I Curse the River of Time (21 page)

‘Shall we fish now?’ she said.

‘Why not. But then you throw the line, I’m busy with these oars.’

‘That’s fine with me.’

She pulled off her mittens and took the fishing rod from under the thwarts, it was fibreglass, bottle green, and swung it back and let the spinner loose and pressed her thumb softly against the lock, and with a swift, almost invisible flick she launched the bait. She clearly knew what she was doing, and the spinner pierced the ice with a crisp plop out on the lake.

The rowing boat was fibreglass, plastic, and rode too high on the water, and did not pick up the momentum a wooden boat would, when finally I fell into a rhythm I could handle. So I struggled to keep her on a straight course, and I was starting to sweat, and it annoyed me. I saw her face flush in the cold air and her eager eyes watching the shiny line and the white scrubbed water, and along the shore was a mist still drifting among the trees turning them into mythical creatures from some heathen past. A pale rose streak was floating above the red cabins along the bay and from behind the mist, the sun was breaking through, and why so annoyed, I thought, this is fine, this is so fine, you
could not have wished for better, why shouldn’t you sweat a little?

‘Jesus, this boat is hard work,’ I said.

‘I know,’ she said, ‘they’re like that, those plastic boats, they’re really too light.’ Then she got a bite. She jumped up and cried out: ‘Got one! Fucking hell, we’re going to get the bastard.’ she yelled, and I had not heard her swear like this before, and I liked it, truly, it was exciting.

She let the fish thrash around before slowly reeling it in and lifting it carefully over the side.

‘A perch,’ she said, ‘a big one.’

‘Congratulations,’ I said, and I meant it too, and she took a bow and dropped her head like maybe Chaplin would have done, or Pinocchio in the cartoon with his head on a string, and her cap tipped forward and she placed her left hand on her right breast and held the rod in an arc above her head and let the fish dangle there.

‘A small fish in your honour, my sweet.’

I laughed and together we got the perch off the hook and tossed it into the bottom of the boat where it flapped about, and poor little fish, she said, and I took a stick that was lying there for that purpose and whacked it pretty hard on the head, and it flapped a little more and then lay still.

I straightened up. I could feel the sun on my back, the fog melting away, the ice melting. Her face was golden, her hair golden, and she lifted her face to the sun and closed her eyes in the dazzling light.

‘Do I have a tan now?’ she said.

I laughed again. ‘You and I,’ I said. ‘Just you and I.’

‘Isn’t it fun,’ she said and she smiled. I let the oars rest
in the rowlocks. The water around the boat fell silent, and silently the cabin was floating up above the rocks and the smoke rose softly from the chimney, and how impossible it was to grasp that in the end something as fine as this could be ground into dust.

IV

24

W
hen we arrived at Lnsø, we walked up to a small hotel in Vesterø harbour, where the ferry from the mainland docked. The old hotel was only a stone’s throw from the quay, and my mother said that she was fine, she could walk the distance, she was no invalid for Christ’s sake. The hotel had a view of the fishing port where seagulls whirled like a tornado above the masts and filled the sky. Their chests were so incredibly white it hurt our eyes when the sun was out. And there were all kinds of gulls and terns with their black cap and heavy grey gulls and orange, green and canvas-coloured sails on the boats and the red buoys flapping pennants in the wind and the nets spread fan-like along the quays.

‘It’s different here now,’ my mother said.

‘Different to when?’ I said.

‘To forty years ago.’

‘You haven’t been here for forty years?’

‘No,’ she said.

We went through the door to the hotel and put down our bags. I did not have a bag, but I was carrying my mother’s blue one, and Hansen had a bag. I had my father’s clothes on and my damp jacket. I had to get it dry. It was cold on the inside. I might catch something, I might be ill.

My mother went up to the reception and took out her
worn, ancient purse from her handbag. There was plenty of money in it, and she was spending it like she never had before; it looked conspicuous, and I did not like it. I heard her ask about a room for someone who had not booked in advance, and that someone, I guessed, was me, and there was no problem, not this time of year. She sounded terribly Danish though, and not like she normally did.

