Echoland

by Per Petterson

  ‘Good thing we’ve got a draughty old cabin,’ Gry said, ‘or we would be dead now.’

  ‘Who’d have thought we would be thankful for that,’ his father said. His chest rose and fell, rose and fell. ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Three.’

  ‘Well, I should have been up by now anyway. I’ve got such a lot to do,’ he said, and laughed out loud until he had to throw up and Arvid’s mother only laughed a little, she coughed and said: ‘What’s happening to this family?’

  ‘Nothing,’ his father said. ‘Nothing’s happening to this family.’ Arvid heard a sharp crunch as his father crushed the box of matches he still held in his hand.

  ‘Maybe not,’ his mother said, and coughed again. She staggered to her feet and stood there until she had stopped being sick and then she went into the cabin and opened the windows all the way round and came back out with warm clothes for all four of them. Her face was red after holding her breath for so long.

  ‘We won’t be able to go in there for a while,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to walk around a bit to keep yourselves warm.’ They were freezing cold now and quickly dressed on the grass and Gry tugged at Arvid’s arm.

  ‘Come on, let’s go to the beach. It will be nice there now.’

  They walked down between the rows of pine trees and across a beach plot, where the house was dark and empty, and along a path to the shore. It was easy to find their way for the moon was shining, clear and yellow, even though they couldn’t see it from where they were, but all the way down they could hear the sea.

  They still felt a little shaken and Gry said: ‘Just imagine if we’d died.’

  ‘We wouldn’t have. Not me anyway.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I just know.’

  Gry looked at him and shook her head. ‘You’re pretty weird sometimes, you know that?’ she said.

  They scrambled over some pine-tree roots and then they stopped. Before them lay the sea, dark, and you could hear the soft hiss of it and right above them hung the moon, a huge, yellow balloon. How big it is, Arvid thought. The beams from the lighthouse seemed weak and almost meaningless by comparison.

  ‘Isn’t it pretty?’ Gry said, sitting on a low sand dune. She caught her hair with both hands, formed it into a ponytail and laid it over one shoulder. He saw her white neck and her hair reached down to her stomach, and her hair glowed and her neck glowed and Arvid thought, now I see what Mogens sees. He felt as light as air. He wanted to touch her, but he couldn’t and then he did anyway. Her skin was warm and her neck curved and fitted well into his hand, but his hand was cold, and she shivered and hunched up her shoulders right away and he withdrew his hand.

  ‘Hey, what are you doing?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, and must have looked startled for she smiled and nudged him and said: ‘Take it easy. Your hand was just cold. It was OK. Honestly.’ But that didn’t help, he couldn’t say anything and felt shaky again and slipped away from her, down the dune and walked towards the water.

  ‘Where are you going?’ she said, but he didn’t answer.

  He walked right down to the sea, there was a high tide and the belt of sand was slimmer than usual, and the moon was on the water and nothing cast a shadow except himself until he came to the rushes. They were like a wall and so high he couldn’t see over them, but the path continued straight on. He followed it and knew exactly where he was. Now he could hear the gulls, it was like a humming, but he couldn’t see them. There was a murmur in the rushes but that was the creek and he walked on until the rushes were not so tall any more and faded away and he saw the fields sloping down in front of him and then the moon vanished behind a large cloud and he stopped.

  It was pitch black. He stood still on the path and waited for his eyes to adapt. He heard someone or something trampling and snorting. It was hard to know where the sound was coming from, it kept moving and a beam of light from the lighthouse swept in across the land and that was when he saw it, a large, black body in front of him. He took two steps back and the beam swept by and the night became even darker and swirled around him full of sounds and he turned and ran. He was naked with only his skin between him and all that could come out of nowhere and harm him, tear him to pieces while still alive.

  In the darkness he must have lost his way because he ran straight into the sea with a splash: it wasn’t deep, but it was shockingly cold and full of mud and he tried counting to ten and then breathing slowly to stop the wild shivers that were rising up his spine. He bent down and groped with his hands and found his way back, calmer now until he bumped into something soft and living and he groaned aloud. The moon shone out again. It was Gry.

