by Laura Newman
In summer, by the time I was eight or nine, I was allowed to walk the three miles from our village down to the fjord and the port town. I was known to the fishwives on the piers. They would send me on errands or I would clean fish for a few kroner and go home smelling of smelt and herring. Once a Russian vessel came to dock; I was curious and inclined toward the ship. But Elin, who is my mother’s childhood friend and has eyes in the back of her head, called out to me, “Kristoffer, leave those Russian boats be.” “Why, Elin?” I asked. She pushed out a hip in consideration. “Because they drink a different vodka than we drink,” as if this explained the difference and the danger. And somehow it did. I kept to my kind.
I came to know the seasons by the colors of the sea. In deepest summer when I raised my gaze to the horizon I found it difficult to discern the difference between sea-sparkle and sky-sparkle, but I know an angel-light when I see one. Then on toward October the sea is of colder colors, emerald and darker still. That’s when the whales come and I know winter soon will follow.
I spent my kroner on squares of chocolate or soda and felt a little guilty for it, because I knew my father would consider it wasteful to hand my money to the dock vendors. It would not be fair to say my father was stingy so much as frugal. He taught me to fish, not for the joy of the sound the twine makes at cast, but because fish is food. He taught me to build a fire, not because it’s almost an incantation to call to life such an elemental thing as fire, but because it’s expensive to run the radiator. Thus it was that all my pants were purchased too long and worn until too short. Same with boots.
It’s true that my mother gave me honeycombs and wild flowers. But the centerpiece of our kitchen table was always a bottle of clear table booze. Mostly my parents had a shot together after dessert. But sometimes, in the winter, when my mother said the days were too short to bother with, she sailed into that bottle and my father made eggs for dinner until she tumbled back out.
The year that I turned thirteen everything in my life changed. I remember that as the year autumn stayed so long the forest iris were confused and started to bloom early. I had spent the summer apparently doing nothing but growing. I barely fit in my bed. I had grown out of my rubber boots. My mother told me to put talcum powder in them to help slide them on, but by the time the rain finally started to fall, the powder trick was clearly failing. Reluctantly my father agreed to new boots. My mother never learned to drive, so he drove us to town in the world’s oldest Saab. I chose beautiful Wellies of shiny black with red plaid wool lining. On the first real day of rain, I put them on and showed the mud puddles who’s boss. In the evening, I set my Wellies by the fire to dry. But I put them too close and the fire melted the face of the boots.
I was a boy without a future.
I hid the boots until my father left the house and then I showed the pathetic melted things to my mother. I would forever forgive her any infraction because she got out her cookie-jar money and walked three miles into town and three miles back with a new pair of boots. They were navy and the plaid yellow, but my father never noticed and my mother never told.
If my father was a stingy moralist and my mother an occasional drunk, they covered for each other, and under that cover I was safe.
As winter set in it was my job to build up the fire in the church an hour before the congregation arrived. Then, during the service, I was to stand by the stone fireplace and add in logs of oak and birch. Our church was from the 1800s, and although it had been retrofitted with a heating system, it was always on the brink of despair and my father cared not to spend the money to fix it while there was a perfectly good fireplace at hand.
Jorgen Munsen carried a loaded pistol. Everyone knew it and he wasn’t the only man to do so. When he came to church he treated the chapel like his living room. This Sunday, as usual, before he sat down Jorgen took his pistol out of his shearling coat, unloaded it, and set the gun and the bullets on the stone mantel of the fireplace. He left a tin of chewing tobacco and a few coins as well. Jorgen thought it disrespectful to carry a gun in church, but disinclined to leave the weapon at home. So be it.
After Jorgen had settled into his pew, Blind Ingrid tap, tap, tapped her cane across the rough floor and, for reasons unknown, this day ran her hand across the mantel as she crossed in front of the fire. It was an exceptionally cold day and I had built the fire wild-high. Perhaps the strength of the flames had alarmed Blind Ingrid and she wanted to make sure of the distance between her skirt and the embers. Her hand pushed three bullets into the flames. I was the only one to see this.
