Bear Witness

by Mandy Haggith

  ‘Cally, it’s you that’s not listening. We’re offering to help you.’ Diana’s gaze bored into Callis as if force of eye contact was all that was required to convince her.

  Callis knew that gaze and she wasn’t going to let it intimidate her. She looked down at the floor, observing the deposition pattern in the sandstone. It had probably been laid down millions of years ago. Then she spoke. ‘I want the freedom to meet Malcolm Johnstone again if I feel like it and not if I don’t. We might turn out just to be good friends.’

  ‘Well, friends is one thing.’

  ‘And if we end up in the sack again, I want the freedom to do that.’ She wasn’t quite sure what was driving her to stick her neck out about this, but it felt true as she spoke the words.

  ‘But that wouldn’t be freedom, would it?’ Diana uncrossed her legs and crossed them the other way. ‘You surely don’t need us to reiterate all that stuff about true freedom as restraint, liberation from the passions. Come on, Callis, that’s Fe-Phi-Pho 101. Fallacy of the Appetites.’

  Callis squirmed. It was true. This was basic doctrine. She had believed it all for so long. The ideal state of non-attachment had been irrefutable since she had thought it through, what, nearly ten years ago. It was completely irrational to be opposing it now. But the more Diana was adamant, the more Callis wanted to resist. She said nothing. She knew Diana was still looking her directly in the eye, monitoring. Eventually Callis met her gaze.

  ‘And if I go ahead?’

  ‘You mean reject our offer of help?’

  Callis shook her head. ‘No, if I sleep with Malcolm again?’

  ‘Same difference.’ Diana’s jaw was set.

  ‘Aw, come on. One shag.’

  ‘It’s the principle of the thing.’

  ‘So it’s not an offer of help at all, it’s an order to submit to your control. It’s an ultimatum.’

  ‘You’re very emotional just now, Cally. I think that’s putting it a bit strongly. It’s an offer made in friendship, and of course you can reject it if you choose to but that’s, well, that’s your choice,’ She was sitting straight-backed now.

  Callis found herself starting to cry. ‘I don’t think this is very fair,’ she said, feeling the ground beneath her weakening. ‘I just want…’ She couldn’t bring herself to speak the thought. Comfort. A hug.

  Diana sat hard and silent opposite her while Callis blew her nose. ‘I take it that’s no, then?’

  Callis shook her head, mutely.

  Diana stood up. She paused. ‘Goodbye, Callis.’ The door swung behind her.

  Callis clutched the flat bear in her lap. She ruffled the velvet fibres against the pile, then stroked them into shiny smoothness. The creature seemed to emanate resolve, a symbol of what she knew she needed to do – to make it real, to fill the idea of a bear with substance, not just to dream and play with toys and do her arid job and live her meaningless life.

  She got to her feet and headed back to the conservatory. There, she selected two yellow eyes, a felt nose and a clump of kapok. She listened intently to Juliana’s instructions and proceeded to stuff the bear, evenly, taking care not to pack it so tightly that it was stiff. The result was floppy and undeniably cute, and along with the stuffing it was full of wishes and determination.

  Then she started making her goodbyes. ‘I’m going to get the train home on my own,’ she said to Diana, who was in the process of stuffing her polar bear.

  She hardly looked up. ‘I’ve said goodbye already.’

  Frances’ lynx was splendid, the first whisker being knotted into position. She, at least, got up to give Callis a hug and admire her bear. ‘What’ll you call it?’ she asked.

  ‘”Brown”, probably,’ said Callis. ‘I’m not very strong on names.’

  ‘”Brown” it is, then. Smile!’ Frances pointed her phone at her and Callis grinned a false smile for the shot, trying to hide her face with the toy.

  ‘Take care, and let us know if you change your mind,’ Frances said.

  Callis picked her bag up in the hall where Juliana was waiting with an evaluation form. ‘I hope you’ve enjoyed the weekend despite everything,’ she said, formal as a hotelier, no trace of her earlier warmth. Callis wondered what Diana had said to her.

