The Cabin in the Mountains

by Robert Ferguson

  It was a dream I’d been nurturing for decades, ever since the early 1970s, when I was living and working in London and met a woman who had recently returned to England after spending two years among the hippies of Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. We moved in together, and among the books she unpacked from her cardboard boxes was a green Noonday American paperback edition of Knut Hamsun’s novel Pan, originally published in Norwegian in 1894. I recognised the name. I had come across it in one of Henry Miller’s books. Miller described him as ‘that Dostoevsky of the north’ and that was enough to arouse my curiosity. I picked it up, opened it and read the first paragraph:

  These last few days I have thought and thought about the Nordland summer’s endless day. I sit and think of it, and of a cabin I lived in, and of the forest behind the cabin, and I feel like writing something down, just to make the time pass, and because it amuses me. Time drags now, I can’t make it pass as fast as I would like, although nothing troubles me and I lead the most enjoyable of lives. I’m well satisfied with everything, and thirty is no great age. A few days ago someone living far away from here sent me two feathers in the post. It was amusing to see two such fiendishly green feathers. And I have no health problems, apart from a touch of arthritis in my left foot from an old shotgun wound that healed a long time ago. I remember how quickly the time passed two years ago, incomparably quicker than it does now. A summer was gone almost before I had noticed it. It was two years ago, in 1855.

  With a strange and almost diffident passion, the narrator, Lieutenant Thomas Glahn, goes on to describe the young woman he met and fell in love with that summer. Her name is Edvarda and she is the daughter of the local squire. She lives in a big white house in a coastal settlement called Sirilund. He can just about see it from the door of his cabin, perched at the edge of a forest high above the village. Edvarda falls in love with him too, but their complexity as individuals dooms the relationship. Both have too much pride to be able to give of themselves completely, and as the first signs of autumn begin to appear in the forest, Glahn leaves Sirilund. Two years later he writes the memoir we have just been reading. In a brief coda set in India Hamsun brings in a second narrator, another hunter, who describes how Glahn provoked him so greatly that in the end he shot him. It’s a suicide by proxy.

  I was a fast reader, used to devouring books, but that short book hypnotised me. As I read I became Thomas Glahn. I could smell the stale blood on the hides nailed to the walls of the cabin, see the glints of spectral colour in the wings pinned there, hear the faint whimpering of our dreaming dog Æsop, the explosive pop and crackle of the firewood as we sat and roasted the game we had shot in the forest. And afterwards we would lie back and rest on our primitive wooden bed, smoking our pipe and listening to the approach of night in the forest outside, completely alone, completely content.

  I had never come across anything like Pan before. In marking the start of my lifelong fascination with Norway, a country that up until that time I could hardly have shown you on the map, in a quite literal sense it dictated the course of my future life. Much later I learned that Pan has similarly obsessed generations of young Norwegians – men as well as women – since its publication in 1894, and that attempts to mimic its stylistic originality have been the ruin of many a young Norwegian writer.

  It was the dream of this cabin, and a life like this lived in the cabin, that took hold of me at that early age and contrived, through all the subsequent years in which my life did not resemble Glahn’s in the slightest, to sustain itself in the belief and the hope that these dreams might one day come true. Gripped as I was by the hypnotic quality of the prose, even in James McFarlane’s English translation, and curious to know whether this quality derived from something unique to the Norwegian language, or whether it was directly attributable to the genius with which Hamsun used the language, I started teaching myself Norwegian. At the time I was working behind the counter at a newsagent’s at the lower end of Charing Cross Road, and on afternoons with few customers my head would be buried in the copy of Hugo’s Teach Yourself Norwegian in Three Months that we carried on our shelves. After a few months this obsession with Norway developed to a point at which I enrolled as an undergraduate at University College London and took a degree course in Scandinavian Studies, specialising in Norwegian. Part of the attraction of the course was that in the first of its four years students got to spend three months in Norway.

  I remember the mixture of pleasure and sadness that descended on me after the four years of study were over. I was thirty-two years old. I’d been to Norway. I’d learned that the effects Hamsun was able to achieve in Pan and the other novels and short stories I subsequently devoured owed more to his inspired use of Norwegian than to any special quality in the language itself. Now this brief engagement with the dreamland was over, and it was time to go back to – well, back to what? The four years had left me with nothing save an extensive and probably useless knowledge of what was still, at that time, an obscure and minor European culture.

  By 1980, towards the end of my studies, I had managed to sell a couple of ideas to the drama department at BBC Radio that included a dramatisation of Knut Hamsun’s first novel Hunger, his fraught account of the travails of a young writer living rough and starving on the streets of Kristiania* as he struggles to write something that will make his name. But my infatuation with Pan and life as a doomed hunter–lover living in a cabin in the far north of Norway remained as strong as ever, and on the back of the broadcast of the much more radiophonic Hunger I was able to persuade the drama department to follow it up with an adaptation of Hamsun’s great novella.

