The young man, though he was some years older than herself, perhaps twenty-one or twenty-two years old, was familiar and sparked a series of tiny memories. Blond hair and a whisper of whiskers on his chin and his top lip. He had dismounted from his trap and was trying to calm the fjordling, stroking her two-tone mane and whispering sweet-nothings into her ear. At the same time he was stretching out his other hand to Solveig, Thea’s pale and frail mother, sitting in her chair in the sun.

When Thea came into his line of vision he was fully stretched like a picture of Golgotha, one hand on the beast, the other touching the fingers of the invalid, but his features broadened as he presented Thea with a smile and she saw that though he was only familiar to her, she was fully recognised by him.

‘I hope this isn’t inconvenient,’ he said. ‘I’m staying in the area, and I thought . . .’

And there he was, in his voice. It had been some years since she had seen him, perhaps four years, and then only briefly. She would have been twelve or thirteen at the time. But before that, when she was a little girl, the relations between their two fathers had been more active, and they had been regularly together during the months of summer. Though he was, no doubt, fully grown, the boy remained in his voice and on his smiling lips.

Solveig got to her feet and would have taken a step towards him, but Thea managed to get to her and settle her back down again. ‘Look, mother,’ she said, “We have a visitor come to see you. You remember Kristian Olsen from Engelsvik.’

‘Ole?’ she asked. ‘Is it really Ole?’

‘It’s Ole’s son, mother. Kristian, all grown tall and handsome.’

‘Ah,’ Solveig said. Kristian? Really?’

‘My father sends his regards,’ Kristian said. ‘He often speaks of you and your husband.’ While he spoke he unhitched the fjordling from the trap and let her wander around a grove of trees on the far side of the track. ‘She’ll be quiet now,’ he said, gazing for a moment through the branches towards the sea. ‘Though I should give her some water.’ He manhandled the two-wheel trap up against the fence and turned to give his hand to Thea. ‘It’s been a long time,’ he said. ‘Too long. Though I’ve thought of you.’

‘And I you,’ she said. ‘When I think on happy times. You have changed, though, grown taller than I remember.’

‘And you have changed,’ he said. ‘For the better. In my mind you were still a child in braids.’

Thea felt herself flush, for it was not her braids to which he referred, except by name. ‘I’ll find a bucket for the fjordling,’ she said. ‘Then we’ll catch up. Mother will entertain you.’

She collected a bucket from a shelf in the barn and took it around to the water butt for the horse. She realised it was the fulfillment of a promise, Kristian Olsen arriving on their doorstep just now. A month earlier her aunt had told her that the young men would come around once she started bleeding. And it had happened exactly as the old woman said. Ten days ago she had bled for the first time, though only for a day and a night. Hardly bled at all in fact, not what she had been led to expect. But two days after the little bleed a much bigger one had come, thick black curds had slowed her down in her daily tasks and, especially in the mornings, they had been accompanied by a dolour and a dullness which invited her to see the world as nothing more than a graveyard.

And then, as suddenly as it had begun, only yesterday, the bleeding stopped. It ceased and the world began anew. And today the first young man was already arrived, summoned by a happening of which he could have no knowledge.

. . . . . . . . . . to be continued

It strikes me as a brave thing to say because it reveals certain vulnerabilities. It tells whoever is listening that she is alone, that she has a child to care for and that she has been abandoned by her partner or has chosen to live without him for whatever reason.

And we can also speculate some on the priority she gives to the areas in which they still maintain a common interest. The child comes first, followed by the dog and car in that order.

She and her partner may be able to communicate and co-operate quite well over the child, both being happy to contribute materially and emotionally to her well-being and development while willing to step back from continuous involvement from time to time and let the other take control and responsibility.

This being a fictional narrative, however, we are not required to stick closely to the truth, and should our purpose require we could remove that degree of rational co-operation from the woman with the smile and leave her an unconscious urge to punish her ex-partner, using their daughter as a stick with which to beat him. When she tells us she shares these things with her ex, she may not be truthful. For all we know she may sabotage the car, starve the dog and poison the mind of the bairn.

