Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube

by Blair Braverman

  There were no fresh footprints in Rune’s soggy yard.

  I figured Rune didn’t know I was back in the country, so I went to the door alone, anticipating his surprise. I knocked hard and stepped back. But nobody answered. I knocked again, and waited. Finally I tried the knob—unlocked—and cracked open the door enough to stick my head in.

  I was hit, instantly, with the smell. Sour and rotten. Something awful—I recoiled before I could think, shut the door again, and motioned for Arild to get out of the van. My heart was racing. I waited until Arild was beside me and took a deep breath before pushing the door again.

  The hallway was lined with piles of sticks and trash; a beer can on its side had spilled and dried, leaving a puddle of stain on the wooden floor. “Hei?” I said to the house. “Rune?” Silence.

  Then, as I stepped inside, something moved. A figure shuffled into the light.

  Rune was so thin that I hardly recognized him. He seemed to have lost half his mass; his shirt hung from his shoulders in such a way that the front of his body seemed concave. His hair and beard had grown into a matted curtain. But his face cracked into a smile. “No, hello!” he slurred.

  “I see you’re on a diet,” Arild said. He had taken a step back, for the smell.

  “There’s no food,” said Rune. “I haven’t eaten.”

  “When?” I asked. “Today? This week? This month?”

  Rune giggled.

  Arild’s eyes traveled around the room—over the piles of wood, a heaping bag of empty cans, littered cigarette butts and porn VHS tapes stacked on a shelf. “Why didn’t you call?” Now he sounded angry. “You know we would have brought you food.”

  “My phone’s out of money,” Rune said. “My car won’t start.”

  We helped him out to the passenger seat of the van. I crouched in back as we pulled onto the road, slowly parting the crowds of dancing children and flags and bunads and dogs in sweaters. Rune watched the revelers happily.

  “The seventeenth of May,” he said. “We have to celebrate this country. It’s not everyone who gets to live in a country like Norway.”

  Back at the shop, we unlocked the door and turned on all the lights. I filled my arms with loaves of brown bread, day-old sweet rolls, and the Danish pastries that Henning baked in excess every morning. Arild got cartons of milk and butter and goat cheese and five packs of expired sliced ham. Together we packed the food into bags. “These are for you, you Martha-lover,” Arild said, although he let Rune pay for his own tobacco and Mack Polar Bear beer.

  Rune leaned against the counter and bit into a sweet roll. He swallowed, his eyes closed. It took him a while to open them again.

  “You’ll be around,” he said to me. “We’ll see each other again soon.”

  “Of course,” I said, glancing down at my hands. I’d taken a Danish for myself, but I didn’t want it anymore.

  “Let’s have a fire on Midsummer,” Rune said. “St. Hans. It’s the twenty-fourth of June. We can do it ourselves, without Martin. We can get cider. I know you like cider. We’ll build a big fire on the beach.”

  “She’ll be around,” said Arild. He didn’t look at me, but he didn’t need to. I’d be leaving, back to my other life. He knew.

  “Yeah,” I said softly. “I’ll be around.”

  Rune smiled. He gathered the bags of food in his arms. As he started back toward the van, I grabbed a Norwegian flag from the display by the shoes, the kind of cheap flag that all of the children outside were waving, and tucked it between his beers. “Here,” I said. “It belongs to the richest country in the world.” But Rune handed the flag back to me.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I already have one.”

  That night, lying in bed, I felt again the surge of anger I’d felt on my birthday, reading Quince’s note, only this time my anger was directed not at his words but at his very being. I didn’t need him. I wanted a great wall to descend across the Atlantic Ocean, cutting off all connection. Fuck you, I thought, with your farm and your chickens. Fuck you with your letters, claiming you miss me. Fuck you with your log house and your horse and the sexy muscles in your arms. I don’t need you at all. I don’t want you.

  Again the emotion came suddenly, forcefully, seizing at something in my gut. I sat up in bed, pulling the blanket around my shoulders, and lifted the blind from the window. The bedroom faced south, toward Sand, but all I could see from here was a decrepit white house in a field, the broad pale sky over the water, the twin peaks of Vassbruna Mountain. The sight slowed my pulse. I tightened the blanket around my neck and the bottom half of my face, feeling petulant. Fuck you, I thought again, an aftershock of anger, and my face curled into a frown so exaggerated and childish that it broke the spell, amusing me despite myself.

