Northernmost

by Peter Geye

  It’s one thing to measure the fathoms of the sea, and altogether another to plumb the depths of your own lonely soul. Sometimes the wiser course is to seek the silent company of a draft of Mack’s brygge, which is what I did. First one, and then another. By the time I sprouted from that cellar staircase, the world had gone dark above the spitting snow. It fell like an affirmation and so I strode along, sanguine in my newfound faith that fell through the night all around me.

  But this day, which had already offered so many beguiling questions, had yet one more to ask. I checked our lodging for the third time, finding neither Inger nor any trace of her. So I walked back downstairs and asked the proprietress—a young widow named Andrea Jensen—if she had a message for me. Shaking her head, she offered the same list of possibilities that I’d already considered. She also suggested that perhaps my wife had grown weary of waiting for me while I’d wasted the afternoon in the tavern, and gone off for dinner at the café on the Strandgaten. She even insinuated that I might benefit from a square meal myself. I suppose she thought me drunk, and perhaps I was.

  In any case I thanked her, then asked that if she saw Inger, she let her know I’d return after dinner myself. And with that I ventured back out into the snow, down toward the quay and a café I’d seen there on my ramblings. I ate reindeer stew and a heel of bread and paid my tab before again walking back to the hotel. Now the streets were deserted and the snow blowing as much as falling. The widow Jensen was not behind the desk, nor did she appear when I dinged the bell, so I reached across and took the key from its slot and walked back up the stairs.

  The hallway was carpeted and dimly lit and I was pushing our door open just as a different door opened at the far end and out stepped Inger. There must have been thirty paces between us, but I could see a blank look on her face.

  What can I say? I wouldn’t have been more flummoxed if she’d appeared before me on Spitzbergen. She was wearing the same dress she’d had on for dinner at the Bjornsens’ house the night I met Marius Granerud. Her long hair caught the lamplight and veiled her face like a whiteout moving along with her. She usually wore it up or in a single braid, and to see it mussed like that gave me a moment’s excitement before I wondered why.

  She seemed not to even notice me standing by our door as she drifted down the hallway. At least not until halfway, when she looked up and stopped suddenly where she stood. After gathering her wild locks and smoothing them behind her ears, she continued toward me and, without so much as a word, stepped right by me into our room. I followed the sweet scent of her hair, lit a lamp, and stood there looking at my wife.

  She sat on the edge of the bed, unlaced her boots and took them off, then tried again to tame her hair.

  “You might explain where you’ve been all day,” I said.

  “Not sitting in the tavern drinking beer,” she snapped. “I can smell it from over here.”

  “I came looking for you several times today, Inger. It’s now past nine o’clock.” I crossed the room and sat on the end of the bed, our shoulders almost touching. “Yes, I had a beer in the tavern, and another with my dinner. That hardly seems profligate.”

  “Nor noble.”

  “Whose room were you visiting?”

  Now she turned to face me. “The Bjornsens have arrived,” she said.

  I scooted closer, our knees touching now as well. “Granerud told me that you and Gerd have become friends. Confidantes, he said.”

  “It’s true.”

  “You and Gerd, you were in her quarters there?” I gestured down the hall, then looked at her and brushed her hair with the back of my hand.

  “Yes,” she whispered. “That’s right.”

  “And Bengt?”

  “I’d have thought he was at the tavern with you.”

  “This is foolishness. What were you doing with Gerd so late at night?”

  But instead of answering Inger rushed past me to the bureau and changed into her nightdress. She picked up her new brush and worked it through her hair until she was satisfied, then pinned it up and got under the covers.

  “Should I not wonder?” I asked.

  “If you must know, I was getting ready for bed—having no idea where my husband was, I might add—when Gerd knocked. Nighttime is the worst for her. She gets headaches. I helped her. I waited for her to fall asleep. And now I’m here, and I’m going to sleep myself.”

