Nordnes

She slept that first night in a hotel on a hill, in a room the size of a closet, with a chair wedged under the doorknob and the window cracked an inch for the sound of the rain.

She paid in cash. The woman at the desk, who had gray plaits and a cardigan the color of oatmeal, looked at the notes and at the satchel and at the dead man’s coat, and at the swell under it, and said in English, “You are a long way from home,” and Corinne said, in Norwegian, “I’m told that’s the best kind,” and the plaits shook with laughter.

In the morning she took a bus. She did not know why she took a bus, except that it seemed a thing that a person with nothing to hide would do. It wound out of the city along the harbor, past the fish market, shuttered and glistening, and the old Hanseatic warehouses leaning together like drunks on the quay, and down a long street of wooden houses on a spit of land with water on three sides. Nordnes. She had remembered it, in the course of twelve years, as one remembers a smell. White clapboard, steep roofs, windows with lace. Little lanes that ran uphill at angles no sane architect had approved, each one ending in a view of gray sea. She got off at the end of the line and stood in the drizzle with her hand on her stomach, getting her bearings. Then she took a small lane on the left, very narrow, called Klosteret, and climbed.

The house was where it had always been. It was white, and tall, and slightly crooked, with green shutters, and a flight of seven stone steps up to a blue front door. There was a pot of dead geraniums on the second step. In the window beside the door a large orange cat sat on the sill like a sack of flour, gazing out at the weather with an expression of settled disapproval.

She had not thought what to say. She had had three days to think of it, and seven hours of train, and she had no idea.

She rang the bell.

It was a full minute before she heard the footsteps: slow, heavy, deliberate, with a stick. A bolt shot back. The blue door opened six inches, on a chain, and a face looked out at her. It was square and weathered, with a nose like the prow of a small boat and a mass of iron-gray hair pinned up anyhow with a pencil, and a pair of bright, shrewd, pale-blue eyes which went over her, from the soaking hat to the wet boots to the satchel, and stopped at the coat.

“Corinne Aldermere,” said Solveig Arneson. It was not a question. “Du er veldig våt.”

You are very wet.

Something in her chest gave way, quite quietly, like a knot being undone.

“Ja,” said Corinne. “Jeg vet.”

“Har du bagasje?”

“No. Only this.”

“Hm.” The eyes went to her stomach, and stayed there for a moment, and returned to her face. If Solveig Arneson thought anything, it did not appear. “Hvor lenge har du vært på reise?”

How long have you been traveling.

She tried to count. Friday night. Saturday. The lake. The long white road. She found that she could not.

“I need somewhere to stay,” she said, in Norwegian, as plainly as she knew how. It came out quite steady. “For a long time, maybe. I have money. I’ll pay. I can’t tell you why. Not yet. I can’t tell you who I’m afraid of, or whether I’m right to be. I don’t think you ought to open this door.”

The chain rattled. The door opened.

“Kom inn,” said Solveig. “You will eat first. Why, afterwards. Or never.” She stood aside on her stick. “It is a long time since anyone said I do not think you ought to open this door. I sold tickets on the Hurtigruten for thirty-seven years, my girl. Every person who ever bought a one-way ticket at my window had a reason, and not one of them wanted to say.”

* * *

She ate. It was fish soup, thick and yellow and tasting of the sea, with potatoes and carrots and a great deal of cream, and rye bread, and a plate of brown cheese cut in thin curls, which she had once found disgusting and now thought was the finest thing on earth. She ate three bowls. Solveig sat opposite with her stick between her knees and her chin on her hands, and the orange cat, whose name was Billett, climbed onto Corinne’s lap, turned round twice, and sat on her stomach with a heavy sigh.

“He is not usually friendly,” said Solveig. “He bites the postman.”

“Maybe he can tell.”

