by Peter Geye
“Solvang’s offer, did it mean more pay than your work with Sverdrup?”
“I was to be paid a share on Solvang’s boat, same as the others.”
“So the chance was there? Boom or bust?”
“Precisely. But there was much promise, and we’d done well in the two months I was aboard. We had a hold full of sealskins.” It occurred to me that my share of our slaughtering, as I understood it, would have been about what Granerud was paying me to relive this experience.
“Would you sign on with Solvang again? Knowing what you now do?”
The question had not crossed my mind, and I considered it earnestly. Surely, by now, I knew better than to fantasize about revising my life. The last few years, ever since we sent Thea to America, had been one notable misstep after another. At a glance, signing on with Svene Solvang had the same aura of failure. Yet here I was, sitting with this gracious man, Fridtjof Nansen’s last three bullets in my pocket, a hundred kroner in my purse. And prospects with Inger more hopeful and promising after the previous night’s conversation than they’d been since before Thea set sail. Though it’s true I had survived an outrageous ordeal, I had lived after all. Perhaps that was all that mattered in the end.
“I believe I would,” I said. “But I suspect the answer to that question would be different had I not got that reindeer. Otherwise, I might very well have perished. From hunger or from lack of will.” As soon as I said it, I knew I was wrong. Lying or mistaken, who could say?
“You’ve never suffered a lack of will, Herr Eide. That much about you is perfectly obvious.”
Now it was my turn to smile. “I feel great esteem for you. And I marvel at your intuition. I must say, when I met you I was doubtful.”
“Of what?”
“I thought, Any friend of Bengt Bjornsen…”
He let out a guffaw as he nodded. “I keep company with Bengt because he plays no small role in shaping what happens in our corner of the world, not because he’s a friend. Though, in truth, I believe he’s more troubled than most, and so I reserve some sympathy for him.”
“I know you do.”
“And I know of your contempt for him.”
“I’ve made it no secret. In actual fact, I’d rather not speak of him. Not where our business is concerned.”
“A reasonable request, to be sure.”
“Let me finish telling of the reindeer, and the night that came after, and my first true slumber.”
He smoothed a fresh sheet of onionskin paper, dipped his pen in the inkwell, and nodded.
I spoke of my walk across the plain, the ice coming up the fjord from the same direction as the sun, which remained glorious, and the kindly wind that followed third in line. I spoke of my hesitation standing over the reindeer’s antlers, his eyes open and blood-rimmed, and how I reminded myself of the pungent smell his guts would unleash, of the stain its blood would leave. I spoke of the sweet sound the blade made cutting into its hide, of the care I took in eviscerating it, of the hour I spent sawing off the choicest meat. Of my first meal, gnawing on its ribs, my tongue slapping on its flesh, my gut at first recoiling but soon growing fuller and demanding more. A half hour I spent at my feast, packing meat into my pockets, stacking it on the ledge rock as though it were kindling to start the fires I dreamt of cooking it over. I spoke of the falling light and the turn of sky and the weariness that followed from a full belly. Finally, I spoke of skinning the beast, and of using his hide as my market sack, and of traversing the plain once more, back to the igloo I’d built on the mountainside, and of the choice to bring my bounty into my home, risking the ice bear’s visiting.
“And do you know what?”
He looked up and asked mutely, with his arched eyes, for me to answer my own question.
“I slept that night as though full of Inger’s cooking, snug in our old home on Muolkot. She might as well have been keeping me warm beneath our eiderdown, promising coffee and kanelbolle come the morning. I slept through all eighteen hours of darkness and woke to a new day.”
“Your fifth, yes?”
I don’t know why I was compelled to say, “The day the good book tells us God brought forth fowl and fishes.”
“The good book you’ve abandoned? The one you no longer believe in.”
He meant this benignly, I’m sure of that. “The very one. But of His creatures I was never more grateful. For that morning brought back the birds, dozens of them pecking at the carrion that had come back up with the tide going out. The same tide that also left the ice dotted with enough seals to fill Solvang’s hold all over again.”
“Food for another day.”
“Or for my friend the ice bear, so that I and my venison might be spared.”
Granerud checked his watch, then set his pen down. “Unlike you, my faith in the Lord God has never wavered. But my faith in my fellow man? Well, this has been tested many times, and more so of late than ever before. But you, Odd Einar, are helping to restore it.”
I’m sure his compliment turned me scarlet. Even as the morning’s interview had awakened in me some small modicum of pride, I was still loath to think of myself as other than a dupe.
“May I give you some advice?” he continued.
“Of course.”
“I do not offer this lightly, and beg your pardon if I’m overstepping, but I beseech you: look upon the crucible of your experience as evidence of your strength of character. The world is full of ordinary men who inflate themselves. Men such as Bengt. But there are just as many men like you. Men of substance. Of integrity.” He looked into his folded hands and paused. When he spoke again, his voice was softer, almost apologetic. “Men who honor their women and children. Right men.” Now he nodded as though he had solved some long-posed riddle. “You could be their spokesman.” He sighed, clapped his blotter, and pushed himself up. “Tomorrow you can tell me more.”
