The End of the Ocean

Chapter 21 SIGNE

Do you remember, Magnus, when you found out that I was pregnant?

We were in Bergen again, living our lives as usual, the weeks slid by. It was summertime, we were getting up early, working nine-to-five and talking about how we were looking forward to the autumn and student life. At the same time, plans were being made back home in Ringfjorden. I spoke with Daddy almost every day, it’s getting there, he said; it was growing, two national organizations had become involved, and this time we would mobilize. People were on their way from Bergen, from Oslo. All over the country nature conservationists were talking about Ringfjorden.

I had just come home from my summer job in a cafeteria the first time I noticed it. I was on my way up the stairs and suddenly felt a heaviness in my breasts. With every single step I took I could feel them, the tenderness, like I was about to get my period, but more extreme, and how long had it been since my last period, four weeks—no, five. I should have had my period the week before.

I let myself into the bedsit, which was silent and dark. I didn’t turn on the light but went straight into the bathroom without taking off my shoes.

It was only then that I turned on a light.

I stood in front of the mirror, pulled up my sweater, my undershirt.

This heaviness, discomfort, I had never felt this way before, as if my breasts needed support. I would have to start wearing a bra—no, I couldn’t, nobody wore a bra unless they had to, only old ladies and housewives.

I looked the same as always, everything was the same as always, but nonetheless, something was different, and while I stood there in the cold glare of the bathroom light, with my sweater pulled up under my arms, I felt the other symptoms, too, those I knew would come, which I had already been afflicted with for a few days without really paying attention to them: fatigue, my mouth watering, the stirrings of nausea.

I stood in front of the mirror with the sweater, an apple-green wool sweater, pulled up under my arms. I held it up, my arms were two pointy angles in the mirror, like wings, and suddenly I knew that I was pregnant and there was such a lightness in me—my arms were wings, I could fly, but I didn’t know if I dared.

We met at my place that evening, I asked him to come. I wanted to be here, in my nondescript bedsit, not in his apartment.

He noticed that I was quiet, and I told him almost immediately.

“I think I’m pregnant.”

He was so thrilled that at first he couldn’t speak. Then he asked if I was sure.

“Sure?” I said. “How do you define sure?”

He laughed. He had to stand up, jumped up and down on the floor in front of me, then he hauled me up from the bed I was sitting on, hugged me so tightly that my feet were lifted off the floor, he carried me, but then he stopped himself.

“Sorry, I didn’t think about the one inside there.”

“If there is someone in there.”

“If? But don’t you know?”

“Yes, I think so. My period has always arrived like clockwork.”

“There’s someone in there.”

Then he placed his hand on my abdomen.

“Just a lump of cells,” I said.

“No. A child. Our child. Do you think it’s a boy or a girl?”

“I’m not thinking much of anything yet.”

“Signe!”

He laughed again—a loud, strange and very happy laughter. Then he leaned forward, kissed me and pulled me towards the bed.

Afterwards we lay side by side in silence. He stroked my forehead and cheeks.

“Signe. I think you should give her a call.”

I turned towards him. “Who?”

“You know who.”

“Now?”

“Daughters need their mothers. Especially when they become mothers themselves.”

“I’m not thinking about how I’m about to become a mother yet.”

“But you are.”

“It’s too early to think that.”

“Call her.”

“All I need is to be free of my childhood.”

I pressed my nose against his arm.

“Acting as if it doesn’t exist,” he said, “isn’t the same as being free of it.”

He gently twisted his arm free and tried to make eye contact with me.

“I’m not going to call,” I said.

“You grew up in the midst of a conflict but that doesn’t mean that it’s yours,” he said.

“When did you become a psychologist?”

“…I’m your boyfriend.”

“But you think I need to be in therapy.”

“I don’t know… maybe. What do you think?”

“I don’t have time for psychoanalysis.”

“Signe, I didn’t say that you should start therapy, just that you should call home—”

“Two times three hours a week, a monologue on a couch… I don’t have those hours. Or the money. Besides, I have more faith in a behaviorist approach. I am a rat. I have learned that contact with my mother produces frustration. Ergo: I stay away from her.”

“You aren’t a rat.”

