Dead Water (22 page)

She boxes up his papers. She invites men she trusts, old colleagues of her father, to bear away his life’s work and curate it as best they can. She writes letters to banks, solicitors, foreign institutions. Finally, and grudgingly, she fills out the necessary forms, telling the Quisling state the least it needs to know. All done, she pockets the red notebook: a keepsake for her on her journey – and vanishes into the north.

Two dead boys slither after her.

Saturday, 1 January 1944: six in the morning

In Norway’s far north, morning is indistinguishable from deep midnight except that at this hour the air is colder, heavy with freezing dew. This is a place the old maps have down as Lapland. Inside the tent, safe behind walls of hide and lichen, Vibeke wakes to the nausea of her pregnancy.

In such utter darkness, to reorient yourself is an act of will: the recreation of the world. Vibeke imagines into being the dimensions of the shelter surrounding her. She listens, and out of the scrape and hiss of dormant branches she unpicks the distant lap and trickle of a stream of meltwater. She imagines the path to the stream. A fallen trunk. A patch of bog. A clearing. She imagines the stone circle and the fire on which the water is heated. The vessels in which it boils. Breakfast. Little by little, she builds a world to wake to, then sits up, tugs hides and blankets around her against the chill. She picks the moss out of her hair and concentrates on her breathing. The cold will ease the swimminess in her guts: she has only to breathe and wait.

The air in the tent is damp and thick. There are half a dozen sleepers in here with her. Sightless, night-blind, in her mind she contemplates her companions – sleepy and yet observant, one of them and yet apart, a refugee with Oslo eyes and brain, cast up by the war among these Arctic people.

The Lapps are a small, inquisitive lot, slow to smile. They treat outsiders with more curiosity than kindness. Nonetheless, they have taken to her.

Impossible to say why she never thought to come to an accommodation with the invader. She has no pressing love of nation. Her father was once the intellectual darling of Vienna, for heaven’s sake. Not that her background need have come into it. All she ever had to do was pay a visit to Austvågøy’s chief of police, Herr Birkeland. So what if he’s a Quisling man? She imagines herself swapping notes with him on the nesting habits of shrike, the mating calls of fieldfares. Birkeland the tyrant, Herr Birkeland the jackbooted oppressor, is, when all is said and done, a local man. A bird-spotter! She’s known him for years. She’s shown him her drawings before now; he’s as easily awed as a child. On Birkeland’s say-so she could be living out the war in Eric Moyse’s house. It is there for her use, after all. Clean sheets, and money in the drawer.

At the same time, she knows that none of this has ever been possible. There has never been any chance for her to remain in the Lofotens: not living as she chooses to live, the fairy of the ferns. Invading armies do not believe in fairies. Invading armies fear the footloose and the indigent. The casual labourer with his bag full of arcane tools. The wagon with its indeterminate load of men and food and fuel. For the same reason it has never occurred to her to fall in with Eric Moyse’s escape plan either. What has England for her now? Only its own set of suspicions, regulations, restrictions, expectations. Easier for her to embrace the wild life she has been courting ever since she came to the Lofotens. Easier, by far, to travel north!

In Tromsø she found work as a teacher. It wasn’t very satisfying. The little Lapp children didn’t speak Norwegian and when she tried talking to them in their own language the school administrator told her that teaching in Samí was forbidden. She had to ask him: What’s Samí?

‘You’ve just got to keep speaking Norwegian,’ he told her. ‘They’ll learn in the end.’ Of course, they didn’t learn.

She sits up in the dark, groping for the red notebook. Blindly, she scrawls with a burnt twig across its pages, in the style of a palimpsest:

Downy birch forms the treeline, often 200m above the other species. Rowan, aspen, willow, grey alder, and bird cherry are common in lower elevations.

Elk, red fox, hare, stoat and small rodents. Small bears in summer.

A nice irony this: the German invaders understood her. They were sympathetic. They were good boys, well-brought-up young boys: responsive to her civility. On her walks she was careful never to startle their lacklustre patrols, sure always to explain herself truthfully and fully to the miserable, half-frozen lads manning the checkpoints. They were, after all, her father’s kind of people. Officers of the Twentieth Mountain Army, lonely and miserable in their chilly exile. Beguiled by her perfect German, her talk of Vienna and Bonn, they fed and clothed her more than the hatchet-faced fishwives of Tromsø ever did.

