The End of the Ocean

Chapter 7 SIGNE

It’s easy to find out where he lives. Some things have actually become easier and he clearly hasn’t made any attempt to hide it, the address is posted on several sites on the internet.

I look through the maritime maps, I have what I need, having sailed these waters before, so I quickly undo the mooring lines, start the engine and leave Ringfjorden, gliding through silent, pitch-black water.

It’s as if I can feel the ice. The helm of Blue seems heavier under my hand, the distribution of weight is different and it infiltrates my body, as if the locus of my own center of gravity had also shifted. It feels like the boat is lying low in the water, but that can’t be right—a couple of hundred kilos is nothing compared to the boat’s 3.5 tons, it can’t be enough to produce this change.

Painful shocks tingle through my fingers, the warmth in them starting to return. I have put on gloves, thick knitted gloves, threadbare on the fingertips, it was Mom who knitted them, she struggled for months with these gloves; I can’t remember her ever knitting anything else, they are water- and wind-resistant, wool keeps you warm even when it’s wet.

I put my foot carefully on the throttle and press it slowly towards the floor, letting the engine run at the highest rotational speed I think it will withstand. I don’t raise the sail. I make do with the engine, the iron sail. The night is calm, the ocean lustrous, and nonetheless I must get away, quickly, before somebody discovers what I have done.

The mountains flatten out as I approach the ocean. I remember this fjord being long, the trip out taking an eternity. It was almost meaningless to try to make it all the way to open sea, too much for one day, I remember thinking, even though that was also all I wanted, to get out.

For some people the mountains are a security blanket. They wrap themselves up in them, pull them over their heads to hold them in place. Magnus was like that, they made him feel calm, he said. I never understood how he could think like that, because they loomed over me, I could feel their presence even when I was a child—the heaviness, the weight of them.

That feeling only released its grip at higher altitudes. Daddy used to take me up into the mountains, ever since I was small, just him and me, to the glacier, to the Sister Falls, and up there, when I was with him, I could breathe.

Had it been up to me we would have gone hiking every single day, Daddy and I. He stopped all the time to show me plants, insects or animals, point out small things on the ground, or birds, no more than specks way up in the sky, which I never would have noticed without his help.

We often followed the river up to the mountain.

He loved the River Breio, that was what had brought him here. He came to Ringfjorden as a young student. He was going to write a long dissertation about the freshwater pearl mussel, Margaritifera margaritifera, an unassuming small species that lived partially hidden between stones and gravel at the bottom of the river. He told me that the larvae pass through a parasitic juvenile phase, maturing in the gills and fins of salmon and trout, while the adult mussel filter-feeds on microorganisms, and in this way also cleans the river for the surrounding environment.

“That tiny creature can live more than a hundred years,” he said, his eyes shining. “Think about it, Signe, once it has been created, it lives longer than a human being. Irreplaceable for the entirety of its lifetime.”

The first time he came to the village, he stayed at a hotel and by breakfast time on the second day he had already noticed Iris, the daughter of the hotel owner, and she noticed him. They quickly became an item. Bjørn and Iris were their names, names that went so well together, I remember thinking. Bjørn, meaning bear, a huge, powerful animal that lumbers heavily through the world, and Iris, a fragile, slender blossom, deeply rooted in one place. But actually, it should perhaps be the opposite; she should have had his name, he should have had hers.

It had apparently been beautiful, what they had, during the initial period, the first years, but then it grew ugly. Nothing is uglier than something that once was beautiful.

For Daddy the hate that sprang up in him lasted for the rest of his life. He never forgave her for taking the river away from him.

I think I know when it began, at least I know when it began for me, but maybe they had already been talking about the development project for a long time, during the late-night hours, in angry, whispering voices that didn’t awaken me, they must have done that, but all I remember is the day she came home and told us that the development project had been approved.

I think he had a deadline, an article that he was supposed to write, because he was sitting bent over the typewriter out on the porch—he liked working out there, in the fresh air. I envied him that typewriter, what he accomplished on it—all the words, sentences that unfurled onto the paper before him, the speed of his fingers hitting the keys, the letters on the type bars knocking against the paper—and then I pushed my way onto his lap and said that I wanted to type as well.

He let me, as he so often did, but the rhythm wasn’t the same when I typed, the sound didn’t travel through the house, the letters didn’t turn into sentences, it took such a long time. I had only just learned how to combine letters into words, so I searched and searched with my index finger.

Besides, Daddy’s lap was hard and his legs restless. He had put his feet on the floor so his thighs sloped forward and I was always on the verge of sliding off. But I tensed the muscles in my body and just kept going.

“There,” he said, finally. “Now you’ve tried. Now I have to get back to work.”

“No,” I said. “I want to write a story.”

“That’s enough for now,” Daddy said.

“No,” I said.

But he lifted me off the chair and gave me a quick hug, as if to apologize, and I held him tight. His beard stubble scraped against my cheek, but I still wanted the hug to last.

“Let go of me now, Signe.”

“I want to write,” I said.

