Northernmost

by Peter Geye

  If this thought should have embarrassed her, it didn’t. She knew the slim likelihood of love coming of all this. But even the idea of it, the hope of it, the notion that such a thing might still exist for her, this electrified her. “You’re so handsome,” she whispered, as though people were eavesdropping. She still had her hand in his underwear, caressing him, the wires running from the tips of her fingers to the palm of her hand and then through her body to that spot just above her clit, all of it was burning. To calm herself, she let go of him.

  “I only care that you think so,” he said. He bunched the pillow under his head and ran his hand gently across her back, his fingers still playing her flesh. “I cannot believe we are lying here. When I saw you in the church I…”

  She waited to see if he had the words she lacked, but when he remained silent she said, “I know. Me too.”

  “What will I do?” he asked.

  “About what?”

  “About you.”

  “I don’t know, Stig.” The feel of his name on her lips was like another kiss. “Stig Hjalmarson.”

  She thought she could feel his body lighten upon him hearing his name. His shoulders rose, his belly sank. His hand on her back came to rest, and wanted to hold her there.

  “You will go home. And I will still be here,” he said. “I do not think that one night is enough.”

  His voice delighted her as much as what he said. It was like they were continuing a conversation they’d been having for years. The intimacy. The lulls. The inexactness that was no barrier to understanding what they meant to say. It aroused her as much as his flesh did.

  “One night that will last now for one or two months or more,” he said. “After I kissed you last night, I said to myself, That will have to be enough. But I was wrong.”

  “I thought something like that, too. Which is why I went to the airport.”

  “But you did not leave.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Am I supposed to make this night everything I need?”

  She knew exactly what he was asking, and exactly how impossible the answer. The silence between them was amplified by water lapping against the hull of his boat. He pulled the comforter up over them, and drew her close to him. Her appetite was resting now, and she took a different kind of pleasure in the warmth of his nearly naked body next to hers. She closed her eyes and tried to memorize what he felt like. She breathed in the fresh smell of him. And somehow she fell asleep to the gentle rocking of his boat.

  [1897]

  Before leaving Granerud’s office, I stopped by his secretary’s desk. Herr Rudd possessed the countenance of a man beholden to the drudgery of office work: ashen, pudgy, even sickly. But his voice carried almost birdlike, and he happily obliged me when I asked for a pencil and stationery. He even offered me a table beneath a window overlooking the harbor to write my letter.

  The wind had not relented, and the bustle I’d grown to associate with the quayside had vanished that afternoon, replaced by the forlornness of vacant boats tied to docks. The view from that pane of glass was the perfect vantage for composing the missive I intended for my daughter. I licked the tip of the pencil and wrote her thus:

  Min Kjære Datter,

  If I told you the circumstances under which I find myself writing this letter, I doubt you’d believe me. But since I last wrote to tell you of my great adventure, much has changed. Or, maybe I am changed.

  Your mother—who sends her best wishes and regrets that it has been so long since her last letter—and I find ourselves in Tromsø, at the behest of a man named Marius Granerud. A newspaperman, you see, intent on capturing the story of my unlikely survival on Spitzbergen, which is an island archipelago due north of Hammerfest and halfway to the Pole. When I have more time I will tell you of my tribulations, but on this storm-tossed day suffice it to say that I have weathered a most harrowing ordeal, the experience of which has caused me to take new measure of my life.

  Much of what I once believed has been altered, and if I find myself adrift as never before, then it is on such uncharted seas that I have rediscovered something very important that I wish to tell you: For all the inconstancy of my life I have not been dissuaded from knowing that my love for you has withstood every bit of my suffering and is the one sure thing, on stormy days such as this one, that spares me from despair. If in America you have found yourself similarly altered, with difficulty or sadness or loneliness, just think of your father’s love.

  Daughter, if that seems a small thing, then remember what I have just told you, and know that it is truly the most glorious! And if I might ask you for one small kindness, it would be word that you are safe and well. Until then, I will persist in believing you are.

  Med Kjærlighet Fra Din Hengivene Far

  Before folding the letter and putting it in the envelope, I reread it twice. My intention had merely been to tell my daughter that she’d been on my mind, and that my love for her was undeterred. Why then so much else? I thought of dashing the whole thing, but opted instead for a simple postscript:

  P.S. A great storm is passing through Tromsø even as I sit at a window writing you this letter. It has reminded me of the hurricanes that came to Hammerfest when you were a young child. I doubt you remember them, having been back then only two and a half years old, but I do. I held you sometimes for whole nights and sang you every song I knew. Which I mention only because the weight of you in my arms tethered me to the ground while the world all around us blew into the sky. I think about that often.

  May the winds be but a breeze where you are. And may you remember how I held you as a child. I hope against all odds to be able to see you again someday.

  Now better satisfied, I folded the letter and stuffed it in the envelope and sealed it shut. I addressed it to my daughter and stood for a last look out onto the harbor. Outside the window, snow blew up the Storgata and I pondered briefly, as I often did while it stormed, the nature of wind, and where it went once it blew by. Did it simply disappear? Or did it persist, blowing onto other streets and mountaintops and seas? Did it whorl around the world and come back weeks or months or years later? Were the gales out on that street remnants of the same hurricanes that had recently held so much of my attention? Would they blow forever? Would they take my hat as I walked back to the Grand Hotel like the hurricane had taken my faering?

