Thursday

It rained on Thursday as it had not rained in Bergen since the winter she arrived.

It began before dawn. She heard it from the bed, where she lay on her back with her hands folded on her breastbone like a woman on a tomb, awake since three, watching the dark go gray in the window at the level of the grass. It came down straight and hard, on the roof, in the rose, in the gutters of the lane, with a long steady roar like a train that never quite arrived, and the whole house hummed with it. At six she got up. She did not light the lamp. She dressed in the clothes she had laid out the night before on the chair, trousers and the gray wool jersey and the good boots, and went into the kitchen and put her hand on the stove, which was warm, and filled the kettle.

The suitcase stood by the door. She had packed it at midnight in forty minutes, without a list. It held two changes of clothes for each of them, Alma’s rabbit-eared slippers, a cardigan with a gas bill in the pocket, a pair of wire picks sewn into a hem, and in a biscuit tin wrapped in a vest, eleven thousand kroner, a United States passport, dark blue and well thumbed, and a photograph of a woman in a green coat. She had put in the Vuggeviser. She had taken it out and put it in again. She had not packed the clock.

“You will eat,” said Solveig.

She stood in the doorway in her nightgown and her old quilted dressing gown, leaning on her stick, with her iron plait over one shoulder and her face scored by sleep. She had come down the garden in the rain in her slippers. She had not knocked.

“I’m not hungry.”

“I did not ask whether you were hungry. I said eat.” Solveig came in and sat down at the table, stiffly, in one movement, like a drawbridge, and put the stick across her knees. “There is porridge. I made it at four. I could hear you through the floor, going round and round, and I thought, either that woman will wear a groove in my boards or she will eat something.”

So Corinne ate. She sat across from her landlady at six in the morning with the rain pouring down the window and a bowl of porridge in front of her with a pat of butter in the middle and a spoon of cloudberry jam, and swallowed it slowly, a mouthful at a time, while the old woman watched.

“You are going tomorrow,” said Solveig.

“Yes.”

“On the train.”

“The 7:56.”

“And the child?”

“I’ll take her to the barnehage as usual. I’ll tell Ellinor. I’ll be at the door at two.” She put down the spoon. “I’m sorry. I should have said it sooner. I should have told you in the autumn, in September, when the letter came. I should have gone then, while it was quiet. I didn’t want to.”

“Why?”

She looked at the window. It was streaming. “Because it was nice here,” she said. “Because of the rose. And Billett. And your terrible cheese. Because I was happy, Solveig. For about six months, I think, I was just happy. I forgot it was borrowed.”

Solveig was silent.

It was a long, flat, weighty silence, of the kind that Norwegians use for what other people use words for. She sat with her big square hands folded on the head of the stick and her pale eyes fixed on a point somewhere above the stove. A drop of rain came down the chimney and fizzed on the iron.

“I was thirty-one when Per died,” she said, at last. “I had a house, and a job with the ships, and nobody. People said you will marry again. I did not. I said, I am not looking. For forty years I said it.” She turned the pale eyes on Corinne. “You know what I found out? It is not the looking that you are afraid of. It is the being found.”

“Solveig —”

“I do not want to be told where you are going. I do not want to know. If he comes to my door I will say, in all honesty, I don’t know, and I will hit him with this.” She lifted the stick an inch and let it fall. “But I will tell you what I think, since I am old, and there is nobody to stop me. I think you were found in the autumn. I think you have been found all along. And I think you are the sort of woman who, if she were told so, would sit down on the floor and cry for a year, and then get up.”

“That is not very comforting.”

“I am Norwegian,” said Solveig. “We do not comfort. We feed.” She pushed herself to her feet. “I will go to bridge at one. Gudrun will be put out if I do not, and she will ring the whole of Nordnes, and you said you wanted to be dull. Go now. Take the child. Take the umbrella; it is the black one, the big. Henrik left it.”

At the door she stopped, with her hand on the frame, and did not turn round.

