She did not tell him about the telegram. In truth, she did not know what to make of it herself. So she decided to act as if she had never received it. She hid the telegram in the utility drawer. But soon the drawer felt as though it could no longer safely contain such a document, so she hid the telegram beneath a floorboard in their bedroom that she had pried loose with a hammer. Inside this hole she also put a binder of newspaper articles she had collected about Radar’s birth. And the clipped ad for the IFAC flavorist position that she had stashed away in the recipe booklet. When she could not think of anything more to put down there, she hammered the floorboard back into place and covered it with a rug from another room.
7
Kirkenes turned out to be about four hundred kilometers north of the Arctic Circle, the last town in Norway before the Russian border. On the flight from New York to Oslo, they watched an overexposed screening of Days of Heaven, in which a man murders his boss in a steel mill and then flees with his wife and daughter to the wheat fields of the Texas Panhandle, only to murder his boss again. At least this is what Kermin thought that the movie was about. There was no sound in his stethoscope-like headset, and he was at a bad angle to watch the dreamy images of the wheat fields burning. There was something uncanny about flying over an ocean while watching wheat fields burn. He looked out the window, trying to catch a glimpse of the ocean that he had once escaped across in the hull of a boat. It was hard to imagine that the small layer of blue far beneath them was the same sea that had borne him to the New World.
Maybe sea and land were not altogether different, he thought, touching the cold glass of the airplane window. Only a small matter of density.
Inside the clean and empty Oslo airport, they blearily drank a coffee and thumbed through a rack of chunky Telemark sweaters before catching a toothpaste-colored prop plane up to Kirkenes. People in line to board the plane stared openly at Radar, until Charlene glared at them, and then they stared at everything but Radar.
The airplane sputtered and bounced against the hidden pockets of turbulence that lay sleeping above the Kjölen Mountains. Radar threw up twice. The Norwegian stewardess smiled as she took the wet airsick bag from Charlene.
“Poor boy,” she said. “He is so far away from home, yes?”
They came down in a sea of fog. The airplane descended and descended, and suddenly there was the tiny airstrip. The sun glowing dimly from somewhere behind that suspended scrim of moisture. They collected their bags directly from the plane. Under a light breeze, the air smelled sweetly of wet moss. The handful of other passengers made their way into cars and a small bus headed for town, leaving them alone inside the one-room terminal but for a janitor mopping at a floor that looked as if it had already been cleaned.
“They are meeting us here?” Kermin asked.
“That’s what they said.”
“There’s no one here.”
“I can see that, Kerm. Maybe they got the time wrong.”
But as she stared out at the fog rolling in waves across the runway, she knew that no one was coming to meet them. There was no such thing as Kirkenesferda. There were no scientists and artists experimenting with electricity up here. There was only tundra and fog and an invisible sun that never set.
“This is Santa Claus house?” she heard Radar say.
“No,” said Kermin. “Santa Claus does not live here.”
“Jesus Christ,” she whispered to her reflection. Her shoulders slumped. They had come this far for nothing.
There was nobody at the ticketing booth. Charlene walked up to the janitor swabbing at the pristine floor.
“Do you know when the next flight to Oslo leaves?” she asked loudly.
To her surprise, he spoke perfect English. “Five hours, ma’am. If the weather doesn’t get worse.” He looked at Kermin and Radar, sitting on a bench. “Didn’t enjoy your stay?”
“No, no,” she said, embarrassed. “It’s beautiful. There’s just been a mistake. A mix-up. We weren’t supposed to come.”
He nodded. “Same thing happened to me. I’m Swedish. I came here for a woman, but the woman left. I ended up staying. Twenty-five years.”
“Is there someplace we can wait?” she asked.
He looked around the room, as if to indicate that this was the extent of the known universe.
It was at this point that a man in a yellow jumpsuit came dashing into the terminal. He appeared quite frantic, but when he saw them, his expression dissolved into relief.
“I’m so sorry I’m late,” he said, coming up, breathless. “There was a little problem at the office.”
The man was hairless — completely bald, no eyebrows. Charlene guessed he was in his late sixties, though his light blue eyes remained young and bright.
“You’re Leif?” said Charlene. He was wearing knee-high mucking boots over his yellow jumpsuit, giving the impression that he had just skydived into a manure field.
“That’s not Santa,” said Radar, and then hid his face in Kermin’s jacket. “Santa has a beard.”
“No, I’m sorry to report that I’m not Santa. He was otherwise engaged.” The man smiled, extending his hand to Charlene. “Leif Christian-Holtsmark.”
“We weren’t sure if. .” she trailed off.
“If I existed? I do. I very much do. My apologies,” said Leif, turning. “And this must be the famous Radar. How old are we, little man?”
Radar burrowed into Kermin’s jacket.
“How old are you, Radar?” said Charlene.
“Dis many,” said Radar, holding up a hand that showed a varying number of fingers, anywhere from two to five.
“He’s four.” Charlene apologized. “He knows he’s four, but he seems to insist on presenting a range of choices.”
“It’s understandable. One can never be sure,” Leif said, and laughed. “But four years old! Now, that is something. Well, Radar, velkommen til Finnmark. You are now on top of the world.”
He drove them in his battered Land Rover out into a light boreal forest of pine and downy birch. The road hugged the bank of a fjord and then turned onto a small dirt track that wound around several kettle-hole lakes thick with summer algae. The trees began to thin, and they found themselves on a long, flat plain.
“We are right on the edge of the tree line,” Lars explained. “To the north is tundra, to the south is the great taiga, which stretches two thousand kilometers into Russia.”
The fog burned off. Charlene could see that the ground was marked by splashes of bright lime-colored lichen. It was unlike any landscape she had ever seen before.
“There,” said Leif. He pointed up to a raised kame terrace. A herd of bone-white reindeer were tracking their progress. Leif stopped the car and rolled down his window. He was silent.
“Do you hear it?” he said finally.
They listened.
“What?” Charlene asked.
“The reindeer,” said Leif. “They have their own frequency. About fifty-eight hertz. Listen.”
They listened. After a while, Charlene could hear it, or at least she could imagine hearing it. Something like a moan that had not quite escaped the lips, but rendered simultaneously by hundreds of animals. The sum of a sound never fully finished.
“Santa’s reindeer!” Radar yelled.
As if in response, several of the reindeer began to run over the terrace, and soon the whole herd, sensing some unspoken signal, was thundering away as one.
Radar looked heartbroken.
“Don’t worry, honey,” said Charlene. “It wasn’t you. They had someplace to go.”