  “What’s happening?” I whispered. “Why am I alone?”

  But I wasn’t alone; I knew that. I was loved, and I was, in all rational moments, supremely grateful for that love. I had parents who cared for me beyond words. I had a partner who challenged and supported me in equal measure. In Norway, finally, I had a second home and community. I had Arild.

  And yet here I was. Furious at Quince for reasons I did not know. Overcome with a brittle aloneness that was less lonely than defensive.

  It felt familiar.

  Familiar.

  The word seized on something. My anger, I realized, wasn’t about Quince at all. I saw a sleepless night in a long-ago bedroom, a hand tracing down a pebbled wall. The shocking conclusion that home had abandoned me. It was so long ago. With the recognition came a flood of exhaustion. I lay back on the bed, my eyes sinking shut even as I closed the blind, and fell quickly into sleep.

  That night, I dreamed that I left Malangen and went to my host family’s town, where Far stood in the audience at a public choir concert. I walked up and stood beside him, not saying a word. When he noticed me he kissed me tenderly on the head. I thought: I am going to stand here and not respond to anything he does, and then I’ll know. I thought: this is an experiment; nothing could hurt me now. Far started stroking my back, gently, continuously. I stood still as ice, alert. He ran his hand over my ass, cupping it lightly, and then trailed his fingers to my waist. Kissed my head once more. He seemed so happy and soft and eager. In the dream I knew he’d been waiting to do it. And then I surprised myself and started to run. I ran down winding, charming streets, small houses and cobblestones, but each turn brought me back to the crowd; each time, I turned and ran in a new direction. Finally I found a house where I could rest.

  When I woke up, I was struck first with disappointment: it had only been a dream. Even now, it had been such a relief to not doubt my instincts. Had Far touched me? Had he not? But, I thought, it didn’t matter. He touched me now, as had anyone who had ever made me feel that my body, my life, was not under my control. Far’s touch had come in the years after I left his home, when I wondered and remembered, when I let those memories chase me.

  My second thought came with surprising strength. I had been certain, for a decade now, that I could not return to Lillehammer. It was a promise I’d made to myself upon leaving: the year was over; I never had to think about it again; I never again had to go back to the town by the lake. But maybe, I thought now, the question wasn’t whether I could go back. It was whether I could leave it behind.

  My last week in Mortenhals was busy. The enthusiastic German organist arranged for me to lead an Ask-a-Jew session for the fifth-graders at Sand School who, along with their teachers, had never seen a Jew before. Each of the students prepared a question on a sheet of lined paper. I explained about the high holy days, and latkes, but mostly they wanted to know how to recognize a Jew when they saw one. “You look normal,” they observed. “That’s the point,” I told them. “Jews are normal people.” But they insisted. Put on the spot, I pointed out five students at random and suggested that they looked as Jewish as anyone else. This made the chosen students very happy. Then I wrote all their names for them in Hebrew, an alphabet I only
vaguely remembered from religious school, with the confidence of someone who knows that her mistakes will never be found out. The session was such a hit that the seventh-grade teacher wanted me, and so did the ninth-grade teacher, and by the end of the week I had come back a half dozen times and spoken to nearly all the students in the school. I felt like a lousy ambassador but a good citizen.

  When I returned to the shop after my final session, the coffee table was crowded with men, talking and laughing. They glanced up when I walked in. Rune and Nils and Odd Jonny and the Sailor and Quince.

  And Quince.

  He sat at the end of the table with a cup of coffee in his hands. Then he stood up and wrapped his arms around me. I let myself melt into him. The men cheered.

  He had come during the night, a surprise: rented a car in Tromsø, taught himself a single Norwegian phrase—“Where is Blair?”—and followed the fjordside roads toward the incongruous silver gleam of the Brygger resort, stopping only to ask a few farmers his only question. Hvor er Blair? They all knew, of course; they answered in Norwegian; and he followed their gestures until he came to Johannes Kristoffersen’s Descendants. Though he’d never seen it, Quince recognized the shop immediately, and Arild knew him at a glance. “You’re here, Mr. Q,” said Arild, pouring him a cup of coffee. And so it was.