  ‘Hey, Arvid, you look as if you have been in the wars. How did you get so mucky?’

  ‘I saw something out there.’

  ‘Just a cow. I saw it too.’

  ‘I thought it was the bull,’ he said. His throat burned and he wiped his face and got mud on his jumper.

  ‘But you’re not afraid of the bull, are you? Mogens told me about you and the bull. That was some story.’

  Mogens had told her about the bull. Mogens told her everything.

  ‘That was during the day. It was light then.’ He began to shake and his teeth were chattering.

  ‘My lovely brother,’ Gry said, and hugged him, muck and all. She stroked his back and he wanted to run away, but he couldn’t move. She was softer and taller than he was. He hugged her and held her neck in his hand and wondered if he should cry or not.

  ‘I didn’t think you were afraid of anything,’ she said. ‘My lovely weird little brother.’

  She held her arm around him as they walked towards the dune and up the path across the beach plot, but when they came to the row of pine trees he gently removed her arm.

  The sky changed colour from deep blue to a lighter blue, the moon paled and the stars were barely visible. When they reached their summer-house his father was nowhere to be seen and his mother was standing just inside the door with a broom in her hand sweeping thin air impatiently towards the open door. The broom didn’t touch the floor and there was nothing there to see.

  ‘She’s away with the fairies,’ Gry said, ‘but then what can you expect?’

  His mother turned and said angrily: ‘Very funny. Propane gas is heavier than air, right? You take the broom!’ She gave it to Arvid and he swept and swept without seeing a thing and so he didn’t know if he had finished or not and he felt like an idiot.

  ‘Can we come back in now?’ he said.

  ‘That should be fine.’

  ‘OK.’ He placed the broom against the door and went in and sniffed the kitchen. The rubber pipe to the gas had been detached and the empty container was by the wall. They could say what they liked. There was a reek of dead bodies.

  HARD AS FLINT

  AUNT ELSE LIVED to the south of town. It was a long bike ride there, from the summer-house along the coast and through the town centre, for the annual visit. From her living-room window Arvid could see the Kattegat, with the bay facing Sæby and one mole sticking out into the sea and disappearing to the north like a line drawn in charcoal. Aunt Else was Grandmother’s elder sister. She was taller than Grandmother, who was very small and sparrow-like, and Aunt Else’s hair was still black with grey streaks. Arvid liked her. Although she went to church every Sunday she was still easy to talk to.

  All the houses in her street were small and painted yellow with red-tiled roofs and in Aunt Else’s living room the walls were covered with pictures and old photographs and nautical charts and objects from fishing boats. Aunt Else was a fisherman’s wife, everyone who lived here was connected with fishing and always had been. Twenty years ago the fishing smack Lise-Lotte sank north of Skagen with Aunt Else’s husband on board. It was wartime then and a dark, moonless night and stormy weather, even the sky had its blackout blinds up, and nothing from the wreck was ever found.

  It was Aunt Else who hid Jesper until he could escape to Sweden. They
were good friends even though she was his aunt and since then she had lived alone. The only thing she regretted was that she and her husband had waited too long to have children, and then Jesper had died, and anyway it had been too late for a long time, for she was sixty-five now. For a while she thought of doing what Madame Olsen did in Pelle the Conqueror, but she was afraid her husband would turn up one fine day like Boatman Olsen did in the book and so she didn’t take the risk.

  ‘Mark my words, young man, it was not for the lack of candidates!’ She laughed and Arvid laughed because it was easy to see that Aunt Else had been attractive in a way that was not usual in this town. Her eyes were big and brown and her black hair with the grey streaks and her narrow face made you think of other countries than Denmark.