We went up to our rooms. My mother had to rest for an hour, and Hansen did too. I took the bottle of Calvados from my inside pocket and placed it on the bedside table and hung my jacket on a radiator below the window, it was good and warm, and the room was warm and I sat on the bed and stayed there looking out of the window to the harbour and thought about things that needed thinking about. But that didn’t help me much.

I lay down on my back. The bed was soft. I closed my eyes and then time just vanished, and when I looked at my watch, an hour had passed. I put my steaming jacket on and went downstairs to eat with the others, and they were already there. I should have found it odd with Hansen sitting at the end of the table, and not my father. But I didn’t, and when I realised, I felt guilty.

We ate by the window. I was really hungry. After a while my mother leaned over the table and looked out at the road. She did this twice, and the third time she stood up, took her coat from her chair and said:

‘Right, time to go,’ and Hansen stood up and this time I did not ask where we were going. I just left my food on the plate even though I was far from finished and stood up to join them. Where else could I go? In the road was a cab
with the engine running. We sat as we did before. Me in the front next to the driver and the two others in the back. I don’t know why it turned out that way, if it was something they decided that morning.

We drove south towards Byrum, one of three major villages on the island, and on both sides of the road were flat meadows framed by electric fences and stone walls and rows of low trees, shrub almost, and then by some taller trees depending on which farm the field belonged to, and now in November they looked cold and scrubbed clean.

We were approaching Byrum at speed. We saw the tower they had in that village come closer, and it was not a very tall tower, but easy to see in the flat landscape, like the tower of a knight’s castle with its gun slits, and I do not know what the tower was used for in the past or what use they made of it now. Maybe they just liked to have something to look at. A strange thing in a Christian town, a thing of vanity pointing where only the church should point, and the church, I knew, was the oldest in the country, but we drove right past it and then south out of the village.

And we suddenly turned east almost heading back towards the coast, or so it seemed, but I guess the taxi driver knew something that I did not, and it was really not my problem, he could drive wherever he liked. It was a gravel road, the ground was dry, and in spite of the humid air, we could see a tail of dust whirling behind the car. Some kilometres further out on the plain we stopped. Of course, there was nothing
but
plains here. Off the road was a medium sized house built of yellow bricks with a narrow pointed roof and an attic room. It was not a very old house, nor
was it new, not like they built them after the war. It was older than me. There were sheep behind the house. They had plenty of room to move about, but the whole flock stayed close to an outbuilding, a small barn I could barely see behind the yellow house, where no doubt the hay was laid out, now that the pastures were bare.

My mother climbed out of the car. Hansen stayed in his seat, so I stayed too. She walked a few steps towards the house, stopped and then came back, leaned into the car and picked up her bag from the back seat and took out an envelope before she slammed the door shut. She opened the envelope and shook out some black and white photographs, there were four of them. She leaned against the car door and spread the photos in her hand like cards in a poker game.

‘What are we doing here?’ I said.

‘This is where your brother was born,’ Hansen said. ‘In this house.’

I bent forward and could clearly see the photographs through the window, and it
was
that house. It was her in two of them. She was sitting in the grass with a dog by her feet, a sheepdog, an ace of diamonds on its forehead, not that I knew much about dogs, but it was looking up at her, they were friends, the slightest hint and the dog would do whatever came into her head.

She was young, she had an apron wrapped losely around her waist. She was very pretty. In the other photo she was sitting on the doorstep in front of the house next to a woman who was older than her. Not older like a mother is older, but maybe ten years older. The last two photos showed only the house, from two different angles. Someone had taken
those photographs to remember exactly how the house looked.

She put the photographs back in the envelope, opened the door and placed the envelope on the seat in the back and looked over at Hansen. Hansen nodded and smiled. She took a deep breath, closed the car door and started to walk towards the house, a little shaky on her feet, I thought.

Once she was there, she stood for at least one minute before she knocked on the door, and then she waited, and no one came. She turned and looked at us, and with her palms up she shook her head, and Hansen just nodded and smiled. So again she knocked, much harder now, and she waited, and someone came to open the door, an elderly woman, she was older than my mother, maybe seventy. They stood facing each other. They started to talk, but I could not hear what they were saying, they were too far away.

