Chapter Six
Turin. August.
The phone rings at twenty past seven in the morning and I answer it with my shoulder because both hands are full.
Nobody rings me. That is the point of my life at this moment. I have a phone for the landlady and for the clinic and for a woman at the comune who is processing my license conversion at a speed that would embarrass a glacier, and it has rung six times in eight months.
“Nora.”
Norwegian.
I have not heard Norwegian out loud since a woman at a basin in an airport in Gardermoen asked me if I needed a doctor.
“Nora, it is Trygve.”
He worked with my father for twenty six years.
He is the only man alive who was allowed to touch the long plane.
He has a beard that goes to his chest and he once carried me up the yard on his shoulders when I was five and my mother screamed at him from the door of the shed and he did not put me down.
I sit down on the kitchen chair.
Sophia is on my other arm and she is five weeks old and she is doing the thing where she has finished eating and has not yet decided how she feels about it, and there is a bottle on the table and the tap is dripping into a pan, and it has been dripping since I moved in and I have never fixed it.
“Trygve.”
“I found the card,” he says. “In the drawer of the desk. There is a number on it. You sent it in March.”
I did. One card. A picture of the Mole Antonelliana on the front, because it was the only card in the shop, and on the back I wrote nothing at all except a telephone number, because I could not think of a sentence that would hold.
Eight months, and he never rang it.
“He is in Haukeland,” Trygve says. “Since Sunday. He went down in the shed. Sitting down.”
I look at the tap.
“He had been out,” Trygve says, “and he came back and he sat down on the bench with his coat still on, and Ingrid found him on Monday because the light was on and the door was open and it had rained in.”
“How long was he there.”
“A night. Perhaps more.” A pause. “They will not tell me anything because I am not family. That is the word they used. Family.”
I hear a chair go back at his end. He is standing up. Trygve has never in his life said a difficult sentence sitting down.
“They operate on Friday,” he says. “Ten in the morning. If he is strong enough on Friday.”
I write it on the back of the electricity bill with a pencil that is on the table because everything in this flat is on the table.
Friday. 10. Haukeland.
I look at it. It is my handwriting, and it is exactly the handwriting I use for a site note, and I have just taken down my father’s operation like a delivery.
“The yard is mortgaged,” Trygve says. “He put it up in the spring. The whole of it. He did not tell anybody he was going to and then it was done.”
“Why.”
“He did not say why.”
“Trygve. Why.”
There is a long pause and I can hear the sea in it, or I am inventing the sea in it, and either way I let it run.
“He said he was keeping it,” Trygve says. “He said he was keeping it for somebody.”
The tap drips.
Sophia makes a small sound against my collarbone, a complaint she is filing for later, and I move my hand up her back without looking down and she stops.
“Nora.” Trygve’s voice changes. “Did he know?”
“Know what.”
“There is a child. I can hear it.”
The kitchen is very warm. There is a pan on the stove and a bottle on the table and my father is on a bed in Bergen with a tube in his arm and a light over him that nobody has turned off.
“No,” I say. “He does not know.”
Trygve does not say anything at all for a while.
Then he says, “He asked about you,” and he does not say it kindly, he says it the way a man reads out a figure, and there is nothing in the world I can put on top of it.
“Every time I came. He would wait until I was leaving. He would be at the door with the plane in his hand and he would say, and Nora, and I would say I do not know, Halvor, and he would say, no. No. Of course.”
He clears his throat.
“So. Friday,” he says. “You will come.”
“Yes,” I say.
I hang up. I put the phone face down on the table.
And I sit in a rented kitchen in Turin with a five week old child on my arm and I price a flight in my head, because I price everything, because that is what I am.
Torino to Oslo, Oslo to Bergen, Thursday out, Sunday back. Two hundred and sixty euros if I book today. I have three hundred and twenty, which is the whole of what I have, which is what is left of a redundancy from a practice in London and eight months of not eating properly.
I could go. That is the first thing I understand and I want it written down. I could afford it. It would take almost everything I have but I could be standing in a corridor in Haukeland on Friday morning when they wheel him out.
And here is what would happen.
I would give my passport at a desk in Torino.
Nora Lindqvist. It would go into a system.
I would give it again at Oslo, and again at Bergen, and there would be a hotel, because you cannot sit outside an operating theatre with an infant and then get on a plane the same night, and the hotel would take the passport too.
And I would sign my name at a nurses’ station in a hospital in a town of two hundred thousand people where every single one of them knows what a Lindqvist is, holding a child, and I would write daughter in the box, because that is what the box is for.
There is a folder on a desk in London. I know there is.
I have known it since the airport. There is a man in an office being paid to find me, and he is being paid by a family that has fourteen investigators and a hundred years and a woman in gray who carried a note in her handbag through a dinner party, and there is exactly one place on this earth where they know to look, and it is my father’s yard.
