Rune met them at Vigra, the airport at Ålesund, on Saturday morning, the day after the sixteenth of July had come and gone with nothing decided.
Karl Thorsen was eighty-one, and in June a small clot had gone through his brain like a man walking through a house without stopping, and left the doors open behind it. In the inside pocket of his jacket there were four pages in the hand of Thorsen’s mother, Ana, headed KARL — NORWAY, with Do NOT let him carry the bags underlined three times, and Danny, I mean it at the bottom. Thorsen had carried both bags. His father had let him, and looked out of the window.
Rune was a tall, square, grey-haired man in a dark blue windcheater, standing very still at the back of the little crowd in the arrivals hall with his hands in his pockets, and Thorsen knew him at once by the way he stood, which was the way he talked on the telephone: a man who measured things. He took Karl’s hand in both of his and held it, and said something in Norwegian, and Karl answered him in Norwegian, slowly, with long pauses, as if he were going down a staircase in the dark and feeling for each step with his foot. Rune listened to him with his head bent. Then he turned to Thorsen and shook his hand once, hard, and let it go.
“My mother has been cleaning since Tuesday,” he said. “Please notice the windows.”
He drove them south. It was not far, and it was mostly water: a tunnel under the sea, and a long road along the shore of a fjord with the mountains going up out of it white at the tops, and a ferry. On the ferry Rune bought three of the kiosk’s thick soft pancakes, folded over butter and brown sugar, and they ate them standing at the rail in the wind. Karl ate his very slowly and then held out his hand for another.
“The same,” he said. “Sixty-eight. The same. I had four.”
“On this boat?”
“Not this boat.” Karl looked out at the water going by, green and very clear, and the islands, and the white houses along the shore with their red boatsheds at the waterline. “But this water.”
Rune was silent for the rest of the crossing. On the far side he drove them over the hill and down, and there was Ulsteinvik: a harbour full of ships, real ships, big blue-and-white working ships tied up at a yard with cranes standing over them; a town of white and yellow houses going up the hill behind; and at the top of the hill, above the harbour, a white house with a red roof and a flagpole, and a small old woman standing on the step.
She came down the step before the car had stopped.
She was smaller than he had imagined from her voice. She was in a grey skirt and a blue cardigan with silver buttons, and her white hair was cut short, and she held herself very straight, the way a woman does who has stood at the front of a classroom for most of her life and been looked at. She did not look at Thorsen. She stood at the bottom of the step and watched his father get out of the car, one leg and then the stick and then the other, and straighten up, and turn round.
“Karl,” she said.
“Ingrid.”
They stood and looked at each other across a metre of gravel. Then she said, very dry, “Du har vorte gammal, Karl,” which was You have got old, Karl, and Karl said, “Du òg,” which was So have you, and she laughed: a short, startled laugh, as though it had got out before she could stop it.
Ingrid put out both her hands, and his father took them.
“You ate all my mother’s waffles,” she said, in English.
“I was twenty-two,” said Karl. “I was hungry.”
“You were very polite about it.” She looked up at him, and her face did something, and she put it back. Then she turned, at last, to Thorsen, and put out her hand. “Daniel. Come in. You are very large. Sindre said you would be. He said all the Americans in the family were large, and I said how do you know, you’ve never met one, and he said, Grandma, it stands to reason.” She held his hand a moment. “Come in. I have cleaned the windows.”
The kitchen looked down over the whole harbour. There was a chair by the window, an old armchair with a wooden frame and a cushion worn pale in the middle, and a small table beside it with a telephone on it, and a lamp. Everything else in the room was very clean and very ordinary: a stove, a table with a blue cloth, a clock ticking on the wall, and on the door of the fridge, held on with a magnet in the shape of a puffin, a photograph of a black dog with a white chest and one blue eye, sitting on a gravel bar and looking at whoever had taken it with his head on one side.
Thorsen stood and looked at it.
“He sent it in June,” Ingrid said behind him. “The first week. With a message, in Norwegian. Grandma, I have got a dog. Do not tell Dad.” She put coffee on the table. “I told his father the same day.”
“She did,” Rune said.
Thorsen had brought the book, the old Pelsjegerliv with its cover held on by tape. Marj had taken it out of Sindre’s duffel herself, on the Tuesday night, and wrapped it in a clean tea towel, and put it in his hands without a word, and the rest of the duffel was coming by sea. He gave it to Ingrid now, at the table, in the tea towel.
