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

I have something you need, he said.

I didn’t want to watch him, so I went over to the wall where the golden rings hung. They sparkled in the light of the fire.

That knife you carry. His voice again. So aggravating. Have you used it?

Once I had seen you I couldn’t get enough of you. I had to see you again. Every night I said it would be the last. But each time you put the blindfold over my eyes, I knew I would soon see your face again and the moment you slept I took it off. What is it about beauty that draws us so? I wanted to show you to the world. To the girl. This is your father, I would say. This man looks after you. Looks after me.

I felt so strong. So happy. I snuggled up to you and smoothed my hand over the shapes of your body. Studied you in the light of the candle stumps. Your hands and lips, your closed eyelids. Your allure kept me awake and I thought to myself that it wasn’t right the way we were living. That it wasn’t fair on you to keep you hidden. Dazzled, I absorbed myself in thoughts of your grandeur. I wanted to lift you from our hiding place and stun the world. I became obsessed. The thoughts became a truth. They said the life we led wasn’t good enough, there was another life waiting for us somewhere, and all we had to do was reach out and take it.

Was it my thinking out loud that woke you?

You opened your eyes and looked at me. You looked at me and I saw in your eyes what I had done. We came together there in that look. In the grief of realizing that life as we knew it was over.

Do you see the mountain over there? Can you see beyond it to the other side? The world is small, Ellinor. It’s not like you think. He laughed. The world’s a little dungheap.

Do you see the mountain?

I think back on the night that passed. The tumult and the silence that followed.

He indicated a door at the rear of the house. That way. But I want to give you something first. Don’t you think it’s sad, Ellinor? My having what you need. The only one who has. He took my hand and drew me close. Drew me to the face into which I did not wish to look. His rugged face, the eyes that beguiled me. It was as if he were shouting, though his voice was a whisper.

I’ve been working on them as long as I can remember. You can have them, Ellinor. The iron claws are yours that you may climb the mountain. I shall give you all you need, to do what no one else can. Do you see the mountain, Ellinor? That steep face? Its smooth and endless rock? He laughed again. That’s where your future starts.

Claws of iron.

The needle that sought my blood. My innermost self. His voice inside me there, and all around.

The sudden cold and heat.

Have you ever seen anything more clearly?

No. Never. Never as now.

The exquisite night. The smell of the mountain.

He attached the claws to my outspread fingers. I laughed. The night and the warmth of his body. The dream of who I was, which I was now living out. My laughter rose and echoed back. It came out again as weeping. His face there in the night, in front of me. He was floating. Expanding and diminishing.

Now, Ellinor.

I laughed as he took the knife. The knife I had carried so long I had forgotten what it was. What it could be used for. Now suddenly it was all I saw. The way it shimmered in the dark.

Do it well. He looked at me. I fell silent. The thick taste of metal in the mouth. The taste of fear.

Do it well. The words were like blows. Nothing less. Not now, not since.

I took the knife. Gripped it there as it danced in the air. I held the shaft. My hand, with the claws closed around it.

I followed the knife into his body. I touched his heart. Again and again.

So easy it was to die, I thought, and turned towards the mountain.

All that night, all the day after and the night after that, I climbed the mountain. Scaled the steep face with my claws. I was too scared to look up or down. Too scared to turn my head to the side. I stared straight out in front of me, my hand searching for the next crack that might offer purchase, the next little ledge on which to set my foot. The cold issued from the rock and felt like breath against my face. Fatigue racked my body, wormed its way into my thoughts and settled like a fog behind my eyes. Onwards. Onwards and upwards. I inched my way, claws gouging the rock. Climb the mountain, Ellinor. I saw myself from a distance, a tiny dot moving almost imperceptibly upon the vast surface, the rock, the mountain. I could not think about the girl. I had abandoned all thought of her when I fled from the house in the night. I had left her. If I were to think of her sweet smell after a night in sleep, or of how she would come running towards me when there was something she had done that she wanted to tell me about, the radiance in her eyes, my delirious joy at her existence, I would not have been able to leave her there all on her own. The choice of her or him could only ever be her and her alone. Why, then, was I here? With blood trickling down my arms?

My anger at this now being my life, the anger that rose up in me when all else was erased, was what made me go on, though my strength was long gone, had seeped away, shed onto the senseless rock.

When the second night became a dawn, when I could no longer manage to lift a hand, I found myself at the summit.

The wind buffeted me, blowing warm, dry air into my face. He’s here, it said. The one you love is waiting for you. You’ve arrived now. You must find the hall where he lies in a casket. Go past the planes and the hangars, pay no heed to their gaping mouths through which the people surge and vanish.

I got to my feet and looked out over the airfield. The enormous planes, so big as to almost defy belief, were lined up in a row with stiff and shiny wings.

People on the ground, milling all around them. Lorries driving up the ramps into the bodies of the aircraft. The sound of the engines. A thunderous clamour that caused the earth to tremble.

One of the planes detached itself and taxied away, accelerated and heaved itself into the air. I watched it climb into the sky and vanish.

I crossed the airfield, at the perimeter of the world, and went towards the light, so bright I had to look down at the ground so as not to be dazzled. Somewhere inside me I knew I was dead.

ISAW PETER HØEG from the back seat of my parents’ car, a sudden perception, like a revelation, an abruptly descended prophet, as I leaned forward between the seats in front to take the piece of blue SorBits chewing gum that my father, hidden behind his headrest, was holding out in the palm of his hand while we sped northwards through Jutland on the E45 motorway. He (the author, my future real self) was actually concealed behind a half-mask of leather, and his intensely, almost insanely bright, eyes were gazing up at the sky from above an article on page 4 of Politiken ’s arts section, which my mother, in the passenger seat next to my father, held in her lap. “Who’s that?” I asked, and my mother, who didn’t have the courage to take her eyes off the road for fear that my father would steer us into a head-on collision with an oncoming vehicle, handed back the newspaper between the two headrests, and I took it and laid it out on my bare knees and read what from then on would be a holy scripture, a kind of personal genesis penned by the author himself and recalling the moment in his life at which he had become an author. Until then it had never occurred to me to write as much as a single line outside the confines of my school exercise books or my reports in physics or social studies, but from that moment on I wanted to be an author too, or rather I wanted to be Peter Høeg, a person of multiple talents and personas who would never need to decide, because he could do everything all at once: study drama in Paris, trek through deserts, speak Swahili, fence, ski, dance ballet, climb mountains, write novels, sail the seven seas (simultaneously!), give talks, and meditate and look like a monk, and be a monk, and play Johannes V. Jensen, and be Johannes V. Jensen with the aid of only a half-mask, and marry an African and have beautiful children, and live like a saint in ten square metres of space in an oasis in the middle of the city, and write his books on his lap in only two hours a day, in the evenings even, when he’s feeling at his most exhausted, and breast-feeding, even though he’s a man! I wanted to meet him. But where? How do you meet a person who seems to be everywhere all at once?