In Norwegian

Bergen did not rain. It hung.

That was the first thing he learned about it. Rain, in Maine, was an event; it came across the bay in a gray wall and one stood in it, and it passed. Here the water simply stayed in the air, fine as flour, all day and all night, so that one walked through it without being quite wet and was wet through without noticing, and the whole town had a faint polished shine on it, like a stone held for a long time in a hand. He liked it at once. He had not expected to. He took a room on the fourth floor of a narrow hotel in Strandgaten with a window onto an airshaft, and stood at it with his bag still on his shoulder, and breathed it in; and what he thought was, absurdly, this is what she smelled like when she came in from the garden.

He gave it a day before he made himself do anything.

It was a discipline. He walked. He walked the length of the harbor and up the funicular to the top of Fløyen in the dusk, and came down in the dark by the path, with the whole town laid out below him in strings of light and the black water between, and the ferries going to and fro across it like beads on a wire. He bought a dark knitted cap and a pair of wool gloves, and a notebook, and he ate in a café at the edge of the fish market where the waitress called him du without asking and laughed when he answered in kind. He spoke nothing but Norwegian. It had surprised him how easily it came, out here, off the page and into the damp, like a tool he’d forgotten he owned.

“Er det alltid slik?” he asked the baker on the second morning, with a nod at the window.

“What, this? This is nothing. This is a dry day.” The baker, a vast red man in a flour-colored apron, slid a cinnamon snail across the counter in a paper square. “There is a saying. Det finnes ikke dårlig vær, bare dårlige klær. There is no bad weather. Only bad clothes.”

“I’ve heard that.”

“Where are you from? Not Oslo. You speak like a book.”

“Maine,” said Emory. “In America.”

“Ah.” The baker nodded, as though this explained everything. “Then you will like it. It is the same, I think. Water and fishermen.”

He took the snail out into the hanging rain, and ate it standing, and found that his hands were quite steady.

* * *

On the second morning he looked up the publisher.

It took a quarter of an hour. Fyrlykt Forlag A/S was in the register at Brønnøysund like any other small firm, with a head office in Oslo and a branch, a few rooms up a stair by the look of it, at Strandkaien 22, 5013 Bergen. The director’s name was Daglig leder: Ingrid Solheim. He read the name twice. He had last seen it in the corner of a laptop screen, over her shoulder, on a morning in August, framed in cherry-red glasses. He took the notebook and wrote the address. Then he went and sat in a café on the other side of the street with a pot of coffee and a window, and began, with the patience he had learned from a hundred nights in a rescue boat, to watch a door.

On the Wednesday he saw a postman, a delivery boy with a trolley of paper, and a man in a green anorak who left at eleven and came back at two with a bag from the bakery; and on the Thursday, at ten past nine, a tall woman in a gray coat and a red scarf, off the early flight from Oslo by the look of her bag, with cherry glasses pushed up into her hair, who went in with a key as one goes into a house one owns. He did not move. He did not follow. He sat with his hands round the cup and thought of nothing at all, and at a quarter to twelve she came out again with a long white envelope in her hand, looked once up and down the street, and set off briskly for the harbor.

He followed her at forty paces. He was good at it. He had been good at it, he thought, with a wry detachment that surprised him, since he was fifteen.

She went to the main post office. It was a big old building with a stone stair and a hall like a railway station, and a wall of little brass doors along one side, each with a number. She stood in the registered queue. He stood three behind. When she reached the counter, she laid the envelope on the glass, and the clerk drew it toward her, and he saw it upside down across the hall for the length of time it takes to blink: Postboks 3. 5005 Bergen. Fyrlykt Forlag, Redaksjon.

Postbox three.

He went and sat on the long bench under the clock, with a newspaper, and the notebook open on his knee.

She came for it at ten to one.

