That was it.
Well, not quite: above the point where the top road met the lower one, right by the tunnel, there were two large buildings, which had to be the school.
‘Håfjord!’ said the bus driver. I stuffed my headset into my pocket and walked up the aisle, he followed me down the steps and opened the door to the luggage compartment, I thanked him, he said no problem without a smile and clambered back up, whereupon the bus turned in the square and re-entered the tunnel.
With a suitcase in each hand and a seaman’s kitbag on my back, I first looked up, then down the road for the caretaker while drawing the fresh, salty air deep into my lungs.
A door in the house right opposite the bus stop opened. Out came a small man dressed in only a T-shirt and jogging pants. From the direction he was heading I could see this was my man.
Apart from a little wreath of hair around his ears, he was completely bald. His face was gentle, his features were pronounced, as happens when you are in your fifties, but the eyes behind the glasses were small and piercing, and it struck me as he approached that in a way they didn’t quite match the rest.
‘Knausgaard?´he said, proffering his hand but without looking me in the eye.
‘Yes,’ I said, and took it. Small and dry and paw-like. ‘And you must be Korneliussen?’
‘That’s right,’ he said with a smile, his arms down by his sides, taking in the view. ‘What do you reckon?’
‘About Håfjord?’ I asked.
‘Nice, isn’t it?’ he said.
‘Fantastic,’ I said.
He turned, looked up and pointed.
‘You’ll be living there,’ he said. ‘So we’ll be neighbours. I live just there, you see. Shall we go up and have a look?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Do you know if my things have arrived?’
He shook his head.
‘Not as far as I know,’ he said.
‘They’ll be here on Monday then,’ I said and set off up the road beside him.
‘You’ll have my youngest son at school, from what I’ve heard,’ he said. ‘Stig. He’s in the fourth class.’
‘Have you got many children?’ I said.
‘Four,’ he said. ‘Two live at home. Johannes and Stig. Tone, my daughter, and Ruben live in Tromsø.’
I scanned the village as we walked. Some people were standing outside what must have been a shop, where a couple of cars were also parked. And outside a snack bar stand on the top road there were a few people with bikes.
Far out in the fjord a boat was coming in.
Seagulls were screeching down by the harbour.
Otherwise all was still.
‘How many people live here actually?’ I said.
‘Two hundred and fifty or so,’ he said. ‘It depends on whether you include the kids who go to school.’
We stopped in front of a black 1970s timber house, by the porch.
‘Here it is,’ he said. ‘Step inside. The door should be open. But you might as well have the key straight away.’
I opened the door and went inside the hall, put down my suitcases and took the key he handed me. It smelled as houses do when they haven’t been inhabited for a while. A faint, vaguely outdoor, whiff of damp and mould.
I pushed a half-open door and went into the sitting room. The floor was fitted with an orange wall-to-wall carpet. A dark brown desk, a dark brown coffee table and a suite upholstered in brown and orange, also dark wood.Two large panoramic windows facing north.
‘This is great,’ I said.
‘The kitchen’s in there,’ he said, pointing to a door at the end of the tiny room. He turned. ‘And the bedroom’s in there.’
The wallpaper in the kitchen was a familiar 1970s pattern: gold, brown and white. There was a little table under the window. A fridge with a small freezer compartment at the top. A sink set in a short laminate worktop. The floor grey lino.
‘And, last of all, the bedroom,’ he said, standing in the doorway while I went in. The carpet on the floor was darker than the one in the sitting room, the wallpaper light and the room empty except for an enormously wide low bed made of the same wood as the other furniture. Teak or imitation teak.
‘Perfect!’ I said.
‘Have you got any bed linen with you?’
I shook my head. ‘It’s being sent.’
‘You can borrow some of ours if you like.’
‘That would be great,’ I said.
‘I’ll drop it off then,’ he said. ‘And if you’ve got any questions, anything at all, come down and see us. Visitors are welcome here!’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’
From the sitting-room window I watched him walking towards his house, which was perhaps twenty metres down the road from mine.
Mine!
Bloody hell, I had my own flat.
I walked to and fro inside, opened a few drawers and glanced into some cupboards until the caretaker returned carrying a pile of bed linen in his arms. After he had left I started unpacking the little I had brought with me: my clothes, a towel, the typewriter, some books and a wad of typing paper. I placed the desk beneath the sitting-room window, put the typewriter on top, moved the standard lamp, arranged the books on the windowsill, as well as a literary magazine, Vinduet, which I had bought in Oslo and decided I would subscribe to. Next to them I stacked the fifteen, maybe twenty, cassettes I had brought along, and beside the pile of paper on the table I laid the Walkman and the spare batteries I had for it.
When my writing alcove was finished I put my clothes in the bedroom wardrobes, shoved the empty cases onto the top shelf and stood in the centre of the room for a while, unsure what to do next.
I felt an urge to ring someone and tell them what it was like here, but there was no telephone. Should I go out perhaps and look for a phone box?
I was hungry as well.
What about the snack bar stand? Should I go over there?
There was nothing to do here anyway.
In front of the mirror in the little bathroom that led off the hall I put on my black beret. On the doorstep I stood for a few seconds looking down. In one sweeping gaze you could scan the whole village and everyone who lived in it. There was nowhere to hide, as it were. Walking down the road, the surface of which was gravel underneath tarmac, I felt utterly transparent.
Some teenage boys were hanging around outside the snack bar. Their conversation froze as I approached. I walked past without looking at them, went up the steps to the veranda and over to the serving hatch, which shone bright yellow in the wan late-summer evening light that seemed to hang over the landscape.The window was smeared with grease. A boy of around the same age as those behind me appeared at the hatch. A couple of long black hairs grew from his cheek. His eyes were brown, his hair was black.
‘Hamburger with salad, fries and a Coke,’ I said. Listened intently to hear if any of the mumbling behind was about me. But it wasn’t. I lit a cigarette and paced up and down the veranda while I waited. The boy lowered a landing-net-style receptacle full of thin potato sticks into the boiling fat. Slapped a hamburger down on the hotplate. Apart from the low sizzle of the meat and the by now excited voices behind me there was no sound. The houses on the island across the fjord were illuminated. The sky, which hung low there, higher by contrast above the mouth of the fjord, was a bluish-grey and rather heavy, though far from dark.
The silence was not oppressive; it was open.
But not to us, I thought for some reason. The silence had always been like this here, long before people existed and would remain so long after they had disappeared. Lying here in this mountain bowl, with the sea spread out before it.
Where did it end actually? America? Canada?
Yes, that had to be it. Newfoundland.
‘Here’s your burger,’ the boy said, placing a styrofoam tray containing a hamburger, a few strips of lettuce, a quarter of a tomato and a pile of chips on the shelf outside the serving hatch. I paid, grabbed the tray and turned to go.