The Cabin in the Mountains

by Robert Ferguson

  Petter, always an impeccable but discreet host, seemed to sense that something was up at our table. Standing in the centre of the lawn he now clapped his hands together loudly, and when the conversation died down informed us all that he had recently returned from a trip to Sweden where he had purchased a Canadian Red Shaver. It was a kind of chicken, apparently very rare. If anyone wanted to see it now was the time, because he was heading down to the hen coop right now to put the birds to bed for the night. He strolled off down the slope, clicking his fingers, his black labradoodle, Oskar, bouncing along at his side. About a dozen of us stood up and set off in a ragged train behind him. Bjarne clambered up from the bench but then gave me a wink and whispered he was going up to the house to see if he couldn’t find some Bob Dylan records to play.

  From the jut of his beard and his profound silence I could tell Per was still very angry, and in an attempt to develop the conversational theme of wood without actually resuming it I told him, as we made our way across the grass towards the chickens, that I had recently finished translating Lars Mytting’s book Hel ved for a British publisher, and described to him the difficulties I had encountered with the title.

  ‘“Hel ved” in English means “all wood”. If you say someone you know is “hel ved” it means you like them, you admire them, you trust them.’

  ‘I know that,’ he said irritably.

  ‘I’m sure you do. But my point is that it’s simply untranslatable into English. As a matter of fact, it was quite a hard book to translate. It’s full of technical terms involving wood-burning stoves and types of wood and chainsaws that you just don’t find in ordinary English dictionaries. I kept having to trudge all the way over to Blindern to use the specialist dictionaries at the Treteknisk Institutt. It was very annoying because, even if I did find the right translations, I never imagined anyone in England would actually buy the book. But the title was the biggest problem of all. And then one day, walking back from the Treteknisk Institutt, I suddenly knew what it would be called: Norwegian Logbook.’

  ‘That’s very good,’ Per mused. ‘Norwegian Logbook. I like that.’

  ‘Me too. I was very pleased with myself. I sent the translation in and told them that was the title. I heard nothing until a few weeks later when I saw a copy of the publisher’s catalogue with Mytting’s book in it: Norwegian Wood: Chopping, Stacking and Drying Wood the Scandinavian Way.’

  ‘So it wasn’t your title?’

  ‘No. Of course “Norwegian Wood” had occurred to me almost at once as the obvious title. But then I thought, it’s already been used as a song title by the Beatles, as the title of a novel by Murakami, and even a third time as the title of a book about Norwegian architecture. How could you use it a fourth time? Where’s the dignity? Where’s the pride?’

  ‘Ignorant bastards,’ Per grunted sympathetically, from which I knew that in relating the tale of my own trials and defeats I had successfully lightened his mood.

  A tall, bespectacled man, who had been walking just behind us in silence, now leaned forward.

  ‘You’re English,’ he stated. ‘What does it mean in the song when they sing “Isn’t it good, Norwegian wood?” How is that about Norwegian wood?’

  ‘I think it just means pine,’ I replied. ‘But in Lancashire where I grew up people called it “plain deal”. It was the cheapest wood you could get. Then IKEA came along and made it fashionable. Now let me ask you something: why did Mytting’s book sell so well here? It’s fun, it’s well-written, but when all’s said and done it’s just a book about chopping and stacking wood and the best kind of chainsaw to buy.’

  ‘It’s not “just about wood”,’ he said. ‘Well, actually, yes it is. But you have to know the true significance of wood to Norwegians. Wood is one of the deepest things you can know about our country. In the south of the world, in countries like Spain and Greece, they have stone cultures. That’s because the sun is hot down there, it shines all day, even at night it’s hot, the people need houses that are cool and dark so they build with stone. Up here in Norway we have a wood culture. It’s dark and cold, so we need houses that are warm and light.

