It is very hard to describe what happened to me when I reached Malangen.
It was an understanding, I guess, but it hit me with the force of shame, or joy—something chemical, like the first spring sun after darkness.
First thing was the mountains. We weren’t even close yet, but the shape of the landscape changed. There was a certain silhouette to the mountains, that meltedness, and the sight of it gripped me with a shock that froze me solid. So, first thing was the mountains.
Second thing was the sagging fish racks on the pebbled shore.
Third thing was the spacing of the farms, and the stretch of snowy bog that surrounded the road. Cloaked, with colors underneath.
How hadn’t I known that this place was the point of everything? That it had been the point of everything all along?
Just a totally normal thing, getting off the bus in Mortenhals. Not a big deal at all. Just a normal thing to walk up the driveway to the folk school, find two small packages on the steps, make my way into the woods. Obviously the woods were familiar. Obviously they were perfect. Obviously I was safe here. I sat down and opened the well-sealed boxes. Obviously I was carrying a knife.
The boxes were full of camping supplies. Chapstick. Gloves. A sweatband. A flashlight. A magazine. Some sort of charger. Some sort of nylon holster, which was empty. A contact lens holder. Two bandannas. A fanny pack. I looked for a note and found one scrap of paper with a torn edge. Quince’s handwriting, in marker, in misspelled Norwegian: “Happy Trails!”
Something was wrong. I didn’t even wear contacts. I unzipped the fanny pack and found it empty. I reached inside the gloves. I spread everything out on top of my backpack.
Please open it privately, as you would any, um, intimate thing that you might not want immediately seen by others.
My eyes fell on the flashlight. It was silver metal, still in its clamshell packaging. But the photo on the case showed a red plastic flashlight, not a silver metal one. Looking closer, I saw that the packaging had been opened. The flashlight was big, about ten inches long. I pulled it out. It had metal spikes on the end. It had a button marked with a lightbulb, and another button marked with a lightning bolt. It had a socket for a charger. The charger had come in the second box. The flashlight fit in the holster.
I was in Malangen. In Malangen I could do anything.
I picked up the flashlight with both hands, pointing it away from myself, and pressed the lightning bolt.
Quince told me later that, when he said he was shopping for his girlfriend, they tried to sell him a girlie stun gun. A pink one, little and cute—the kind that could fit in an evening bag. But I had said I was scared for my safety, and if there was one thing Quince understood, it was that people knew better than anyone else what their position was in the world, what their struggles were. If I said I felt danger, he believed in that danger. If what I wanted was safety, and he could help, then he would. So he didn’t want to send me a cute mini-weapon. He wanted to send me something powerful, something I could decide whether or not to accept. He chose that particular million-volt stun gun because, when the saleswoman demonstrated it, when the crackling electricity filled the room, she peed her pants.
Me, I just screamed and dropped it. Then I picked it up, strapped it into the holster, and tucked it into the bottom of my bag. It was heavy, but I didn’t mind the weight. I was in Malangen and Quince loved me and I had received my first piece of mail. I had finally arrived.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
NILS WALKED INTO THE SHOP AND grinned, like everyone was watching. They were, of course, though they hadn’t looked up. “When’s today’s Northern Light coming?” Jeanette said, flipping through her phone, and before Arild could respond, Odd Jonny interrupted: “The newspaper’s like death,” he said. “You know it’s coming but never when.” A well-worn joke. They took long sips of coffee. Nils settled at the head of the table and crossed his arms. He knew everyone’s questions were burning under their nonchalance, and, as the man with the power, he fully intended to wait them out.
Nils looked good. He was fit and glowing from his weeks on the beaches of Thailand, his skin a deep bronze, his sleeves rolled up to show that the sores on his arms had healed over, leaving patches of soft pink. He cracked open a Coke.
Jeanette didn’t wait long. So: was there a girl?
There was a girl, Nils allowed. He hadn’t met my eyes yet. Odd Jonny looked up.
Who was she?
Her name was—well, something with a K. Nils couldn’t pronounce it, so he just called her Gi.
