The End of the Ocean

Chapter 17 SIGNE

The sound of the storm is in my body. I awaken with a start and it is still roaring in my ears, but then it’s gone, because it’s the silence that’s creating a din inside me now. I am lying on the floor, can’t remember coming in here, I must have collapsed from exhaustion, all curled up halfway beneath the table, the ice containers looming over me. My body is stiff and sore. I push myself up into a sitting position and can feel how every part of me aches.

Magnus, you stood there at the party and looked right at me, steady and calm through and through, and after that it was the two of us.

Not dramatically and intensely, but slowly. Years passed before we did anything more than look at one another, before we had a proper conversation, before we held hands and walked down the gravel road in the village, before we sat down at the far edge of the pier, out of sight, and kissed tentatively the first time, before I let go of your hands to touch other parts of your body, under wool sweaters and singlets that smelled of boy, the smooth skin on your back, before we clung to one another with all the desire we still didn’t know what to do with, before we walked down the road and talked, talked, talked, about everything, and especially about how there was nobody else we could talk to exactly like this.

We walked, away from the fjord, away from the water and the valley and up towards the mountain, because there we could be alone. The mountain and the glacier were our landscape during these years.

And then we moved away from the village. I remember how we stood on the deck of the steamer, looking at Ringfjorden at the end of the trail that was the backwash, the village growing smaller and smaller and everything inside me growing lighter.

We chose Bergen. He was the one who wanted to move there.

“It’s a short trip home,” he said.

“You call it home,” I said.

“It will always be home.”

“Not for me.”

“I’ll talk to you about that in a few years.”

“If you’re so certain it will remain home, we can just as well move further away.”

“Bergen is good.”

“Bergen is wet.”

“Wet is good.”

“Home is where the heart is.”

“What?”

“They say home is where the heart is. But it’s a cliché and, besides that, weak, linguistically speaking. Hearts can’t be somewhere without the people who have them.”

“Fine. I’ll stop calling Eidesdalen and Ringfjorden home.”

“You can call it what you want as far as I’m concerned.”

“You are home to me.”

“How sweet.”

“Isn’t it?”

“And that’s pretty feeble as well, linguistically speaking.”

“I figured you’d say that.”

But we stayed in Bergen, I accepted it. I accepted a lot from him during that period. We attended the same university college; he studied engineering, I studied journalism, but our free time was our own and we followed only the minimum number of lectures, because there were so many other things going on. It was as if the city, the country of Norway, had just woken up. We looked towards the world, became a part of a huge movement, fought alongside people from all over the world against the Vietnam War, nuclear power, atomic test bombings in the Pacific Ocean, but also fought our own battles, against the European Community, for legalized abortion and the right to choose, for the conservation of Norwegian natural resources and wildlife.

I remember the back of his neck in front of me in the First of May parade—he always walked a bit more quickly than I did, but unintentionally. He would stop from time to time, catch himself doing it, smile apologetically and take my hand. Then we would walk a few yards together, before something or other distracted him and pulled him ahead of me again and I would walk and look at the back of his neck, thinking that he wasn’t wholly mine, but nonetheless knowing that he was. I remember thinking that he walked quickly because of his enthusiasm, his engagement. It wasn’t until later that I understood that he maybe just wanted to get it over with.

We each had our own bedsit, but always slept together, usually in his bed—it was wider than mine and his bedsit larger; he had a separate bed recess, almost a separate bedroom. There was something homey about having the living space divided up like that, I thought, something adult, and he had also put more effort into fixing up his apartment, had worked hard to create a home. Mine was just a room where I stayed when I needed a place to sleep and he wasn’t around.

The bed was a place we slept, but also a place we lived; after having made love, naked, our bodies entangled, we chatted, sleepily stroking one another’s chests, hair, arms, backs, and also before we slept together, full of anticipation, sometimes lazy, uncertain of whether we could be bothered, sometimes we just talked, that was sometimes enough, but usually we still wanted one another. We ate in bed, drank red wine, neglected to brush our teeth, woke up with blue teeth and laughed at one another, but even tolerated each other’s morning breath, inhaled that as well, deep into our lungs, because we wanted to be completely filled with one another.

And we talked. His bed became the site for all our conversations and all his plans. Because he made plans, more and more plans, more and more often. He asked me about the future, about my expectations, about my wishes, and he searched through all my answers, sort of casually, for the points where they coincided with his wishes and expectations.

“How do you see it? How will we live?” he asked.

“I don’t know… a garden, maybe?”

