Читать книгу White Shadow - Roy Jacobsen - Страница 6

The kitchen was warmer now. Ingrid took off her gloves and hat, ground some coffee and placed the pot on the stove, stocked the larder with her provisions, fetched more firewood and by now the coffee was ready. She took off her coat and drank the coffee, sitting in her own chair by the casement window, peering out at the shadows to the west, Moltholmen, Skogsholmen, Lundeskjærene and the sleepy shore, well into this day which would never come to anything. Still she did not eat. She looked around for a place to start, under the stove or the table, in the corner by the larder?

She got to her feet, pulled out the peat scuttle and began to tear the newspapers into strips, crumpled them into small balls and made a pile on the floor, like a snow lantern. It collapsed. She stacked them again, the newspaper was one she used to get in the days when Barrøy was a community, with people and animals and a lighthouse, with storms and doughtiness, with work, a summer and winter and prosperity, she laid some kindling and bits of peat around the balls of paper to make a fire, an idea no-one had had before, burning down a house on an island; there were some ruins on the eastern side of Barrøy, but no scorched ground, and suddenly there was no doubt anymore, those who had left Karvika had done so of their own free will, not because of any disaster, they had quite simply got sick of it, had looked at themselves in the mirror, packed their things and gone, it was an unbearable thought.

She grabbed a lamp and went up to the North Chamber, then into the South Chamber, poked her head into Barbro’s room on the eastern side of the house, went into her own childhood room with a pull-out bed and a potty and a bedside table and faded school drawings, which she hadn’t seen since she was here picking potatoes in September; the house had shrunk, the doors were lower, the windows narrower; the smell of its inhabitants had once stuck to these walls like paint, now all that was left was the odour of wet, heavy earth, she ran a fingertip through the beads of condensation and sat on her parents’ bed where her mother had died.

“Let Lars take over Barrøy,” was the last thing she had said. “And leave this place, you’re young and bright, turn your back on the sea, heed my words . . .”

Ingrid said no.

“You’re not strong enough.”

“Yes, I am,” Ingrid said to her dying mother.

The following spring Lars did not return from Lofoten, he had found love, he wrote, and stayed there with the boat and the crew and the tackle, year after year, even when war broke out. And Ingrid and Barbro became lonelier and lonelier with every sun that rose and every storm that abated, with every animal they slaughtered and every sack of down they gathered and failed to sell, a young woman and a middle-aged woman on an island, waiting for letters from Lars, neat, regular ramblings, which one day were also furnished with some green scribbles, the signature of Lars’ three-year-old son, Hans, the longest three years of Ingrid’s life. Now the war had lasted for four, and Hans had a brother, Martin; with him came more scribbles, to an aunt and a grandmother who didn’t write back because one of them was too proud and the other couldn’t.

~

Ingrid went into the North Chamber and decided to sleep there, where a hatch in the floor led down to the kitchen, allowing the heat to rise. She shook and beat the eiderdowns, made the bed, went downstairs again and drank some lukewarm coffee as she re-read the letter from Barbro, whereupon she scrunched it up and placed it in the pile on the floor.

But she didn’t set it alight.

She went into the sitting room to put some wood in the stove and noticed that her grandfather’s bedroom door was ajar. She took hold of the handle, wanting to close the door, but she had done this a short time ago, she had shut the door and now it was open again, the house was silent, nothing stirred.

She heard a click, then distant, sustained thunder from the bowels of the earth, she backed into the kitchen and stood rooted to the spot, for much too long; then she returned and wrenched open the door and was angry with herself for not hav-ing done so in the first place, whoever it was could have got away.

But she could smell nothing, she heard no shuffling steps, mumbling voices or the sound of a cat, only the same faint hissing sound, inside and out. She unhooked the lamp from the sitting-room wall, went right inside her grandfather’s room and established beyond all doubt that nobody was there, neither in the bed nor underneath it, neither in the corner cupboard nor in the chest, which she opened and closed, and sat on the lid with the persistent hiss of silence so loud in her ears that she had to scream.

Then the silence was total.

She put on her coat and went out into the falling snow, stopped and surveyed the buildings, the barn, then the quays and the boat shed by the sea, suddenly wonderstruck at all the things that had kept her on the island, which in truth were nothing at all. Soon the snow would turn to rain, the island would become as brown as scab and the sea grey, unless the wind changed.

Ingrid walked south through the gardens, avoided the gates and clambered over the stone walls as she did when a child. But she was a child no more. She continued to the southernmost point, where she stopped and stared at the ruins of the lighthouse, which she and Barbro had blown up with the last of her father’s dynamite when war broke out, shattered glass in clear, garish colours, strands of seaweed and kelp wrapped like black hair around rusting, twisted iron girders, a paraffin drum resembling a scorched rose. She sat down on the tree trunk they had found drifting in the water and had secured with bolts and wires so that the sea wouldn’t take it from them again, this colossal bone-white giant they thought one day would be worth something, maybe a fortune even, now it had served as a bench for three decades, for people who never sat down.

And Ingrid was no longer a child.

She waited until she began to feel the cold, walked north along the rocks to the west without seeing any footprints or hearing anything but the dismal wail of the sea, past the Hammer with the new quay and the three boat houses, that was at least one too many; she realised that if she had woken Nelly that morning, if she had allowed herself to hear her voice and see her smile, she would still have been at the trading post, tearing the backbones out of dead cod as her thoughts ebbed and flowed.

~

Standing in the new quay house, Ingrid bunched her wet hair and let it fall, repeated the action, wondering why she still wasn’t hungry. She noticed a hole in the sleeve of her woollen jumper, was unable to remember how it got there. In a rectangular box on top of the workbench were some wooden floats arranged according to size. She took the largest and played with it, saw the teeth marks left by Lars, who chewed everything when he was a toddler. She still had dried fish blood under her nails. Her jumper had caught on a nail on the staircase as she went down with her suitcase that morning. On the shelf above the bench were spools of yarn of all dimensions, knives, whetstones, hooks, corks . . . and bodkins, Barbro’s bodkins.

Ingrid pulled over the stool and sat by the iron hook beneath the window, threaded a bodkin and set to work on the gill nets. An hour later she had made three fathoms with a mesh size of fifteen. Her hands were soft and delicate in the cool air. She was ravenous, went out into the darkness of the night and back to the house, she had been wrong about the weather, the rain had turned to snow, as light and dry as soot, and she was no longer afraid.