The Blue Place

ten

We were packed and eating our second breakfast, this time in the hotel dining room, when the hire company delivered the car and phone. I had the driver bring the papers and phone to our table. I finished the smoked salmon while Julia called Edvard Borlaug to give him the number and tell him where we’d be, “Just in case.” When she was done, I talked to Tante Hjørdis, who said she would be delighted to see us on our way out of the city.

I pushed the food aside. “We should leave room. She said we can’t be there for an hour. She’s making koldt bord.”

“Does that mean what it sounds like it means?”

I nodded. “She always makes the same things, and always the same amount—whether she expects a horde or just two people.”

While Julia oversaw the transfer of our luggage into the car, I checked us out. I had the absurd urge to lean confidentially towards the desk clerk and tell him what a marvellous day it was; to tip everyone obscenely; to sing. I restrained myself.

The sun was hidden behind low grey cloud, but the world was still a bright and exciting place. The Audi was about two years old but its four-wheel drive did not seem to have been much abused, though the sedate drive to Ulleval Hageby at the prescribed fifty kilometers per hour was not an exacting test. Julia’s hand rested on my thigh as I headed into the suburb.

We parked just down the street. Julia climbed out of the car and looked up into the trees. “Is it my imagination or have the leaves grown in the last three days?”

They were bigger. Julia was beautiful beneath them.

I knocked. Tante Hjørdis opened the door and hugged me. Just as she was stepping back she stopped and held me out at arm’s length to study for a while. Then she let go and shook hands vigorously with Julia. She gave Julia the same extra moment’s scrutiny, then opened the door wide, and said over her shoulder as she headed for the kitchen, “The sauce needs watching.” Inside, the table groaned with food, and the scent of fish and sauce drifted through from the kitchen. We followed it to find Tante Hjørdis stirring a tiny saucepan with a wooden spoon that had been old before I was born, adding flour, pouring cream. In another pan, round white balls bobbed in boiling water.

“Fiskeboller,” Hjørdis said to Julia. “Pass me the cream, please.” Then, in Norwegian, “Aud, you can unload the tray in the dining room and bring it out.” I did. “Coffee,” she said, which is coffee in any language. I filled the kettle and put it on the modern halogen stove to heat.

Julia was now stirring the sauce while Hjørdis fished the fish balls out of the water with a slotted spoon. “Norwegians make good spouses,” she said out of nowhere. “Tidy, sensible, efficient. If you plan and budget and work hard—but not too hard the way you Americans do—life is steady and pleasant. There! We’re ready to eat.”

We started with the spekesild. Julia seemed to enjoy it. She told Tante Hjørdis her idea about a children’s enclave at the Olsen Glass sculpture garden. Hjørdis put her fork down.

“Now, if he and his family were proper Norwegians, they wouldn’t be making so much profit that they had to spend it on gardens. Money, everything is money these days. Oat flour costs twice as much today as it did two years ago. Twice. And do you know how much these Greenland prawns”—gesture to the shrimp lying abjectly in their mayonnaise—“cost? And work! Work, work, work. I call your mother, Aud, and I say, ‘When do you come to visit?’ and she says, ‘Oh, Hjørdis, there’s no time for a visit,’ as though it’s me who is being foolish. No time for family. Imagine that. But at least you have come to visit. And you have brought Julia.”

We ate salad and thinly shaved reindeer meat. Julia asked Hjørdis what she did with her day when she wasn’t preparing delicious lunches for guests. Hjørdis snorted. “I work with young people—and not so young—who should know better. Those who…” She looked to me for the English phrase.

“Drug addicts.”

Julia looked only mildly surprised, but her right leg, lying close against mine under the table, jerked.

“I help with the…” Another look.

“Needle-exchange programme,” I supplied.