“I’ve thought about that too. A big old wooden house and a garden. And apple trees, I want to have a lot of apple trees, don’t you?”

“Sure, if you pick the apples.”

“And on the hillside, maybe all the way up in the mountains, we will have a bench and we will sit there when we get old and look at the view.”

“A bench?”

“Yes, I’ll build it myself.”

He imagined us sitting on a bench together when we get old—what a cliché, I thought, and I liked it.

“We will live by the fjord,” he said, “then you can keep Blue there. You can go sailing while I putter in the garden. And pick apples.”

“Nice that you remembered the apples.”

He laughed and then he went on talking about us, that he wanted us to have a progressive distribution of labor, where he wore the apron in the kitchen and I came home with the fish, where he made applesauce. He wouldn’t be angry if I ended up making more money than he did, he said, and was clearly proud of his own generosity: I will allow you to bring home the bigger paycheck.

He talked and talked, had so much to get off his chest. There’s so much I don’t understand, he said, it’s only after we became a couple that I’ve been able to bear thinking about all the things from my childhood that I don’t understand. What do you mean, I asked; there’s so much, he answered, the most obvious, how often I felt the sting of my father’s belt. Even though this was also common in other families we knew, that was no excuse. My mom cried too, she stood in the next room and sobbed, I could hear it through the wall, that’s how loud it was, as if she wanted me to hear that she couldn’t do anything. Even though it was her decision, she encouraged him, he just did what she convinced him he had to do, what fathers were supposed to do. That’s how it was all the time, she was the one who made the big decisions, you know, for him, for me, for all of us, she controlled us, with her hands, the hands she wiped on her apron, with those disapproving sighs and encouraging smiles… or maybe it wasn’t her, after all, maybe it was the expectations they felt the world had of them, but which they actually produced by themselves. It still controls them; they say that they want me to become an engineer, do something more with my life than they have done, because they believe it’s right, the only way. My mother and father, they are so traditional that it burns me up inside, tears me apart, but nonetheless, that’s what keeps them on their feet, I think. They know the rules, they know this game, they know what’s allowed and what is forbidden, and God forbid they should decide to step over the line.

“I feel bad for them,” he once said. “And at the same time, I’m furious with them.”

“Don’t be.”

“Will it make it better if I laugh at them?”

“I don’t know.”

“It would be better if I could laugh. Maybe the objective should be to laugh, do you think? If I can learn to laugh at them, then I will avoid turning out like them? I will be different?”

“You’re already different.”

“Are you sure?”

“You’ve been different ever since the first time I saw you.”

“Or was it you who made me different?”

“…I think we should practice laughing.”

It’s perhaps his laughter that still inhabits me. I can’t get rid of it, the way it rocks inside me, along with the waves.

The boat is still moving, but it’s completely different now, rocking on gentle swells from the storm that has blown over, slowly, back and forth on the weary waves, sliding away.

My boat, Blue, I fell asleep on it. I can’t even manage to sleep with one eye open any longer, my body keeps letting me down, maybe because he is still aching inside me, aching because he let me down.

Because when push came to shove, he wasn’t as good at discerning my needs, at seeing the needs of others, as I’d thought. When push came to shove, he was still just a child of his generation and the belt had made its mark. He wanted to move back to Ringfjorden; he grew tired of Bergen, he said, tired of being required to have an opinion on every street corner, tired of having to take a stand on every issue and that it had better be the “correct” stand. He wanted to move back home, wanted to have a garden, a kitchen, but actually I was the one who would be there, in the kitchen, because the whole time he was searching for the thing in me that had brought us together. He was searching for the girl he could rescue.

Everything else about him was just talk.

He was less daring than our fathers, he took no chances, because actually he was just like all the other young men at that time, with shaggy beards and gentle smiles who pussyfooted their way through life and talked about how everything was going to be different, without meaning it.

The work we took part in, the demonstrations we walked in, the fliers we wrote together—it was just a game for him. I look forward to seeing his eyes when I am standing in front of him with the ice, when I dump it in his yard, the expression on that padded, middle-aged man-about-town face of his, with traces of red wine from the evening before on his lips and his sweet little wife with a forehead just a bit too smooth, and a smile just a bit too tight, and the grandchildren who no doubt will be visiting. Maybe they are the ones who will stomp the ice into the dust, sully it, because it’s their future he is stealing. It is their future his entire generation is stealing… my entire generation has stolen.

Those of us who have only experienced prosperity, never any obstacles.

