“Brusa lives here, too?”
“No, he ended up leaving. A disagreement over language.” Leif dipped a wooden ladle into a bowl of water and poured it over the stones. A great wall of wet heat rose up and enveloped them.
“Ay,” said Charlene. Her head felt as if it were compressing.
Leif did not seem to notice her distress. “You see, here in Norway,” he said, “there are actually two languages, two different types of Norwegian — Nynorsk and Bokmål. To an outsider, the differences between them might seem minimal, but there have been years of turmoil and cultural warring over who should speak what, and which is the true language and which is not. It’s all a bit silly — I can say this to you now — but back then it mattered a great deal whether ‘I’ was jeg or eg. Somehow everything else depended upon this distinction. Did you say jeg? Or did you say eg? There could be no compromise.”
“So what did Brusa say? Jeg or eg?” she asked, trying to breathe normally.
“Without boring you with the specifics, as a group we chose to speak Nynorsk, which was the language invented for the people, not the elite, who all spoke Bokmål. Bokmål is really a kind of bastardized Danish. And Brusa didn’t like this decision, even though we took a vote and it was all done completely democratically. He thought Nynorsk was one man’s fantasy. So he left. To tell you the truth, I don’t think he ever wanted to stay. He was a different breed than I was. He wanted to be a writer. Some people are meant to do things, and some people are meant to write about these things from a great distance.”
The heat was beginning to get to her. She ran a finger across a sweat-soaked eyebrow.
“Brusa seems to admire you a lot,” she said. “He was the one who recommended we come here.”
“Yes, well, from afar, one can admire one’s nemesis.”
“Nemesis?”
“Perhaps this is a bad translation. In Norwegian we say konkurrent. And this means ‘opponent,’ but it also means ‘someone who is a part of you.’”
“Your English is very good.”
“Of course,” he said. “I’m Norwegian.”
She suddenly had the urge to ask Leif about Per Røed-Larsen and why he might not have wanted them to come, but then she would have had to reveal to Kermin that she had kept the telegram from him. She would have to acknowledge that the telegram had been real.
Instead she said: “So you started a school up here?”
“Not quite,” Leif said. He dipped the ladle into the water again. Charlene wanted to tell him not to do it, but he was already dousing the rocks. The air grew thick with vapor. Charlene’s head started to swim. “At first, when the war was still on, it was a resistance movement. But not with weapons. We were interested in issues of atomics, theater, the avant-garde. You know, we were still young then. We thought we could change everything by staging a little happening about nuclear fission and cultural decimation on the tundra. There was no audience. No one even knew we existed. But I’ve come to learn that this isn’t how you win a war. And it isn’t what the people needed. At the end of the war, this whole area was completely destroyed by the Nazis. Can you imagine? First there was a town, and then there was nothing. Just ashes, bent metal, these terrible memories. For a while there, that’s all there was up here. Terrible, terrible memories. We are lucky memories die with those who have them.”
The heat was causing Charlene’s vision to collapse in on itself.
“I’m sorry. I can’t do it anymore. I have to get out,” she said. “I’m going to check on Radar.”
“Yes, it takes some getting used to,” he said. “But it will cure you of almost anything. I hardly notice the heat anymore.”
To her horror, she found Radar asleep amid a swarm of mosquitoes. How stupid she had been to leave him unattended! She swatted angrily at the insects. Attacking her poor, helpless child — how dare they? The mosquitoes responded to her attacks by gleefully turning their attention to her.
“I’m sorry,” Leif said, emerging from the sauna pink and steaming. “I should’ve warned you about the myggs. They can be nasty this time of year. They have a short period to do their damage, and they take their job very seriously. A reindeer can lose two liters of blood per day.”
They flip-flopped back to the main lodge. Now, suddenly, all Charlene could think about were the swarms of mosquitoes dive-bombing their heads. She protectively enshrouded Radar with a towel as they passed a group of men filming what looked like a collection of headless, green-skinned dolls.
From beneath his towel, Radar pointed to the dolls. “Halfway oop or down de stairs,” he said.
“Yes. That’s like Robin’s song, isn’t it?” Charlene sang: “Halfway down the stairs is a stair where I sit. There isn’t any stair quite like it.”
“It isn’t really anywhere, it’s somewhere else instead.” Leif completed the verse. “God bless the Muppets, eh? Jim Henson’s a bit of a deity around here.”
“Where dere heads go?” Radar asked.
“An excellent question, my friend. One that we’re trying to figure out as we speak,” Leif said. “Do you know where we put them?”
“Nooo,” Radar said shyly.
Leif waved at the film crew, but the men were too embroiled in an animated argument to respond. One of them flicked at a green doll, and its body parts flew in all directions. Then the man pulled at an invisible string and the parts returned, the doll whole again. This demonstration calmed the group; they all laughed and then looked up and waved back at Leif.
Charlene noticed a tall, towheaded boy standing among the men.
“Who’s the kid?” she asked.
“Oh, that’s Lars. The first and only child to be born in the Bjørnens Hule. Fortunately, he has caught the bug from his father.”
“Is that you?”
Leif laughed. “No, no. I’m childless, partnerless. My work is my life. My family are these men here. I barely have time to breathe. His father’s the famous Jens Røed-Larsen.”
“Røed-Larsen?” said Charlene.
“That’s right.”
“Any relation to Per Røed-Larsen?” She butchered the rolling ø.
“You know Per?” Leif’s face clouded over.
“No, no,” Charlene said. “I’ve only. . I’ve only read his work.”
“And?”
“I’m not sure what to think.”
“Per’s an interesting character. A bit of a groupie, one must say, though you can’t blame him. Jens had a family before he came here. Per is Jens’s other son. And then Jens abandoned him for us, and Per has never quite gotten over it.”
“Abandoned him?”
“Per stayed in Oslo with his mother. And now he has become obsessed with us. He’s writing our history, you see. Writing it before we’ve even managed to make history.”
“So then Lars. .” She stared at the boy holding one of the green dolls.
“Is from a different woman, yes. Siri. They met here. You’ll probably see her around.”
“How scandalous,” said Charlene.
Leif shrugged. “Strange things happen this far north. I cannot control what others do or say. I can only look after myself.”
In the main lodge, they drank black tea and sampled some local Lapland sautéed reindeer meat that smelled to Charlene of old leather jacket and a particular hairspray that she recognized from somewhere deep in her memory. This was undercut by a lingering aroma of ancient peat moss, finished with a touch of lard that had recently turned. She forced herself to try the meat out of politesse. It was delicious. Salty and rich and sweet all at once. It tasted of wet tundra, of pumping leg muscles, of crystallized sweat on the hide.