer.”
Now he stepped to the porthole and cupped his hands around his eyes as he peered out into the darkness. Though we had found a fine lee from that storm, the Sindigstjerna still rocked, so did Svene’s body. He stood at the window as if adjusting a load on his shoulders, then turned and pulled out his pipe. “Smoke, gentlemen.” And so we took out our pipes and in solemn unity packed them and lit one another’s and the aroma of stewed seal was soon replaced by the sweetness of tobacco.
“Why have we made these seas our dwelling, gentlemen? Why have we chosen these floes of ice and snow, these temperatures and gales? Why have we ventured so far away from our fellow men?” He drew a puff. “Some of you have come here thinking you might leave your past behind. Find respite from your conscience. Have you committed crimes and done misdeeds? Are you punishing yourself? Odd Einar here is restocking his pride. He’s making things right for his family again. What about you?” And here he stabbed the tip of his pipe toward Mikkelsen and Andreassen and Hushovd, one-two-three. “Whatever your reason, whatever your aim, let me tell you what I learned there in Greenland.”
