by Peter Geye
These were not questions meant to be answered, so I sat still, listening attentively, while she did speak into the empty cup, her voice now came out of its whisper. “When I see things in this light, I am filled with hope.” And then she did look up, but not at me. No, she turned her gaze to the onset of twilight, and it only just past lunchtime. “But when I look away from His kindness—when I look out into the world we live in, Odd Einar—I see darkness. And I see our trials are not yet finished.” Finally she looked at me. “I will continue my toil. To honor the vows I made. And in truth I can see the hardships of our life becoming less fierce. I welcome this, of course. But on the matter of my fidelity, you need know that even if we were still penniless, even if we were still living in that dismal and isolated hut on Muolkot, chewing our fingernails off to boil into soup, I would still be true to you. Because I made that exact vow so many years ago. But”—and now she reached to take my hand in hers—“also because I love you from the bottom of the cold sea to the height of the distant heavens.”
There was only one thing to do: I slunk to the floor and knelt before my wife and held her hand to my face wet with happy tears and said, “Thank you, Inger. I promise you I will earn that love every day. And I will give it back a hundredfold.”
How long did I kneel there at my wife’s lap, holding her hand? How long did I revel in this reward for having clawed myself off that mountainous island of ice and snow? How long did I hang my every hope on Inger’s steadfast kindness? How long did I relish what I had not believed in many years: that we would rise from our privation together, and be better for having suffered it? Long enough that the voice that eventually called from across the lobby did not abolish my hope. Nor did the sight of Bengt’s rotund belly and nose. Nor, even, did the smell of his rummy breath as he stood before me, offering his hand and a genial greeting as if we were old business partners.
For, when I looked back at Inger, she was smiling at me. She stood and took my arm. And when Bengt Bjornsen, his own wife nowhere to be seen, told Inger that he wished to know of a place to take his midday repast, she didn’t so much as meet his eyes, and only told him that he perhaps ought to ask me, who had come to know this town far better than herself.
I told him they poured a delicious draft of Mack’s brygge in the basement tavern, and that he might find a bowl of mutton or plate of fried fish to go with it, but that my wife and I had already had an early lunch and would be retiring to our chamber for a long rest. And so we walked, Inger and I did, up the open staircase, and turned to our passageway, and at the end of it, we walked into our room like young lovers. Hungrier for each other than for fish and potatoes.
Part Three
VANNHIMMEL
[2017]
Friday morning, three days before Christmas. She sat at the kitchen counter, her hands wrapped around a mug of coffee, the laptop open before her, every one of her senses attuned to the life of her house: she heard footsteps in Liv’s bedroom above, the dog’s sigh and the whump of his tail as Liv came down the stairs; she could smell, below the coffee and the Christmas tree in the living room, the faintness of anise from the glass that’d held her aquavit the evening before, a drink she had alone in the living room, gazing out on the city’s darkness with thoughts of Stig keeping her awake. Greta had a new awareness of things happening around her, almost like an animal. It was as if the reawakening of her sexual desire had revived other primal instincts. She heard and smelled and even sensed things that for years had eluded her. There the front door, the screeching hinge of the mailbox lid, the almost pneumatic hiss of the door being closed and the weather stripping sealing back up. But most of all, she had a clairvoyance about Frans: where he was, what he was doing, what thoughts possessed him. She knew, for example, that he’d just gone to get the morning’s mail, and that in a moment he would bring it to the kitchen counter, and sheepishly refill his coffee, and offer to top hers.
She turned from the counter to look at the stairs, waiting to see Liv. The house was trimmed in garlands and holly berries. The tree was decorated and strung with cranberries, a stack of presents already wrapped beneath it. Outside, the lights Greta hung each year—to the height of the turreted entryway and the tops of the Tudor-style peaks—went on at dusk and stayed lit until midnight. To any passerby—and down here by Lake Harriet, even on these frigid days before Christmas, the city was busy with walkers and fat-tire cyclists and even skiers out on the frozen and snow-covered lake—the house would have appeared a bastion of cheeriness and affluence. Certainly the bank statement, which was pulled up on her computer screen, attested to the latter. Even with profligate Christmas spending, their checking account was flush with over thirty thousand dollars. She’d lately become fixated on their finances, figuring out, as she was, how to survive on her own.
The bulk of their money came from Frans, a combination of his work and his family fortune. Greta still wrote features for magazines and newspapers, but her income accounted for merely a fraction of their wealth, and she had lately begun obsessing about how she could ever make the financial ends meet. She even kept a page in her pocket notebook with a running tally of their accounts. She would have to work. To make more money than she was. But there was no danger of her being broke, not by a long shot. Still, how many times had she sat at the kitchen counter thinking how much of their money she’d trade to want to be under the mistletoe hanging in the archway between the living and dining rooms? The one that hadn’t been commemorated except by Liv and Frans.
She closed the computer and walked through the dining room and under that mistletoe and into the living room. She looked out at the snow-crusted lawn and then the lake before turning around and running her hand across the back of the couch. At the piano she stopped and lost herself for a moment in thoughts of Stig. She could rest there, with the memory of him playing.
