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White Shadow
Roy Jacobsen
Translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw
BIBLIOASIS
Windsor, ON
Contents
Biblioasis International Translation Series
1
The fish came first. Man is merely a persistent guest. The foreman came in and asked if any of the girls could split, there had been an unexpected influx of cod. Ingrid looked up from the barrel of herring and directed her gaze towards the quay, where dancing snowflakes melted into the black woodwork. She wiped her hands on her apron, followed him into the salting room and went over to the splitting bench and a tub of gutted fish. They looked at each other. He nodded at the knife lying there, it resembled a small axe.
She pulled a two-foot long cod from the rinsing tub and placed it on the bench, slit its throat, flipped up the gill cover and sliced through the ribs from the neck down to the belly and out to the tail, severed the backbone at the anus, cut through all the ribs on the right-hand side too, ripped out the spine as if she were undoing a rusty zip, and held it aloft in her left hand; the fish on the bloodstained bench looked like a white wing, waiting to be rinsed and stacked in layers, before being salted and turned and dried and washed and piled and sold, as the ivory-white gold that has sustained life on this scraggy coast for the eight hundred years that have passed since the place was first chronicled.
“Let’s have a keek a’ th’ spine.”
Ingrid switched it to her right hand to conceal the cut between her thumb and index finger. “Clien as a whistle.”
He added that she could stay for as long as it took, you could never be sure in the autumn . . .
“But get s’m gloves on tha.”
Ingrid looked down at her blood mingling with that of the fish and forming a drop that fell to the floor, as he turned his back and squelched over to the office on his rubber soles.
Ingrid longed to be gone, to be back on Barrøy, but no-one can be alone on an island and this autumn neither man nor beast was there, Barrøy lay deserted and abandoned, it hadn’t even been visible since the end of October, but she couldn’t be here on the main island either.
~
She split fish for ten hours a day, kept her distance from two salters and after a week couldn’t sleep at night in the damp, chilly cooper’s loft, where she lay with Nelly and two young girls from the mainland who were here because of the war. They pretended not to cry themselves to sleep, they gutted herring,