Before I could even find my voice, the first bullet went straight through the Jesus window, shattering the glass. The window just slumped and fell like a landslide. The immediate shared thought was Second Coming. There was a stunned silence as the last pieces landed with a tinkling sound. And then a warbler, that littlest of birds, flew through the open space. I would almost like to say that the second bullet shot the warbler, just for the thrill of it. But that bullet was stopped by the pulpit and stays there still. We all stared at the bird and the sky like we had never seen such things.
(Later the window was replaced with a solid sheet of wavy blue glass, which was just as well because ours was a Lutheran church and the painted glass affair was a leftover from a fifty-year hostile Catholic takeover, resented, but not enough so that anyone would take down perfectly good glass. There were those who felt that particular bullet was God-sent. However, the blue was somewhat ill advised, because when the northern sun pushed the watery color onto the very white Norwegian skin, the congregation looked like Nordic Smurfs. But that was later.) Back to the third bullet …
Then I remembered the third bullet and my voice and screamed, “Duck!” Some idiots thought I was calling the warbler a duck and stayed standing, but most had now caught on and knew good advice when they heard it.
The third bullet was marked for my mother. While others went down, she stood up and turned toward me, reaching out her arms, climbing over the pew. I don’t know why she did this because I was the safest person in the chapel. Standing to the side of the fireplace I was the only one who couldn’t get shot. My father slid behind his pulpit like a lump of lard. But Arne Erikson, the village butcher, perceived my mother’s danger and threw himself up into the air. Arne looked so courageous I swear he could have stopped that bullet with his teeth. But he didn’t and his head kind of blew off and onto my mom. She held on to him, this big, kind of headless ragdoll. I don’t know how she had the strength. No one wanted to move because no one but I knew all the bullets were spent. The warbler flew back out into the forest. Finally, Jorgen took Arne from my mother and laid him down on the broken pieces of colored glass, which was a sort of shattered shroud for the poor man as his blood ran over the pieces of Jesus.
My father came to and collected his hysterical wife and told everyone to go home and pray for Arne. Some people stooped to pick up pieces of glass as souvenirs but my father said, “This house of prayer shall not be made a den of thieves,” plagiarizing Matthew, but effectively shaming everyone into leaving without the Catholic relics.
Of course no one but she knew, but in that moment my mother lost her lover. At the funeral, it would have been unseemly, the amount she cried, but it was excused because he had, in fact, died for her. Well, maybe I knew, or suspected. During the funeral I remembered when I had seen my mother and Arne together a few months ago in the early fall …
Each September my father would go hunting for a few weeks. He would bring back boar and deer to hang and cure in the smokehouse. It was a time of some small reprieve for my mother and me. We would eat late and leave the dishes in the sink, watch movies on our grainy TV, or dance to the radio. She would sleep in and I would read comics on the porch, something my father forbade as a ridiculous waste of time and money. The last late daisies nodded to the meadowlark.
One day during this time my mother and I walked into the village. Usually sh
e just wore knee-blown jeans and her hair pulled back. Today she wore a summer dress that showed the outline of her thighs when she moved. Her hair was curled and pulled up in some different fashion. She wore her wedding earrings, large hoops of thinnest silver with weighty dangles of aquamarine. We stopped at the library and I checked out a book of Rudyard Kipling short stories that would change my life, although I did not know it at the time. For now, it was just a book with a dusty green cover and gold letters. We bought produce and then surprisingly went into the butcher shop. We usually had our own meat, but it was late in the season. Arne, the (soon-to-be-dead) butcher with beefy arms and an always-clean white apron, came out from behind the counter to talk to my mother. He called her Liv, but her name is Livinia.
