by Peter Geye
* * *
—
How did it always happen? Slowly, and then all at once.
For ten or twelve years, she had spent each day in a loneliness complete, not even knowing enough to say that it possessed her like an illness. Her children suffered for it. Her father suffered for it. Her friends suffered for it. And of course Frans did too. When she’d finally boarded the plane in Hammerfest two mornings after she’d first tried to leave, Stig’s scent still on her jacket, his shadow behind her like the longest day, she panicked. She would miss him like she couldn’t even imagine. What’s more, she didn’t know if she ever would see him again. That vulnerability was appalling, but only for as long as it took her to get on the plane. She sat down. She fastened her seat belt. She was crying, but didn’t notice until tears fell onto her folded hands.
As the plane left the gate, she looked out at the terminal. Snow blew down and the window blurred from it and she watched as the sharp lights from the fuel truck and the baggage cart faded and the plane stopped in the halo of floodlights from the roof. And then she saw Stig standing in the parking lot. His hands up and poking through the chain-link fence. His eyes, even through the smudgy darkness, were visibly frantic. And just as she saw him, and reached her own tear-streaked hand up to wave, the cabin lights went out and the plane taxied onto the runway.
She closed her eyes and wiped them dry and saw him, there in the light of her mind, coming to her again. She would miss him until then, but already the loneliness of her destination was replaced by the promise of him standing out there in the snow. The promise of the things they’d said. By the time she landed—first in Oslo, then in Newark, then in Minneapolis—she knew that she’d traveled not only a great many hours over thousands of miles but also very far back, to a place where she could begin again to try to become herself. She would learn what that meant, in an extremely difficult course. But even once she was in the taxi from the airport heading home, she knew that it had much less to do with distancing herself from her husband than it did with moving forward herself. With Stig. After only a few days in Hammerfest, she could see a future she’d never had with Frans.
Another surge of resoluteness swirled through her as that taxi had exited on Diamond Lake Road. There at the stoplight she resolved to make a future for herself. With Lasse and Liv and Stig. She knew it wouldn’t be easy, but also that she was fierce and determined enough to do it. She would be a more attentive mother. She’d be happier with them, would scold them less, and love them more simply, without her resentment of Frans muddying her affection. She had to. She fucking would. Stig had cracked the ice in her, and now she would finish busting it up.
That was how falling in love with Stig began: by looking ahead. Or she might have said that’s where she felt the first possibility of it. Certainly, during their time in Hammerfest, Greta had glimpsed it. But that had been like remembering a song instead of listening to it, like nodding her head to a rhythm she hadn’t heard in years. When the plane from Newark to Minneapolis touched down, she opened her e-mail, and saw that he’d sent her a note. They were the first words in a conversation that lasted until he’d arrived at the fish house, whether through the ether or in the quiet of her own mind.
Now, as they turned onto the highway toward town, all of this had become clear to her, thanks to his being here. “I do know how this happened,” she said, reaching over to him in the passenger seat and taking his hand in hers.
He’d been looking out the window, up at the patches of snow still in the hills above Gunflint. “How what happened?”
“How we happened. How falling in love happened.”
“You can tell me?”
She stared out the windshield at the blacktop glistening with snowmelt, both hands back on the wheel. “When I left you in Hammerfest, for the whole trip home I thought about how meeting you had changed me. It was as if the part of me that had been frozen like ice was now starting to melt. By the time I got home I felt like a different person. I felt like I could do anything. Even things that seemed impossible. Like navigating my kids through what I knew I’d have to. Like disentangling myself from the cold person I’d become. Like waiting for you.” She again took his hand. “How did I know all that with such certainty?”
“Like you say, because we were falling in love.”
“And now we have all our lives for that.”
“Yes we do,” he agreed.
When they turned in to town on Wisconsin Street, her father’s Subaru was parked in front of the historical society with the rear hatch open, and as she slowed at the intersection for a pedestrian, Gus looked up and saw her and waved. She had no choice but to stop.
“Holy shit,” she whispered, pulling into a parking spot.
“What is it?”
“That’s my father.” She pointed at him, as if several men on the street were waving.
Stig sat up straighter, like he’d been called to attention. Greta put a hand on his leg and said, “This is fine. This is good. My dad is wonderful.”
“You will introduce me?”
“It would be strange if I didn’t. So come on, then.”
Gus had started walking toward them, with a big white bucket in his left hand. When Greta and Stig opened their doors and stepped out, his tall body unfolded from the passenger side like a sail filling with wind. He came around to Greta’s side, she hooked her arm in his, and they walked over to Gus.
“Hi, Dad.”
He smiled. “Hey, kid.” He stepped closer, held out his hand, and said, “You must be Stig.”
“Hello,” he answered.
Greta said, “Stig, this is my dad, Gus.”
Gus eyed him like Greta had never once seen him do before. Up and down, almost like he was about to challenge him. Her eyes widened in surprise. But then he said, “So, you’re the man who pointed my daughter home?”
“I think she pointed herself, yes?”