“Yes, and facts about AIDS. Though they know more than I do, I’m sure. Personal knowledge.” For a moment, her ruddy face stilled but then, with native pragmatism, she shook the sympathy away. “And I represent them, no”—this to me, as I opened my mouth again—“I advocate on their behalf with social services and so on. A lot of work, though less in summer. All this is since I retired, of course. Before, I used to work in a chemist…a pharmacist’s.”

“She was the pharmacist at Jernbanetorgets Apotek.”

“Yes. It stayed open all night. I didn’t have to work at night, of course, I could have asked one of the younger people, but it is only fair for everyone to take their turn sometimes. That’s when I met all the young people, so thin, so pale. So sad….” Again, that head shake. “Come along. The fiskeboller will be getting cold.”

We ate the fish balls. Soft and milky, so unlike anything else.

“You used to get that look on your face when you were only as tall as this table,” Hjørdis said, smiling. She turned to Julia. “She and her mother used to come here every Saturday for my koldt bord, and every holiday.” Sometimes my father came, too, but not often. “And Aud, who was sometimes not a well-behaved child, would try to steal some fiskeboller before we’d even eaten our salads. Eat, eat. I made enough for two helpings. But save some room, there is still the cheese, and dessert.”

We started on the cheese. Julia and I sat so close our arms rubbed together when we reached for the crackers or the nuts. Her leg was still against mine. I retold the story of the Nigerian heroin ring I’d heard from Taeko.

“Now, we need berries for the dessert. Aud”—I stood; it had always been my job, from the time I was seven or so and strong enough to carry up the big glass jars from the cellar—“a jar of…” she looked from me to Julia and back again, “the molte, I think. Yes, the special molte,” she repeated with a certain satisfaction.

I hadn’t been in Tante Hjørdis’s cellar for years. As a child it had been a wonderland: past the laundry with stone troughs, which I imagined might have been used during the war to cut up captured Nazis; past the mysterious sheeted shapes in the storage room; to the cavern of treasures, a long room, narrow and dry, lined with row after row of shelves, each bending under the weight of pickled gherkins and canned tomatoes, of sauces and preserved berries, that glowed with muted colour—red and gold and emerald—like precious jewels under the dust of centuries. I ran my hand along the shelves, remembering being eight, fourteen, nineteen…. It was different. It took me a moment to work out that the difference was illumination: the single, swinging bare bulb of my childhood had been replaced by two halogen floor lights. It only made the colours richer.

The last four jars of special molte were on the top shelf. I’d heard the story of their picking: during the war, when there was no sugar to be had, she had picked them and put them whole into two-litre jars with fresh water only, sealed them, and put them in a cold stream to chill. I expected to have to stand on tiptoe to reach the big jars, but that was a child’s memory; the top shelf barely came to my chin. I lifted one down, held it to the light. Fifty years old. They looked like golden raspberries. Perhaps Hjørdis exaggerated for effect and they were indeed preserved in sugar or some kind of syrup, or perhaps there was just a kind of magic in her cellar, where time and dreams stood still. I would not have been surprised to find myself three feet tall again, with both front teeth missing.

When I got back upstairs, Julia and Hjørdis were in the kitchen; Julia poured coffee into cups, Hjørdis whipped the cream.

“You always did spend a long time in that cellar, even as a child,” she said, when she saw me standing there with the jar. “Bring that through to the dining room.”

I put the jar on a placemat. Hjørdis, still standing, put one hand on the glass lid and the other around the wooden handle on the wire fastening. She pulled, then pulled again more firmly. “You have to seal them tight,” she said. She had told me when I was a child that sometimes the rubber lining between lid and jar started a chemical reaction with the fruit and fused to the glass. She was having none of that. She put her strong back into it, and the lid came free with an audible pop. I shut my eyes and breathed. Lazy late summer sun, warm grass, the cold, bitter scent of the glacier half a mile away. Hjørdis ladled a good pile into a metal bowl and took it back into the kitchen. Over the sound of the food mixer, I said to Julia, “These are molte. Called cloudberries in English. Families guard the location of their favourite patch as closely as national secrets. More closely.” I dipped one out with a spoon. It lay, still and golden and perfectly formed in its pool of liquid. I held it out. “This is how your hair smells.”

