I pushed the food aside. “We should leave room. She said we can’t be there for an hour. She’s making koldt bord.”
“Does that mean what it sounds like it means?”
I nodded. “She always makes the same things, and always the same amount—whether she expects a horde or just two people.”
While Julia oversaw the transfer of our luggage into the car, I checked us out. I had the absurd urge to lean confidentially towards the desk clerk and tell him what a marvellous day it was; to tip everyone obscenely; to sing. I restrained myself.
The sun was hidden behind low grey cloud, but the world was still a bright and exciting place. The Audi was about two years old but its four-wheel drive did not seem to have been much abused, though the sedate drive to Ulleval Hageby at the prescribed fifty kilometers per hour was not an exacting test. Julia’s hand rested on my thigh as I headed into the suburb.
We parked just down the street. Julia climbed out of the car and looked up into the trees. “Is it my imagination or have the leaves grown in the last three days?”
They were bigger. Julia was beautiful beneath them.
I knocked. Tante Hjørdis opened the door and hugged me. Just as she was stepping back she stopped and held me out at arm’s length to study for a while. Then she let go and shook hands vigorously with Julia. She gave Julia the same extra moment’s scrutiny, then opened the door wide, and said over her shoulder as she headed for the kitchen, “The sauce needs watching.” Inside, the table groaned with food, and the scent of fish and sauce drifted through from the kitchen. We followed it to find Tante Hjørdis stirring a tiny saucepan with a wooden spoon that had been old before I was born, adding flour, pouring cream. In another pan, round white balls bobbed in boiling water.
“Fiskeboller,” Hjørdis said to Julia. “Pass me the cream, please.” Then, in Norwegian, “Aud, you can unload the tray in the dining room and bring it out.” I did. “Coffee,” she said, which is coffee in any language. I filled the kettle and put it on the modern halogen stove to heat.
Julia was now stirring the sauce while Hjørdis fished the fish balls out of the water with a slotted spoon. “Norwegians make good spouses,” she said out of nowhere. “Tidy, sensible, efficient. If you plan and budget and work hard—but not too hard the way you Americans do—life is steady and pleasant. There! We’re ready to eat.”
We started with the spekesild. Julia seemed to enjoy it. She told Tante Hjørdis her idea about a children’s enclave at the Olsen Glass sculpture garden. Hjørdis put her fork down.
“Now, if he and his family were proper Norwegians, they wouldn’t be making so much profit that they had to spend it on gardens. Money, everything is money these days. Oat flour costs twice as much today as it did two years ago. Twice. And do you know how much these Greenland prawns”—gesture to the shrimp lying abjectly in their mayonnaise—“cost? And work! Work, work, work. I call your mother, Aud, and I say, ‘When do you come to visit?’ and she says, ‘Oh, Hjørdis, there’s no time for a visit,’ as though it’s me who is being foolish. No time for family. Imagine that. But at least you have come to visit. And you have brought Julia.”
We ate salad and thinly shaved reindeer meat. Julia asked Hjørdis what she did with her day when she wasn’t preparing delicious lunches for guests. Hjørdis snorted. “I work with young people—and not so young—who should know better. Those who…” She looked to me for the English phrase.
“Drug addicts.”
Julia looked only mildly surprised, but her right leg, lying close against mine under the table, jerked.
“I help with the…” Another look.
“Needle-exchange programme,” I supplied.
“Yes, and facts about AIDS. Though they know more than I do, I’m sure. Personal knowledge.” For a moment, her ruddy face stilled but then, with native pragmatism, she shook the sympathy away. “And I represent them, no”—this to me, as I opened my mouth again—“I advocate on their behalf with social services and so on. A lot of work, though less in summer. All this is since I retired, of course. Before, I used to work in a chemist…a pharmacist’s.”
“She was the pharmacist at Jernbanetorgets Apotek.”
“Yes. It stayed open all night. I didn’t have to work at night, of course, I could have asked one of the younger people, but it is only fair for everyone to take their turn sometimes. That’s when I met all the young people, so thin, so pale. So sad….” Again, that head shake. “Come along. The fiskeboller will be getting cold.”
We ate the fish balls. Soft and milky, so unlike anything else.
“You used to get that look on your face when you were only as tall as this table,” Hjørdis said, smiling. She turned to Julia. “She and her mother used to come here every Saturday for my koldt bord, and every holiday.” Sometimes my father came, too, but not often. “And Aud, who was sometimes not a well-behaved child, would try to steal some fiskeboller before we’d even eaten our salads. Eat, eat. I made enough for two helpings. But save some room, there is still the cheese, and dessert.”
We started on the cheese. Julia and I sat so close our arms rubbed together when we reached for the crackers or the nuts. Her leg was still against mine. I retold the story of the Nigerian heroin ring I’d heard from Taeko.
“Now, we need berries for the dessert. Aud”—I stood; it had always been my job, from the time I was seven or so and strong enough to carry up the big glass jars from the cellar—“a jar of…” she looked from me to Julia and back again, “the molte, I think. Yes, the special molte,” she repeated with a certain satisfaction.
I hadn’t been in Tante Hjørdis’s cellar for years. As a child it had been a wonderland: past the laundry with stone troughs, which I imagined might have been used during the war to cut up captured Nazis; past the mysterious sheeted shapes in the storage room; to the cavern of treasures, a long room, narrow and dry, lined with row after row of shelves, each bending under the weight of pickled gherkins and canned tomatoes, of sauces and preserved berries, that glowed with muted colour—red and gold and emerald—like precious jewels under the dust of centuries. I ran my hand along the shelves, remembering being eight, fourteen, nineteen…. It was different. It took me a moment to work out that the difference was illumination: the single, swinging bare bulb of my childhood had been replaced by two halogen floor lights. It only made the colours richer.
The last four jars of special molte were on the top shelf. I’d heard the story of their picking: during the war, when there was no sugar to be had, she had picked them and put them whole into two-litre jars with fresh water only, sealed them, and put them in a cold stream to chill. I expected to have to stand on tiptoe to reach the big jars, but that was a child’s memory; the top shelf barely came to my chin. I lifted one down, held it to the light. Fifty years old. They looked like golden raspberries. Perhaps Hjørdis exaggerated for effect and they were indeed preserved in sugar or some kind of syrup, or perhaps there was just a kind of magic in her cellar, where time and dreams stood still. I would not have been surprised to find myself three feet tall again, with both front teeth missing.
When I got back upstairs, Julia and Hjørdis were in the kitchen; Julia poured coffee into cups, Hjørdis whipped the cream.