  She mustered one last smile and shook her head. ‘It was all very nice, thank you. I’ll fill this in at home.’ She stuffed the form into the outer pocket of her bag.

  ‘John’s waiting. He’ll take you to the station.’ Juliana showed her to the door, with another, Callis thought, rather pointed ‘goodbye’.

  The word echoed around her head all the way home, the emphasis on ‘bye’. G’bye, G’bye, G’bye, a voice in her head repeated, leaving her old self behind. Once on the train, east from Nairn, she got out her book, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, but left it unopened on the seat next to her. She sat stroking the velvet bear, her fingers delving in its fur for some answer, some sense of direction, something to fill the void that her life had become.

  On the ferry back to Norway, the tiny cabin made Callis feel claustrophobic. She couldn’t get her mother out of her mind, the thought of her touch, that cool hand on her forehead when she was sick as a child. She remembered sitting between her mother’s knees after a bath, on the floor beside the bed, wearing her dressing gown, the comb gently tugging her hair, fingers untangling it from scalp to tip.

  She went out on deck. The water frothed like a petticoat around the boat, the sea fresh as peppermint. The wake billowed up like meringue, like lace, like doilies on birthday party plates. She had a sudden taste memory of lemon meringue pie, so tart it made her cry. She said goodbye over and over, over and over. But nothing eased the failure to have said it when it mattered.

  When Callis disembarked, Norway seemed an alien land, yet she could not put her finger on what had changed. She noticed that the clock on her phone had shifted forward by an hour to 12.30, remembering the joke that Norway was one hour and ten years ahead of Britain. From the headlines on the newsstand, the whole country seemed to be obsessed by the killing of the bear cub.

  Callis bought a sandwich and munched it on the tram from the stop nearest the ferry terminal up to her flat at Vestmarka. Coming up the narrow path to the modern wooden house she had lived in for the past two years, she found herself imagining what it might look like to her friends in Scotland, to Malcolm even. Brashly coloured, she thought, though the ochre yellow colour hadn’t struck like that before she went home. She clunked the deadlock and the door yawned open like a stranger. She dumped her bag and had a shower, but couldn’t settle, so she set off again for the Institute.

  Her in-tray was piled high, half from before she had left for the funeral, half unopened post. She sliced all the envelopes open, but barely glanced at the contents of most of them. One was a pollen analysis she had requested from one of the research assistants before she left. She sat at her desk, leafing through it, with a growing sense of disconnection. She knew why she had asked for it: the soil sample had come from an archaeological dig of an early Bronze Age settlement in the far north of the country, and she remembered that she had wondered what it would tell her about the climate and vegetation, and whether that would correlate with similar data from Scotland. She also distinctly remembered being excited by the possibility of making these comparisons. Now all she felt was numb.

  She picked the analysis up and took it to the filing cabinet. She opened the top drawer. It was too full to add anything else. How often had she written ‘weed filing cabinet’ on her to-do list in recent months? Back at her desk, she plumped the analysis down on the top of the in-tray, sat down and powered up the computer. Her online inbox and filing system was in an even worse state than the paper version.

  After a couple of hours of painful catch-up, Callis gave up for the day, and called Karl to ask him to invite her for a drink after work. Karl was her pal, 55, gay, as devoted to her as she was to bears. He ran a café-bar at the harbour and she had taken to drinking there. I
t was cheaper than most of the pubs in town and handy for the tram, plus there was always something interesting to watch as pleasure boats and fishing vessels plied back and forth between the fjord and the canal.

  She arrived at 6pm. Karl had binoculars trained on a yacht making its way back from the fjord.

  ‘Is that Michel out there?’ she asked.

  Karl nodded. ‘It’s a fine night for a sail. We haven’t had many chances since she came out of the boat shed for the season. Michel’s been at his salon all day and needed some fresh air after all that hair lacquer. I was going to get someone in to tend the bar and go too, but then you called.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she began.

  ‘Don’t be. I’m glad to see you.’ He poured them both a glass of white wine from the fridge behind the bar. They took the drinks out on to the deck of the wooden building, enjoying the spring evening. They tried to ignore the huge yellow food processing factory further along the front, spoiling the view. Its fishy odour wasn’t as bad as it could be some days. They watched as the bascule bridge swung open to allow a yacht to pass out from the sheltered canal into the fjord, then clunked closed again.