Arne’s shop stocked one-kroner candies displayed in an old trunk made to look like a treasure chest. Sugar booty. I loitered by the candy while my mother talked to Arne. I saw her head go back in a small laugh, her white neck, her earrings a-jangle. Then one of the earrings fell loose and into the top of her dress. This jewelry was the only exquisite thing she owned. She must have been able to feel that her bra would not stop the heavy piece. Arne’s floor was cold cement, easy to hose. My mother had no choice but to spread her legs just a little bit and squat just a little bit, so she could reach down and catch the aquamarines in her hand. I knew this would humiliate her, the unfeminine act of an earring coming out between her legs. But Arne broke into a fractured laugh when decorum would have been to turn away and pretend it had never happened. Then my mother laughed too. I was confused by the intimacy but quickly distracted by a pyramid of red-yellow-orange gumdrops.
Yet perhaps I knew that my mother liked Arne. He was a nice man. Not as straight-lined as my father, not as full of pastor-words and rules. Arne gave me the gumdrops for free. When we left, I hardly noticed that we had no paper-wrapped packages of meat.
Father came home from the autumn hunt. I helped him butcher and hang the carcasses. Mostly I just carried the innards out. When we were done, the forest was completely removed from the animals and they smelled of salt and smoke and were dry to the touch. I hated them. These things devoid of face and fur. My friend Fredrik and I would sometimes walk through our smokehouse with our eyes closed and allow ourselves to knock into the hanging carcasses, set them swinging, let the legs and heavy middles collide with us. Meat to meat, I would leave the smokehouse bruised and feeling brutal. I don’t know why we did it.
The book I brought home from the library was not as expected. I thought it would be like the Just So stories I had previously read. But it was a collection of adult stories and I set it aside to be returned to the library. Father picked it up: Plain Tales from the Hills, set in India—British India in the hill station town of Shimla. He read that book to pieces.
And then he wanted to go to India to preach.
“Are you kidding me?!” my mother shouted, her voice climbing straight up the ladder, under my rabbit blanket, right up the back of my spine and into my heart. “India! What are you? Some hero-preacher, some walker-on-water? What are you thinking?!”
My father’s voice was low and even. He wanted to do this. It was his calling. She had to come; she was the wife.
“Calling? It’s a novel, Nils, it’s a novel.”
Through the autumn this argument went on. Then came a night in late November when I heard my mother’s footfall in the dark. I heard her pull her shawl from the wall peg, the blue wool one, I knew, the one with edelweiss embroidered on the edges and yellow fringe on the hood. She opened the door and stepped out. I couldn’t help myself; I climbed out of bed and opened my window. The run of the river silvered under the moon. The night wind pushed the smell of pine into my hands. I watched my mother walk away and thought I would never see her again.
That night the first snow came, sudden and hard. But in the morning the sky was pure blue. I dreamed of the gunny wolf and when I woke there were slender icicles hanging from our roof, like prisms against the blue sky. When I went downstairs my mother was making oatmeal with apples and her shawl was in its place.
My father kept up his argument and kept making his plans. My mother kept shouting and taking walks in the night. But then, after the shooting in the church, she suddenly stopped her night wandering. On the day of the funeral I thought she would climb into the table booze, and she did. For three days. Then she started to pack. For in the spring we would go to India, soon after my fourteenth birthday.
My father was not assigned to Kipling’s hill station of Shimla, where the air is Himalaya-shaded and tea-plantation-scented. There you could live like an English teapot with pink roses on a silver tray with biscuits. Every foreigner wants to live there, even the Dalai Lama. They made room for him.
Instead, we were sent to Varanasi, four hundred miles south of New Delhi, built on the holy, wholly polluted Ganges River. My father was given leeway to pick the country, but had no control over his parish assignment, nor was the church ever known for explanations. When my mother read “Varanasi,” she was shocked. “What a bunch of addlebrained muddlers! Of all cities. How will you get a congregation?” The letter fell from her hands onto the table. I knew she was not concerned about saving souls so much as eating dinner. My father’s stipend was limited; his livelihood was dependent upon donations from his flock, like tips for good service.
