Breathless (13 page)

I
t was Papa's father who'd given him permission to go out. He who said that the ice was safe. Perfect ice to hammer a hole for burbot fishing. It had been an ordinary day at the beginning of winter. Mama's sister, who was only eight, had gone with him, the thirteen-year-old. He couldn't save her. The red jacket had slipped from her, just as a petal drops from a rose, without a sound. The red material floated in the hole in the ice long after she had been sucked under and disappeared into the center of the lake.

The ice hole where she drowned recurred constantly in Papa's dreams. The silence. He dreamed of silence—that the disaster was so silent and quick and calm was the most frightening thing of all. It was too late to do anything. To make a sound or even try to save her. He just stood there in the middle of the lake, alone.

There then followed a winter that would never end. They knew that she was there somewhere beneath the ice, her body drifting along the bottom, or perhaps it had stuck fast in the ice during the coldest nights. Only when the ice thawed, which happened unusually late that spring, did they find her. Preserved by the cold, naked except for her baptism cross. Identification was a formality but a nightmare nevertheless. Papa's parents went in place of Mama's, and Papa went too because his father thought he should. He stood a little apart and was upset that they showed her naked in the cold light of the room at the mortuary. To see her again . . . after all those months. Dead, answered Papa when I hesitantly asked what she looked like. And yet not dead. He was quite sure that he saw a movement in her pale eyelashes, but perhaps it was just something thawing—not enough to bring her back to life, but enough to cause a movement. It was his fault. No one needed to say it.

I was afraid of the wind openings—large open holes where the wind kept the water open, invisible to the eye, the most sinister traps in the ice. Sinkholes, gas holes, erosion holes. Warm currents that made the ice so fragile that it wouldn't even bear the weight of a tiny lynx out hunting. In late winter the sun could be so high that it penetrated the ice and melted the frozen water from below. The ice was a dangerous world that you needed to understand. As a child Papa had been forced to learn to read it—risks, bearing capacity, signs—but there were never any guarantees. Once-only ice could only stand one person walking over it—the next person tumbled through. That was how Mama's youngest sister had drowned. Papa had turned around and watched it happen without being able to do anything. The ice that a moment ago had supported him didn't support her, even though she was much lighter.

I followed close behind Papa's back. The mist drifted over the frozen water. We were father and daughter out hunting, right out toward the sun. Every so often I stopped behind him, took aim, and shot. When we heard the ice lowing we were well out on the lake. Appalled, I saw the fracture open up between his legs and mine, convinced that it would widen, separate us, swallow us up. But a glance at Papa's face told me that the ice would hold. The shots that went off beneath us just meant that the day was exceptionally cold and the ice thicker than usual and it was cracking because of temperature stresses. The warning noise of the thaw was quite different; you had to learn to hear the distinction.

There seemed to have been something special about Mama's sister even before she drowned, perhaps just that she was the youngest.

“As small as you, Lo, and yet she still fell through the ice I'd walked on a moment earlier. If she'd gone first she'd have been fine and I'd have drowned,” Papa said as we were standing right out in the deepest part. Once-only ice, nightmare ice. To be the death of someone else in that way, to want to protect but instead to weaken the ice so that it broke the minute the next person put her foot on it.

Salt ice, sweet ice, blue ice, glass ice, wreck ice, floe ice, diabase ice. Ice that looked like frozen carbon dioxide. Walking along I almost dozed off to his soothing voice, as he explained to me how the water was arranged in different layers, coldest uppermost in winter, warmest uppermost in summer. Papa knew just as much about the ice as Mama knew about the art of handling an ax. The drowning accident didn't make him afraid of ice. It was the depth that frightened him, the vertigo, the feeling of great height, a fear of falling that could strike at any time. But he still went out onto the ice as soon as it froze, set pike traps though there were hardly any fish here. He never asked me to come with him. Nor did he stop me when I put on my ski boots and followed.

It was mostly for the stories that I went with him. The stories belonged to the ice. About the dogs that were let loose during the polar bear hunt, still leashed together in pairs, and two by two they surrounded the quarry, which instinctively reared up in defense. Upright on its back legs the bear became an easy target for the hunters. When Papa described this to me I thought of his father, who in an upright position was as large as the animal from which he took his name. He and Papa didn't see eye to eye. It was something you just knew—that they were like dog and bear together.

“Were you really all born out of the ice?” I had gone around shaping this question until it had gotten soft and sweaty—that was the picture I had before me when Papa's mother said that she and Mama's mother gave birth to one child every winter. I imagined that they went out and pulled them up from a hole in the ice. But all at once Papa's desire to tell me things vanished into thin air.

“When we get home, tell your mother to explain how children are made. She can give you all the details.”

And she did. About the bakehouse that was next door to the house they lived in, and in the bakehouse there was a warm wall, and by the warm wall they had made a bunk bed, and to this bunk bed you could go if you wanted some time to yourself. This is where they had been made, one after the other. In the heat lost from the oven that was often newly lit, in the familiar smell of birchwood and barley flour. If you took a tub of butter with you, you could eat some of the leftover bits of bread if you were hungry afterward. And you were.

