It’s a long time ago now, but once I lived in a cabin in Norway. It was Olav who mentioned the place to me, at the start of our relationship. He told me that it’d been the summer cottage of the Norwegian author Knut Terje Aasbakken. Now it served as a writer’s retreat, and a narrow lane led up to it from the village Olav was from. As a child, he’d spy on the writers. They seemed so secretive, he said, and dived into me.
After our relationship began to get complicated, a friend suggested I go away somewhere. So it was that I remembered Aasbakken’s cabin. The one on a mountainside, in a forest.
I applied, got the cabin, and left at the beginning of September. A woman from the general store drove me from the village. She talked about the area as we crept up the mountain in her little Golf. On the way, we passed the community center. She said it was customary for whoever was in the cabin to give a reading in the center. I gazed down on the river in the valley, and then she dropped me off with a key to the woodshed.
Evenings, I’d take a chair out in front of the cabin and try to stay there till I was shaking from the cold. In the mornings, I read, wrote zip. Late in the day I’d take a walk. And then one day I found myself at a standstill in front of the community-center notice board. “bunads,” the heading read, and under it was the name of Olav’s mother. She was called Halldis and taught the locals to sew their own folk costumes.
The days lasted an eternity, and at night the cold moved in. I walked around Aasbakken’s house and picked paint from the cabinet doors. Out in the forest, the mushrooms poked up, and it was impossible to escape the reading event in the community center. One evening in October, I positioned myself against a large loom-woven tapestry. During the coffee break, a woman with short dark hair and a face like an Inuit’s came over. She said, “I think you’ve met my son. He lives in Copenhagen.” I must have stared. “I’ve got an article he’s written about you,” she said.
In that way, I became sort of friends with Olav’s mother, Halldis. We agreed to go on some walks together. Later we also went out riding on her Fjord horses. She talked about the landscape, the kinds of tracks animals left, and how the winter we were entering would feel. We never spoke of Olav. It was my impression that she was a strong person, but at regular intervals she’d worry about whether I’d write about her.
One day in early November, we took the horses into the forest. When we came to a clearing, I said that the vista would make for a good opening scene. She said, “Yes, that’s what I’m so afraid of.”
I thought of Olav, his face and hers, and that might’ve been the day she invited me home for coffee. In any case, I remember that we let the horses loose in the pasture and sat in the kitchen. There were pictures of Olav and his wife on the bulletin board, and I’m sure that I gave Halldis a hug when I left.
Despite the awkwardness in our relationship, we kept seeing each other. One day when we were in the kitchen, Olav’s father came in. He sat down at the table reluctantly, as we probably didn’t want to be disturbed. Halldis found him a coffee cup, and of course he was disturbing us. I recall him saying that he didn’t care for well-educated people. He was a carpenter, Olav’s father. Said that the hand’s labor was important and pointed to the table. I praised the table, and then I had to go and see his workshop.
We walked out to it, all three, and what I remember most clearly was that he’d stuck up a photo of a naked woman with a thumbtack. He’d pinned her up over the door to the room where Halldis worked on her costumes. That meant that Halldis had to walk under the naked woman anytime she went in and did her sewing. You never know about other people’s relationships, but I thought to myself that it was their marriage Halldis didn’t want me to write about. It seemed complicated to me, though I think it seemed healthy to her.
Every day she passed beneath the naked woman who hung over the door with her legs slightly spread, and she’d hung there so long that Halldis no longer noticed her. She was no doubt thinking of her son in Copenhagen. His wife was beautiful and industrious. He interviewed famous authors. And now one of them was living in Aasbakken’s cabin.
The cabin had no phone, so I ended up getting a letter. I have it still. He was angry, Olav. “I wouldn’t have thought it of you,” he wrote.
In that sense, he wasn’t like his mother. I can recall another time we rode out together. It was a clear fall morning. On the outward part of our route, we rode past a lake. To me, Norwegian lakes feel bottomless, the landscape unknowable. Such uncertainty must leave its mark on the locals, I thought. Later, we went in among the trees, where it smelled of fungus and rot.
As we rode, we talked about how the forest looked lovely in its decay. I told her she resembled an Inuit, and that Olav must have got his features from her. She smiled at that, and there were birds of prey aloft, and moss upon the massive trunks of spruce, and I drank in everything I saw.
Then one day, when we were drinking coffee in the kitchen and her husband came in, wanting attention, she actually began to tell a story. She looked at Olav’s father, asked him, “Do I dare to tell this?” and he said, “Yes, just tell it.”
At first I thought she asked him whether she should tell the story because it was his, or because he decided which stories could be told in their relationship. In any case, she began telling it, though at times she’d put a hand over her mouth. “No, I don’t know if I dare,” she said, glancing from her husband down into her cup.
The story concerned her cousin who had been married to a bad man.
It wasn’t until the man was dead that the cousin discovered just how bad he’d been. It came out from the estate and certain letters found with it. “But you mustn’t write this story,” she said. She shouldn’t be worried, I said. “Your cousin’s husband wasn’t so out of the ordinary.” She asked, did I know such men? I said that now and then I ran into one. She asked if I wrote about them. “Sometimes,” I said.
I have the impression that during the time we spent together she managed to read my books. She mentioned one in particular. It had become winter, we were in the forest, and the surroundings creaked with snow and ice. She’d read the book but didn’t quite know what to think of it. She found the indecisiveness of the female protagonist especially hard to bear.
We crawled over an old stone wall. The sun was shining; my eyes hurt from all the whiteness. Recently, I saw an old photo from the gold-mining town of Yellowknife, near the Arctic Circle. It was a picture of an Inuit and then the sun, and the sun wasn’t alone. It had company. It’s an optical phenomenon—the sun’s light is refracted by ice crystals and two bright points appear, one on either side. Under the picture it said that the sun had been joined by its rivals, the ones that in the language of the prairie were called sun dogs.
“What exactly are you afraid I’m going to write about?” I asked her. “I don’t know,” she said.
She stood there and the light went right through her, that’s the way I remember it.
How the sun caused her physical form to cease. On the broad white expanse she cast a sharp shadow and I stood opposite her, not alone.
“Halldis?” I said.
She tugged at her mittens, nodded