Across the China Sea

by Gaute Heivoll

  “Please see who it is,” said Mama.

  I went into the chilly hallway. Someone was standing on the other side of the window in the front door. I pressed down the door handle and felt the night air on my feet. It was Anna.

  “So you’re answering the door?” she said.

  “Yes,” I replied.

  Anna’s cheeks were rosy and her eyes shone, even though she hadn’t walked very far. Some strands of hair at the back of her neck had come loose and hung by her cheeks; it made her look younger, and I thought she might have been crying.

  “May I come in?” she said.

  Anna had not seen Mama since Mama left. They gave each other a little hug, and she stayed for a long time that evening. Anna must have seen the same thing I did. Or perhaps she already knew. Mama said nothing. I should have been in bed long ago, but both Mama and Papa forgot the time. They sat talking about all sorts of things, but after a while I realized Anna had come for a very specific reason. Namely, a Christmas concert in the church. It would be performed on December 23, and she and young Bjarne Sløgedal, the sexton’s son, were responsible for providing the music. Bjarne was an exceptionally gifted musician. During the war he had traveled back and forth to Kristiansand to practice on the cathedral organ. Later he would attend the Conservatory in Oslo, and then cross the Atlantic, like Jensen and Matiassen, to continue his studies at the Juilliard School of Music in New York. But this autumn he was only seventeen years old and had been given the task of performing a Christmas concert in the church with Anna.

  After all, it was the first peacetime Christmas.

  He and Anna had prepared a preliminary program. Mama sat on the sofa with her hands in her lap, listening calmly, Papa stood warming his hands over the stove, and I sat on the piano bench dangling my feet. Anna took a small piece of paper from her skirt pocket, unfolded it on the table in front of Mama, and stroked it with her hand as if it were a piece of clothing she was trying to smooth out. First she would play a short prelude, she said, followed by Hermann Wenzel’s “Christmas Day”; then Alma Kleveland would give a Christmas prologue. Next would be Schumann’s “Evening Song,” and after that Bjarne Sløgedal would play “Good Christian Men Rejoice.”

  Anna spoke rapidly, and seemed tense. She glanced over at Mama, but Mama sat just as before.

  “Then we’ll have the evening’s speech,” she said. “And after the speech I’ll play Lasson’s ‘Sabbath Clocks’—you know that, of course. Then Bjarne will play a fantasy on the national anthem, and finally Syvert Maesel will give a short talk.”

  Syvert Maesel was the leader of the Mission Society.

  Anna paused for a moment. Mama looked at her attentively. The fire crackled in the stove. No one said anything for a while.

  “We also wanted to have someone sing.”

  Mama still sat without saying a word. Papa turned around.

  “And we thought about you, of course.”

  “About me?” Mama exclaimed.

  “You’ve performed in public before, after all,” said Anna.

  There was a long pause. Then Mama said: “That was in another life.”

  Anna looked at her, then at the handwritten piece of paper on the table. Papa opened the stove door and added more logs.

  “We’d like you to sing Schumann’s ‘Evening Song,’” Anna continued. “See, here are the words.”

  She handed another piece of paper to Mama, who took it halfheartedly, read it for a while, and then abruptly put it down. She looked up at Papa and shook her head.

  “No,” she said. “I can’t do this.”

  When Anna left, I was sent to bed. Mama and Papa sat in the living room for a long time; I heard their voices through the wall. I heard Mama pacing back and forth, I heard Papa stoke the fire, I heard footsteps in the hall and the front door being locked, and finally I fell asleep.

  The next day Mama put on her winter coat, mittens, and shawl, and left the house as dusk began to fall. I ran upstairs and watched from Josef’s window as she disappeared down the road.

  “Why such a rush?” Josef said from his bed. “Is the Roman Empire burning?”

  “It’s just Mama,” I said.

  “Is she going to leave again?”

  Mama crossed the yard slowly; her coat was unbuttoned, and she seemed heavy, sluggish. She stopped by the hawthorn hedge to wait for Anna, and then they walked down the road together.