“Well, you might’ve had something to do with it.” He turned to Greta. “I didn’t know you were expecting company.”
“I wasn’t. A surprise visit.”
“I like your style, Mr. Hjalmarson.”
“What’s with the bucket?” Greta asked.
“Oh, time to swab out the Odd Einar.”
“The Odd Einar?” Stig asked, doing a verbal double take.
“There,” Greta said, pointing at the boat sitting in front of the historical society.
“My own father’s boat. And his father’s before him. Our Odd Einar built it, in Greta’s fish house. That was when?” He looked at her as though he didn’t know for sure. “Back in nineteen what?”
“Nineteen twenty,” she said. And then, to Stig, “Every spring he comes down and cleans it up, and every fall he repaints it.”
“I can see it would look beautiful on the water,” Stig said.
During their few conversations about Stig, Greta had not told Gus that he was a sailor. And though Gus hadn’t been on the water himself for a long while, he still loved to watch the boats come in and out of the harbor. Countless poems he’d written had been about exactly that.
“Come on over,” Gus said, ushering them along the sidewalk and saying, “She was a very fine boat. And gorgeous on the water, you’re right. I can remember from when I was a boy. Very smooth. Very steady. She’s got a hell of a keel.”
Greta watched the two of them amble around the boat, each of them pointing and nodding and smiling. At one point they both squatted and Gus ran his hand between the keel and the skeg and Stig shook his head as though in disbelief. They made a full circumnavigation of the Odd Einar and then stood looking up into the bulkhead, Gus pointing and then miming waves coming over the portside. They spoke too softly for her to hear, but she could see by the expression on her father’s face that he was listening. Impressed. Curious. It was not a look he often had when lis
tening to Frans, and though Greta had long ago made up her mind about the future of her life, that look on her father’s face struck her as a fine confirmation of her choices.
After a few minutes more, Stig caught her eye and she walked over to them. “I was telling Gus about the Vannhimmel. He says I should take you sailing around the northern seas.”
“I agree,” Greta said.
“But not until summer,” Gus said. “We’ve heard what happens up there in winter.”
Now Stig stepped around the boat and ran his fingers over the escutcheon, a scroll famously carved by a boatwright in Duluth that had finalized the reclamation of their family vessel. He looked up at Greta and her father and said, “Who would think that someday I am standing in this place with you, looking at this boat. I have known about this man”—here he pointed at two words on the stern—“for so many years. For my whole life, really. And now I hear about his grandson and meet his great-great-grandson and already know his great-great-great-granddaughter.” He shook his head and beamed. “It is a strange life we all live, yes?”
Gus picked the bucket off the sidewalk and tilted his chin up to look at Stig through the bottoms of his bifocals. Through the lenses, Greta could see her father’s eyes blooming. “Welcome to God’s country, Stig. I hope you two have a nice lunch.” He glanced at his watch. “Or supper, whatever it is you’re eating.”
Greta and Stig watched him mosey up to the historical society, unlock the door, and go inside. Greta knew he’d fetch a bucket of warm water and spend the next hour with a mop and scrub brush, shining everything up, and that when they came out of the Burnt Wood Tavern, Stig would want to look at the boat again. She also knew that someday he would sail her off to wherever she wanted to go.
* * *
—
After they ate—fish stew for Greta and a bowl of chili for Stig—she called Lasse and Liv to say good night. She talked to Frans, too, and said she planned on staying a couple extra days if he could manage to take care of the kids. She was midstream in a project, she told him, and wanted to wrap it up. He didn’t ask what it was, just said it was fine if she needed a few days. That was how Greta and Stig ended up staying together at the fish house for three nights.
On the last, they made sandwiches and washed them down with a growler of the local brewery’s Devil’s Maw IPA and, as they had on the previous nights, built a roaring fire out on the shore and pulled up the Adirondack chairs and talked and planned and finished falling in love. Nothing had ever been so easy. They took their phones out and checked their calendars and made plans to meet in New York in June. She would visit him again later in the summer, when Frans was taking the kids to see his parents in Oslo. He would go to Bodø and take care of his own divorce. He would sell his mother’s house or get it ready to rent. He would either put his boat up or sail it over here.
She couldn’t help thinking, as she sat there with him, that this is what a future looks like. Their chairs were arranged arm to arm and they held hands looking up at the brilliant sky. Excepting the births of Lasse and Liv, she could not recall a single instance of greater happiness in her entire life. But a kind of gloom sat with her too, knowing as she did that after this night she wouldn’t see him again for almost two months, in New York. She took a sip of beer, and turned to him at the same moment he was turning to her.
“I have something for you,” he said. “I meant to give it to you first thing.”
“What?”
He sprang up and hurried around the fish house and then she heard the car door open and shut, and just like that he was back at her side holding out a paper bag.
She set her glass on the arm of the chair and took it. “I didn’t get you anything,” she said.
“You didn’t know I was coming!” he protested.
“What is it?”
“Open it. See for yourself.”
So she did, tearing the paper aside.
