“You can see both ends,” she said.
“There are fairies as well as trolls in this country.”
We got back in the car. I rolled my window down. “It reminds me of the Yorkshire Moors,” I said as I drove. “They stretch like this for miles. Every mile or so, in the wilder parts, there are these waist-high stone walls that form a circle with a section cut out. When I was eight years old, I thought they were windbreaks the farmers had built for their poor sheep. I had visions of little friendly groups of the woolly creatures huddling behind the walls while the world turned white with snow, and the nice farmers driving along in their wagons and unloading hay and turnips and other sheep treats. When I was a teenager, I found out they were hides for pheasant hunters. Beaters walk the moor in a line, whacking at the brambles and heather while His Lordship and his weekend friends crouched behind the wall with their matched Purdeys and silver hip flasks, waiting for the birds to burst out in a rush of frantically beating brown and cream feathers. In spring and summer it’s green and dotted with tiny wildflowers. Autumn turns it into a haze of purple heather. Then the farmers burn it off and it turns into a blasted heath, desolate and destroyed. It stays that way all autumn and into the first hard frost of winter. Then there’s the wonderful, softening white blanket, and by spring it all starts up again. It can be hard to believe that anything could come to grief in such a lovely place, but every year hikers die there. They forget that the world can hurt them. They wear silly little English T-shirts and street shoes and think a bar of chocolate is all the emergency equipment they need. Norwegians don’t die out here, because they understand. They know about trolls.”
“Do you think hobbits are the tame English version?”
The sun was bright now, and the air seemed thinner. We were the only car on the road. As Julia talked, I watched her. I could not imagine driving this road without her in my car. I could not imagine going back to Atlanta without her turning restlessly in the plane seat next to mine. I could not imagine how things would have been if I hadn’t turned that corner in Inman Park.
At Tyinkrysset I turned off the highway and five kilometers along the unmarked surface I pulled off the road.
“Where are we?”
“The lake below is Tyin.”
“My god, it’s green.”
“Glacier water.” But that was not why I had stopped. “Look north.” We were above the tree line, and ahead lay a vast range of peaks, studded with green lakes and moraine-strewn flats. Jotunheimen, home of the giants. “This is my country. Before we enter it I want to tell you that I was wrong. If we were back in Atlanta, we might have something to worry about, but not now, not here. I think I was so uneasy because I didn’t know what was happening.” I took her hand. “I didn’t understand just how much I needed to be sure you were safe, or why. I just knew I felt vulnerable. Well, now I do understand. And we don’t have to think about Atlanta, about Honeycutt or his blackmailer anymore. They don’t know we’re here, and by now the police will have the situation well in hand. It’s time to leave it all behind.”
Her eyes were as blue and mysterious as the bottom of the ocean, her smile like the sun. “I left it all behind in Oslo, stepped out of it and left it in a crumpled heap on your bedroom floor.”
eleven
The boat was old—Hjørdis had said she remembered the same carved prow from when she was a girl—and with the oars shipped it floated motionless in the middle of the glassy waters of Lustrafjord. Julia slept in the bow; I held a fishing line, utterly relaxed, mind as still as the water. There was no traffic, no machinery, just the occasional warble of the little dumpapers nesting on the far bank, and the creak of sun-warmed oak. It could have been another millennium.
The family seter was not quite that old, but Hjørdis thought its basic design dated from the fourteenth century. It and the loft were all that were left of a rambling farm, and our family had owned all the land I could see on the east bank of the fjord. We still owned a great deal, but the working farm had moved north and a little downslope, and instead of sheep it was now cows and pigs and, in the summer, berries. Old Reidun and her daughter Gudrun, and Gudrun’s husband, ran the place. They also owned half of it. Once or twice a year when Hjørdis called, they would make sure there was fresh linen and firewood at the old seter, that the power was turned on, and the cupboards bulged with staples. We had driven to the seter, unloaded our bags, and found a note from Gudrun asking us to go down to the farm for middag. I thought it was more likely that Old Reidun wanted to meet Julia, but we went.
We were greeted by Gudrun and her husband, Per, who were about forty. “Velkommen til Norge,” they had said to Julia, and we had been ushered into the huge farm kitchen, where Reidun was supervising. We all shook hands, then she told us to go get a home-cured ham from the stabbur. “It’s her way of saying we’re family, not her landlord,” I explained to Julia on the way to the curing house.
“But you own half the farm and don’t put in any labour.”
“We also don’t take out any profit, which in some years is considerable. This farm is one of the prime spots for molte cultivation. But our side of the family, who owned the farm originally, moved to the city more than a hundred years ago. In return for half ownership and all the profits, Old Reidun’s father agreed to work the farm and keep up the seter for our use.”
Even after so long, it worked well. The two sets of honorary cousins regarded each other warmly but with a shake of the head that said: They’re not like us.
Middag eight days ago had passed pleasantly with fiery homemade redberry wine, trout, the ham, rømme, new potatoes and salad. We had left loaded down with fresh milk, cream, butter, eggs, bacon and bread. Gudrun promised to resupply us every three or four days.
Julia, since we had been here, had eaten an astonishing amount. “It’s just so good,” she always said when she served herself seconds. We had walked, and napped, and eaten, and talked, and walked more, and now we bobbed about on the fjord because she hoped we could catch some perch.
She slept on. I cast again, watched the lazy ripples. If I squinted, I could just make out the flowers growing in the sod roof of the old loft half a kilometer away on the east bank. The seter itself was hidden by an outcropping of the fjell that plunged straight into the fjord and formed its eastern bank. Beyond the fjell was Jostedalsbreen, the largest glacier in Europe. When the wind was right you could smell the almost chemical bite of the ice but today all that filled the air was the scent of Julia’s skin, like dusty, sun-warmed violets, and, even two kilometers beyond the bank, the pagan smell of the earth’s skin: millions of hectares of birch breaking into leaf at the same time. There was nothing like it; it woke parts of me that usually slept.
“You look pleased with yourself.” Julia was awake and watching me, her eyes a startling, sheened blue against the green lake.
“I’m breathing air like wine, I have money and good health, and I’m in a boat on green water with a beautiful woman. There’s nothing I can’t do.”
She gave me a lopsided affectionate look. “Except catch fish.”
I twitched at my line. Nothing.
“Let me have a go.”
We traded places carefully. She cast expertly.
“Where did you learn how to do that?”
“Massachusetts. Guy taught me.” Her mouth stretched in old grief and her eyes glittered. A bird sang from the woods far away on the west bank. Its call was heartbreakingly pure.