  “No,” I replied. “I think she’ll come back.”

  A few evenings later Ingrid and I were in the cattle barn with Papa while he groomed the horse. He brushed from the mane to the hindquarters, first against the hair, and then he smoothed the coat with long, supple movements until the whole horse shone in the pale light. Ingrid and I walked quietly across the straw dust in the hayloft and filled our arms with hay that still had a strong, spicy summer fragrance. In the semidarkness I saw the horse cart, but I don’t know if Ingrid saw it, she walked silently right behind me. She still had this softness within her, and her gentle gaze still turned toward me. When we returned to the cattle barn, I filled a bucket with water and lay a tuft of hay on top so the horse would not drink too quickly. Then Ingrid and I watched Papa. He had his back to us as he took the horse’s hoof between his knees and rubbed it with an oily mixture of animal fat and Creolin that made his hands shiny. I imagined his face, which at times could be deeply unhappy, as if sadness had turned it to stone, while at other times it broke into a smile. At that moment I had no idea what his face looked like. I stood there watching him until he was finished. Neither of us had said a word.

  “Where’s Mama?” I asked suddenly.

  He answered without looking up.

  “At Anna’s house.”

  Papa hung his barn jacket on a nail, and then Ingrid and I were allowed to turn off the light switches that were fastened firmly to a board by the door. Ingrid turned off the lightbulb in the hayloft and I turned off the two bulbs in the cattle barn, leaving the horse and two cows alone in the dark.

  “Is Mama going to sing?” I asked.

  “We’ll have to wait and see,” Papa replied.

  As the three of us walked across the yard I heard the clasps on his boots jingling. Darkness. No stars. Light shone from Jensen and Matiassen’s window.

  “We’ll have to wait and see,” he repeated.

  14.

  The nights were cold, and the grass was covered with frost when I walked to school early in the morning. Ingrid watched me leave from the window upstairs. Nils Apesland stood in front of us and directed while everyone sang; above him hung the Atlas Mountains and the Mediterranean Sea with its dark blue color. The snakes must have gone into winter hibernation deep within the scree near his house, because I didn’t see them anymore. Later, when everyone was busy writing, he came over to my desk.

  “What happened to Ingrid?” he asked.

  “She’s at home.”

  “Doesn’t she want to come to school?”

  “No,” I replied.

  I noticed that the whole class was listening.

  “Why doesn’t she want to come to school?” Nils asked.

  “Because she’s mentally disabled.”

  “Maybe she’ll come with you tomorrow then,” said Nils, returning slowly to his desk.

  “No,” I said, before he could turn around. “She’ll never come back.”

  One morning I woke up and realized something had happened while I was asleep. I threw aside the duvet, stepped onto the cold floor, and went over to the window. Outside I saw large snowflakes drifting down, and by the time I walked to school, the whole world had turned white. It was still snowing that afternoon—the forest was silently being snowed under and the light appeared bluish among the trees.

  Josef was standing on the front steps, barefoot, his shoulders turning white, and he shouted that I must come. His voice sounded strange and different, but I soon understood it had nothing to do with me or with us; it was about the snow falling from the sky.

  “L
ook,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The angels are dancing until their feathers fly,” said Josef.

  The snow was already deep in the yard, the pine trees at the edge of the woods had grown stout, the treetops shimmered through the driving snow.

  We stood in the doorway for a long time, Josef and I, just looking.

  The snow continued all night long. I heard Jensen hobbling back and forth upstairs talking with Our Lord, while snow fell and fell, on the house and the yard and the woods, and deep down in my sleep and my dreams, where everything was silent and white.

