The Sunlit Night (9 page)

“Come,” Nils said, after a few measures. “The chief wants to meet the New Yorker.”

We walked toward lush black smoke and entered the museum’s smithy. The blacksmith welcomed me and suggested that I forge myself a nail. The chief was on his way. I sat beside a freestanding anvil, and the blacksmith presented me with a tiny hunk of iron. I only managed to strike the thing once, and weakly, each time the iron was hot. I struck four times. Then the blacksmith stuck the mangled nail back into the coals. Nils excused himself for a moment and vanished.

“I am Sigbjørn,” the blacksmith said, and with his free hand he shook mine.

“Frances,” I said.

He nodded. Sigbjørn had the build of a soccer player. He was thin and of medium height, but his frame suggested agility and power. Sandy hair had begun to recede from his temples, and he hadn’t shaved in a few days.

In a long, continuous gesture, Sigbjørn removed his tongs from the coal pile. The nail’s shaft was square from my four petty blows. Its tip was not sharp enough, and its head was not flat. He cooled the metal in a bucket of water. When its color had returned from orange to black, he placed the nail in my palm.

“You know about the sun?” Sigbjørn asked, plunging a new piece of iron into the coals. I told him I did not. “It never goes down,” he said, smiling. I was looking at the black stripe of iron in my hand, the darkest thing I would see for several months, when the chief entered and told me to call him Haldor. He was bald, had a red beard, and wore a red felt tunic. A leather belt cut into his significant belly, and a royal blue satchel hung over his left hip. The whole outfit was trimmed with what looked like teeth. He walked straight past me to the fire the blacksmith was goading and reached from his hip to the smoking coals. He stood a moment warming the one hand. Nils reappeared.

“New York,” Haldor said to Nils.

Sigbjørn rolled his sleeves all the way up to his shoulders, revealing his grotesquely wide forearms.

“We don’t know why she wanted to come here,” Sigbjørn said, “to Borg!”

“Have you done some shooting? Have you mounted the boat?” asked Haldor.

Sigbjørn said, “She hit the nail.”

“The boat goes at two.” Haldor pulled a wristwatch from his satchel. “Good time,” he said, replacing it.

“Take her to the boat. She cannot be only painting all the time, as you are,” Sigbjørn said to Nils.

I watched Nils consider this—he looked first embarrassed, then puzzled. He shifted his kitchen rag from one pocket to another.

“She has come here to paint all the time,” Nils said.

“She lives at the asylum?” Haldor asked.

“Where?” I asked.

“Ja,”
Nils said. “We have not gone home yet. She has only just come from Bodø.”

“Straight to work,” Haldor said. “Nils. Take her home. Be civilized.”

Sigbjørn wiped coal onto his bruised leather apron. His movement made the teeth on Haldor’s tunic shake and clatter. Nils, the only modern man in the smithy, coughed from the fire’s smoke.

“How long will you stay?” Sigbjørn asked me. “
If
she stays,” he said to Nils.

“Until the wedding. My sister is getting married,” I said to everyone in the hut.

“Fine!” Haldor said.

“In California,” I added, and turned my head to the left, as if it were the West.

“Fine!” Haldor said again.

Sigbjørn pulled a glowing orange lump from the coals. He began to whack it mercilessly.

Over the steady noise, Haldor said, “You will not leave us before the KORO inspection, I hope.” He looked to Nils and added, “The government is hard to please.”

“It is true that Nils is needing help,” Sigbjørn said. He kicked open a small door and emptied one bucket after another of ash, water, and scrap iron into the back field. The wind mixed the lighter pieces into a black vapor and spread the rest across the grass.

Right then Nils hurried out of the smithy, and I followed. The chief and the blacksmith remained, speaking all at once their own language. Nils was walking very fast in the direction of the docks, where I could make out a few figures and the approaching prow of a boat. We walked away from the sparse trees that surrounded the smithy. They added a bark smell to the hut’s smoke, and a few clouds rolled in from the water we were now running toward, making it all smell of camp, campfire.