What she never expected, until it was too late, was the degree to which one or two of them might beguile her. Once or twice it happened that an officer induced her to slide off the stockings he’d given her: a hiss indistinguishable from a sigh. Such well-behaved young men!

The school fell apart. More and more men were billetted on the town against the threat of Russian counter-invasion. Soon the school was full of soldiers and there wasn’t any room for the children. An order went out telling children to collect moss and leaves, medicinal plants, tea plants – that this outdoor work counted as schooling. Winter came and the school closed altogether: a ‘fuel holiday’, they said. Since by then the Lapp children she was teaching had neither clothes nor shoes, Vibeke knew it was over. So she followed the children. Together they collected moss and leaves, they collected medicines and tea plants, and, heading east, at last the children led her to the hidden places they called home. Look at our strange, pale friend! Ma! Pa! Look at our prize!

Come late spring, Vibeke, round-bellied, heavy with her firstborn, follows the clan east. They eke out a living in a lonely, colourless land of mosquito-ridden bogs and lakes. Human dwellings fall far behind them. They lay traps for wading birds and wild ducks. Not having game, they survive on bilberries boiled in salt water and occasionally on sorrel plants. Vibeke gives birth to a son, evacuating him into a nest of moss and lichen and feathers while the men sit a little way off and – for her sake, she likes to think, though chances are they’re quite oblivious – sing slowly, bearing each syllable deep in the throat, and with a kind of boiling anger that never seems to go anywhere until it peters away at last, worn through by constant repetition.

She falls ill. For a long time she is silly with fever and cares only for the sight of her child. Her recovery is slow, so that this life of hers comes back to her in fragments, newly minted: no longer an experiment in living, but a life. Not a wilderness: a world.

In crabbed charcoal-ash shorthand, Vibeke sets down her adventures. The red notebook is virtually unreadable now to any but the most conscientious cryptographer. Her camp-mates watch her, dubious, as she hatches at that strange red fetish of hers and Vibeke records, as well and as economically as she can, her travels with these remote people: what she’s seen and heard and done with them. Torrential mountain rivers strewn with great chunks of ice. Tracts of boulder-covered wilderness.

Closing the book, she bends to study her infant, stirring in his willow cot; at two years a beauty, trusting, eager to please: half-German child. Strange, that happiness should come upon her here, impoverished, unwed, and a mother – but is this not the happiness she has been moving towards all these years, since Eric Moyse, her patron, set her the task of recording the life of his Arctic home?

Faithful to her task, she’s found a hidden treasure here: a way of observing that is, at the same time, a way of living. A freedom from society’s absurdities that is, surely, a higher and more responsible way of being. A primitive life that, through its very directness, becomes a kind of science. She wishes she had the room and symbology to write all this down. Then again, by restricting herself to a brutally curtailed shorthand, does she not observe all the harder? Is her memory not keener, her understanding sharper? Neither has it escaped her notice that, the more observant and analytical she becomes, the more she resembles her companions – the bright-eyed, silent Sami with their furs and fires and elk.

Civilization has been dislocated by the war. It is possible that she will never see it again – at least, not in a form she would recognize.

There is a little light now. Grey motes finger their way between the overlapping hides of the shelter. Her companions, stirring out of sleep, turn and stretch under their blankets. Vibeke imagines herself surrounded by grey waves: a human sea.

As she stares into her son’s eyes, bright with winter half-light, Vibeke feels a great excitement. Here, she thinks, or whispers, or thinks she whispers. Here, little Havard, here is the world, and it is no one else’s, not any more. They have all gone away. Here is the world. Yes, it is cold. Yes, it is hard. And – yes – it is ours.

At the end of the war Reindeer-Sami, Sea-Sami, homeless families, gypsies, bankrupt fishermen, Russian deserters, all varieties of human rubbish, sweep down the Norwegian seaboard, mile after mile of them, all the way to Ålesund.

The police find Vibeke squatting in a ruined farmhouse twenty miles inland from Narvik with ‘a party of labouring men’: jargon at once petty and lubricious. Once labelled a delinquent, Vibeke is fair game for a justice system struggling to reassert its authority after years of wartime compromise.

