DEDICATION
For Arild
EPIGRAPH
We are on a set, and the set makes us all actors.
—CHARLES BOWDEN
CONTENTS
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Afterword
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE
“I’M SICK,” SAID MARTIN.
He sat hunched in a folding chair before the bonfire. It was St. Hans’s night—midsummer—and the sun hung small and orange over the northern horizon, like a sullen child not quite willing to leave the room. Across the fjord, a line of tiny fires flickered between the water and the hills.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.
Martin pushed himself up and came to stand before me. “Did they tell you?” he said. “I bet they didn’t tell you. Didn’t want to scare you away, a nice pia like yourself. You don’t even know what it’s like. I’m going to die soon. If God has a heart, I’m going to die soon.”
I was looking at the fire behind him, I realized, and made myself look up at his face. He was maybe sixty. His body seemed full of bones.
“I can’t even fuck a woman,” Martin said. “I’m going to die soon, and I can’t even fuck a woman. Yeah, just drink your cider. Drink it while you can. You don’t know what it’s like to be in pain.” As if on cue, he stiffened and moaned, biting his lip hard. Then he caught his breath. “I could have fucked you,” he said quietly. “Once in my life I sure could have fucked you.”
He seemed to expect a response, so I tried to think of one. Fear seemed appropriate—a show of being intimidated. The proper gift for a dying man. Could he have fucked me? It made me tired to consider.
I thought of another man, the day before, who had wrapped his arms around me from behind. Treasure, he’d whispered, you’re north of the moral circle now.
“Let me show you,” said Martin. With white hands he fumbled the button of his canvas pants. Behind him, sparks rose toward the blue sky.
“You don’t need to show me,” I said. “I believe you.”
“No, you don’t,” said Martin. “Look.” He pulled down his waistband to reveal two curving, white hip bones and a colostomy bag, half full. He prodded the bag with his fingers so that it sloshed.
Across the fire, Martin’s son and daughter-in-law were kissing, their legs entangled: Erling in black leather with a stiff mustache, Berit dressed from head to toe in a pink leather motorcycle suit. I’d heard rumors about her—that she was Sami royalty, the daughter of the man who owned more reindeer than anyone else in Sápmi, what used to be called Lapland. Their two toddlers rolled in the sand.
Another man, Rune, was down by the water with an armful of sticks, half bent over, his free arm extended toward a piece of driftwood. It was Rune who’d invited me to the bonfire—a party, he’d promised. A good time. Now he stood frozen, watching Martin. He seemed to have forgotten what he was reaching for.
Martin tugged his pants lower, revealing pale, hairless genitals. “You see what I have to live with?”
“All right,” said Berit, looking up from her husband. “She’s seen it.”
Martin zipped his pants. “I just want her to understand.”
“You like the cider?” Rune had come back over and stood beside me. “There’s five more. I got them just for you—the others drink beer, but I thought maybe you don’t like beer. Maybe we can start the salmon now. You like salmon, true?” He was talking more than usual, and slurring. He kept glancing at me and then glancing away.
“Who is she?” said Berit. “How did you find her?”
It was a fair question, and the hard answer—the real answer—stretched back fifteen years and four thousand miles, through blizzards and open tundra, smothering ice caves and the pulsing northern lights, many nights alone and some, unmercifully, not. I was a twenty-four-year-old girl from California, camped in a tiny village in the Norwegian Arctic. I had lived here once before, and it had helped me restore some lost courage. Now I’d come back, years later, and I needed that courage more than ever. I just didn’t know how to get it. The truth was that Rune had found me because I was hoping that somebody—anybody—would.
The simpler answer was that Rune had found me at the local shop, and I’d found the shop because of a wool sweater, six years earlier. At the time I was a student at a local folk school, eighteen years old and learning to dogsled. I had come to the Arctic for adventure, but I also carried with me a circular logic: If I could be safe in this land, maybe I could be safe in my own body. If I could protect my body, maybe I could live in this land. So far, though, I was not doing anything right. To start with, I had no wool sweaters, and wool sweaters in the Northland were of nearly religious significance. If it was thirty below and you were cold, it was your own fault because your sweater wasn’t wool. Or if your sweater was wool, then maybe your shirt wasn’t, maybe your bra wasn’t. I didn’t own any wool at all, so I went to the nearby shop in hopes of finding some.
