But this was the road Daddy wanted us to take. He walked without hesitation, long strides and heavy shoes against the ground, shoes that soon were covered in mud and filth.

When we had walked a short distance up the mountainside, he turned to face me and finally started to talk. But it was like he wasn’t talking to me.

“Aluminum,” he said. That was a difficult word; I wondered if it was written “ali” or “alu” or “alm,” like the word almond, I wondered about this while I listened to Daddy, but he said the word so quickly that I couldn’t distinguish between the sounds.

“Hydraulic power is actually about aluminum, about war, about war, because it’s the aluminum plants that demand an increase in power production, and without the production of weapons, eight out of ten aluminum plants would go bankrupt. People think this is about electricity, for schools, day-care centers, hospitals, for people’s homes, but it’s really about weapons and war. Norway’s entire development is based on aluminum and weapons.”

I didn’t know how I was supposed to answer.

We stood there with our heads bowed, looking at the river. We were near a particularly powerful waterfall and saw a rainbow shimmering.

“ROYGBIV,” I said.

“What?”

“The colors of the rainbow. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.”

“It’s enormous,” Daddy said, and I thought he meant the rainbow, but he was pointing to the river. “It’s the snow from the mountain. The snowfall this year has been extreme. This is the last year we will see the river like that. Next year it will be gone.”

“And the rainbow?” I asked.

“That too. You understand that, certainly.”

It was a silly question. I felt suddenly ashamed, I knew that the rainbow was produced by light that was refracted by drops of water, he had explained that to me long ago and I wasn’t one to forget—I stored everything away, especially things he told me.

“But it will still be in the sky,” I said, hoping it would comfort him. “When it rains while the sun is shining, then we’ll see it—it will appear, like a bridge across the fjord.”

The last thing was something I’d heard him say once and I thought it sounded nice.

He didn’t answer, so I continued, raising my voice. “You said that, do you remember, Daddy? That God painted the rainbow in the sky as a promise to Noah that he would never again let a flood destroy the world.”

He used to like it, that I told him about things I had learned, that I impressed him, but he didn’t answer me now either.

“Do you remember that? And then you asked me what I thought about it. I said it was a fairy tale. Because if the story was true, the rainbow would have to be in the sky all the time. Do you remember that I said that? That it was a fairy tale?”

He gave a slight nod.