And where?
Well—
Nils turned the bottle cap over in his hands. No writing inside. He batted it across the tabletop with his index fingers. Well, the thing was, he didn’t need any girl. That was what he’d found out. He’d had a good time, drunk beer and enjoyed himself, hung out with the family of his friend’s ex, who were welcoming but miffed when they learned that Nils’s friend hadn’t brought them money. There were girls everywhere in Thailand. Girls driving two and two on mopeds, whistling at him. Like he was hot shit. Girls asking to come home with him. But Gi, she had been there from the start. She’d been waiting for him. And he liked her all right, and thought maybe something would come of it. But she was so jealous, Gi. He’d go dancing and she’d follow, he’d talk to girls and she’d follow, she’d accuse him of avoiding her and just blow right up. “Anyway,” he said, pleased by the room’s attention, drawing out the dregs of his story. “Anyway! What I figured, you know—she didn’t even like me. Or, she liked me jo all right, but she liked me before she even met me, right? She just thought Norwegians were rich.” So he told her it was over, and came back to Norway alone. “I do just fine,” he said, leaning on his elbows, sweeping his eyes around the table to grin at everyone in turn except me. This was flirting, this avoidance. I had no patience for it. “I have my own farm. I don’t need to share it with anyone.”
“Except dear Blair, of course,” he finished, his eyes darting at me quick, a flash.
“Except for me,” I said, staring at him until he looked back at me. A moment’s smile. A truce. But Jeanette had followed his gaze; Nils should stay in the spotlight. “How’d you break it to her?” I asked. “Gi.”
“Be patient,” said Nils. “All details with time.”
“There’s no time,” I said. “I’m leaving next week.”
Nils drank some Coke. “I just told her so,” he said. “Why are you so interested?”
“Not,” I said.
He laughed. We were okay.
When Helge Jensen called me to go fishing, to sail out onto the lit night fjord, I said I’d be there in half an hour. So folks said his ship didn’t float? I could swim to shore. I borrowed Arild’s car and braked my way back to Mestervik. When the car broke down, I walked the rest of the way to the fishing dock. Seagulls swung over me as if on strings.
Once more, Helge Jensen helped me onto his boat, holding my hands just a bit too long after I jumped down on the deck. It seemed like the crowd had already gathered. A few empty beer cans lay tossed on the ground. There was a quiet man named Markvard, and Helge’s cousin Svein, and Svein’s date Katrin, who was visiting from Ukraine. Svein wore snug jeans and a faded track jacket with a silhouette of a trawler on the back. Katrin was slight, with blond curls pulled back in a braid and dainty ballet flats. As Abdullah churned from the dock, I settled into one of the leather couches on the deck. Katrin sat down across from me, crossing her legs at the ankles, and Svein dropped down beside her like he’d been waiting for his chance. She stared away from him, into the sun.
Svein smiled at me, like we were sharing a joke. “It’s only her first visit,” he said. They’d met on the Internet a year ago, and already things were great. “Look at her,” he said, and then he waited until I did to continue: “Look how she takes care of herself. They all do, in her country. It’s a poor country, okay, but the women are still women there.”
His words hit some part of me—the women ar
e still women—and I became aware of myself, in my cargo pants and wool sweater, and smiled weakly. Svein seemed not to notice. He reached around with his free arm and rubbed Katrin’s knee, like he was tousling the head of a child, and then left his hand there. Katrin tucked her long fingernails under each other in her lap, clicking them back and forth. Svein beamed at her. “Norwegian women,” he said, lowering his voice, “they’re not exactly something you’d want to collect. Anyway, she loves it here. She loves all of it. Right, Katrin?”
Katrin, clicking her fingernails, didn’t respond.
“What does she love?” I said.
“Fish,” said Svein. “It’s all she wants. She can’t get enough of it. It’s fish and more fish for every meal. Fish for lunch and fish for dinner and roe for breakfast, on bread.” Katrin raised her eyebrows. “FISH,” he explained in English. “YOU IS EATING FISH.”