THE OTHER STUDENTS AVOIDED THE SHOP. It was a square white building below the church, perched on a spike of land that jutted into the fjord. Inside, the shop was decorated with out-of-date promotions for chocolate and lottery tickets, and crowded with necessities—milk, potatoes, yarn, fishing line, socks—everything except condoms, which the shopkeeper knew from experience that nobody wanted to buy at their near-store. Beside the counter was a single table, where locals gathered for hours to sip sour coffee and polish the dramas of their lives. “You go in there,” a classmate had warned me, “and everyone looks up, and they just watch you.”
I was used to people watching me. I went to the counter and asked the aging shopkeeper—Arild, his name was—where I might find a wool sweater. Not here, he told me. My best bet would be to hitchhike to Tromsø, then a two-hour trip if I caught the ferry right. I thanked him and walked back to the school, stopping to linger on the beach, disheartened. So I’d be sweaterless. I wasn’t brave enough to hitchhike alone.
Across the fjord, sharp white mountains softened near the shore, sloughing into low mounds like melted wax. Like most communities in northern Norway, the twenty or so homes that made up the village of Mortenhals were spread on the thin strip of land between mountains and fjord, along a beach dotted with fat wooden rowboats and wooden racks for drying cod. The fish would be served with bacon grease, a delicacy, while their heads were ground into protein flour and sent to Africa. From one rack hung two dead crows, tied by their feet with string, whose wings reached toward the sand.
By the time I got back to my cabin, there were three wool sweaters folded on the front step, and a note from Arild saying that his daughter had moved away and wouldn’t miss them. I took the gift, wrongly, as a sign of particular friendship, and from then on always looked forward to my errands at the shop as visits to an ally in this strange frozen world, though we greeted each other with little more than nods. For Christmas I gave him a calendar of American national parks, which hung behind his counter for the rest of the year.
So when I returned to Mortenhals six years later in snowy June, I had some expectation of a reunion—exaggerated, I’m sure, by the fact that Arild was the only person I still kn
ew on the peninsula. I found him behind the shop, carrying a sack of pellet feed to his sheep. I felt giddy: here was a person from my old life, right in front of me. Arild squinted and hoisted the sack on his hip.
“I’ve come back,” I said, grinning.
“Yes so,” he said. “You have.”
We looked at each other. Arild readjusted the feed sack and shuffled some snow from his boots.
“I wanted to ask you,” I said, suddenly shy. “Can I sleep in the old house by the water? I’m traveling through. I’ll just be here a few days.” People called it the Ghost House; it had been empty since World War II. I felt certain that Arild would agree.
“It got torn down,” he said. “Sheep got in the basement.”
“Oh.”
A seagull landed nearby and started hopping toward us.
“No point standing in the cold,” said Arild. He bluff kicked the seagull, shifted the sack with a slight groan, and turned back toward the barn. “I’m sure I’ll see you around.”
“Sure,” I said. “See you around.”
It was quite warm, actually.
I walked the beach slowly, wondering what I had been expecting. Too much, apparently. Now I had come back and I was alone. My flight home wasn’t for another two months, and I had begun to think that this whole Return, which had seemed so vital from a distance, was maybe a bit of overkill. What was I proving, again? That I had not been scared out of the north, that I could come back and belong? I’d been looking for a home in Norway—somewhere with roots, somewhere I could come back to—since I’d first lived in the country at age ten. But now, after two weeks of sleeping in unfamiliar towns, catching rides with truckers at gas stations, I was reluctant to keep moving.
I went into the woods and found a place to camp, in a clearing scabbed with snow. I laid out my tent, my sleeping bag, and my stun gun, which I was vaguely afraid to touch. The next morning I didn’t want to go back to the shop, but I was hungry. There were men at the coffee table. “There’s the girl,” Arild told them. And to me: “I drove all over last night, looking for you. I was going to offer you a bed and a taco.”