“You have been a very good tenant,” said Solveig Arneson. “You paid on time. You did not play the trombone.”

She went out into the rain.

* * *

“Ingen,” said Corinne. “No one.”

It was twenty past eight, at the gate, under the black umbrella, with the downpour drumming on the silk like a thousand small fists and the red-and-yellow-and-blue fence running with water. She had Alma by one hand. In the other she held, folded small, a sheet of paper with three names on it in block capitals. Ellinor Vik stood on the step in a green raincoat, a thin tall woman with a gray bob and a whistle on a cord, who had run the school for nineteen years and who had never once, in the five that Corinne had known her, inquired about anything she was not told.

“I beg your pardon?”

“There are three people who may take Alma home. Me. Henrik Dahl. Solveig Arneson. They’re on the list already, but I want to say it again, in person, and I want you to write it down.” She held out the paper. Her voice was flat and level and extremely polite. “Not a relative. Not a friend. Not a person who says that I’ve sent him. Not even if he has a letter, not even if he telephones. If I do not come to the door myself, or Henrik, or Solveig, you will keep her here until I do.”

Ellinor took the paper. She read it. She was a woman who, in the course of a long life among children, had learned to read the faces of parents, and she read this one, standing in the rain, for what seemed a very long time.

“Is there something we should know?” she said, gently.

“There is a family reason.”

“Yes. I understand.” She folded the paper in half. “Of course. Selvfølgelig. It will go on the whiteboard in the office. Randi will have it by nine.”

“Thank you.”

“Nora.” The older woman put her hand on her arm. “If you are afraid. We have a duty. You must tell us if you are afraid. There are things we are able to do.”

“I know,” said Corinne. “I’m not. It’s only for a few days.” She tried to smile, and it nearly worked. “It’s the weather. It makes me nervous.”

“We have all been nervous this week,” said Ellinor, with a small dry laugh, looking up at the sky. “It is the worst since I was a girl. We have cancelled the outing. The children will paint.”

“Mamma.”

A small voice, at her hip. Alma stood in her red coat with the hood up and the yellow hat folded in her fist, looking up with the grave gray-green stare that she turned on weather, ferries, and the faults of adults. Her boots were wet. She had her rabbit by the ear, a stuffed gray one, the old boy, which she allowed out on wet days.

“Will the friend be at the playground?”

The world stopped. Corinne heard the rain on the umbrella, the drip from the gutter, the quick clop of a bicycle going by on the wet street; and she crouched, slowly, in the puddle, so that their faces were level, and took both small shoulders in her hands.

“There’s no playground today, love. It’s too wet. You’ll stay inside and paint.”

“But he said soon —”

“I know. I know what he said.” She kept her voice quite steady. She did not look at the street. “Listen to me. You know what Mamma says.”

“Never go with anybody.”

“Never go with anybody. Not anybody. Not a friend, not a nice person, not a person with a boat on his arm. Not if he says I said. Not if he knows your rabbit’s name.” She held the shoulders, hard. “If a grown-up you don’t know tries to take your hand, you scream. You scream the loudest you ever have. You scream this is not my mamma. Do you understand me?”

“That’s what I say when they give me the wrong bag.”

“That’s what you say.”

“But he’s not a stranger,” said Alma, reasonably. “He knows my name.”

Because you gave it to him. She did not say it. She drew the child into her arms, in the rain, in the street, in front of the whole green-fenced yard, and held her, and smelled wet wool and toothpaste and the faint sweet milky smell of the top of her head, and thought: one more day. She said, into the hood:

“I love you. I’ll be back at two. I’ll be early. We’ll have a snail.”

“Two snails.”

“Two snails.”

She let go. She watched the small figure run across the yard in the rain to the green door, where the big blond woman with the fleece stood waiting with an umbrella, and be taken inside. The door shut. She stood for a while. Then she picked up her own umbrella from the puddle where she’d dropped it, and turned, and walked up the street, and did not look at the plum tree on the corner, or at the doorway of the closed church across the lane.