“Maybe.” She poured coffee. “I have a flat. Downstairs. The ground floor, through the garden, with its own door. My tenant left in August, a student, a noisy boy with a trombone. There is a bed, a stove, a table. The window is at the height of the grass. It is damp and a little dark, and you must be careful with the step.” She sipped her coffee. “It is cheap. Cheaper than I should ask. You will pay me in cash, because I do not like banks, and I do not like the man in the bank, and I do not need a contract.”

“Solveig —”

“I will say one thing. Then I will not speak of it again.” She set down her cup. The pale eyes did not blink. “Whoever he is, he does not come in this house. I have a rolling pin. I have a nephew. Between them there is a good deal of damage. If a man with a nice voice comes to my door and asks for you, I will say I do not know any Corinne, and I will say it in four languages.” A pause. “That is all. Eat your cheese.”

Corinne put her face in her hands.

She hadn’t known she would. It came up through her in a long slow wave, from the soles of her feet, and she bent over the cat and wept as she had not wept in the lake house or on the plane or on the train: with abandon, with a loud wet ugly noise, like a child. Solveig said nothing at all. She got up, after a while, and came round the table on her stick, and laid one large rough hand on the back of Corinne’s head, as one lays a hand on a horse, and left it there until it stopped.

* * *

The flat was damp, and dark, and entirely perfect.

It had a low ceiling and a window at the height of the grass, through which she could see the bare roots of a rosebush and a thin wedge of fjord. A narrow bed with a white duvet. A tiled stove in the corner. A kitchen the size of a wardrobe. A shelf of Norwegian paperbacks, left by the trombonist, which turned out to be a complete run of Anders Skau, in the original, with a coffee ring on the cover of Den druknede timen. She laughed aloud when she saw it. She sat on the bed with the book in her lap, in the half-light, and for some time she laughed and could not stop.

The door was the trouble.

It was a thin hollow door with a Norwegian pin-tumbler lock the size of a thimble, so old that the brass was worn smooth as soap. She stood and looked at it for a very long time. She thought of a white door with a bolt on the outside. She thought of how a lock is a conversation.

On Friday she walked up to the hardware store in Strandgaten, a narrow shop that smelled of linseed and nails, and bought a deadbolt with a thumb-turn on the inside. She paid cash. She bought a chisel, a drill, a set of bits, a screwdriver, and a pound of screws. She carried it all home in a canvas bag, and sat on the floor of the flat with her legs crossed, and began to cut a mortise in a door.

She had never done it in her life. It took her three hours. She made a mess of the first hole, and a worse mess of the second, and was crouched on the boards in a litter of pale splinters with a chisel in her fist and sweat running down her face, cursing in Swedish, when she heard the stick come tapping down the garden path.

Solveig stood in the doorway. She looked at the door. She looked at the chisel.

She said nothing. She went away. She came back with a spirit level, a mallet, and a thermos of coffee, and set them on the floor, and lowered herself on a kitchen chair and sat watching, with her hands on her stick, like a woman at a dog show, until the bolt went home with a clean sweet thunk that she felt through the soles of her feet.

“Pent,” said Solveig. Nice.

Corinne sat back on her heels with the screwdriver in her hand and a smear of sawdust on her cheek, and turned the thumb-turn. It slid. She turned it back. It slid. She did it five times.

“It locks from my side,” she said.

“Yes,” said Solveig. “I can see that.”

She cut three keys that afternoon at the cobbler’s, a man with a leather apron and a face like a walnut, who did not look at her. She put one on a string round her neck. She put one in the toe of her left boot. She stood a long time in the kitchen with the third in her palm, and thought of a cedar box, and a tin of flies, and a ring with a manila tag. A man with one key has none. She had thought it a clever thing, once, in a lamp-lit room. Now she put the third in a biscuit tin behind the stove, and stood with her hand pressed hard against her mouth, and understood that she had spent eight weeks in school and had passed.

* * *

She wrote the rules on the back of the electricity bill.