. . . . . . . . . . to be continued

Unedited?

A short novel for the internet.

Although, with a nod in the direction of Per Petterson, it might be called Out Stealing Timber, because that’s what I was doing when the idea came to me.

We were basking in a heatwave during the summer and I set the saw-horse up in the shade of an old silver birch. When I worked there I could see the waters of the fjord over to my left. Every day I would walk up into the forest and find suitable fallen trees and branches, drag them down to the cabin and saw them into good sizes to burn.

The forest belongs to Råde Community, and not to me, hence the title, Out Stealing Timber. I hope it’s not a hanging offence.

The old folk used to go up there and take out healthy trees once they grew high enough to block out the morning sun for their breakfast table. But that was then and I wouldn’t want to claim immunity by citing the sins of my forebears.

Out Stealing Timber is, of course, a metaphor, the timber standing for, well, whatever suits your purpose. You are expected to contribute a little effort if you want the novel to work for you.

I have a woman who says about her ex-husband, ‘We share only a bairn, a dog, and a car.’

She’s in her thirties, say middle thirties, and she has a soft smile which works for her with both men and women. I’ve written elsewhere about how fictional character is accrued and the woman with the smile is already beginning to don the robes of personality, those traits and individuations which mark her out from other women with other smiles who are also living in the never-never-land of their middle thirties.

Let us linger with the smile in which she puts so much faith. It is capable of seducing men and women of all ages, even children when necessary. She is a woman alone with a young daughter and needs to interact with the world. She no longer has youth, though she does not consider herself old. She needs affection sometimes, and her smile is useful for that, and other times she needs friendship, and the smile can lead that way too.

It is a soft smile in a rounded face, surrounded by blonde hair and a fair complexion. It lends an air of vulnerability to this woman who is alone. It says, ‘See me, I represent no threat. Treat me well. I have something to offer.’

The people who receive this smile, strangers who have not passed this way before, do not hurry on by. They want to know more. If they can they stick around. At least for a time.

. . . . . . . . . . to be continued

Each plant is intensely competitive and sacrifices individual bulk for the advantages of height. But when collected together they tend to allow their colour to leak into the spaces between them, forming a mass of pigment which collects and reflects the light.

It is strange to see that the brief lives of these petals have blown and ended by the time we make our return journey the following month.

The Rowan berries were the colour of sensuality.

As we left a brass band began to play on the far shore. The notes, each phrase, rippled with nostalgia.

Heading for home, back to our lives, our friends, our cherished illusions.

At the wooden gate there was a movement in the shadows of Thea’s room. I stopped and searched for its origin, waiting for another clue, but everything there lies deep in the past.

No dinner, then, watching apprehensively as the crew packed away the Scandinavian buffet; and no sleep either, for those in peril on the sea.

As plant cover diminishes and forests peter out the further north you go, buildings become lower and settlements more scattered. Is this a general rule? Perhaps. Perhaps not. What business is it of mine?
I must wait until tomorrow to continue my journey, and have nothing better to do than swell on such truths.
Here in Tromso you hardly notice when it’s evening. At this time of year the light never fades completely. This is the empire on which the sun never sets. Hold on, I think to myself, that’s a sentence I can use when I write my mother a postcard.

I walk down a street with pale blue wooden houses. It’s broad daylight, it’s not a public holiday, yet no-one’s at work because it’s half past ten in the evening.
People are out and about, roaming the streets, no-one seems ready for bed. Youths just like the youths in a Dutch backwater grope the same sort of girls, who comb their hair as they walk. What is different here is that their ice creams come in big cones, much bigger than the ones at home. There are very few cars, if any. A tranquil dream-town, where the sound of footsteps prevails!
There is a souvenir shop with reindeer hides, traditional Lapp costumes, reindeer antlers, doilies, boat-shaper sleds, postcards of Technicolor Lapp families, bear-skins. A stuffed polar bear stands guard by the door.
Everyone strokes its fur in passing, me too.
A father hoists his young son onto the bear and aims his camera.