  “I was worried,” I said. But she had already turned on her side, and again gave no answer. So I, too, got ready for bed and slipped in beside her. The warmth of her body gave as little comfort as the stone cairns I’d built up against the Spitzbergen night.

  [2017]

  When, by four a.m., she still couldn’t fall asleep, she got out of bed and went to that now familiar spot at the window overlooking the town square. She would’ve sworn she could still see his footprints in the snow.

  In the hours since Stig had left those tracks, Greta had tried to reason with herself. Why had she kissed him? Did that count as unfaithfulness? Would she do it again? The answer to each of these questions—and the countless others strafing through her mind—did not come in words, but rather in the commotion of her desire, now reverberating in her like one of the notes in “Vannhimmel.” Much as his footprints were still there in the snow, the skin where he’d touched her still held the impression of his hands. Her lips were still thrilled by the memory of his own. These palimpsests paused in her mind, but then funneled like a maelstrom into her belly. A flood of need that was sexual, but also something more. She wanted to kiss him again, she wanted him to undress her, to make love to her—but she also wanted the possibility of emotional deliverance, and this man had somehow offered it.

  These thoughts made her feel foolish. Wanting him, believing in her yearning, her deranged notion that he could offer her a kind of salvation—it occurred to her that she was behaving like those people who visit Paris for a weekend and suddenly decide it’s their destiny to live in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. She was a grown woman, for crying out loud. With a family and a respectable life. She doubted she would ever even see him again. Which meant that she’d have to live with the longings of a single night. A single kiss. This notion—inevitable as it seemed—left her feeling more pathetic than ten years of a failing marriage had.

  Her marriage, she thought. Her children.

  The thought of Lasse and Liv roused hopelessness in her. Her love for them was fathomless. She could see them this very minute, as if they were asleep on the bed behind her. She could smell the sweetness of their hair. Could see Lasse’s T-shirt riding up his sleeping body, and Liv’s arms resting on the pillow above her head. It would be too much to disrupt that peace, wouldn’t it?

  The answer to that last question was unambiguous. She spun away from the window, sat down at the desk, and picked up her phone. Within minutes she’d bought a ticket on the first flight to Oslo—going through Tromsø—later that morning. She called the front desk and asked them to arrange a taxi to pick her up in three hours, took a shower and readied herself, then packed her few belongings. It was not yet five o’clock.

  She took the elevator down to the lobby and stepped outside. It was warmer than it had been, and the melting snow sent up a ghostly vapor that smelled briny. Or perhaps that was the breeze off the harbor. She walked up Kirkegata to the cemetery and passed through the gate for the second time since she’d arrived. Somehow, she’d lost track of exactly how long ago that was. Two or three days? Maybe even four?

  In any case, much of the snow that had greeted her then had melted, and as she walked down the lanes with her phone’s flashlight on, she now could read most of the names on the headstones. The longer she walked, the greater the kinship she felt for this place. Hansen and Johnsen and Berg, Larsen and Wahl and Bergdahl. There were people buried under those same names back in Gunflint. Why this calmed her, she couldn’t say. Perhaps i
t was merely the thought of her childhood home. Or maybe it was how quickly the world seemed to shrink with any sense of recognition. She paused in front of a bronze cross in one grouping and brought her light closer. ANNA OLAVA KNOBLOCK, it read. The only date she could make out was the year of this woman’s birth, 1832. The markers on either side, she saw, were for more of the Knoblock family. In the plot in front of them, in the row closest to the fence, were several other bronze crosses. She waded through the snow and stopped, disbelieving, before one of them.

  ELSKEDE

  INGER ASTRID EIDE

  FADT 6 NOVEMBER 1855

  DSD 30 APRIL 1900

  Elskede? She used her phone to translate the word: beloved. And only forty-four years old. Younger than Greta was now. She stepped close enough to the cross to touch Inger’s name, and traced it with the tip of her finger, bringing this Inger more to life. She counted back the names. Inger begat Thea begat Odd, then Harry and then her own father, Gus. Then her. Finally, Lasse and Liv. Families were like seasons. Each built on the others.