It was a thing she had done before, in a bed in Maine, with a pencil, in the blue light of a June morning, and laughed. She did it now at the table with the cat on the chair opposite and a pot of tea gone cold, in a small upright hand, with a stub of pencil that Solveig had found in a drawer.

1. CASH. Always. No cards, no bank, no phone. Nothing with my name on it that can be searched.

2. NO PHOTOGRAPHS. Not of me. Not of her. Not of the street, the harbor, the cat. If it can be found it will be.

3. One name outside this house, and it is not mine.

4. Never go the same way twice.

5. Sunday: the Doppler. Two minutes. Listen.

She got to six, and the pencil stopped of its own accord. There had been a rule six once, on the back of a gas bill, in a bed in Maine, in the blue light of a June morning. If either of us says stop, plainly, once, the other one lets go. He had agreed to it. He had said I agree, after a half-beat, and signed it in pencil. It was still in her pocket, soft as cloth. She sat looking at the empty line for some time. Then she wrote it differently.

6. Do not tell her.

7. Do not answer the door till you have looked.

8. Eat. Sleep. Work. Be dull. Be so dull that no one could possibly be looking.

She thought for a long time.

9. If he finds you, run.

She put down the pencil. Outside the window the rain went on in the roots of the rose, and a gull went by, low and white, and the cat licked his paw. She looked at the list. It was not a very good list. It was the list of a person who had been frightened by someone she had loved, and it had in it, she saw, not one thing that a sane woman would put in a rule. It was an inventory of the fear. But she folded it in four and put it in the pocket of the cardigan, with the picks, and found that she could breathe.

* * *

On the twelfth of November she went to hear her daughter’s heart.

She went alone, by a long way round, on foot and by bus and on foot again, to a small private clinic above a pharmacy near the Torgallmenningen, on the recommendation of a retired midwife called Gudrun who played bridge with Solveig on Thursdays and who had asked, as Solveig had, no questions at all. The waiting room was cream and green, with a rack of magazines and a fern. A woman in a white coat took her name, and Corinne gave the one she had decided on in the bus, Lind, Nora, and paid seven hundred kroner in cash, and the woman wrote it down.

She was seventeen weeks and three days. She lay on the table in a dim room with her shirt up and a paper sheet across her knees, and a sonographer named Mari, young, brisk, with a shaved head and a ring in her nose, spread the gel with the flat of the probe and began to talk, in the soothing nonsense of her trade, about the temperature of the room.

“Så.” She tilted the screen. “Der er hun.”

There she is.

She had seen her before. She’d seen her every Wednesday for six weeks on a gray machine in a room with a shutter, held by a hand she had hated and been grateful for, and she had thought that she knew what it would be. She had braced for it. She had not braced for this, which was bigger, and clearer, and moved: a profile, small and perfect, with a high round forehead, a snub of a nose, a mouth that opened and closed, and a fist that rose to the face with the exact fierce unthinking gesture of someone brushing back a lock of hair. Four chambers of a heart, beating, white against black. The long curve of a spine like a string of pearls. A foot.

“Everything is where it should be,” said Mari. “Look. The brain, the stomach, the kidneys. The spine is closed. She is measuring a few days big, but that is nothing. Your dates?”

“I — I’m not certain.”

“It does not matter.” The cursor clicked. “Vil du vite kjønnet?”

Would you like to know the sex.

She didn’t answer. She was looking at the screen. It had been such a long way to come, to be told by a stranger in a room that smelled of chamomile what she already knew, and what she had been told once before, offhandedly, in a lamp-lit room, by a man who had put his hand across her stomach and said it as one says it looks like rain.

“Det er ei jente,” said Mari gently, and smiled. “A girl.”

I think it’s a girl.

Corinne lay with her eyes on the ceiling and the gel cooling on her skin, and was aware of an odd mixture of things: joy, exact and ordinary, as plain as a loaf; and under it, deeper, something she could not look at. It was the voice. I think it’s a girl. He had been right. He had known, from a thermal print, three weeks before anyone could have said, and he had said it softly, in the dark, with a look of such tender certainty that she had wept, and now he had been proved right by a young woman with a ring in her nose in the city of Bergen, and she wanted, quite savagely, to put her fist through the screen.

