Christmas at Frozen Falls

by Kiley Dunbar

  ‘He says he’s going to sing something. For me,’ says Nari, still staring dead ahead.

  The piped carols coming over the restaurant speakers cut out, and there’s the faint crackle of a microphone switching on. Niilo’s voice, a little shaky, rings out over the room.

  ‘Huomenta ja hyvää joulua. My name is Niilo Oskal.’

  Some of the staff whoop and cheer at this. He has the attention of everyone in the place.

  ‘I look after the reindeer here at Frozen Falls resort. My family are Sámi people and have lived in the lands to the south of this area for generations. They taught me how to sing traditional joik songs. I would like to sing one now, a new song. It is called “Nari’s Joik”.’

  He adjusts the microphone in front of his mouth and looks down at the keyboard before him. I hear Nari exhale sharply, but we both sit in silence, awestruck, as he stretches long fingers over the keys, and then he closes his eyes and opens his mouth to sing.

  His voice, when it reaches us, is soft and tender, repeating the first word of his song: Nari.

  As he incants her name, his fingers touch the keys and lend a melodious swell which builds as his voice grows stronger and he breaks into longer lines of poetry. The words sound a little like Finnish, but somehow more ancient and with greater complexity and power. And he’s looking only at Nari, as if they’re the only two people here.

  Their gaze feels so intimate I shift my chair a little distance away, leaving Nari in a space of her own where only she and Niilo exist.

  The music is like nothing I’ve ever heard before, and is sung in languages I’ll never understand, but I do understand the look on their faces and the electric feeling in the room, which is palpable.

  I’ve never actually seen two people fall in love before, right in front of me. I imagine it’s what seeing a baby being born is like: the perfect combination of wonderful, splendid nature in all its terrifying glory and magical, unfathomable love in all its intangible, inexplicable wonder. Niilo is singing his love for my friend, and I watch helplessly, my own heart swelling with happiness for her as she falls. I can see the tears shining in their locked eyes.

  Niilo’s song ends with a sweet sustained note, and suddenly, Nari’s on her feet and I bet she isn’t even aware of that fact yet. She’s leading the applause as the room wakes from Niilo’s enchantment.

  I look down at the spa gift token still in my hand as Nari breaks her gaze away from Niilo and turns to me, wiping her eyes with her sleeve. We’re both thinking the same thing.

  ‘Sylve?’ she says, with a shaking voice.

  ‘Off you go,’ I say, and I admit a tear or two might have spoiled my own mascara at this point. ‘Have fun.’

  She kisses me hard on my cheek, and she’s gone, and I’m left smiling sadly like a mother of the bride waving off her daughter at the end of the wedding reception.

  I watch as they meet in the middle of the room and take each other’s hand and race for the doors and out into the snow. Through the frosted pane I see Niilo fastening Nari’s helmet straps under her chin before they leap onto a snowmobile with a loud, revving engine and disappear into the white world beyond the resort.

  And suddenly, I’m very aware that I’m alone and still standing by the breakfast table. I have a sudden urge to check my pockets, feeling as though I’ve misplaced something, but nothing is amiss.

  I look around the room, which is slowly emptying. The staff are chatting amongst themselves as they clear away dishes and strip table cloths into big laundry baskets.

  ‘Right,’ I say aloud to myself, catching my breath. Christmas day. Alone. In Lapland. Of course. What should I do now? I stand there for a while, like a satnav rerouting after an unexpected diversion.

  I suddenly think of the key to the dog sheds back at my cabin. Although I doubt I’ll see Stellan today, there is someone who I know will be pleased to see me later. I gather up the remnants of breakfast in a napkin and put it in my bag. Toivo will enjoy these, I tell myself.

  Then, looking at Nari’s Christmas gifts lying on the table, I try, with a bit of effort, to smile, shake my hair back and straighten my shoulders. My best friend is off having a romantic adventure with a beautiful, talented, surprising man, and if she’s happy, I’m happy.

  I run my fingers over the jackets of the books she gave me. They’re festively foiled and glittering. I have something nice to read and I have something nice to do today. That’s not too bad. Surely, I can be content on my own for one day? I catch one of the staff as they bustle past with a tray of coffee cups.

