Nora Lind

She wrote it flat.

That was the whole of the method, and it took her a week to find it. On the second of December, at the kitchen table in the flat with the stove ticking and the rain in the rosebush, she squared three hundred and eighty pages of Anders Skau in front of her and sharpened six pencils and began at the beginning. She had done the first hundred and sixty pages once already, in a sunny study in Maine, and the draft was gone. It did not matter; she remembered it the way one remembers a road. She read the first line of the Norwegian aloud. She heard exactly how it should go in English. And then, with great deliberation, as one lays a plank across a hole, she wrote something else.

She wrote the sentence the way a competent stranger would. She put the commas where the grammar wanted them, not where she would have breathed. She cut a clause where it trailed. She took the long, falling, rueful cadence that had been hers for sixteen years and flattened it, like a hand pressing down a page, until what was left was clear and correct and had no one in it at all.

Marit stood at the window. It was raining. She had not slept.

She looked at it for a long time.

Good, she thought. That’s nobody.

The days went by like that, with the dark coming down at three and the lamps lit all along Klosteret by four, and the sea gone the color of a slate. She had rules for the mornings too. She never walked to the harbor the same way twice; one day it was down the steps by the old fire station, one day along the wall by the aquarium, one day, with her heart in her mouth and her hat pulled down, through the crowd at the fish market on a Saturday, with a paper cone of shrimp from a stall and a stranger’s elbow in her ribs. She bought bread at a different bakery each time. She said Nora to the woman in the post office, who had never asked her anything else. She grew, in the course of the winter, to the size of a small round tent, and walked with her hand under the swell and a faintly dazed, inward look, like a woman carrying a lamp through a dark house; and everyone she passed on the steep wet lanes of Nordnes, old men with dogs, girls with prams, a postman with a red face, nodded at her kindly, and let her by.

Nobody looked.

It was the oddest thing about it. She’d thought she would feel it on her back, like a hand. She had braced for it on the first morning with her shoulders up round her ears. But the city went about its business in the rain with its collar turned up. Nobody looked at the foreigner with the belly. She was a woman buying bread. She was a part of the weather. And in the second week she caught herself, on a bridge, in a gap in the traffic, simply standing, with her face tipped up and her eyes closed and a drop of rain on her eyelid, and not thinking of anything at all.

* * *

On the twenty-fourth of November she had mailed a postcard.

It was a picture of the Bryggen, the old wooden wharf, in a sunny summer that had never existed. She had stood a long time at the post office counter with the pen in her hand. In the end she wrote nothing on it but the name of a box, Postboks 3, 5005 Bergen, and addressed it, in capitals, to a woman in Rye. She watched the clerk stamp it. She watched it go into the bin. And she thought of a hand, a long thin cold clever hand with the knuckles skinned raw, closing round another card at a kitchen table across an ocean.

I’ll know that you’re alive, Pip had said. And if it doesn’t come —

She did not finish the thought. She never did.

* * *

Ingrid’s letter came on the eleventh.

It was a registered envelope with the stamp of Fyrlykt Forlag, and in it a bank sleeve of notes, not very large, and a single typed sheet. She read it standing in the hall with Billett winding round her ankles.

Dear N.L.,

The first forty pages are received. They are correct.

Correct is a word for a tax return. I read them twice, and I could not hear a person. There is a woman in this book who is losing her mind in a very orderly way, and I have never in my life wished so much that a translator would lose hers a little. You are holding your breath. I can hear it on every page. I know why. Do not hide so well that you vanish from the book. A fingerprint is not a confession, my dear. It is only a hand.

Breathe.

I.S.

She read it three times. Then she folded it very small, and tucked it into the cardigan, with the picks, and the list, and a gas bill gone soft as flannel, and went out into the garden in the rain and stood among the bare roses with her face turned up.

Do not hide so well that you vanish from the book.

She knew it was right. She had known it on the second page. The thing she had made was a clean glass in which nothing moved, and a book could not be made out of glass. But the other voice, hers, the long falling one, was a thing she had once been paid for and loved, and a man in a patch of June sun had said he would know it anywhere. She thought of the way he said things. I’m very good at your voice.

He’s three thousand miles away, she told the roses. He thinks she is dead.

