She was not really talking to me.
“Now look at this,” she said, in front of a big abstract canvas of purples and greens. The nameplate read WEIDEMANN. “Even this is about nature.” I wondered how she could tell but I kept my doubts to myself.
More paintings.
“Full circle,” she said. “Neo-Romanticism. This painter may as well have been a Romantic who watched television.” We went back to the Dahl that had so interested her. “It reminds me of Hjørdis.”
Mountainside, cloaked in fir, falling straight into water as smooth and reflective as glass. You knew, looking at it, that it was a mile deep. Lush spring flowers, laughing sky. But changeable, and everywhere bones of rock. Good country in summer, but dangerous if approached without caution and, in winter, utterly isolated from the next valley by mountains suddenly cloaked in ice and mist. Troll country.
“I’m beginning to understand.” She reached out as if to touch the painting, then drew back. “So…untrammeled. Uncompromising. This is how you all like to see yourselves, isn’t it? The consensus of the national psyche: clear, uncomplicated, immovable as granite.” She looked at me with the same concentration she had directed at the painting. I felt her gaze on my bones, the cant of my eyebrows; weighing the line of jaw and length of neck; noting colour and shadow. “But these paintings don’t tell your story, do they, Aud? These paintings don’t have bad dreams.”
We stood there for an age, facing one another. A light above one of the paintings began to hum.
“These paintings show sunshine,” I said. “They show spring and summer, and when there is snow it glitters white and bright.” I held out my left hand. She gave me her right. It was cool; I held it carefully. Neither of us said anything as I led her from the room, down a corridor, through a door.
“This is the Munch Room.”
Self-portraits of Munch bleeding from gunshot wounds. Paintings of the sick and dying. And Skrik, with its sky swirling lower and lower, a long bridge whose planks aren’t quite clear because there’s not enough light to see, to make out anything clearly, but that doesn’t matter because the world is grey and you don’t care; wavy lines of nightmare; the face of one so utterly alone they scream to shake the world.
“This is how it is during mørketiden, the murky time, the lengthening nights of winter. The sky is so low you feel as though you could reach up and touch it, but even if you could, you couldn’t, because everything is so grey you can’t tell where the ground ends and the sky begins. There is wind, but it can’t get through the unreality, the knowledge that it will get darker and darker, day after day. You go to bed at night and pray that tomorrow the cloud will clear and the sun will shine, just for a little while, but you wake up and it’s dark, and it’s raining, and it’s only the first of December.”
Her hand stirred in mine, then she had my hand in both of hers, was lifting it to her cheek for a moment, letting it go. Neither of us said anything.
A sudden gaggle of noisy children clustered in the doorway while their teacher marshalled them into pairs. They held hands and giggled and pointed at the paintings. The Munch gallery was once again just a room in a museum.
“Ask them whether they would prefer an abstract or figurative sculpture park,” I said to Julia in an undertone. She huffed with quiet laughter. The teacher gave us an apologetic look as we left. We smiled at her with sympathy.
Outside, the students in their bright colours no longer seemed so gaudy, and I found my fatigue was gone.
The meeting with Borlaug went well but they were still mired in details at one o’clock. They agreed to a forty-five-minute break for lunch. We wandered down Dronningensgate. She stopped outside Café Tenerife. “Do you suppose it would be the act of an Ugly American to eat Spanish food in a Norwegian city?”
“Have you ever been to Spain?”
“No.”
“Then think of it as a two-for-one experience.”
We ordered a mountain of food.
“There’s still so much to be decided,” Julia said as she divided the tapas onto two plates, neat as a cat. We both ate ravenously. I was careful not to let my leg touch hers under the table.
“Do you need me this afternoon?”
She tilted her head, considered. “No. I think he’s past the shy stage. He’ll ask if he doesn’t understand.”
I walked her back to the building—she swung the briefcase, the way an adolescent, caught between girlhood and womanhood, might—and stopped outside the plate-glass entrance.
“I’ll return at four. Please wait in the lobby, even if you finish early. If you’re ready very early, call the hotel. I’ll check for messages.”
The concierge at the Bristol had bulging, oyster eyes and an encyclopedic knowledge of business in the city. I told him what I wanted and in ten minutes had a confirmation number for a four-wheel drive Audi and a cellular phone, to be delivered tomorrow at eleven-thirty. I tipped him and asked him to tell the front desk that I might be expecting messages but would be calling in for them from outside the hotel.
The harbour smelled of sunshine on cold water, the wet wood and diesel fume of boats, and the shrimp the crews cooked and sold from the deck in little white paper bags, heads and shells still intact. When the breeze changed direction it brought the scents of warm city stone, flowers bursting into bloom in the hills and the wildness of spring. I walked faster, drawing the heady mix deep into my lungs.
Two buskers with guitar and electric violin played some folk tune with fierce underpinnings, careless of the fact that no one seemed to be listening. I stood there awhile, letting the music prod at me and work its way under my skin. They nodded when I tossed some coins in the hat, and launched straight into an idiosyncratic reworking of Grieg.
Away from the harbour, the streets turned to neoclassical nineteenth century buildings and glass and steel towers built in the last two decades. Fire had done as much damage to Oslo over the years as Sherman did in Atlanta. I wandered, paying no particular attention, just absorbing the city through the soles of my shoes and the taste on my tongue.
I am used to being alone, used to autonomy, the freedom to stop when and where I want, be as I please. I could walk into a shop, like this one—chat earnestly to the girl behind the counter about a friend’s birthday, and which were the best chocolates she possessed, how much was that gorget; pay for them; ask for them to be wrapped—and the other customers would remain untouched by my presence, I by theirs. No one knew me; there was no one to compare my behaviour in the shop with my behaviour at other times. I could be fluid and responsible only to myself.
In my imagination, Julia snorted: Very Norwegian!
The image made me smile as I angled north and east. Half a mile or so from the Olsen Glass building the pavement was torn up and cordoned off. Below street level, a handful of people in cut-offs and work boots sweated away earnestly with pickaxes and shovels. They were young, and all cut from the same mould: plump tan muscles, fair hair, soft cheeks. Archaeology students. What looked like rotting foundations were partly exposed. One man was using a trowel to slice away clay, rasher by rasher, from what looked like a support post. He stretched, saw me watching, and nodded.
“What is it?” I called down.
“Remnants of the old city. Fifteenth century, we think.”
It would be good to jump down into the pit, roll up my sleeves and swing a pickaxe on a spring day.
“This was a large building—look at the size of this post—perhaps with some kind of ritual or civic function.”