Nathan Hill - The Nix

Lillian, meanwhile, is pleasantly making conversation, asking Faye where she’s from, how she’s enjoying her travels, where she’s gone. She suggests restaurants to try, nearby sights to see.

“This is your house?” Faye asks.

“It’s my mother’s.”

“Does she live here too?”

“Of course.”

“How long has she lived here?”

“Most of her life.”

The garden out front is wild with life, a great efflorescence of bushes and grasses and flowers thick and barely domesticated. It’s an eccentric and rowdy garden, a place where nature has been encouraged to its messy ends. Lillian leads the horse into its pen and closes a rickety gate that she secures with a bit of twine tied in a knot. She thanks Faye for helping return the animal.

“I hope you enjoy your vacation,” she says.

And even though this is what Faye has come here to find, she’s feeling tongue-tied and nervous now, not sure exactly what to say or how to proceed, not sure how to explain everything.

“Listen, I’m not really on vacation.”

“Oh?”

“I’m looking for someone. Old family, actually. Relatives of mine.”

“What’s the name? Maybe I can help.”

Faye swallows. She doesn’t know why she’s so anxious saying it: “Andresen.”

“Andresen,” Lillian says. “That’s a pretty common name.”

“Yes. But, you see, I think this is it. What I mean is, I think my family used to live here, in this house.”

“Nobody in our family was named Andresen, or moved to America. Are you sure you have the right town?”

“My father is Frank Andresen? When he lived here he went by Fridtjof.”

“Fridtjof,” Lillian says, and this seems to take a moment to register as she looks up in concentration trying to access why that name sounds familiar. But then suddenly she finds it and she looks at Faye and her stare feels piercing.

“You know Fridtjof?”

“I’m his daughter.”

“Oh, my,” she says, and she grabs Faye by the wrist. “Come this way.”

She leads Faye into the house, first through a pantry full of vegetables elaborately canned and pickled and labeled, through a warm kitchen where some bready thing is baking, the air smelling of yeast and cardamom, and into a small living room with squeaky wood floors and wood furniture that seems antique and handmade.

“Wait here,” says Lillian, who lets go of Faye’s wrist and disappears through another door. The room she’s left in is cozy and richly decorated with blankets and pillows and photographs on the walls. Presumably family photos, which Faye studies. None of the people here look familiar, except for certain of the men who have a quality around the eyes that Faye recognizes from her father — or maybe she’s imagining it? — a familiar kind of squint, a familiar way with the eyebrow, the slight wrinkle between the eyes. There are lamps and chandeliers and candles and sconces all over, presumably to light the place brilliantly during the interminable winter darkness. A big stone fireplace occupies one wall. Another wall is filled with books with unassuming white spines and titles Faye does not recognize. A laptop computer that seems anachronistic in the otherwise old-fashioned room. Faye can hear Lillian speaking through the door, speaking gently but quickly. Faye does not know a single word of Norwegian, so the language is only a phonic event for her, its vowels sounding a little flat, almost like German spoken in a minor key. Like most languages that are not American English, it seems to move too fast.

Soon the door opens and Lillian returns, followed by her mother, and when Faye sees her it’s like she’s looking into a mirror — in the eyes, and the way they both hunch at the shoulders, and the way age has played out on both their faces. The woman recognizes it too, as she comes to an abrupt stop when she sees Faye and they stare at each other for a moment, not moving. It would be clear to anyone watching that they’re sisters. Faye can see her father’s features play out on the woman’s face: his cheekbones, his eyes, his nose. The woman cocks her head, suspicious. She has an unruly mass of gray hair tied up at the top by a ribbon. She’s wearing a plain black shirt and old blue jeans, both dotted with the evidence of many domestic chores: paint and spackle and, on the jeans, on the knees, mud. She is barefoot. She is wiping her hands clean with a dark blue rag.

“I am Freya,” she says, and Faye’s heart leaps. Every ghost story her father told her, every one involving a beautiful young girl, this was the name he gave her: Freya.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” Faye says.