She waited for it to be true. She stood in the rain with her hand on the swell until a small hard heel kicked her under the ribs, with an air of the greatest impatience, and she laughed, and went in.

* * *

Henrik Dahl came to Sunday dinner on the thirtieth, and mended the tap.

He was forty-one. He was tall, and rather stooped, in the way of people who have spent their lives ducking under low beams, with a long mild face and gray in his hair at the temples, and a green anorak that had been through a great deal. He taught English at a gymnas out in Fana. He had been married to a woman in Trondheim, and was not, now, and had been very sensible about it, and was said by his aunt to be the only man in Bergen who could be relied on to arrive with a fish.

He arrived with a fish.

“Sei,” he said, holding it up in its newspaper, with a look of vague embarrassment. “Coalfish. It is the best of the week. I am told it is the best of the week. Aunt, the stair has a loose rail, did you know?”

“I know.”

“I’ll look at it after.” He turned, with the fish, and saw Corinne in the kitchen door with her hand under her belly. He did not look at it. She noticed that. He had the grace, in the first second, to look at her face, and in the second, at the cat, and he said, in English, in an accent so purely Cambridge that it made her want to laugh, “How do you do. I’m Henrik. I’m the nephew. I am told there is a rolling pin.”

“I’m Nora,” said Corinne.

It came out smoothly. It was the fourth time she’d said it to a living person, and it still caught, very slightly, on the tongue, like a button on a coat.

“Hyggelig,” he said. Nice to meet you. And then, in a tone of the mildest curiosity, as a man comments on the weather: “Aunt Solveig tells me you are a translator.”

“Yes. Norwegian into English.”

“Ah. That is the correct direction. The other way, one hears terrible things.” He put the fish in the sink. “I teach A Doll’s House in March. To eighteen-year-olds. They hate it. They say Nora is selfish.” The long face did something wry. “I ask them, what would you have her do? And they say, stay. They are very conservative, my students. It is alarming.”

She went, rather slowly, cold to the roots of her hair, and said, “What do you tell them?”

“That a door is a very small sound,” said Henrik Dahl, “for what it does.”

He fixed the tap. He fixed the loose rail. He mended the flue on the stove in the garden flat, lying on his back on the cold tiles with a torch in his teeth, and he asked her not one question about herself except, when he had finished, with his head under the stove and his voice coming out of it hollow as a well, “When is it due?”

“April.”

“Ah. That is a good month.” He slid out, black to the elbows. “The light comes back. You’ll see. One day in April you wake up and there is a gray line on the wall, and it is not gray, it is yellow, and you think, ah, there you are.” He wiped his hands on a rag. “She will like it. She will think that is how it always is.”

She. She hadn’t said it. She looked at him sharply, and he met her eyes with a face of such flustered apology that her suspicion simply melted.

“I am sorry. I say it of all babies. It is a habit. I have no sisters, and I always say she.”

“It’s a girl.”

“Then I was right.” He smiled. It was an astonishingly good smile, crooked, out of a face not made for it. “That is good. I am so rarely right.”

* * *

Christmas came at four in the afternoon on the twenty-fourth, by the church bells, and the whole of Bergen went indoors at once and shut its doors.

Solveig had cooked since dawn. The little kitchen smelled of juniper and salt lamb and boiled potatoes and the sharp dark sweetness of cloudberry jam, and the table, extended by two leaves and laid with a cloth embroidered in red, held a dish of ribs the size of a canoe. There was a candle in every window. There was a small fir in the corner, hung with paper hearts and little flags, and under it, in a pile, a number of gifts wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. The cat sat on the best chair. Nobody had the heart to move him.

They ate for two hours. Henrik carved. Solveig corrected him. They talked in two languages and sometimes three, about ferries and the price of salt, and the winter of nineteen seventy-nine when the fjord froze, and a Hurtigruten captain called Olsen who had proposed to Solveig at the Kirkenes quay in a gale, and been refused, and gone on proposing at every port from Bergen to Kirkenes for eleven years. Corinne laughed until she had to put down her fork. She had not laughed like that since the summer. She sat in a house that was not hers, in a country that was not hers, in a borrowed sweater, with a baby that was not, by any law she knew, supposed to exist, and she was happy. It was a plain, shocking, unremarkable happiness, like a coin found on the street, and she turned it over and over with a kind of wonder.

