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

The forest was as quiet as sleep, the stillness of sleep before opening one’s eyes and peering at the pristine day. I stood up, lifting an arm to my brow to wipe away my perspiration, and looked straight into a pair of dark eyes. I’m not sure how long we stared at each other like that, our gazes entwined without blinking. My chest filled with joy and my body shivered in the heat. His gaze reached into my core, it wandered through my organism as if through some uncharted land, stopping now and then to consider what it was he saw. When he lowered his eyes and drank from the tadpole-infested water, it was as if it were my blood he drank, as if it were my flesh he touched with his tongue. And then he was gone, vanished into the forest.

I grew up. The piece of land on which we lived shrank. The road into the city was blocked and the mines sensed the soil’s slightest vibration. In the floodlit night the beams of the searchlights glanced off our faces as we sat around the table, eating the dinner mother had so painstakingly prepared from scratch. The fire roared. My father’s hollow face was drenched, beads of sweat emerged on the backs of his hands like tiny mushrooms, his moisture staining the table. Mother’s hands trembled. I rose to speak.

I told them they had to choose there and then whether they wished to die in the flames of all that was familiar to them, or to grow old as wanderers and face an uncertain fate in the forest. Father’s yellow eyes blinked and mother wept.

They won’t let us die here, she said, and gestured towards the diploma. We get money every month. We live a decent life.

I went and got the hunting knife Father kept under his mattress. When I returned I kissed my parents goodbye, went out of the door and strode towards the forest.

He was waiting for me at the pond. I climbed onto his back and after we’d come a fair way he asked: Have you ever sat on anything softer? Have you ever seen anything more clearly?

No. Never.

The sight I beheld made tears well in my eyes. The luscious green, the darkness of the forest pools, the glittering sky. The animals that moved among the trees. The song of the deer and the gleaming eyes of the lynx. For some time they walked at our side, leading us deeper into the forest that was his and theirs and—so it occurred to me the further we went—mine too. I cried like the child I once was, until the night closed around me and his movements beneath me rocked me to sleep.

I would live much of my remaining life in darkness.

He wasn’t always the way I saw him then, he told me. I’ve been living under a witch’s spell, he said. In the day I’m a bear, in the night a man. Can you promise me something? You must never see me as a man.

I stared into the forest. I saw its lush abundance, the great moss-covered standing stones that topped the curve of a hillock. How they ever got there had long since vanished from any living memory, only the forest itself knew. My gaze wandered up the thick trunks of the trees, onwards into the blue expanse of sky, and then, for the first time, he put the blindfold over my eyes.

To begin with, my time in darkness was like constant waking. My body would seek him out and the fire that burned within me flared at the slightest touch. All through the day I would live in the excitement of approaching night. Each hour took me closer to him, each morning bound up with the night that had passed and that to come. I woke up wanting it to be night. Could a person feel more elated?

Through days, weeks, years we wandered. I aged in the forest. Eventually we neared the fringes. The trees became more scattered, abandoned houses began to appear. First one, then another, then another still. I realized we were wandering towards death. It was the only thing that awaited us, there was nothing else. My chest ached at the thought.

Do you think about dying too? I asked him. About which of us will be first? About who will be left behind, and who gone forever?

No, he said. I don’t think about it.

I gave birth to a girl. A magnificent girl who thrust herself from my body with a victory cry. Her blood-smeared eyes opened and we looked at each other for the first time. I became someone else. The mother of this girl. She would draw nourishment from me and I would cherish giving her life. The first night, snuggled up. The smell of the forest pools on her body and mine. All of a sudden I felt a will had come to me. The will to live with this child. All of a sudden there was a future beyond the now in which we existed. It was the child’s future. Her life, held in my arms, feeding so hungrily from my body. I existed for her sake. Only for her sake. She was the innermost circle. He was outside, though close. He would never be closest again. It frightened me more than it frightened him.

One night I dreamt about my parents. I was sitting in the kitchen eating my mother’s food. Father and Mother watched me eat in silence. Then Mother asked me how I was. I told her about the girl, about the beauty of the forest and the man I loved who was a bear during the day and whom I was forbidden to see as a man. Mother looked at me for a long time, then went out and brought back some candle stumps she wrapped in a tea towel and handed to me.

So you can see the one who makes you happy.

Father chewed on his food and said: Don’t do it. It’s good the way it is.

When I awoke I was holding the candle stumps in my hand.

What until then had been so easy, so taken for granted, became impossible. I lit the first candle.

I saw you. How could I not, I tell myself in an effort to explain. It was inevitable. The betrayal was there from the start, implanted in our history, perhaps its very premise.

It’s my fault that we wander now on separate paths, each in our own landscape. It’s my fault that we may never find each other alive. Perhaps I am a mother who failed her child. Perhaps I will never see her again. Perhaps there is no way back. Perhaps you are already dead.

I walked alone in the forest. I no longer know how many nights followed the days.

I saw a light between the trees. A cottage. Little windows and lamps burning inside. It was night. My fists pounded at the door. Is anyone there? Open up. Help me.

Rain battered down.

Was this the last of my strength I mustered?

My lungs expelled the scream from my chest. The earth rumbled and shook. The mountain, suddenly rising up, emerging before my eyes. The eternity of darkness in front of me. Smooth rock reaching into the sky.

The door opened. Shadows steeped in lightless murk. A shuffle of footsteps. A person without the will to lift their feet, passing through the dark.

I peered inside. The fire burning in the open hearth. The golden rings hanging on the wall. A narrow bed. A figure lying outstretched upon it, face hidden beneath a newspaper. Hypodermics littered about the floor.

Ellinor?

A voice from under the paper.

My name. My name. Someone spoke my name.

I stepped forward to the bed. Did I not? I sat down on a stool beside it. I heard the sound of breathing.

Yes, I replied. You know who I am?

Laughter. I waited. I heard his breathing dwindle, a gentle whistle.

I think I slept too. I was exhausted.

When I awoke on the floor, the man was up making coffee. He turned with a mug in his hand and gave it to me as if we were old friends. The radio was playing. A song I heard once, a long time ago. He was handsome this man. He touched something inside me and it must have shown in my face because he laughed at me and straight away I felt angry and restless.

I want you to do something for me, he said. His eyes were blue. He turned back to the fire and heated up some powder in a spoon. He filled a hypodermic, knotted the tie around his arm and stuck the needle deep into his vein.