White Shadow

Roy Jacobsen

Translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw

BIBLIOASIS
Windsor, ON

Contents

I

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

II

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

III

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

About the Contributors

Biblioasis International Translation Series

Copyright

I

1

The fish came first. Man is merely a persistent guest. The foreman came in and asked if any of the girls could split, there had been an unexpected influx of cod. Ingrid looked up from the barrel of herring and directed her gaze towards the quay, where dancing snowflakes melted into the black woodwork. She wiped her hands on her apron, followed him into the salting room and went over to the splitting bench and a tub of gutted fish. They looked at each other. He nodded at the knife lying there, it resembled a small axe.

She pulled a two-foot long cod from the rinsing tub and placed it on the bench, slit its throat, flipped up the gill cover and sliced through the ribs from the neck down to the belly and out to the tail, severed the backbone at the anus, cut through all the ribs on the right-hand side too, ripped out the spine as if she were undoing a rusty zip, and held it aloft in her left hand; the fish on the bloodstained bench looked like a white wing, waiting to be rinsed and stacked in layers, before being salted and turned and dried and washed and piled and sold, as the ivory-white gold that has sustained life on this scraggy coast for the eight hundred years that have passed since the place was first chronicled.

“Let’s have a keek a’ th’ spine.”

Ingrid switched it to her right hand to conceal the cut between her thumb and index finger. “Clien as a whistle.”

He added that she could stay for as long as it took, you could never be sure in the autumn . . .

“But get s’m gloves on tha.”

Ingrid looked down at her blood mingling with that of the fish and forming a drop that fell to the floor, as he turned his back and squelched over to the office on his rubber soles.

Ingrid longed to be gone, to be back on Barrøy, but no-one can be alone on an island and this autumn neither man nor beast was there, Barrøy lay deserted and abandoned, it hadn’t even been visible since the end of October, but she couldn’t be here on the main island either.

~

She split fish for ten hours a day, kept her distance from two salters and after a week couldn’t sleep at night in the damp, chilly cooper’s loft, where she lay with Nelly and two young girls from the mainland who were here because of the war. They pretended not to cry themselves to sleep, they gutted herring, boned them and salted them in barrels, added brine and drank ersatz coffee, salted and slept and washed themselves every other evening in cold water, their hair once a week, in cold water too, rust red beneath a starry firmament of glistening herring scales, and Ingrid split cod like a man.

In the middle of the second week one of the salters left and Nelly was sent to work with Ingrid. The following day was stormy and the fishing boats sought shelter in the islands. They didn’t come in the next day either and when eventually they managed on the third morning to tack through the snow they didn’t have a single fish in their holds.

But many people were waiting for them, a whole village was there to welcome men returning alive, once again. Then more bad weather, confined to harbour with idle fishing gear, catches that were of no value except perhaps for making guano, it depended on so much, especially the market prices in a different world from this; the sorted fish were tail-tied and hung, and the autumn’s bizarre adventure was over.

~

Ingrid and Nelly turned over the salted fish, discarded the bad ones, ensuring that those at the bottom of the old pile were at the top of the new one. Now it was the end of the herring season, and the mainland girls were given notice, they received their meagre wages, picked the fish scales from each other’s faces, washed each other’s hair in cold water, dried and combed it, taking care to ensure their hairbands were straight before they left on the steamboat laughing and wearing clothes no-one had seen before.

With the same steamer came a letter – from Ingrid’s aunt, Barbro, who was in hospital – set down on paper by a nurse whose handwriting was like a doctor’s, a scrawl which Ingrid was able to read but did not understand. Her aunt wasn’t com-ing up north because her upper femur was not knitting and because she couldn’t get a lift . . . she would be back in good time for Christmas, she said twice, Barbro was fifty-nine and Ingrid thirty-five, that evening she soon fell asleep and had no dreams.

She also woke early and lay listening to the wind clawing at the slate roof and the sea gurgling and lashing between the posts beneath the quay and Nelly’s breathing, Nelly’s sleep was human, it was the only thing here that was as it should be, the sound of Nelly sleeping, night after night, now she couldn’t stand it anymore.

Ingrid got up, washed in the galvanised bucket, packed her suitcase, didn’t eat or make any coffee, carried her stinking work clothes down to the place behind the canning factory where the Germans burned rubbish, and tossed them into the oil drum, staring at the flames until people began to assemble on the quay, it was snowing lightly.

She went back and brewed some coffee of sorts, poured a cup and placed it on the chair by the bedhead next to Nelly, who still lay there looking like a serene corpse, waited for the reflection on the wall to tell her that the foreman had also arrived, that day was now dawning, though it was still dark, then got to her feet, went down to the office with her suitcase and said she wanted to settle up.