For dessert there was rice porridge, sweet and cold, with a blob of butter in the middle and a sprinkle of cinnamon. Risengrynsgrøt. One almond was hidden in it. Whoever found the almond won a marzipan pig. It was an old law, and no one dared to break it.

“I have never had the almond,” said Henrik sadly, stirring. “In forty-one years. My aunt always rigs it.”

“I do not rig it. It is fate.”

Corinne’s spoon hit something hard.

She sat quite still. She took it out with her tongue, and the others watched her with the gravity of a jury, and she put the almond on her saucer, white and smooth and no bigger than the top joint of her thumb, and said, “I think I’ve won a pig.”

There was a roar. Solveig struck the table with her stick. Henrik clapped his hands and said something very rude in dialect, and the cat leapt off the chair in alarm, and she was handed a marzipan pig the size of a fist, pink, with a sprig of holly in its ear, and kissed on both cheeks by an old woman who smelled of lamb.

“You will have luck in the new year,” said Solveig. “It is certain.”

“I’ve had enough luck.”

“Nobody has had enough luck.” She dried her eyes. “Open your presents, you foolish girl.”

There were three. Henrik’s was a book, a battered copy of the Norwegian lullabies, Vuggeviser, with a faded cover and a pencil mark on the flyleaf in the hand of someone who had loved it. Gudrun, the midwife, had sent a pair of knitted socks, tiny, no longer than her finger. And Solveig’s was in a small flat parcel she did not open until she was sure that she wanted to: a baby’s cap, hand-knitted in soft white wool, with a border of green pine trees and a tiny red tassel on the top.

“Per’s mother made it,” Solveig said, gruffly. “Nineteen eighty-eight. For a baby that did not come.” She turned her face away. “It has been in a drawer. A hat should be on a head.”

Corinne could not speak. She held the cap in both hands in her lap, a small, light, soft, absurd thing, and Billett climbed up and sat on it.

And Alma kicked.

It was not the little heel of the afternoon. It was a great rolling tumble, a somersault, a thump that went the length of her and rattled the plates, and she gasped, and put her hand to her side, and Solveig, who had seen it, said “Oi,” and put down her stick.

“May I?”

“Of course.”

The big rough hand lay flat against the green sweater. For a moment nothing happened. The candles burned in the window. The church bells had stopped, and the street outside was entirely silent, and the three of them sat round the ruins of the feast with their heads bent like people at a well. Then, under the old woman’s palm, with the force of a small fist knocking at a door, the child kicked again.

Solveig made a sound.

It was not a word. She stood there in her kitchen with one hand pressed to a stranger’s stomach and the tears pouring unchecked down her square face, and she did not say anything, and nobody said anything for a long time. Henrik had taken off his spectacles and was polishing them on his sleeve. And Corinne, who had not meant to, who had told herself on the plane and the train and in the hardware store that she would not, found that she was lifting her water glass.

“To the Block Island ferry,” she said, softly, in English.

“What is that?” said Henrik gently.

“It’s an old toast.” She was smiling and could not stop. “From a friend. It means — it’s a way of saying I’m all right. It means I’m very far away, and I’m all right, and someone is on the other end.”

“Skål,” said Solveig, hoarsely, and raised her glass. “To the ferry.”

“May it always run,” said Corinne.

* * *

Henrik walked her home across the garden, in the dark, with a torch.

It had begun to snow. It did that perhaps three times a winter in Bergen, a thin sparse reluctant snow that fell for an hour and vanished, and the garden was a small black bowl of silent whirling white. They stood on the step of the flat with the flakes settling on his hat. He had been very quiet, she thought, all through the pudding. He cleared his throat.

“I want to say something,” he said. “And then I will go. I am a coward, so I will say it quickly.”

“Henrik —”

“I do not ask. My aunt does not ask. We have decided between us, without discussing it, which is the Norwegian way, that you will tell us what you wish to tell us, and we will be glad of it, and that is all.” He turned the torch over in his hands. “I only want you to know that there is a person in this city, a boring person, a man who teaches the English subjunctive, with a car and a telephone and no particular plans, and if you should ever wish to have a thing done and not be asked why, you need only say it. That is all.”

