Nathan Hill - The Nix

Fridtjof could spot the fish better than anyone in living memory. He had the sharpest eyes in town, and he bragged about this constantly, whenever they were in port. He said the ocean was a piece of paper only he could read. He was young. He had a bit of money. He spent time in bars. He met a waitress named Marthe. It might not be accurate to say he fell in love with her. More like they were both feeling certain common teenage longings and they made themselves available to satisfy them. The first time they made love it was in the hills near her family’s house, after he’d waited for the bar to close and walked her home and they lay in the tough grass under a gray-white sun. Then she showed him around the land, the big house painted salmon-red, the long pier over the water, the long line of spruce trees, the field of barley. She loved it here, she said. She was a charming girl.

That was the summer the war came. Everyone thought Hammerfest was too remote to be of any concern, but it turned out the Germans wanted the city to disrupt Allied shipping to Russia, plus it would serve as an effective resupply base for their U-boats. The Wehrmacht was coming, was the word that spread up Norway’s coast, from dock to dock, boat to boat. There was talk on Fridtjof’s ship of escape. They could make it to Iceland. Start a new life there. Or keep going. There were ways to get from Reykjavík to America, some said. But what about the submarines? They wouldn’t bother their little fishing boat. But what about the mines? Fridtjof would spot them, they said. It could be done.

Fridtjof wanted to believe what some of the older men said, that the Germans were more interested in the docks than in the city, that they would leave everyone alone as long as there wasn’t a resistance, that their fight was with Russia and Britain, not Norway. But rumors had been spreading about happenings in the south: surprise attacks, burned villages. Fridtjof didn’t know what to think. On their next landing in Hammerfest, the crew would make a decision: stay or go. Anyone who wanted to stay was free to do so. Anyone wanting to risk the voyage to Iceland would bring all the supplies he could manage.

The only one who didn’t have a choice was Fridtjof. Or at least that’s how it seemed to him, when the older guys took him aside and said they needed his eyes. Only he could spot the mines that made the waters out beyond the islands so treacherous. Only he could read the swirls and eddies that signaled the presence of a U-boat. Only he could see the shapes of enemy ships way out there on the horizon, far enough away to avoid them. He had a gift, they all agreed. They’d be dead without him.

That night he waited for the bar to close and went to see Marthe. She was so happy to see him. They made love in the grass again and afterward she told him she was pregnant.

“We’ll have to get married, of course,” she said.

“Of course.”

“My parents say you can live with us. We’ll inherit the house someday.”

“Yes. Good.”

“My grandmother thinks it’s a girl. She’s usually right about these things. I want to name her Freya.”

They made plans for most of the night. In the morning, he told her he was voyaging out to hunt cod to the northeast. He told her he’d be back in a week. She smiled. She kissed him goodbye. And she never saw him again.

When Freya was born, she was born to an occupied city. The Germans had come and removed most families from their homes. Soldiers lived in the houses now, while everyone else crowded into apartment buildings or schools or the church. Marthe shared a single flat with sixteen other families. Some of Freya’s earliest memories were from this time of hunger and desperation. They lived this way for four years before the Germans withdrew. On that day, in the winter of 1944, every living soul in Hammerfest was ordered to evacuate the city. Those who did fled to the forest. Those who didn’t were killed. The Germans burned the city to the ground. Every structure except the church. When the people returned, there was nothing left to return to but rock and rubble and ash. They lived through that winter in the hills, in caves. Freya remembers the cold, and the smoke from the fires they burned, smoke that kept everyone awake coughing and hacking. She remembers vomiting spoonfuls of acid and ash into her hand.

In the spring they emerged from shelter and began rebuilding Hammerfest. But they did not have the resources to make it what it once was. That’s why the city looks in places the way it looks now, cheap and anonymous, a testament not to beauty but to resilience. Marthe’s family rebuilt their house as best they could, even painting it the same color, that same salmon-red, and eventually, when Freya was old enough, Marthe told her the story of Fridtjof Andresen, her father. Nobody had ever heard from him after the war. They assumed he fled to Sweden, like so many others did. Sometimes Freya would go out to watch the fishing boats, imagining him on top of one searching the ocean for her. She’d daydream about his return, but then the years went by and she grew up and had her own family and she stopped wishing for his return and started hating him, then stopped hating him and began simply forgetting him. Before Faye arrived, she hadn’t thought about her father in years.

“I don’t think my mother ever forgave him,” Freya says. “She was unhappy most of her life, angry with him, or with herself. She’s dead now.”

It’s just past seven o’clock and the sunlight pouring into the kitchen is slanted and gold. Freya slaps her palms on the table and stands up.

“Let’s go to the water,” she says. “For sunset.”

She brings Faye a coat and on the walk down explains that sunsets are a precious thing in Hammerfest because they get so few of them. Tonight, the sun sets at eight fifteen. A month ago, it was setting at midnight. In another month, it will get dark at five thirty. And one day in mid-November, the sun will rise at around eleven o’clock in the morning, set about half an hour later, and that’s the last they’ll see of it for two whole months.

“Two months of darkness,” Faye says. “How do you bear it?”

“You get used to it,” she says. “What choice do you have?”

They sit on the dock in silence drinking coffee and feeling a cold breeze coming off the water and watching a copper-colored sun set over the Norwegian Sea.

Faye tries to imagine her father sitting high above the water, perched on the uppermost mast of a fishing boat, the wind reddening his face. What it must have been like for him, in comparison, at the ChemStar factory in Iowa — turning dials, recording numbers, doing paperwork, standing on the flat, dull earth. And what would he have been thinking as they left for Iceland, as he watched Hammerfest recede from view, leaving behind a home, a child. How long would he regret it? How big would that regret become? Faye suspects he regretted it forever. That the regret became his secret heart, the thing he buried most deeply. She remembers him as he was when he thought no one was looking, staring off into the distance. Faye always wondered what he was seeing in those moments, and now she thinks she knows. He was seeing this place, these people. He was wondering what might have been had he made a different decision. It was impossible to ignore the similarity of their names: Freya and Faye. When he named her Faye, was he thinking about the other daughter? When he spoke Faye’s name, did he always hear the echo of this other name? Was Faye just a reminder of the family he left behind? Was he trying to punish himself? When he described the home in Hammerfest, he described it as though he’d actually lived here, described it as though it were his. And maybe, in his mind, it was. Maybe next to the actual world was this fantasy, this other life where he inherited the farm with the salmon-red house. Sometimes those fantasies can be more persuasive than one’s own life, Faye knows.