32I stood in the aisle between the rows of tables, gazing into a full glass of schnapps. It glowed green against my fingers. I was thinking they were strangers, the people sitting here. Foreigners. They’d flown in from home, and now they were sitting here. I had no idea who we were. So it seemed to me. That I was floating. Meanwhile the old lady was finishing her speech. ‘To Marita’s memory,’ she said. A man’s voice at my elbow repeated, ‘To Marita’s memory.’ A wet sigh went from table to table.

The wake lasted all afternoon.

The fog was beginning to lift, separating like sour milk and creeping off in all directions. In the car park by the school a few off-white strips lingered, irresolutely luminous in the winter dark.

The car was cold. The Tarantula cursed softly into his beard as he fumbled with the heater, switching on the radio and getting into gear. My mother’s hair poked over the edge of the front seat, immobile. On the back seat beside me sat Omma.

Along Køge Bay motorway, the remains of the fog hung in the trees like wet tinsel.

Omma wanted to say something. Her mouth worked slowly, concentratedly. I looked away. Yellow and white headlights flickered past in a blur, now dense as bolts, now dissolved in outstretched lightning. 33

Omma put her hand on mine. Her face was calm now. It appeared and disappeared with the light of the oncoming cars. ‘No island is an island,’ she said. Then she patted my cheek and departed.

34

BJØRNØYA

The sloop KALYPSO set out early this summer with twenty-odd men. Younger men from the same village, childhood classmates, a few cousins, his brother Jegvan and a handful of older men. A few visitors too, from the northern fjords.

The weather’s been fine. The weeks have passed. She’s leeward of Svalbard’s southernmost island now, the ocean either side. It’s the arctic summer. The pale sky is blind, the days nightless, blurred.

When the bell tolls, the men flick their cigarettes overboard and take up position along the gunwale.

The fishing lines are cast into the water, the boat drifting.

Fritz observes his fingers. The skin is worn to a shine, red. At first the cold stuck like glass fibres under his nails; now the hands are barely his.

The deep current tugs at the hull, and the water, glossy as oil in the silence, laps against the sides of the boat. The crew work, eat and smoke. The cod decide when. 35