Yes, perhaps the children should be allowed to do it, because they are the ones he is hurting. But they probably don’t want to, because they don’t care either, the children of today. They are pushed forward by the generations behind them, feel only the absence of any impediment, they don’t care as long as they can have the latest iPhone when they turn seven, and their own large-screen television and an apartment on their twenty-first birthday. They won’t care, they won’t even look at the ice melting on the ground, much less stomp on it, because something else will get their attention, a screen beeping, a phone buzzing. And besides, their feet could get cold.

My head spins.

I need food, I need water.

Finally I get to my feet. I go to fetch a coffee cup, find one in the closet; it’s a mess in there, all the unbreakable dishes have been tossed around and deep inside it is damp—water must have leaked inside here, too. The closet is situated where the deck meets the hull—it can’t be fully watertight there either.

I step on the foot pump for fresh water and muddy water drips into the cup; the water has a faint odor of diesel, like almost everything on board, but I am used to it and drink quickly.

I open the door to the stowage space for dry goods and find a mess in there as well. The lid has fallen off the can of flour and everything is white and damp: bags of powdered soup, canned goods and packages of pasta are covered with sticky flour. I dig out a package of spaghetti and tear off the plastic, can’t bear to wait for the water to boil, can’t bear to look for a pot, but chew some of the hard strands right out of the package, along with a piece of crispbread that has become soft from the moisture.

I eat half the package, find a chocolate bar, too—palm oil, I know it contains palm oil, but bought it anyway, can’t manage without it out here and nobody can see me, I think quickly, but catch myself doing it. Signe, c’mon now, there are limits.

I open the hatch, not knowing what to expect—chaos, the rigging destroyed, the dinghy blown overboard? But everything is as it should be—the rigging, cordage, everything is hanging in its place, as secure as before, the boat has weathered this, held its own, without my doing a thing, and I know it, that long-keel sailboats like this one can withstand a lot, can be knocked down and get back up again. They aren’t like modern boats with deep fin keels, which can lose the keel, be tossed about and capsized. Blue was designed for this, for recovering in a storm.

I stand there in the cockpit, a soft wind caressing my cheeks; the ocean is growing calm, the sun breaks through the clouds, the water on deck evaporates, and the floor is slippery. When the ocean is peaceful, mirroring the sky like this, I could be anywhere on earth—nothing about the ocean here, about the sky, tells me that I’m located on the North Sea. The surface is identical, here and in the Pacific Ocean, an ocean is an ocean is an ocean, until you go beneath the surface. It is then that you will see the species, the seabed, hollows and seamounts that make every ocean unique, the way mountain formations and animal life on land create the variations and characteristics of different regions. The surface of the ocean is the sky for the underwater world, above high mountains and deep valleys, for thousands of creatures we have never seen.

I tear myself away, walk on deck, over to the mast, put my feet on the mast rungs and climb upwards, two thirds of the way up. It’s easy to loosen the halyard from the crosstree; I look down, the deck is small below me, just water everywhere, the horizon, the sky and the only thing I have is this boat.

Blue, my Blue, I think immediately, you saved me when I couldn’t save myself, you took over when I couldn’t take any more. But then I shake it off, snort to myself. How sentimental, it’s just a boat, just aluminum, plastic and fiberglass, wood and ropes. I am the skipper, this is a skilled profession. I would never have managed had it not been for an entire lifetime of experience.

I climb down again and go inside; everything is in disarray, cupboards and drawers I thought I’d secured have opened, knives and forks have been thrown across the floor. I have to clean up, but first I must check my position. I have no power, the fuse box may have short-circuited, I should trouble-shoot, but can’t bring myself to do it. I hate the small shocks I sometimes get and perhaps it will dry out on its own. I must bank on that, have experienced it before, I just have to wait, until the sun and the air do their job, once again prevail over the water.

Map, pen, paper and sextant, I bring all of it up into the cockpit, look at the clock, exactly 13:06 hours, check the tables, gauge the position of the sun, find the degree of longitude. I know how to do this too—I am clever, I think, I am clever, there’s nothing wrong with telling myself that I’m clever.

But it takes time, good God, what painstaking work, it’s been a long time since I have used these ancient methods, but finally I establish the degree of latitude and a position.

I sit there looking at the “X” I drew on the nautical map—there’s the boat, there I am.

And now I understand where the wind has taken me, that in the course of the storm it changed directions, came from the north, and it has helped me, carried me south. I’m already at the same latitude as Flekkefjord. Thank you, wind, thank you, ocean, thank you, weather. Again I can raise the sail, I can move on, set my course for the English Channel.