“Yes,” I said. “Of course I will.” And then, almost as an afterthought, I stood myself.
I waited while Granerud gathered his notes into his valise and crossed the room to don his inverness and hat. I buttoned my coat and together we walked from his office, past Herr Rudd, who was busy at his desk. Outside, on the Storgata, Granerud paused again and took hold of my shoulder.
“I believe Bengt Bjornsen will be taking his lunch at the Grand Hotel today. He and his wife both.” He reached into his pocket and removed a two-kroner piece, which he pressed into my hand. “Perhaps you and your wife ought to have your lunch there as well.”
He looked up at the sky and nodded, whether to its new softness or to God I could not say, then turned up the street and shouted, “Same time tomorrow!” over his shoulder.
* * *
—
“You can’t eat it with your eyes, Odd Einar,” she said, her voice teasing.
We were sitting at a table beside a window in the hotel’s café. In one hand I held my spoon, churning the bowl of venison stew, and with the other I traced the three bullets pouched in my pocket. I looked up at Inger, who had her own bowl of stew, hers half gone.
“I was thinking about my conversation with Marius Granerud this morning.”
“I figured such.”
“I killed a reindeer up in Spitzbergen. Except for a few leaves and flowers, I ate nothing else. And here I am sitting in this fine café by candlelight, eating from porcelain bowls as though we were part of the bourgeoisie.”
“That’s God’s good grace.”
I nearly suggested that it was Granerud’s good grace, but instead said, “I started to tell him something else, but we got sidetracked. I was explaining how I went from Sverdrup’s to Solvang’s employ. The Lofoten lay at anchor on an inlet on the Isfjorden. You’d not believe it, but there’s a hotel up there—established by Vesteraalens, of course. A place for the sportsmen to wet their tongues before they go shooting. T
his is where I met Solvang.
“How did I end up at a table with Otto Sverdrup and Svene Solvang? In fact, it’s quite unremarkable: I wanted to get my land legs back under me, if only for an hour, so after the tender had run our passengers ashore, the crew was offered passage. Only Sverdrup and I took that tender ride, perhaps owing to the nasty sleet cutting from the sky. In any case, he told me he was going to meet an old friend of his, whose boat—the Sindigsterna, you see?—was also at anchor. As we made the shore, he asked if I’d like to accompany him. Can you imagine that, Inger? Me keeping company with Otto Sverdrup?”
Again she squeezed my hand.
“Well, his friend was there at the hotel, sitting in the corner with a pot of tea and a big ledger before him. I tell you, he was a handsome, fearsome man. He wore a fur coat and hat, and when standing to greet Sverdrup he towered above us. His hand was more like a bear’s paw, and had the strength of one as well. His beard a foot long, his hair blossoming out from beneath his hat.
“My goodness, he made an impression on me. I felt almost helpless against the magnetism of his eyes. And when he spoke, why, I lost myself in his voice. It was as if he’d uttered his words a hundred years ago, but they were coming out loud only just then.
“ ‘Otto Sverdrup,’ he announced. ‘I heard you were a consignor now, running bankers and politicians and their well-fed wives up to our hallowed island. Tell me, how do you sleep at night?’
“He meant it in good fun, you see, but this was Solvang’s manner, even with a man commanding such respect as Otto Sverdrup. Of course Sverdrup knew many men like Solvang. And he knew how to humor them. ‘You should count me among your great allies, Svene. I’ve got a ship full of men here to kill all the ice bears. That’s more seals for you.’
“ ‘Otto, you know as well as I do that your cargo of slothful louts shouldn’t even be here. This place will make a mockery of them. And then a mockery of these sainted precincts. You also know we need the bears, to keep us alert. To remind us of our mortality.’ I kid you not, Inger. That’s how Svene Solvang spoke. Whether buttering his bread or waiting out gales he was like a preacher. And he wasn’t above striking fear into his crew. But on that first meeting, he seemed almost impish when he asked Sverdrup and me to join him.”
I finally took a bite of my lunch, which even if tepid was peppery and delicious.
Inger had finished her bowl, and took the opportunity of my mouth being full to interject. “Why did you go with him? With Solvang, I mean.”
The faraway look in her eyes told me she had more in mind than this simple question. “I went with him because he offered me a golden chance, and because Otto Sverdrup encouraged me. I went because I thought you might be impressed.”
“Impressed? You’ve always impressed me. And here I’d wondered if you’d left because of the hard woman I’ve become.”
“Inger—”
“If the prospect of all that desolation was more appealing than living with me.”
“You can’t believe that.”
“Yes, ever since Thea left. Since we moved off the island. Since Bengt—”
“We’re done with Bengt! You’ll never have to speak with him again. I promise you. I went because I thought it would help us get out from under him. That as soon as I got home we’d make a fresh start.” I sat up in my chair and pushed my lunch aside and took both of her hands. “I went with Sverdrup because it was the first opportunity I’d had in years. That venture itself was plain enough. But I went also to see if the world was just too big for me. I thought it might be. And though you won’t like this, I went because I wanted some evidence of God, even a trace of it.”