“Ah-ah,” said Tante Hjørdis from the doorway, “don’t eat that. The only way to taste cloudberries for the first time is in Angel’s Stew.” She put the bowl of sweetened whipped cream and berries on the table and plucked the spoon from my hand. “Aud, dish that out while I go get the coffee, as Julia seems to have forgotten to bring it with her.”

We sat. I dished the delicious mixture into three small bowls. “The last time Tante Hjørdis brought out her special molte was when my cousin Uta brought her fiancé to lunch with the family and then announced she had already married him that morning. She brought out a jar, too, when my mother married my father, though she told me once she should have known he would leave her and regretted ever letting him taste them.”

Julia’s hand was cool and soft on mine. “She will never have cause to regret this.” A statement of fact. She will never have cause to regret this. The sun will rise in the east and set in the west. Two and two is four.

We took E16 north. Julia drove. “At least they drive on the same side of the road we do, even if we do have to keep to this snail pace.”

“You can go up to eighty a little farther on, and past that, ninety.”

“What’s that in real money?”

“Fifty and fifty-six miles an hour.”

Pensive silence. “How far is it?”

“About two hundred and fifty kilometers. But the last fifty are on very small roads.”

“The road gets smaller?”

As she got used to the car, and traffic thinned, she relaxed. “So, now I’ve eaten Tante Hjørdis’s cloudberries.”

“Yes.”

“She’s pretty smart.”

“When I was little, I used to believe she knew what I was thinking.”

“That’s just guilt. I used to think that about my mother whenever I’d done something wrong.” The city was behind us now and we began to gain altitude. The speedometer needle inched forward. She looked at me sideways. “When we get back to Atlanta, I’ll have to introduce you properly to my mother.”

“Properly?”

“You’ve met her, you know. Twice.”

Sitting in Julia’s office, feeling like a child in a friend’s house, waiting for them to come out and play….

“Annie,” I said. “Annie Miclasz…” She nodded. “I wondered why you never called her Annie. Always ‘Mrs. Miclasz.’ Did you know she asked me if I was dating?”

“No! Did she?”

“More or less. Told me carefully how you liked your coffee. Just in case I needed to know, I suppose. Watch the road, please. So, what’s it like working with your mother?”

“Good, usually. She’s been working for me for about four years. She used to be an office manager with GE but when she remarried six—no, god, it’s more like ten years ago now—she didn’t have to work. But she got bored, so when I left Boston and moved back to Atlanta to start my business, I offered her a job. It was more to prod her into getting a life, you know. I never dreamed she’d actually say yes and work for me.”

“She’s very good at her job.”

“Do I hear the word ‘formidable’ lurking in the background?”

“Maybe.”

“Well, you charmed her socks off.”

“It was quite deliberate.” I put my hand on her thigh. Muscle bunched and relaxed as she speeded up to pass an ancient Volvo then slowed again to eighty kph. We passed a sign for Hønefoss. “The road is going to fork in a kilometer or so. Highway 7 on the left, 16 on the right. Take the right.”

I tried the radio. There was a lot of jazz, of course, two classical stations, and a Norden pop station pumping out thin, metallic stuff like recarbonated generic cola. Then I found Radio Norway. They were playing a folk tune I remembered from my early childhood, with simple words and handheld percussion. It was the first time I’d heard it sung by adult voices. I sang along.

“What’s it about?”

“A troll who lives under a bridge.” I translated as I sang. Julia laughed at the troll’s stupidity.