“She has a strong chin,” said Mari, tracing it. “Look at that. A little stubborn one. Where does she get it?”

It was what he had said. She’s got your chin. He had said it in October, in the room with the shutter, in the voice that made every word sound like a gift. She thought she would be sick.

“From her father,” she said.

It came out quite steady. Mari, who had seen a thousand women and a thousand silences, did not look up. She pressed a key, and a thin strip of gray paper slid out of the machine, and she tore it off and put it into Corinne’s hand.

“Gratulerer,” she said.

* * *

Ingrid Solheim came to Bergen on the twenty-second.

She arrived on the first flight from Oslo, in a long gray coat and a red scarf, with an enormous leather bag over one shoulder and an umbrella that she did not open. She was fifty-six years old, and tall, and spare, and tanned like a sailor, with an iron-gray bob and a pair of cherry-red glasses pushed up into it, so deliberate a red that no one had ever dared to ask what they were for; she walked up the stone steps on Klosteret like a general, and kissed Solveig on both cheeks, and Billett on the head, and Corinne, with great formality, on the brow.

She took a long look at her.

“You are not at all as I imagined,” she said, in English.

“I’m sorry.”

“No. It is a compliment. I imagined you very pale and very thin and wearing a cape.” She sat down at the kitchen table, in the chair that was never sat in, and took off her gloves one finger at a time. “Instead you have a belly and a very clear eye, and you are making soup. Excellent. A translator should always be making soup. Takk, Solveig. No, no cream.”

They had a long afternoon. It was the first time in her life that Corinne had told the story out loud to a person who was neither a friend nor a doctor, and she told it badly, and short. A man. A house. A door. She said that she was safe now, and that she meant to stay safe, and that she was unable to say any more. Ingrid listened without interrupting. She had very still hands. At the end of it she sat for a long time looking out at the rain, and the geraniums, and the thin dark line of the fjord.

“I once left a husband in Trondheim,” she said, at last. “In nineteen ninety-four. He was a lovely man. He was an architect. He never raised his hand to me. He only knew, always, where I was.” She turned her cup in its saucer. “It took me six years to stop turning at the sound of his car.”

“Ingrid —”

“I am not asking you for it. I am telling you that I understand it.” She took a folded paper from her bag and laid it on the table. “I have thought about what you wrote to me. You say that you want to continue to work, and that you do not wish to be found. Both can be done. Authors vanish every day. Translators, you know, are already invisible, it is the whole joke of our trade. We need only give you a name.”

“A pen name?”

“A work name. Something with a little history in it.” She tapped the paper. “I thought of one on the train. You will think it theatrical. It was the first thing that came.”

Corinne unfolded the paper. There were two words on it, in a spiky hand.

Nora Lind.

“Lind is your mother’s name,” said Ingrid. “You told me yourself, in a bar in Frankfurt, in two thousand and twelve, when you were drunk. I do not forget. It will mean nothing to anyone but you. And Nora —” She smiled, thinly. “Nora is the one who leaves. She puts on her coat in the third act and she walks out and she slams the door. Ibsen’s audiences nearly rioted. I think she would approve.”

Corinne looked at the name. She turned the paper over in her hand.

Nora Lind. It looked quite ordinary. It looked like a thing you might see on the spine of a book, in the window of a shop, in a language that is not your own, and pass by without a second glance. It looked like a woman who has already left.

“The Skau,” she said. “I have lost the draft. All of it. The pages are in — it’s in a house in Maine. I can’t go back.”