  ‘Wood is the fundamental environmental fact of our lives. We grow up in houses with wooden walls and wooden roofs. We play with wooden toys on wooden floors. Until not long ago even our skis were made of wood. Do you know that there are over ten thousand million trees in Norway? That’s about two thousand trees to each person living here. It’s a far greater wealth to have than the oil-fund. Pines, firs, birches…’ He gestured vaguely towards the dark pines that rimmed the smallholding, piercing the sky like the points of a crown. Only now did he seem to recall that he was carrying a half-full bottle of white wine and without breaking stride raised it to his lips and took a long swig.

  I took a sly look, trying to place him. I had heard someone address him as Christian: was it Roy’s brother Christian? Roy was my dentist and a good friend. Both had the same pronounced twist in their noses. And if it was him, then I knew he worked as a repairman for Canon or Xerox, driving around to service and repair photocopy-machines onsite at offices in the Østfold region.

  We were gathered around the chicken wire of the henhouse. The grass around the edges of the compound was long and I could feel a wetness penetrating the instep of my trainers. Petter went into the barn behind the shack to turn on the lights. Oskar made a sudden dart up onto the far side of the driveway and began rushing and diving about, burying his nose in the grass. It was long now, but in the early days of these midsummer eve gatherings, at a time when Petter and Hanne kept sheep, part of the deal was that guests would cut and rake and shake the grass before hanging it to dry on long strands of wire stretched between a line of crossed poles. It was an old country technique called hesjing. They didn’t have any farm machinery so we used scythes to cut the grass. It was two hours of hard work, raking the cut grass into piles and folding it in armfuls across the wire where it would be left to dry in the wind and sun for a few days before being gathered in as winter feed for the sheep. It felt good to walk away from the piled grass, wash your face and hands and comb your hair free of grass, and sit down afterwards for the first beer of the evening, feeling tired but content at the honourable simplicity of the task you had carried out. Later on in the evening, just after the sun had set, when there was still enough light lingering in the dip of cleared land, you could look up the slope at your work and in the flowing grey dimness the shaped lines of hay might seem alive, a caravan of mysterious, yak-like beasts ambling silently across the grass. Each time I saw them I was reminded of a painting by Theodor Kittelsen, an artist who specialised in themes from Norwegian folklore and whose pictures conveyed so well the now almost forgotten sense that every last thing in creation is alive, everything is sensate, everything can be enrolled into the world of human imagination. ‘Pine and fir make up ninety per cent of those ten thousand million trees,’ Christian continued. ‘Right up until the end of the nineteenth century, with very few exceptions, wood was all Norwegians ever used for buildings. Norwegian builders knew all about wood. They knew it had qualities like elasticity and strength that stone and brick don’t have. They built using a very precise knowledge of the behaviour of wood, how it ages, how it weathers, how to make use of its natural shape and form. There were two main building techniques used in building with wood. One was stave construction. You must have seen stave churches in your travels around Norway?’

  The old country technique of hesjing, as depicted by Theodor Kittelsen.

  I said I had, but I had never before thought to wonder why they were referred to as stave churches.

  ‘Stave is like your English word “staff”. It means “upright”. The timbers of a stave church stand upright. The same technique was used to build longhouses in the Viking Age. Vertical timbers and planks driven straight into the ground, with no supporting frame. They used less timber than log houses, so for areas that weren’t as rich in timber, like the coastal regions in the west of Norway,
the technique persisted for centuries; but with the walls being thinner they couldn’t retain heat in the same way. With the discovery of the laft technique things changed. You’ve been to the Viking ship museum on Bygdøy?’

  I said I had, many times. It was probably my favourite Norwegian museum.

