Johan Harstad Read online

  “Good morning,” said Havstein.

  “Hi.”

  “Look around,” he said.

  I looked around, turned three hundred and sixty degrees. An advanced picture postcard.

  “Eysturoy,” said Havstein.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Do you want something? Coffee perhaps? I feel like a coffee.”

  I didn’t feel like anything.

  “Okay.”

  “Come on then.”

  “Okay.”

  I followed after him into the gas station, through the shop, and in through a door at the very back, where we came to a rundown truck stop café, brown plastic chairs, Formica tables, curtains from the seventies, dirty from cigarette smoke and road dust. We were the only ones in the room, apart from a middle-aged woman in a red apron, who stood waiting behind the counter as we came in, she and Havstein nodded and I was put in a chair, a cup of coffee put in my hands.

  “There you go.”

  “Thanks.”

  We sat there quietly for a long time, saying nothing. Havstein leaned back in his chair.

  “Does it help?” he said finally. “The coffee?”

  “Yes.” I answered. “A bit.”

  Silence again. The coffee machine puttered in the background. Sun in at the window.

  “Well?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Well, here you are.”

  “Yes. Here I am. It’s very nice here.”

  I was polite. I played along. Felt like an idiot.

  “We’re fond of this place.”

  “I can believe it.”

  “So?”

  “So?”

  Havstein dug a packet of cigarettes out, lit one.

  “So, why did I pick you up last night?”

  The room went quiet. We looked at each other, we looked past each other, we looked out of the windows, there were birds everywhere, apart from in the room, the fullness of summer was about to explode out there. In here, time had come to a halt, had taken a seat.

  “I don’t know,” I answered quietly.

  Havstein said nothing, drank his coffee, I heard the liquid trickle down his throat, down his neck, heard him swallow.

  “On holiday, are you?” asked Havstein.

  “Kind of,” I answered.

  “We were supposed to give a concert here on Friday.”

  “Today’s Thursday.”

  “I see.”

  “So, you’re a musician?”

  “No, I … I’m a gardener.”

  “A gardener? That’s good.”

  Somebody should have taken a Polaroid of this moment, should have caught it on tape, as we sat here, Havstein, whom I didn’t know, whose name I hardly remembered, and myself, sitting on a plastic chair opposite him, and I wanted to start talking, to tell him everything, to let it foam out over the table, to chance it. But I didn’t. I was silent. Drank my coffee. Watched the birds. They’d built a nest just outside one of the windows, beneath the eaves.

  “And the others?” asked Havstein. “Your friends?”

  “I don’t know, some place or other in Tórshavn, I think.”

  “Maybe you should call them. There’s a phone in the hallway,” he pointed toward the door.

  “I don’t know what I’d say.”

  “The truth.”

  “Which is?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I see.”

  “But you don’t want to call.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “There isn’t a lot you do know, is there?”

  “No.”

  The woman behind the counter disappeared out into the petrol station, closing the door gently after her. Havstein leaned closer into the table.

  “I’m happy to drive you somewhere if you like. If you know where you’re going, or where you want to go. I could still drive you into Tórshavn. How about it? It’s no problem, you know.” Then he hesitated for a moment, before adding: “If not, I really should be heading back home. I’m actually on my way home, I’m going north. To Gjógv. So, what do you say? Shall I drive you to the harbor?”

  I looked down. Rubbed the fingers of my right hand across the surface of the table. For every second I sat here, the sea rose, nanometer upon nanometer. I didn’t answer. I stared into the table.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I’m not sure I want to go back.”

  Then I started to talk. I started telling him everything that had happened over the last weeks, what I remembered of it. I told him how Helle had left me on Kjeragbolten, and how the boulder still hadn’t come loose, about the job that disappeared because of the shopping malls, I talked about Mother and Father, about the Christmas ball that year, I talked about not wanting to be seen, about wanting to be one of the many, and I think I talked a bit about space. Havstein sat quietly and listened, drank coffee, nodded once in a while, but mostly sat quietly. I’d opened all the valves, and gave him the long version, I don’t know why, perhaps I didn’t want to be alone anymore, perhaps the pressure had grown too great and I did it to stop my head from exploding over the Formica and curtains. I just talked, a stream of words, a maelstrom. And then I sat quietly back.

