“You’ve gone quite green.”
“I felt so sick. That coffee must be bad.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the coffee that I could taste.”
“I think I need to sit down for a while,” I say.
“You go up and sit in the car. We’ve finished here now.”
I don’t quite know what it is we have finished, but I do as she says, go and sit in the car, and feel better at once. The only thing I smell is the timber, and it is insistent, but if I breathe carefully through my nose I can keep the nausea down. Aunt Kari rinses out the coffeepot and puts out the fire with water from the river, then comes heavily up beside the bridge and puts the coffeepot in the little trunk.
“How are you feeling?” she says in the car on the way back to Oslo. We drive with the window half open.
“Fine,” I say, and in a way that is true.
One day there is a letter for me on the kitchen table. It’s leaning against a cup where I shall see it at once. I see it at once. It has stains and stamps with intertwining letters. I open it and read:
Dear Sistermine,
it runs,
when you get this letter I shall probably be home in Denmark again. The mail takes a long time, I’m told. Mum sent me your address, and that letter had been on its way for centuries. I have been here a long time now, longer than I’d intended. The people I was with left a couple of weeks ago, or maybe more. I’m not quite clear about it. They took the boat across the straits of Gibraltar to Spain. But I shan’t set foot in that country now,
he writes:
not with that butcher Franco as dictator. On the way south we took a train to Marseilles and a ship from there. In the harbor before we sailed I saw a woman I’ll never forget. I took her photograph, I couldn’t resist it, but she didn’t see me. She stood on the quay shouting and weeping beside the gangway, there were people everywhere, French police with hard black peaked caps, Arabs on their way home, some in djellabas, others with Turkish fezzes on their heads, and Americans with white tropical helmets playing at Africa already. She didn’t see any of them, she stood with closed eyes behind her spectacles facing the boat, and she beat herself on the throat so her cries came out in short bursts rather like the way we played at Indians when we were small. I swear, Sistermine, it was the most horrible noise I have ever heard. And she looked like Mother. Just as small, the same gray hair and the same gray coat and hat. I looked around to see who the strange screams could be for. By the rail a few meters away stood a man, younger than me, almost a boy. He stared at her. His face was like stone, his hair cut short all over his head, and it was impossible to guess what he was thinking. Then he turned and walked across the deck without looking back. She didn’t see him either, her eyes were still closed and she was still beating her throat and crying out, and I had the feeling I had that time I was on the way over to Hirsholmene and found the cap on the ice. That I had to turn around. Wasn’t that strange? But Morocco is not Denmark. I am certain the young man was on his way to join the Foreign Legion.
He writes:
Sistermine, I have seen it all, all the places in the book we had at home; Marrakech, Fez, Meknes, Kasba, do you remember how I used to say those names aloud, and they were exactly as I knew they would be, but in color! Terracotta and brick and yellow sand and red sand and blue mountains, and the people we called the blue men who came with their camels and horses to the market at Marrakech weren’t blue, they were like you after a summer with lots of sun. And the Berbers from the mountains were whiter than me and some were blond with blue eyes. You and I never had that. So who is Aryan in this world? They were skeptical toward me because in appearance I looked French to them, and I was skeptical toward them because I knew Franco used Berbers in the Fascist army. They were proud and could fight like fiends for their freedom, but probably they weren’t so fussy about others’ if the money was good. They have a saying which goes: kiss the hand you can’t cut off. Damn it, say I,
it runs, and he writes:
On the way from Al-Hajeb to Meknes by bus a few days ago we stopped at the foot of a mountain, and there was a tent and a woman with small children and some black goats. She was tall and beautiful with tattoos on her face, and she had a scarf on her head with coins or medallions sewn to the edges so close together they jingled when she walked and jingled when she bent over the goats. I had to go up to her. I had been so thirsty the whole way, we had traveled for hours, it was as hot as the anteroom of hell, and I said to her in French, “J’ai soif!” and she understood that. She picked up a wooden bowl and went and milked one of the goats straight into the bowl and gave it to me. It was very kind of her, and I took a big mouthful. Say thanks for me to the cows at Vrangbæk, if they’re still alive. It tasted terrible. Maybe that’s why I’m lying here now, in a little guesthouse near the Socco Grande in Tangiers. I’ve been feverish for a couple of days, but I think I was a bit better this morning. The son of the house runs errands for me and tells stories at full speed in a blend of Spanish and French and a dose of Maghrebi. It sounds like a new language. He falls to his knees and laughs aloud when he gets to the point, and I don’t understand a thing. He’s twelve. Tomorrow I’m sure I’ll be on my feet again. I need to be actually, I’ve booked passage on a freighter to Nice leaving two days from now. I’ll work my way over. From there it’s the train home with the last of my money.