“Oh,” said Katrin. “Yes, fish.”
“She’s moving here?” I said. It was gross, speaking Norwegian past her. It was the easiest thing to do.
“Well,” said Svein, “you’d have to ask her that. But between you and me, I’ll just say it’s going very well.” He leaned against her and laughed suddenly, loudly. “Right?” Katrin looked at the sun and closed her eyes.
Somewhere a faint radio played a jazz standard, the sound of horns drifting over the sounds of the engine and the waves. We churned down the center of the fjord. The mountains on either side of us were traced with white lines, creeks draining the last of the summer snow.
Helge Jensen came out of the cabin, leaving Markvard to steer, and sat down on my couch. His body didn’t touch mine, but his fluffy hair tickled my cheek. “Abdullah,” he said, looking around at the skipper. She’d never sunk, Abdullah, though his other ships had, too many times to count. One January, he told me, he’d been hauling a freight of fish heads around Lofoten with a friend and a German shepherd. When the boat sank offshore, they climbed onto a little islet, a rock outcropping. But the coast guard helicopter wanted to fly them to Bodø, which was where their boat had been heading. If they got to Bodø by helicopter, they wouldn’t have gotten there fairly. “No,” Helge Jensen remembered saying, “we’ll go to land.” So they swam, and while it was tough to convince the dog to leave the islet, they all made it back to shore. Fair as fair.
“Was that when you taped your lighter to your head?” I asked.
Helge Jensen squinted at me. “You’ve done your research.”
There was a light onshore now, a fire at the water’s edge with two figures standing by it, one shirtless and one in a red bra. Helge Jensen smiled. That was the Sailor and his lady, enjoying the night. He pulled his phone from his pocket and dialed.
Behind us, Svein and Katrin had started fishing. Katrin held a pole, lifting it in a bored rhythm, while Svein stood behind her with his hands on her waist. I found another pole in the back of the boat and came to join them. There was a breeze from the north, and we faced into it. Onshore, the figures came to the edge of the water and shaded their eyes, looking for us. Then they returned to their fire.
Suddenly Katrin squealed, and reeled in a cod. She laughed as Svein unhooked it for her, and posed for a cell phone picture holding the fish by the gills in one hand and making a peace sign with the other. She giggled as she dumped the fish into a blue plastic barrel.
Svein looked into the barrel, then winked at me. “One has to be well rested to get fish,” he said. “So you understand, I rested her well last night.” I tried to think of a response but the pole jerked in my hand, so I began reeling instead, winding in slow motion until another cod broke the surface. It gasped its big mouth as Svein unhooked it. Then Katrin got a second cod, and Svein lifted it by its eye sockets and kissed its lips. “Katrin!” he said, his lips moving against the fish’s. “Photo! Look, photo! You can kiss.” There was blood in the lines of his knuckles.
Katrin stood back, flicking through pictures on her phone. “You can kiss,” she said.
It was hot and we were drifting shoreward. When Katrin got a third cod, Svein said, “You can bet she got rest last night,” and when my second fish was a thin, undersized herring, he burst into laughter. “You got a herring because you’re so nice,” he said, tossing it back into the water.
Nice. There it was again. Just like Dan had said: that I was the nicest girl he ever met.
I looked at Svein carefully. He wasn’t drunk. So he just had a terrible sense of humor.
I wondered what I’d done to make him think I was nice. I guessed that I’d smiled a bit. I thought then that I could probably become quite mean to Svein, and that if I smiled the whole time he wouldn’t even notice. That maybe nice was a word men called women they didn’t bother to get to know. When I caught my next fish, I handed it to him and watched, disgusted, as his stained fingers worked the hook free with a sucking, cracking sound.
There was a splash; Helge Jensen had dropped into a dinghy and was puttering toward shore. Katrin produced a wet wipe and dabbed fish blood from the railing, then the handle of her pole. Svein watched her. “Look at that,” he said. “City girl.” My line was knotted and Markvard came from the cabin and untangled it for me, as delicately as if he were painting a face on a doll. But the reel was broken, so he handed me his own pole, and for himself used a can of Mack’s Refreshingly Norwegian Arctic Beer with line wrapped around it.
