When the spell of the stranger from far away merged with the shrouded mystery of the Devil’s Island their simple, ordinary love story became a myth, a legend. As they walked hand in hand in empty coves, on the cliffs, climbed the ruins of the castle that Ulla had also started calling the Devil’s Castle, they were transformed into the heroes of old Nordic legend. She was no longer a plump village girl or Deniz an unshaven, unkempt young man who had let himself go. The love between Ulla, walking in her long white, blue and pink skirts, with her hair blowing in the wind, and the mysterious stranger who had emerged from the sea one day — some said he was the son of an Arab sheikh, others maintained he was an Italian count — seemed the long-awaited miracle itself.
When he embraced her and felt her flesh upon his flesh and her heart in his heart, when he entwined her long hair around his fingers, when he snuggled against the comforting warmth of her soft breasts, when he held her hand or put his arm around her waist, Deniz became drunk with a happiness and satisfaction that he experienced for the first time in his life. The faint bitter memory of previous halting, awkward, inept and incomplete love-making faded each time they touched each other, each time they made love, during their long silences, whenever they went out to sea or climbed the cliffs. It was the first time he embraced a woman’s body with confidence, the first time his heart was not overcast with guilt and anxiety. For the first time it was a good match. The inferiority and timidity he had always felt deep inside melted away in Ulla’s eyes tinged with the hazy blue of the North Sea. For the first time he shed his identity as the child who could not handle life, who had destroyed people’s hopes in him and resorted to dream worlds as an escape.
Ulla was the first person who loved me for what I was and wasn’t. It was as though she had been waiting for me for years on that island. All she wanted was to make love to me and live by my side; she desired nothing more. We were like two seals playing and mating between the rocks in secluded coves. We were like the dolphins and the seagulls. We were part of the landscape of the sea, the cliffs and the clouds. We were the mascots of the fishermen when we went out with them to the open sea on their ocean-going boats. We had provided the joy and laughter in the guesthouse where visitors were few, the inhabitants quiet and the air sombre. We laughed. How we laughed at my inaccurate Norwegian, Ulla’s clumsiness, the funny things Grandfather did, the behaviour of the guests who arrived from time to time, the chat of fishermen going out to sea, the sun, the clouds, the storms, the rain. We didn’t talk much. We didn’t need to talk a great deal, and anyway we were bereft of words. I from my foreignness, from my fear of words … Ulla, because she didn’t feel the need for them …
They were children who loved each other and conquered their fear through one another. Ulla forgot her loneliness in being an orphan and the agonies of her childlike soul through the fairytale prince who came from the sea and who appeared at her door one evening. When the stranger arrived at this haven where he longed to be a nobody, he found Princess Ulla who was happy with this. Because his little woman never asked, never wanted anything more than for him to be with her and never expected him to be different from his true nature, he was no longer obliged to invent dreams that had become a burden to him, to make up lies that he could no longer bear. The two children neither pondered on the meaning of life nor worried about the rest of the world. They believed that life was wonderful and worth living. And with that belief they made their life, the island and the sombre guesthouse a place to be lived in, beautiful and cheerful.
Ulla painted colourful pictures on the gate and the garden wall of the cottage: plump fair mermaids, Koi carp of all colours with gauzy tails, flowers that had never grown on the island, spring blossom, fairies, little candy-coloured houses in pink, blue, green and yellow … They overcame Grandfather’s resistance and had the house painted a bright deep yellow. Deniz became first a guest on the deep-sea fishing boats, then a cabin boy and finally a sought-after member of the crew. There he was hard-working, strong and efficient. When he wasn’t at sea he helped the grandparents with the Gasthaus, where he was willing and eager if incompetent. The good fishermen of the island, who were quiet and tough on the sea and cheerful and rowdy on land, adopted the stranger who had come to share their lives. Ulla’s grandparents liked him because he had drawn their granddaughter out of her solitude and her melancholy and rescued her from solitude. She had never known her father, and her mother had gone far away in a fishing boat when she was three years old. They were curious as to why the stranger had arrived on their island, but they never enquired or had any doubts about him. And he told them, ‘I came here on a trip with my parents when I was very small. I hadn’t been able to climb up to the ruined castle then, so I promised myself I would come back to see the Devil’s Castle when I grew up. Now I’ve arrived!’ He told them about the old German, the unknown deserter, whom he could hardly recall but whom he had heard about so often from his mother. They were surprised that he could remember; happy, too.
He was looking for a burrow, a shelter where he could hide like a wounded animal, but he found more than that. He had never belonged anywhere until then, and now he had found a place where he could belong. He loved the people, Ulla’s grandparents, the fishermen, the villagers, the little wooden church’s old priest who had known the unknown deserter, the young teacher who was curious about the Muslim religion and eastern culture, and Jan the Bear who was so proud of producing the best moonshine…
I loved them all with a love that was without fear or obligation, because they accepted me, didn’t expect me to be anything other than myself. They were happy with me; because when I was with them I didn’t feel inferior. And perhaps it was also because, deep inside, I secretly enjoyed feeling superior to them. I don’t know if love is the right word, but for the first time since my childhood I felt relaxed, at ease and happy. Mother would call it ‘the happiness of pigs’. This island where people made do and were happy with small, simple things was a refuge far from the cruel adult world.
Their baby would be born in this sanctuary and grow up in safety. The flames of a world set on fire would not reach them; nobody would be able to hurt him or push him around. Their child would not have to share the fate of the one behind barbed wire in Iraq whose wounded captive father with the sack over his head had tried to protect him so frantically and hopelessly. He would not feel the weight of the world’s suffering or humanity’s sins. He would not have to account for them. Nobody would force him to settle this account or weigh down his conscience. He would be as natural as a beautiful animal, free as nature — and be himself.
Then Bjørn was born. It was three days after the Gasthaus’s white-faced, blue-eyed Alaskan husky gave birth to two beautiful puppies; the day that the fishermen had succeeded in rescuing baby whales beached on the shores of the island and floating them back out to sea. When the grandfather, Ulla’s Bestefar, who was anxiously waiting at the door of the delivery room heard the baby’s first cry, the cry of life, he shouted with joy, ‘There! Another baby has been rescued today!’ He was even happier when he found out it was a boy. He said, ‘Let his name be Bjørn’, without consulting anyone. It was then that Deniz realized they hadn’t thought of a name for the infant. Bjørn was a good name — so why not? In that language, the bear was the symbol of strength, of nature. Why not?