  Havstein lit another cigarette. A couple of truck drivers walked into the café, rowdy, they laughed and called out for the waitress, who puttered in through the door at the back and poured them coffee without asking if that was what they wanted. They sat down with her at a table at the other end of the room and talked excitedly at each other, I understood only fragments of their conversation, but it was about trivial things, who’d done this or that, or said that or the other, what they had to deliver and what they had to pick up, and the waitress smoked like a chimney, enveloping them in smoke and told them most of what had happened since they’d been there last, who’d gotten married, who’d split up and gone away, who’d had children and who hadn’t, there’d been some births and some deaths, jobs had changed hands, and it was only a week since they had been there last.

  “Okay,” said Havstein. I looked across the table, I could see he was thinking, and he said: “You can come with me, if you want.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Waited for the continuation. It came.

  “I … we, live up in Gjógv, a little settlement to the North, myself and three other people, Palli, Anna, and Ennen. Lovely people, all of them. We live in an old filleting factory up there, converted, more or less. You’re welcome to stay a few days, get yourself together. If you want.”

  “A collective?”

  “Not quite,” said Havstein, and smiled. “I run an institution. Kind of a halfway house.”

  “An institution?”

  “Yes.”

  Pause. I have been demoted to a psychiatric case. Suddenly I am Jørn’s brother, the eternal patient.

  “It’s not a hospital,” he continued. “I’m not taking you in because I think you need treatment. For now. I’d already have driven you to the airport if I did. Sent you home.”

  “I don’t want to go to the airport,” I said, looking down into my coffee.

  “Exactly.” Havstein started to explain: “But you’re right to think the people who live up there have spent time in that sort of place before. It’s somewhere for people who no longer need to be locked in an institution either here or in Denmark, but who don’t feel quite ready to live alone. For various reasons. Let’s just say when you’ve lived in an institution for a long time, over several years, you get a little too used to it. And then it can be good to live in a similar environment. Or put it this way; everybody wants somebody to look after them. So that’s what I do. I try to make sure they’re okay. Of course anybody who lives up there, or has lived up there, is free to leave. And once in a while they’ve done just that, they’ve gone off again. That’s really not an issue.”

  The other table had grown quiet, their ears grew bigger, sliding down to the floor and scuttling over
to our table.

  “But in theory,” continued Havstein, “they can equally well stay as long as they want, given that they have a right to a place. If they’re not with me, they can demand a place in a normal institution, until it’s proved they no longer need one. Which is more or less impossible. Besides, lots of people who have been in and out of these places don’t have proper qualifications, they’ve missed out on so much schooling, so it’s almost impossible for them to get themselves a job. But if I call a fish farm, or the port authorities in Tórshavn for example, and promise that the state will pay half the salary, it smooths the way. You understand? So this is the situation. I live together with three ex-patients, rather than them living with me. Two of them have jobs outside town, and the last works in the Factory. We run a workshop producing knickknacks, tourist items, that’s what the state demands, naturally they require some form of input from our side for being allowed to run things like this. Palli’s lived there for almost ten years and has been there longest. Ennen came five years ago and Anna closer to six. Right now they’re the only ones living there, though there’s space for four more. There’s another, similar place outside Klaksvík, so we represent an alternative, as long as we last. They’re lovely people. And I think they’d be happy for a visit. At the moment there aren’t more than fifty-four people living in all of Gjógv, so a new face is generally very welcome.”

  “Generally?”

  “It’ll be fine.”

  Dr. Havstein. I felt institutionalized. Tablets at fixed times. Slit arteries on the bathroom tiles. Eyes that spy along miles of white corridors. I didn’t know how to answer. I wanted somebody to look after me. I wanted somebody to take my hand, to lead me home. I wanted somebody to tell me they were happy they’d found me at last.

  “It’ll work out,” he said.

  “Will it?”

  “Yes,” he said. “It always does.”

  I never said yes. Neither did I say no. We simply drank up our coffee in silence, got up almost simultaneously, and walked out through the gas station. Statoil. Norwegian oil. Full tank. I had nothing better to do. Couldn’t be bothered to ring Jørn, search Tórshavn and find him, go out with him again in the evening, sit together with them after the concert and meet all the ghosts from the last month, talk about Helle. I couldn’t face setting up the sound equipment.