* * *

The rain gave no quarter. She walked through it all morning like a woman in a dream.

She went to the station and bought two tickets in cash from a boy with a nose ring and a head cold, a one-way to Oslo on the 7:56, and he printed them on a strip of pink paper and wished her a good journey. She went to a baker and bought a bag of cinnamon snails. She went to a hardware shop and bought, for no reason she could name, a small padlock, brass, with two keys; and put it in her pocket. She walked. It was the third way, and the fourth, and the long way round by the fish market, and the rain beat on the umbrella, and the gulls stood about on the wet stone in lines like deacons. And she looked at it all.

It was an odd thing. She had expected to be hurried. She had thought that, on the last morning, she would race. Instead, she found herself slowing down. She stopped on the Bryggen at the end of the wooden wharf, in the middle of a downpour, and watched the gables go up one behind another, red and yellow and ochre, wet and gleaming, with their crooked windows and their faded swags of carved flowers; and she thought of a girl of twenty in a car, wrapped in a friend’s coat, being driven at a hundred miles an hour through the dark, who had looked out of the window and thought: I will be anywhere but here. She had been right. She had been right for twenty-three years.

To the Block Island ferry, said Corinne, to the rain.

Nobody answered. Nobody ever had to answer, now. It was the toast of a woman who had no one left to say it to, and she said it all the same, in a very low voice, at the end of the wharf, and it was suddenly not a sad thing, but a sort of a vow.

May it always run.

* * *

Ingrid’s office was on the second floor of a narrow building in the Strandkaien, up a flight of stairs that smelled of damp plaster and tobacco, behind a door with a brass plate that said FYRLYKT FORLAG in small modest capitals, beneath which someone had once stuck a postcard of a lighthouse and not taken it off. There were three rooms. They were crammed to the ceilings with books. A single lamp burned on a desk heaped with proofs, and beside it, in a pair of cherry-red glasses, with a pencil behind each ear and another in her hair, sat Ingrid Solheim, looking up with an expression of such extraordinary and uncharacteristic gentleness that Corinne stopped in the doorway with the water running off her coat.

She had rung her at seven, from the flat, and said six words. Ingrid had said, come at noon, and put down the telephone.

“You have come to say goodbye.”

“I came for the envelope.”

“I know why you came. You have the face of a woman who is holding a door shut with her whole weight.” Ingrid stood. She was very tall and very lean in her gray cardigan, and she came round the desk with the long loose stride of a wading bird and stood, a yard off, looking down. “Sit. I will make you tea. Not that dreadful American kind. A proper one.”

“I can’t stay.”

“You can stay ten minutes. It is in the left-hand drawer. It is thirty thousand kroner and an address in Holland, which I have not asked anything about and you will not tell me.” She took off the glasses. Without them her face was old, and raw, and kind. “I have not said it. I have not said it in five years. So I will say it now, in front of the dictionary, where it is safe. You are the finest translator I have ever worked with. Better than the Swede. Better than the man who did the Nobel.”

Corinne’s mouth shook.

“Don’t,” she said.

“I shall. It is my office.” Ingrid put out one hand, slowly, as one puts a hand to a wild bird, and laid it against the side of Corinne’s face. It was dry and warm and smelled of pencil shavings. “In November of the year you came, I told you that a translator leaves a fingerprint. I told you that a fingerprint was not a confession. I think I was wrong about that. I think, in the end, everything is a confession. It is only a matter of who reads it.”

“Henrik reads it.”

“Henrik is a good man. I mean someone else.” The pale eyes were very steady. “I was not going to tell you this either. When the Americans printed the book, the young man at the press wrote your biography. He wrote she lives in Bergen. He took it from my letterhead. I did not see the proof until the thing was in the shops, and by then it was a matter of eleven thousand copies, and you were happy, and I thought: it is a sentence. Nobody will read a sentence in a biography and get on an aeroplane.” Her mouth twisted. “I have lain awake over it. I would give a finger to unprint it.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to me.”

