The Sunlit Night (11 page)

Haldor and Sigbjørn taunted us eagerly. When Sigbjørn came out from the smithy at museum closing, covered in smoke and iron residue, he looked at us, covered in yellow paint, and called us sticks of butter. Haldor liked to remind me that there were no barns in Manhattan. He asked me if I was homesick, and I told him about my parents moving out of our home. He asked me if I was lonely, and introduced me to Frida, the museum’s Icelandic sous-chef, and Kurt, the museum’s German chef. Kurt’s girlfriend, Agnes, had come with him for the summer, and had been hired to tend the museum’s stables. Haldor didn’t introduce me to Agnes, because she terrified him.

Agnes had the body of a fourteen-year-old, the face of a forty-year-old, and the ferocity of a wolverine—if I rode in the truck with her, on a lunch break or in the evening, she screamed for me to unbuckle my seat belt. Why a seat belt, she screamed, was I scared? She was under five feet tall. She was the only person at the Viking Museum who could tame an enraged Icelandic pony. I could see her some days driving between the museum and the stables in her little gray Volkswagen, hollering along to death metal with her windows down, her pearl earrings slamming one at a time into her neck.

Every morning Kurt prepared breakfast for the staff and for visitors. Afterward, he prepared one individual meal, on the museum’s only pink plate—a gift from the Princess Mette-Marit upon her visit five years earlier—and carried it to Agnes. He lived for her, and I rooted for him. If Agnes was near him, he was picking the pony hairs out of her sweaters. If she was off working, he was writing messages to her over the tops of sausages, in thin lines of mustard. He’d bring them to her, one in each hand—
liebe
in the left,
dich
in the right—for their lunch.

Nils and I slept less and less, and started painting the inaccessible places. I climbed tall ladders to yellow the rafters; Nils lay with his ear in mud to yellow the foundation.

The world was perpetually visible, so I looked at it. Conditioned by hours in the Yellow Room, I saw the landscape in colorblock. The midnight sun came in shades of pink. The fjords rushed up onto white-sand beaches, and the sand made the water Bermuda-green. The houses were always red. They appeared in clusters, villages, wherever there lay flat land. Mountains rose steeply behind each village—menaces and guardians. Each red house was a lighthouse, marking the boundary between one terrain and another, preventing crashes, somehow, providing solace. Nils told me, “There are no dangerous animals here,
bare flott
,” which meant either “only nice ones” or “only ticks.”

The sky often split into two opposing weathers: blue over the mountains, where the many peaks had ripped the clouds open, and white over the water, where the clouds collected again, blanketing the fjord. At night, out the colony windows, silent machines passed through crops, and in the morning, great white plastic-wrapped bundles appeared, preserving I didn’t know what until I didn’t know when.

Even at midsummer, snow remained on the highest peaks. The mountains were writing something with those high ridges; there was surely calligraphy there. Where the mountains ended, a line of cursive ran across the otherwise blank sky, four thousand meters up, where it could be read by everyone. People who’d lived in Lofoten all their lives had surely translated those scripts, I imagined, at crucial moments, when they needed to be told.

One triumphant evening, Nils and I bought tickets to a screening of Harry Potter at the Leknes movie house. Nils didn’t know anything about Harry Potter. When I tried to give him a basic introduction, he didn’t understand the word
wizard
, but after he looked it up in the dictionary and found that it meant “trollman,” he was excited.

Dead fish hung by their tails from wooden racks, mouths open, all along the side of the road. Nils said they were dried cod, for the stockfish export—Lofoten’s once-great industry. The fishermen were late in collecting them this year. As the weeks passed, the fish dwindled in number, until only the bare racks remained. Nils was pleased that there would be no dangling heads when the inspectors came—with all those sharp teeth taken out of the sky, he said, the barn would have less visual competition.

The lights stayed off in the colony, and when the sun rose or fell to tree-level, perching briefly in the branches, it looked like a bird’s nest in flames.