Now that we were past the fork in the highway, Julia’s interpretation of the speed limit was liberal. When we drove the twenty miles along the vast lake of Sperillen, I turned the radio off. Unlike a fjord, it was not sheltered by the steep plunge of mountains, and its gray-green waters were choppy. So different from the artificially flooded valley that had formed Lake Lanier just north of Atlanta—where during dry summers the stumps of trees and drowned homes occasionally ripped the bottom out of pleasure boats driven too fast by their too-young, too-stupid owners who saw a water as a surface, a water road, unaware of depths and currents and the life that dwelt there.

North of Sperillen, we started to climb. The river on our right, the Begna, began to tumble and show white here and there.

Julia glanced from the road to the river. “Does anything live in there?”

“Trolls. Trolls live everywhere in this country. There are homes here where if you say, ‘Faen tar deg’—‘The devil take you’—or ‘Fy faen’—which is ‘Shoo, devil!’—you won’t be invited again, nor will your friends. Words associated with the devil are trollskap, trollmagic. They open the boundary between this world and magic, and no good will come of it. These days, city people will laugh if you talk about trollmagic—but only if it’s during the day and it’s summer. Away from the city, they don’t laugh at all. When you see the fjells and the fjords, you’ll understand. This country’s bones and flesh are made of rock and its blood is the ice-cold water of glacier melt. The world is a dark place, and three of the four seasons are winter: autumn winter, high winter, and spring winter. The summer, with its green trees, lush grass, flowers and berries, is a very thin skin over the realities. During mørketiden, when candlelight flickers on the walls and half the country hasn’t seen the sun for a month, trolls walk the streets and grin at sleepers in their dreams.”

“Tell me a troll story.”

“The Billy Goats Gruff is a troll story.”

“Tell me another one.”

I considered. “When I was eight, I had tonsillitis. I had a fever that came and went and I didn’t sleep well. The line between reality and dream was strange and wavery. One night, when I felt as though I had been awake for years and my throat hurt so much I couldn’t swallow, my mother came and sat on my bed in the dark. She stroked my head. ‘A thousand years ago,’ she said, ‘in Oppland there was a family, a hardworking man called Tors and his strong-minded wife, Astrid, and their sandy-haired daughters Kari and Lisbet, better off than most….’”

I was surprised at how easily the rhythms of that long-ago night came back, how drenched through it was with all things Norwegian, complete of itself and needing no adapting. Julia was a good listener. It began to rain. Julia found the windshield wipers and the headlights. I settled back and, in my mother’s words, told her how Tors had hired a man named Glam as winter shepherd.

Glam was a master of herding: the sheep seemed terrified of him, and all he had to do was call out in his terrible hoarse voice and they huddled at his direction. One night, while Glam was out with the sheep, the snow flurries became a blizzard. No man could step forth and live. That night, Lisbet had strange dreams of dark shapes battling in the snow on the fjellside.

In the morning the family woke to find that Glam had not returned. They walked up the mountain and found him in a bloody, levelled place. His skin was mottled and bloated, as though he had been dead a long, long time. Huge tracks, the size of barrel hoops, filled with frozen blood, led off to a deep and narrow gully. “Troll tracks,” said Astrid. She peered into the gully, looked at the blood, and said, “Nothing, not even a troll, could have survived that.”

They tried to move Glam’s body, but it was as if his bones had turned to stone and he would not shift. In the end they covered him with stones where he lay.

Three days later, Lisbet woke in the middle of the night and ran to her mother. “Glam walks in my dreams!” The next morning, they found a dog—or what was left of a dog—on the stoop.

Astrid went to Tors. “Glam is not easy in his grave. You must burn him, husband.”

But upon toiling up the mountain with faggots and tallow, and heaving aside the stones, they found nothing. Astrid said, “The troll lives in his bones and walks abroad wearing his skin, even under the sun.”

And as the nights grew longer, Glam spread terror: running on the rooftops until the beams buckled, rolling great boulders down the fjell, crushing the spirit of men and driving cattle mad.