“Ingrid.” Corinne took the hand from her cheek, and held it. “It would have to be a man who was looking for a sentence. It would have to be a man who knew exactly what to look for. And he’d have to be reading me.”

“That is the only kind of man I have ever worried about,” said Ingrid.

They stood a moment in the lamplight, with the rain pouring down the window. Then the older woman had the drawer open, and was pushing a thick envelope into Corinne’s hands, and the hands, which had been cold since dawn, would not close on it.

“You will write to me. To the box. You will tell me you are alive. You will tell me when you want a book.”

“I’ll write.”

“I shall find you something wonderful. A very bad woman. A murderess in Trondheim.”

Corinne turned in the doorway. She looked back. Ingrid Solheim stood in her gray cardigan in the lamplight of the little office, among the proofs, with the pencils in her hair and the glasses dangling from one hand, a tall plain furious grieving woman who, for five years, had asked her no questions whatever; and Corinne went back across the room, and put her arms round her, and was held.

It lasted four seconds. It was the longest hug of her life.

“Go,” said Ingrid, into her hair. “Go on. I have a book to proof.”

* * *

She was late. It was the one thing she had not allowed for.

It was Ingrid’s tea, which she had refused and been given; it was the hug; it was the long stop on the stair, with her forehead against the cold wet plaster, while a boy with a trolley of paper edged by. When she came out into the Strandkaien the clock on the fish-market tower said twenty to two, and the rain was coming down so hard that the gutters had overflowed and the whole street ran like a river, and a tram stood stopped across the points with its bell going and a tree down on the line. She looked at the clock. She had told Ellinor two, early. She had meant half past one.

She began to run.

She did not know why. She told herself it was the snail. She told herself it was only that she had promised, and a promise is a promise, and a child waits at a window. She ran through the Strandkaien in the rain with the black umbrella in one hand and the envelope crushed in the other, and her boots slipping on the stones, and the long Bergen downpour roaring in her ears; up the steps by the Fløibanen and through the lane behind the fish market, and across the broad square with the statue, past a woman with a pram, and a man under an awning selling flowers, who called after her. She did not stop to look at her watch. Somewhere in her, very far down, a cold clear voice was counting, and it did not stop at twenty to two.

The hill was steep, and the stones were streaming, and her breath came sobbing; and at five to the hour she turned the corner by the plum tree, and went down the last of the lane at a staggering lope, and saw the fence, the red and yellow and blue, with the rain running down every plank of it. The yard was empty. The sandpit was a gray pond. A single plastic spade lay on its side in a puddle, filling.

On the step stood Randi.

She was not in her fleece. She was in a yellow oilskin, bareheaded, with her big face wet and blotched, and she was holding a sheet of paper in both hands, and when she saw Corinne come round the corner she took a step forward, and a step back, and put the paper over her mouth.

No, thought Corinne. She did not say it. She had stopped; she stood in the middle of the lane with the umbrella dropped behind her and the water running into her eyes. No. No. Not on a Thursday. Not in the rain.

“Nora,” said Randi. She was crying. “Nora, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry. We tried. We tried, we rang you, we rang the flat, we rang Solveig, we rang Henrik, we rang — Nobody —” She stopped. She swallowed. She tried again, in a cracked, high voice, as if she were reading from a card. “Your child’s father already picked her up.”

The rain made a sound like applause.

“What?” said Corinne.

“He came at a quarter to two. He said you knew. Ellinor had — you wrote, you wrote this morning, she showed me —” She held out the paper. It shook. “He had a passport. He spoke Norwegian like a minister. He had a — Alma knew him. She said, it’s the friend, it’s the friend, she said, he’s taking me to Mamma. She took his hand. She — we couldn’t — we’ve never —” Her face crumpled. “He was so gentle.”

Corinne took the paper.

It was a printout. It was an email, in Norwegian, on the school’s paper, timestamped 09:12. It was from an address she did not know, with her own name on it, Nora Lind, and the words were in her own voice; they were in her own voice exactly, in a plain, careful, slightly formal Norwegian, with a fine dry shape to the sentences, and a weight on the last word of each.

