by Peter Geye
He walked back to the table and stood above us. “It was the Fonn I saw in that storm.” He bent at the waist so as to be closer to us all. “The eternal snow,” he whispered, smoke issuing from his mouth and his nostrils. “It was the answer to my lifetime of prayers.”
He took another puff and turned to Eivind Hushovd. “Have you been paying attention, man? Did you see the pack at Nordaustlandet? When was the last time you looked out that porthole”—he aimed his pipe over his shoulder at the window—“and saw a world that wasn’t snow and ice?”
“It’s where the fattest seals live, sir,” Hushovd said.
“It’s also where the truth will be found, Eivind. Don’t you see? It’s all there is. Stand up, man! Stand up and have a look.” He shook Hushovd by the shoulder, guiding him toward the window. “Birger, dim that lamp so Eivind here might see what I just saw.” Mikkelsen reached up and dimmed the lamp until the galley was almost as dark as the night outside. Hushovd went and gazed blankly out the porthole.
“What do you see?” Svene nearly hissed, then turned back to us at the table. “Close your eyes, lads, and think about what Eivind is seeing. Listen to him tell you about it.”
“I see the snow,” he said, as though making a grave admission.
“What else do you see?”
“The night.”
“You are preaching, friend!” Svene said. “That is the Fonn. That is the answer!” He turned yet again toward us. “Birger, bring that lamp flame up again.” He did, and Svene ushered Hushovd back to his seat. “This storm will pass. We will get back to killing seals, to replenishing our purse and our pride. But that snow out there now, that snow is eternal. Hold the Fonn up as a mirror. That snow is God’s answer.”
He tapped his pipe empty and slipped it back in his pocket and went around the table once more, marking each of us with a look of uncommon gentleness.
We all sat in the stunned silence of his conviction until Hushovd ventured a word. “I don’t recall the gospel preaching thus.”
Svene raised his hand as though to bless him, or perhaps to forgive him, or merely to suggest he understood his misgivings. “Eivind, that’s merely the gospel of my own experience. But let me ask: Why would you put faith in any god when this is all around you? Heaven or hell, what’s the difference?”
* * *
—
“My second morning as a castaway, I woke to the Fonn. Or I might better say that I opened my eyes to it, as sleep eluded me.”
Marius Granerud sat hunched behind his desk, scribbling. I’d been telling him about Svene Solvang’s sermon in answer to his question about whether or not I thought to pray up there.
For breakfast Inger and I had sipped strong coffee with cream and sugar, had eaten roe and crackers and Danish cheese, had reveled in our simple contentment. As we stood to go, she asked whether the thought of spending more time with Granerud, dredging up the memories he meant to shape and immortalize, filled me with any sort of feeling. I told her no, and meant it, but I must admit that once sitting there across from him I did feel something. A cross between regret and fortitude. Regret because I understood now that my decision to accept the offer to join Svene’s crew had ultimately meant the end of my faith. And fortitude because I possessed a resolve I never could’ve mustered with faith as a yoke.
“Of course I thought to pray, and did, you can believe,” I said. “At many different times and with shifting hope, over and over. But on that morning, I can see now, I was already beginning to doubt. Even if I didn’t understand why. You see, my first thoughts on that morning were not to ask God for guidance or salvation—salvation of any sort—or even forgiveness. No. My first thoughts were of the Fonn.”
“The eternal snow?” Granerud clarified.
“Yes,” I said. “I held myself up against it, used it as a mirror, as Svene Solvang had commanded. And the truth is, I saw myself. I understood his meaning. Even if I hadn’t that night in the galley, I did that morning in the snow.”
“What a terrible loss,” he said.
“Beg your pardon?”
“To abandon God, in a place like that. You might have found such comfort.”
“Herr Granerud, I understand your sentiment, but I must tell you it was no loss. It might have been humbling, even humiliating, to give up my belief. And it might sound like lunacy to make a covenant with that wild, falling snow. I might even have hesitated. Might have looked once behind me at what I was abandoning. But the truth is, absolving myself from the clutches of His almighty grip, forsaking the notion that all my days on earth were only an audition for the next, everlasting life, giving myself the freedom to rail against the forces of nature and my own ineptitude—all of that was a true gift.”
When Granerud finished making his copious notes he glanced across his desk at me and said, “So, having forsaken God, and having found comfort in your own”—and here he double-checked his notes—“ineptitude, what did you do next, that snowy morn on Krossfjorden?”
“I remember this well, sir: The snow fell straight down, there was hardly a breeze, it must have been late morning because now a diffuse daylight was illuminating the snow. I unburied myself, took stock of all my belongings, and started slogging through the snow. A foot had fallen, maybe more. Everywhere I looked the world was banked in it. I thought of what Svene had said. Accepted it almost casually. And as I walked I hummed a song I used to play on my hardingfele. A song for Thea. ‘Draumkvedet,’ I’m sure you know it. And that simple song carried me along.”
“Where were you going?” From the tone of his voice I could tell he was rapt, and I thought this was because we were getting to a part of the story he couldn’t possibly have foretold. He appeared almost embarrassed, whether for himself or for me I couldn’t say.
