The house I rented lay on the end of a narrow spit of land, separated from the other houses by a shallow bay, which in turn was sheltered from the sea by a low rampart of a mountain. From there the ground rose in a grass-covered slope to the island’s highest point, where the lighthouse stood. Although not a single bush or tree grew there, only grass and moss, it appeared fertile compared with the ground on the other side of the lighthouse, where the rock, stretching seaward for several hundred yards after forming a steep descent down a cliff-like escarpment, was so low-lying that the sea flooded it during storms, and made it look more like a skerry than anything: bare, barren, bereft of vegetation.
Right up until the sixties more than forty people lived out here. Now only four remained, and because the purely practical side of life on the island was so complicated, without a shop, post office, doctor’s office, school, or refuse collection, it could be only for sentimental reasons that they stayed on, and that placed them high in my estimation, especially as sentimentality, which is usually considered to be a weak emotion, displayed itself in them in the form of unwavering resolution.
Or perhaps this appreciation was no more than a type of self-defense, as my own grounds for moving out here were at least indirectly sentimentaclass="underline" from my very earliest childhood I’d heard tell of the Utøy Islands, my great-grandfather had grown up here, and despite not knowing his name or what he looked like, it was enough to cause a vague sense of belonging to grow in me, and for some reason this was what I clung to when events the previous year had forced me to break with the life I’d been living. I’d done something terrible, and the terribleness had become a part of me; somber and shady it always lurked in my consciousness, every glance I met, every conversation I had, even if it was only with a supermarket cashier, led my thoughts back to what I’d done and aroused the same feelings each time: baseness, sordidness, blackness. Intellectually I could both understand and explain what I’d done, but in this the power of thought was too insignificant, as it is in all decisive questions, and thrown back on my emotions, I was cast into a hopelessness so pervasive that my days were spent doing nothing but enduring. I slept, I ate, I watched television. Each time a car slowed down outside, I turned off the light and stood by the window to see if they were coming to me, each time the phone rang, it was as if fear broke out within me, in a matter of seconds it had filled me like a vessel, and only an enormous effort of will steeled me to lift the receiver and answer, even though I knew how small the chances were of them finding me there.
This went on for several months. When I finally did manage to get out and rent a house on Sandholmen, as it was called, it was September. Up the fjord the boat following the landscape had begun to yellow, the evenings came early, and when I walked down the gangplank with my two suitcases onto the quay of the tiny fishing hamlet where the landlord was to meet me, the lights from the houses on the islands all around shone like small stars in the thick darkness.
I put the suitcases down and lit a cigarette, let my eyes wander over the few figures on the quay, and decided it must be the eldest of them who was waiting for me. At all events he glanced in my direction several times. I met his gaze and raised my eyebrows expectantly. It was enough to bring him over.
“Hello,” I said. “Are you the house owner?”
“That’s right,” he said. “Egil Leirvik.”
We shook hands. Behind us the thump of the boat’s engines ceased, and the light in the saloon was turned off.
“My boat’s just over here,” he said. “It’s late, so we’d better get going.”
He picked up one of the suitcases and began to walk across the quay. I turned to the boat, which was now in complete darkness apart from the green, phosphorescing lights of the instrument panel in the wheelhouse, chucked my cigarette into the sea between the hull and the quay, took a deep breath and felt how the tang of diesel, seawater, and fog sent a surge of delight through my breast.
A few minutes later I was aboard his fishing boat leaning my elbow on the cabin roof, staring out at the many channels that intersected the small islands. Occasionally we passed a house, spaces like great aquariums of light in the darkness, and I had brief glimpses of how people lived, their lamps, flowerpots, leather sofas, and television screens. Below each house was a jetty and a boathouse and a couple of boats of different sizes, which tugged at their mooring ropes when the waves from our wake reached the land. The old man at my side stood as if he were alone, occasionally turning the metal wheel attached to the wall in front of him, always with his eyes fixed straight ahead, and even though his silence struck me as unnatural, there was something in his bearing that told me it wasn’t necessary to say anything.
On both sides of the inlet the ground was gradually becoming lower and sharper. When we passed the last headland and got out into open water, the boat began to pitch. I noticed several times that his gaze turned to me, but each time, like an animal, he made sure he didn’t make direct eye contact, and I knew that my presence worried him.
I wiped my hand across the cabin roof and gathered the droplets into a little pool under my fingers.
“My grandfather helped to build the chapel out here,” I said. “And the quayside.”
He gave me the quickest of glances.
“Aha,” he said.
“That must have been sometime toward the end of the twenties,” I said. “His father was a builder. Many of the houses they built are still standing.”
He said nothing to this.
“But then he turned to fishing when his father died,” I went on. “Out here, too. Herring.”
Not a line of his features betrayed what he was thinking. He stood there impregnable with one hand on the wheel and the other on the cabin roof and his gaze fixed on what was ahead, where the sea lay heavy beneath the black sky. Each time the bows took a wave badly the water came down with a splash on the cabin roof, and a light shower of sea spray filled the air around us. A few hundred yards ahead a light blinked regularly in the darkness. Then a low island appeared through the blackness, and the old man raised his hand.
“Sandholmen’s behind that,” he said.
“Is it?” I said.
He altered course, and the next wave lifted the propeller out of the water, and the engine noise suddenly altered. It was as if it were barking like a dog, I thought. Shortly after, we glided past the headland and entered a calm bay, faintly illuminated by the reflection of the lights on the quayside. Nearest us were five boathouses side by side, on the slope behind were a few houses, threaded by a narrow gravel road that continued into the darkness along the bay, where it was regularly lit up by a shaft of light from the blinking lighthouse on top of the island, and this also revealed the undulating terrain of the hillside: rocks, moss, grass, and the occasional clump of heather.
A small dog was barking furiously on the edge of the quay as we came sailing in. It was tied up, and kept straining forward the whole time.
He moored just beneath it, turned off the engine, and motioned me to go ashore. I glanced up at the frenzied animal.