“It’s the holiest of the seven sacred cities. The birthplace of Buddhism,” explained my father, like this would help his case. “The spiritual capital.”
“It’s like sending a Zoroastrian to the Vatican or a Jew to Mecca.” She was really worked up. “Like all the Hindus and Buddhists in Varanasi are standing up on tippy-toe, looking for a new God!”
“There is no new God,” said my father, the literalist, and my mother had that what-was-I-thinking-when-I-married-you look on her face. She decided to pack all the preserves in our larder. If she could have put a side of venison in a suitcase, she would have.
But I was excited. The farthest from home I had ever been was three miles.
Nils’s Point of View
So what does Nils think of this state of affairs? He lies in their bed, and when Livinia joins him she is in flannels when she used to be bare and burrow into him like a forest animal. Now she sleeps on the razor’s edge. They’ve known each other since the time before they even knew their own names.
Nils remembers when Livinia ate his crayons. He remembers when she fell in the blue creek on an ice-cracking day and he let her walk home in his boots. How she looks in May. When she was the taller one, and then she wasn’t.
Nils knows he is a man who always wants to do the right thing. He went to seminary school to learn how, and the Bible is his primer. He wants a simple life. He wants guideposts and the hope of a miracle. But now it’s come to this. His heart is the wolf running under the full moon.
When Arne was killed by the church-bullet, so help him God, Nils was happy. Arne had been butchering his marriage for the previous six months and just in that instant Nils allowed himself to think God put that bullet just where it was most needed. But Nils is not that kind of man, or won’t allow himself to be that kind of man for more than an instant, and so he let that thought drown like a bug in a bog. Livinia thinks Nils is following Rudyard Kipling into India. But he’s not. He’s taking his wife on a far-away adventure, in hopes of bringing her home.
Livinia Speaks for Herself
My childhood was daisy chains and ice skates. But nothing lasts forever. At seventeen I ripped my childhood to shreds like a paper doll. I wanted to go to Oslo for college, not so much for the education, but to get the hell off the mountain. I was crazy for it. But my parents told me there was no money for such a thing; there would never be money. Suddenly the forest around me was a pine box.
On a May day of thin sunshine I took Nils up to Mink Creek and seduced him to punish my parents for being poor. Nils asked me to marry him that very afternoo
n, but I did not agree until the fall when I found I was pregnant. Don’t doubt that I loved Nils; I still do. The first time he asked me to marry him we were six. I wanted to marry him. But ever since he came home from seminary school I’ve felt like I’m in a three-way with Jesus and one of us has got to go.
And now I’m supposed to follow him to India? For Christ’s sake!
For Kris’s sake. I’ll go.
Kris
I don’t think a Norwegian can be prepared for the heat of India. Heat in the north is stones by the creek holding on to late afternoon sun. The closest comparison to heat in India would be staying inside a Finnish sauna and sweating until your heart fell out. That’s what an “Indian” summer feels like.
My first impression was that Varanasi was a mirage rising out of heat and dust. A sky without the hope of blue. The sun a twilight disk at noon. I could not clearly see the far side of the river and the water was the color of a speckled trout, gray-green and impenetrable. From somewhere there came fire smudge and ash, and at the time I did not know that it was burning bodies.
We secured long-term quarters at the Ganges View Hotel, an inexpensive riverfront tourist retreat. We had a dollhouse suite of rooms, but it didn’t matter because the lodging had three floors of open verandas lined with bougainvillea and pots of lemon trees. There were secluded, shaded areas with teak floors and silk pillows on dusty couches. My favorite outdoor room had an orange-feathered chickadee in a willow cage who could sing the light fantastic. As long as I was respectfully quiet, I had free roam. From the verandas I could play an endless game of I Spy.