It was not Corinne. He had known it would not be, and it was still a small drop in the floor of him. It was an old woman with a stick. She came in out of the rain, square and weathered and slow, with iron-gray hair pinned up with a pencil, and she went to the wall without looking at anyone and turned a key in a little brass door, and took out a slip of paper, and took it to the counter. “Fru Arneson,” said the clerk, bending forward, with great respect. “Det er til deg.”

Solveig Arneson signed. She took the envelope, and put it in the pocket of her coat, and gave the clerk a nod like a bishop’s. Then she turned her whole head, slowly, and looked straight across the hall at the man on the bench.

It lasted two seconds. He lowered his eyes to the paper. He turned a page. He felt the look go over him like a lamp across a deck, once, cool and thorough and entirely without hurry, and move on.

She went out. He gave her a full minute.

He followed her up through the town by the long way, past the Fish Market and the Bryggen and the little steep lanes behind the old fort, with her stick going tock, tock on the wet cobbles and her black coat going before him like the sail of a very slow boat. She went at the pace of a woman who had never in her life been late for anything. She turned in at last, under a plum tree, by a wall with a cat on it, at a lane called Klosteret, which ran steeply down toward the water between two rows of leaning wooden houses, and stopped at the fourth.

It was white. It was tall. It had green shutters and seven stone steps up to a blue front door, with a pot of dead geraniums on the second, and a rosebush, and below the steps, at the level of the grass, a small low window with a lamp behind it.

He stood at the corner under the plum tree, with his hands in his pockets, and looked at the window. It was a small square of yellow light in the gray. A shadow crossed it. Then a smaller shadow, quick, with something in its hand, ran after the first; and he heard, thin and clear through the glass, the thing that went through him like a cold wire:

A child, laughing.

He did not know how long he stood there. The orange cat on the wall regarded him for some time with level contempt, and then yawned. A woman came out of the house opposite and glanced at him and went in again. He thought: go. Go now. You are standing in a lane, looking at a window, and you have promised.

He went.

* * *

On Saturday he heard her voice.

He had planned it, as he planned everything. He was in the lane by half past seven, on the far side, in the doorway of a boarded shop, with the dark cap pulled low and a thermos in his hand, like a man waiting for a bus. At ten past eight the blue door opened. A small figure in a red coat and a yellow hat came out on the top step, and stood, and looked at the sky with the severe expression of a harbor master; and the door shut behind her, and the key turned, and a woman came down the seven steps with a bag over her shoulder.

He had told himself he was ready.

She had cut her hair. It was the first thing and the stupidest. It was short, to her jaw, and darker than it had been, with a streak of gray at the temple that she’d made no attempt to hide; and she wore a long gray scarf and a coat he didn’t know, and she walked with her head very slightly lowered, as a person walks who has taught herself to take up exactly as much room as she needs. She was thinner. She was forty-three. She took the child’s mittened hand and went down the lane toward the water, and she did not look round.

He followed at sixty paces. He watched her go through the town. He had his eyes on the back of her head for eleven minutes, the exact curve of her neck above the collar of the coat, and he found he could not feel his hands at all. They went down to the harbor. They went along the quay. They stopped at the end of it, by the iron ladder, in the clear bright cold, and the child ran ahead and turned.

“You must watch now.”

“I’m watching now.”

He had come in behind them along the stone with his shoulder to the wind, and stopped ten yards off, with his back to the water. It was a good place. It was nothing at all. It was a man waiting for an hour to pass. He stood with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the middle distance, and he heard her voice, five years and three months, say I’m watching now, in the dry, kind, slightly husky American that he’d have known from the bottom of a well.

The ferry came out of the haze.

“Hei, Pappa!” shouted the child. “HEI!”

He turned his head.

He had not meant to. It was a reflex, the turn of a man who hears the word spoken near him, and it happened before the rest of him could stop it; and in the quarter of a second it took he saw the whole thing at once, as one sees a coast from a plane. The red coat. The small fist beating the air. The yellow hat pushed back off a brow, and under the brow a pair of eyes the color of sea-glass, gray with a flash of green in it, wide and furious and delighted. A strong small chin. A mouth with a gap at the side. And behind her, over her head, Corinne’s face in profile, turned to the ferry; and on it, quite plainly, for no one to see but the gulls, the expression of a woman being slowly, patiently, hurt.

