Mommy. Again it was about her, again it was about the two of them. There was no end to it. A breakup lasts forever.

“We’re going to have to live with this for many years to come,” Sønstebø said again. “Enough bridges have been blown up.”

He looked at me as he said it.

After that the camp changed. The singing died out, the laughter as well.

We just waited.

Two days later they came, when we’d been up there for twenty-one days.

It was in the evening. The first thing we saw was a gleam of light above the mountain. Then we heard the sound of tires against the wet road. A convoy. We couldn’t see the end of it, that’s how many there were. They parked in a line along the roadside, the doors opened, and out of every car men poured. Every car was full—four or five in each one. Some also came on motorcycles and one even came on a tractor.

They gathered into a group and walked toward the camp. We had gotten to our feet, people coming out of their tents, stopping their cooking, hushing the children, leaving the guitars in their cases, shoving pipes into the pockets of parkas.

They looked like us, we looked like them. I recognized farmers, fishermen, colleagues of Svein at the plant, familiar faces, people I associated with the place where I grew up, people associated with security, predictability. These were men I’d perhaps laughed at a little—for their taciturn sturdiness, their lack of knowledge, lack of education—but also respected, for the job they did, the investment, the ability to take pleasure in the life they had been allotted. First and foremost, however, it was men I had never thought about much, just taken for granted. They were there, they hauled the fish out of the ocean, harvested grain, picked apples day in and day out, in the sun, in the wind, in the rain.

They had brought signs and banners, all of them hand-painted, like ours, but the message was different.

LEAVE OUR VILLAGE IN PEACE!

GO BACK WHERE YOU CAME FROM!

HIPPIES, GO HOME!

We moved toward the end of the road and they followed, approaching us from all directions, like magnets toward a pole.

A man stepped forward. It was Svein. He had a megaphone in his hand and a thick wool cap pulled down over his ears. He lifted the megaphone to his mouth and looked around, his gaze sweeping over me. I was sure he saw me, but it didn’t have any effect on him.

“We, the citizens of Ringfjorden municipality,” he began, “hereby present you with the following ultimatum.”