Dear Ellinor,

I must write to you again. Forgive me. I have been a coward and a fool.

I know what I said to you at the gate this morning. I said no one but myself. I was frightened. I said it because I have been frightened of a certain person for a very long time. I told you, years ago, that he was dead, and that was a lie, and I am ashamed of it. He is not dead. He is in Bergen. He is a good man, and he has never raised his hand to me, and he has come a very long way to see his daughter, and I have spent a night and a morning thinking about whether I have the right to keep her from him.

I do not.

Please let him collect her. He will come at a quarter to two. If it rains, he will come to the school door. He will show you his passport. His name is Wolcott. He is very gentle and very tired and he speaks our language.

I cannot answer the telephone today. I am not well. I will see you tomorrow.

Hilsen,

Nora Lind

She read it. She read it through to the end, and it was good. It was the best forgery she had ever seen. It had her voice in it. It said a thing that she might have said, in a world in which she was a different woman, braver and more foolish; and there was a verb at the end of every paragraph, falling like a stone on a letter.

He read the book, she thought. He counted. And she thought of the doorway of the closed church across the lane, which she had not looked at, and where, she did not doubt, a thermos had stood on the step.

“Ellinor read it at half past nine,” Randi was saying. Her voice came and went. “She said — she said, poor girl. She said we must let her have her peace. I said, but this morning she said — and Ellinor said, she says so herself, Randi, she’s quoting herself, how could he know what she said at the gate? And at one she rang, and nobody — and at a quarter to two he was at the door, in the rain, with a little umbrella. A red one. He said it was for Alma. He didn’t try to hurry her. He asked her whether she wanted her boots.” She stopped. “She said yes. She was very excited. She said, I’m going to see my mamma at the ferry.”

Corinne did not hear the end of it. She stood in the rain, holding the paper.

“Ellinor —” she said.

“In the office. She is in the office. She won’t — she cannot — Nora, he left this.” The big woman fumbled in the pocket of the oilskin, and drew out something small and white, damp at the corners, and held it out. “He said, give this to her when she comes. She will want to see it. He said it was just a card.”

It was a postcard.

It showed the Bryggen from the water, wet and gleaming, with a rainbow over it, in the sort of colors that are sold in kiosks to tourists in July. She turned it over. There was no stamp. There was no address. There was only a single message on the back, in neat small upright capitals, in black ink, a little blotted at the corner where a cuff had touched it:

RAIN. FORTY-ONE. WIND SOUTHWEST, NINE.
SHE IS WARM AND DRY.
I WILL BE WHERE YOU CAN SEE ME.
—E.

She read it three times. She read it as one reads a will. Then she lifted her head.

She did not decide to. It was the last thing she would have chosen. It was what her whole body did, of its own accord, in the roaring gray rain, with the card in one hand and the printout in the other: she lifted her eyes from the page, and looked down the street.

The lane ran steeply away from the gate between its leaning wooden houses, wet and shining, a long gray funnel of water and slate, all the way down to the harbor road; and at the bottom, where it opened out, a single lamp was burning in the middle of the day. Beyond it was the wall of rain. Beyond that, very faint, the long gray shape of the quay.

Under the lamp stood two figures.

One was tall. He stood with his feet apart and his weight a shade forward, as a man stands who is used to a deck, in a gray cap and a dark coat, with the orange of a patch on his sleeve showing like a coal. He held a red umbrella, very small in his hand, tilted, so that it covered not himself but the child. And the child, in a red coat and a yellow hat pushed back off her forehead, stood close against his leg with her hand in his, small and trusting and quite wet, talking up at him with her whole arm, as she talked to the sky.

He was not listening to her.

He had turned his face up the hill. He was looking at the woman at the gate, down the whole length of that streaming street, through all that falling rain, quite calmly, with a patience that had no hurry and no end. And as she watched, with the card in her hand and her mouth open on a word that did not come, Emory smiled.