Хьелль Аскильдсен - The Dark Blue Winter Overcoat and Other Stories from the North

In the year 1974 my father started attacking his own family. In 1974 I waited for phone calls from a crazy girl who I knew was going to drop me the minute she got tired of me. But that’s how it is, that’s how you lose a city, and it’s only afterwards that you can write the story. When you’re in the middle of it, you think everything will stay the same, everything will remain the way it is, just a little bit different.

Then you’re standing there one day on the empty street when you’ve come home after having been away for a long time, and you meet people you don’t know, or people you don’t recognize. The grey factory buildings and the grey mountains are the same as they have always been. But everything has changed and the workers don’t walk through the gate to punch the clock any more. That’s how it happens: first your best friend moves, then you move, then they shut down the smelting works, then there’s a whole gang of men nobody needs, and then the radio stations don’t play the records you like any longer. Then they ship the entrails of the factory to Poland, China and Argentina, and then they start arguing about what’s going to happen to the shells of the buildings that have started falling down. The benches are empty, there’s no longer water in the fountain outside city hall, and the neon lights on the cinema have stopped working.

There used to be something here, something beautiful and disturbing all at once, and it seemed important, a sparkling future that perhaps nobody fully believed in, but which was ingrained in you—this is your city, this is your time, this is what you are. And look now: I can’t even remember everybody’s names. That’s why I decided to create this little booklet with a list of all the people who used to be at the cabins in Skånevik for those weeks of the summer every year. I have written short biographies of people, made copies of photographs of them and tried to piece together what has happened to everyone.

After that summer I was sure that I would never go up to the director’s residence again. We weren’t going to sleep together any more. It was best to avoid one another or not speak to one another ever again. But I longed for her, I dreamed about her, how she took my hand and stuck it in between her legs. How she took my foot and put it between her thighs and then started moving on top of me until she came. How she shoved my head down towards her crotch and whispered for me to show her what she had taught me. My parents were like children that summer, consumed with trying to find one another anew. My mother had come crawling back and asked for forgiveness. They spoke in soft, secretive voices and I tried to interpret everything they said, but pretty soon they were yelling at one another again, loudly and without consideration. They had disappointed one another too much; neither of them managed to live up to what they had been when they’d first fallen in love. I wanted to get away, I wanted to be free. I slipped up the path to the director’s residence every time she called. As soon as I was inside, she fumbled with my belt, then she pulled off my trousers. I wondered whether there was a name for this. And if it didn’t have a name, was there a way out of it?

This was the worst thing I could know about myself—that I was just like her, that we were two of a kind. I wanted to get out of there; I wanted to stay. I gave in to her hard hands every single time. Afterwards I lay with her back against my stomach, like an accident victim. We lay in the dirty afternoon light and I saw that her skin was young and smooth, without wrinkles, free of all the scars that were waiting somewhere in the years to come. I wanted her to start talking, for her to explain to me what had happened. Or that one day she would cry or crack, say that she wanted to be with me or at least that she needed me. I lay as close to her as I could. On some afternoons I could hear her breathing change and I realized she’d fallen asleep. Their house was so different from ours. They had, for example, a pool table and a huge fireplace in the living room. On the stairs and on the second floor, there were bookshelves filled with novels and reference books. The rooms were dark and solid. The dead stared down at me from up on the walls, oil-painted ancestors who’d perhaps been real bastards when they were alive, for all I knew. The carpet was thick and soft; walking on it was like walking across a lawn. I thought that one day I would live in a house like this, a house as huge and as expensive. At the time I didn’t have any idea just how badly all this was going to end.

THE HEAD-TEACHER’S WIFE, Mrs Rybert-Hermansen, was quite unlike her husband. A tall, angular woman five years his senior, sometimes prone to kindness but mostly brusque and bossy, she spoke Danish when she spoke at all, and allowed no one to address her in Faroese with impunity, although she rarely cared to make a fuss.

She was the daughter of a stern postmaster, Jens Erich Rybert. He had become known across the land for having fought at the battle of Dybbøl in the 1865 Dano-Prussian war, when an explosion had left him with a limp. His dark disposition could sometimes transform him through fits of demonic rage.

In Tórshavn his thin, high-pitched voice earned him the nickname “Bleater”. Having completed his military service, Rybert, who was from a well-bred but not equally well-to-do family, studied economics and law in Copenhagen, but delayed taking his final examinations.

He came to the Faroes one spring in the early 1870s to work at the Governor’s office as a temporary replacement, but ended up staying on.

For the first few months he rented lodgings together with the surgeon Paul Fobian in the house at Bakka owned by the shopkeeper Knút Hermansen.

As fate would have it, there were two housemaids working for the newly married shopkeeper. The housemaids took turns tending to the lodgers in the house at Bakka—one day to clean for them, the next day to prepare their dinner.

One of these housemaids was called Thalia, originally from Elduvík.

Her age was uncertain.

Thalia was more plain than beautiful. She was short with narrow shoulders, a small, full bosom and a dark complexion with black slanted eyes, a flat nose and a wide mouth.

She had, however, one particular attribute that distinguished her, more than any external feature, from other women. She was possessed of an internal, almost supernatural power to command any man’s desire with the same cool glow of innocence and oblivion as the moon commands the tides.

But Thalia was a gentle soul.

She considered her power a sin for which she must atone every day.

But she accepted whomever it drew to her.

She satisfied, soothed and satiated, all with the same humble diligence.

Soon after taking up employment with Knút Hermansen she had been given a room of her own in an annex which had originally been used for storage. The entrance was from an alley at the back of the house.

The shopkeeper would certainly not allow himself to be diverted by any special powers. He kept an accurate account of everything he saw, heard or thought. He was a prudent man with a strong sense of honour. After the household had retired for the evening, it was his habit to keep an ear on all the goings-on in the annex.

And sometimes also an eye.

A row of old deck boards formed a wall separating Thalia’s room from a passageway that followed the length of the house from the shop to the annex. There was a knothole in one of the boards that was situated at a height particularly convenient for peeping, when the small mirror covering it was pushed aside.

Not infrequently, the shopkeeper had trouble sleeping. Despite her young age, his wife Gisela could snore like a bull. Thus any movement in the alleyway would easily compel him from the marital bed, and he would eventually find himself standing in front of the little mirror.