The ironmonger is shut. Mustn’t forget where it is. I’ll come back in the morning for that measuring tape. It’s easy to locate – the shop is on a square that slopes down to the water.
In the middle of the square is a bronze statue on a rectangular base, a bluish figure in arctic clothing.
I’m looking at the statue from behind. Who is it? I walk up to it and read the name on the plinth:

ROALD AMUNDSEN

Facing the fjord, the conqueror of the South Pole looks over the water to the black mountains beyond, their peaks laced with white snow even at this time of year.
He stands with his feet wide apart, as though permanently braced against the storm. Bare-headed, though. His hood rests in ample folds around his neck. His anorak is as long as a nightshirt and the thick tubular trouser legs overlap the tops of his boots.
His forehead is high, the hair on his bony scalp cropped short. His moustache is bushy and dignified, and it is hard to visualise it encrusted with icicles, which would make the explorer look far less serene. Maybe not so hard, after all.
The stories about explorers I read as a boy come floating back to me in gory details. Amundsen surviving by eating his own dogs. The dogs in turn, eating each other. Shackleton eating ponies. He used ponies instead of dogs, which caused insurmountable food problems; the more ponies he took with him, the more insurmountable.
And then there was Scott.
Scott. Battling to reach the South Pole in his frozen thermal underwear, his toes frostbitten, but his heart pounding in his throat at the idea of treading on ground that had never been trodden by man . . Ground? Snow then. And treading on snow heretofore untrodden by man is something anyone with a back garden can do in winter.
What else was new?
A gaze cast skywards to a zenith never before observed by man? What sight would meet those eyes? Not stars, because in January it never gets dark in Antarctica.
So what did Scott get to see at the South Pole? The Norwegian flag flying from a ski pole planted in the snow. Note attached: Greetings from Amundsen and good luck to you, sir.
So he turned back. His companions died one by one. Scott himself slowly froze to death in his tent, in his thermal underwear which hadn’t been dry for months. Unlike Amundsen, he didn’t have jerkins made of turned animal skins. Until the very end he continued to write up his diary. It was found afterwards and published in a special issue of The Earth and Its Peoples, which I read when I was fourteen.
‘For God’s sake look after our people.’
Scott’s words, written at death’s door. I wonder if it ever entered his mind that they might one day be published in a magazine. I expect it did. Maybe not, though, maybe he always wrote in that vein. Most people don’t write down what they’re really thinking. Not: my half-frozen thermal long johns stink to high heaven. Or: at fifty degrees below zero urine freezes into reeds of yellow glass in the snow.
That is not the way they write. They keep the flag flying, even if they’re not the first to plant it at the South Pole.

Although well received in Germany, Scandinavia and his native Netherlands the work of WF Hermans has taken a long time to gain any recognition at all in the English-speaking world. This is strange when you consider his wry humour and easy though elegant way with words.

Beyond Sleep is a deadpan comedy set in the north of Norway in the 1960s. It details the adventure of a young man, Albert Issendorf, who joins a geological expedition to the far north in search of meteorite craters. Unfortunately, Albert is twinned with Arne, a masochist equipped with threadbare equipment, including a leaky tent, and a seemingly endless hoard of blood-crazy mosquitoes. As if hunger, dampness, paranoia, insomnia and delirium weren’t enough.

People are born to annoy other people, seems to be a view steadfastly held by this writer, though his pessimism is always tempered by humour. This is reminiscent of authors like Kurt Vonnegut, and were this book the only evidence, that comparison would stand. Herman’s other works, however, allow him a place closer to the very pinnacle of twentieth century literature.

I have the feeling that this tragicomedy will stay with me for a long time, especially the quixotic Albert, who is characterized magnificently.