She walked back into the kitchen with him, picked up her coffee, and sat back down at the counter. She heard Lasse running upstairs, probably to brush his teeth before leaving with his father for some last-minute shopping, while Frans and Liv walked into the kitchen from opposite ends at the same time, her sleepy face such an antidote to his creeping gait as he paused behind Greta for a moment before setting a package on the counter next to a bowl of bananas and pears.
It was a padded manila envelope stamped with a return address from the Hammerfest Biblioteket, the crown-and-polar-bear town seal making it look official. It was addressed to her in penmanship so fine, she at first thought it was a printed label.
“What’s that?” Frans asked. He’d rarely shown much attentiveness to the ordinary details of her life, not unless they had some direct connection to his own. But since she’d returned from Norway three weeks ago and told him she thought their marriage was over, since she’d isolated herself even further, to his great alarm, he’d been trying to demonstrate a little interest, which came across as nosiness.
“It’s from the library in Hammerfest,” he said.
She gave him a scolding stare—obviously it is!—and pushed the package aside and turned to the newspaper. Now she heard him move to the bread box, take the loaf from it, untwist the tie, and pop two slices into the toaster. She knew he would go to the fridge and get the jam, and she could smell the raspberries as soon as he opened the jar. A moment later, he was at her side with the coffeepot. He filled her cup and poured cream into it, and put the pot back in the machine. Then the toast popped up and she heard him spreading butter and jam on it, heard him take a plate from the cupboard, saw it appear at her elbow.
“I’m taking Lasse to buy Grandpa’s Christmas present,” he said, holding his own cup of coffee.
“I know.”
“Do you need anything?”
“Take Liv, too. I have some things to do around here.”
“Okay,” he said, then turned to Liv. “When you finish your banana, brush your teeth, okay? You can come shopping with us.”
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br /> There’d been a time, a month ago, in fact, when Liv might have protested or begged off to stay with Greta, but all of the tension in the house after Thanksgiving had left her timid, sometimes even cowering, so she stuffed the rest of the banana in her mouth and shot upstairs to get ready. That left only Greta and Frans in the kitchen. Both with their coffee and toast.
“Can you at least be civil over the holidays?” he asked. “For the kids?”
She folded the newspaper, put it aside, and picked up her cup. “Do you realize this is the first time you’ve ever taken the kids Christmas shopping? Your son’s thirteen years old, for God’s sake, and so far he’s been made to understand that Christmas shopping’s for girls.”
“Is that true?”
That deference was new, too, and even less tolerable than his cocksuredness. “Well, you’re taking them now. If you can manage it without their knowing, you should also have them get each other something. I usually let them spend twenty dollars.”
“Okay.”
“They do have ideas for each other.”
“Okay,” he said again.
Now she heard one of the kids zipping their coat in the mudroom. She heard the familiar gurgling of the pipes in the bathroom off the kitchen, and another sigh from Axel. She felt the kitchen floor’s slightest vibration as the furnace turned on right below her in the basement. She heard Liv’s light step on the staircase, and then she was back in the kitchen. And she saw how deflated Frans was. Not by the task, but by the tension in their home. She sensed his total bewilderment.
Liv had put on the sweater Frans had brought home from Norway. Apparently he’d come bearing armfuls of gifts, including a jewelry box for Greta, which still sat in the packaging on her dresser upstairs.
“Are you ready to roll?” she asked Liv. “Your new sweater looks nice.”
“I thought Grandpa would like it. It’s woolly.”
“You’re a beauty,” Frans said. “Can you put your coat on? It’s cold this morning.”
“I told my dad we’d be there for dinner tonight,” Greta said.
Frans nodded before reaching into the mudroom for his own coat. As he buttoned it up and tied a scarf around his neck he said, “Have a nice morning,” loud enough for the kids to hear. This was perhaps the most egregious of his new habits, making sure the kids could see his kindness and gentleness.
Greta got up, brusqued by him, and kissed Lasse and Liv on the tops of their heads. “Have fun,” she said, then went back to the counter, where she grabbed the package and her coffee before heading upstairs.
* * *
—
In the bathroom, she locked the door and then peeked through the blinds, watching as the kids stumbled through the snowbanks toward Frans’s Land Rover. She heard Axel get up to look out the window downstairs. She heard the back door close and the dead bolt slide into place as Frans locked it behind him. He would put his sunglasses on before opening the back door for Liv, slide each of his hands into the cashmere linings of his gloves, clap his hands twice, then get behind the wheel. Even from upstairs she could smell the winter air wafting through the house.
In a basket at the back of the linen closet, beneath cast-off makeup and toiletries and years-old tampons, Greta kept a pack of cigarettes. She fished them out, went to the window and opened it a crack, sat on the toilet, and lit one, blowing the smoke out the side of her mouth toward the window. The package sat on her lap for as long as it took her to smoke the cigarette, the butt of which she dropped into the toilet along with the ashes she’d tapped into the palm of her open hand.
