The mist had receded during the course of the morning, and green mountains and fields stretched in every direction now, interrupted only by the road, a straight line drawn straight across the valley and connected to a tunnel into which passing cars vanished. I counted red cars. None came in fifteen minutes. I felt ill, nauseous. I’d drunk a whole bar. I bent down, stuck my head in the stream, held it underwater until I felt the weather clear in my head. Then I heard snorting behind me. A cow came up to the wire fence beside the stream, brown and white, a genuine milk chocolate ad. It stood there close to the fence, staring at me. I stared back.
“Good morning,” I said.
I got a vacant look in return.
“And the grass is still green?”
Gaze. Like a camera out of focus.
“Moo,” I said.
I was being eyeballed. For a long time. And then it spoke:
“What are you really thinking of doing now?”
I stared at the cow.
“I’m going home,” I answered.
“Do you really think that’s going to change anything?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Why are you going?”
I had no answer. I tore up a fistful of grass, held it up in front of the beast. But it was full. This obviously wasn’t the time for lunch. The days were probably long.
“Do you know about Buzz Aldrin?” I asked.
The cow looked away. Snorted.
“Do you think Aldrin was lonely?”
“Why do you always want to be number two?”
“The freedom it gives, maybe.”
“What freedom?”
“The freedom to go where you want, and do what you want afterward. The freedom of not being remembered for your achievements. What did you want more than anything when you were a calf?”
“To be a cow.”
I nod cautiously.
“Even those who are number two can be disappointed, Mattias. There’s no such thing as invisibility.”
We stared at each other. I was looking into two enormous eyes.
“Know this, Mattias, we love you—we hold you in high esteem. Know this—you are loved. Do you know this? That you’re always seen? That there are people out there who would give everything they have to be with you?”
I patted the cow on the muzzle a couple of times, then it turned, lumbered across the field and stood next to another cow, impassive now, and started grazing. I looked down at my watch. It really was time to leave the country.
A quarter of an hour later the Subaru came to a halt in front of me on the road below. But Havstein wasn’t alone in the car. They were all there. Carl in front, Anna and Palli in the back. I got in next to Anna and got a hug.
“Christ,” I said, pleased to see everybody. “The whole nuthouse!”
“You didn’t think you could just go off like that, did you?” answered Anna, as Havstein started up the car and headed for Kvívík and the underwater tunnel to Vágar and the airport.
They said their goodbyes in the departure hall, hugs and exhortations, they asked when I’d be back and I hesitated a moment before answering October, I’ll probably be back in October, I said, and then I asked them to wait while I went to the ticket office. The woman with the pearl-white teeth who’d sat here the last time I was here had been replaced by an older model, a stocky woman who’d had a bad day and barely looked up when I addressed her.
“I’d like a ticket to Oslo or Stavanger,” I said.
She looked at me as though that was the most idiotic thing she’d heard all week.
“We don’t fly to Norway today,” she answered. “All right, then. Copenhagen.”
I pulled the envelope from my jacket pocket, took out the money. The woman behind the counter surveyed me as she considered whether she felt like sending me to Denmark or not.
“When do you want the return for?”
“I want an open ticket. My return will be sudden.”
She looked only half satisfied with my answer, but she smiled faintly, or I thought she did. Then she tapped in the appropriate letters and digits.
Ticket in hand I returned to the others, and we all shook hands, hugged one more time, and said we’d see each other soon, time I had a vacation, we said, and I said they could just drive back now, and Anna wished me a good trip, and Havstein told me to look after myself, and call him, and Carl said:
“Make sure to come back. Don’t just disappear.”
And I said:
“Of course not.”
Then we parted ways.
I bought some T-shirts, a couple of wooden sheep and a video about the Faroes in the souvenir shop while I waited for the plane to start boarding.
Made a phone call home. Said I was coming via Copenhagen.
Then my flight was called.
I stood, boarding pass at the ready.
There weren’t many of us. I boarded the flight, and we had to distribute ourselves evenly throughout the plane, so there’d be no imbalance in the accounts.
We taxied out onto the runway, gathered speed and vanished into the mists, and for some minutes it was gray outside the windows before we came up over the clouds and I leaned toward the glass, gazed out, the sun was so sharp I had to squint to see anything, I saw blue sky above us, sea, sea, sea in all directions, and below us, a country entirely veiled in mist, haze, and rain that just kept falling.
2
Do you remember Sergey Korolyov? He was a cosmonaut on Mir, the space station that had been continually manned since 1986. When he returned to earth on March 25, 1992, he’d been in space for 311 days. Korolyov had been sent up when the Soviet Union was still in existence. When he came down again, everything was gone. The Soviet Union had become Russia, Leningrad had become St. Petersburg and Mikhail Gorbachev was nowhere to be found.
That was how I felt when I got back to Norway. As though somebody had changed all the bricks while I was away, had shuffled the cards and come up with totally new rules.