He writes:
Sis, there’s so much to tell you, but it must wait till we meet, and that will be soon. Then you must tell me everything too. I haven’t seen you since that time in the harbor. I forgot the photograph, do you remember? I realized it in Sweden. Everything went so fast, it was a crazy time. And then you weren’t there when I got home.
Now I must sleep, and when I wake up I’ll be better and I’ll go out and fetch the presents I’ve bought. I’ve hidden them in a safe place. At the moment I don’t trust anyone.
Aunt Kari drove me to the quay. It was winter again. There was snow in the streets and silence and early dark. Between the houses in Storgata, Christmas decorations had been put up all the way from Ankertorget to Kirkeristen, and we drove down Skippergata and out by the big warehouse and on beneath the castle where it was shadowy beside the wall and gloomy like Quai des Brumes with Jean Gabin. A new ship lay at Vippetangen. The Melchior had gone, this one was called Vistula. The Vistula was a river in Poland and the ship had sailed between Gdansk and Copenhagen with Polish refugees until quite recently.
“Gdansk was Danzig when the town was German,” said Aunt Kari, but I did not need to be told that. We walked from the car to the departure hall past some taxis with open trunks, the drivers were getting baggage out. All red in the face they walked to the entrance with a bag in each hand and one under each arm and put them down in rows, but I carried my own suitcase. The ship was quietly waiting when we went out on the other side of the hall. It was smaller than the Melchior with fewer decks and the gangway was just a plank with railings like a well-made chicken ladder. People were walking up the plank, and I wanted to get on board as fast as I could, but Aunt Kari took my arm and said:
“So far so good, my dear. Now, you mustn’t get seasick.”
I put down the suitcase.
“I’ve never been seasick before. I’m really fine.”
“Have a schnapps on an empty stomach just before you eat, it usually helps. Here’s a small contribution,” she said, pushing a note into my hand.
“Thanks, but I’m sure everything will go well.”
“Maybe it will, but you must remember to be careful, mustn’t you.” She was still holding my arm and squeezing it hard, and when she realized that she blushed and let go. I stroked her cheek.
“Aunt Kari, everything will be all right now,” I said, picking up my case, I was impatient and feeling bad about it.
“I wonder,” she said quietly, and she had tears in her eyes, and then I couldn’t say any more, even though I knew it would be a long time until we saw each other again. And then
I went on board.
She stood on the quay until the ship was under way and I stood on deck, and for a moment I was certain she was going to take out a cigar, but she only raised her hand, turned and walked through the hall and out on the other side where the taxis had gone away and she got into the Citroën and drove off. I looked at the note I held in my hand. It was a hundred kroner. I could buy myself schnapps for months with that.
I didn’t have a berth but a hammock in a section of the ship without portholes two stairways down from the superstructure in the stern. It was pitch dark when I went in with my suitcase in one hand and a blanket I had been given in the other, and I put down the case to find the light switch. When the light came on I saw there were more suitcases and bags in there, but only one hammock was occupied, and that someone turned around and said:
“Put that light out, for Christ’s sake!”
