“You always did spend a long time in that cellar, even as a child,” she said, when she saw me standing there with the jar. “Bring that through to the dining room.”
I put the jar on a placemat. Hjørdis, still standing, put one hand on the glass lid and the other around the wooden handle on the wire fastening. She pulled, then pulled again more firmly. “You have to seal them tight,” she said. She had told me when I was a child that sometimes the rubber lining between lid and jar started a chemical reaction with the fruit and fused to the glass. She was having none of that. She put her strong back into it, and the lid came free with an audible pop. I shut my eyes and breathed. Lazy late summer sun, warm grass, the cold, bitter scent of the glacier half a mile away. Hjørdis ladled a good pile into a metal bowl and took it back into the kitchen. Over the sound of the food mixer, I said to Julia, “These are molte. Called cloudberries in English. Families guard the location of their favourite patch as closely as national secrets. More closely.” I dipped one out with a spoon. It lay, still and golden and perfectly formed in its pool of liquid. I held it out. “This is how your hair smells.”
“Ah-ah,” said Tante Hjørdis from the doorway, “don’t eat that. The only way to taste cloudberries for the first time is in Angel’s Stew.” She put the bowl of sweetened whipped cream and berries on the table and plucked the spoon from my hand. “Aud, dish that out while I go get the coffee, as Julia seems to have forgotten to bring it with her.”
We sat. I dished the delicious mixture into three small bowls. “The last time Tante Hjørdis brought out her special molte was when my cousin Uta brought her fiancé to lunch with the family and then announced she had already married him that morning. She brought out a jar, too, when my mother married my father, though she told me once she should have known he would leave her and regretted ever letting him taste them.”
Julia’s hand was cool and soft on mine. “She will never have cause to regret this.” A statement of fact. She will never have cause to regret this. The sun will rise in the east and set in the west. Two and two is four.
We took E16 north. Julia drove. “At least they drive on the same side of the road we do, even if we do have to keep to this snail pace.”
“You can go up to eighty a little farther on, and past that, ninety.”
“What’s that in real money?”
“Fifty and fifty-six miles an hour.”
Pensive silence. “How far is it?”
“About two hundred and fifty kilometers. But the last fifty are on very small roads.”
“The road gets smaller?”
As she got used to the car, and traffic thinned, she relaxed. “So, now I’ve eaten Tante Hjørdis’s cloudberries.”
“Yes.”
“She’s pretty smart.”
“When I was little, I used to believe she knew what I was thinking.”
“That’s just guilt. I used to think that about my mother whenever I’d done something wrong.” The city was behind us now and we began to gain altitude. The speedometer needle inched forward. She looked at me sideways. “When we get back to Atlanta, I’ll have to introduce you properly to my mother.”
“Properly?”
“You’ve met her, you know. Twice.”
Sitting in Julia’s office, feeling like a child in a friend’s house, waiting for them to come out and play….
“Annie,” I said. “Annie Miclasz…” She nodded. “I wondered why you never called her Annie. Always ‘Mrs. Miclasz.’ Did you know she asked me if I was dating?”
“No! Did she?”
“More or less. Told me carefully how you liked your coffee. Just in case I needed to know, I suppose. Watch the road, please. So, what’s it like working with your mother?”
“Good, usually. She’s been working for me for about four years. She used to be an office manager with GE but when she remarried six—no, god, it’s more like ten years ago now—she didn’t have to work. But she got bored, so when I left Boston and moved back to Atlanta to start my business, I offered her a job. It was more to prod her into getting a life, you know. I never dreamed she’d actually say yes and work for me.”
“She’s very good at her job.”
“Do I hear the word ‘formidable’ lurking in the background?”
“Maybe.”
“Well, you charmed her socks off.”
“It was quite deliberate.” I put my hand on her thigh. Muscle bunched and relaxed as she speeded up to pass an ancient Volvo then slowed again to eighty kph. We passed a sign for Hønefoss. “The road is going to fork in a kilometer or so. Highway 7 on the left, 16 on the right. Take the right.”
I tried the radio. There was a lot of jazz, of course, two classical stations, and a Norden pop station pumping out thin, metallic stuff like recarbonated generic cola. Then I found Radio Norway. They were playing a folk tune I remembered from my early childhood, with simple words and handheld percussion. It was the first time I’d heard it sung by adult voices. I sang along.
“What’s it about?”
“A troll who lives under a bridge.” I translated as I sang. Julia laughed at the troll’s stupidity.
Now that we were past the fork in the highway, Julia’s interpretation of the speed limit was liberal. When we drove the twenty miles along the vast lake of Sperillen, I turned the radio off. Unlike a fjord, it was not sheltered by the steep plunge of mountains, and its gray-green waters were choppy. So different from the artificially flooded valley that had formed Lake Lanier just north of Atlanta—where during dry summers the stumps of trees and drowned homes occasionally ripped the bottom out of pleasure boats driven too fast by their too-young, too-stupid owners who saw a water as a surface, a water road, unaware of depths and currents and the life that dwelt there.
North of Sperillen, we started to climb. The river on our right, the Begna, began to tumble and show white here and there.
Julia glanced from the road to the river. “Does anything live in there?”
“Trolls. Trolls live everywhere in this country. There are homes here where if you say, ‘Faen tar deg’—‘The devil take you’—or ‘Fy faen’—which is ‘Shoo, devil!’—you won’t be invited again, nor will your friends. Words associated with the devil are trollskap, trollmagic. They open the boundary between this world and magic, and no good will come of it. These days, city people will laugh if you talk about trollmagic—but only if it’s during the day and it’s summer. Away from the city, they don’t laugh at all. When you see the fjells and the fjords, you’ll understand. This country’s bones and flesh are made of rock and its blood is the ice-cold water of glacier melt. The world is a dark place, and three of the four seasons are winter: autumn winter, high winter, and spring winter. The summer, with its green trees, lush grass, flowers and berries, is a very thin skin over the realities. During mørketiden, when candlelight flickers on the walls and half the country hasn’t seen the sun for a month, trolls walk the streets and grin at sleepers in their dreams.”
“Tell me a troll story.”
“The Billy Goats Gruff is a troll story.”
“Tell me another one.”
I considered. “When I was eight, I had tonsillitis. I had a fever that came and went and I didn’t sleep well. The line between reality and dream was strange and wavery. One night, when I felt as though I had been awake for years and my throat hurt so much I couldn’t swallow, my mother came and sat on my bed in the dark. She stroked my head. ‘A thousand years ago,’ she said, ‘in Oppland there was a family, a hardworking man called Tors and his strong-minded wife, Astrid, and their sandy-haired daughters Kari and Lisbet, better off than most….’”