“I followed the shore of the fjord, through the snow to the base of the glacier. It was hard to tell where the sky ended and the ground began. I tell you, Herr Granerud, that while hiking up the valley of ice, searching for a passable section not rutted with crevasses or pocked with moulins, I felt a great lightness. As if, unencumbered by my faith, I might make haste of my situation. And indeed I did that first glacier in the Fonn. Was I sheltered from its hazards? Was the snow my salvation? Certainly it carried me that day.”
I closed my eyes, hoping to draw the memory of that trek closer. I wanted to convey to my scribe the beauty and treachery of it. I wanted, I see now, to proselytize. But he was unmoved, perhaps even upset. When I opened my eyes, he set his pen down and reclined in his chair and fixed me in a blue-eyed stare that mimicked Svene’s. But Granerud’s eyes were penetrating, not bottomless, and we stared at each other before he raised his meaty fist and pointed at the crucifix hanging on the wall of his office. He began to speak, but only stammered and then lowered his finger and then his face.
So, still trying to conjure that morning, to make Granerud see, I began to sing in a voice calm and uncharacteristically clear. “Will you hark to me, I can sing / Of a good young man / About Olav Åsteson / Who had been asleep for so long.”
He looked up as I sang on, right through the refrain that was for me then, and remains even now, a great comfort, because it reminded me that, for all of my desolation, I wandered same as any other man. “For the moon shines / And the paths disperse so wide.”
“You sing a lovely song, Herr Eide. And I suppose it’s true our paths disperse. And widely at that. But I believe those paths converge again. Do you not?”
“Some paths do. But my path goes on. I am happy to be on it.”
“And Fru Eide? How does she see it?”
“You’d have to ask her.”
“She strikes me as a pious woman.”
“You can be sure of it.”
“And she’s content with a husband who believes in what…snow?”
“It’s not a religion, Herr Granerud.”
“What would you call it, then, this worshipping of snow?”
“I don’t worship the snow.”
He leaned forward again and consulted his notes. “You said your first thoughts were not of God—whom you had forsaken—but of the Fonn.”
“Yes, but I only took comfort in how the snow obliterated me. How it made me meaningless. How, when measured against it, I was nothing.”
“And this is still the reflection you see?”
“Yes.”
“But here you are, telling me about the snow. About crossing the glacier. You seem very much alive. Very much not obliterated.”
I looked at him for a long time before responding. “In the flesh, I am here. Of course. Just as I was on Spitzbergen. What I’m attempting to describe is how my spirit left me. Or rather, how I found new peace in that bleakness. It was as if I’d been pardoned from worry and guilt.” I paused, and thought deeply. “Had I put my faith in God, had I trusted in His guidance, I would’ve perished on Krossfjorden. Instead I trusted that my death would not matter. That I myself did not matter. And I did that by seeing the hereafter not as a time spent in heaven or hell, but as time I’d spend in the eternal snow.”
“A most pious heterodoxy, Herr Eide.”
“You asked me if I thought to pray up there.”
“And? It sounds as if you’d prayed to snow. What foolishness is that?”
“I did not pray to the snow. I communed with it. And in answer, the snow saved me. As you will see.”
* * *
—
When I took leave of Marius Granerud that morning, I was unmoored. Outside his office, the gulls skimmed the rooftops, cawing their pleas, and with them I felt more kinship.
I had never considered myself an apostate, but Granerud’s reaction to my description of the Fonn left me doubtful. Was it possible to renounce God yet still have some devotion to the divine? My revelation—if I dare call it that—had certainly changed me. I felt more holy, and closer to salvation, than I ever had before. But I also knew that others—even thoughtful people like Marius Granerud—would be scandalized by my thinking. His wondering what Inger would make of it chilled me.
She had already rebuked me. Back in Hammerfest, when I first spoke of relinquishing my faith, she had even called me blasphemous. Would her own piety and love of God supersede her love of me? Did she love me anymore? What thoughts these were, for a fisherman from Hammerfest. A man who, before the Fonn, had bowed his head every day of his life.
I walked back toward the hotel. Inger and I had made no plans for that day, but I assumed she’d be in our chamber. We might have lunch and then take a walk through Tromsø. If she hadn’t already, she’d likely visit the church again for another hour’s prayer. Granerud, no doubt changing the subject, had suggested on parting that I should take Inger to the University Museum or the opera house. Such bourgeois extravagances seemed unthinkable. But then, what else could we do? My meetings with Granerud had so far not lasted more than three or four hours, leaving so many idle hours in this foreign city that I had no clue what to do with them.
When I got to the hotel I found no sign of my wife in our quarters, other than a few strands of golden hair in her new brush sitting atop the bureau. It thrilled me to see them there, and to have Inger with me on this peculiar adventure. Given how few weeks had passed between that moment standing over her brush and the morning of the Fonn, I might’ve been excused for not comprehending my whereabouts. But with each hour that passed, I felt closer and closer to being the sort of man who would regain his wits.
So off I went again, up to the church. It was now midday and snow was falling on the mountains across the sound. I paused and watched the squall line pass up the valley between two peaks, shimmering like the sea on a cloudy afternoon.