The four of us were quiet, lifting and dropping our lines. We’d drifted close enough to shore to bump against an anchored boat, which was small and wooden, painted in a uniform shade of blue. The boats squeaked where they rubbed together. I’d mostly fished with my grandfather before, during my childhood summers in the Puget Sound, and whenever my line tweaked I heard his deep voice in my ear: Set the hook, Blair. Set the hook! But the force of that movement, the sudden lift, embarrassed me, and nobody around me seemed to be setting their hooks, so I reeled quietly instead, and loosened whatever seaweed had caught on the line, and cast again without a word.
Then the Sailor climbed aboard, beaming at me and smelling of garlic, and his lady Lily followed with her red bra shining through a thin gray tank. Before I could talk to them, Helge Jensen beckoned me to the helm. “It’s yours,” he said, staring at my eyes with his lips twitching. “Ride it like a bull. You’ll feel it. Take us to the Brygger”—the resort between Mortenhals and Mestervik. He thrust a lever to start the engine again. He was still staring at me hard, and I looked down and put my hands on the many-handled wheel. It hardly turned when I pushed; I had to lean my whole body against it to shift it to the left, even slightly. Helge Jensen was gone and I watched out the milky windshield as he joined Lily on the couch, sandwiching her against the Sailor.
I hoisted myself onto the tall bench and sat with my legs swinging to the rhythm of the engine, starting to enjoy myself. After a few minutes, Katrin wandered in. She sat beside me, then reached out with one hand and touched the wheel. There was only one other boat on the water, a dinghy straight ahead of us with two Germans standing in it. I tried to turn, but the wheel was stuck. We were going fast now. Katrin whimpered. Without speaking, we shoved together, to the right, and with a great scraping sound the wheel gave and Abdullah turned sharply, charging around the dinghy in an arc. Helge Jensen looked up at us and smiled. Katrin and I, glancing at each other, broke into giggles.
Up close, Katrin’s lips glittered with pink and silver sparkles, and her top and bottom lashes curled sharply away from her eyes. She hugged herself with thin arms. I asked where she was from. Mykolaiv, she said. Two hours from Odessa.
“And you’re liking Norway?”
Katrin wrinkled her nose. “It is . . . boring. What people do? Yesterday I’m drill all day.” She mimed drilling into a wall, her hands trembling. “We drill all day, Svein’s house.” She rolled her eyes.
I liked sitting in the cabin with her, swinging our legs. It occurred to me that I hadn’t spent time alone with another young woman all summer. I felt that we were thinking the same thoughts
. I wanted to tell her that I saw Svein for what he was, so that she wouldn’t have to be alone in that knowledge. I thought that she probably felt lonely.
What I said was, “Do you like him?”
“He has good . . . character,” said Katrin. She was playing with her fingernails again.
“Are you moving to Norway with him?”
“What?” Katrin’s hands froze. “No, no. I’m . . . holiday. Two weeks. Then home. Home, I’m dance, salsa, Latin. I’m take class in the city. What people do here? No, I no like.”
Then Svein was in the cabin, squishing onto the bench beside us, and Katrin’s face went blank. He looked at us and laughed and took Katrin by the hand and pulled her with him outside. I watched them leave, and watched the calm sea splitting around the boat, the sweet red houses along the shore. Markvard came in and sat down beside me, where Katrin had been a minute before.
Markvard’s calmness, his ease on the bench, caught at something in my rib cage. You got a herring because you’re so nice, I heard in my head. I wanted to prove Svein wrong. I wanted to prove Dan wrong. “It’s ugly,” I said. “It’s ugly and horrible. Everything is just disgusting.” I thought a moment. “And I hate it. It’s ugly and horrible and I hate it. Everything is stupid and everyone is awful.”
I smiled at Markvard and waited.
“Sure,” he said. “Of course.”
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