  The sound! Shit! Shit! Shit!

  I’d promised to be their sound technician, and now what was I doing? I’d disappeared on them, flown the coop, and maybe they were looking for me. Had they called home? Had they called Mother and Father? I hoped not. Couldn’t bear to think of it, I was so tired, so much had gone wrong, practically nothing had worked out.

  We stood outside the gas station and Havstein looked at the price of a disposable grill. He caught sight of my hand.

  “Have you hurt yourself?” he asked.

  I looked down at my hand. It didn’t look great. As though I’d dragged it through a nightmare. It had swollen up along the knuckles, dark blue skin and congealed blood.

  “I don’t remember,” I said, and Havstein nodded toward a tap mounted on the wall near by, I went over and turned it on, let the ice-cold water run over my wounded hand, it stung and I had to clench my teeth as I pulled out a bit of paper from the dispenser and wiped away most of the blood, whatever wasn’t stuck to the wound. Pulled out more paper, wrapped it round my hand. Then I went obediently and sat in the car, I just wanted to sleep, I just wanted to float away, hover over the town, without worries, like a child in the backseat at night, on the way home from a Christmas outing or a trip to the mountains, fist closed on bags of cookies and orange soda sloshing in a bottle, teeth coated with fur that would have to be brushed off when we got home, before somebody put me to bed, tucked the covers under my feet so they wouldn’t get cold, stroked my hair and said there was so much time, how lucky I was to be just a child, there were oceans of time, it was important to take the time you needed.

  And that’s all I remember of that first drive to Gjógv. I remember how calm I felt and the silence we shared as we drove along, as though the sound had been turned off, and Havstein drove so carefully along the road. We sailed up the steep hairpin curves from Funningur and the view opened up over the fjords and mountains below, up toward Slættaratin∂ur, and I was a miniscule person being dragged across summer-green meadows, farther and farther upward, the windshield of the car was dirty, making the view hazy, before Havstein switched the cleaning fluid on, probably at about the time we passed the top of the last hill, and the windows cleared, an early afternoon sun sliced through scratches in the glass and I had to screw up my eyes, and I saw the little village that spread out below along the shoreline, hundreds of feet down the dry, worn asphalt road, squeezed between two mountains, and if I’d seen a lot of green so far, that was nothing compared to this, the fields spread imperceptibly out into the landscape and rose to become massive hills you could almost stroll over, a completely rounded landscape with no irregularities or jutting knolls, opening itself up in all directions, this, I thought, was like the moon, dressed in grass, this was what it must have been like to walk on the moon for the first time, an untouched wasteland. And I was an explorer of virgin territories, I knew nothing, was nobody, and I think I was grateful. Grateful that somebody had found me, and that the atmosphere wasn’t a vacuum, was filled with oxygen, as I opened the car door minutes later and stood before the huge two-story, concrete Factory, on Gjógv’s village square, with its view straight into masses of nothing at all.

  I was put next to a big, oblong table of solid wood, in the middle of an enormous kitchen, nearly thirty feet long, and Havstein stood with his back to me, rummaging in the fridge, a droning noise filled the room, dust in the air, sun through the windows, and I began to dry out, my skin contracted, as though I’d been gently tumble-dried and had come to rest, the sound of birds outside, chirrup, chirrup. Havstein made the coffee, Havstein poured orange juice into a glass, Havstein came over and sat opposite me, my hands rested on the table, quite still, in a bundle before me.

  Havstein got up, went through the room, opened a cupboard, took out a piece of paper, a pencil, came back and sat down. He put the paper on the table in front of me, laid the pencil carefully on the paper, pushed both over to me.

  “I need a telephone number,” he said.

  “For who?”

  “Anyone.”

  I didn’t know what to write, the situation was absurd, I ought to get out of here, get away, I should pull myself together, put on my shoes, my jacket, I should get a taxi back into town, back to the band, I should do what I’d promised, what was expected of me. I had no business being here, I didn’t belong, had no purpose here, I didn’t know who Havstein was, who the others were, I had to get away, get down to town. I had to get back home to Norway. Now.