She looked at him. He stood with the snow on his shoulders and the long mild face turned half away, at the dark, at the roots of the roses; and she thought of another face, young and bright and sorrowfully handsome, in a storm-lit lamp room in May, saying I can wait. She thought, with absolute clarity: he would never.

And then she thought: I thought that, too.

“Thank you,” she said. “I’ll remember.”

“Good.” He put the torch in his pocket. “God jul, Nora.”

“God jul.”

She went in. She shot the bolt. She stood in the dark with her back against the door and her hand on the thumb-turn, and the cat winding between her feet, and the small hard heel going under her ribs like a drum, and she listened to the crunch of his boots on the thin new snow until it was gone.

Nobody has had enough luck, she thought.

Then she put on the lamp, and took out the pencil, and sat down to work.

* * *

The book came together in the dark of January, as books do.

She never could say when it turned. Some day in the second week the flat wall of glass simply cracked, and the sentences began to move under her hand as if of their own accord, and she stopped hearing the rain. She worked from seven until one, and again from three until six. She wrote with her feet on a stool and the Doppler on the sill and the stove at her back, in the circle of the lamp, and the cat on the manuscript, and her daughter turning over in the dark of her like a swimmer. She was twenty-six weeks, and twenty-nine, and thirty-two. Her ankles swelled. She couldn’t see her feet. She did not notice. She had not been so absorbed in anything in her life.

It was a very good book. That was the unlooked-for thing. She had thought of it for eight months as a debt and an alibi, a thing to be got through, and now, somewhere about the middle, it had taken hold of her with both hands. It was about a mother. It was about a woman called Marit Skaar, in a small town on a fjord, whose daughter is taken from the street one winter evening by a man who has been very patient; and about what she does about it, which is nothing, for two hundred pages, and then everything. It was a long cold slow pursuit through snow and fog and abandoned houses, and she had already translated the sentence on page ninety-one, Jeg kommer til å finne ham, in a sunny study in Maine, with a boy at her elbow, and thought it an excellent thriller. She had done it again in December, flat as a plate, without feeling anything at all. She translated the rest of the book now in a different light. She sat with her hand on her stomach, and a pencil in her fist, and her lips moving, and the words came as if she had known them all her life.

She sent the last chapter off on the twenty-sixth of February.

She finished it in the night, with the snow coming down outside, and the stove ticking, and the lamp turned low. It was a quarter to five. She had read the last paragraph aloud three times, softly, to the cat, to check the rhythm. It was the scene in the child’s room. A woman stands in a doorway at dawn, in a house across the street from her own, where it never once occurred to her to look, and watches her daughter sleep, safe, in a bed, with her fist against her cheek, and does not wake her. Does not speak. Simply stands there, in her wet coat, breathing, with the first gray light coming up the wall. The Norwegian ended on a plain short word. It had to be rendered. There was no avoiding it.

She wrote:

She stood in the doorway for a long time, listening to her daughter breathe, until the light came up the wall and touched the quilt and the small fist and the hair; and then, very quietly, so as not to wake her, she went in, and sat down on the edge of the bed, and stayed.

She read it back. She read it aloud. It was a good sentence. It was a very good sentence. It had weight in it. It had the long falling cadence, and the little pause, and the plain short word set down at the end like a stone on a letter, and she felt it land in her, quite quietly, under the breastbone, with the click of a rightness. It was the best thing she had done in her life.

She set down the pencil. She turned the page over, and wrote on the back of it, in a small square hand, translated by Nora Lind, and sat looking at the name for a long time.

She did not hear it.

That was the thing. It was all so plainly there, in front of her, on the page, in the lamp. A hand’s breadth from her fingers, as plain as a hair on a sleeve. But she was tired, and happy, and thirty-two weeks gone, and the stove was warm, and the snow was falling, and there was nobody to look.

She put the pages in the envelope. She wrote Fyrlykt Forlag, Redaksjon across the front, and under it, in a hand that was shaking only a very little, Registered. She sat at the table with her palm flat against the swell and watched the window go from black to gray to a long thin yellow, the exact color of the light that comes up a wall in April, and she thought:

I did it. I did it all. And no one knows where I am.

Upstairs, a chair scraped. A stick tapped, once, across the boards.