“In a moment,” I said, “I just want to stow my luggage.”
I went over to a free hammock next to the person, who was a lady, put my blanket into it and the suitcase underneath.
“I’m feeling so ill, you see,” she said, and then I saw her face. She didn’t look well. She screwed up her eyes and pulled her mouth into a tight line. She was younger than me.
“Is there anything I can do, shall I fetch help?”
“Oh, no, I’m just so damn seasick. It’s the same every time.”
“Seasick now? We’re not at Drøbaksundet yet.”
She opened her eyes. “Aren’t we? Damn it, I thought we were long past that. I can’t have slept for more than five minutes.”
“There won’t be much sea running till we’re past Færder lighthouse. Besides, it’s dead calm.”
“Is it?” She raised her head and looked around her. She had red hair like Rita Hayworth in technicolor, it lay around her head in a huge tangle.
“You’re Danish, aren’t you,” she said. “Are you on your way home?”
“You could say that. An old aunt of mine says the best remedy for seasickness is a schnapps on an empty stomach just before you eat.”
“All very well for her to say that. I’m broke.”
“But I’m not. May I treat you?”
“Thanks for the offer,” she said, getting carefully out of the hammock and putting her feet on the floor to see if it moved. It did not.
“I’m Klara,” she said.
It was dark outside the windows of the cafeteria, but we could sometimes glimpse the snow where the fjord was narrow, and the lamps in houses right down by the water and a car on a bridge with its lights on, and mostly we saw our own faces in the glass. Klara had brushed her hair till it shone and stood out like mine would have done if it had not been cut short, and she had a sweet face with fair skin which must have been freckled in summer. She raised her glass with the clear schnapps and said:
“Farewell, Birthplace of Giants; I’m sick of it. Shall I tell you who I was named after?”
“You may as well,” I said.
“Clara Zetkin. D’you know who that is?”
“Yes. She was a German communist.”
“Right. German communist and friend of Lenin. They wrote letters to each other. She was a giant. My father is a giant too. He’s a communist at Aker Mekaniske Verksted. He makes speeches with his fist clenched at club meetings. My boyfriend is smashing, in a few years he’ll be a great giant too. It’s not that I’m against them at all, but I’m fed up. They won the war single-handed. They can’t talk about anything else. And then I have to make coffee. So I picked up my hat and left, as they say. Anyway for a while. Now they can make the coffee themselves. I’m going to Hirtshals in Jutland to clean fish.”
I pictured Rita Hayworth in a fish delivery hall. It didn’t seem so daft.
“We had a picture of Lenin,” I said. “That’s to say, my brother had. In a shack we built on the shore. It may still be hanging there.”
“Are you a communist?”
“No, I’m a syndicalist.”
“Ah ha. Then we’d better not discuss the Spanish war. Or there’ll be trouble.”
I laughed. “No, better not.” I said. “Skål.” Then each of us emptied our glasses into each of our empty stomachs before we ate the rissoles that were the dish of the day, and the only one.
After Færder I was the one who was ill. We had gone down to bed and fallen asleep at once, and when I woke up I heard violent creaking and the sound of the sea beating along the sides of the ship and someone snoring in the darkness. It was not Klara. I felt the nausea rising and didn’t know whether it was the schnapps we had drunk or the bad air or the sea against the ship that lifted and dropped all the space around me, but I had to get out. I found my coat in the heap of clothes and the door in the dark and went out into the blinding light of the staircase and up the stairway, leaning first against one wall and then the other with the ship’s movements, and right up on deck. It was dark out there with throbbing sounds. The weather had changed. There was a shrieking wind and white foam in the air and a sudden slash of drops on my face. With my coat tightly around me I went over to the other side of the deck so I had the wind behind me and vomited over the railing. “How kind of you to feed the fish,” Jesper would have said. I wiped my mouth and walked backward until my back was against the wall of the superstructure, held on tight and stared out into the gray black spray where the crests rushed along, and I stood there till I felt better and so long that my teeth began to chatter and then a bit more.