  I wrote the number for Jørn’s cell phone on the piece of paper. And under it, his name. Pushed the piece of paper back to Havstein. He got up, took the paper with him and left the room, went up the stairs, they creaked and I heard his footsteps on the floor above, a door being opened, his voice, but not everything he said. He talked quietly, slowly, but firmly. I heard him say Jørn a couple of times and my name. I heard him say something or other about Tórshavn, then it went quiet again. Shortly afterward he came back down the stairs, into the kitchen.

  “I’m taking a trip into Tórshavn,” he said. “I’m going to meet this Jørn fellow for you. There’s nothing to worry about.”

  Flat batteries. No coverage. The far side of the moon.

  All I said was: “Oh well.”

  Havstein showed me into the next room, which was when it first became clear this was no ordinary house, everything was too big here, concrete walls, and I was in a factory, converted, an old factory, made habitable, homey. I stood in the living room, a gigantic room, almost a warehouse, covered with carpets, with paintings on the wall, those old lamps Mother would have thrown out at the beginning of the eighties, a TV at one end. Bi
g windows, a view over the sea, sofas of a kind I hadn’t seen for twenty years. I was told how the TV channels were set up, and Havstein put out some pastries, orange juice, and a Danish newspaper. He was going to Tórshavn, and would return this evening.

  “Don’t go anywhere,” he said.

  “Where would I go?”

  “Exactly.”

  He disappears. I sit stock still on the sofa, staring out the window, looking out over the water, the sea, waiting for it to crash through the windowpanes at any moment, for glass to rain over me, for the room to fill, the seas to lift me out of the house. But nothing happens, everything is calm outside, a blue blanket lies over the world and my face warms in the light.

  Even anxiety has its boredom threshold, and after an hour I couldn’t keep watch over the view any longer; I gave the sea a break, turned my gaze inward to the room, a big room, about a thousand square feet, with feet upon feet under the roof, and somewhere far above a person had succeeded in securing some lamps, great, blue lamps, that would light the room in yellow when it got dark. The furniture and the walls were all brown and light blue, seventies colors, and there were carpets, the whole factory was furnished like a house, a HOME. There were three sofas in here, in a vague semi-circle, they looked tiny in relation to the room’s size, almost laughable, and against a wall, the west wall, were three hefty chairs, wingbacks of the good, old-fashioned sort Grandfather had kept at home, toward the end he’d sat in his red wingback chair all day, reading or staring into space, only the latter in his last days, and I remember we visited one Tuesday in May, it was raining and Grandfather was sitting in his chair, sitting with the binoculars in his hand, staring out into thin air. We sat on his bed, Mother and I, but he didn’t notice us, not even when Mother said his name several times, or when she put out a bowl of Twist chocolates on the table in front of him, he liked Twist a lot, he used to collect the gold wrappings, collect them in a box under his bed. He didn’t see us, and suddenly he lifted the binoculars he’d put next to his chair, pointed them toward the wall on the other side of the room, adjusted the lenses and looked at the picture of Grandmother through them. Then he laid them back in his lap, only to pick them up again moments later to look through them at Grandmother again, bringing her right up close, as though she was standing right before him, as though she was the only one in the room. We sat there for an hour. And Grandfather spent the entire time focusing his binoculars, looking, adjusting, looking. The entire time. I went back a month later. Grandfather was sitting as impassively as before in his chair, looking at Grandmother. In exactly the same position. The next time I went back, it was to help Father carry the chair out to the moving van, and to drive it to the nursing home where Grandfather would be staying. But it wasn’t as good there, the walls were too close to each other, Grandfather couldn’t focus, Grandmother grew blurred at the edges, as did Grandfather, in just a few weeks, before finally erasing himself completely and vanishing. Once more, we carried the chair out to the moving van, put it in our hallway at home, and there it stayed. And now, the same chairs were here in this living room, in this factory. Chairs made at a time when furniture had to last. I considered sitting in one of them for a moment, but didn’t. Instead I got up, stood in the center of the room and looked out the windows, the sound of the birds and the wind outside quieted, merged into the humming of the refrigerator out in the kitchen.