  * * *

  —

  Unlike the previous day’s guesses on Inger’s whereabouts, this one found her sitting in the hotel’s lobby as if she expected me just then, a cup of tea on the table beside her, a newspaper spread on her lap as though she were an aristocrat. She glanced at me, but otherwise made no effort to greet me. As I walked toward her, she might even have started reading again the news of the day.

  “Hello, Inger,” I said, standing before her. I could see that her hair had been recently washed and braided. She smelled wondrous.

  “Hello, Odd Einar.”

  “It must be lunchtime, or thereabouts.”

  Now she did look at me. “I was hoping you’d return in time to dine with me.”

  I cannot say why she sounded so formal, but I had the strange sensation of our taking lunch together being compulsory. She picked up her teacup and saw it was almost full. “Would you like a tea before we eat? While I finish mine?”

  “That sounds fine,” I said, and looked around for the provenance of her cup, which was a tray across the hotel lobby. I went and got one and stirred in a lump of sugar and thought of how badly the next hour or two with my wife might go. We had not yet spoken of the night before, and though I had done my duty to Marius Granerud it would be a lie to say that I hadn’t been preoccupied about her behavior. In all my married years with her, I’d hardly ever felt she had a secret from me. Until now.

  The thought soured me, so I stirred another lump of sugar in my cup before I
went and sat down beside her.

  She folded the newspaper and set it on the table next to her and fixed the sleeves of her dress and finally turned to me. “I owe you an explanation, Odd Einar. So much has happened in the last few days. I’ve been altogether out of sorts.” Her eyes were a study in uncertainty, and for the first time since we’d made love upon my return, I believed her.

  “Do you wish I’d perished up there, Inger? Would you be happier if I had?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Do you no longer love me?”

  “Oh, Odd Einar. You know I do.”

  “Are you not content to be here? To have me earning these kroner?”

  “We need the money, you know as well as I.”

  “Have I failed you?”

  “You’ve never failed me.”

  “Is there some question I ought to ask but haven’t? Is there something I’m missing?”

  Now I could see a tear spring from the corner of her lovely eye. Inger seldom wept, and for a moment I paused in my questioning, which had been spontaneous and even seemed out of my control.

  After she dabbed her eye with a handkerchief and collected herself, she said, “You’ve done nothing wrong, Husband. Nothing at all.”

  “I only ask because ever since I stepped off that mailboat, ever since old Magnus brought me ashore, ever since I laid eyes on our empty room and then you standing there over my grave with Bengt Bjornsen, why, I’ve felt a stranger in my own life.”

  “Oh, Odd Einar—”

  “Or—pardon me, Inger—worse still: like a man sentenced for a crime he didn’t commit.”

  “You’ve committed no crime. You know that. If I’ve been aloof, it’s because I was already mourning you. When you appeared in the graveyard, you might as well have been Lazarus.”

  I reached over and took her hand. “Inger, you’ve already told me this. And I can well believe what a shock it would be to see me rise from the dead. Nearly every day up on Spitzbergen I felt like I was doing just that. But I’m here.” I pointed to my feet on the carpet. “I’m no Lazarus. I’m no damn draugen or ghost. I’m alive, even if just barely. And I’m not”—and here I felt in my pocket, and knew the risk of invoking our daughter—“some unanswered letter.” I waited for a reaction to play across her face, but none came so I went on. “When the going was hardest up there, when I wondered why it wouldn’t be better to use my last bullet in my own ear than suffer another bitter night, it was you who were my answer. You and Thea both. You might as well have been calling to me through that damn darkness.”

  She looked at me again, and another tear came to her eye.

  “I can wait patiently for your love, Inger. I truly can. But if it’s not coming”—and now I lowered my eyes—“then you have to tell me so I’m not made a fool yet again. Ever since I got on board the Lofoten, ever since those conversations with Otto Sverdrup, I’ve proven over and over again that I should’ve just stayed by your side. Should have worked on our life from home. Should have proven my love to you. If I’ve lost you because I left, well, I couldn’t bear that.”

  When I summoned the courage to look at her again, it was kindness that met me—of a sort I hadn’t seen since Thea still woke each morning in our home. And so it was my turn to shed a tear.

  She tightened her hold on my hand. “Of course I love you, Odd Einar. You needn’t wait to know that.” She held my gaze until her grip loosened, then she sat back in her chair and sighed. A gust of wind shrieked past the window, and we both looked out to see the snow blowing sideways.

  “This wind has put me in mind of the hurricanes,” she said.

  “I spoke of them this morning. With Herr Granerud. And the same boat that came ashore in Hammerfest was docking this morning here in Tromsø.”

  “I saw it too. The schooner with the Danish flag. I’m sure that’s what reminded me.”

  “Those storms were the beginning of our troubles, do you remember that?”