He placed his well-worn pencil on the desk, seemed surprised, said she had caught him on the hop, he couldn’t do without her, fish would be coming in that evening, he was sure of that, she was both necessary and surplus to requirements, the paymaster’s usual convoluted trickery, but Ingrid was from an island, the sky was her roof and walls, so she repeated that she wanted her money now, and waited patiently for all the drawers to be opened and closed, all the papers to be shuffled, the ambivalent sighs over the time sheet and the equally laborious counting of the dog-eared banknotes, as though it were an insult to ask for your wages, as though on payday it were the master who was to be pitied, not the slave.

~

Ingrid walked up the icy road to the store and waited for Margot to open, selected the items she needed, including coffee and butter, paid with ration coupons and money, borrowed Margot’s handcart, and wheeled her purchases down to the rowing boat, which had been moored beneath the quay all autumn.

She cleared the snow from the boat with a bailer, loaded her provisions and her suitcase, returned to the store with the cart and on her way back passed two German soldiers, who were sitting smoking on the sheltered side of the salthouse, they must have been there all the time, watching her.

She went down the steps, got into the boat, untied the mooring rope and sat at the oars. One of the soldiers came over to the quayside and shouted something to her, gesticulated, cigarette in hand, a red eye in the winter gloom. She rested on the oars and sent him a quizzical look. Again he shouted something she couldn’t hear, the swirling snow thickened, the boat slipped away and the soldier vanished from view.

Ingrid rowed across to the elongated island of Gråholmen, following the sea-smoothed rocks at an oar’s distance until they were gone, visibility was zero, the sea was heavy and calm.

From the marker on the last rock she steered a course, maintaining the angle between the boat’s wake and the swell until she reached Oterholmen an hour or so later. The island was to port and it should have been to starboard. She adjusted her course, proceeded at a new angle between the swell and the twisting wake and reached Barrøy half an hour after she had lost sight of Oterholmen.

She unloaded her things, opened the boat-shed doors and hauled in the boat with the winch her father had installed when she was a child, straightened her back and looked around, the houses in the grey mass up on the island’s humped ridge, visible at a distance of fifteen to twenty sea miles in clear weather, now just small, black boxes beneath a thin layer of milk, no light, no tracks in the snow.

She lifted the yoke onto her shoulders, hooked on her provisions and walked uphill. The boxes turned into houses and homes, surrounded by trees resembling charred fingers. She let herself in and went from room to room lighting the lamps, fired up the stoves in the kitchen and sitting room. She couldn’t be here, either. She went back out, down to the boat shed, checked it was locked and moved the trestles to the leeward side, as though she hadn’t done all this when she arrived. The bouldered harbour moles and the criss-crossed log skids in the green water, Oterholmen came into view and disappeared again. Not a boat to be seen. Not a bird. She turned and gazed at the houses, one with two yellow eyes, then she walked uphill for the second time, so now at any rate there were three sets of tracks in the snow.

2

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.

3

Ingrid ate and slept and woke and was still not afraid. She took her time eating, dressed, went out into the fragile November light and pushed out the rowing boat. The wind had turned once again and had picked up, from the south-west. She rowed around the headland and into the metre-high waves, south through the sound to the anchor bolt which Lars had once hammered into a rock there, fastened a rope to the end without getting out of the boat – taking care not to let it dash against the rock – and rowed against the current across the sound to Moltholmen, where her cousin had also hammered in a peg, from which hung a pulley. She threaded the rope through the eye, again without getting out of the boat – taking care not to let it dash against the rock – and rowed back towards Barrøy, she had thought it would be eighty or ninety fathoms in length, but it was closer to a hundred and fifty, the line was too short.

She burst into tears, tied a float to one end and let it go, rowed north with the current to the new quay house to fetch more rope. The sea was rougher now. She fought her way out again and found the float, tied the ropes together and rowed back to the mooring on Barrøy with the end. She was soaked to the skin, sweating profusely, exhausted and furious, but now she had a line over the sound and could run a net, or two, fishing without recourse to a boat, in all kinds of weather, until the hardest frosts set in, perhaps even longer.

She let the boat drift north and put it away, noticed that the swell was falling and stopped short in surprise, she had expected it to rise, and still she wasn’t afraid.

She went up to the house and slept on the bench next to the stove, not waking until it was evening. She felt cold and stiff, got up and put more wood on, cooked some food and wondered whether to set the nets in the darkness, dismissed the idea and opened one of the books she had, there was nothing in it.

She donned her waterproofs, walked to the new quay house and fetched two nets, walked south to the moorings by the sound and drew the first net, like a noiseless spider’s web, into the black waves, fastened it to the eye of the second and kept pulling, two nets joined together, that wasn’t much of a fleet, she pulled them fifteen fathoms further out, secured them and went home.

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