So Havard, Vibeke Dunfjeld’s bastard son, grows up an orphan: one of hundreds shivering in camps in Trondenes and Finnfjordbotn. His schooling begins in a series of dilapidated coal sheds. Later he is taken to a mountain lodge in Lahpoluoppal where there are no lamps and only one wood saw. When Lahpoluoppal closes, defeated by the winter, he is transferred to Narvik.

By the time rescue comes, in the spring of 1951, Havard Dunfjeld is eight years old and has spent more years in the orphanage than he ever spent with his mother.

It is a rescue as fantastical as any of Havard’s orphanage-driven dreams. ‘Dunfjeld, you’re wanted in the office.’ He’s suspicious. The solid world is teasing him. It is aping his desires – desires he knows can find their true fulfilment only in his imagination. True emissaries are faceless, they are nameless, but this one has both a name and a face. An absurd, rosy nubbin of a face, congenitally happy and with a voice to match: ‘Hello! I’m Peder Halstad!’

Havard stands there. Not shy. Unconvinced.

Peder asks the boy many questions. Havard finds it strange, having to justify himself to a man he half-suspects must be a hallucination.

‘Tell me about your mother.’

Havard remembers rucksacks, axes and saws. A few books and blankets. Odd tools sequestered in abandoned cottages. He remembers wire nooses and dead rabbits. Wild garlic in the gullies. Black water under dripping trees. A dog snaps at orchids and covers herself in marsh mud. Stunted thorns grow out of the stones. ‘We went out before sunrise to lift lobster pots. We sat on rocks with fishing lines tied to our toes. We hunted the shoreline for branches and hatch covers. Sometimes the fishing crews threw us fish.’

Peder Halstad offers to take Havard for a drive. ‘What do you think of that?’ How could he know that Havard has only ever been in a car once before? That it bore him away from his mother? That she screamed after him. That he struggled free and turned to look out of the back window in time to see her being slapped in the mouth. Norwegian social services,
circa
1946. Pounding a sundered nation together.

Havard and Peder walk slowly, side by side, out of the building and across the yard, its cracked surface marked out for games Havard and his dorm-mates have never learned to play.

Peder Halstad says, ‘I’ve an idea you might like.’

Here it comes.

‘I work for a man in business. A shipping man.’

Havard has visions of running away to sea. Of spending years before the mast. A whaling ship!

‘This man knew your mother. He was her friend. After the war he looked for her, but without success. We have not found her. We have found you.’

The implication – that he has become the grail these men seek, powerful men in powerful black cars – counts for less with Havard than mention of his mum. How ‘not found’? How ‘lost’?

‘He knows you’re here. I mean, he knows, I’ve told him, how you live here. How you are.’

‘Can I see him?’

‘Of course you can see him. It might take a while. He lives in New York.’

‘In America!’

‘And London. And Oslo. He travels.’

‘Does he travel on aeroplanes?’

Peder smiles. ‘Now and again.’

‘He’s rich?’

‘His name is Eric Moyse.’ Peder looks at Havard: he expects a reaction. ‘You’ve not heard of him?’ He opens the door of the car and Havard climbs in.

Four years go by.

It is 1955, and Havard’s just finished his first semester of high school. He flies to Chicago’s Midway Airport with Peder and Peder’s wife, Judith – a woman who qualifies these days as ‘Mum’. (Peder, mindful of his employer’s interests, has never stood for ‘Dad’.) A car is waiting at the airport to take them to the New Bismarck, and while Peder and Judith share a meal in the hotel’s dining room the child they are all but fostering flakes out in his bedroom, exploring TV channels over milk and a club sandwich.
Dragnet
.
Kraft Television Theater
.

Early the next morning a call comes: Eric Moyse is waiting in the lobby. Havard, Peder and Eric drive to a parking lot in Burnham Park with a view of the navy pier. The prototype container has been delivered.

Havard climbs out of the car. The cold hits him full in the face: it will snow today. He turns up the collar of his lumberjack shirt and pauses before the container: a corrugated-steel box, forty feet long by eight feet square. It carries no livery, no badges, no marks. It might have been deposited here by aliens: a blank on to which you might project any desire. Its raw, unpainted sides glisten in the low autumn light. Its doors are open: they swing back and forth in the breeze as though the box were trying to propel itself through water.