  As it turned out, Quince had been e-mailing Arild for weeks, trying to plan the trip, without ever getting a response. In his trash can, Arild unearthed a series of e-mails with the subject line “Important message from Mr. Q.” It seemed that, for reasons none of us could parse, Henning had deleted the e-mails as quickly as they arrived. He left the room when I tried to ask him about it.

  Luckily, Arild did not seem the least bit flustered about his surprise international houseguest, and wished only that the visit was longer. Over the four days of his stay, Quince worked in the barn and sat at the table and joked with Nils and made appropriate facial expressions when the men showed him pictures of mail-order brides. He ate open-faced sandwiches and fried whale, and on his last night, he went with me and Arild to the pizza restaurant with the old things. He would fly home the next morning, and I, a week later.

  The waitress was British, though she had lived in Norway for years. She looked us over—the white-haired man with his stilted English, the American man with excellent posture—and turned to me, the woman in the middle.

  “Let me guess,” she said. “It’s the first time they’ve met.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  She pointed at Quince. “You met him in America, and now you’re bringing him home.”

  We looked at each other, the three of us, and nodded.

  “Congratulations,” she said. “That’s just like me, except the other way around. I fell for a Norwegian, and here I am.” When the pizza was ready, she gave us sour-cream dressing on the house.

  My last week passed like all the others, and the sky was bright, early morning, as Arild drove me to the airport. Summer’s thaw was rising up the mountains, so that mossy fields and wildflowers grew toward the white peaks. We drove the tunnel under Malangen fjord and then, a half-hour later, crossed the fjord once more to reach the island that made up old Tromsø. I was already slipping into the cool, numb state of travel, the one I’d felt when I came to Norway, except that now I was leaving again. Something felt more final this time. I would come back, but probably not for a whole summer. I was growing roots at home as Arild, retiring from the shop, was letting go of his. When I looked up from the horizon, I saw that Arild was crying behind his glasses.

  “In English,” said Arild, “one doesn’t say ‘love,’ right? One says ‘fond of.’”

  “It depends,” I said. “The word love is used more loosely in English. Like, you can love your friends. People say that.”

  Arild stared at the road. “I was under the impression that love was what is between you and Mr. Q.”

  “Well,” I said, “that’s love, too. That’s romantic love. But love can mean—I mean, in English, it’s used to mean strong affection. Like for family. If you care about someone a lot. If they’re important to you. I’ve heard it used—” I was babbling, and stopped myself. Something in my voice had grown tight.

  “I see,” said Arild.

  We fell into silence. The bridge arced high above the water. Looking down, I saw the patches of clear turquoise that lined the shallow shoreline, and the turquoise of underwater pillars that held up the bridge itself.

  “Arild,” I said, “were you going to say that you were fond of me?”

  “I had thought of doing so, yes.”

  “But we know that jo,” I said. Then, after a moment, “You know I’m fond of you, too.”

  We had crested the bridge. The road curved down to the right, toward the watchtowers and gray buildings of Tromsø-Langnes Airport. By the shore, a few men were at work erecting a lavvo, a lure for tourists who had recently disembarked. Arild changed the subject. He had given me a duffel bag’s worth of raw wool from his sheep. Because it was a livestock product, I wasn’t sure if the wool was legal to bring into the country. We discussed possible reactions on the part of United States customs until he’d pulled into the drop-off zone and I stood on the sidewalk with my luggage around me: my backpack, a small carry-on, the enormous duffel bag of wool. I’d also packed some chocolates and lefse from the shop, and he inquired about these now. Did I have enough food? Would I be cold on the flight? Had I remembered my passport, and a knife that he’d given me from the Old Store?

  Finally, having run out of logistics, we stopped and looked at each other. Arild was crying again. He took off his glasses and rubbed quickly, almost violently, at his eyes.