She unwrapped it and opened the cover. Per Eiksund, Ulsteinvik, 1962, in faded blue fountain pen; and under it, in a boy’s careful capitals, SINDRE 2016. She looked at the two names. Then she got up and went to the shelf by the window and put the book on it, in a space between two others where it fitted exactly, as if the space had been kept.
“Ruth said to tell you you’re welcome,” Thorsen said. “Ellie’s grandmother. At the Landing.”
“Then she got my letter.” Ingrid sat down again. “Tell Ruth thank you.”
At the door, while Ingrid was showing Karl where to put his stick, Rune stood beside Thorsen and looked out of the window at the harbour.
“She sits up,” he said, very low. “Still. Some nights. In that chair, with the telephone. My wife comes on Sunday mornings and the cushion’s still warm.” He did not look at Thorsen. “She thinks I don’t know.”
He told it plainly, at the kitchen table, with the coffee going cold.
He had thought on the aeroplane about how to tell it, and decided in the end that there was only one way, which was in order, the way she had told it to him on the telephone in April, the way she would have told a class of twelve-year-olds a thing that was hard and true. So he began at the beginning, at the ferry, and went on. He did not leave out the things that were difficult. He did not put in anything he did not know. When he did not know a thing he said so, and Ingrid nodded, as though she had marked a great many essays and that was the sentence she looked for.
He told her about the drill, and the money, and the lie the camp had told, and why. He told her about the creek, and the cutbank, and the water. He told her what Celia Harker had said in a room in Prince George, word for word, and no more than that: that he was going to tell Ellie, and then her father, and that she had only wanted the phone. He told her what he thought it meant, and said that it was what he thought. He told her about the dog, and the four marks on a woman’s arm, and the first-aid book that said she had fallen on the rocks.
Karl sat with his hands on the blue cloth and did not move. Rune stood at the window with his back to them.
Ingrid listened with her hands in her lap. Once, when he told her about the dog, she closed her eyes and opened them again.
When he had finished she sat a while without speaking. The clock ticked. Down in the harbour a crane on the yard was moving something very slowly through the air.
“She wrote to me,” Ingrid said at last. “In September. A very kind letter. About what a lovely boy he was, and how everybody at the camp had loved him, and how sorry she was.” She looked at her hands. “I answered it.”
Nobody said anything.
“So he was going to ring me,” she said. “After. When he had told the girl, Ellie. That night. He was going to ring me and tell me the two things.”
“Yes. I think so.”
“Then I was right to sit up,” said Ingrid Thorsen Eiksund.
Hazel had come down to the airport in Nesvik on Wednesday on her bicycle, and stopped at the fence without getting off it, and handed him a padded envelope through the wire. Inside it was a memory stick and a yellow sticky note in her careful capitals. THREE MINUTES FOUR SECONDS. FOR HIS GRANDMOTHER. NOT FOR ANYBODY ELSE. NO MUSIC. MUSIC IS CHEATING. H. Then she had ridden away without saying goodbye, because Hazel did not.
He told Ingrid what it was, and who had made it, and what was in it, and asked her whether she wanted to see it, now or later or not at all.
“Now,” she said.
Rune turned round from the window.
Thorsen put his laptop on the blue cloth and turned it so that she could see, and pressed the key, and sat back.
There was no title. There was no music. There was the sound of wherever the camera had been, and the picture, and it was the Larkins’ footage, a summer of it, a family filming its own life, and in the background of it, at the edges, not looking at the camera, a tall fair boy with big ears.
The herring toss, in May 2026, with the crowd shrieking and a fish going over the camera’s head, and at the back of the crowd the boy catching it one-handed, astonished, and holding it up, and giving it back to a small child with a little bow. The Sons of Norway hall, in the corner of a shot of Hazel’s mother talking about lefse, the boy at a long table in the background eating it, and listening to an old man beside him, and nodding. Main Street on a wet morning, out of the window of a car, the boy going up a flight of wooden steps carrying two bags of groceries, and an old woman in front of him on the steps with her hand on the rail. The harbour float, the boy with a pack on his back, laughing at something somebody had said outside the frame. Then the river.
The bow of an orange boat, the GoPro low over the water, and a gravel bar coming up, and a black dog standing on it barking with its whole body. Gordie handing a parcel across. The boy on the bar tearing the paper off it, and holding it up, and it was a sweater, red and white, and he pulled it on over his head right there, on the gravel, with the dog jumping at him, and stood with his arms out to show it, and the sleeves came down over his hands.
