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I learned a great deal of Norwegian this way. When the sky darkened slightly, we got in the car to chase the midnight sun. The roads were visited nightly by arctic foxes, little things, and lined by construction machines. We’d stop to examine abandoned backhoes whose digging claws rested on the ground, mouths open. I crawled inside each claw and sat bunched up in the corner, while Nils took notes on the machine’s industrial yellow. My work on the fourth interior wall progressed until it was nearly indistinguishable from Nils’s original three. We would soon be ready for inspection, and indeed the men were due in less than a week. Haldor and Sigbjørn became nervous, and kinder. An approved KORO installation would mean much- desired traffic for the museum. And they knew what it would mean to Nils—at least, they could imagine what rejection would mean to Nils. It was the Thursday before the government’s Sunday visit, and Nils and I were driving from Leknes up to the barn. There had been a storm overnight—we had woken to find the radish fields beside the colony flooded, and the ox gone. Now the sun had recovered and spread through the washed air, glinting off the road and the roofs of passing cars, making us squint. I’d never seen such strong light. Nils was terrified, imagining the exterior wall damage. I was dazed, watching bluebells shoot past in the side shrubs, when a black line bisected the pale world. A boy was walking up the road’s shoulder. His back was to us, and he wore black clothes from neck to toe. He had the darkest hair I’d seen on these blond islands. He walked slowly, and quickly fell away behind our car. I rolled down my window, stuck 92
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my head out, and looked back at him. His head was down, and curly hair fell over his face. He looked no older than eighteen. I shouted, “Need a ride?” He looked up for a second, but I couldn’t hear if he spoke. Nils grunted for me to sit up straight. He rolled up my window from the control panel on his door. We didn’t have time for rides, he said. The barn had come into view, and immediately we saw what had happened: the top coat of paint, which hadn’t been completely dry before the start of the downpour, now formed a bleary film over the surface of the wood, threatening to drip uncontrollably. We spent the day holding paper towels up to the barn walls. Nils suggested we slam the towel once, as if crushing a bug, and then not move until the paper had saturated. The goal was to absorb the excess moisture without smudging the wet paint. Sigbjørn helped us. Haldor’s hands were enormous, and Nils worried they’d make more mess. By early evening we’d soaked up all the dripping but stripped a good deal of the color. A new coat wouldn’t dry by Sunday. As it stood now, the barn looked decades old and severely faded. Nils went into the smithy to dry his hands by the coals and think. I sat in the barn, listening to his Schubert. When he returned, we began to add thin layers to tiny areas, blowing on what we’d painted. We added only some patchy brightness over the course of the next ten hours. Leaving the museum for the night, I saw a light shining in one of the guest rooms. The head I saw in shadow, racing around the room, was too high to be Agnes’s, and too slight to be Haldor’s. June had ended, and I felt a change coming—the KORO officers were on their way, maybe this was the first of them. • • •
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In the morning, I was hungry and the sun was back to the top of the sky. Nils had left a note under my door that said he was doing some detailed repairs he’d rather do alone, and that I should get a pancake. I had been hearing about a pancake stand. It was straight up the mountain from the artist colony, the REMA 1000 cashiers had told me. I put on a dress and started walking. After nearly a mile of climbing with nothing in sight, I began to suspect that there never had been any pancake stand. I kept on, despite feeling hopelessly duped by the whole pancake story. My beacon came in the form of a shabby roadside sign that read pannekake and listed hours of operation. I turned off the road and walked down a short driveway toward a gigantic house. Following the signs inside, I entered a room full of tables. It was the largest restaurant I had ever seen. The dining room was a square expanse with windows on every side, framing the ubiquitous mountains and fjords and geitrams. Nobody was there, nobody at all. I went up to the counter, read the laminated menu, and waited awhile before a woman appeared. She