I stood at the baggage belt at Sola Airport waiting for nothing. I had no baggage, at least not the kind you can show for inspection. I had a plastic bag filled with things I’d bought at the airport at Vágar, a bottle of vodka, some Danish peanuts I’d bought on the flight and some souvenirs. I went through the green doorway, nothing to declare, and nobody flung themselves onto me with gloved hands and triumph in their eyes. In fact, hardly anybody looked at me at all.
And as I came out on the other side, Mother and Father stood there waiting. Their faces lit up as I passed through the doors and it struck me that they looked more or less exactly as they had when I’d left them a year ago. Mother was perhaps a little thinner, a little smaller than I remembered, but it might just have seemed that way, because a lot had changed in Stavanger while I’d been away. Not only had houses been torn down to make way for a new hotel, but it felt as though somebody had pulled the entire town apart, only to put all the streets and houses back in place, almost exactly where they’d been before, but with tiny changes, a road placed slightly differently than I remembered it. And there were people everywhere. People, people, people. And cars. And trees.
I was hugged, kissed, taken out into the sunshine and to the car, put in the backseat, transported home and placed with care on the sofa. And there I sat, as though nothing had happened.
Mother could barely get over her joy at having me back, and just to prove it she came bearing all the cakes in the world, shuttling back and forth between the kitchen and living room, a regular bakery, and I obediently ate everything on offer, drank a glass of Solo orangeade that Father put before me, and leafed through some old newspapers. Saw that C. Walton Lillehei had died at around the time I’d left for the Faroes, nearly fifty years after he’d performed the first successful open heart surgery. The commander of Apollo 12, the third man on the moon in the autumn of 1969, had done the same. Charles Conrad, Jr., had driven to his death in a motorcycle accident, maybe he’d been knocked back to the moon, who c
ould tell. And babies, hundreds of babies had been born here in this city since I was here last. And the sea had risen and the land had risen, an eternal balancing act nobody had control of.
Father peered over my shoulder. Asked me if there was anything interesting in the papers. His good-hearted, clumsy attempt at starting conversation.
“Edward Craven Walker is dead,” I said.
“Who was he?”
“He invented the lava lamp.”
“The lava lamp?” His voice was almost fearful. “I’d all but forgotten those. That must have been about twenty years ago. You had one, didn’t you?”
And I had. Once. I’d been one of the first to get one, I think, early in the seventies. They were called Astro-lamps then, and I’d have killed for one.
“Yes,” I answered. “It’s still up in the loft.”
Mother came in with more coffee, put it on the table, and sat beside Father.
“What are you two talking about?”
“Lava lamps,” Father and I answered in unison.
“Oh yes, I saw it up in the loft the other day, I think.” That decided things.
We went up to the loft. All three of us. Mother rooted around for a while before getting the scent and digging out what we were looking for from one of my old boxes.
And Mother found the lava lamp.
And Father found an extension cord.
And I found a bottle of wine.
And then we sat on soft-drink crates in the loft, one lovely July evening, and while we watched the warming fluorescent paraffin wax and the oil floating in the water filled container, we drank wine, a superb family to belong to, and we talked about everything that had happened in the last year, without reproach, we talked about why I’d left, how happy I’d been when Father came over, and Mother put on the old cap she’d worn for synchronized swimming, and we laughed, Father held Mother close and gave the cap a gentle tug, before taking pictures of me and Mother. Afterward I went and brought in the plastic bag with the souvenirs, gave them the Faroe Islands video, the T-shirts and wooden sheep, and when they went off to bed I stayed up there, sipping vodka as the lava flowed quicker and quicker up in the loft. Eventually I turned the lamp off, took the bottle and clambered down the ladder, went into my old room to a freshly made bed, posters on the walls, lay under my duvet and slept the restless sleep of a sixteen-year-old.
“Do you have everything you need?” It was Father who asked.
We’d loaded my car up with my things next morning. Wasn’t much. I put the box of old space books in the trunk, together with some old newspapers I thought I might read out there, a box of food and some clean clothes. Apart from that there wasn’t much to take. The few things I’d left behind in my flat, that Mother and Father had fetched and stored in the loft some months earlier, could stay there as far as I was concerned.
I nodded, said I had everything.
“And you’ll come back on weekends?” said Mother.
“Yes, don’t worry.”
Hugs all around.
It rained as I drove down Seehusensgate and swung toward the stadium where the Viking players were warming up with their coach, I came out onto Madlaveien and joined the motorway going south towards Jæren. Felt good being out like this. Sitting in the car alone, with just the radio playing songs I’d nearly forgotten, window wipers never quite hitting the beat, and fields, fields that stretched across the landscape as I rolled on toward Varhaug and its beaches.
We’d had a summer cabin since I was fourteen, since Grandpa had been promoted to the nursing home and we’d taken the place over and started calling it “our cabin.” Although it wasn’t so much a cabin as an ordinary house, and Grandma had lived there for large parts of her life, as far as I knew, the smell of Grandpa and her still hung in the walls, impossible to clean away, the smell of old people sitting side by side in their chairs staring out of the windows, content with the way things were, the boulders and fields, waves and bad weather, a storm in Grandpa’s hair as he went out to fetch the morning papers.