  ‘Do you want to talk about your week at home?’ he asked.

  She shook her head.

  ‘Books then?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m reading a tome by Simone de Beauvoir and I’m totally bored by it. I need a bodice-ripper or something!’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘An easy-to-read historical romance.’

  ‘I can’t help you there.’

  ‘Oh come on, Karl, you’ve always got great suggestions. You introduced me to Laxness and Pushkin and Sándor Márai. There must be something you can think of?’

  Karl had appointed himself her guardian shortly after she arrived in the country two years previously. He had introduced himself in the library in Trondheim, telling her he admired her taste in books, and they got chatting, finding themselves kindred spirits in their love of good old-fashioned paper books.

  ‘Perhaps you should try Dickens.’

  ‘Dickens? Come off it. What are you reading at the moment?’

  ‘A history of the Catholic Church.’

  ‘OK, leave books. What about politics?’

  ‘Well, it’s been a hairy week here.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Norway has gone crazy about bears.’

  ‘Cool. I saw a newspaper sign saying something like “Thorsinn Backs Bear Bill”. What’s that about?’

  ‘Did you hear that a farmer shot a bear cub by St Olav’s statue?’

  ‘Yes, it was on the radio the morning I left.’

  ‘Well, there’s been uproar ever since. First children began writing to politicians from schools, then environmental organisations have been on the TV saying it’s disgraceful. It turns out half our leaders sleep with toy bears and all of their children do. It has been like pressing some kind of button. People are horrified by the blood on our patron saint, and we Norwegians like to think we are in tune with nature. It’s important to our, how would you say, “national psyche”? The bear is deep in legend, we have many stories.’

  Callis was agog. ‘Go on,’ she said.

  ‘It’s our brother-creature. There are the macho men who want to hunt anything, of course, but for most people we prefer to think of hunting as a kind of sacred ritual, something traditional. Not brutal at all, almost a kind of worship. In the past we would thank the bear, the spirits, you know. Wiping out the last one is like killing a Brother-God. It has horrified our whole nation. We’re full of shame and guilt and anger at the farmer: Boltzman, German name unfortunately for him. I gather he’s taken refuge with relatives in Denmark. There were vigilantes at his house, calling for him to come out and face their guns. We have all gone quite crazy.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m one of the ones who sleeps with a bear.’

  ‘Well, I admit it, I have one, too.’ They smiled, and clinked glasses.

  ‘I was gutted when I heard the news that morning. I cried first about the bear, then about my mother. Somehow it seemed I was crying about the same thing.’

  ‘The bear is very deep in our psyche. You Scots are a big part Viking, so you are maybe close enough to us to feel it, too. You know the way the mother bear goes to sleep in winter, burying herself away. It is like she dies. Then in spring she wakes up, she comes back from the dead with cubs, new life, like the earth is a womb. She is a sign...’ he waved his hand in a circle, searching for a word.

  ‘A symbol?’ Callis suggested.

  ‘Yes, a symbol of fertility. The bear is like the goddess of mothers, the spirit for making life. It’s natural for us all to feel grief at her loss. And for you, two losses in one day. Poor Callis.’

  ‘Are people saying this?’

  ‘Perhaps not in so many words, but I think they feel it.’

  ‘You should write it down. This is so important, to see it this way.’

  ‘I could do that. Maybe I will write a letter to Aftenposten.’

  ‘Go for it, Karl. Up the stakes. If bears are that symbol of rebirth then surely instead of killing them off we can bring them back again?’

  ‘People here are saying this. Bring them back. Bring back the bears.’

  ‘But won’t they just be persecuted again?’

  ‘That’s where all the debate is now. That’s the hot question. Hence the Bill – there’s a private member’s bill to bring some Swedish bears and set them free, put forward by Bakker. Bjørn Bakker, good name for it, huh? And the Prime Minister has said he’ll support it, and I think it’ll be hard to beat, and they’ll give bears special status, making it a crime to kill them anywhere in the country. So it cannot happen again.’