Pappa.

He knew what it meant before he had the word fully in his mind. A child did not shout it at a ferry because she had been taught to. She shouted it because someone had told her something about a man. Someone had given her a story, and she had taken it down to the water every Saturday, and waved.

He turned back to the sea. His heart was going slowly, like a drum under water. He stood another half a minute, because to leave at once would be to look as if he were leaving. Then he took his hands out of his pockets, and put them back, and walked away up the quay against the wind, past the stacked fish crates, and sat down on an upturned box behind the third stack with the gulls screaming over him, and put his forehead down on his fists.

That’s mine, he thought. It came up out of the dark, quite clean and calm. The chin. That is my chin.

He sat there for a long time.

When at last he lifted his head, he was very white, and the quay was empty, and he was no longer a man who was going to watch and wait. He was something that had been made, that morning, out of a gap in a child’s teeth. He did not know yet what. He took out the notebook and wrote, in the careful capitals of the fifteen-year-old who had begun it: SHE HAS A VOICE. SHE HAS MY CHIN. And he looked at it for a minute, and did not cross it out.

* * *

The days that followed had a fixed shape, and he kept to it.

He rose at six. He walked. He stood at the corner of Klosteret at half past eight, under the plum tree, with the thermos and the gray cap; he watched the blue door open; he followed them, at a distance, down through the hill to the green wooden building on the corner by the school, where a fence painted red and yellow and blue enclosed a yard with a sandpit and a slide and a long low shed full of tiny boots. A big blond woman in a fleece took the child at the gate. She was called Randi. There was a sign on the fence, hand-lettered, with a lighthouse on it, that said Klosterhagen Barnehage, and under it a timetable of the week in careful capitals: MANDAG og TORSDAG: TUR TIL LEKEPLASSEN, KL. 12.30–14.30.

Monday and Thursday, an outing to the playground. He wrote it down.

On the Monday he had traded the black cap for a gray one, on the principle that a man who changes his hat is two men. On the Wednesday he took the long way through the old town for no reason but the pleasure of walking behind a woman with a string bag of onions, and halfway up the Strandkaien she stopped, abruptly, in front of the window of a shop that sold old charts, and stood looking at the glass. He saw her face in it. He had known it would be there, and he stopped, a yard behind, a man with a map, and turned his shoulder, and counted.

Forty. She was counting too. He could see her lips move.

He had never been so happy. That was the terrible part, afterwards, when he looked back on it. It went through him like a long swallow of warm brandy: she has seen me. She had stood in a street in the rain and looked at him in a pane of glass, with her whole attention, and not run, and not screamed, and not looked away; she had watched him, quite steadily, to the end of forty; and he had known her. He had known her as one knows a house in the dark. A tram slid between them. When it had passed, she had gone on, with her onions, at a perfectly ordinary pace; and he stood in the street with his heart beating in his ears, and thought, with perfect lucidity, she’s very good.

On Friday night he stood under the lamp at the end of the lane for four minutes.

It was after one. The rain had thinned to a mist. He had come down from the hotel on foot with his hands in his pockets, and he’d gone to the corner, and stood where the light fell on him, with his back to the house. He didn’t look at the window. He knew which curtain moved. He saw it in the corner of his eye, and held perfectly still, and let her see him, a tall man in a lane at night with his head bent, looking at the sea; and he thought, quite clearly, in his mother’s voice: Em. What are you doing.

Letting her know, he answered. I haven’t come to the door. I haven’t touched the lock. I am not hiding. I’m only here.

That isn’t a courtesy.

I know.

He stood the four minutes out. He rubbed his face with his hand, because he was tired, and it was the first honest gesture he’d made in a fortnight. Then he went back up the hill, and in the hotel room, in the dark, sat on the edge of the bed with his coat on and shook, for an hour, from head to foot.