Ingrid put her hand out and touched the key, and it stopped.
“Again,” she said. “That part.”
Thorsen took it back, and she watched the boy pull the sweater over his head again, and hold his arms out, and the sleeves come down over his hands.
“It fits,” she said. “I was afraid of the sleeves. I made them long, because his arms were always too long for everything.” She took her hand away. “Go on.”
The drone, then, coming down out of the canyon over the bar, and the boy turning on the stones and looking up at it with his hand over his eyes, and waving, both arms, over his head, laughing, with the dog beside him.
And that was the end. Hazel had stopped it there. She had not put in the last one, the one from the boat backing away, of the boy standing on the bar with his hands in his pockets watching them go. Thorsen had wondered on the aeroplane whether she would, and had known she would not.
Rune had come across from the window. He stood behind his mother’s chair with one hand on the back of it, looking at the last frame on the screen, at his son waving.
He had had the photographs since April and had not been able to look at them. He looked at this. He looked at it for as long as it was there.
“I would like a copy,” he said to Thorsen, when it had gone dark. His voice was very precise. “Of this. For Hilde.” He took his hand off the chair. “Not for television.”
“It’s Hazel’s. I’ll ask her.”
“Ask her,” said Rune. “Please. Tell her it is for his mother.”
Later, when the coffee had been made again and Rune had gone out to the car for something he did not come back with for twenty minutes, Ingrid asked about the dog.
“He’s in Nesvik,” Thorsen said. “With Marj. The landlady. She wouldn’t let me bring him. She wanted him.”
“Good,” said Ingrid. “A dog should be wanted. And you will go back for him.”
“End of the month.”
“And then?”
“Minnesota. There’s a house.”
She looked at him over her cup. “A house,” she said. “Well.”
“Bamse likes it there,” Thorsen said. “He hasn’t been. But he’ll like it.”
He said the name the way his father said it. He had not known that he did. His father had been saying it for a fortnight, on the telephone, in the car to the airport, on the plane somewhere over Greenland when he woke up and asked how the dog was, and he said it his own way, with the vowel dark and the end of it nearly swallowed, the way nobody had said it in Nesvik or at the Landing or anywhere else, and Thorsen had picked it up the way a boy picks up his father’s walk.
Ingrid put her cup down and laughed.
It was not the short startled laugh from the step. It was a real one, from somewhere further down, and it went on, and she put her hand over her mouth and could not stop it.
“Bamse,” she said, the way he had said it, and laughed again. “Oh, Daniel. That is how my uncles said it. On the island. In nineteen sixty.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “You sound like a man selling herring on the quay before the war.”
“Sindre said it like a boy from Ålesund,” said Rune. He had come back in from the car without anybody hearing, and was standing at the window. “Short. Like a dog’s name.” He did not turn round. “I like this better.”
“He learned it from me,” Karl said.
“And where did you learn it?” said Ingrid.
“Here,” said his father. “Sixty-eight. From your uncle. At this table.” And he began to laugh too, helplessly, an old man’s laugh, with his shoulders going, and his hand flat on the blue cloth, and Ingrid looked at him and laughed harder, and the two of them sat at the kitchen table in Ulsteinvik and laughed, eighty and eighty-one, at a word, until Ingrid had to get up and get a dishcloth for her eyes.
At eleven o’clock he went out onto the step.
It was not dark and it was not going to be. The sun had gone down behind the mountains across the water, and the sky in the north-west was still full of it, a long clear band of pale gold over the islands, going up through green into a blue that was not night. The harbour lay under it as still as a floor. The ships at the yard stood in it with their lights on, though they did not need them, and every light lay on the water twice. A boat went out between the islands with no sound that reached him, drawing a line on the water behind it that took a long time to close.
He thought of the dog at Marj’s door, ten hours behind, in the early afternoon, lying across the top step with his chin on his paws, looking at the road.
Behind him the kitchen light went off.
He waited a little longer, and then he went in, quietly, past the window. His father’s stick was propped by the stove. Upstairs a door closed. The chair by the window was empty, and the cushion was cold, and the telephone lay on the little table beside it, where it had been all day.
Outside, the light stayed on the harbour all night, the way it does in July, and nobody in the house sat up to watch it.
The End