“You are Fridtjof’s daughter?”

“Yes. Fridtjof Andresen.”

“You’re from America?”

“Chicago.”

“So,” she says to nobody in particular, “he went to America.” Then she gestures toward Lillian, “Show her,” and Lillian fetches a book from a shelf and sits on the couch. The book is an antique, yellowed brittle pages, two flaps of leather protecting its cover, a clasp on the front. Faye has seen one of these before: her father’s Bible, the one with the family tree on the inside filled with exotic names he used to show her and cluck disapprovingly at because they were all too cowardly to make a better life for themselves in America. And the Bible in Lillian’s lap is just the same sort, a family tree on the front two pages. But whereas her father’s stopped at Faye, this one shows the full blooming of the family here in Hammerfest. Lillian, Faye can see, is one of Freya’s six children. Grandchildren fill the next line down, a few great-grandchildren below that. It’s a flourishing that takes another sheet of paper to fully accommodate. And above Freya’s name are her parents’ names: Marthe, her mother, and another name, blacked out, inked over. Freya shuffles toward them and stands in front of Faye and bends to point at that spot.

“This was Fridtjof,” she says, her fingernail pressing a crescent into the page.

“He’s your father too.”

“Yes.”

“His name is erased.”

“My mother did that.”

“Why?”

“Because he was a…oh, how do you say it?” She looks at Lillian for help with the word. She says something in Norwegian and Lillian nods in comprehension and says, “Oh. You mean, coward. ”

“Yes,” Freya says. “He was a coward.” And she watches Faye, waiting to see what kind of reaction this will bring, whether Faye will be offended by this, and Freya is tense and maybe waiting for an argument she seems perfectly willing to have.

“I don’t understand,” says Faye. “A coward. Why?”

“Because he left. He abandoned us.”

“No. He immigrated,” Faye says. “He tried to make a better life for himself.”

“For himself, yes.”

“He never mentioned he had family here.”

“Then you don’t know very much about him.”

“Will you tell me?”

Freya breathes heavily and looks at Faye with what feels like impatience or disdain.

“Is he still alive?”

“Yes, but his mind is going. He’s very old.”

“What did he do in America?”

“He worked at a factory. A chemical factory.”

“And did he have a good life?”

Faye thinks about this for a moment, about all those times she saw her father alone, keeping his distance from others, desolate, in his own self-made prison, standing for hours in the backyard staring into the sky.

“No,” she says. “He always seemed sad. And lonely. We never knew why.”

Freya seems to soften at this. She nods. She says, “Stay for dinner, then. I’ll tell you the story.”

And she does, over bread and a fish stew. It’s the story Freya’s mother told her when Freya was old enough to understand it. It begins in 1940, the last time anyone heard anything about Fridtjof Andresen. Like most young men in Hammerfest, he was a fisherman. He was seventeen and had recently graduated from the dockside work given to children, the cleaning and gutting and filleting. He now worked on the boat, which was an all-around better job: more lucrative, more fun, so much more thrilling when they’d drag up whole big nets of cod and halibut and the evil-looking, foul-smelling wolffish, which everyone universally agreed was better to catch than to gut. Whole days spent out on the water, losing track of the days because in the summer in the arctic the sun never sets. And feeling proud of the mastery he achieved with his trade’s various tools, the buoys and nets and kegs and lines and hooks stored in the hull just so. His favorite thing was sitting lookout atop the highest mast because he had the sharpest eyes on the boat. He had a gift; everyone said so. He spotted the schools of blackfish that steered into the bay all summer long, and seeing a boiling spot on the water he yelled “Fish-o!” and all the men would roll out of bed and put on their caps and get to work. They’d lower the rowboats, two men per craft — one to handle the oars, the other, the net — and they’d spread the net between them and he’d direct the whole operation from up top until the school reached them and they’d encircle the fish and hoist the whole churning mass of them triumphantly into the boat. There was power in that, their control over the wild sea, feeling unstoppable even while they sailed too close to jagged shores that would doom their ship to sinking if they weren’t such capable sailors.