To Siberia (24 page)

“Can I use the sink in the kitchen?” and she nods toward the door. I go in and have a thorough wash with the door shut and come out again with the white waitress’s apron tied around my waist. The sun shines in through the windows. They could do with a polish. I go straight over to the only breakfast customer and ask if he has had enough, if there is anything more he would like. He turns to look at me and smiles. I’ve never seen him before.

“Maybe,” he says, stretching his lips over his teeth like Humphrey Bogart, but his hair is thinning and his cheeks are chubby.

“What would you like?” I ask.

“I don’t know, maybe you do?”

“Haven’t a clue,” I say. I pick up his cup and plate and the half-full ashtray and everything I can find and put it on a tray without looking at him. He scratches his neck, the table is cleared, and I carry everything into the kitchen. I wait five minutes, and when I look out he has gone.

For the rest of the day I walk restlessly from the counter to the tables and back again, I am obsessed with crumbs and dust, I clear away and straighten curtains, Aunt Kari says I am annoying the customers.

“For God’s sake sit down and have a fag,” she says, but I cannot. I stand at the window looking out, but I’m not looking for anything special.

“Anyone would think you had wanderlust,” says Aunt Kari.

That night we see a red light above Kiellands Square. It was not there before, and we think it has something to do with the sunset. But it is on the wrong side, it flashes in the wrong windows, and we go on with what we are doing, and then the fire engines arrive. Salomon’s Shoe Factory is on fire. We go out on the sidewalk, people come from all sides, some on foot, others cycling. A bus stops, the doors snap open, the passengers stream out and most of them run across the square to get as near the flames as possible, but we stay where we are outside the café.

“Good God,” says Aunt Kari, “I hope everyone escaped, we are going to lose some customers, though. Especially one.” She turns towards me, I can feel it, but I do not look at her.

“It may well be he’s not even there,” I say.

“What do you know about that?”

“A bit,” I say.

The glow above the square gets stronger, and at the same time it’s strangely quiet. We watch cars glide up and shadows running to and fro against the red, quickly and jerkily as in a silent film.

No lives are lost. No one is hurt either, but the factory is ruined and the machinery burned out, so production will move to another part of town until a new factory is built, and that may take a long time. None of the workers come to the café any more. It’s too far away, and there are other cafés.

The days go by, and I go with them, but I do not count them. I wait. It is a flowing feeling. I don’t read books anymore. I work in the café or sit on a chair and leaf through a paper or stand at the window looking out. My mother doesn’t write any more. “If you don’t write, I shan’t,” she said in the last letter, and she means it. She is iron. I am iron too. I don’t write. I have nothing to say to her. I go out in the car with Aunt Kari. We go for long trips on Sundays with a map and a picnic. She has a permit to buy gas because the Citroën is registered for the café, it’s a commercial car, and even though gas is hellishly dear she does not lift an eyebrow when she pays. We drive to the Lier hills outside Drammen, along the tops where we look out over the fjords. We drive to a farm near Årnes where she has friends, and I don’t know where she met them, but they are happy for us to come and give us cakes. I go on my own to the barn and along the row of cows and feel the warmth of their bodies streaming towards me and stroke their backs and say words to them only they can hear. We go to Bingsfossen at Sørum early one morning. I sleep most of the way. Aunt Kari stops the car just above the suspension bridge, and we walk down to the river on the flat rocks. The water roars down the rapids and sprays a shower of drops over our hair and coats, and there are piles of timbers on the bank with the owners’ mark cut into the end of each log. The whole area and my coat smell of timber for several days. It’s chilly beside the river, but Aunt Kari wants to make coffee on an open fire, and I shiver and get the coffeepot from the car, I am still sleepy, but I make use of what I have learned and get a little fire going.

I serve the coffee standing. We clasp our hands around the mugs and blow into the warmth while we look at the rushing river. Aunt Kari smokes a thin cigar and stands nearest to the river with her back to me, and that back is so broad, and we have done it all as she wanted, the river roars and thunders so loud we can hardly talk, the coffee is piping hot on our palms, and only then do I realize she has been to all these places before, with someone else, in the same car. She turns and smiles. She has a scarf around her head and sunglasses and a big black coat. She looks like a matron, the mother of many children. I smile back, we have a fine time. I take a big mouthful of coffee, and suddenly it’s bitter and fills every hollow of my body, nausea shoots up my throat, my stomach turns over and everything comes up all over the rocks in front of me. I’m not prepared, I drop the mug and mess my coat, the china splinters and breaks around us. I bend down and vomit again.

“Damn it,” I say.

“What’s wrong with you?” Aunt Kari says. She hurries over the rocks with a handkerchief and wipes my mouth and the front of my coat and looks me in the face:

“You’ve gone quite green.”

“I felt so sick. That coffee must be bad.”

“There’s nothing wrong with the coffee that I could taste.”

“I think I need to sit down for a while,” I say.

“You go up and sit in the car. We’ve finished here now.”

I don’t quite know what it is we have finished, but I do as she says, go and sit in the car, and feel better at once. The only thing I smell is the timber, and it is insistent, but if I breathe carefully through my nose I can keep the nausea down. Aunt Kari rinses out the coffeepot and puts out the fire with water from the river, then comes heavily up beside the bridge and puts the coffeepot in the little trunk.

“How are you feeling?” she says in the car on the way back to Oslo. We drive with the window half open.

“Fine,” I say, and in a way that is true.

