by Dea Brovig
At six o’clock, she prepares her dinner. In spite of the rain that is falling in the yard, she leaves the door to the garden open, inviting in a damp breeze to escort the smells of her cooking out. She adds the chopped vegetables to a wok and they sizzle while the radio plays. Else hums along to songs she does not know. She pours in the sauce and decides in an act of rebellion to serve her food in a bowl.
At the corner table, she lights a candle before taking a seat and spreading her napkin on her lap. She jabs her fork into a pile of noodles and twirls its handle, wrinkling her nose when they slither off its prongs. Else spears a courgette baton and lifts it dripping to her mouth. She washes the taste away with a gulp of water. She braves another bite before putting down her fork, standing and crossing the floor to the oven.
The ringed binder is in the cabinet above the hot plate, set against the wall at the end of the spice rack. Else pulls it from the shelf and leafs through the recipes she has collected over the years. When she finds what she is looking for, she slips the plastic folder from the metal hoops and brings it with her to the table. There she sits and empties the folder’s contents onto the Formica top.
She examines the brochures one at a time. There is a three-week tour that is high up on her list: ‘The Great Wall of China * The Terracotta Warriors * The Three Gorges * The Yangtze River’. Next come the Pyramids – ‘Visit the Tomb of Tutankhamun’ – and then the waves of the Greek archipelago. Else places a slice of leek in her mouth. While she chews, she smoothes the spine of the catalogue flat with her thumb. The water sparkles on the page. How different it looks, the greens and blues and their gentle, clean peaks. It is unlike anything she has seen, though she has spent her life staring at the sea.
A coating of sauce remains on her tongue once she has swallowed the leek. She pushes her plate away and, standing again, switches off the radio. The kitchen’s four walls seem to throw back the silence, amplifying its loneliness. Else blows out the candle and tidies away the brochures. She scoops her dinner into the bin and goes into the hall, where she fluffs her hair in the mirror and runs her tongue over her teeth. When she has rubbed at the shadows under her eyes with a licked finger and applied her lipstick, she leaves the house, locking its silence up behind her.
Rain spatters her windscreen as she pulls up outside the yellow house on Gaasestien. For several minutes Else waits in her Golf, keeping the engine running. A lamp is on in the living room. Through the window, she watches Petter settle into an armchair. He points a remote control and colours light up his face. He lifts a mug and sets it down to the scrape of her windshield wipers.
Else jumps when a car drives by. She glances at the houses on either side of Petter’s, noting which windows are bright, trying and failing to remember whether she has ever heard about his neighbours. With a frown, she removes her key and reaches for the umbrella in the back seat. She opens her door and steps into a stream that washes pollen pods down the road.
At the top of the drive, she rings the doorbell. A rich smell spills onto the porch when Petter answers.
‘Else,’ he says.
‘You mentioned something about lasagne,’ she says.
Petter looks at her with an expression she cannot read. She wonders if he will send her away, but he nods and shifts aside for her to pass. ‘So I did,’ he says. ‘Come in.’
The walls of his hallway are decorated with paintings of seascapes. A potted plant sprouts red buds where it sits on a chest of drawers. When she has taken off her shoes and Petter has hung her jacket, Else follows him down the corridor and into the kitchen. A counter splits the room in two, separating the work surfaces from a spacious eating area. From the TV next door, a woman’s voice delivers the evening news.
‘Are you driving?’ Petter asks.
‘Yes,’ says Else.
‘Then I have water or apple juice.’
Else asks for water and he fills two glasses from the tap, then turns the dial of the oven. While he lays the table, she busies herself with studying the photos of his children stuck with magnets to the fridge. In one of the snaps, they are as she remembers them before they moved with their mother to Oslo. Their grins are missing teeth, their cheeks are freckled from the sun. Brother and sister dangle fishing lines into the water from Petter’s sailing boat. In a more recent shot Hermann poses in a school photo, his fringe sculpted with gel over a forehead speckled with acne. Siri is wearing eyeliner in the picture beside it. She is trying to hide her braces behind a self-conscious smile.