“She’s a lever. When I press it, I get a shock. And I want you to stop being Skinner.”

“I’m not Skinner.”

“You want to put me in the laboratory again.”

I twisted away from him and rolled over onto my back to stare up at the ceiling. It was stained yellow from cigarette smoke and time.

“I should paint,” I said.

“What?”

“The ceiling.”

“Why?”

“Why does one paint a ceiling?”

“You’re changing the subject.”

“I’m done talking about it. I have been done with it for many years.”

“…Are you going to spend money on this shabby bedsit?”

“I’m sure the landlord will cover the cost.”

“But we aren’t going to live here, are we?”

“Why not? It’s cheap.”

He laughed. “And after a while it will be pretty crowded.”

“It’s still just a lump of cells.”

I twisted towards him again, caught myself in time… Stop it, Signe, you know what he wants and he loves you, why are you pushing like this, why do you keep insisting?

I laughed softly, to emphasize that it was a joke, and hugged him.

But he didn’t return the hug.

“I want you to call it something else,” was all he said.

“Fine.”

“Fine.”

“Sorry.”

“And call Iris.”

Iris, not your mother.

“I would rather lie on a couch six hours a week.”

“It’s cheaper to call home.”

“I don’t want anyone to know yet. Not her, not Daddy, not your parents.”

“But I want to tell people.”

“Not yet. Please. We don’t know yet how things will go.”

“Fine. We’ll wait. But you can still call her.”

“Maybe.”

“Think about it. I just want everything to be fine when the baby comes.”

“I’ll think about it.”

But I didn’t have a chance to call because a short time later we were summoned to Ringfjorden by Daddy. It was happening now.

The rooms in the little house by the wharf had formerly seemed so small; now it was as if they’d been expanded. There were people everywhere, loud conversations, a woman was cooking a vegetable stew in two enormous pots and the floors had been cleared to make room for the painting of signs and banners:

Daddy had let his beard grow out; it made him look younger, more like the many male arrivals surrounding him. He introduced me to all of them, spent the longest time on Lars, who was Daddy’s age, but had a longer beard and apparently a leading role in the protest. They talked and talked, all of them, especially Lars, especially Daddy, as quickly as only people from the capital can. Daddy was beaming with enthusiasm, for the struggle had only just begun and we had the most powerful tool of all. He talked about Gandhi, about non-violent methods, about the power of the Indian model, passive resistance, civil disobedience based on the religious concept ahimsa.

“To prevent injuries. Non-violence… that’s the only way one can be heard,” Daddy said. “And now, soon, the eyes of Europe will be turned towards Norway. Towards the Sister Falls, towards Eidesdalen.”

He pushed his glasses further up on his nose—they were round, not unlike Gandhi’s, not unlike Lars’s glasses. I could feel the warmth radiating off him and I wanted to throw myself into the work. I grabbed a paintbrush and got down on my knees. With a steady hand I began filling in the pencil lines forming the word “Eidesdalen,” using a bright-red oil paint with an acrid odor that filled the room and made me slightly dizzy, and perhaps it was not good for the baby, but I didn’t have time to think about that.

In the evening Sønstebø came; he and Magnus hugged each other stiffly, the way they used to, as if they didn’t know each other very well and at any rate not like father and son, before Daddy separated them with his torrent of words. More people were on the way from Oslo, he said, from Bergen, tomorrow the camp would be set up.

“We will win this fight! For the Sister Falls, for Eidesdalen.”

“Yes,” Sønstebø said. “Good.”

“And the people of Eidesdalen,” Daddy said. “Are they ready?”

“Yes,” Sønstebø said, “yes, they are.”

“Great,” Daddy said. “How many are coming?”

“A few,” Sønstebø said. “I don’t know… They have farms, all of them.”

And he didn’t say much more than that. I didn’t notice when he left, I was sitting with a student from Oslo. She was my own age and had, like me, quit her summer job to help out. I was moved when she told me that.

We slept on the floor at my father’s place, Magnus and I, side by side between other bodies; it was uncomfortable and safe.

The next morning we packed up the car. We were given Daddy’s old tent; he’d bought a new one. I had brought sleeping bags and a Primus with me from Bergen. Then we set out for the mountain.