  In front of the house was a small lawn, with the beach directly below, and there were white chairs and a table where they could sit and eat cake, when the wind was not too strong. Grandmother and Grandfather had already arrived and Grandmother was sitting in one of the chairs with a blanket wrapped around her hips and thighs. Small and fragile like a baby bird, she seemed ten years older than Aunt Else, her eyes were blue and transparent and she looked at Arvid with a smile on her lips and he couldn’t work out why she was smiling.

  Arvid ate cake. When he had finished the first piece Aunt Else said: ‘Surely you’re not going to have just one piece, are you?’ He surely wasn’t, and he took another slice of layer cake and Grandmother frowned at him as if it was bad manners to eat more than one piece. What the hell, he thought, and left the table and walked down to the water with the piece of cake in his hand. Grandfather had been standing there all the time, hands behind his back, wearing the not-so-worn suit and a tie, and the stub of a cigar poked out from under his moustache.

  ‘Don’t you want some cake, Granddad?’ Arvid said, but Grandfather shook his head without turning and gazed across the sea. He took out the cigar and spat in the sand and put it back in and said: ‘We didn’t even have shoes then. Only in the winter. In the autumn, when I was in the fields with the cows, my feet were so frozen that when they had a shit I would run over and put my feet in it. That warmed them up, for a while.’

  Grandfather stood smoking, and then he spat again and threw the cigar butt into the sea and walked up to the house without looking at Arvid even once. His shoulders were crooked at the top, almost like a hunchback’s.

  ‘The old miser,’ Arvid mumbled.

  Gry came down and joined him. She had icing sugar round her mouth, and she licked it and looked pleased.

  ‘What’s up with Granddad? He walked straight in without a word.’

  Arvid shrugged and ate a mouthful of cake.

  ‘Pelle the Conqueror, Part One,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘When Granddad was a boy, he had to walk barefoot when he tended the cows, even in the autumn, and he warmed his feet in the cowpats. It’s in the book too. I wonder if he really did it or he just read about it.’

  ‘Of course he did, otherwise he wouldn’t have said so.’

  ‘Maybe he did,’ Arvid said. ‘I don’t give a damn.’

  When they went back up Grandfather was still in the house and Aunt Else had gone in after him. After a while they came out and Grandfather sat down at the table to eat cake. But he said nothing.

  Aunt Else was in the doorway and called Arvid to her. He went over and she said: ‘Come with me. I’ve got something to show you.’ He followed her through the living room to the small room behind the kitchen. He had never been there before. The walls, the shelves and the window-sill were full of souvenirs of bygone days. Aunt Else opened a chest in the corner. It was brown and made of wood with a curved lid and had no decoration of any kind, just a wrought-iron handle on each side and below the keyhole you could see the numbers 1869 when the light was straight on them.

  ‘I didn’t give you anything for your birthday,’ she said, and took out something big and square wrapped in a neckerchief. ‘I always meant to give it to Jesper, but never got around to it and then it was too late. When the accident happened I was so sorry I hadn’t.’

  ‘What happened?’ Arvid said.

  ‘He was out sailing with a friend. There was a strong wind and Jesper was sitting at the helm. When they had to change course to go round the lighthouse island the current was so strong he lost control of the tiller and the sail flew back and the boom hit him on the head. He died instantly. Didn’t you know?’

  ‘Mother said it was written in the stars.’

  Aunt Else gave a faint smile. ‘Did she say that? You know, Arvid, your mother was very fond of Jesper. They were almost always together after she was old enough for him not to be embarrassed. You might say they protected each other. That’s what it looked like anyway. She helped him whenever he got into trouble with your short-tempered grandfather and he helped her that time when she came home from Norway so suddenly. No one else dared. The year he died and you were born she was tired and poorly, she was back in Norway then of course. It was important for her to know that Jesper was out there somewhere. When he died her life seemed so meaningless she had to console herself with the thought that it had not been the usual sort of accident, that it had been preordained and no one could have done anything. That’s the way people think sometimes.’

  ‘So it wasn’t written in the stars then?’ His hands were clammy and he kept wiping them up and down the thighs of his trousers. The denim felt stiff to his palms.