“It’s not so romantic,” he said. “But I hope you will like it.”
She held the book toward the firelight so she could read the cover. “Viktige Liv i Norsk Historie,” she stammered, then held it at a slightly different angle. “Marius Granerud?” she said. “This is a book about Granerud?”
“Important Lives in Norsk History. Yes, Granerud.”
“This is incredible,” she said. “Is Odd Einar mentioned in here?”
“Yes, of course. And Fridtjof Nansen. Otto Sverdrup. Bengt Bjornsen. Gerd Bjornsen. All of them.”
Greta flipped through several pages. “But it’s all in Norwegian.”
“You are lucky to have a translator who isn’t very ugly.”
She set the book down and straddled him in the chair, their jackets bulky between them. She unzipped his and took off her mittens and slipped her hands under his shirt.
“You are happy for the book?”
“Very much.”
“And glad that I come here?”
She kissed him, her hands now up in his untamed hair. When she leaned back again, he appeared distant.
“What will we do now?” he said. “What is next?”
“Everything,” she said. “We do everything. Just like we said.”
* * *
—
Later, in the middle of that night, after they’d made love and dozed and made love again and should’ve been asleep, Greta got up and went to the window overlooking the lake. The same one Stig had stood at, playing his imaginary piano, on the day he arrived. The fire had burned out and the night shone darkly luminous as she watched the waves come in slowly while the cove, now free of ice, returned its darkness to the night. She stared out into the distance, the future and past both.
Stig rolled over behind her. “What is it, Greta?”
“Since I’ve met you, from the first moment I allowed myself to imagine us, you’ve felt like safe harbor. But that’s not quite right.” She shut her eyes against the darkness, then faced him again, walked to the bed, and lay down beside him. “You’re the whole wide sea. Every drop of it.”
[1900]
It never failed to please me, seeing my faering there with the other boats in the harbor that had welcomed us home. The harbor we saw each morning, living as we did in a second-story room on the church end of town. Yes, the harbor that had taken but also given. After more than two years, I finally understood what it was: a place to dock my boat and sell my fish. And I’d sold plenty, at a price fair to all, from my first catch back in ’ninety and seven until this winter day. So many fish had I sold that I could have afforded a new boat, one for larger waters. But my faering had been true to me, so I would be true in turn.
Inger had also been true. My elskede, there every morning and again each evening. We had weathered so much together, and though time had schooled me not to speak for her I could hazard a guess she’d found happiness with me again. Just this last Christmas, after our plates of pork and cabbage and potatoes, after we sipped our tea and rested in the warmth of our stove, she with her Bible, I with my trusty copy of Mysterier, she looked up and said, “That book again?” as though I hadn’t been sitting there all evening with her. “About the man with the viola?”
“Yes, Inger. My good friend Johan Nagel and his fiddle.”
She gave me a coy look and made a show of turning her attention back to Deuteronomy—Moses being preferable to Nagel—before she sighed and said, as she had on many such occasions, “We can’t all be characters in the stories of our own lives, can we?”
Indeed, she had read Isbjørn i Nordligste Natt three Christmases past, and while the burden of that yarn hung heavy between us then, it was now almost a thing to tease about. And tease she did, often speaking of the man lost on Spitzbergen as though he were a fiction. As though he were Johan Nagel.
She closed her Bible and set it aside. “That fellow up on Spitzbergen, he would’ve been better off
with a hardingfele, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know, Inger. I’ve not read his story.”
She got up and went to our small shelf of books and took my story down, with its black leather cover, the ice bear with his growl. I remember stopping to marvel, seeing it for the first time in the window at G. Hagen Bokhandel. I might even have gone in and held it. But something stopped me, some force I could not name. I remember people passing me on the Kirkegata, whispering and glancing away when they met my eyes. It wasn’t until Herr Hagen himself stepped out of the shop and shook my hand and gave his thanks that I was able to move. And so it was with his handshake and word of gratitude that my reputation was restored. From then on, there were no shifty looks, no whispers. In fact I became something like a curiosity, and folks might stop me to ask of some profundity, as though I had wisdom to spare.
In any case, it was Inger who brought our copy of that book home, a complimentary one from our friend Marius in Tromsø. And on that Christmas three years back, she paged through it again and said, “Yes, this part here where he sleeps under a cairn of rocks, I believe a fiddle would have done him well.”
“That’s clever,” I said, and turned back to Knut Hamsun.
“Honestly, can you not see when your wife wants to play? Put that book down please and go look on the bureau.”
Ever dutiful, I marked my page and set down my pipe and went to the chest of drawers on which sat a brown leather case. I couldn’t fathom by what sleight of hand it had arrived there, but I picked it up and brought it back to my chair and held it on my lap.
Inger’s patience was then extinguished by nervous excitement. “Well?” she said.
I unclasped the buckles, slowly opened the lid, and withdrew from its velvet lining a hardingfele and bow and also a block of rosin. I held it as though it were a newborn child. For a long time, I did.
When I at last looked up at my wife, she said, “Play me a song?”