* * *

“You sound different,” said Mary.

It was Sunday, ten in the morning in Bergen, four in the morning in Maine, and he had no business calling at that hour; but she’d answered on the second ring, in a voice thick with sleep, because Ned had been up since three with his knees and she had not trusted the phone to the dark. He sat on the window-sill with his feet on the radiator and the airshaft gray beyond the glass.

“Different how?”

“I don’t know. Lighter. You sound like a man who’s put something down.” There was the rustle of a quilt. “Is it nice? Over there?”

“It’s very wet. The people are kind. I’ve been to the rescue station twice. They have a boat called Skomvær that you’d love, she’s got a hull like a —” He stopped. He listened to himself. It was all quite true; he had seen the boat; he’d stood on the quay and looked at it. It was merely that a very large quantity of other things lay behind it, folded, like a sail below decks. “I’ve been eating. Don’t worry.”

“Eating what?”

“Fish. A kind of cinnamon thing. A man here makes them the size of a hat.”

“Well, that’s all right, then.” She was quiet a moment. He could hear the old kitchen clock behind her, the stove, the particular hush of a house before dawn. “Em. I want to say something and you needn’t answer. Ned and I were talking. He’s been worried. Not because of you. For you. He said it’s like you’ve been holding your breath since you were fifteen, and now there’s nobody left to hold it for. And he thought, if you went away, maybe it’d come out. Like it does. When you stop.”

“Mary —”

“That’s all. Go and look at your mountains.” And then, in a different voice, very quick, as though it were a thing she’d been afraid to say for years: “You’re a good boy. Whatever else. You were always a good boy to me.”

He said thank you. He said it with his whole face, to the airshaft. When he had put the phone down, he sat for a while with his hand over his mouth, and looked at the notebook on the bed, which said, in capitals, on the last page he’d written, LOOKING IS NOT HOLDING.

* * *

On the Monday, at a quarter to three, a ball rolled out of the sandpit and across the gravel and stopped against his shoe.

He had meant to sit. That was all. He had meant to take a bench on the far side of the hill playground, by the slide, in the thin gray light, with the thermos, and a paper, like any of the other solitary men who haunt such places for a half-hour in the afternoon: a grandfather, a night-shift worker, a man between jobs. He’d chosen the bench with care. It was thirty yards from the gate, where the big blond woman in the fleece was talking to a mother in a gray scarf with her back turned. The mother was Corinne. She had come to collect early. She was standing quite still with her shoulders slightly forward, listening to the woman, nodding. She did not turn.

He had unzipped his coat, because it was warm with the thermos, and the sleeve of the thermal beneath showed at the cuff. He had not thought about that. He had put on the jacket that morning because it was the warmest thing he owned, and it was the jacket he’d worn on a hundred nights on the water, with the patch sewn on the left sleeve, orange, a lamp in a ring. He told himself he had not thought.

A pair of boots stopped in front of him.

They were red. They were small. They were extremely muddy. Above them a pair of knees, and a red coat unbuttoned at the throat, and a face turned up to him with an expression of the most profound, level, businesslike suspicion; and the child held out both her hands in front of her, in a way he knew from the sea, from the dock, from a hundred people standing on the stern with a rope, and said, in Norwegian, “That’s mine.”

It took him a moment. The ball was at his foot. He bent, and picked it up, a red-and-yellow rubber thing with a dent in it, and found that his hand was not quite his own.

“That’s a good ball,” said Emory.

His voice came out low and slow and careful, the voice of a man reading aloud from a page. She took the ball. She looked at him, up and down, in the manner of a customs inspector, and he saw her take in the cap and the coat and the thermos, and the cuff.

“You talk slow.”

“I learned from books.”

“Tante Solveig learned from a mamma.” She said it with an air of settled superiority. Then, since nothing had been said that she disapproved of, she sat down on the end of the bench beside him with the ball in her lap, and swung her boots, and looked at the slide. “I’m Alma.”