  It was during the recording of this play, at Bush House just off Oxford Circus, that I came as close as I would ever actually get to becoming Lieutenant Glahn and moving not just into his cabin but into his life. With the hindsight of years, of course, my obsession with this novel might easily seem ridiculous, but in defence of the old young man I was I might add that at a reception I attended in Oslo some twenty-five years ago to honour Ibsen’s biographer, Michael Meyer, Meyer told me that his friend Graham Greene had been similarly fascinated by Hamsun’s Pan, and that traces of this can be glimpsed in Greene’s 1952 novel The End of the Affair, for example in the way Greene gives his narrator, Bendrix, the limp that he shares with Hamsun’s Glahn.

  An actor called Robin Ellis, well known at the time as the male lead in the original television dramatisation of Poldark, had been cast as Lieutenant Glahn. The film version of John Fowles’ novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman had just opened in the West End and Lynsey Baxter, who played the part of Ernestina, Charles Smithson’s fiancée in the film, was Edvarda. Lynsey was small and blonde, with a beautiful forehead and mysterious eyes. I was infatuated with her from the moment she entered the studio and struggled desperately to hide the fact. But with the innate intensity of the story further intensified by the claustrophobic and windowless environment of the recording studio at Bush House, over the three days that the recording spanned I just couldn’t do it. On the final afternoon of the recording session, as she stood buttoning her coat to leave, still clutching a bunch of flowers the producer had given her, in front of a grinning array of studio technicians I plucked up the courage to ask if I could see her again.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  Yes!

  How my heart sang!

  I never wanted to leave that stuffy, airless little studio with its blinking consoles and coloured lights and microphones high up in Broadcasting House. Suddenly, in the middle of London, it had become my cabin at the edge of my forest in the remote north of Norway. My dream had come true. I had entered completely into the world of a book. In a bewildered ecstasy I shook everyone’s hand twice and wished them all goodbye several times before heading for the studio door. There I almost tripped over a tin wastepaper bucket that had toppled over from the weight of the copies of the script tossed into it by the actors on their way out. The sight of those scripts spilling from the mouth of that upen
ded bucket was like a dagger to my heart. To the actors it had been just another day’s work, just another day at the office. On the lift down I recalled how the urbane Ellis had even laughed during rehearsal as he read a line of Glahn’s about ‘thirty being no great age’. At one point he also made some in-character crack about ‘fishes and loaves of bread’ and in general he had made no attempt to hide the fact that he disliked the character. As far as I could tell Ellis was a perfectly nice man and a good actor, but Glahn he wasn’t. How could he be? I was Glahn.

  And what did it matter? Edvarda, Edvarda – my Edvarda had said yes!

  *

  Two days later, out in the world of big red Routemasters and newspaper vendors, things weren’t quite the same. Edvarda and I met in the coffee bar in the basement of Dillon’s, as the university bookshop on Malet Street was then known. Her forehead was still beautiful, but away from the cabin, away from the studio, things weren’t quite the same. When we had finished our coffee she took me straight to the department stocking New Age books, probably the only type of book in the world I would pay not to have to read. Already I could sense our budding romance was doomed to fail, and in the midst of a kind of joyous misery it made me all the more desperate to see her again. The whole point of the exercise was to fail, and it seemed to me there was a very good chance I might succeed.

  At the entrance to Goodge Street tube station, as the street lights were coming on to lighten the November gloom, I said goodbye to her. We were standing next to a newspaper vendor who smelt of beer and hawked copies of the Evening Standard in such a loud voice he nearly drowned out my attempts to make her understand how much I needed to see her again. Looking back, I imagine she was alarmed and puzzled by the fervour of my demeanour, especially since it was obvious to both of us that we had little in common. She had already discreetly suggested that my interest in her might have something to do with the play. It was a stunningly accurate insight, which I dismissed as absurd. But she agreed to meet me the following Monday, at a BBC lunchtime concert at St John’s Church in Smith Square, in Westminster, within sight of the river. Utterly content with the way things were working out I set off down Tottenham Court Road. I was still walking on air as I crossed Oxford Street and continued down Charing Cross Road, heading towards The Cambridge, a pub in Cambridge Circus, where I stopped for a drink, to deepen the intensity of the night, before completing the journey back to Clapham Common in the warm and magical orange nicotine-fug of the upper deck of a number 88 bus.

  Come Monday my Edvarda stood me up. I waited at the foot of the steps outside the church until the last minute, and when I was certain she wouldn’t be coming bought a ticket and went in anyway. A string quartet played something rhythmic by Haydn, and as the music raced forward I put aside my disappointment and followed it, rocking and swaying about in my chair. After a few minutes a middle-aged man sitting beside me tapped me on the shoulder and whispered something. I couldn’t hear what he was saying. At that time I suffered from a kind of reverse paranoia in which I suspected total strangers of whispering kind words about me to each other, and plotting secretly to find ways of increasing my happiness. I dipped slightly towards him and half-raised a cupped hand to my ear to indicate I hadn’t heard. I was probably expecting to hear something along the lines of how good it was to see someone so obviously enjoying the music. What I heard, as he leaned towards me, articulated as clearly as possible and almost audible above the music, was: Stop joggling.