flicked the lights on over the dining tables. I asked for a pancake with blueberries, bananas, and chocolate sauce. She took my kroner and said, “Next.” The boy in black stood behind me. He stepped up to the counter and ordered a pancake. The woman asked if he wanted any toppings. There was a long pause. Then he said no. I stared at him, trying to take in the details I’d missed from the car. I couldn’t believe I’d gotten a second chance: here he was, not lost to the road, no windows to roll up between us. As he paid, I studied the way his glasses (black, like his clothes) rested on his nose, partially obstructed by his unstoppable hair. The register’s cash drawer slammed shut and the boy turned away. I 94
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watched him as he walked toward the far window. He stood up tall and straight, and rested one hand on the back of a chair. He seemed to fill the room. The way he looked at the fjords out the window reminded me of the way I did—it was a foreigner’s awe. Even his no to the cashier had betrayed an accent of some kind, and my basic loneli ness, though I had come to accept and even enjoy it, reached out toward his. The waitress disappeared into the kitchen. I didn’t dare walk any closer to him, so I found myself shouting from a distance again: “Are you from around here?” He continued to look out the window. Given that there were only two of us, I couldn’t have been speaking to anyone else, but I took a step in his direction and tried again. “Er du Norsk?” I said. When he finally turned my way, revealing an expression of intense weariness and irritat ion, he mustered the word “What?” and sat down in a chair, his back to me. No, he wasn’t Norsk. My pancake arrived. I took it from the waitress’s hands and found a fork and a place to sit—I chose the table farthest from the boy, and sat with my back to his back. I saw the waitress bring out his plate. Looking down, to keep from looking at him, I poked at the pancake with my fork. It was thin, dense, and elastic. It lay like a bedsheet under the chocolate sauce. When I heard the boy begin to eat, I ate. Each bite was sweet, slippery. We chewed in the silence of the great room, making just a little noise between the two of us, until we’d both finished and the deeper silence resumed. Perhaps the boy hadn’t liked being iden tified as an outsider. I felt I could amend things by sympathizing. 95
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The waitress circled around us, gathering first my empty plate and then his. I rehearsed a line: I’m not from here either. Nice to see another stranger in town. When I stood up to walk to his table, he’d gone. • • •
Just as well, because it took ages to find a bus stop, and ages until a bus came, and by the time I entered the Yellow Room, Nils was beside himself. I found him sitting on the floor of the barn, clutching the boom box to his stomach. Haldor was standing over him. I suspected something terrible had happened—Haldor never entered the Yellow Room. “There you are,” Haldor said to me. “If I could trouble both of you a minute.” Nils popped open the CD deck, placed one finger on his Schubert CD, and closed the lid on his finger, again and again. “Going to need a favor,” Haldor said. “Inspection in two days,” Nils said from the floor. “No favors.” “Inspection in two days, fine, but, funeral tomorrow,” Haldor said. Nils stood up. “Who’s dead?” he asked, so mercilessly direct and Nils-like that I nearly laughed. “I do not know the man, and I very much do not know how to bury him. But the museum has agreed to do it. It will only take a few hours. I must ask you both to join me at Eggum, at midnight, Saturday. I have promised a proper ceremony.” “Eggum?” I asked. I imagined hot colors and holograms. “According to the family’s request,” Haldor said. “The man has asked to be buried at the top of the world.” 96
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“Eggum is not the top of the world,” Nils said. “There’s Svalbard.” “Can’t dig through the ice on Svalbard. This is the closest they will get, and they know it.” The two men switched to Norwegian, for more efficient arguing. I recognized the words for “no,” “sleep,” and “absurd.” Haldor ended the escalating dispute by pointing at me, shouting, “Then she will!” and leaving the barn. In the moment the doors were open, I saw, walking between the museum’s archery targets, the boy. I followed Haldor out of the barn. The boy walked aimlessly over the museum grounds, and when he reached a nearby hall, I saw him open a door I’d never opened. His appearances no longer charmed me. For somebody so good at keeping his