  “I’ll have some peace and quiet at last,” Arild said, “finally free of that American pia, she who plagues me constantly.”

  “And I’ll be free of the old man,” I told him, and walked away before I cried, too.

  Late that summer, I got sick with anaplasmosis, a tick-borne illness. For weeks, exhausted and feverish, I hardly left my bed. Although I vaguely registered that my letters from Arild had dwindled, I was too weak to think much about it; the frequency of Arild’s correspondence had always waxed and waned depending on how busy he was with the shop and the farm, and based on the few notes he did send, life in Mortenhals seemed fine enough.

  But in September, I received an e-mail from his youngest daughter, Emma. I’m writing because Papa wanted me to . . . she began. Henning has a real temper and says ugly things and is psychologically breaking Papa down. She explained that Henning was gone for the weekend, and perhaps I could call Arild as soon as possible. I needed to set up an account to call long distance from my computer, and the setup, though it took no more than ten minutes, seemed to last an interminably long time. I couldn’t find the right buttons to press. Finally, I called the shop’s number, feeling nervous and shy. I needed to hear Arild’s voice, but I didn’t know what to say.

  “Hello,” said Arild. His shopkeeper voice.

  “Hello,” I said. “Do you sell milk?”

  The joke was a gift for both of us. I could have come up with a better joke if I was thinking better.

  “Yes,” said Arild. “We sell milk.”

  “Can you deliver milk to America?”

  He laughed, a laugh of sudden recognition and delight, and when I heard his pleasure I relaxed slightly. “Yes so,” he said. “It’s you.”

  “Emma wrote to me.”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “No . . . He has a temper, he Henning.” A moment’s hesitation, polite distance, before he poured forth a litany of grievances. How Henning forced Arild to sleep in the grimy basement of the shop. Forbade him from eating meals at the coffee table, then even in the back room, so that Arild had to take his bread in the basement, too. Kicked over a bucket of water when Arild was mopping. Pushed him down, breaking his glasses. Grabbed him by the neck hard enough to leave bruises. Drove the shop into debt but made Arild take out the
loan to save it. And when Arild bought lefse to sell at the shop, and paid with money from the cash register, Henning threatened to report him for stealing.

  Arild’s voice was calm, but it quavered as he talked about his customers. Recently, he said, an old woman came by at 8:45 A.M. to buy diesel, fifteen minutes before the shop’s official opening time. As Arild unlocked the door for her, Henning wrestled him away, knocking him to the ground. “At least that time I was able to save my glasses,” Arild said. “But it’s clear, to do that with a customer on the stairs . . .

  “But last Monday,” he added, “Henning was gone from one to six, and then I received feedback from customers that it was pleasant to have me back in the shop.”

  Now he had a window of time—a few days, while Henning was away—and he was acting fast. Just that morning he’d written a letter to his lawyer, attempting to terminate Henning’s right to the family business, firstborn son or no. When Henning returned, Arild would confront him, backed by his most formidable customers. “He has tried to push me down as much as possible, but I have had sufficient troubles over the years that I am fairly strong. I have a good psyche, and all that—” He cut off; his voice changed. “Do you see this here pia with two lambs?” He was showing a picture of me to a customer. “She is in America, and it is she that I’m talking to right now . . . No, I certainly hope that she never comes back.”

  I laughed. I was laughing too much in the conversation—laughing every chance he gave me. I just wanted to keep him talking.

  But the moment had passed. It was time for news: Was I well? How was Mr. Q? And the weather? The only other update, Arild said, was that next week he would be sending the summer’s lambs to the eternal hunting grounds. Even his favorite—Black and White, the lamb with the special face.

  “Because Black and White is a boy?” I asked.

  “He’s a boy lamb,” said Arild. “And boys, they’re a piece of shit.”

  When I hung up the phone, my whole body was burning. I searched for plane tickets to Tromsø immediately, thinking to leave that very afternoon, and went as far as to enter my credit card number before realizing, with a wave of dizziness, that if I was too sick to walk across the room without falling over, there was no way I could handle traveling to the Arctic. Arild wanted my support, had gotten his daughter to ask for it, and yet I couldn’t get to him. I had never felt so helpless.