‘They’ve grown,’ Else says.
‘They’re growing still,’ says Petter. ‘Hermann is almost as tall as I am. I’m beginning to think they’ll never stop.’
‘How often do you see them?’
‘Whenever they’ll have me,’ he says. ‘They’re at that age now, you know. They want to be with their friends. So instead of them coming here, I go to Oslo. There’s a little hotel not far from where Merete lives. They don’t stay over, but I can take them out for dinner.’
Else touches a finger to the mole on Siri’s cheek. She imagines ruddy skin under the layer of face powder. ‘You must miss them,’ she says.
‘I do,’ Petter says. ‘The house is too quiet. Are you ready to eat?’
Else takes her seat as he fetches a tray from the oven. He places it on the table and she blinks at the half-finished lasagne.
‘You’ve already eaten,’ she says.
‘I’ve been working up to a second helping,’ he says and spoons a generous portion onto Else’s dish. He serves himself a smaller square. ‘Hope it’s edible. Skål.’
She raises her glass. Petter sips his water, holding her eye as he does.
Else picks up her fork and dips it into the filling that oozes from between the sheets of her lasagne. The combination of tomato and cheese is creamy-sweet. She swallows and cuts herself another bite.
‘It’s delicious,’ she says.
‘It’s okay,’ Petter says. ‘Siri’s is better. It was Siri who taught me how to make it.’
‘She likes to cook?’
‘No,’ says Petter, ‘I wouldn’t say that. She didn’t like to think of her old dad’s arteries after a few too many kebabs. She’s a good girl is Siri, though more complicated than her brother. She always was, but now … I gather she’s giving her mother hell.’
‘Daughters do,’ says Else. ‘That’s part of it.’
‘But you and Marianne are close. At least, you’ve always struck me as being close.’
Else smiles, pleased that he thinks so and in no hurry to chronicle the friction between her and her daughter.
‘I saw her last week, actually,’ says Petter. ‘Together with an impressive looking man on the Longpier. She looked very happy.’
‘Is that so?’ Else says.
‘Is it serious?’ he asks. ‘Do you think they’ll move in together?’
Else is about to tell him not to be ridiculous, that Marianne has just met this impressive looking man, but a tightening in her chest makes it hard for her to answer. She has not allowed herself to think about what she knows in her heart: that Marianne is doing more than passing time with Mads. She recognises in her something she has not seen since Liv was born. She knows her daughter.
‘Maybe,’ she says.
Petter nods, though she wonders if he could have heard so small a reply. She inspects the pattern of ropes and anchors on her placemat. They sit for a while without speaking, the silence delicate and interrupted by the scratch of cutlery on their plates.
‘When the kids left for Oslo,’ Petter says, ‘I never imagined. The things I missed.’ He shakes his head. ‘Hermann’s video games, for one. He’d got his hands on something hair-raising called Resident Evil. All weekend long, you’d hear this eerie music and then be scared out of your skin when the zombie dogs started barking. And Siri needed an hour in the bathroom every morning just to shower and dry her hair. And then there was none of it. Everything was so quiet. But you get used to it. You do. It isn’t t
he worst thing in the world.’
‘What did you do?’ Else asks. ‘How did you get used to it?’
‘I learned to sail,’ Petter says.
‘But you’ve had your sailing boat for years.’
‘That’s true,’ he says. ‘But I never took her out of the skerry. Now I could go to Denmark tomorrow, if I wanted to. I learned to really sail. I can’t say I’m sorry for that.’
After the meal, Petter helps Else into her jacket. She zips it up and steps into shoes whose leather is still wet at the toes. Outside, the rain is coming down hard. She pauses on the porch and watches the strings of water falling, listens to the clattering on the roof, the gush of the gutters.
‘Drive carefully,’ Petter says.
‘Thanks for dinner,’ says Else.
With the umbrella in hand, she runs down the drive to her parked car. She ducks into the driver’s seat and slams the door, resting her palms on the steering wheel as she catches her breath. The fan fogs the windscreen when she starts the engine. Water drips from her jacket onto her thighs while she waits for it to clear and she glances at the house, where Petter stands in the doorway. He lifts a hand to wave goodbye. She pulls her fingers through her hair, rakes wet strands from her face, presses the clutch and drives away.