Now, it happened that at this time, a ship came into the fjord and Grettir the Strong, who was tired of adventuring in foreign lands, heard of Tors of Torsgaard and his dead shepherd, Glam. He went to Torsgaard and saw Kari milking the cow, saw how her sandy hair turned to gold in a shaft of rare winter sunshine, and agreed to stay and deal with Glam, for he was curiously unwilling to leave Kari Torsdottir to the anger of the troll.

On the eve of his first night, Astrid gave him a plan.

And so, as the sun went down that evening, Tors found himself strangely sleepy and he snored. Astrid directed Grettir to pick up her husband and bundle him into the bed at the far end of the hall, away from the passage that led to the door. Then she dressed Lisbet in her warmest clothes, and the two of them stole out to hide in the barn. Then there was only Kari and Grettir. They stood opposite each other by the hearth. Grettir, forgetting himself in his fear for her, took her by the hand. “It’s not too late to hide with your mother and sister.”

“You will need me,” she said. “We must bring Glam inside.”

When the embers began to die, Kari lay down on the wall-bed by the inglenook. Grettir wrapped himself like a sausage in an old, heavy fur cloak and settled himself on the wall bench opposite Kari’s bed. In front of the bench was a bench beam, a huge ancient thing set into the floor when the farm was built. He set his feet against it and straightened his legs so he was firmly braced between the beam and the wall. And then they waited.

Sudden as an avalanche, something leapt onto the roof and thundered about, driving down with its heels, until the new beam buckled and splintered and the roof almost fell in. Glam. The walls shook and Glam jumped down, and the earth trembled as he strode to the door. A sharp creak as he laid his huge horny hand on the door and suddenly it was ripped away, lintel and all, and moonlight briefly lit the hearthroom before Glam blocked out all light as he thrust his huge head through. The whites of his strange eyes gleamed like sickly oysters, and Grettir felt his heart fail him.

“Glam,” said Kari. “If you want me, I will come with you, but I must have a bearskin to lie on. Bring that old cloak on the bench by the fire. I’ll wait for you outside.”

Glam strode over to the sausage-shaped bundle of fur and tried to pick it up with one hand. Grettir was braced and ready. He made no sound and the fur did not move. Glam pulled harder, but Grettir braced his feet more firmly. Glam grunted, and laid two hands on the bundle, and now a titanic struggle began. Grettir was dragged towards the door. Finally, with a furious wriggle, he eeled around in Glam’s grip until his back was to the awful face and bull-like chest. He dug his heels against the threshold stone and with a strength that was equal parts fear, determination and desperation he leaned in towards the last breath of warm, indoor air. As Glam hauled backwards with all his might, so, too, did Grettir thrust backwards, and his last strength and the inhuman force of Glam’s heave hurled them both outside. Glam, with Grettir still clutched to his breast, landed spine down across a rock. The loud crack of his backbone parting would live in Grettir’s mind for the rest of his days. And then Glam spoke, hoarse and horrible in his ear.

“You will live, Grettir the Strong, but you will never be the same. You will always look into the dark and see my face, hear my voice, and know I will come for you. You may kill me, but I will live on in your mind.” And the troll laughed, dark and full of wickedness. At the laugh, Grettir sprang to his feet, pulled free his sword, and swung. Glam’s head, like some vile rock, rolled free, and Grettir did not laugh, but wept.

They burnt Glam right there, outside the hall. And then they burnt the ashes. And when the ashes were cold they were gathered in the torn cloak and wrapped tight, and Astrid saw to it that it was thrown into a chasm, and huge boulders hurtled down on top of it.

Torsgaard celebrated all day and into the evening, but eventually the fire dwindled and the torches were doused. Everyone slept. In the middle of the night, Kari was woken up by a strange noise, like a child crying. It was Grettir, trying to light a torch and rocking back and forth. “He will come for me. He will come for me.”

“He is dead, beloved.”

“I am all alone and he will come for me!”

“You will never be alone again.” But he would not hear her, he just rocked and rocked, back and forth.