“I did not suppose that you could.” Ingrid took a heavy envelope out of her bag. “A clean print of the Norwegian. Three hundred and eighty pages, as it was. The deadline is the end of February. I have told Skau that his translator has had a difficulty and a change in her circumstances, and that the book will be excellent, and that if he complains I will tell his wife about the girl in Ålesund.” A gleam. “He has not complained.”

“Ingrid, I can’t —”

“You will be paid in cash. The first installment is in the envelope. In notes, in a bank sleeve, not very large. Afterward it will come to Solveig’s post box, in a registered envelope marked Fyrlykt Forlag, Redaksjon, and no one will think anything of it. I have done this for authors before who had a reason, and I have not asked what it was.” She rose. “You are the best I have had, Corinne. I do not say that to be kind. The book is better with you. You are not to disappear. You are to go on being good at your work under a different name. That is all. That is all I am asking.”

Corinne put the paper in her pocket, beside the list, and the picks. She found, a little to her surprise, that her hand was not shaking.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Do not thank me.” Ingrid was gathering her gloves. At the door she paused, with her scarf half knotted, and looked back, the long gray figure framed in the oblong of rainy light. “One thing. It is a small professional remark. I say it because you will not have thought of it.”

“Yes?”

“We are not, you know, so invisible as we like to imagine.” She said it lightly. “A translator leaves a fingerprint. I could tell my twelve best from a page, blind. You have a way of ending a paragraph on a verb. You put the weight on the last word, like a stone on a letter. But nobody notices, of course. Nobody reads us that closely.” She smiled, and flipped the scarf over her shoulder. “Who would?”

The door closed.

Corinne stood in the warm kitchen with the soup going on the stove and the cat on the chair and the heavy envelope in her hand, listening to the tap of the stick as Solveig saw her guest to the gate. Nobody reads us that closely. It had always been the truth. She had done it for sixteen years with her name on the title page in eight-point type, and in sixteen years she had received a dozen letters.

I’d know it anywhere, said a voice in her head, comfortably, from a chair in a patch of June sun. In a hundred books. In a thousand.

She put it away. She did it quickly, as one puts a coin in a drawer, and shut the drawer, and stood with her hand on the cold edge of the table. A lover’s joke, she had thought then. He was three thousand miles away, in a house on a cliff, and he believed her lost, and in a month she would have a name that was not hers on a spine that did not say C. Aldermere. It would be all right. She would write it flat. She would write it cold. She would write it, as Pip had said of lies, plain.

“Who would?” she said again, aloud, to the cat; and the cat regarded her with great contempt.

* * *

That night she lay in the narrow bed in the half-dark flat with the stove ticking and the rain in the rosebush, and the cat, who had followed her down the garden without invitation, a warm weight against her knee.

She put the Doppler on her stomach. It wasn’t Sunday. She did not care. She waited for the static to clear, and it cleared, and there was the small quick certain knock at the far end of the long house.

Here. Here. Here.

“Alma,” she said aloud.

It was the first time she had said it to her. She said it softly, in English, in the dark, to the ceiling. Alma. It was an old name, round and calm, a name for a woman who would get on boats. It did not sound like him at all.

“Nora Lind,” she said, and listened to that, too.

Then she turned off the machine and lay on her side with her hand under her cheek, and watched the door. It was shut. It was bolted. The thumb-turn stood at a quarter past, a small brass crescent in the dark, the one thing in the room that she had put there herself. She watched it a long time. She counted her breaths. Four, and then a big one.

Overhead, in the kitchen, a chair scraped. A stick tapped, once, across the boards, and was still. Solveig, going to bed. Somewhere in the walls, a pipe gave a long low knock. A stair complained.

She went rigid. She lay and listened with her heart in her throat.

It was only the house. It was only an old wooden house on a hill, settling for the night, and an old woman on the floor above, climbing, one stair at a time, to her rest. She let her breath out. She felt, absurdly, for the key at her throat.

It’s all right, she told the dark. It’s all right. It locks from my side.

And in the pocket of the cardigan on the chair, folded in four, a list lay waiting to be believed.