  ‘Can you point me in the direction of the spa, please?’

  Chapter Twenty

  Niilo stands astride the snowmobile, clasping the throttle tightly, powering through the landscape, as Nari, her hands gripping his waist, laughs and screams. Once out of sight of the resort and on the wilderness track, Niilo throws his head back and howls a deep call into the grey light of the late morning sky.

  The vehicle’s suspension absorbs the impact of each snowy mound and curve as Niilo pushes it to its absolute limit, sending birds scattering from the few scrubby trees and bushes they pass by before crossing the vast frozen lake and taking a turn southward onto a narrow forest track that Nari has never seen before.

  Under the cover of the thick evergreen branches burdened with snow the headlights shine out, making the fine flakes in the air shine like glitter in a snowglobe.

  Niilo takes the opportunity offered by a straight stretch of track to look around at Nari. Their faces are obscured by their black ski masks and helmets but each knows the other is smiling. The pair voice elated shrieks as they speed over a snowy mound and are, for a few exhilarating moments, airborne.

  As the track widens, Niilo slows the pace and sits down on the wide seat. Nari pulls herself close to his back and wraps her thighs tightly around him, causing Niilo’s heart to pound even harder as a breathless, light-headed sensation washes through him. Gasping for air, he briefly reaches his gloved hand for hers and presses it reassuringly against his chest.

  Nari closes her eyes, loving the sensation of this man being in control. When she opens them again, she gasps, though Niilo cannot hear her over the engine noise. There, running alongside them, just a few feet inside the treeline on both sides of the track, are a pack of wolves, their sleek necks bobbing and stretching as they run, their shaggy backs undulating with the speed of the chase. Niilo knows they are there but keeps his eyes fixed on the track ahead, and he and Nari race on through the wilderness making wild howling cries into the air before the creatures suddenly turn and disappear into the dark wood.

  * * *

  The cabin at the edge of the forest is almost entirely snowbound. Niilo parks the snowmobile beside what, in the summer months, would be recognisable as a herb garden. Clambering off the machine, he helps Nari step down into deep, untrodden white drifts.

  ‘Where are we?’ she asks, lifting the helmet from her head and pulling the ski mask down so it hangs around her neck.

  ‘This was my grandparents’ home. It’s mine now,’ Niilo replies as he searches in the snow near a tarpaulin-covered log pile for a wide shovel. ‘Give me a minute and we’ll be inside.’

  Making her way over to the log pile, Nari finds a second shovel and joins him on the path. ‘You dig, I dig. OK?’

  Niilo accepts with a nod and they clear their way to the low wooden door which bears the evidence, blackened and withered, of a contorted summer rose stretched over a lattice frame surrounding the entrance.

  ‘It’s going to be cold inside, I haven’t been here for months. There’s no time to get away from the resort during winter and check on the place. But I’ll light a fire and get you warm again. And I brought food too.’

  ‘You’ve thought of everything then?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ Niilo grins, bringing an ornate key from inside the chest pocket of his gákti jacket and opening the door with ease. It swings inwards and Nari steps over the threshold.

  ‘Sorr
y, it’s very basic, and it’s not decorated for Christmas day.’

  ‘I don’t need decorations,’ Nari says with a warm smile, as Niilo runs a hand along the wall by the door, feeling for the fuse box.

  The lights flare inside the room and Nari takes in the low-ceilinged kitchen with its scrubbed wooden table, pitted and slashed from decades of use. The grey cabinets and work surfaces around the room are uncluttered, clean, and dating back to the nineteen-eighties at least. Nari is relieved to spot a modern electric stove and a few new-looking radiators which she hears burbling and clanking into life.

  ‘Go through there, into the lounge. I’ll get the firewood, says Niilo, leaving again by the main door.

  Nari makes her way into the little den with its low sofa in front of a tall chimney, a wide hearth, and solitary standard lamp topped with a crooked yellow shade which she straightens as she passes by. The walls are papered in orange and green diamond patterns, the likes of which she hasn’t seen since her earliest childhood. But everything is neat and homely and she knew it would become cosy once the fire was lit.