The name went through him like a hot wire. He had written it in a car in August. He had put it on a kitchen table among three others, and she had taken the one that was hers; and he had known, he had known, there in the oil room in the dark, not as a hope but as a fact, the way one knows the next stair.

“Alma,” he said. “That’s a good name.”

“It’s my great-grandmother’s. She came from a place with a lot of fish.” She held the ball up to the light. “Mamma says I’ve got her eyes.”

“I think you have.”

“What’s your name?”

He had thought about it. He had thought about this, in the hotel room, on the airshaft, a hundred times. It was the one question he had rehearsed. He looked at her sidelong, at the profile with the strong small chin, and thought, quite coldly: do not lie to her. Not a child. Not this one.

“I’m a friend of a lady,” he said.

“What lady?”

“A lady who lives far away. I haven’t seen her in a long time. I came to see if she was all right.”

“Is she?”

“I think so.” He looked at the gate. The red coat of the mother was a gray thread in the corner of his eye. “I think she’s very well.”

“My mamma’s got friends,” said Alma. “She’s got Henrik and Tante Solveig and Ingrid. And a lady who died.” She said it quite without weight, in the tone of one listing the seasons. “That was in America. In the autumn. Mamma cried a lot. I made a picture.”

Pip. He did not move. She knows. Somebody had told her; a letter, he supposed, from some drawer, from some friend of his mother’s he had never met; and she had read it somewhere, alone, and cried. He had not known that. He had not let himself wonder.

“I’m sorry,” he said, carefully.

“It’s all right. I didn’t know her.” Alma frowned at the ball. “My pappa died too. Before I was born. He liked boats.”

He sat extremely still.

“Did he.”

“Yes. Mamma says. He liked boats a lot. He was a man who loved the water. She says if he was here he’d know me anywhere.” She put her head on one side. “I wave at the ferry. For him. Because it’s the right direction. Do you think he sees?”

It was a thing a person could drown in. He felt it close over his head, a green, enormous, noiseless swell, and he held on to the edge of the bench with both hands, and looked at a gap-toothed child on a wooden seat in a gray wind, who had been taught, in the most loving way imaginable, to wave at the sea.

He liked boats. He was a man who loved the water. It was what his mother had always said of Desmond, at every table, to every guest. He understood now, all at once, whose death the child had been given.

She’d given the child his father. She had dug Desmond Wolcott up out of a Maine graveyard, and put him in a story, and handed him to a four-year-old on a quay, with a wave. And the other one, the one who was sitting on the bench, was nowhere in it. He had been taken out like a stone from a shoe.

“I think he sees,” said Emory. His voice was not steady. “I think he sees every time.”

“Do you?” said Alma, with pleasure. And then, as one who changes the subject to something more serious: “I’ve got a rabbit.”

“Have you?”

“She’s called Kanin. It means rabbit. I wanted to call her Pappa, but Henrik said it’s confusing.” She frowned. “She’s white, and she’s got one gray ear, and she lives in a house Henrik made with a latch. I’m not allowed to undo it. Mamma says never go with anybody.”

“That’s a very good rule,” said Emory.

She looked up at him, startled. It was clear that she had expected opposition.

“It is?”

“It’s the best rule there is. I knew a lady who had the same one.” He cleared his throat. “She was always careful about it. She was right to be.”

“Was she?” Alma pondered this. She had, he noticed, the habit of lifting her left shoulder when she thought, a small jerk, like a bird settling; and he had it too; and in the second it took him to realize it, a long cold pleasure moved through his chest like a ship’s bell, struck once. “You’ve got a boat on your arm.”

“Yes.”

“Is it a lighthouse?”

“Yes. It’s mine. It’s from a place where I live. There’s a real one.”

“A real one? With a light?”

“A real one. With a light that goes round, at night, and tells the boats where to be.”

