by Peter Geye
Then she saw Lasse and Liv again and again and again. She saw both her children and the aura of love she kept in her vision of them. What would happen to this sacred love? Or was it better to ask: What would happen to their love for her? Would they feel the shroud of its protection vanish? Would they abandon her? Hate her? Would they choose their father? She saw herself—there in the darkest part of her vision—without their love, and knew that she could never allow that to occur. She would never countenance any of those losses. She would make loving them the most important thing in her life. She would preserve it. She would make it even stronger. She’d become a better mother by becoming a better person. She would laugh with them and play with them and romp through the woods with them like she hadn’t done for years now. She would show them how a woman could remake herself, in her own image. She would become, Greta would, more like her own beautiful mother.
“Hallo?”
Greta opened her eyes. She had not moved since she closed them. The last person before her in line was passing through the door onto the runway.
“Er du ombordstigning?” The agent raised her eyebrows, then added, “Time to board.”
“No,” Greta said. Simply. Declaratively. The light in the airport hall was shining from above and below, reflecting off all the tile floors. “I’ve changed my mind.” She reached down for her bag. “I’ve changed my mind,” she said again. “I won’t be leaving today.”
The woman didn’t say anything in response, just turned toward the door, stepped out onto the tarmac, and disappeared.
Greta took a deep breath, then slowly exited the airport. Outside, she rubbed her eyes and opened them wide and looked up at the stars and moon, shining like daylight. She saw his face—Stig’s—as if he were standing in the choir loft in the church. So easily did he occupy her mind. She glanced around, to make sure she was alone, and whispered, “Are you sure?”
In answer, she went across the parking lot and knocked on the window of the same cab that had dropped her off. She told the driver to return to the Hotel Thon, and five minutes later she hurried back into the lobby. The same woman who had bidden her goodbye remained behind the counter. When she saw Greta, she smiled, and held up her finger for a moment before bending down to reach under the counter, then she held Stig’s red sweater out before her. “You left something,” she said, to which Greta said, “Yes, I did.”
[1897]
All night a wild wind came down Grøt Sund, rattling the windows at the Grand Hotel and stirring snow and grit up off the Storgata to spit against the panes. In the morning, it roused me from my wayward sleep. Inger woke, too, and together we got ready for breakfast with hardly a word between us. The café was empty but for the maid setting the tables. She showed us a seat by the window and brought us strong tea and brown bread with butter and a boiled egg and we ate in silence. It was hard to tell which appealed less to Inger’s appetites, the food or my company. Indeed, she would nary look at me, and only as we sipped the last of our tea did she say anything at all.
“You’ll be going to Marius Granerud’s again this morning, then?”
“Of course.”
“First thing?”
“After breakfast. He’s eager to continue. No doubt he’d like to be finished as much as I would myself.”
“When will that be?”
“Who can say? I’ve spoken with him only about the first two days.”
“At that rate we’ll be here until the start of Advent.”
I’d never known Inger to embroider the facts, and it did not become her. “The meetings with Granerud might as well be counted as mornings spent at the oars and nets.”
She took a drink of tea and then pursed her lips. “You had trouble sleeping last night.”
I glanced at her.
“I saw you up, sitting at the desk in the middle of the night. What were you doing?”
I touched my pocket under the table, to feel that my letter for Thea was still there. “I made a list of things to tell Herr Granerud. The memories, sometimes they wake me and I’ll lay there thinking about them. But when I get to his office, they’ve left my mind altogether.”
Inger rarely exaggerated, and I rarely told a lie. It felt unnatural to keep the truth tucked into my pocket. The fact was, I’d spent my sleepless hours contemplating things I would never tell Granerud, not if we had a lifetime of interviews.
Another gust rocked the window, this one startling my wife. “Will this wind bring more snow?” she asked. Though she knew as well as I did what kind of wind portended snow, what shadows at midday meant thunder by sundown, what chill on the evening air meant frost on the windows by morning, I could tell from the inflection of her voice that this wind reminded her of a very particular season of storms, one neither of us would ever be able to forget.
I knew all this, but still I said, “Hard to say.” Then I dabbed the corners of my mouth with the napkin. “Should I plan on taking lunch with you?”
“If you can avoid stopping at the tavern, I don’t see why not.”
I fixed her with a hard gaze and then got up to leave.
“I’ve never know you as a drinking man, Odd Einar.”
I turned back to her. “I’m no more a drinking man than I am a member of the King’s court, and you damn well know it.” I thought to rage more, but in truth I didn’t even know what I was angry about, so I put on my coat and walked out of the café. On the Storgata the wind came with sharp sleet. I didn’t need to glance skyward to know more snow would come hard on its heels.
Even from a block away, I could hear the water tossing in the sound and followed its noise until I stood at a piling on the wharf. There was a schooner coming down from the north, her sails down, her exhaust harried into the gale the instant it coughed out of the stack. The boat looked like a larger version of the Sindigstjerna as I watched it navigate the treacherous seas. The captain was attempting to bring her portside to a dock in front of the brewery, though the waves allowed little progress, and she was soon coming astern for another approach. That’s when I noticed her Danish ensign. I looked closer, and sure enough the schooner attempting to dock was the very boat that had washed ashore in Hammerfest during the storms of ’eighty-two. The Tifældighed. How could I forget her? Half of her hundred feet had lain aground at the foot of the church, so you could nearly have walked off the bowsprit right into the narthex.