I set up an easel near the window where the ox most often appeared. Painting the animal at night, from a distance, was a relief after days spent with my nose against splintering walls. When it rained, the sky reflected itself in the ox’s wet horns, and the horns turned cloud-gray, aging the beast considerably.

Nils finished the barn’s exterior walls. Our sun on the hill stood irrefutable, and we began to apply details to the surfaces—thin shapes drawn in white-pink, barely visible, but making the monochrome shimmer into motion.

At the end of each day’s work, Nils wanted to drink box wine. The government controlled all alcohol sales in the country, and he bought the boxes in bulk from a state-owned outlet in Stamsund. At the upstairs kitchen table, he handed me full glasses, and I shared my brown cheese with him. We read
Lofotposten
, a thin local newspaper that included photographs of every child whose birthday it was that day. He’d take out a pen and circle grammatical forms for me, using the simplest articles as examples.

RAMBO, KITTEN, RESCUES OTHER KITTEN, ON A FARM NEAR TANGSTAD

A kitten / the kitten / this kitten / that kitten

En kattunge / kattungen / denne kattungen / den kattungen

I learned a great deal of Norwegian this way. When the sky darkened slightly, we got in the car to chase the midnight sun. The roads were visited nightly by arctic foxes, little things, and lined by construction machines. We’d stop to examine abandoned backhoes whose digging claws rested on the ground, mouths open. I crawled inside each claw and sat bunched up in the corner, while Nils took notes on the machine’s industrial yellow.

My work on the fourth interior wall progressed until it was nearly indistinguishable from Nils’s original three. We would soon be ready for inspection, and indeed the men were due in less than a week. Haldor and Sigbjørn became nervous, and kinder. An approved KORO installation would mean much-desired traffic for the museum. And they knew what it would mean to Nils—at least, they could imagine what rejection would mean to Nils.

It was the Thursday before the government’s Sunday visit, and Nils and I were driving from Leknes up to the barn. There had been a storm overnight—we had woken to find the radish fields beside the colony flooded, and the ox gone. Now the sun had recovered and spread through the washed air, glinting off the road and the roofs of passing cars, making us squint. I’d never seen such strong light. Nils was terrified, imagining the exterior wall damage. I was dazed, watching bluebells shoot past in the side shrubs, when a black line bisected the pale world.

A boy was walking up the road’s shoulder. His back was to us, and he wore black clothes from neck to toe. He had the darkest hair I’d seen on these blond islands. He walked slowly, and quickly fell away behind our car. I rolled down my window, stuck my head out, and looked back at him. His head was down, and curly hair fell over his face. He looked no older than eighteen.

I shouted, “Need a ride?”

He looked up for a second, but I couldn’t hear if he spoke.

Nils grunted for me to sit up straight. He rolled up my window from the control panel on his door. We didn’t have time for rides, he said. The barn had come into view, and immediately we saw what had happened: the top coat of paint, which hadn’t been completely dry before the start of the downpour, now formed a bleary film over the surface of the wood, threatening to drip uncontrollably.

We spent the day holding paper towels up to the barn walls. Nils suggested we slam the towel once, as if crushing a bug, and then not move until the paper had saturated. The goal was to absorb the excess moisture without smudging the wet paint. Sigbjørn helped us. Haldor’s hands were enormous, and Nils worried they’d make more mess. By early evening we’d soaked up all the dripping but stripped a good deal of the color. A new coat wouldn’t dry by Sunday. As it stood now, the barn looked decades old and severely faded. Nils went into the smithy to dry his hands by the coals and think. I sat in the barn, listening to his Schubert. When he returned, we began to add thin layers to tiny areas, blowing on what we’d painted. We added only some patchy brightness over the course of the next ten hours.

Leaving the museum for the night, I saw a light shining in one of the guest rooms. The head I saw in shadow, racing around the room, was too high to be Agnes’s, and too slight to be Haldor’s. June had ended, and I felt a change coming—the KORO officers were on their way, maybe this was the first of them.