“Why are you running?” I shouted ahead.

“Bad time,” Nils cried without turning his head back to me.

“I thought the chief said good time!”

“You see the boat?” Nils flung out a finger and shook it.

I caught up with him, and we ran the last stretch of the road side by side. Nils’s legs were short, like mine, and we pumped our arms. We were kicking dirt from the road onto the many roadside flowers—these were not house orchids, my mother had never told me their names—and into shrubs hung with dark berries. We both began to sweat. When it seemed we would have to stop to catch our breath or wipe our foreheads, we stopped. The path had ended.

In the water, a twenty-foot Viking ship was being roped and stocked by the deckhands I’d seen from the hut. They were sweating too. The clouds that had passed over the smithy were gone again, revealing a very high sun.

“You will paint all of the time,” Nils said, his tone both commanding and beseeching. “Today,” he said, “okay, the boat. I will fetch you after the ride. So, home for the evening.” He told me that we would be working long days. We would begin tomorrow, formally. For tonight, he suggested that I try painting the ox that roamed around the asylum, for my leisure, for an exercise. Then dinner, he said. He had a fish in the freezer. I didn’t tell him I didn’t eat fish. I figured it would count as blasphemy in this country, though I hardly knew where I would find other food.

The Viking ship’s deckhands waved their blond arms at us. The boat was long and thin, vegetable-like; it had the shape of snow pea and the color of a turnip. Nils led me down the hill to the dock and exchanged a few words with a deckhand. Dozens of passengers had taken their seats, and the crew had untied the boat. I climbed aboard. Nils started back up the hill.

A girl with muscular arms said, “Welcome.” She wore an upturned sack with holes cut out for her head and arms and had a rope tied around her waist.
“Velkommen,”
she said to us.

•    •    •

Fifty strangers and I rowed the ninth-century ship out to sea. The strangers were mostly small families—one child with two parents, or two children with their dad. The families, clumped, sat at the center of the deck. A few individuals had taken the single seats around the edge of the boat, where they could look out at the water. As we rowed, the girl captain hollered again and again, “Haroo!”

Over the course of our rowing, the roles shifted. I saw the younger children squint their eyes and become older, concentrated. The fathers, in their shorts, reverted to little boys, looking up at the girl captain, then down at their own legs. The single adults around the perimeter rowed without thinking, lost in separate dreams of the same sea. I was a poor rower. I did not manage to tilt the oar correctly, and I was distracted by my own separate dream:

My sister, wearing a Viking sack, stood at the mast. I looked down at the water in panic. Its color was changing, darkening. We were far out at sea for such an old boat. Sarah was far out at sea for such a young girl. I had to believe she was ready, because she had looked me in the face and told me so. None of us, I saw on the faces of the boys and girls on the center benches, were ready to be where we were—ever farther out in the water, closer and closer to Greenland. The captain was constant, shouting “Haroo!” every other minute.

I looked at the captain’s blond hair and knew my black-haired sister was at that moment sharing our childhood bunk bed with her fiancé. Scott was visiting my parents for the first time since the announcement, spending the weekend at our old apartment, which was slowly being dismantled—my mother taking her things down from the walls, my father folding and refolding his two pairs of pants.

The water grew brighter, shallower. The captain shouted what turned out to be her final “Haroo!” We had rowed in a tidy loop. I saw Nils standing by the dock. We tied the prow’s dragon head to the dock posts. I thanked the captain, complimented her on her sack, and ran up the hill from the water.

“Not enough hours in the day for boat rides,” Nils said when I reached him. We started for the parking lot. I looked up at the incredible, never-setting sun. There would be countless hours in the day.

•    •    •

Toward the end of our fifteen-minute drive to the artist colony, Nils admitted that the main building had previously been a mental asylum, but he assured me that he had repainted the outer walls blue. Upon arriving, I discovered he’d not just painted them blue, but seven shades of blue, in a wave pattern. The asylum building was three stories high, and ours was the only car in the lot.