Having glimpsed that memory, I fell headlong into recollection. Thea was not yet three years old when the first hurricane struck in January. My God, I can still hear the wind and see the seas breaking on land that had forever been dry. Two days it rained and snowed and blew a tempest and when finally on the third morning we woke to calm, our stock of awe was long spent. Whole docks were rent from shore in the village, two warehouses on the water reduced to rubble. I believe the first shock of those storms destroyed eighteen fishing boats and ten townsfolk in Hammerfest. In villages out on the open sea, in Sørvær and Hasvik and Loppen and countless others, whole houses vanished, along with the families who lived in them.
Our own hovel was a simple sod-covered hut out on Muolkot. The northern half of our home was carved into the earth, and the half facing the village was built out of logs. The onslaught brought ankle-deep floodwaters into our dwelling, but it was otherwise valiant against the storm—my sweet young daughter less so. Goodness, how the wind scared her. Having never been much for fussing or crying, she spent those two nights in sleepless terror. Neither my lullabies nor my hardingfele could calm her, and her keening harmonized with the weather outside.
In the following two weeks, we put our place back together. We helped our neighbors in the village—fetching lost nets or buoys, mending houses, washing laundry, cooking fiskesuppe and lefse for those who’d lost everything. Those days showed us the best of each other, and as January turned to February, Thea regained her childish spirit. She played in
the snow. Sang alongside me. Went to sleep without holding my hand.
But bitterer weather lay ahead, and in the shortest month our skies began to turn three days before the second hurricane fell upon us. This one also from the north, bearing even more elemental force. The wind in this round came hardest the first night, as if it had been born in the bowels of hell and used for its fuel all the hate of the demons dwelling down there. Even Inger lost that night’s sleep.
I remember holding Thea, walking with her between her bed and our own, making promises I could never deliver—ones I had to believe myself so as to survive this pitch-black ordeal. The second night brought with it the cold, and the next morning, after a few hours of lucky sleep, we woke to a world hard as steel. We dressed in all we had and rowed to town. The sea itself was proof of the storm’s wrath. The mast of an unlucky ship, its halyards trailing like the tentacles of a Kraken, its sail unfurled and nothing more than a shadow in the depths. A flock of exhausted sheep, their long coats a certain death knell, swimming in circles a hundred yards off, their baaing an unholy testimony. There were uncountable oars and barrels and unmanned skiffs, countless boards and planks and doors. Gulls circled above the flotsam like accountants, calling out an inventory of loss, one atop a bobbing chest with its left wing broken and wavering in what gale remained.
I knew the words I’d consoled Thea with the night before might as well have vanished in that wind. What good was I to her in a world capable of such devastation? I looked at her there in Inger’s lap, feeling certain we would be swallowed up. Later that morning, as stragglers filled the church pews, I prayed that I was wrong. What others prayed for I might’ve guessed, given our congregation’s solemnity.
Yet for another two weeks we all worked together, replacing windows and roof shingles, cooking and cleaning and salvaging wood for fireplaces and stoves. Inger’s sister, Hege, broke her arm in the storm, and her husband, Rune, swore they would leave this godforsaken country the next summer, which they did. But before that summer came, before they could liquidate their lives on this icy shore to make a new one nigh four thousand miles westward, they had to endure the worst of the three hurricanes that winter’s season.
Later in my life I would remember this last as the cruelest, without knowing if that was actually true. We were in awe of the first round, in terror of the second, and furious with the finale. Perhaps it was fatigue. Maybe the challenge of surviving three in such close proximity felt like God was taunting us. Or possibly it merely inconvenienced us beyond any measure, taking as it had my faering and lying it atop the hillside on Håja—four miles across the sound—as though it were a kite. In fairness to the Lord or the wind it was set down upon that grass with such a gentleness that it had no need of repair. I had all but given her up for lost when Magnus Moen came rowing up to check on us in the town tender.
“Odd Einar, Inger, sweet child,” he said, pulling ashore on Muolkot, our first visitor since the storm passed two days earlier. He brought with him a basket of fresh bread and cheese, a jar of milk.
“How are things in the village?” I asked.
“There’s a Danish ship aground,” he said. “At the door of the church, which is about the only building still standing.”
I remember wiping my eyes, trying to conjure what he’d just described.
“I figured you must’ve lost your boat, else we’d have seen you in town with a hammer to help.”
“Ja,” I said, and could say no more. Without my boat, we were as good as dead.
“Well, my friend, grab your mitts and a length of rope, if you have one left, and come with me.”
Under any other circumstances I’d have asked why, but I only had to glance at Inger to know that I must follow. We rowed out to Håja and spent a half hour scaling that mighty hill. There she sat, my boat.