  She watches Niilo returning and kneeling by the grate, first piling on the small pieces of kindling, then scrunched yellowing newspaper and something that looks like dried bundles of lichen. He forms them all into a little pyre. It takes two matches to start the flames licking up the chimney.

  After a satisfied moment watching the fire grow, Niilo bundles on the logs. The flames soon build to a bright heat.

  ‘One moment,’ Niilo says as he leaves the room again.

  Waiting expectantly, Nari watches him through the low window as he opens a hatch at the back of the snowmobile and pulls out bundled blankets and a grocery bag.

  When he returns he’s careful to close the doors behind him. Crouching by the fire again, he unpacks the bag onto the hearth.

  Nari lifts some of the packages and squints at their labels. ‘I don’t recognise any of this food packaging, but if we’re going to cook, I want to help you.’

  ‘OK, open this.’ He hands her a tall bottle. ‘Cloudberry liqueur. Have you tried it?’

  ‘Nope, but I’ve heard it’s deathly strong,’ she says with a smile, taking the bottle from him.

  ‘That’s why we’re drinking it with coffee.’

  ‘Just coffee?’ Nari pulls a face as she cracks the lid and takes a quick sniff at the boozy vapours emanating from the bottle.

  ‘And vodka, cream and ice.’ Niilo waggles his eyebrows, making Nari laugh.

  ‘Oh, you’re a cocktail waiter too?’

  ‘You’d be surprised, the things I can do. You get resourceful, living out here on your own.’ Niilo pours ground espresso into a silver coffee pot along with water from a plastic bottle and, tightening the lid, he places the pot close to the flames to heat up. Nari simply watches him, her eyes sleepily fond and heavy-lidded.

  ‘So do you want to tell me about the song you sang this morning? It was beautiful.’

  ‘I wrote it last night, for you. I couldn’t sleep, and I find I can think most clearly on the occasional winter nights when I’m awake.’ As he spoke, Niilo took a cloth and wiped out the inside of a shining cooking pot by the fireside which had the look of a witch’s cauldron before setting about pouring powdery milled oats, sugar and a carton of milk into it.

  ‘Me too. What were you thinking about?’

  ‘That I shouldn’t be such an ass,’ he said with a dry laugh. ‘And I should make your visit to Lapland the best it can possibly be.’

  ‘So you wrote me a song.’

  ‘A joik, yes. It was the song of your spirit. It wasn’t hard to write, it just… happened.’

  ‘It was beautiful, what were the lyrics?’

  ‘Maybe they weren’t so much lyrics as… a kind of list?’

  ‘A list?’

  ‘Of things that you are, things about you that I like, or things you make me think.’ Looking away hurriedly, he busied himself rummaging in the bag for a jar of nutmeg.

  ‘Are you turning red? OK, OK, I won’t push you. Just show me them written down one day?’

  ‘I will. I promise.’ Niilo nods, sprinkling a pinch of the nutmeg into the pot and passing a long-handled wooden spoon to Nari who crouches by the pot over the hearth and stirs.

  The cosiness of their simple domesticated scene isn’t lost on either of them, and Niilo finds he can’t help smiling contentedly as he reaches for the coffee pot and pours the steaming black liquid into two tall plastic beakers.

  ‘These need to go outside on the windowsill for a minute, then we drink.’

  As Niilo briefly opens the low window, a sudden blast of cold air helps Nari realise it has become warm enough in the little room to strip out of their snowsuits.

  While the coffee cools on the snowy ledge, and without looking towards each other, they remove their outer layers with a curious shyness.

  Niilo is hooking the suits on the back of the den door when Nari gives in to temptation and turns to watch him in his wonderful blue clothing, ornate, elegant and timeless. Finding herself in danger of staring and in need of distraction, she lets her gaze flit towards the glass cabinet behind the sofa. ‘What’s in there?’

  ‘Family stuff. Come, take a look.’

  Unlocking the cabinet doors, Niilo carefully lifts out a large flat object with painted figures all over it. Nari comes to stand near him.

  ‘This is my great grandfather’s drum.’

  ‘It’s beautiful. It looks so fragile.’ Nari isn’t sure why her voice has shrunk to a near whisper.