So I sat down. After all, despite what I’d said about passing through, I had nowhere to go. But also, this particular land felt safe to me—not just Mortenhals, but the whole Malangen peninsula on which it lay, and the wilderness around it. I had survived a year among these mountains, had watched them turn white and glow under the northern lights and thaw in spring into crumpled tinfoil. There were worse places to be than Arild’s coffee table.
The heart of Mortenhals’s social scene, the coffee table had room for six people to sit comfortably, a thermos of fresh coffee, and a stack of small plastic cups. The cups were thin, and grew soft in contact with the hot coffee, so most people had their own mug that they kept on a shelf and never washed. There were sugar cubes in a cardboard box, and although there was a small tin with a coin slot that said Coffee: 5 Kroner, nobody ever paid. Most of the coffee drinkers were men, because most of Mortenhals was men, and they seemed pleased by the company of a young woman.
Though I came to meet many of them in those first days, the man I saw the most was Rune. Rune had a thick remarkable swoop of gray hair and beard that left just his eyes visible. When he smiled, his eyes squeezed shut. Maybe he was slow, or maybe just lazy, but he’d apprenticed as a carpenter in his youth, lived with his parents until they died, and promptly stopped woodworking. Instead, he hung around the shop and did odd jobs for Arild in a reluctant, dreamy way. In return, Arild kept Rune fed during the second half of the month, after his welfare ran out. In the coming weeks, Arild would call me to the window: “Look at Rune’s idea of work.” Rune would be leaning against a fence post, watching the sheep escape from their pasture one by one as he rolled a cigarette with practiced fingers.
“WHERE I FOUND HER? She went to the folk school,” said Rune, taking the easy way out. “Six years ago. I remember her,” he added, which seemed doubtful.
“So you drive sled dogs,” said Berit.
I nodded.
“My neighbor has dogs and they’ve even learned not to eat reindeer,” said Berit. “I bet your dogs can’t do that.” She began tearing open single-serving packets of marinated salmon, releasing bursts of dill-scented air, and rewrapped the fish in tinfoil. Her daughter walked up to the bonfire and stood with her head dropped back, looking up at the flames. Then she placed one foot on a burning log and stepped forward into rippling air.
Berit snapped in Sami. When the girl didn’t respond, Erling walked over and picked her up, somewhat lackadaisically. Her pink rubber boots were bubbling at the toes. The girl looked at her boots, then her father, and tightened her face to sob. But her cries were preempted by a moan so loud and guttural that she whipped around, startled.
Martin had fallen from his chair and lay on his side, legs curled to his chest. He moaned again, then took a handful of coarse sand and squeezed it through his fingers. “Morphine,” he whispered.
“I’ll get it,” said Berit.
Erling put down the girl, who returned to the fire. “It’ll go over, Dad,” he said to Martin. “It’ll go over soon.”
“Fuck you,” said Martin.
“Why don’t you drink more cider?” Rune asked me. He lifted my can and shook it. “Finish this and I’ll get you another one.”
I finished my drink and opened the next gratefully. Berit came back with a syringe and injected it into Martin’s forearm. He moaned again, then sat up and climbed back into his chair.
“What are you looking at?” he said to me. “I could have fucked you.”
That summer, in the days leading up to St. Hans’s, the season had changed quickly. One morning the lakes were frozen and the fields bare, and in what felt like an hour the landscape sprouted into a plush green, the meadows yellow with thigh-high dandelions where there had been ice days before. I’d been in Mortenhals for two weeks, but I did not want to leave. One day I walked up into the mountains, where I drank from a creek with cupped hands, after first checking that there were no sheep upstream. The water was sweet and piercing cold. It made my knuckles ache. It tasted healing, I thought, and then I corrected myself, embarrassed at my own emotion. The water was water. The place was a place. It was no more healing than a kiss to a bruise.
The men at the table called me pia—girl—or else city-pia or the Journalist. “The only time we had a journalist here,” one man told me, “he went back to Tromsø and wrote an article about how we’re all just horny men looking for womenfolk.”