When I went down darkness filled the space so densely that I felt the air like cloth against my face, I had to support myself along the wall and feel my way to the empty hammock. I leaned against it to swing myself up, and that was hard enough with the light on and dead calm, and even more difficult now.
“Is that you?” whispered Klara. “Are you ill?”
“I must be.”
“I’m quite all right, isn’t that weird?” she said. “I was always sick before. It must be those schnapps.”
I did not reply. If I lay right back with my eyes open and did not move, I didn’t feel too bad.
“Hey,” whispered Klara, “can I ask you one thing?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Are you going to have a baby?”
“Why do you ask that?”
“Because you keep on stroking your stomach, and I thought, unless that lady has a damn awful pain in her stomach, she must be expecting a baby. My sister did the same thing when she was pregnant. She didn’t even realize she was doing it.”
I didn’t realize it either. I stroked my stomach in the dark and felt quite sure there was something there, and I had been so confident the whole time and so full of expectation, but now I could not remember why. Maybe it was the night, and this darkness and the sea out there with no light from anywhere, only gray black in one huge abyss and the ship so frail and weightless and far away from everything.
“Yes,” I said, “I’m going to have a child.”
“That explains everything,” said Klara, “now you mustn’t bother me any more. I need to sleep.” Then she was quiet and perhaps she slept, and the creaking went on and the sound of the sea thumping against the ship, but the hammock followed gravity more than the movements of the boat, and it was like hanging in the middle of a wheel with the whole world spinning around and around, and I lay quite still.
I was awake and up on deck before Skagen. It was still dark with a pale gray streak in the direction of Sweden, and I stayed there till I saw the lighthouse in front, and I stood by the rail as we passed and let myself be dazzled. The sea was calmer now, the seagulls following us hung over the ship completely still and gray and unmoving as if they were tied to invisible threads, and when the beam of light came they were suddenly white and so close that if I stood on tiptoe I was sure I could stroke the feathers under their breasts.
I stood there until the lighthouse disappeared to the north and only the flashes came each time the beam pointed at the ship’s course, and then I went int
o the cafeteria. I sat there for an hour before Klara came up with her hair in chaos, and the ship turned toward land around Hirsholmene, and I saw the lights of the town and Pikkerbakken faintly in the gray light behind the houses and the lights of the breakwater, red and green alternately, and the masts in the fishing harbor and the corn silo and the church with the bell like a golden spot in the tower. The tugboat came thumping toward us from inside the harbor, and Klara sat down beside me and said:
“I get really melancholy when I arrive at a new place like this. Don’t you?”
“Not exactly,” I said, “this is my town. I was born and brought up here.”
“So you’re home, then.”
Home, I thought, where is that. I gazed at the quay and the few people there, but it was still too far away to distinguish one from another in the gray light that made all the colors melt together.
“Then you will be met and everything. I’m quite alone, I am. But that’s what I wanted, of course.”
“We’ll see,” I said.
There was no one there to meet me. I didn’t know what to think. Everything was familiar, and everything was strange. Klara walked away from the ship with me. We each carried our suitcases along the inner quays where fish boxes with holes in them were immersed in the water with the live catch inside, and two fishermen pulled the net from its roll in their boat and out over the quay in one big fan, I saw there were tears in it and loose threads in several places. They wore big boots and oilskin trousers with wide braces and thick jumpers and caps of the same material. One of them had bare hands. It was cold, and they were painfully red and swollen from the freezing wind and water, and I felt uncomfortably neat and different in Aunt Kari’s coat as we walked past. Klara turned and stared and could not stop staring and almost walked backward up to the Cimbria Hotel.
“Christ. I’ll be meeting that sort of man every day. Just look at them,” she said, but I didn’t want to turn around.