A man in a hospital bed is a bed with a number on it. A man in a hospital bed does not move for weeks. He is the easiest thing in the world to sit outside of and wait.
They would not even have to be clever. They would only have to be patient, and they have been patient for a hundred years, and I would come up that corridor in the only coat I own with a five week old child on my shoulder, and there would be a man in the car park with a camera, or there would not, and I would never know which, for the rest of my life.
And if there were, then by Monday she would be a photograph on a desk in London.
And by Monday they would know exactly where to find him for the rest of his life, and he would be seventy years old, and he would be in a bed, and he would not be able to get up.
That is the sentence. I did not have it in the kitchen. I have it now and I have had it every day since and it does not get any better with handling.
I sit at the table for a long time.
I book the flight.
I want that written down too, because it is the only part of this that anybody has ever been able to forgive me for, and it is the part I have never once forgiven myself for, and both of those things are correct.
I book it at twenty past eleven at night on the Tuesday. Torino to Oslo, six forty in the morning on the Thursday. I pay for it with a card that has ninety euros left on it afterward.
And on Thursday morning I am at Caselle at ten to five with a five week old child in a sling and a bag with three things in it, and I stand in the queue for the desk, and I move up it, and I move up it, and there are four people in front of me and then two and then one.
And I do not board it.
I stand out of the line. Nobody stops me.
Nobody notices, because nobody in an airport at five in the morning notices anything, and that is the thing I have never been able to get over, that it cost nothing, that there was no man in a car, that it was not taken from me, that I simply stepped out of a queue.
I sit down on a metal bench opposite the desk with her against my chest and I watch them close the flight.
It takes forty minutes. I could have gone at any point in those forty minutes.
They call the name three times, which is the procedure, and the third time the woman at the desk looks out into the concourse, straight across at me, at a woman on a bench with a baby, and her eyes go over me and past me.
Lindqvist.
Then she closes the door and turns the sign around.
I take the bus back into Turin. It costs six euros fifty and it takes an hour and ten minutes and Sophia sleeps the whole way with her fist against my collarbone, and I look out of a window at a motorway I have never seen in daylight.
I do not ring Trygve back, that day or the next day, and he does not ring me, and that is its own answer, and I have thought about it a great deal since and I believe he understood, and I have no evidence for that at all.
On Friday I am up at six because she is up at six.
At ten o’clock in the morning, Norwegian time, which is ten o’clock in the morning here, I am sitting on the floor of the kitchen with my back against the cupboard and my legs out flat, and Sophia is asleep in the carrier on the chair, and I have my father’s chisel across my knees.
It is the only thing of his that I own. It came out of Bergen in a suitcase fourteen years ago and it has been to London and back and I have never told anybody that it is his, including the man I married, who once held my thumb up to a lamp and asked me how the scar happened, and I said a chisel, and he said a chisel, and I did not say his.
I have the stone. I have the oil. The oil is cooking oil, because I do not have any other kind, and my father would have taken it off me and thrown it out of the door of the shed.
I sharpen it.
That is what I do while they open my father’s head.
I sit on a linoleum floor in Turin and I put the bevel down on the stone and I work it, twenty on one side and then the back, flat, dead flat, no rocking, because the back of a chisel is a promise, and he told me that when I was seven and he told me it again when I was nineteen and bleeding into a rag with my thumb open to the bone, and what he actually said, on the way to the hospital, in the van, was, the tool was not the problem.
I go on for a long time.
My arm gets tired and I change hands and it is no good and I change back. The oil goes gray and then black. There is a rhythm to it, and the rhythm is older than I am, and it is the sound of a shed on a cold morning with the sea outside it, and I do not cry.
I want to be exact. I sit on the floor for the whole hour and I do not cry, and I wait for it, I actually wait for it, the way you wait for weather, and it does not come, and at some point I stop waiting and simply carry on sharpening.
Afterward I test the edge on the back of my forearm the way he did.
It takes the hair off clean.
I wipe it and I put it in the drawer, and I stand at the sink and run the tap over my hands for longer than my hands need, and I look out at a wall of shutters and somebody’s laundry.
Trygve rings on the Saturday. I let it go.
He rings again on the Sunday and I pick it up, and he says one word, which is alive, and then he waits, and I do not say anything, and after a while he hangs up, and neither of us has ever mentioned it since.
That is what I bought. I want that on the record too. I did not do it for nothing and I did not do it for a small thing. I bought a man’s whole remaining life in a boatyard in Bergen with the price of not standing in the room while he had it.
He does not know I was in that airport.
He will never know. There is nobody left alive who could tell him, and I am not going to, and if you want to understand everything I do afterward, every year of it, you can start there.
I have used the chisel every day since.
I use it to open the post.