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

THE HOUSE I LIVED IN with my parents stood on a dingy piece of land at the edge of the forest, between the forest and the road leading to the city. The road construction was still going on, advancing steadily, consuming the earth bit by bit. Men wearing headlamps toiled in the night with crowbars and pickaxes. In the daytime they burnt everything away with their fire cannon. There was always something ablaze somewhere nearby and the soot got in everywhere, sticking to the walls and windows, the glasses from which we drank.

Mother cleaned from morning till night. Scrubbing, wiping cloths over panels and windows, tables and chairs. All the way up her arms she was covered in the soot. The sheets could no longer be washed white. Hers was the generation of cleanliness and poverty. She battled the dirt and counted the money we received for giving up our land and supporting the expansion of the city, as it said on the certificate that hung in a place of honour in our front room.

Father lay in his room, drinking and smoking the cigarettes he rolled. He called for me on occasion whenever he wanted company. It wasn’t often, but when he did he would talk about the olden days. He got the albums out. His photographs and autograph book. He’d been an autograph hunter once, later a tank driver in the northern regions, where mantles of snow covered the firs, the roads, the boglands.

If he was in a good mood, he would take out the maps. He kept them rolled up under the bed and would spread them out on top of the army blanket that was stiff with dirt and coffee stains. Mother never ventured to his room with her cloths and cleaning.

Here I wallow in my shite, he would say, inhaling and then blowing out the smoke that filled the cramped space like a fog, as if to give atmosphere to the stories of his army days. He reconstructed various operations, his ruler passing over differently shaded areas on the map.

Not getting lost, that was my talent, he said with a laugh. Burträsk, he went on, jabbing a yellow-stained finger at the spot. Burträsk, Råneå, Jukkasjärvi. And that dump Karesuando. He laughed again, a mouthful of brown teeth.

Sometimes I went with the workmen into the city, climbing up into the cab of the orange earthmover and drinking the alcohol they passed around. It was like death itself, they said. Better than death. We drove with the windows down and took potshots with rifles, or let rip with the fire cannon, setting the ditches aflame, the sprawl, dogs.

My name is Ellinor.

You were born lucky, my father said.

You slid out of me like a seal, my mother said. You stared at me all night. You didn’t sleep like other infants. Your eyelashes were curled together. I saw the way they dried and unfolded like the petals of a flower stretching out to the sun.

My name is Ellinor and I have a wish. The crown of gold I see in my dreams at night. I want it.

It’s the only thing I want.

I heard his voice all through my childhood. It was a voice I knew as well as my own. It could speak from the drinking glass when I brushed my teeth, seep down through the ceiling crack in the front room or mingle with my mother’s voice when she asked me to wash the dishes. It was a hum in the walls and a whistle in the wind when the trees swayed and creaked. A dark and yet immaculate tone that fluttered and tingled inside, wrapping itself around the bones of my body, as substantial and nourishing as the food I ate. Wordlessly it told me I was taken care of, provided for, protected. It made my steps more intrepid than they ever would have been. I knew all this inside. The way you know you breathe and live on in the night when you’re asleep, without ever giving it a conscious thought.

I remember the first early winters when the sea froze at the shores and the children congregated like dark little birds on the grey slabs of ice that scraped their open edges against each other, forcing us to quickly shift our weight from one slab to another so as not to fall into the freezing water. I could run across the cracking ice without being afraid. I didn’t think about it much, the tone that kept my back straight and put a spring in my step.

The ice disappeared, and the cold of winter. Summer came, and the sun warmed up the earth, the soil breathed out its smells, its innermost aromas. I climbed the trees and looked out across the land, at the machinery waiting in the turning area. All the children and their parents who had ridden the machines into the city with their pots and pans, clothes, shoes and armchairs, departed in their little flocks, there to split up and be spread like flower seeds, absorbed by asphalt and buildings, installed in flats to live new and better lives by new, metropolitan principles. I sat in a tree and watched their worldly goods being driven away and those I had called my friends vanish, and the abandoned properties and emptiness that spread in their absence became mine alone.

I woke up early in the mornings. I drifted around the house and read the books on the shelves, buttered sandwiches I piled up like towers and took outside with me, my mother’s fur coat over my nightclothes. I pottered about barefoot in the dirt and soot as I ate. Here and there I paused and thought about what I saw in front of me, or about my sandwich and the way it dissolved between my teeth, or I would let my imagination wander into the landscape and turn itself into wild grunting animals that chased me back and forth across the terrain. I took tobacco from my father’s room, rolled cigarettes and breathed the smoke in and out of my lungs, with the unpleasant sensation and clarity that followed. Father slept with his mouth and eyes open. His troubled breathing and the room’s rank odour were smeared across the walls in all the years he inhabited that tiny space. One morning when I went in to get tobacco, he awoke at once, sat bolt upright in the bed and gripped my hand, pulling me down towards him and shrieking into my face never to accept advice from a woman, before returning quite as abruptly to his slumbers, once more to wander through sleep, his skin a brittle, yellowed shell about his flesh.

I was fond of my mornings alone, though I paid for them with evenings of fatigue. I was asleep in my bed even before the first entertainment programmes came on the television and filled our house with images of life from a world far beyond our own. Mother arranged the TV tray, with buns and marmalade, and put out teacups for herself, for me and for my father, although he only ever emerged from his room to eat his evening meal. All the solitary evenings she sat there with her teacup in the glow of the television set saddened me immensely, but my fatigue and the urge to wake with the first light were stronger. I slept in my bed and awoke to the new day as if to a celebration, even if everything lay desolate about me. My room was pleasant: the intricately carved wood of the bedstead, the chair next to it with its pile of books, the clock that ticked and the lamp whose shade was decorated with boats sailing on a sea, the picture on the wall of elves dancing in meadows of flowers. And in all the life, I lived his voice was so familiar to me, so deeply a part of me that I was often unable to tell if the thoughts I listened to were his or mine.

One day I went along the path into the forest to catch tadpoles. In one hand I held a plastic bag containing sandwiches, a bottle of milk and some biscuits. In the other a washing-up bowl in which the tadpoles could swim, and a scoop from the time we had the boat.

The scoop still smelled of the sea, of kelp and old wood from the shed. The yellow washing-up bowl knocked against my leg as I walked, and on the way I sang a once popular song about dying honourably on the battlefield, feeling the sun scorch my neck, its warmth soaking into my back and bare shoulders. Inside the forest the light was dimmer, slanting down between the leaves and branches of the trees, the pond with its inky waters appearing, like a black jewel, on the other side of a moss-covered bank. I dropped to my knees at its edge, sinking down into the saturated earth until small pools formed at my sides. Water lilies floated on the glassy surface, stalks descending, sinewy and strong, towards the bottom. Pond skaters skittered across the water. Dragonflies flitted in the air. The pond was teeming with tadpoles, little heads and tails milling at the surface. I filled the bowl with the murky water. It smelled of iron. Some of the tadpoles that came with it had already grown tiny legs that kicked as they swam.