  One evening I was in my bedroom when Mama put on her coat by the mirror in the front hall. I heard her throw a shawl over her shoulders and disappear into the darkness, closing the door carefully behind her. I waited as she went down the steps outside, and then I followed her. I opened the front door very cautiously and slipped outside. It was cold. Pulling my jacket tighter around me, I paused in the yard and listened. I could tell she was ahead of me; I heard her footsteps going down the road, and when she got to Hans and Anna’s house I saw her clearly in the light of their outdoor lamp. She knocked on the door. Anna appeared in the light, opened the door, and let her in. I walked along the hawthorn hedge and into their garden. The snow was almost up to my knees. Through the kitchen window I saw Mama take off her coat and hang it over a chair. She turned, looked toward the window, and fixed her hair a little. She was wearing a dress I hadn’t seen before. I stood motionless, thinking she had seen me. But she turned and went into the living room. I stole to the other side of the house, where I could look in through the living room windows, and I saw Anna sit down at the piano while Mama paged through a book of music. I barely heard Anna begin to play; my feet were freezing, my hands were freezing. The piano music was muffled and faint, even though I saw how her fingers raced over the keys. At first Mama stood very still with the book of music in her hands, and then, after a while, she began to sing.

  I saw her singing, and I saw Anna playing, but I heard almost nothing. Faint wisps of music and song wafted into the darkness, but I didn’t go closer; I just stood there until Anna lowered her hands and turned on the piano bench and said something to Mama. I saw Mama laugh, Anna touched her arm. And in her new dress, I saw very clearly that Mama was pregnant. I looked at her stomach, and I seemed to feel her breath on the back of my neck. Then I followed my tracks back to the road and hurried home.

  PART THREE

  1.

  It took me many weeks to empty the house; I had all the time in the world, calmly went through room after room, threw out most things, and left the large, heavy items until the end. November arrived before the entire upstairs was empty. The ash tree had lost all its leaves. I’d gone in and out of the house so many times the front steps crunched with sand. Now and then I paused in the yard to take a deep breath of the autumn air. Above me, the ash tree’s sprawling, motionless branches looked like cracks in the sky.

  The garbage bags filled with clothes and shoes were in the hayloft; I had folded everything neatly, tied the sacks with twine, and attached a note about what they contained. All Mama’s clothes were to be sent to the needy in Russia. Nothing was to be thrown away. Not even the shoes. Other women would continue to walk in them, somewhere else, preferably in Russia. It was what she wanted. It showed a Christlike spirit of love.

  Darkness fell early at the end of November and I worked long into the night. I got used to being alone in the house, but I was not used to removing things from the walls: pictures that had always hung in the same place, lamps that had always cast the same shadows on the ceiling. The mirror in the front hall where Josef had smoothed his mustache with a shoe brush every Sunday morning.

  Finally, all that remained were the kitchen and living room. In addition to what was already in those two rooms, I collected other things I felt were worth saving: the tin plates, Matiassen’s lantern, the bag of Tone’s clothes.

  One evening I went to work on the tasks that remained. I parked my car under the ash tree, turned off the headlights, and looked up at the house as it stood there in the darkness. It was raining slightly; I felt the drops in my hair when I let myself into the house. I turned on the lights in the front hall, the kitchen, and the living room. Then I squatted in front of the stove, laid in pieces of kindling, struck a match, lit a wad of newspaper and birch bark, and waited with the stove door open until I was sure the wood would burn. While the warmth slowly spread in the living room, I made coffee and cleaned out the kitchen cupboards. The hours went by and the kitchen became increasingly empty, until in the end all that remained was the cold echo of my footsteps, the flickering fluorescent light in the ceiling, and the unreal feeling that everything was unchanged, but at the same time unfamiliar.

  When the kitchen was done, I took a break, sat down in the easy chair in the living room with the television on, and thought about Josef and Lilly and Ingrid sitting upstairs twenty years earlier watching the Fleksnes television series; their laughter and Josef’s exclamations could be heard way out in the garden. The past weeks of clearing, sorting, and discarding had brought memories of them closer. I remembered how they gathered in Josef’s room every Saturday evening to watch Krutrøyk, or the king’s New Year speech, or the election broadcasts or political debates with Gerhardsen, Borten, or Bratteli in the studio. They always sat spellbound in front of the screen, Josef on the edge of his chair, Lilly on the edge of the bed with Ingrid, who seemed totally absorbed as she calmly licked around her mouth. They sat there and concentrated on following the program, and none of them said a word until the broadcast was over, the nation’s patriarchs stopped talking, and the screen went dark. Then Josef might stand up and say:

  “Well, well. So Christmas came again this year.”