Because it’s windy in Jæren. More than you’d think. And the trick, I’ve always thought, is to hold yourself upright, to lean into the wind with all your weight and take aim for where you’re going before setting one foot in front of the other. Like living in a wind tunnel, almost, with sideways gravitation, I pictured the farmers tethering their cows to the ground, nailing down their roofs, taping themselves to their chairs and waiting for better weather. I remembered things Grandfather had said when I was little, when I went there every summer and we’d go for walks, the hoods of our rain jackets tied tightly and rain falling straight in our faces, and how when I complained and wanted to turn back, he’d always say I ought to be proud the weather was so bad out here.
“It’s like this, Mattias,” he’d say, “nearly everybody knows that every single eel, European and American, is born in the Sargasso Sea. What they don’t know is that every single wind is born here, right here.”
And I never doubted it for a moment. It wasn’t my place to doubt Grandfather; that was a job for other people, other people’s everyday business. And then he’d rest his large hand on my hat and turn me into the wind and we’d gaze out into the North Atlantic like two old seadogs, watching the ships that carried the strangest things to the most remarkable places, and Grandfather would call me his little Christopher Columbus, even though he must have known deep down that I’d never discover anything of note in my lifetime.
So I leaned into the wind as I got out of the car in front of the cabin and carried my few belongings to the door, dug out my keys and let myself in for the first time in over ten years. It smelled closed in, dusty, Mother and Father didn’t come here often either, they filled their days with other things. I pulled back the curtains and opened the windows, letting the rain and air in, the curtains flapped and I unpacked my things onto the small living room table, placed my box of books on the floor, went into the kitchen with my food. I pondered whether or not to ring Jørn right away, probably should, tell him I was home, that I hadn’t changed, we could meet maybe, have a beer, we could find something to do, catch up with the year that had gone, get a head start on the clocks.
But I didn’t call. I stayed in my chair by the window and picked the summer’s dead flies off the sill, sat in the sofa and stared at the wall, found an old Rubik’s cube in the newspaper rack and in four and a half hours I solved three sides, gave up on the fourth, turned the radio on. Shipping forecast. There was rough weather to the west and everybody was advised to get their sea legs out. I put some coffee on because it felt like the only sensible thing to do, but didn’t drink it. I took my old space travel books out of the box on the floor, stacked them neatly on the table and went into the kitchen to make some pasta, and that was when I thought of it. No idea what triggered it, but that was when I thought of him; Sofus.
I hadn’t taken the time to visit him in Tórshavn after he’d moved, nor had I written to him as I’d promised. Did he wonder what had happened to me? Or had he forgotten me, found new friends, new playmates in the neighboring houses, even a girlfriend perhaps?
I had his address. I’d written it down in the notebook I’d bought in Klaksvík. As the pasta boiled, I dug out some paper and a pen from the activity shelf that Father had put up for me once, light years behind me now, and I sat at the kitchen table and wrote as I ate.
I don’t need to say what I wrote, just it was largely about why I’d decided to go back home for the summer, and how we had to do things like that sometimes, return to GO even if we didn’t get to collect $200, I hoped he was well, that he’d made new friends. And then I promised again, promised him I’d come and visit. In the fall. Hopefully that wasn’t too far away.
Over the following weeks I began to look like myself again in the mirror. I called home once a week, sometimes more, visited once in a while, when things panned out that way, for Sunday lunch. I worked with Gunnar on the neighboring farm, drove the tractor, painted the barn, worke
d in the cowshed, helped out where it was needed. Gunnar was sixty, he’d taken over the farm when he’d barely turned twenty, and I remembered him from all those summers as a child, I’d get to sit on his lap on the tractor when he went out in the fields. He still had the same tractor, one of the few who still ran a Gråtass model, and on a bad day this could mean two hours of repairs and tinkering for every hour of work done. But it was all right. There was little hurry, the potatoes had been dug up long ago, the strawberries were picked by the youngsters from the neighboring farm, and the cows stood in the field obediently and waited. I usually had supper with Gunnar and his wife, Ebba, I’d sit and nod with a mouth full of broccoli as she told me the latest news about their son who’d made his fortune from manufacturing tennis balls in Newcastle. Not the most fascinating story ever, but it was okay to hear her voice as I ate, like having the radio on quietly in the background, a kind of accompaniment to the food. Gunnar himself talked about the weather mainly. Always found so much to say. There was sun, there was rain. It could be fine or it could be abysmal, who could tell. But he kept himself updated, listened to the forecast, and noted the day’s outcome in the weather journal that hung by a string from the wall. Gunnar had records of the weather going back forty-five years. The fourth of April, 1951? Mild rain that day, with a gentle breeze from the northeast. Good temperature. But their conversation would stop on the rare occasion that a car drove past outside, and they’d fall silent for a second, stretch their necks to the window, and Ebba would squint to identify who it was before they reached a swift conclusion and returned to their conversation, picking up exactly where they’d left off, mid-sentence. Pretty impressive.
It was Jørn who called me, in the end. On a Friday in early September and I was conscience-stricken from the moment I heard his voice, and I could swear he noticed it from the moment I answered hi there, so I could hardly have expected anything else but that he’d exploit it.