The Dark Blue Winter Overcoat and Other Stories from the North

NOTES FROM A BACKWOODS SAAMI CORE ^{SIGBJØRN SKÅDEN}

NOTE 1

A creek.

The fireweed blossoms.

Nothing here is coincidental.

The fireweed is an intelligent plant that knows where the dirt is

rich on nitrogen.

Long roots fetch nourishment from the deep.

He who understands the fireweed can read off its stem

what is north and what is south.

Rarely do people know that the fireweed’s blossoms also can be white, like water lapping the stem of a moving boat.

NOTE 3

He’s got a washing machine that’s gone to hell. He takes out the drum, cuts off the top and puts it on a rack. Now he’s got a grill. When he tears down the old shed, he builds a wind-stopping wall out of the rubble.

NOTE 4

She looks at him smoking a fag. After a while she goes inside. She knits. A scarf with a message in Saami for mum. “Eadni, don leat máilmmi buorremus!” says the pattern. “Mum, you’re the best in the world!” Only one word is misspelt.

NOTE 5

It’s a few generations back. King-Jo stands on a hill overlooking the village. A mastodon of a man. He’s heard that the Swedish king himself will pass here with his cortège on his way to the coast. Jo’s brought two planks of wood onto this hill which has a good view in several directions. Now he just waits. Nobody in the village understands what he’s doing. Until now they’ve called him only Jo.

Then Jo sees a long cortège approaching in the distant. It can only be the king. Jo has never laid hands on an instrument, but he’s heard “God Save the King”. He picks up the two planks and starts banging them to the beat of the song so hard that the sound echoes throughout the parish. He keeps on doing this until the king’s cortège has passed and is out of sight. Then Jo walks down from the hill. Whether the Swedish king ever understood the tribute, nobody really knows.

NOTE 6

There’s an inherited pride in not buying new stuff, but rather making what you need out of what you already have. Here we call it making one’s own patent.

NOTE 7

Any car has potential value. Enough organ donors could in the end become a product. The organ-donor hoods remain lying around in the field encircling the house. No need to remove them, he says, they shimmer so nicely in the sun.

NOTE 10

His parents buy him new trainers while on holiday in Sweden. The shoes are blue and yellow. Among the kids in the village they are quickly nicknamed “the Swedish shoes”. The Swedish shoes are made from a stiff, synthetic material that proves unsuitable for soccer. To shoot the ball is impossible, it’s too painful. He can only lob it. In the course of that autumn and the following summer, until he finally grows out of the Swedish shoes, he develops a sophisticated lobbing technique. There is no situation he cannot lob his way out of. For all time he is the one who’s lobbed the highest penalty on the calves’ grazing field.

NOTE 12

Recipe for a boat trailer:

Buy a 30–40-year-old caravan.

Slash it all to smithereens with a chainsaw.

Dump everything apart from the undercarriage behind the barn.

NOTE 13

Greetings from the neighbour: Nothing colours the September sky like the sound of a chainsaw eating away at fibreglass and aluminium.

NOTE 14

The dead are here. With no drama, no conundrum, without being anything out of the ordinary, they are here.

NOTE 17

The floor of the community hall is about to cave in during the New Year’s party. He’s on the committee. Like all the others he’s drunk out of his mind. He sees only two possible solutions to the problem.

Option 1: Tell the villagers to stop jumping to the beat.

Option 2: Phone his grandfather in the middle of the night and tell him to get over there with some building materials quick as hell so they can emergency-reinforce the floor foundation.

He chooses option 2.

NOTE 19

Down by a place where two rivers meet there is a meadow. If the time is right, he who passes here will hear infants crying. These are the unwanted newborns, left here to die by a desperate father or mother. Every seventh year these children return to the place where they were abandoned.

We call them eahpádusak, human apocrypha trapped between existing and never having existed. That is why they return. That is why they cry. Only by performing an ancient baptizing ritual may all be alleviated. Only then will it all be over.

NOTE 21

“I wash the dishes the Saami way,” he says.

“How so?” says the anthropologist.

“It’s in the wrist,” he says. “But for people who are not so familiar with Saami culture it might seem like I do it exactly the same way as everyone else.”

NOTE 23

My coffin is slender, skinned trunks of willow, tightly bound.

My coffin is old postal bags, split and sewn to a snug cocoon.

My coffin is nightfall and the following day.

My coffin is the particularly roomy ski-box I got so cheaply in Sweden.

My coffin is a boat, with no sail, no oars, and the sky open above me.

My coffin is the wind, and entrusted men carry me onto the mount.

NOTE 24

Much later they arrived at a place. They viewed the land.

“This looks rather OK,” he says.

“Yeah,” she says.

“We’ll settle here,” he says.

“Yeah,” she says.