  ‘OK. But it’s what we call locking the door after the horse has bolted.’

  ‘It’s a good step. I think we need something to make us all feel that we are not a nation of animal slayers. But of course everyone says there is no point having a bear protection law with no bears to protect. Logic demands we bring them back.’

  Callis finished her wine and put it down, feeling it resonate, as if she could make it sing. ‘I want to be in the ring.’

  ‘In the ring?’ Karl frowned incomprehension.

  ‘Involved. I want to help. I want to help bring the bears back.’ Hearing herself say it was like watching a compass needle settle on due north. ‘If we can do it here, then maybe we can do something in Scotland, too. I found out when I was home that a friend of mine is doing a trial to reintroduce lynx. Anything’s possible.’

  ‘Maybe you should be reading Barry Lopez.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘American nature writer, brilliant.’

  She looked him up on her phone and nodded. ‘Yeah, good recommendation.’

  ‘More wine?’

  ‘No.’ For once she wanted to stay sober. ‘I’m tired. Long ferry journey. Better go home.’ She got up and in the ensuing flurry of air kisses, Michel appeared, as tall and elegant as Karl was not. Together, they always made her think of Gandalf and Frodo.

  ‘Good sail?’

  ‘Wonderful. Welcome back. You’re not leaving?’ He placed a slender hand on her arm.

  Looking up, she saw his long face full of concern. ‘I must. I’m sorry,’ Callis said. ‘I’ve got a lot of thinking to do.’

  ‘We were so sorry to hear about your mother,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks, but it’s not that. It’s the bears.’

  ‘The bears? Has there been another…?’

  ‘Karl will fill you in. See you soon.’

  She walked along the shore to the tram stop. Back at her flat she unpacked her bag and began tidying up. She had left the place in a mess before going to Scotland.

  For a while it was steadying to impose some order on her surroundings, but after an hour or so she realised she was tired and hungry, running on empty, as her mother would have said. There was nothing in the house but mouldy cheese so
she put her jacket back on, laced up her boots and headed back down into town.

  It was 9pm. There was still time to grab a takeaway. The Thai place was playing dreamy music. Callis ordered a noodle dish and sat in the window on a high stool, wondering how busy Karl and Michel’s bar would be and whether she wanted wine and company. She decided not. Waiting for her food, she leafed idly though a newspaper, taking in the gist of what was written. Her Norwegian was still not up to scratch. She had done the usual British thing, picking up easy words that overlapped with English, learning some polite phrases and enough chat to get by in shops and bars and restaurants. But for work, friendships or political conversations, she still often resorted to English, taking for granted the near-fluency of so many of her colleagues and acquaintances.

  The newspaper was full of bears: photos, discussions of the proposed new law, histories. She plugged away at translation with the help of the dictionary on her phone. On page seven there was a piece about a meeting in Oslo to form an expert group for the reintroduction and protection of bears. She found herself wondering if there was some way to make a good name for the acronym BEAR. Bear Ecology Assessment and Restoration, perhaps. She asked the waiter if she could clip the cutting out of the paper. He shrugged permission. Scotland needs this, she said to herself. But first, Norway. This is where to start. This is where to learn.

  At the 24-hour store, she bought bread, cheese and coffee for breakfast, then went home. With a cup of tea, she sat back on the sofa and called Stig.

  ‘Hi Stig, did you hear what’s happening here?’

  ‘No, what?’

  She raved to him about what Karl had told her about the bears.

  ‘How did you get into the lynx programme?’ she asked him.

  ‘I just got asked to join in, they thought my PhD work was relevant.’

  ‘Damn, do you think I can persuade someone that vegetation dynamics is relevant to bears?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘I mean, the whole climate change thing has to be a major risk. And there are bound to be habitat requirements specific to bears. I’ve got to, I don’t know, I’ve got to do something about bears. I’m sick of doing a job that’s just ancient history. I make all this stuff up for grant proposals about it being relevant to today, but I don’t really believe any of it any more. ‘