A WEEK LATER, Else brings a bouquet of picked wild flowers to the cemetery. In the warm chirp of the summer evening, she winds her usual route through the gate and to the rear of the church, past two of the benches that were donated in the Nineties to where the younger plots now claim the soil. The air smells of cut grass and she scans the graveyard until she sees the sexton’s tractor by Ole Haugeli’s headstone. The gravel crunches under her trainers as she makes her way down the track to the row of marble where her mother lies.
Else spends some minutes beside the grave holding the wild flowers’ stems. She eyes the epitaph that does not come close to summing up her loss. ‘Dagny Dybdahl. 1932–2008. Beloved mother, grandmother, great-grandmother.’ Since the end of winter, a green fuzz has sprung up over the mound of earth that tucks in her ashes. The grass is thinner here than elsewhere, like the fledgling bristles of a pubescent beard. Else kneels to gather the withered irises from the tin at the foot of the plot, chucking out the stale water before refreshing it from the pump and arranging her bluebells and forget-me-nots.
When she has pruned the grave’s weeds and browned flower heads, she rises and brushes the mud from her shins. She surveys her handiwork before doubling back towards the church. Else distracts herself from the grief whose scab seems to crack with each visit to the cemetery by thinking of the spring afternoon when she last sat through a service on its pews. By then, Pastor Seip had moved to a parish in Sandnes. Pastor Gonsholt was the minister when Marianne was confirmed. Else remembers her mother beside her in the congregation, wiping proud tears from her eyes as her granddaughter approached the altar. When the minister traced a crucifix on Marianne’s forehead, Else forced her lips into a smile although, inside, she felt like weeping.
Instead of continuing to the church gate, she steps onto the path to the Second World War tombs, barely aware of having changed course until she has come as far as the memorial cross. Else checks off the names of the locals who gave their lives to the Resistance – Gregor Sundt, Carl Ulland, Per Henrik Wiig – and wanders past the grave of the English soldier to the north wall, where her father’s plot is pressed close to the brick. ‘Johann Dybdahl. 1927–1975.’ His name is black with algae. Flakes of slate have crumbled from the headstone into grass twisted with weeds and feral blooms.
Else rereads the letters and an unhappy image develops in her mind. Her father sits in the Best Room, his rheumy eyes following Marianne’s first roll across the floorboards. Else blinks it away, blocks it out. Johann was dead when Marianne was a little girl. She lowers herself to the ground and sinks a hand into the thatch that sprouts from his plot. Closing her fingers around a stem, she gives it a tug. The weed is sturdier than it looks. Another yank and its roots come loose in a knot of fibres like pale capillaries. Else studies the shoot in her palm. She lets it drop, grasps another. She pulls it free. Lets it drop. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?
Else is out of breath and squatting in a pile of vegetal waste when a voice breaks in on her thoughts.
‘I’ve been wondering when you’d be getting around to that,’ Lars says. ‘The poor man’s grave is in a mess.’
Her head snaps around to where he stands not five feet away. His golden retriever strains against her lead, her tongue lolling pink and plump.
‘This is where you walk your dog?’ Else says.
‘Why not?’ says Lars. ‘I don’t think the dead care.’
He scratches the grooves behind the puppy’s ears before dragging her back with a jerk of the wrist.
‘Don’t let me disturb you,’ he says and sits on a bench. Else purses her lips and wipes the sweat from her forehead. She rubs her hands together, showering earth over the weeds she has extracted from her father’s grave as she glares at the puppy. The dog wags her tail and sniffs the ground by Lars’s shoes. Else retrieves her handbag from a patch of leaves.
‘I hear you’re seeing Petter,’ Lars says. ‘I hadn’t realised.’
‘Is that what you hear?’ Else says. She swings the handbag over her shoulder and gets up off the ground, intent on denying him an explanation. As exasperated as she is to learn about the town’s gossip, she resents Lars’s presumption more.