  “Your boat blew out to Håja. Half the sod blew off our roof. It stole our pots and pans, that wind did.” She gave me a discerning glance. “But we weren’t the only family to lose a little. How many people lost their loved ones? How many lost their homes altogether?”

  “Surely others had it far worse.”

  “You built us back up, Odd Einar. Your strength and conviction.”

  We both peered out the window at the blowing snow. A man walked past, the tails of his coat trailing him like his own ensign at half-mast. The tea had gone cool, and I drank it down in two long gulps and turned back to Inger. “Well, this day’s wind is no match for those storms. But maybe it’s a harbinger of change for the better, Inger. Maybe it will blow in good luck.”

  If I’d not known my wife so well, I’d have said a smirk rose from her lips. Certainly her eyes shimmered, and she set her empty cup down and took hold of my hand again and leaned across the space between us to whisper, “When’s the last time we made love in the daytime?”

  “Why, Inger!”

  Now she grinned.

  “Daytime or daylight? The sun will set before we finish lunch.”

  “Then we shall skip lunch.”

  I might reasonably have wondered where this appetite came from. My wife had almost never tried to seduce me. But my mind went quickly to that first night back in Hammerfest, when the feel of her soft skin did much more to restore me than the coffee and kanelbolle.

  Now, sweetening her offer, she put her wet lips to my ear and said, “I want to take you to our fancy hotel room, Odd Einar.” Then she sat back and crossed her legs and I swear she was twenty years old again, and I the first and only man she’d ever loved.

  “I remember that look as well as I remember the hurricane winds, Inger,” I said.

  “Then you know what’s in store.”

  What sort of fool presses his luck in such an instance? When his wife, in all her loveliness, makes an overture so promising? I could nigh feel her suppleness already beneath my hands. I could feel, too, the sweetness of her kisses, one of which still lingered on my ear. But there was one thing still plaguing my mind: I would not be a cuckold, especially not to Bengt Bjornsen, whom even Marius Granerud saw fit to call out.

  I sat back myself. Looked into my teacup and spoke into its emptiness. “There’s one more thing I need to ask you. Our whole life Gerd Bjornsen has taunted us. How is it you and she have become friendly? She’s a miserable woman.”

  “She is indeed. But not like you mean.”

  “Oh?”

  “Behind most women whose lives are a misery are miserable husbands.”

  “It’s no news to me that Bengt is a wretched man.”

  Now she looked at me as though I were a simpleton. I could tell I had taxed the long patience that she possessed in such abundance. Could see her calculating her thoughts. Weighing what to say and what not to. “These mornings, you go to Marius Granerud’s office and tell him of your time stranded on the ice, yes?”

  “You know the answer to that.”

  “You tell him about the agony you endured, the coldness, the isolation, how it will likely haunt you for many years. Maybe for as many more as you live, yes?”

  “I suppose it will.”

  “And I suspect there will be many times when, as you contemplate your ordeal, your mood will turn inward. When you become melancholy, or worse. Perhaps even angry. Or dour.”

  “Or I may feel joy at having survived. At having returned to you.”

  A knowing look spread across her face. “All the better, then. So now imagine there never being a slim prospect of that joy. Your life being an endless and frigid snowstorm. This one with no hope of relief.”

  She may as well have been describing the Fonn! It wasn’t the first occasion in our marriage that Inger had demonstrated the ability to own my most private thoughts. Ofttimes, t
hose moments of intuition troubled or even spooked me. But on that afternoon in the Grand Hotel lobby, it gave me a feeling of great tenderness to have her back in the realm of my consciousness, sorry though it could be.

  “You look pleased. Like you know of what I speak. The loneliness of such a prospect, that’s what Gerd faces every second of her marriage.”

  “So you are her warmth? You come as relief to the everlasting coldness of this blighted life?”

  “I am her friend, Odd Einar.”

  “And Bengt?”

  “What about him?”

  “Are you his friend, too?” I knew it was a simpleton’s question.

  She smoothed the pleats of her skirt and crossed her ankles under the chair and I watched the kindness of her expression waver before she gathered and held it forth again. “I will grant you this single instance of doubting my faithfulness, and answer you one time only: I am your wife, Odd Einar. I have been for more than twenty years. In all that time—indeed in all my life—I have never loved another man. Never even given such a thing any consideration. To suggest I might be capable of such a betrayal—with a man like Bengt Bjornsen, of all people—is an affront. When we wed, I stood on the altar of our church and made a vow to you before God. And even if your faith in Him has been tested, mine has not. In fact, it has never been so steady.” She closed her eyes and raised her head and her hands found each other as though she were about to offer a prayer. But what she gave me instead was the last apology I would ever receive on the matter of my coming back from the dead. “I know I have seemed unkind and irritable. Or muddled. I know I have been slow to open my heart to you. And if I have failed to explain the reasons for my behavior, then I apologize. I have told you I will return to you, and every day brings me a step nearer. For this I am happy. And for this I thank God.”

  “Inger—”

  “Please, Odd Einar. I’m not finished.” Now it was her chance to pick up and study an empty teacup. When she spoke again, it was little more than a whisper. “For all that God has tested us, we find ourselves sitting here together. Is that not a miracle?”