‘Are we supposed to just sit here in the car?’ I said.

‘I guess we’ll sit here for as long as it takes,’ Hansen said.

‘All right,’ I said.

They stood on the doorstep and the sun hit the car in a flash through the windscreen and was gone, and the taxi driver sat smoking with the window ajar, a Prince cigarette it was, and I turned away from the stinging smoke.

‘I remember you,’ my mother said. ‘You’re Ingrid. Do you remember me?’

The woman stood with her right elbow leaning stiffly against the door frame and her fist slightly clenched in the air in a way I would bet she had done her whole life long.
She looked closely at my mother’s face, left the door frame to support itself, took two steps back and pulled a pair of glasses from her apron pocket.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I remember you. I remember your name. You were here, not long after the war. Only a few years. We didn’t look then like we do now,’ she smiled. ‘But maybe we’re still the same.’

‘Maybe not,’ my mother said.

‘You’re probably right, but please, won’t you come in?’

‘I would like that,’ my mother said.

She walked behind the old woman into the hall and bent down to undo the shiny zip on her ankle boots, and it took some effort, and the woman called Ingrid said: ‘That’s how you used to do it back then, you were pregnant, just keep them on, it’s a dry day, it doesn’t matter, I’ll just sweep the floor.’

She smiled. ‘I’ll make some coffee,’ she said and went out into the kitchen. There were two gas rings on the counter, and she lit the one and placed on it a shiny kettle with a whistle on the spout. My mother entered the living room. It was not like before. It looked like an old woman’s living room. No matter who you were when you were young, the day would come when everything was in its place, the knick-knacks and lace tablecloths, the little china dogs and the china shepherd boy by the mill wheel somewhere in the Alps, and on the wall in their frames, the guardian angel watching over the little girl with blonde plaits leaning too far out over the water to catch a fish, or whatever it was in the brook. On the windowsill there were pots of geraniums and they had been there for a long time already and were white and red.

My mother unbuttoned her coat and pulled it slightly off her shoulders before she sat down at the coffee table and looked out of the window towards the outbuilding where the sheep stood silent, looking heavy, with their heads against the wall like they did back then, in the autumn, in the winter, in the sun and in the snow. In the summer they moved out to the heather on the heath and grazed there. They could go wherever they pleased, but always came back in the evening, like goats do on the mountain pastures in Norway.

Ingrid entered with coffee in a china pot and cups on a tray.

‘You still have sheep,’ my mother said.

‘It seems I can’t give it up. We’ve had sheep here for as long as I can remember. Or I have, but I manage fine. Haulier Karlsen died young, you know.’ She still referred to her husband as
haulier
Karlsen, as she did forty years ago.

Ingrid sat down on the sofa with her back to the window.

‘A neighbour helps me at lambing time, and if I am in distress I do have the telephone,’ she said and smiled. ‘But of course, I have to stop soon.’ She placed a cup on the table in front of my mother. She waited. She was not impatient. She leaned forward and poured the double-roasted coffee into the cup and the aroma was overwhelming.

‘I wanted to see you one more time,’ my mother said. ‘I made up my mind only a few days ago. It felt like the right thing to do.’

‘Ah, but that suits me fine,’ Ingrid said, ‘I don’t have many visitors. Only my son every now and then. He lives in the town across the water. I thought about you a great
deal in the first years. But then it went away.’ Her voice was calm and careful so the words would not come out wrong.

‘I thought a great deal about you, too. Sometimes you were all I had. We would meet again, I used to think, but nothing ever came of it, even though I was home so many times,’ my mother said and she pointed to what she thought was the mainland. It was not of course, but she said:

‘This house is where the rest of my life began. Or where the first part ended. Or both. You were. It felt safe here, no place could have been better, and I would have loved to stay, but when he was a year old, I had to go to Norway. I thought I had no choice. But I did.’ And then my mother cried with her head on her knees. ‘It did not turn out as I had imagined,’ she said, ‘as I had hoped, no, it did not,’ she said harshly, ‘and now I am ill’.