“Oh,” said Alma. She was silent a moment, and looked at the patch with her whole face, the way she had looked at the ferry. “Tante Solveig’s got a lighthouse book. It’s very old. Can I see yours?”

“One day.”

“Alma!” The big woman at the gate had turned. “Alma! Kom!”

The child slid off the bench. She stood with the ball clasped to her chest, and hesitated, in the manner of one who has been brought up to be polite, and held out her free hand. It was small and cold and wet from the sandpit. He took it. It was the first time, in all his life, that he had held it.

Not hers, he said to himself. Not Corinne’s. You have not put a hand on Corinne.

He had never been so certain that he was lying.

“It was nice to meet you,” said Alma, gravely, and shook once, up and down, like a small general. “See you soon.”

“See you soon, Alma.”

She ran. The red coat went across the gravel with its boots flying, and the blond woman caught her up under the arm, and said something, in the sing-song of one who scolds with affection; and, at the gate, the mother in the gray scarf turned at last, and took the small hand, and looked down at the child, and then, slowly, down the long gray length of the playground.

He was already walking. He did not hurry. He was a man in a gray cap who had been sitting on a bench and had now got up, and he went away over the hill with his hands in his pockets, across the wet grass, under the plane trees, down the steps, and did not look back until he was at the bottom, in the doorway of a closed church, with the wall at his shoulder. He leaned on it. He looked up.

The gate was empty.

* * *

He wrote the email in the hotel, on the Wednesday night, in Norwegian.

He wrote it in the evening, by the green lamp that he had brought in his bag, a small brass thing from a shelf in the oil room, because he could not sleep without it. He wrote it as he had written the notebook, in a plain hand, with a pen, on a pad, first. It was addressed to Klosterhagen Barnehage, Styrer: Ellinor Vik. It said that the writer was Alma Lind’s mother. It said that there had been a family matter; that she had told the staff, long ago, that a certain person was dead, and that this had been an untruth; that she was ashamed of it, and had been frightened, and was less frightened now; that the person was in Bergen, and was a good man, and would come for the child on Thursday at a quarter to two, at the playground on the hill, where they would be on their outing; and that she had wished to tell them in person but was unwell, and would not be answering the telephone.

He read it through. It was extremely good. There was nothing in it that was false, he thought, but the signature.

At the bottom, after Hilsen, Nora Lind, he left a space. He had written in the margin: [what she says at the door]. He had worked out, with the cold small clear part of his mind that did such things, that she would be at the barnehage at half past eight with something to say. She would say it plainly, in front of the director. She would say no one but me. And a man standing at the fence with a thermos would hear every word.

I am not going to send it, he told himself.

He put the pad on the desk.

A door is not a door until it’s opened, said the notebook. Arrange for it to arrive.

He thought about what his mother had said, in the front room, with her hand in his. Let them go. And his answer, the careful one, with the hole. He thought about the gray-green eyes. He thought about Pappa, shouted, every Saturday, at a boat. He thought of a woman standing at a gate with her back to him, quite upright, knowing; and all the dry bright patient discipline of five years and four months stood up in him at once and told him that the right thing was to go to the airport. Tonight. To take the bus in the dark and sit on a bench under a clock and wait for a plane to Oslo, and then to Boston, and then to the lighthouse, and the lamp.

And a small voice that was nobody’s, with a smile in it, said: Now.

He opened the drawer of the desk and took out a postcard.

He had bought it that morning at a kiosk by the harbor: a plain white card, with a view of the Bryggen on the front, wet and gleaming, with a rainbow over it. He uncapped the pen. He held it above the blank back for a long time, and the radiator ticked, and a tram rang its bell somewhere far below in the rain; and then he wrote, steadily, in the small upright capitals that had filled thirteen notebooks, a single line. He read it. He blotted it on the cuff of his shirt. He slid it into the breast pocket of the thermal.

Then he turned out the green lamp, and sat down on the edge of the bed in the dark with his hands between his knees, to wait for morning, and the weather.