And the story goes that though Kari stayed by his side every living minute and married him not long after, his fear grew worse and he began to rock back and forth and light torches even in the daytime. In the end, they say he ran out, barking mad, and Kari was left without a husband and the hall at Torsgaard gradually declined. No flowers ever grew in the chasm where they had thrown Glam’s ashes.

“Kids around here must have strange dreams,” Julia said finally. “So the moral of the story is that the troll will always get you in the end.”

“Even if you think you’ve won. Just like the land itself.” I peered through the rain, which seemed to be easing. “We’re in Oppland now.”

“It certainly looks like troll country.”

Just to prove her wrong, the rain stopped, and above and ahead wind thinned the clouds, sending them fleeing in tatters over the endless coarse grass and wildflowers. “The road gets narrower here.”

“Your turn to drive.”

We stopped the car and got out. The air was as cool and fresh as dew-laden grass. Julia stretched by the left-hand side of the road and I put my arms around her from behind. I kissed the back of her neck and she rested against me and we looked out over the uplands. A perfect rainbow arched over the undulating ground.

“You can see both ends,” she said.

“There are fairies as well as trolls in this country.”

We got back in the car. I rolled my window down. “It reminds me of the Yorkshire Moors,” I said as I drove. “They stretch like this for miles. Every mile or so, in the wilder parts, there are these waist-high stone walls that form a circle with a section cut out. When I was eight years old, I thought they were windbreaks the farmers had built for their poor sheep. I had visions of little friendly groups of the woolly creatures huddling behind the walls while the world turned white with snow, and the nice farmers driving along in their wagons and unloading hay and turnips and other sheep treats. When I was a teenager, I found out they were hides for pheasant hunters. Beaters walk the moor in a line, whacking at the brambles and heather while His Lordship and his weekend friends crouched behind the wall with their matched Purdeys and silver hip flasks, waiting for the birds to burst out in a rush of frantically beating brown and cream feathers. In spring and summer it’s green and dotted with tiny wildflowers. Autumn turns it into a haze of purple heather. Then the farmers burn it off and it turns into a blasted heath, desolate and destroyed. It stays that way all autumn and into the first hard frost of winter. Then there’s the wonderful, softening white blanket, and by spring it all starts up again. It can be hard to believe that anything could come to grief in such a lovely place, but every year hikers die there. They forget that the world can hurt them. They wear silly little English T-shirts and street shoes and think a bar of chocolate is all the emergency equipment they need. Norwegians don’t die out here, because they understand. They know about trolls.”

“Do you think hobbits are the tame English version?”

The sun was bright now, and the air seemed thinner. We were the only car on the road. As Julia talked, I watched her. I could not imagine driving this road without her in my car. I could not imagine going back to Atlanta without her turning restlessly in the plane seat next to mine. I could not imagine how things would have been if I hadn’t turned that corner in Inman Park.

At Tyinkrysset I turned off the highway and five kilometers along the unmarked surface I pulled off the road.

“Where are we?”

“The lake below is Tyin.”

“My god, it’s green.”

“Glacier water.” But that was not why I had stopped. “Look north.” We were above the tree line, and ahead lay a vast range of peaks, studded with green lakes and moraine-strewn flats. Jotunheimen, home of the giants. “This is my country. Before we enter it I want to tell you that I was wrong. If we were back in Atlanta, we might have something to worry about, but not now, not here. I think I was so uneasy because I didn’t know what was happening.” I took her hand. “I didn’t understand just how much I needed to be sure you were safe, or why. I just knew I felt vulnerable. Well, now I do understand. And we don’t have to think about Atlanta, about Honeycutt or his blackmailer anymore. They don’t know we’re here, and by now the police will have the situation well in hand. It’s time to leave it all behind.”

Her eyes were as blue and mysterious as the bottom of the ocean, her smile like the sun. “I left it all behind in Oslo, stepped out of it and left it in a crumpled heap on your bedroom floor.”