‘The kids are something else, aren’t they?’ he says. ‘Andreas never stops talking about Liv. I think he’s in love.’
‘Is that right,’ Else says.
‘Victoria isn’t sure it’s a good idea. What do you think?’
‘They’re young,’ she says.
‘We were young once, too,’ he says. His earnest look irritates her enough to keep her from walking away.
‘Was there something you wanted?’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I want you to sit down.’
Else frowns, wondering what he is up to. Once her eyes have swept the cemetery and she is sure they are alone, she sits on his bench, a tense bicep crushing her handbag against her ribs.
‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ asks Lars.
‘It has nothing to do with me,’ she says.
He slides a cigarette from a pack of Marlboro Reds, lights its end and puffs. ‘I quit ten years ago,’ he says.
‘So I see.’
‘Don’t tell Victoria.’
‘Why would we be talking about you?’
Lars’s eyebrows shoot up and he smiles and pulls again on his cigarette. ‘It’s funny,’ he says, ‘being back here. How is Marianne getting on with her new job?’
‘Why do you ask?’ Else says.
‘She was saying how much she liked it, the last time I saw her.’
‘Well, then, you know, don’t you?’
‘It’s good to see she’s come into her own. She seems like a great girl.’
Else stares at Lars. She thinks suddenly of what Gro Berge told Janne Haugen, the stories of Lars’s family packing up their life in Oslo to escape his infidelities, to start again. There is no hint now of the triumph she felt on hearing the news.
Before she has composed herself enough to answer, the puppy barks and bounds to the end of her lead. Both Else and Lars glance towards the church, where Victoria watches them with her back to the whitewashed wall.
‘Shit,’ Lars says and tosses his cigarette. Victoria hurries away.
‘But, what …’ Else says to the empty seat beside her. Lars is already up and running after his wife.
‘She doesn’t,’ Else says. ‘For goodness’ sake, she can’t possibly think …’
Lars sprints to the church, leaving Else alone and unsettled. She turns to her father’s grave, to the mess she has made of his plot. With a dirty hand, she wipes her face and pushes herself off the bench.
Then
1975
ABEDEHUS BAZAAR FOR the In
ner Mission saw the start of the Christmas week that would bring the year to a close. Dagny organised its committee in stringing lengths of clothes line in the hall and pegging up the potholders and knee socks that would go on sale. The chairs were pushed to the walls or carried to the basement storeroom, making space for a long table decorated with gifts for the raffle, including a much-admired tablecloth that Else’s form teacher, Geir Paulsen, won, though he had only bought one ticket.
A dollop of strawberry jam oozed over the waffle that Else balanced on a napkin as she climbed to the gallery, leaving the rumours about a deal Haakon Reiersen had struck with the oil fields in the North Sea to circulate in the hall below. She had heard Solveig whispering to her mother about diving bells while they mixed jugs of blackcurrant squash in the kitchen. Esben Omland had asked her father, ‘Is it true what they say about a contract with Shell?’ but Johann did not know a thing about it.
Haakon Reiersen was a moderate kind of Christian. He drank cognac at the weekends after dinner and allowed his children to play American rock music records which his sister sent for their birthdays from New York. Neither Haakon nor Karin was involved with the bedehus. Instead of attending the Inner Mission bazaar that day, Lars had told Else about their plans to drive to Kristiansand to watch the new James Bond film.
Else had never been to the cinema. Many of those with a stricter faith would disapprove of the Reiersen family outing and, while she ate her waffle, she felt important with the knowledge, as if she were safeguarding another secret, protecting Lars from notoriety. She thought perhaps she might ask him about Shell, but he had been different in the weeks since his liquor smuggling began. He talked of little besides his visits to Tenvik’s paddock, where he would deliver the homebrew he brought in canisters for the circus men. The strong man had guzzled a litre of homebrew by himself, while a few sips had sent Petter vomiting onto the bonfire. More than once, while Lars kissed her in the caretaker’s shed, Else found herself promising she would join him for the next party. When Saturday arrived, her father’s presence at the supper table kept her from meeting his moped in the road.