“You must listen to me now,” he said.

“BUT I WANT TO WRITE WITH YOU,” I shouted, right into his ear.

“Ow! Signe!”

He took hold of me and set me firmly down on the floor.

“You can’t scream into people’s ears like that.”

“WHY NOT?”

“You will ruin their hearing. The ear is a finely tuned organ that we have to take care of. Just a single loud noise can injure the ear. Your hearing will never be better than it is now. You must take care of your hearing. Both your own and that of others.”

“Oh.”

Daddy turned back to the typewriter and quickly found a sheet of paper and a pencil.

“Look here. Write something for me,” he said. “Then we can spend some time together later.”

“About what?”

“Write about what you see.”

But I didn’t move.

“There are titmice on the bird table,” he said. “Write about them. What kinds do you see, what do they eat, how are they doing now during the spring?”

“Why?”

“Afterwards I can help you with the Latin names.”

I got to work and composed several lists that day, writing down the names of small animals on the shore, seabirds in the sky, weeds in the garden, insects by the brook, but the writing of my lists went slowly and I envied Daddy his typewriter because if I had it, I thought, I could have written just as much as he did, just as fast, just as powerfully. I would collect the entirety of nature on the pages, just the way he did, and maybe one day somebody would even publish what I had written, the way his texts came back in thick journals, so everyone could read them.

He never got around to helping me with the Latin names because soon it was dinnertime and Mommy came home with big news.

She told us over dessert, delivered the news into our lives as if it were something we should eat covered with cream.

“Today it was finally approved,” she said. “They’re going to install a pipeline to channel the River Breio.”

I didn’t understand the meaning of what was said, not then, but I saw that she was smiling, that she thought this was good news. However, she didn’t say anything more and I realized that she was unsure about the kind of response she would get from Daddy.

“What?” was all he said, as if he hadn’t heard her words.

And he put his spoon down on his plate, even though it was still full of whipped cream and applesauce.

“It was approved,” Mommy said.

“But it wasn’t supposed to come up for a vote until the next city council meeting.”

“We had it approved today.”

“That can’t be right.”

“Bjørn, this is what everyone wants.”

He got to his feet, the plates on the table rattled. He shouted something: ugly words, words I wasn’t allowed to use.

But she spoke calmly, in the same voice she sometimes used with me. “People have been working for this since the 1920s.”

“But don’t they understand what they have?” he shouted. “What the river is?”

“That’s exactly what they do understand. It’s an incredible opportunity. A whole new start for Ringfjorden.”

“A new start?”

He spit the words out, as if they nauseated him.

She spoke a bit more, in the same calm voice.

He tried to respond in a subdued tone of voice, but failed.

And now her voice rose, too. The words flew back and forth between them, faster and faster, louder and louder.

There was something strange about the whipped cream—it was too thick, almost butter. Else, the housekeeper, must have forgotten about it, whipped it for too long. It coated the inside of my mouth and throat like a cloying membrane and I stood up without excusing myself from the table, because they wouldn’t have heard it anyway, the way they were screaming.

They didn’t notice that I’d left them, that I hadn’t even finished my dessert.

I walked through the parlor, into the dayroom, but the sound of their voices followed me. I opened the door to the porch—out here there must be another sound that could drown them out, birds or waves on the fjord, but there was no wind and no birds were singing and I could still hear their voices.

Then I discovered the typewriter. Daddy had abandoned it. The sun was shining, and when I ran my finger over the typewriter the metal was warm.

They didn’t see me out here, didn’t hear me. I sat down at the table. Daddy had left a blanket there, protection from the spring wind. I wrapped it around me and turned to face the typewriter.

I lifted both index fingers and lowered them to hit the letters. The A was beside the S, the R and the T were side by side. The P was at the top on the right, as if the alphabet came to an end there.

I can write a story, I thought, a story about elves and princesses, something magnificent and beautiful that I can present at school and everyone will love it, or something I can save and keep working on, and it will bring me glory and honor while I am still very young, make me a famous author.

I wanted to write a story, but I could only ever write about what I saw, back then as now. I could only write what I heard, because the sounds from inside the house grew louder, they grated on me, like the wind, like the cold or a storm, the words thundered through the porch door and it was impossible to write anything else.

Power company, I wrote.

Guests, I wrote.

Future, I wrote.

“The freshwater mussel will die out,” Daddy cried.

Die, I wrote, as quickly as I could. Die, died, have died.

“And the water ouzel, it lays its eggs by the river.”

A water ouzel, the water ouzel, several water ouzels, all the water ouzels.

“It’s just water,” Mommy screamed. “But it can be converted into electricity, it can create jobs. It can bring life to the village.”

“You’re just thinking about the hotel,” Daddy shouted.

“The hotel is what we live on. Have you forgotten that? Not your underpaid journal articles.”

“But this is the River Breio!”

“It’s just water.”

Water, I wrote. One water, the water, several waters, all the waters.

No. All the water.

Nobody heard me typing, how quickly I was typing, suddenly, how adept I had become at finding the letters.