•    •    •

In the morning, I was hungry and the sun was back to the top of the sky. Nils had left a note under my door that said he was doing some detailed repairs he’d rather do alone, and that I should get a pancake. I had been hearing about a pancake stand. It was straight up the mountain from the artist colony, the REMA 1000 cashiers had told me. I put on a dress and started walking.

After nearly a mile of climbing with nothing in sight, I began to suspect that there never had been any pancake stand. I kept on, despite feeling hopelessly duped by the whole pancake story. My beacon came in the form of a shabby roadside sign that read
PANNEKAKE
and listed hours of operation. I turned off the road and walked down a short driveway toward a gigantic house.

Following the signs inside, I entered a room full of tables. It was the largest restaurant I had ever seen. The dining room was a square expanse with windows on every side, framing the ubiquitous mountains and fjords and
geitrams
. Nobody was there, nobody at all. I went up to the counter, read the laminated menu, and waited awhile before a woman appeared. She flicked the lights on over the dining tables. I asked for a pancake with blueberries, bananas, and chocolate sauce. She took my kroner and said, “Next.”

The boy in black stood behind me. He stepped up to the counter and ordered a pancake. The woman asked if he wanted any toppings. There was a long pause. Then he said no.

I stared at him, trying to take in the details I’d missed from the car. I couldn’t believe I’d gotten a second chance: here he was, not lost to the road, no windows to roll up between us. As he paid, I studied the way his glasses (black, like his clothes) rested on his nose, partially obstructed by his unstoppable hair. The register’s cash drawer slammed shut and the boy turned away. I watched him as he walked toward the far window. He stood up tall and straight, and rested one hand on the back of a chair. He seemed to fill the room.

The way he looked at the fjords out the window reminded me of the way I did—it was a foreigner’s awe. Even his
no
to the cashier had betrayed an accent of some kind, and my basic loneliness, though I had come to accept and even enjoy it, reached out toward his.

The waitress disappeared into the kitchen.

I didn’t dare walk any closer to him, so I found myself shouting from a distance again: “Are you from around here?”

He continued to look out the window.

Given that there were only two of us, I couldn’t have been speaking to anyone else, but I took a step in his direction and tried again.

“Er du Norsk?”
I said.

When he finally turned my way, revealing an expression of intense weariness and irritation, he mustered the word “What?” and sat down in a chair, his back to me. No, he wasn’t Norsk.

My pancake arrived. I took it from the waitress’s hands and found a fork and a place to sit—I chose the table farthest from the boy, and sat with my back to his back. I saw the waitress bring out his plate. Looking down, to keep from looking at him, I poked at the pancake with my fork. It was thin, dense, and elastic. It lay like a bedsheet under the chocolate sauce. When I heard the boy begin to eat, I ate. Each bite was sweet, slippery. We chewed in the silence of the great room, making just a little noise between the two of us, until we’d both finished and the deeper silence resumed. Perhaps the boy hadn’t liked being identified as an outsider. I felt I could amend things by sympathizing. The waitress circled around us, gathering first my empty plate and then his. I rehearsed a line: I’m not from here either. Nice to see another stranger in town.

When I stood up to walk to his table, he’d gone.

•    •    •

Just as well, because it took ages to find a bus stop, and ages until a bus came, and by the time I entered the Yellow Room, Nils was beside himself. I found him sitting on the floor of the barn, clutching the boom box to his stomach. Haldor was standing over him. I suspected something terrible had happened—Haldor never entered the Yellow Room.

“There you are,” Haldor said to me. “If I could trouble both of you a minute.” Nils popped open the CD deck, placed one finger on his Schubert CD, and closed the lid on his finger, again and again.

“Going to need a favor,” Haldor said.

“Inspection in two days,” Nils said from the floor. “No favors.”

“Inspection in two days, fine, but, funeral tomorrow,” Haldor said.

Nils stood up.

“Who’s dead?” he asked, so mercilessly direct and Nils-like that I nearly laughed.