  She stared at Inger’s grave. Studied the scrollwork on the cross, which looked as medieval as a Viking sword. Then, as abruptly as she’d discovered the grave, she wondered about Inger’s husband, Odd Einar. She checked the other graves nearby, but there was no sign of him. As soon as she realized this, the story of what might have happened to him started to vaguely take shape in her mind. His feet would have been the last of her kin’s to walk these village streets. His eyes the last to look out across the sound. That was more than a hundred years ago, and now here she was, in the polar night, almost having forgotten the kiss that had catapulted her out onto this snowy lawn at this ungodly hour.

  She read Inger Astrid Eide’s name and numbers with her fingers again, as though she were blind and the markings in braille. She felt a sudden and profound connection with this woman. What suffering had she endured? What poverty? What loneliness and longing? To have lost her daughter—Thea, Greta’s own twice-great-grandmother—that alone was sorrow enough. She knew this part of the story. But as she stood in the cemetery, the fog rising off the snow, her own heart rent from her body, Greta could feel not only the suffering and sorrow and longing, but, she imagined, the thrill of an elskede. A man like Stig.

  * * *

  —

  She stayed over the grave for an hour, absorbing all she could. She even heard herself talking out loud, telling herself the story of this woman and her husband. Of their intimacies and their illnesses. Of the disease that took her life. Of the grief that gave him freedom. Before she left, she took a picture of Inger’s grave. And as she walked away, she could hear Inger saying goodbye.

  Walking back to the hotel, she practiced mimicking Inger’s voice. Greta knew that to any passerby she would seem crazy, but she hardly cared. By imagining their lives, she was already feeling more connected to herself. She would live vicariously through their ghosts. She would let herself be haunted. And that would be enough.

  She had to let that be enough.

  She went up to her room and washed her hands and looked around for anything she might’ve missed. Stig’s red sweater was folded over the back of the chair, and she pondered whether or not to bring it along. How could she explain this well-worn wool? She couldn’t bring it home. Or could she fold it up and put it in one of her boxes of extraneous clothes in her closet? She could let it be the memory she allowed herself. Hidden away, taken out only when she was alone and needed a reminder of how beautiful life could be. Shaking that thought from her head, she left the sweater draped over the chair.

  In the lobby there were bananas in a wooden bowl next to the coffee machine. She poured herself a cup and peeled a banana and set her things in front of the same window she and Stig had drunk aquavit at only hours before. The same sleepy-eyed receptionist was still behind the desk, and when Greta asked, the woman handed her a few sheets of hotel letterhead and a ballpoint pen. Greta went back to the table by the window and started making notes about the Norwegian husband and wife who would save her.

  Two hours later, at eight, Greta folded the letterhead—by then four full sheets covered with her handwriting—and put them in her purse and gave the pen back to the receptionist.

  “We don’t have very many visitors this time of year,” she said. “And now you are leaving so soon. What was your business, if I may ask?”

  “My family came from here. Part of it did, anyway. I guess I just wanted to see.”

  “What is your family name?”

  “Eide.”

  “Yes, of course,” she said.

  Of course? Greta wondered.

  “So you see where your family is from and also meet the most handsome man in Finnmark.” She raised her eyebrows. “Too bad you have to leave now.”

  “Yes,” Greta said. “It really is too bad.”

  “But there’s your taxi.” She pointed out the window.

  Greta slung her bag over her shoulder and glanced at the receptionist. She wanted to say that, yes, Stig was handsome, but also much more than that. He was divine. He had, in one night, changed how she understood her life. This conclusion gave Greta pause—enough to realize that, to anyone, such a proclamation would sound like the stuff of a high school crush—and she wondered if she’d inflated the entirety of the experience. Instead of saying anything about him, Greta simply thanked the woman for her stay and walked out to the taxi.

  The driver got out and put Greta’s bag in the trunk, then opened the back door and closed it behind her. “To the airport?” he asked over his shoulder.