“How many artists live here?” I asked.

“You and me.”

While Nils dug around in the trunk, I stayed in the passenger seat and tried to calm myself by watching the wind bend the parking lot weeds. They were the same tall, voluptuous flowers that grew alongside all the roads, and the light in their petals was whiter and cleaner than any I’d seen before. Nils came around the passenger side and knocked on my window. If there was anything worse than being an artist colony’s only artist, I thought, it was being the second. Still, I got out of the car and followed Nils through the asylum’s unlocked front door. He walked straight down the ground-floor hallway. I followed him with my suitcase. We passed a large bathroom and stopped at the second door on the left.

It was the room he had chosen for me. I didn’t know which room was his, even which floor. Nils carried my suitcase up in his arms over the threshold of the room. I knew I was marrying myself to something right then, stranded and strangely overjoyed, on this nontropical island in the middle of the Norwegian Sea. There was a bell ringing, and out the window of my room it proved to be the collar bell of a sheep. Four sheep had entered the parking lot.

I advanced to the windowsill and Nils retreated, leaving me to my new quarters. I stared at the animals, the only other living creatures in sight, and it was so easy to cast them as my family: I, the littlest with the clanging bell; my sister, the gangly-legged female closer to the road; my father, the curly one who hadn’t been sheared; my mother, the lean, round-eyed matriarch. It was good to see us again. It was good that we’d transformed and were adapting to new environments, growing steadier hooves.

I turned away from the mirage in the window and made my bed with white sheets and a striped blanket that Nils had left for me. The hallway bathroom didn’t have any toilet paper. I wondered again about Nils. It was easy to imagine that Nils never pooped. I didn’t know where he’d gone. I walked as quietly as possible and peeked inside the first floor’s kitchen, but he wasn’t there. I stood in the center of the hall and stared to the hall’s end in both directions; it was long and full of terrible little doors. One could go insane from the floor plan, if one wasn’t already.

“Nils!” I shouted.

From the parking lot, echoing down the corridor, a long, low, “
Ja
?” It could have been either man or animal answering me. No lights had been turned on in the asylum. I ran toward the smell of sheep dung that wafted in from the open entry. Nils stood centered in the parking lot, his trunk open, the sheep shy and keeping to the lot’s distant corner. I approached Nils, and the sheep drew farther away, out toward the open back fields.

“Where are you going?” I said.

“Town,” he said. “Where are you going?”

“Town,” I said, thrilled that there was such a place.

•    •    •

We drove down the hill and the town came into sight immediately—it wasn’t far, and it wasn’t large. I had never lived in a town. When I thought about it, I had never visited a grocery store by car. The Gristedes where we shopped in New York had been on the ground floor of our apartment building. My bedroom’s fire escape hung six stories above its front door. I had occasionally walked down to it barefoot. And when I thought about it, I didn’t know what I needed from this town. Some milk. A couple pounds of pasta would last me a long time, if Nils wasn’t driving down again soon.

Halfway between the asylum and the town, Nils pulled over and turned off the car. “It’s blue,” he exclaimed, pointing down to a rocky lake beside the road, and also up to the sky. “Blue and orange. Are complementary colors,” Nils said urgently. “If you look at something orange, a paper, for fifteen seconds, and then you look at a white paper, your eye makes blue. The same with yellow and violet. I use yellow and red, and the eye wants violet, so it is living.”

“It is living,” I affirmed, and Nils restarted the car, looking relieved.

It ran for only two minutes before we entered the REMA 1000 parking lot. We pulled in behind a departing station wagon and joined the shoppers. While I hadn’t caught the population number for Leknes, it seemed the entire town was in this grocery store. A long line formed behind each of the six checkout counters. It wasn’t surprising, somehow, that we all needed milk. The terrain of these northern islands could only be tempered by protein, by sips, by cups, the smallest things under our control.