business to himself, I thought, he had little business in there—I ran to catch the door as it closed behind him. Inside, axes everywhere. Axes with decorative holes in their middles and with gold inlay. Axes with smooth-edged blades, others eroded, toothy. One ruby-encrusted axe, resting on blood- colored satin. He stood in the shadow of a royal axe display case, leaning against its pedestal. “Are you lost?” I said. “Are your parents here with you?” I’d later learn it was the worst thing I could say. At the time, he merely looked at me, said, “They are not,” and tilted his chin up. “What are you doing here?” “What are you doing here?” “I am painting a barn,” I said flatly. “It’s an art project.” Then, as thoughtlessly as he’d entered, he exited the Axe Hall and looked up the hill toward the barn. Nils had resumed his 97
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work on the exterior, reaching a paintbrush far above his head. He looked small against the high wall. “People waste their lives in so many ways,” the boy said. Before I could find an equally insulting retort, Haldor appeared, exclaiming, “I see you two have met!” Now the boy looked me in the eye, and he looked alarmed. “What have you told her?” the boy asked, his voice suddenly childish. “We will need her help with the ceremony,” Haldor said. I stared into the boy’s black shirt, comprehending it. I was prepared to start over, to console him in any possible way, when the boy said, “I don’t need help.” He looked at me the same way he had on the road—with the hollowed-out face of an empty person. I could see that he meant what he said. Robert Mason hummed his curse in my ear: I didn’t—I couldn’t—help anyone. “If he doesn’t need help,” I said to Haldor, “the Yellow Room does, and I’d prefer to—” “Let me have a word with him,” Haldor said, and pulled the boy away. They walked past the barn to the lobby. Nils stopped painting, threw his brush down into the grass, and lit a cigarette. He walked toward the parking lot and took a seat on the hood of his car. He didn’t see me where I stood near the Axe Hall. I turned and walked down to the fjord. • • •
It was high tide, and the water was clear and turquoise. A little way beyond the museum’s marked territory, I passed a woman who was swimming in her underwear. We nodded shyly at each 98
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other, and I walked on. When I got to a place where no one could see, I took my clothes off and swam naked in the fjordwater, which was warm after many days and nights of sun. I could see through the clear water to the bottom. I found a large shell, but there was a creature alive inside, so I did not take it. Two long shells lay open, their mussel plucked out. I lifted these from the sand. Inside, celestial blues turned white at the bright point where the shells linked. Spider threads stretched over my socks and underwear when I found them again on the rocks. I wrung the water from my hair and tried to find the spider. It had moved on to a nearby beer bottle. Earlier bathers had left some junk in the sand, but wonderfully, the paperback they’d discarded was in English. I found a concave boulder and crawled down into the hard dent to read. Pan’s back cover suggested that Edvarda would meet a tragic end. I turned to the last page, hoping for instructions on how bodies are buried in the Far North. I could not imagine Eggum accom modating the ceremony I understood a funeral to be—rectangular plot, bordered by other plots, rain the worst possible weather, the gatherers in dress shoes and black umbrellas. On Eggum the beach boulders would be larger than any casket and furthermore threaten to crush the dead. The wind could blow hard enough to remove the mourners’ tears from their cheeks. And there was no place for the dead on that shore. Everything that wasn’t rock had been taken or canceled by the sea. I knew only one funeral by heart. My grandmother had died on Yom Kippur, the most sacred day of the year, in September 2001. We buried her in a Jewish cemetery, and given the burning towers I had just seen out my high school’s windows, I wasn’t sure the 99
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world would be around much longer, and I was afraid and missed her terribly. In Pan, Hamsun’s Edvarda was carried to her funeral in a white boat. I lay my bright body over the rock. I took care not to crush the twinned blue mussel shells. Sometimes the waves made a sound on the rocks like footÂsteps, and I would lift up and look over my shoulder to see who was coming. There was never anyone coming.
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