  The resounding strokes of the Junghans clock on the wall echoed in the Steinway piano, and I sat amid the fading sound until it died away. Herbert Andersson’s painting of Tone holding the kitten hung between the windows that faced south; in the evening light you could no longer see what she had in her arms. I sat in semi darkness as the walls and ceiling flickered in the constantly shifting light from the television, and was about to get up to light the lamp on the piano and continue working when there was a knock at the front door. I’d been alone in the house so long I hadn’t thought about the possibility that someone might visit. I rose quickly, glanced briefly toward the front hall, then went and opened the outer door.

  Anna stood on the front steps. It was still raining a little; raindrops glistened in her hair, and I heard water dripping from the ash tree onto the hood of my car.

  “So it’s you!” I exclaimed.

  “I saw the lights,” she replied.

  My heart was pounding in my chest; I’d stood up too fast. For a moment, everything went black and I held on to the doorjamb.

  “I just wanted to see how you are,” said Anna.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’m fine. I’ll be finished soon.”

  Anna’s face had become leaner, moisture ran from one eye, perhaps a drop of water from the ash tree had struck her as she crossed the yard. She was now eighty-six years old. Her skin seemed thinner, almost transparent; her entire being had become somehow transparent.

  “Come in,” I said. “You can’t stand out there in the rain.”

  “I hadn’t planned to come in,” she said.

  “Well, then things will be different from what you planned,” I replied warmly, and opened the door wide.

  Only her voice was unchanged—her voice, and the way she moved; when she entered the front hall she walked the way she had for as long as I could remember, her body still nimble and tough. She hung her thin gray summer coat on the banister, wiped the moisture from the corner of her eye, and turned toward me.

  “And you?” I said. “How are you?”

  “I’ve gotten old,” she replied.

  “Do you still play the piano?”

  “Not for a long time. My fingers aren’t up to
that anymore. Neither is my heart.”

  I nodded and said, “Please come and sit down in the living room for a while. I’ve made coffee.”

  “That would be nice,” she said. “Now that I’ve come this far. And if you haven’t thrown away all the chairs,” she added with a smile, and I realized her smile was the same too.

  I turned on the sconces with dangling glass prisms that hung on each side of the wall clock in the living room. I lit the piano lamp and the table lamps on either side of the sofa, so when Anna came in, the room was almost completely light. I managed to clear away the worst of the mess, then went to the kitchen and put on the kettle for a new pot of coffee. Anna had pulled out the piano bench and was sitting at the edge with her hands folded on her knees. She had a thin flowered shawl over her shoulders, and when she sat like that she looked younger than when she was standing. Her hair was disheveled and matted down on one side, and in the bright light of the piano lamp it looked thin and luminous, like a halo. I suddenly felt sorry for her, but only for a moment, because I was moved by the fact that she had come. Anna somehow brought back the old life, everything that had been, and that in some way still existed if we began to talk about it. I switched off the television and turned my easy chair toward the table.

  “Sit here instead,” I said.

  The kettle bubbled and gurgled in the kitchen as I found a package of cookies I’d bought and emptied them onto a plate I hadn’t cleared away yet. When I returned to the living room with the coffee and cookies, Anna was sitting in the easy chair, and I sat down on the piano bench.

  It was good to have her there.

  “You’ve had a big job here,” she said, looking around.

  “All that’s left now is the living room,” I said.

  She nodded. The fire burned brightly in the stove.

  “I’m looking forward to finishing. It’s taken a long time.”

  She nodded again.

  “I know it takes time,” she said.