“How in God’s name did you know she was here?” I asked Magnus.
“I saw it in a dream,” Magnus said, “and I mean that true. Toralv Hagen and I came out to check his flock earlier this morning, and I went for a look. She sat then just as she does now. You’ll need new oars and a mast, and you’ll have to visit Skjeggestad to see about new lines too. But a luckier boat I’ve never seen.”
I believed him. How many died we never did learn, but the storms assaulted Norway from the Lofoten Islands to Vardø. In the end, it took the largesse of a German Kaiser, an English Queen, and a Russian Tsar to rebuild Hammerfest, right down to oars and rope for our boats.
As I reached Granerud’s office that day in Tromsø, the wind still rising, I’d replayed that storm right up to when Magnus had reminded me of how lucky I was. I wondered, as I stamped the snow from my boots and brushed my shoulders clear of it, whether he’d been right back then and if that luck had held. In any case, when I was finished with Granerud on this day, I vowed to rewrite Thea’s letter. I would ask if she remembered those hurricane nights and the songs I sang and played for her. I would state simply that my love for her had anchored me then, and it still did.
* * *
—
“I’m happy to see you this morning, Herr Eide!” Granerud stood as his secretary led me into his office, and hustled around his desk wiping the crumbs of breakfast from his waistcoat. “Please, have a seat. That’s one hell of a blow out there, ja?” I’d never seen him so animated. “Please bring us a pot of tea, Herr Rudd.” He spun back to face me. “Is there anything else I can get you? Have you had breakfast?”
“Thank you. But I don’t need anything else. Inger and I had our breakfast at the hotel this morning.” Though curious about his great excitement, I didn’t ask what had brought it on.
“Sit down, sit down.” Now he hurried back to his side of the desk and quickly organized his papers. Then taking his seat, he said, “I’ve been thinking over what you said yesterday. In fact, I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.” He spoke rapidly, even as he readied his pen and ink. “After we adjourned, I went off to lunch and—”
Now his man carried in a tray of tea. Granerud motioned for him to set it on the sideboard and then waved him out of the room.
“Anyway, I couldn’t help wondering the sequence of thoughts that would have to pass through a man’s mind…” He suddenly stopped speaking, and looked at me directly for the first time since I’d arrived. Sitting back and removing his monocle, he said, “Is everything all right, Herr Eide? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”
I got up and poured a cup of tea, then sat back down. “Do you remember the hurricanes of ’eighty-two, Herr Granerud?”
“How could anyone forget?” Now he made himself a cup as well. “I was working for the Morgenbladet then, with an office in Trondheim, but as luck—if that’s the word—would have it, I was in Narvik when the third wave crashed in. I wrote a story about the Bjerkeengen family. Perhaps you remember those people? Their story caused quite a sensation back then.”
I shook my head.
“Well, they lived out in Svolvær, on the Vestfjorden. A fisherman he was. Six children. Married to a second wife. Good Christians all. The second youngest child was a girl named Margrit, who I believe was nine or ten years old.” He took a sip of tea. “Dear Lord,” he said “the day after the storm passed, another fisherman from Leines was out recovering what he could of his nets when he saw a skiff across the water. Mind you, this was not uncommon in the days following the storms. No doubt you know this firsthand. But he saw the skiff and he went to retrieve it. And do you know who he found inside?”
I shook my head again.
“Little Margrit Bjerkeengen. She was all alone. Dressed warmly, it’s true. But alone. She’d spent a full day and night on the sea. Adrift in her father’s boat. When that old fisherman found her in there and asked her where she was from, and what she was doing in the boat all by herself, she simply told him her name and that she came from Svolvær.
“Bear in mind, thi
s child was thirty or forty miles from Svolvær. The storm had passed, but do you remember the cold that followed? And that poor child alone in the boat.” He paused here, and I noted the change in his demeanor. He’d gone from bustling to moribund in the space of half a cup of tea, but he wasn’t done with this story. He sat back in his chair and folded his hands over his paunch.
“When they returned the girl to her home, nothing was left of it but the stones of its footings. Every board used to build it, every plate the family ate from, every doll Margrit ever played with, every one of her five siblings, both of her parents—vanished, all of it. All of them.”
He paused again, transfixed by the glow of his desk lamp. Outside his windows, the sleet of a half hour ago had turned to driving snow. “Margrit went to live with an aunt in Narvik.” He shook his head, as if to lose this painful memory. “Yet I saw her again. I went to see a performance of A Doll’s House in Christiania, and do you know who played Nora Helmer?”
“Margrit?”
“I like to think I’d have recognized her, but in truth she only looked vaguely familiar. I opened the playbill though, and with God as my witness, there was her name. Margrit Bjerkeengen.” He raised his eyes from the lamp flame and set them on me. “As I recall she gave a fine performance. A few times after, I read her name in the paper. Usually it was followed by some small praise, and I wondered what the critics might say if they’d seen the face of that little girl on the boat.”
Now he caught himself. “I beg your pardon, Herr Eide. You asked if I remembered the hurricanes and here I am at the Christiania Theater ten years later.”