—

What about me, though? Where was I made? By the warm wall as well? Mama looked at me as she sat on the chopping block with the ax and the sharpener and answered that no, the bakehouse belonged to a different time and a different place.

The story of the day I was born had been related to me many times, but never how I was in fact made. Why them? The most ill-matched pair. Papa was a perfectly normal father, but Mama . . .

“Not by the warm wall, Lo. You were made under the sloping ceiling.”

Under the sloping ceiling? Was that the only answer she could think of? That explained nothing. There wasn't even a sloping ceiling in our house.

Certain memories are so clear that everything surrounding them seems blurred. It was late one evening several months after Papa had gone, with the hollow sound of the bittern's cry from down at the lake, a sound like blowing into an empty bottle. An invisible and sinister bird, I had only glimpsed it once, how it flew, heavy at the front, like a bird of prey over the quicksilver water.

I turned on the television to block out the eerie noise. Lying in Rikard's room on a bean bag on the floor and bored. The news. Blah, blah, blah. Lay so that I could watch the screen upside down to make it less boring.

Reporter struggling against the wind, raging storm with gusts of hurricane strength, camera lens so spotted with rain it was almost impossible to see anything, but I saw anyway . . . there in the background . . . I stared, lying upside down until all the blood collected in my head and burst. The ominous words
Alexander Kielland
suspended over everything, the whole disaster. The sea in complete tumult, huge waves. The legs had broken, the platform capsized, tipped over, turned upside down. And sank.

Everything had happened very fast. Most of the crew had fallen in and those who didn't fall threw themselves into the ice-cold sea. Why? Because everyone else did? Because there was a risk that the oil would begin to burn? But was the water not also full of leaking oil? Were they not going to drown in the thick black sticky soup like helpless seabirds? Without survival gear they wouldn't last many minutes in the cold, the reporter said, and anyway, what would that matter? When the sea began to burn. A burning sea. I crept nearer to the screen, tried to imagine a burning sea.

They didn't yet know how many had been killed. Their relatives would be informed before the names of the dead were released. I flung myself forward and switched off in the middle of the broadcast, strained to hear if there was a noise from downstairs, but the television was not on down there. There was only me who had heard what had happened. The appalling event. The oil rig disaster. Horrific words. And all of a sudden I was no longer in any doubt that Papa was there. I knew he was. If anyone was to have bad luck it was him. I ran. Down into the kitchen where Papa's mother and Mama were standing by the sink, scaling herrings. Buried my face in Grandmother's fishy apron, refused to tell them what had happened.

The next few days I wandered around in a shocked trance, a bittern in my head, its boom foreboding and echoing, day and night. No one said anything. As if the accident hadn't happened. As if none of them had heard about it, or they tried to keep me in the dark—how could they act so well? Eat and sleep and work as usual. Laugh as usual.

“If he was one of the ones who drowned, they would've told you,” Lukas assured me. If he had been one of the few who survived, they would also have told me. Silence could only mean the worst.

Days of disquieting normalcy ensued. The kitchen in cold sunlight, Mama chopping wood, Rikard and Katja stacking the wood, Erik and Marina washing the cars, Helena lying on the television sofa with her boyfriend, Jon arguing with his girlfriend on the phone, boyfriends and girlfriends coming and going—they never lasted long in this house. And there was Papa's mother putting the dishes in to soak, while his father had retired to the arboretum. Mama's mother was wiping down all the surfaces, touching things with light hands. In the evenings I crept down between Mama and Marina again, as I had when I was small, lay there with eyes wide open, while they appeared to sleep, a sleep as peaceful and deep as ever.

“Girl, you're going around and around like a dog about to have puppies. What is it?” Mama murmured in the darkness. I tried to say something about Papa, but I couldn't get the words out. “Think about something nice. Your birthday. Think about what you'd like. Shall we ask David to come?”

I twisted my head into the pillow. “Stop it! I know he's dead!”

Mama sat straight up in bed. “Pull yourself together. That wasn't funny.”

I buried my face deeper into the foam-rubber pillow. “Ask Grandfather!” I howled.

She grabbed me firmly by the hand and dragged me along the hallway in the cold of the night, down the black staircase to Papa's parents' room. Went in and fetched out a sleepy Grandfather for interrogation in the kitchen.

“Are you out of your mind? Have you told her that her father's dead? Have you no heart, no shame, are you mad?” she screamed at him. Grandfather looked as though he thought he was still dreaming, pressed up against the sink by the sheer force of Mama's voice. I slipped away to get the picture of the oil rig, the one that was no longer standing out there at sea but lying on the bottom, collapsed like a house of cards with 123 dead men. That was the final death toll Lukas had heard on the television and passed on to me. More had died than had survived, and Papa was like Lukas: if anyone was unlucky, it was him.

Before I entered the kitchen I heard Grandfather's voice. “What the hell should I have said, then? The child was asking and asking. Should I have told her that her father lives so close and still never comes to visit her because of—” Because of us, I thought he said, but just then he caught sight of me and swallowed the last bit.

The smell of his night sweat, salty like nettles. He lay on his back with his arms under his head, opened his eyes right next to my face. He had just fallen asleep, but not so deeply that he didn't hear my question. His eyes very dark blue with a circle of rust around the pupils.