The door was locked so I walked around the church and then two blocks more to the harbor. Now the snow had engulfed the nearest peak and seemed to be shining differently. Dozens of faerings were tied to the wharf, and I studied them in turn until I saw one that resembled my old girl, and I stood before her overcome by nostalgia. I resolved that I would fix her up, and that together we would get back on the water and start hauling in fish again. Feeling strong, I walked still farther up the quay to where a schooner was tied off before the cooper. A crew of four men was loading barrels across the gangplank. On deck, a blacksmith hammered against an anvil, his forge smoking behind him.
Now the squall advanced on the city side of the sound like a curtain, hanging so close and thick I thought I could reach out and touch it. Beyond the end of the wharf, a fishmonger stood between two warehouse buildings. Everywhere, folks were making their livings. Fishermen sold their catch, stevedores unloaded boats, tender men rowed out to moored frigates and barques. There were riggers and welders and wagon drivers, even a fellow mucking the horse shit around with a shovel. I stood and watched the commotion as the snow finally reached the docks. But still the men worked, their breath steaming, their busy boots making a slurry of the muddy lane. I fingered the few øre still in my pocket, once more determined that as soon as the foolishness of telling this story was behind me, I would return home with Inger, get back among my own people, and earn an honest wage in the village where I was born. Together she and I would prosper.
Around the corner, I came upon a group of men wrestling still other barrels onto a flatbed wagon. A team of two horses—they must’ve stood fifteen hands—stomped their hooves and whinnied as I passed, their eyes peering at me from the shadows of their blinders. One of the laborers stopped to light a cigarette, and I asked him what they were loading.
“Mack’s brygge. Taking it to the tavern.”
“What tavern?” I asked.
“The cellar at the Grand Hotel, friend.” He bent with his partner to heft another keg. After they’d hoisted it onto the flatbed, he removed his gloves, took a pull off his cigarette, and waved it around. “Best beer in Troms.” Now he patted a barrel as though it were his horse.
I thanked him and moved on. Why shouldn’t I have a beer? I thought. After all, things were now going well and I ought to relish my good fortune. So I walked back toward the hotel, damn well alive.
But our chamber was still empty. I thought Inger might’ve read Granerud’s mind and gone to visit the museum. Or perhaps she was enjoying a late lunch at a café somewhere. Maybe she went for a walk out of the town center, up onto the hillside. Whatever the case, I found myself somewhere close to worried.
It bears mentioning that I was then forty-four years old. Tromsø, at some hundred and sixty miles down the sounds and fjords of Finnmark and Troms, was as far from Hammerfest as I’d ever been, excepting my voyage to Spitzbergen. Inger had never ventured farther than Alta, and that before she gave birth to Thea. The village of Hammerfest might have fit into Tromsø three or four times over. Which is to say that this new place daunted me, as I’m sure it did my wife. The thought of her lost in the hurly-burly unsettled me, and I stood there in our vacant room wondering what to do before I remembered just how savvy Inger was, and that no doubt my worries were pointless. So, I went in search of the Grand Hotel’s cellar, figuring to wait for her there.
My experience in taverns was on that day original. After all, when had I ever had two øre to rub together, much less to pay for a tankard of beer?
A man with a handlebar mustache stood behind the counter, before which were aligned stools and brass spittoons. I took a seat, asked for a beer, and, while he drew from a tap behind him, surveyed the rest of the cellar. On either side of the entryway, ice-bear skins draped the wall. Several reindeer antlers hung above the door. The whole place glowed with the guttering light of oil lamps.
I paid for the beer and swiveled around and looked off into the corners. All around the hall, stout tables carved of birch with matching chairs stood like bulwarks to sobriety. All the tables but one were unoccupied, and that by a lone m
an with his back to me. A candle burned in front of him, and in the wobbly light I could see a bottle and a fluted glass at his right hand.
“You’re not a sporting man,” the bartender said.
“True enough,” I said, turning back to him.
“And you’re not from Troms.”
“Down from Hammerfest.”
“What’s your business here?”
“I’m here to conduct interviews with Marius Granerud.”
He glanced at the man in the corner, then leaned across the bar and whispered, “The drittstøvel. He might try writing the truth once in a while.”
The look on my face must have conveyed my surprise.
“And he’s a goddamn sot. Look at him over there.” Now he nodded toward the same man sitting there with the bottle.
“That’s Herr Granerud?”
“The chronicler of our every misstep.”
“He seems affable enough to me.”
“Most liars are. Never mind the drunk ones.”
I turned again in time to see Granerud pouring another ounce into his glass. “A drunk? Truly?”
“Every day after lunch, he brings his work in here. Usually I freshen his glass five or six times of an afternoon. Today he just asked for the bottle. He’s been over there for two hours, scribbling away on his papers.”
Now Granerud held his glass directly in the candlelight, his head tilted as though the job of conjuring my travails fell exclusively to his imagination. I watched him for several minutes, contemplating what liberties he might take with my story. Would he do such a thing? Did it matter if he did? All of the bloodletting I’d done in his office only hours ago, should I have saved that part for Inger? Or kept those bits to myself?