Her eyes, in deep consideration of our joined hands, darted to meet my gaze, at once admonishing me for such blasphemy and asking what I’d found.
“I’ve learned things, Inger. I’ve learned the folly of pride. And how big the world really is.” Now I looked away. “And if you’re going to love me again, and stay with me, and remake our lives together—you’re going to do it with a man who found no hint of God, and who departed that island bone-thin and weary but also resolute and free.”
Her voice came sweet and quiet across the table. “I know that already, Odd Einar. And because I believe—in both God and you—I trust your skepticism will run its course, and that in time you’ll come back to your faith.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Well, you have at least come back to me.”
I hadn’t realized how much I needed that affirmation until I’d received it. This was almost as if she’d forgiven me some transgression, in the wake of which I felt more emboldened than ever. A good thing, because in the next few minutes my strength of character would be tested even more severely.
First, I lifted her hands to my lips and kissed them. She blushed, naturally. Next, I ate the venison stew in bearish bites, with the thought of that raw reindeer flesh on Spitzbergen never entering my mind. After I buttered the last morsel of bread and finished it off, I looked down at my taut belly and rubbed it as though I were a jolly old fellow used to such repasts. All this time Inger sat sipping her tea, chatting about ordinary things like her knitting, her aunt, the village gossip. And the satisfaction I felt from witnessing her ease? Well, it gave me strength.
She even touched on the subject of the Tromsø museum, where earlier that morning she’d seen an exhibition about whales, their migrations and appetites and mating songs and reproductive practices. We’d seen them often enough in the spring and fall, their spouts rising up in the sound like bursts of smoke from a chimney. Inger was reminding me of the time a humpback breached just twenty feet off the bow of our faering, its tail exposed long enough to watch the seawater sluice back into the sound as we rowed out to Håja, and at that moment the expression on her face shifted as if that humpback’s brother had just surfaced in the café.
By chance I then turned, and walking toward us, arm in arm, were Bengt and Gerd Bjornsen, him with a cane and patent-leather shoes and her on his arm in a fox coat, looking for all the world like half of her dread husband’s shadow. With puckered lips, and her hands folded sternly before her, she held her gaze on Inger even as I wished her a good afternoon.
“I was beginning to wonder if we’d cross paths, Odd Einar,” Bengt said. “Inger, good to see you here again.”
“Herr Bjornsen,” I said.
“How was your lunch, Odd Einar? The prices in this café are quite steep, are they not?” He shifted his rotten eyes between Inger and me. “I expect there are better uses for your hard-earned kroner.”
“I beg your pardon,” I said.
“I imagine your lovely wife, whose lot has for so long been cast in doubt, has a few requirements you might fulfill now that you’ve finally come into an honest bit of capital.” He fixed now on Inger and raised his eyebrows as if to say, Well? And then slowly swiveled his ponderous neck toward me again. “And if her every wish has been fulfilled, then I think you ought to consider the great debt you owe your creditor before spending frivolously on fare such as this, which is no doubt well beyond your taste.” He swayed forward, rising onto his toes, and tapped his cane twice on the wooden floor.
Since he’d imposed on our table, I’d regarded him only from the corner of my eye but now looked him straight in his satisfied face. “You have been a generous landlord, Herr Bjornsen. A landlord and employer, both. And I thank you for looking after my wife.”
He breathed in deeply, and with his exhale a sinister leer unwound from the folds of his face. “It has been my great pleasure to take care of Inger in your absence.”
“I have kept a tally of my debt to you,” I said, “and I wonder how it squares with your own accounting.”
As though awaiting precisely this statement, he pulled from his coat pocket a small notebook, which he opened to a page whose corner he’d already turned. “Since the bag of pear
s you bought for your comely daughter back in the summer of ’ninety-five—”
“That bag of pears was paid for outright,” I told him.
“The pears themselves were paid for, yes, but the cloth sack in which I sold them to you was not. That’s the first øre you owe me.” He flipped to the next page in his ledger and scanned it with the tip of his finger, then turned to the following notes. “And of course your last debt is for the gravestone we laid in the cemetery back home. By my calculation, it appears you are just over one hundred kroner in arrears.”
I felt in one pocket for the bullets Fridtjof Nansen had never fired, counting as quickly as I could the cost of getting me and Inger back on solid ground. Then I stood up and removed from my other pocket the purse containing most of the advance Marius Granerud had paid me upon our arrival in Tromsø. I uncinched it and reached in to pinch out several coins. As I dropped the first two-kroner onto the tabletop, I said, “I would appreciate a current invoice of my debt.” I dropped a second silver and another and another until I dropped a fifth and said, “I hope you’ll accept this as a token of my intention to pay you off in full.” I then took more coins from my purse, and scattered a further forty kroner on the table, including a gold ten-kroner coin that I held up to the light before letting it fall. “I’ll pay you the remaining debt on installment. We can devise this schedule after we’ve returned to Hammerfest and I’ve seen a full accounting from you.”
“All of this is rather presumptuous.”
“I’m in your debt, and I conjecture you’d like to be paid. This is what I’m doing, and arranging to do so in full.”
“What makes you think I’ll accept these terms?”