When last they’d spoken, five days ago, Stig said he’d sent her something—a gift, he called it. Each day since, she’d stalked the mailman and the UPS and FedEx drivers. She even canceled a coffee date with a friend so she could be home, waiting. But now that she held his gift, she could hardly bring herself to look at it, much less open it. And for all she’d imagined it might be, for all she hoped it would be, she found herself now more fearful than excited.
She closed her eyes, traced the package with her fingertips, and then pulled the strip that opened the envelope. There were two books—or what she assumed were books—wrapped in brown paper, and an envelope with her name written across it and the admonition to OPEN THIS CARD FIRST, which she did.
On the outside of the card was a photograph of northern lights and starry skies above Håja and Sørø Sound. The picture might have been taken from where they sat on their first night together.
Dear Greta,
God Jul—Merry Christmas. When I was a child we gave presents on Christmas Eve. I hope you will find some quiet place to open my gift for you then (open the smaller package first). Until then, Nordvinden er for deg.
~ Stig
She read the note three times, then lit another cigarette from the crumpled pack in the basket and read it a fourth. Was this really all he had to say? It felt like a handshake, not the ardent kiss she’d hoped for. Had she misunderstood his intentions so badly? And did he honestly expect her to wait until Christmas Eve to open it? Did he not understand that she was subsisting on thoughts of him? On her desire for him? And that to ask her even for a day of patience was untenable? And what the hell did Nordvinden er for deg mean?
She took a package in each hand, weighing them, wondering. Clearly these were books, small ones. Her mind went to the poets she’d loved so much in college and suddenly understood that what she’d learned from them—from Frost and Whitman and Dickinson—had stayed with her, and was only now returning to her consciousness. A heart gone wild was everything, and to tame it was cowardly. What a pleasure, this realization. This rediscovery.
But from the library? Why would he send anything from there? She balanced the wrapped books on a knee and picked the envelope off the floor to study the return address again. She’d passed by the library several times on her walks through Hammerfest. It could’ve been a library in any town. For that matter, it could have been the firehouse.
Never mind all that, she thought, and took the smaller of the packages and tore the paper off. It was a book indeed, covered in pebbled black leather, and very old. A polar bear, forepaws raised before its snarling face, was embossed beneath the title, Isbjørn i Nordligste Natt. She flipped it open and the pages inside were almost brittle to the touch. She turned them carefully, one at a time, the Norwegian words coming up off the pages like the scent of him.
There were also eight engravings, each covered with a slip of bound parchment, and it was from these that she gleaned the story. Some old schooner among floes of ice. Two men killing seals. A polar bear mauling a man. A glacier in the valley of towering mountains. A desolate, snow-covered plain with a rock cairn in the middle of it. A stumpy-legged reindeer. Another polar bear looking back over its shoulder. And, last, the portrait of a man who was a perfect cross between her father and grandfather, had they been, she gathered, seal hunters at the top of the world a century ago.
If the first of his gifts left her dumbstruck, the second changed her life. She removed the wrapping and saw another leather-bound book, this one brand-new and handwritten by Stig. On the first page, it read: The Polar Bear in the Northernmost Night. She turned the page and started at the beginning:
Owing to its treacherous latitude and everlasting remoteness, most men left for dead on Spitzbergen might seek forgiveness from their Maker. Others might find only the darkness of their wayward souls. But what sort of man would abandon his faith in God and worship the snow instead?
I know one such fellow. I sat with him a week long, listening to his tale of survival. His name is Odd Einar Eide, of Hammerfest, a fishing village in Finnmark. A more unassuming gentleman you’ve never met. But when it came time to brave the polar winds and ice bears, when the choice between living and dying was hardly distinguishable, our man made bold decisions that kept him alive. He insists he’
s not a hero. But, dear reader, I’ll tell you of his travails, and let you decide about that for yourself.
Allow me this observation about our fisherman from Finnmark, though, as you ponder whether he is hero or heathen: The land he tamed is strewn with the bones of men unsmiled upon by God, men whose last steps did nothing to provide a pathway to salvation. Yet there he sat in my office in Tromsø, alive to tell his tale.
She flipped again to the engraving at the back of the first book—the man who was her father and grandfather had they been one and the same—and froze. It would take a while for her to learn this, but what Stig had offered her was not simply this extraordinary gift. As she sat there on the toilet, looking at the picture of Odd Einar Eide, she had a glimpse of who she herself might have been. Of who she might yet become. Stig had given her the gift of possibility, after years in which only her children and her dear father had. He offered a new and different future.
As if the revelation of the rest of her life weren’t enough, Greta noticed then another letter, in the crumpled wrapping of the second book. She took a last long drag from her cigarette and dropped it in the toilet, flushed, and picked up the note.
Dear Greta,
I think the man in this story is from your family. His name, as you told me, was Odd Einar Eide. The exact date of his birth I do not know, but I believe it was in the year 1854. In the Hammerfest cemetery there is a grave marking his life, but the date of death is false, I know this with certainty after a conversation with the sexton, who told me, based on the church records, that this same man appeared at his own funeral looking “every bit the Draugen.” The story told in this book confirms that part of the parish record.