Was that accurate? I asked.
“No!” he said, and they all laughed.
Another time, a visitor stopped by. I could tell he was a visitor because he was thin and paid for his coffee. “You understand that we may not talk to you so much,” Arild told him, “because there’s an American girl here and we tend to talk to her about things.” In fact, I realized, I had quickly become as regular a presence as Rune.
I felt that the village came to know me. One night I woke at midnight to two teenage boys—assistants at the folk school—inviting me to go fishing on the fjord. They showed me how to cast and reel, and when the boat’s motor broke I sat on the bow and watched them yank the pull cord time and again, feeling motherly as we drifted slowly out to sea. The sun was bright, but pearls of dew formed on our bodies and the boat. We were all shivering. Around 4 A.M. we drifted over a sandbar and I jumped out, and one of the boys did, too, and we all pulled the boat to shore. Back at the dock, another boy stood surrounded by older men; they were customers of the neighboring shop, in the village of Sand, so I did not know them. Apparently the boy had been found messing with someone’s boat, and the men had confronted him. “You pedophiles!” the boy shouted, trying to unnerve them. “Let him go,” said one of the men. “I was like that once, too.” I walked home soaking wet and did not go back to sleep.
Arild was up early. He’d begun to assign me jobs. He received orders from distant relatives to plant flowers on their
family graves in the churchyard, and these orders he delegated to me, for a salary of ice-cream bars and open-faced sandwiches. The job—the fact of having a role—pleased me. I trudged up the hill with an armful of pansies in plastic tubs and handwritten names on scraps of paper, then walked the rows of headstones until I found one of the names. Depending on how much the relative had paid, I planted up to three pansies in an arrangement. The newest grave did not yet have a headstone; Edel Kristoffersen, Arild’s mother, had died just a month before at the age of ninety-nine. Arild planted the flowers on his mother’s grave himself.
Arild’s grief was at once impenetrable and blatant. Even on his best days, he was the most doleful person I had ever seen, with a hanging head and enormous eyes, bright white lashes like a cow’s, delicate feathers of hair that looked as if they had turned from blond to white with very little fanfare. He usually wore a T-shirt with a charging elephant on it, its ears cut off by his suspenders, and when he had a cold he tied a scrap of fabric around his throat so that people would ask how he was feeling. He rarely smiled, except with his sheep, and his air in the shop was simultaneously perky and morose. “Just ask, and I’ll tell you we’re out of it,” he liked to say.
But Arild was savvier than he came across. He knew to give shoplifters the best service, and that liars would believe anything you told them because they had the best imaginations. He knew how to quiet a toddler with a sugar cube dipped in coffee, and to take a few bars from a box of new chocolates so that people would think their friends had tried them first. He called his oldest customers “young man” and children “geezers” and he called almost everyone else by the formal you, De, which had gone out of style a century before.
People called him a gossip, but Arild might say, rather, that he kept track of folks. He had delivered pellet feed all over the Northland for over a decade, and prided himself on knowing customers better after six months than other drivers did who’d been at it for years. That, combined with the social spiderweb centered around his coffee table, meant that he knew or knew of almost everybody. Once I watched two truck drivers stop in for a quick soda. Arild enticed them to sit down for a half cup of coffee—“Put on the coffee, Blair”—and set about trading names with the drivers, faster than I could follow. Both men lived hours away, but within six minutes Arild informed the first that his neighbor’s mail-order bride was in fact Mongolian, not Thai, and that his father must have been a fur trapper, which meant that he knew Ronny Grape and Tor Are Magga, which, by the way, had he heard they were dead? After the astonished men left and Arild made sure they had driven away, he beckoned me to lean closer. “It’s a good thing I didn’t say much about that man’s father,” he whispered, though we were alone in the shop. “One time I delivered feed to his farm, and as I was lifting a sack from the truck it started to slip, and before it even fell the guy said, ‘I want a new sack.’ Just like that: ‘I want a new sack.’ Talk about revealing your character! That was fifteen years ago, but you understand, that’s not the kind of thing one would forget.”
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