you’re young and bright, turn your back on the sea, heed my words . . .”
Ingrid said no.
“You’re not strong enough.”
“Yes, I am,” Ingrid said to her dying mother.
The following spring Lars did not return from Lofoten, he had found love, he wrote, and stayed there with the boat and the crew and the tackle, year after year, even when war broke out. And Ingrid and Barbro became lonelier and lonelier with every sun that rose and every storm that abated, with every animal they slaughtered and every sack of down they gathered and failed to sell, a young woman and a middle-aged woman on an island, waiting for letters from Lars, neat, regular ramblings, which one day were also furnished with some green scribbles, the signature of Lars’ three-year-old son, Hans, the longest three years of Ingrid’s life. Now the war had lasted for four, and Hans had a brother, Martin; with him came more scribbles, to an aunt and a grandmother who didn’t write back because one of them was too proud and the other couldn’t.
~
Ingrid went into the North Chamber and decided to sleep there, where a hatch in the floor led down to the kitchen, allowing the heat to rise. She shook and beat the eiderdowns, made the bed, went downstairs again and drank some lukewarm coffee as she re-read the letter from Barbro, whereupon she scrunched it up and placed it in the pile on the floor.
But she didn’t set it alight.
She went into the sitting room to put some wood in the stove and noticed that her grandfather’s bedroom door was ajar. She took hold of the handle, wanting to close the door, but she had done this a short time ago, she had shut the door and now it was open again, the house was silent, nothing stirred.
She heard a click, then distant, sustained thunder from the bowels of the earth, she backed into the kitchen and stood rooted to the spot, for much too long; then she returned and wrenched open the door and was angry with herself for not hav-ing done so in the first place, whoever it was could have got away.
But she could smell nothing, she heard no shuffling steps, mumbling voices or the sound of a cat, only the same faint hissing sound, inside and out. She unhooked the lamp from the sitting-room wall, went right inside her grandfather’s room and established beyond all doubt that nobody was there, neither in the bed nor underneath it, neither in the corner cupboard nor in the chest, which she opened and closed, and sat on the lid with the persistent hiss of silence so loud in her ears that she had to scream.
Then the silence was total.
She put on her coat and went out into the falling snow, stopped and surveyed the buildings, the barn, then the quays and the boat shed by the sea, suddenly wonderstruck at all the things that had kept her on the island, which in truth were nothing at all. Soon the snow would turn to rain, the island would become as brown as scab and the sea grey, unless the wind changed.
Ingrid walked south through the gardens, avoided the gates and clambered over the stone walls as she did when a child. But she was a child no more. She continued to the southernmost point, where she stopped and stared at the ruins of the lighthouse, which she and Barbro had blown up with the last of her father’s dynamite when war broke out, shattered glass in clear, garish colours, strands of seaweed and kelp wrapped like black hair around rusting, twisted iron girders, a paraffin drum resembling a scorched rose. She sat down on the tree trunk they had found drifting in the water and had secured with bolts and wires so that the sea wouldn’t take it from them again, this colossal bone-white giant they thought one day would be worth something, maybe a fortune even, now it had served as a bench for three decades, for people who never sat down.
And Ingrid was no longer a child.
She waited until she began to feel the cold, walked north along the rocks to the west without seeing any footprints or hearing anything but the dismal wail of the sea, past the Hammer with the new quay and the three boat houses, that was at least one too many; she realised that if she had woken Nelly that morning, if she had allowed herself to hear her voice and see her smile, she would still have been at the trading post, tearing the backbones out of dead cod as her thoughts ebbed and flowed.
~
Standing in the new quay house, Ingrid bunched her wet hair and let it fall, repeated the action, wondering why she still wasn’t hungry. She noticed a hole in the sleeve of her woollen jumper, was unable to remember how it got there. In a rectangular box on top of the workbench were some wooden floats arranged according to size. She took the largest and played with it, saw the teeth marks left by Lars, who chewed everything when he was a toddler. She still had dried fish blood under her nails. Her jumper had caught on a nail on the staircase as she went down with her suitcase that morning. On the shelf above the bench were spools of yarn of all dimensions, knives, whetstones, hooks, corks . . . and bodkins, Barbro’s bodkins.
Ingrid pulled over the stool and sat by the iron hook beneath the window, threaded a bodkin and set to work on the gill nets. An hour later she had made three fathoms with a mesh size of fifteen. Her hands were soft and delicate in the cool air. She was ravenous, went out into the darkness of the night and back to the house, she had been wrong about the weather, the rain had turned to snow, as light and dry as soot, and she was no longer afraid.
3
Ingrid ate and slept and woke and was still not afraid. She took her time eating, dressed, went out into the fragile November light and pushed out the rowing boat. The wind had turned once again and had picked up, from the south-west. She rowed around the headland and into the metre-high waves, south through the sound to the anchor bolt which Lars had once hammered into a rock there, fastened a rope to the end without getting out of the boat – taking care not to let it dash against the rock – and rowed against the current across the sound to Moltholmen, where her cousin had also hammered in a peg, from which hung a pulley. She threaded the rope through the eye, again without getting out of the boat – taking care not to let it dash against the rock – and rowed back towards Barrøy, she had thought it would be eighty or ninety fathoms in length, but it was closer to a hundred and fifty, the line was too short.
She burst into tears, tied a float to one end and let it go, rowed north with the current to the new quay house to fetch more rope. The sea was rougher now. She fought her way out again and found the float, tied the ropes together and rowed back to the mooring on Barrøy with the end. She was soaked to the skin, sweating profusely, exhausted and furious, but now she had a line over the sound and could run a net, or two, fishing without recourse to a boat, in all kinds of weather, until the hardest frosts set in, perhaps even longer.
She let the boat drift north and put it away, noticed that the swell was falling and stopped short in surprise, she had expected it to rise, and still she wasn’t afraid.
She went up to the house and slept on the bench next to the stove, not waking until it was evening. She felt cold and stiff, got up and put more wood on, cooked some food and wondered whether to set the nets in the darkness, dismissed the idea and opened one of the books she had, there was nothing in it.
She donned her waterproofs, walked to the new quay house and fetched two nets, walked south to the moorings by the sound and drew the first net, like a noiseless spider’s web, into the black waves, fastened it to the eye of the second and kept pulling, two nets joined together, that wasn’t much of a fleet, she pulled them fifteen fathoms further out, secured them and went home.
She slept naked in her parents’ bed in the North Chamber, a long sleep, rose, another morning, pulled in the nets and had some fresh cod to cook, then went out and added another net to the fleet. Three. She could increase this to four or five. She had some dried fish left over from last winter, she had a cellar full of potatoes, there was some red saithe and half a barrel of herring. She had jam, flour, coffee, syrup, dried peas, butter from the store and sugar. Now she also had fresh fish. The pile of newspaper balls was no longer on the kitchen floor but in the wooden box beneath the stove, with the kindling. In a gap in the cloud cover two planes appeared, she heard gunfire directed at the Fort in the north of the main island, the gap closed again.
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