  It brought me right down to earth. I made a point of joggling even more energetically for the remainder of the movement, but it was joyless joggling, and well before the concert was over I realised that the steam had gone out of the whole thing. No doubt to her relief, I didn’t try to see my Edvarda again. It turned out to have been just something I had to do. Having done it once I wouldn’t have to do it again. But my dream of the cabin survived the death of the dream of love…

  *

  Now the priest had begun the unaccompanied chanting of the Nattverdssalme, the Communion Hymn. It was a sad and plaintive and austere sound, his voice swooping and twisting around the rafters and those Ten Commandments. It seemed to affect Alex too. From down inside the rucksack he raised up an eerie, howling response. No one minded, no one glared at me. Not even the priest. I was the only one, glaring at myself on behalf of the whole of institutionalised Christianity.

  ‘I’ll take him out,’ I whispered to Nina. With forethought, I had taken a seat at the aisle end of the pew, and it was a simple matter to pick up the bag and carry a still wailing Alex the few steps that took us to the sanctuary of the function room behind the thick, partitioning curtain. Putting the rucksack down I unhooked my parka and shrugged it on, doubled the long woollen scarf around my neck, pulled the black woollen beanie down low over my forehead, hooked Alex up to his lead and stepped out into a blizzard.

  Outside the parking area we turned right and headed down the cleared track towards Paul and Trine’s cabin. It was just about visible through the driving snow. We passed a barrier that was always left up in the winter, to let the snowplough through, then turned left up the sloping track that led past their cabin. Alex’s ears streamed out behind him in the wind. Every now and then he stopped to describe a little map of Norway in the snow with his urine.

  The mountain chapel in winter.

  ‘Flink gutt, Alex!’ I said to encourage him, leaning down towards his little grey bobbing head. ‘Good boy!’ I spoke mostly Norwegian to him, but then usually translated it. My wife caught me doing it once. I told her I wanted him to grow up bilingual.

  Many aspects of becoming a dog-owner had taken me by surprise. Struck by the dog’s gentleness, his decency, his strangely hesitant courtesy and his helpless submission to the demands of appetite, in one unguarded moment I had caught myself wondering whether he might not be the reincarnation of my late brother. In a tangential offshoot of this unexpected notion I had even sent off to Amazon for a copy of G. K. Chesterton’s slender study of the life and work of St Francis of Assisi, but by the time it arrived I could scarcely even remember why I’d ordered it.

  About fifty metres past Paul and Trine’s cabin we turned left again, along another cleared track that passed five or six cabins in the woods on the right as it headed back parallel with the first track, pulling away from it just before it passed the church and dropping into a footpath through a small copse that was still just about navigable despite the snow, emerging via a small and slippery plank bridge onto the main track. On a rise directly opposite us stood the long narrow rectangle of the Veggli Fjellstue. In the distance I could hear the growling of a snowplough and as we headed down the track below the Fjellstue towards the sound it stopped. Dimly through the falling snow I saw the driver hop down from the cab, slide the headphones off his ears onto his neck and converse briefly with two people who were out walking. Alex stopped to pee again. Waiting, I looked around and saw that I was standing beside another of Norske Fjellhus’s enigmatic signs:

  VI REALISERER HYTTEDRØMMEN DIN HER

  (We can make your cabin dream come true here)

  The walkers moved on. I stood there on the corner, still looking at the sign. The driver of the snowplough swung himself back up into the cab, pulled the headphones back over his ears, but then took them off again. Sliding the window to one side, he called out to me:

  ‘Are you interested in a hytta?’

  Was I interested in a hytta? It wasn’t the far north of Norway. It was no more than a couple of hours by car from Oslo. There would be no endless days here, no dark and sunless winters. A cabin here would be a second-best dream. But when I looked across the valley at the jagged line of peaks dimming visibly behind the falling snow, it suddenly didn’t seem to matter at all.

  ‘Very interested,’ I said.

  He swung open the cab door, jumped down again, checked for traffic coming up around the corner and walked over to me. He introduced himself. Said his name was Jørgen. That he was the landowner. Turning, he pointe
d to a timber cabin about a hundred metres away up a turn-off higher up the track.

  ‘You want to have a look at one? That belongs to my in-laws. I’ve got the key if you want to have a look round inside.’

  ‘They’re not there?’

  ‘It’s not finished yet. They’re still working on the inside.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I’ll meet you up there.’

  He crossed the track, climbed back up into the cab, started the engine and trundled off towards the cabin.

  As I set off after him I heard faintly, in the distance, the sound of hymn-singing from the chapel.

  * Oslo was known as Christiania until 1877, when the spelling was changed to Kristiania. In 1925 the name was changed to Oslo.

  3

  8 January 1985

  Visit to a cabin by the sea – party on an island – conversation with Sverre – his pursuit of the lucid dream – history of Norwegian cabin culture – listening to calls of shepherdesses in the Norwegian mountains – internet at the cabin