One day there is a letter for me on the kitchen table. It’s leaning against a cup where I shall see it at once. I see it at once. It has stains and stamps with intertwining letters. I open it and read:

Dear Sistermine,

it runs,

when you get this letter I shall probably be home in Denmark again. The mail takes a long time, I’m told. Mum sent me your address, and that letter had been on its way for centuries. I have been here a long time now, longer than I’d intended. The people I was with left a couple of weeks ago, or maybe more. I’m not quite clear about it. They took the boat across the straits of Gibraltar to Spain. But I shan’t set foot in that country now,

he writes:

not with that butcher Franco as dictator. On the way south we took a train to Marseilles and a ship from there. In the harbor before we sailed I saw a woman I’ll never forget. I took her photograph, I couldn’t resist it, but she didn’t see me. She stood on the quay shouting and weeping beside the gangway, there were people everywhere, French police with hard black peaked caps, Arabs on their way home, some in djellabas, others with Turkish fezzes on their heads, and Americans with white tropical helmets playing at Africa already. She didn’t see any of them, she stood with closed eyes behind her spectacles facing the boat, and she beat herself on the throat so her cries came out in short bursts rather like the way we played at Indians when we were small. I swear, Sistermine, it was the most horrible noise I have ever heard. And she looked like Mother. Just as small, the same gray hair and the same gray coat and hat. I looked around to see who the strange screams could be for. By the rail a few meters away stood a man, younger than me, almost a boy. He stared at her. His face was like stone, his hair cut short all over his head, and it was impossible to guess what he was thinking. Then he turned and walked across the deck without looking back. She didn’t see him either, her eyes were still closed and she was still beating her throat and crying out, and I had the feeling I had that time I was on the way over to Hirsholmene and found the cap on the ice. That I had to turn around. Wasn’t that strange? But Morocco is not Denmark. I am certain the young man was on his way to join the Foreign Legion.

He writes:

Sistermine, I have seen it all, all the places in the book we had at home; Marrakech, Fez, Meknes, Kasba, do you remember how I used to say those names aloud, and they were exactly as I knew they would be, but in color! Terracotta and brick and yellow sand and red sand and blue mountains, and the people we called the blue men who came with their camels and horses to the market at Marrakech weren’t blue, they were like you after a summer with lots of sun. And the Berbers from the mountains were whiter than me and some were blond with blue eyes. You and I never had that. So who is Aryan in this world? They were skeptical toward me because in appearance I looked French to them, and I was skeptical toward them because I knew Franco used Berbers in the Fascist army. They were proud and could fight like fiends for their freedom, but probably they weren’t so fussy about others’ if the money was good. They have a saying which goes: kiss the hand you can’t cut off. Damn it, say I,

it runs, and he writes:

On the way from Al-Hajeb to Meknes by bus a few days ago we stopped at the foot of a mountain, and there was a tent and a woman with small children and some black goats. She was tall and beautiful with tattoos on her face, and she had a scarf on her head with coins or medallions sewn to the edges so close together they jingled when she walked and jingled when she bent over the goats. I had to go up to her. I had been so thirsty the whole way, we had traveled for hours, it was as hot as the anteroom of hell, and I said to her in French, “J’ai soif!” and she understood that. She picked up a wooden bowl and went and milked one of the goats straight into the bowl and gave it to me. It was very kind of her, and I took a big mouthful. Say thanks for me to the cows at Vrangbæk, if they’re still alive. It tasted terrible. Maybe that’s why I’m lying here now, in a little guesthouse near the Socco Grande in Tangiers. I’ve been feverish for a couple of days, but I think I was a bit better this morning. The son of the house runs errands for me and tells stories at full speed in a blend of Spanish and French and a dose of Maghrebi. It sounds like a new language. He falls to his knees and laughs aloud when he gets to the point, and I don’t understand a thing. He’s twelve. Tomorrow I’m sure I’ll be on my feet again. I need to be actually, I’ve booked passage on a freighter to Nice leaving two days from now. I’ll work my way over. From there it’s the train home with the last of my money.

He writes:

Sis, there’s so much to tell you, but it must wait till we meet, and that will be soon. Then you must tell me everything too. I haven’t seen you since that time in the harbor. I forgot the photograph, do you remember? I realized it in Sweden. Everything went so fast, it was a crazy time. And then you weren’t there when I got home.

Now I must sleep, and when I wake up I’ll be better and I’ll go out and fetch the presents I’ve bought. I’ve hidden them in a safe place. At the moment I don’t trust anyone.

A
unt Kari drove me to the quay. It was winter again. There was snow in the streets and silence and early dark. Between the houses in Storgata, Christmas decorations had been put up all the way from Ankertorget to Kirkeristen, and we drove down Skippergata and out by the big warehouse and on beneath the castle where it was shadowy beside the wall and gloomy like
Quai des Brumes
with Jean Gabin. A new ship lay at Vippetangen. The
Melchior
had gone, this one was called
Vistula.
The Vistula was a river in Poland and the ship had sailed between Gdansk and Copenhagen with Polish refugees until quite recently.

“Gdansk was Danzig when the town was German,” said Aunt Kari, but I did not need to be told that. We walked from the car to the departure hall past some taxis with open trunks, the drivers were getting baggage out. All red in the face they walked to the entrance with a bag in each hand and one under each arm and put them down in rows, but I carried my own suitcase. The ship was quietly waiting when we went out on the other side of the hall. It was smaller than the
Melchior
with fewer decks and the gangway was just a plank with railings like a well-made chicken ladder. People were walking up the plank, and I wanted to get on board as fast as I could, but Aunt Kari took my arm and said:

“So far so good, my dear. Now, you mustn’t get seasick.”

I put down the suitcase.

“I’ve never been seasick before. I’m really fine.”

“Have a schnapps on an empty stomach just before you eat, it usually helps. Here’s a small contribution,” she said, pushing a note into my hand.