  Mirroring her stillness, his voice lowers to a murmur too. ‘It’s made from reindeer skin. Grandpa made it himself, and painted these animals on it.’

  ‘They’re bears?’ Nari asks, peering closely with a delighted smile.

  ‘Some of the old people of the Sápmi believed in a kind of animism – that everything in nature has a spirit. We believed you could speak to our ancestors through the natural world. My family were particularly associated with the spirits of bears, I think, although I don’t really know much more about them. Their stories got lost when my parents died. Maybe I should have listened better when I was a kid.’

  Eyeing Niilo cautiously, Nari can feel some of his loss and regret.

  ‘Singing songs was one way of passing on family histories. When a new person was welcomed into my family, they received their joik. It told them of their place in the family, and in the universe.’

  ‘And you wrote a joik for me.’

  Niilo returns her gaze. ‘I did.’ He immediately looks back at the drum, a little ruffled. ‘There’s so much I don’t remember about my family, and so much that wasn’t written down that must have been contained in songs and stories that I’ll never hear.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Nari says, for want of better words.

  ‘But I still have the summer and winter cabins.’ He looks around with a faint smile. ‘And I have this drum, of course. It should probably be in a museum, but I don’t feel it belongs there.’

  ‘No, it’s yours.’

  ‘And I have these too. My father’s knife and belt, and these are the boots my grandmother made for me when my mother was pregnant.’ He reaches into the cupboard before handing her the tiny reindeer hide shoes.

  ‘They’re beautiful. But… no photographs?’ Nari glances around the room. ‘I haven’t seen a single picture.’

  ‘I don’t have many here. My cousin has some family albums, I think,’ Niilo said with a sorry shrug, noticing that Nari was gently cradling the tiny shoes to her chest.

  In the silence that followed, Nari let her eyes look over the beautiful fabric of Niilo’s outfit with its skirted jacket, shining buttons and golden thread embroidery again. Something moved her to reach her hand to his belt, gently running her fingertips over the sheathed knife that hung there.

  Niilo glanced down at her hand, his breathing suddenly ragged. Was she going to touch him? He didn’t think he could bear it, and he didn’t think he could survive without i
t. But Nari, sensing his panic, and suddenly confused and not wanting to show it, let her fingers fall away, pointing instead to the bundle of small sticks in the chest pocket of his gákti.

  ‘And those, what are those for?’ she asks, a little flustered and with the air of someone expecting another story.

  ‘These? They’re sticks. For the fire.’ This was said bluntly and accompanied by a level stare, and then, in a sudden, awkward movement, Niilo took the shoes from her hands and locked them away with the drum and his other precious treasures. Nari noted the change in mood and the sharp turn of the cabinet’s little key.

  ‘Oh!’ She tried to laugh off her mistake.

  ‘I’m a man, not a wizard.’

  ‘What? I’m sorry, I—’

  ‘I’m tired of visitors to the resort seeing me as some kind of Shamanic He-man, a kind of exotic make-believe man… a conquest. They see nothing but a fancy costume and it sparks some kind of fantasy in their heads, but they haven’t got a clue who I am.’

  ‘OK, I said I was sorry.’ Nari paced over to the hearth and looked down into its flames. ‘But if you think you’ve got the monopoly on people misreading you, then you don’t, OK?’ She looked up in time to see Niilo’s throat move as he swallowed and cast his eyes to the floor.

  This couldn’t be happening again, he thought. Not this strained awkwardness, not after the exhilaration of their ride out to the cabin, not after he’d sung for her and seen the tears in her eyes.

  ‘No, I’m the one who is sorry,’ he said, taking a few steps towards her. ‘I shouldn’t have said what I said. Not to you. Will you forgive me?’

  ‘It’s all right. I get it.’

  ‘No, I didn’t mean to accuse you of… I got nervous. I thought you were reaching for me, and I don’t know why, I panicked. I got it wrong.’

  She had wanted to reach for him, to slip her arms around him and let him hold her, but the panic in his eyes had startled her too.

  Attempting a smile and a shrug, she reaches for the bottle of liqueur. ‘Come on, mix me that cocktail you promised me.’