  ‘Remember the Gokstad ship? The burial chamber where the chieftain’s remains were laid? You can see the lafteteknikk there. Not on the ship itself, that was built with strakes, a continuous line of planking from stem to stern of the boat. But from that burial chamber you can see how at least a thousand years ago Norwegians knew how to interlock timbers to create strength and stability. Some unknown genius of an architect realised that if you cut notches at the corners of the logs, and stacked them horizontally on top of one another, you would get a house with strength, stability, elasticity as well as a high degree of insulation against the wind and the cold. From then on everything changed. For one thing buildings became lower and shorter, because the horizontal extent of the walls was dictated by the size of the log, because think how simple the whole thing is: your principal unit of building is a tree trunk. In place of the old Viking longhouses, a single building big enough to house everyone, even the animals, you got a lot of small houses on the farm, built together for warmth and protection against the elements, but each with its own separate function. You couldn’t build a better, stronger house. They had found the perfect way to build. So they never changed it. Houses were built to the same simple plan for centuries. The stave method of building lived on in the western coastal regions of the country, where timber was scarce; but everywhere else in Norway they used the laft technique. Did you know that up until the early part of the nineteenth century, there were only twenty cities in Norway?’

  I said I hadn’t known that. He called them cities, but I presumed he meant towns. Even today, there aren’t twenty places you would call cities in Norway.

  ‘Twenty cities,’ he repeated. ‘With less than ten per cent of the population living in them. And because variety within unity is the secret of all art, within the rigid format of this building tradition a fashion arose for making decorative and quite exquisite refinements to the fronts and doors and windows of these buildings, so that within the great basic similarity no two houses or stabbur are ever quite alike. What’s that in English, stabbur?’

  ‘I don’t think there’s an exact equivalent,’ I said. ‘In Numedal I think they call them lofts. There’s dozens of them, literally, once you’ve passed through Kongsberg and you’re headed out along the Fv 40. There’s so many of them they call Numedal “Middelalderdalen” in the tourist books. In English stabbur means something like a pantry or a larder. It’s a place where people used to store food, and…’

  ‘Actually it isn’t quite the same thing, a loft is not the same as stabbur,’ said Christian, declining to let me finish. ‘They’re quite similar, but a loft always had two floors and an external staircase. The staircase ran up to the svalgang, which is a kind of covered balcony that runs round the front and sides of the building. You also get svalgang in stave churches. In a stabbur, on the other hand, the stairs are inside, to protect the grain store and the smoked meat and salted meat from the rats and mice. People lived in lofts, they didn’t live in stabbur. Any unmarried girls on the farm used to be moved out to live and sleep there for the summer. It was to get them out of the way of the grown-ups, so they could flirt with the local boys without disturbing their parents. And on Saturday nights, the boys from the other farms would come round. They’d shout and carry on and make a lot of noise outside her window. She’d let them in, offer them some hjemmebrent (home-brewed alcohol) and cakes and biscuits. The boys would start showing off in front of her, doing arm-wrestling or thumb-wrestling, things like that, to show her who was the strongest. The champion was allowed to sit on the bed beside her. That was the prize. Not in the bed with her, of course.

  An illustration of nattefrieri (night courtship) by Theodor Kittelsen.

  ‘Then the gang would head for the next girl in the next loft. After a while a girl might pick a boy she liked better than the rest, and that was it for the rest of the gang, they couldn’t come back. Her favourite would go back alone and call up to the girl and plead with her to let him in. That was nattefrieri (night-courtship). In Bø in Telemark, where I come from…’

  His phone was buzzing and he reached into his back pocket, turned away and took the call. It left me thinking about nattefrieri. It seemed so simple and direct. Actually, I thought, give or take a few details, it wasn’t so different from the way we used to do things back where I grew up in Lancashire. What I didn’t like the sound of were the arm-wrestling and the trials of strength. That could only end with the same boy winning every time. And I didn’t really believe that, even back then, girls could have been so easy to impress.