  ‘Nothing is written in the stars, Arvid, except that we will die, not how and certainly not when, and what comes afterwards we can only guess.’

  She unwrapped the cloth and took out a large, white book. The cover looked like marble and there were letters on it that looked like gold.

  ‘It’s written in English. “An Artist in Italy”. Meaning “En kunstner i Italia”, if you translate it, but I’m sure you’ve learned some English at school. I was given it by my grandfather and he got it from the man who’d done the pictures in it. It was to thank him for the loan of a boat while he was on holiday here on the coast. He’d heard that my grandfather was from Italy.’

  Arvid took the book. It was heavy and smooth and when he opened it on the first page he saw:

  Open my heart, and you will see

  Graved inside of it, ‘Italy’

  The poem was printed in a kind of handwritten style he could easily read and he knew what it said and he ran his fingertips over the letters and thought he would copy them one day.

  He leafed through the book. There was a lot of difficult-looking text, but mostly it consisted of pictures, colour pictures of sun-drenched countryside and baked houses and churches and people in shabby clothes, and oranges and tall, slim trees. Cypresses they were called. One of the pictures showed the blue Bay of Naples and the town with its gleaming houses and Vesuvius high in the distance, almost floating. He held the book open at that page and studied the picture carefully and Aunt Else leaned over his shoulder.

  ‘Yes, that’s the town my grandfather came from. Naples. His name was Bruno.’

  ‘I know.’ He closed the book and got up. ‘Thank you very much,’ he said.

  He stood for a moment and then he shook Aunt Else’s hand and bowed, but she bent forward and gave him a hug. She smelled like her house smelled. He put the book under his arm and they went back to the living room. It was a nice room when the sun shone in through the windows, the crossbars in the frame making square patterns on the floor, and the others were sitting outside at the garden table, they were bathed in light, his father’s shirt was a dazzling white, Gry’s hair gleamed and Grandmother stood behind his mother ready to pour coffee in her cup, but his mother pushed the pot away so hard that Grandmother spilled coffee on the tablecloth. The stain glinted in the sun.

  Aunt Else placed both hands on Arvid’s shoulders and gazed out of the window.

  ‘She’s been trying so hard to make amends. It just isn’t that easy. She looks gentle and fragile, but she’s hard as flint.�
��

  ‘Who is?’

  ‘Kirsten. Your grandmother,’ Aunt Else said, and Arvid remembered the time there was a knock at the door in Lodsgade and he and Grandmother were alone over the milk shop and two men were outside wanting to have a word with her. They came up the stairs and stood on the landing by the kitchen and began to talk about God and the Day of Judgement. They were Jehovah’s Witnesses. Grandmother listened to them without uttering a word. Finally there was a silence and they didn’t know what more to say, for the tiny woman with the pale blue eyes was looking right through them and they shifted their feet and Grandmother began to talk in a low, clear voice. She talked about God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit and she talked about the love for mankind of the one who died on the cross for our sins, and His House, which was the only House and it had many rooms, but not that many. She talked about the false prophets and the doubts that Thomas had, and Peter, who denied the Lord thrice before the cock crowed, and her voice was cold as ice. She talked about the angel’s flaming sword and about Abraham, who would sacrifice Isaac for his belief in God, and Job, who didn’t understand what really counted until he had lost everything and there was frost in the air in the stairwell. The two men backed down the steps and stopped halfway and tried to get a word in, but Grandmother wasn’t listening any more and her words were like blows from a cane, for they had a different view from her about what was right and what was wrong and she was hard as flint and turned people from her door if they had stumbled from the path.

  When Aunt Else and Arvid came out, his mother was sitting with her face buried in her arms on the table, crying. His father was beside her with his hand raised stiffly in the air above her neck and then he shook his head as though he had just woken up and lowered his arm gently around her shoulders. She straightened up at once and shouted: ‘Don’t you touch me! I don’t need you on my side now. I needed you then! Now it’s too late!’ And his father turned to stone in his chair.