  “Yes, please.”

  He put the car in gear, turned on the meter, and started up Kirkegata.

  “Could you drive by the church on the way?”

  “Of course.” At the church, he rolled slowly to a stop and Greta lowered her window. Fog rested atop the bell tower. She closed her eyes and listened in her mind to the song he’d played on the organ, letting it come alive, and it still sounded sublime. She snapped a picture of the church with her phone, then opened the door, stepped out to have a last look at the cemetery, and took a shot of that too. Finally, she whispered goodbye and got back into the cab.

  The driver turned right past the church and then right again on Sørøygata, toward the harbor and the bench they’d sat on the night before. He drove past the Scandic Hotel, where she’d heard him play the piano and first learned his name. And just as Greta was putting Stig in the right compartment of her heart, there he was, walking quickly toward her hotel at a few minutes past eight in the morning, his feet crossing the same tracks he’d made when leaving. The sight of him stole her breath. He must’ve heard the taxi because he turned to look, and then froze when his eyes fell on her. He raised his hand—to say goodbye? to stop the taxi?—as the driver turned the corner, and only ten minutes later she was stepping through the airport’s only entrance.

  * * *

  —

  In how many ways would she be undone? During the course of the last week, she’d admitted she didn’t love her husband and followed her impulse to chase Frans over here, only to end up in Hammerfest. She’d met Stig and decided, for the sake of her children, to leave him there in the Arctic night, despite her gaping hunger. She’d tracked down the ghosts of her ancestors and given her imagination the license to spirit her off. All of it seemed to happen without her registering these tectonic shifts in the balance of her life. But none of them had shaken her like the look on Stig’s face as her taxi drove on. That look would be her final undoing.

  Now, sitting at the airport, another cup of coffee trembling in her hands, she tried to picture the scene on the quay in Hammerfest a hundred and twenty-odd years ago, Inger and Odd Einar taking turns saying goodbye to their daughter, not knowing if they’d ever see her again. What was the look on Thea’s face that day? Did it resemble Stig’s? And what had Greta’s face told him in ret
urn?

  Had it seemed thankless, or regretful? What if he would never know how much meeting him—hearing him play his music, talking and laughing with him, conjuring the snowfall, kissing him, all of it—had meant to her?

  Now the same woman who had sold her a cup of coffee in the café upstairs was poised by the door that led onto the tarmac, testing the microphone. Then she spoke in garbled Norwegian and a few of the other passengers gathered their belongings and queued up, presented their tickets, and went outside to the plane. Greta checked the boarding pass on her phone, as though it might offer some sign or instructions.

  Another announcement came over the waiting area, and now everyone else stood up and moved toward the gate. Greta went to the back of the line—there were only twenty or so passengers—and clenched her eyes shut. Now she did see Thea Eide standing on the quay saying goodbye to her life in this inhospitable and magical place. She saw the expressions of love and sadness on Inger’s and Odd Einar’s faces. She saw the ocean of opportunity and the fear of a new land in Thea’s imagination. She saw a woman a third her age, embarking on the voyage of a lifetime without benefit of the language she would need, without money, without friendship or even a familiar face. She saw a bravery she’d never possessed herself, because, why would she? What sort of courage had ever been required of her? In herself she saw a moral failure, or an ineptitude, at living. If she were being honest, she saw cowardice. Her eyes were still shut, and now she put the heels of her palms against her eyelids and pressed. There was darkness ahead—the husband she did not love, but instead of being angry at him she felt something more like sadness. For both of them, because she could not stay with him. She could no longer be fainthearted. She couldn’t live the rest of her life feigning devotion and pretending to return his love. Because he did love her. She knew that. Despite his dalliances with Alena Braaten, despite his own aloofness. And he would fight for her. She was sure of that too. All of this taken together meant that she was going to hurt him, if not ruin him. Despite her deep resentment, that prospect brought her no satisfaction. On the contrary, it felt like an enormous onus that she immediately cast from her thoughts.