  Petter came back with the news that there was a problem with the light switch and we’d have to see the Canadian Red Shaver another time. A woman gave a shriek of disappointment and pretended to start crying. Everybody laughed. Petter then lifted up a flap cut into the chicken wire and stepped inside the enclosure. Bending low he began clapping his hands and making upward, whooshing motions with his palms to urge the five or six chickens that had still not gone up the hønsetrapp to roost inside to do so. Bjarne, his resolution to take charge of the music forgotten, had joined us by now and vociferously demanded to see the Scottish Pink Floyd, insisted he wasn’t leaving until he’d seen the Scottish Pink Floyd. Someone said Petter had just stepped on it in the dark. Someone else said it was already inside, resting after the long journey from Sweden. No one seemed to mind that the main purpose of the excursion had been defeated, and in groups of twos and threes, muttering and chatting and laughing, we headed back up the grassy slope towards the tables and the flickering candlelight.

  Both pleased and intimidated to have come across someone so knowledgeable about matters of which I knew so little, and vaguely recalling that I had made a firm resolution to do something about my ignorance, it now occurred to me to show Christian photographs I had taken of the partially built hytta, to see if he could identify some of the joints being used and give me their technical names – those heavy, interlocking ‘finger-joints’, as I thought of them, which looked as if they ran all the way along the interfaces of the horizontally stacked logs and were only visible at the ends, outside the cabin and at three junction points within it.

  We sat down at the table again. I was drinking Aass that evening and offered him a tin. It’s a beer brewed locally at Drammen, pleasant enough when chilled, but for an Englishman a Norwegian beer is always just a lager, and I’ve never been able to taste the difference between them. Christian declined anyway, preferring to carry on swigging from his bottle of white wine.

  Full-round logs, slightly dressed on both sides – a typical feature of Numedal architecture.

  ‘These are full-round logs,’ he said as he studied the glowing image on the phone. ‘But they’ve been slightly dressed on both sides. That was a seventeenth-century innovation. It’s very typical of Numedal architecture. The logs look oval, but next time you go up to your cabin, take a closer look at them. You’ll see there are actually six surfaces, it’s not a perfect oval. Although actually,’ he corrected himself, holding the screen closer to his face, ‘you won’t. In the days when wood was dressed by hand, with an axe, you would. These logs are milled. But the pillars are beautiful. That’s genuine Numedal architecture. All of it – the pillars, the turf roof, these small log-heads here, the lock-and-stop notching – it’s all characteristic of Numedal.’

  He handed the phone back to me and said something about how wood architecture developed in a different way in Sweden, how the Swedes had developed a greater interest in the aesthetics of the corner notches, often choosing a refined and detailed end-treatment that would have looked out of place on Norwegian wood.

  Aud-Marit, whom I knew from previous gatherings to be the most literarily inclined of the foo
tballers, had joined our table after the visit to the hen coop. She was sitting at the end, at the periphery of three intense conversations, and when she overheard Christian’s words she jumped in and began enthusing about Murakami’s novel. As I had never read the novel I was sidelined for the rest of the conversation, although in the course of it I did learn the answer to something that had vaguely puzzled me over the years, namely, the exact nature of the connection between the Beatles song and the title of Murakami’s novel: according to Per, it was the main character’s favourite song.

  It was gone midnight by now. It had been Nina’s turn to drink alcohol-free Munkholm beer that evening, and looking around in my sudden conversational idleness I saw her sitting two tables away from me. I knew she would be worrying about the dog, and sure enough she at once sent me a ‘shall-we-go-now’ lift of her eyebrows. I hadn’t seen anyone else leave yet, and there was still a faint sliver of apricot-coloured light above the pines in the west, and for the briefest of moments I considered pretending not to have seen her signal. But at some point over the last couple of years the old fear of missing something unforgettable by leaving a party early had disappeared. It was time to go and I knew it. I stood up and began pulling my legs up over the bench. As a way of winding things up, and in acknowledgement and recognition of our conversation, from which I felt I had learned a lot, I turned to Christian and asked him how the photocopying-machine business was doing.

  He looked up at me, his eyebrows raised in mild surprise.

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ he said. ‘Do they even still have them?’

  ‘I thought you worked with them.’

  ‘Me? With photocopying machines?’