The cabin had no phone, so of course I ended up getting a letter. I have it still. He was angry, Olav. “I wouldn’t have thought it of you,” he wrote.

In that sense, he wasn’t like his mother, and I can recall another time we rode out together. It was a clear fall morning, and she mounted easily. On the outward part of our route, we rode past a lake. To me, Norwegian lakes feel bottomless, the landscape unknowable. Such uncertainty must leave its mark on the locals, I thought. Later we went in among the trees, where it smelled of fungus and rot. When we came to the clearing, I said, again, “This scene would lend itself to a story,” and I pointed at the animal paths crisscrossing the terrain. “That’s also what I’m afraid of,” she said. “What are you afraid of?” I asked, and she replied, as always, that she was afraid I would write about her.

As we rode on, we talked about how the forest looked lovely in its decay. I told her she reminded me of an Inuit in some ways, and that Olav must have gotten his features from her. She smiled at that, and there were birds of prey aloft, and moss upon the massive trunks of spruce. “Look over there, the moss,” she said, and I drank in everything I saw.

But then one day, when we were drinking coffee in the kitchen and her husband came in, wanting attention, she actually began to tell a story. She looked at Olav’s father, asked him, “Do I dare to tell this?” and he said, “Yes, just tell it.”

At first I thought she asked him whether she should tell the story because it was his, or because he decided which stories could be told in their relationship. In any case she began telling  21it, and at regular intervals she’d put a hand over her mouth. “No, I don’t know if I dare,” she said, glancing from her husband down into her cup. “You really don’t have to,” I said.

The story she was telling concerned her cousin who had been married to a bad man. Then he died, and it wasn’t until then that the cousin discovered just how bad he’d been. It came out in certain letters found with the estate. “But you mustn’t write this story,” she said, “that’s what I’m scared of.” I said that she shouldn’t be worried. “Your cousin’s husband wasn’t so out of the ordinary.” She asked, did I know such men? I said that now and then I ran into one. She asked if I wrote about them. “Sometimes,” I said.