Читать книгу White Shadow - Roy Jacobsen - Страница 5

The fish came first. Man is merely a persistent guest. The foreman came in and asked if any of the girls could split, there had been an unexpected influx of cod. Ingrid looked up from the barrel of herring and directed her gaze towards the quay, where dancing snowflakes melted into the black woodwork. She wiped her hands on her apron, followed him into the salting room and went over to the splitting bench and a tub of gutted fish. They looked at each other. He nodded at the knife lying there, it resembled a small axe.

She pulled a two-foot long cod from the rinsing tub and placed it on the bench, slit its throat, flipped up the gill cover and sliced through the ribs from the neck down to the belly and out to the tail, severed the backbone at the anus, cut through all the ribs on the right-hand side too, ripped out the spine as if she were undoing a rusty zip, and held it aloft in her left hand; the fish on the bloodstained bench looked like a white wing, waiting to be rinsed and stacked in layers, before being salted and turned and dried and washed and piled and sold, as the ivory-white gold that has sustained life on this scraggy coast for the eight hundred years that have passed since the place was first chronicled.

“Let’s have a keek a’ th’ spine.”

Ingrid switched it to her right hand to conceal the cut between her thumb and index finger. “Clien as a whistle.”

He added that she could stay for as long as it took, you could never be sure in the autumn . . .

“But get s’m gloves on tha.”

Ingrid looked down at her blood mingling with that of the fish and forming a drop that fell to the floor, as he turned his back and squelched over to the office on his rubber soles.

Ingrid longed to be gone, to be back on Barrøy, but no-one can be alone on an island and this autumn neither man nor beast was there, Barrøy lay deserted and abandoned, it hadn’t even been visible since the end of October, but she couldn’t be here on the main island either.

~

She split fish for ten hours a day, kept her distance from two salters and after a week couldn’t sleep at night in the damp, chilly cooper’s loft, where she lay with Nelly and two young girls from the mainland who were here because of the war. They pretended not to cry themselves to sleep, they gutted herring, boned them and salted them in barrels, added brine and drank ersatz coffee, salted and slept and washed themselves every other evening in cold water, their hair once a week, in cold water too, rust red beneath a starry firmament of glistening herring scales, and Ingrid split cod like a man.

In the middle of the second week one of the salters left and Nelly was sent to work with Ingrid. The following day was stormy and the fishing boats sought shelter in the islands. They didn’t come in the next day either and when eventually they managed on the third morning to tack through the snow they didn’t have a single fish in their holds.

But many people were waiting for them, a whole village was there to welcome men returning alive, once again. Then more bad weather, confined to harbour with idle fishing gear, catches that were of no value except perhaps for making guano, it depended on so much, especially the market prices in a different world from this; the sorted fish were tail-tied and hung, and the autumn’s bizarre adventure was over.

~

Ingrid and Nelly turned over the salted fish, discarded the bad ones, ensuring that those at the bottom of the old pile were at the top of the new one. Now it was the end of the herring season, and the mainland girls were given notice, they received their meagre wages, picked the fish scales from each other’s faces, washed each other’s hair in cold water, dried and combed it, taking care to ensure their hairbands were straight before they left on the steamboat laughing and wearing clothes no-one had seen before.

With the same steamer came a letter – from Ingrid’s aunt, Barbro, who was in hospital – set down on paper by a nurse whose handwriting was like a doctor’s, a scrawl which Ingrid was able to read but did not understand. Her aunt wasn’t com-ing up north because her upper femur was not knitting and because she couldn’t get a lift . . . she would be back in good time for Christmas, she said twice, Barbro was fifty-nine and Ingrid thirty-five, that evening she soon fell asleep and had no dreams.

She also woke early and lay listening to the wind clawing at the slate roof and the sea gurgling and lashing between the posts beneath the quay and Nelly’s breathing, Nelly’s sleep was human, it was the only thing here that was as it should be, the sound of Nelly sleeping, night after night, now she couldn’t stand it anymore.

Ingrid got up, washed in the galvanised bucket, packed her suitcase, didn’t eat or make any coffee, carried her stinking work clothes down to the place behind the canning factory where the Germans burned rubbish, and tossed them into the oil drum, staring at the flames until people began to assemble on the quay, it was snowing lightly.

She went back and brewed some coffee of sorts, poured a cup and placed it on the chair by the bedhead next to Nelly, who still lay there looking like a serene corpse, waited for the reflection on the wall to tell her that the foreman had also arrived, that day was now dawning, though it was still dark, then got to her feet, went down to the office with her suitcase and said she wanted to settle up.

He placed his well-worn pencil on the desk, seemed surprised, said she had caught him on the hop, he couldn’t do without her, fish would be coming in that evening, he was sure of that, she was both necessary and surplus to requirements, the paymaster’s usual convoluted trickery, but Ingrid was from an island, the sky was her roof and walls, so she repeated that she wanted her money now, and waited patiently for all the drawers to be opened and closed, all the papers to be shuffled, the ambivalent sighs over the time sheet and the equally laborious counting of the dog-eared banknotes, as though it were an insult to ask for your wages, as though on payday it were the master who was to be pitied, not the slave.

~

Ingrid walked up the icy road to the store and waited for Margot to open, selected the items she needed, including coffee and butter, paid with ration coupons and money, borrowed Margot’s handcart, and wheeled her purchases down to the rowing boat, which had been moored beneath the quay all autumn.

She cleared the snow from the boat with a bailer, loaded her provisions and her suitcase, returned to the store with the cart and on her way back passed two German soldiers, who were sitting smoking on the sheltered side of the salthouse, they must have been there all the time, watching her.

She went down the steps, got into the boat, untied the mooring rope and sat at the oars. One of the soldiers came over to the quayside and shouted something to her, gesticulated, cigarette in hand, a red eye in the winter gloom. She rested on the oars and sent him a quizzical look. Again he shouted something she couldn’t hear, the swirling snow thickened, the boat slipped away and the soldier vanished from view.

Ingrid rowed across to the elongated island of Gråholmen, following the sea-smoothed rocks at an oar’s distance until they were gone, visibility was zero, the sea was heavy and calm.

From the marker on the last rock she steered a course, maintaining the angle between the boat’s wake and the swell until she reached Oterholmen an hour or so later. The island was to port and it should have been to starboard. She adjusted her course, proceeded at a new angle between the swell and the twisting wake and reached Barrøy half an hour after she had lost sight of Oterholmen.

She unloaded her things, opened the boat-shed doors and hauled in the boat with the winch her father had installed when she was a child, straightened her back and looked around, the houses in the grey mass up on the island’s humped ridge, visible at a distance of fifteen to twenty sea miles in clear weather, now just small, black boxes beneath a thin layer of milk, no light, no tracks in the snow.

She lifted the yoke onto her shoulders, hooked on her provisions and walked uphill. The boxes turned into houses and homes, surrounded by trees resembling charred fingers. She let herself in and went from room to room lighting the lamps, fired up the stoves in the kitchen and sitting room. She couldn’t be here, either. She went back out, down to the boat shed, checked it was locked and moved the trestles to the leeward side, as though she hadn’t done all this when she arrived. The bouldered harbour moles and the criss-crossed log skids in the green water, Oterholmen came into view and disappeared again. Not a boat to be seen. Not a bird. She turned and gazed at the houses, one with two yellow eyes, then she walked uphill for the second time, so now at any rate there were three sets of tracks in the snow.