Hanna
The trouble with having the girl here is not the one I’d foreseen.
I expected her to interfere, to spy on me and report back to Robert and Helena, giving them more ammunition in their campaign to get me to sell up and move closer to them.
I’d predicted she would be clueless, more of a hindrance than a help around the croft.
I’d known she would look askance at the odd hours I sometimes keep when the simmer dim fills my veins with its restless light, at my daily dips in the sea and the clutter in my house.
But I hadn’t realized what an effect her being here would have on my memories.
She has shaken them up and now, like the bubbles in a bottle of fizzy drink, they keep escaping.
Her youth reminds me of our youth. Of us as we were.
Before. She’s like you, too, Liv. Not your coloring, of course.
Those dark eyes and her long black hair are a complete contrast to our Nordic fairness.
But something in her smile reminds me of you.
A gentleness, perhaps. You always were the kinder of the two of us.
I find myself going back to times and places I try not to visit. Because one thought can so easily lead to another, and suddenly one can find oneself somewhere else entirely.
I saw her noticing the shameful numbers inscribed on my arm. But she didn’t dare ask. And, anyway, if she were to understand it all, I’d need to go back to the start, to see you again as you once were, Liv, my sister and my mirror image, the other half of me.
More of those memories bubble to the surface as I lie awake, the dawn already breaking after the short hours of darkness, and I think perhaps it can’t hurt to go back there after all, just for a little while, to that place Before, when we were young and happy…
*
We were born on Julaften, the night before Christmas Day, on a farm in the Lofoten Islands, where our father’s family had always lived.
Pappa called us his julefuglen—his Christmas birds—because we were as tiny and fluffy as a pair of identical storm petrel chicks when we arrived, and in Norway those little birds would only fledge and fly the nest in late December.
Our red-painted house nestled into the hill, facing south across the fjord with a stretch of pasture running down to the water.
Mamma looked after the cow and tended the patch of vegetables while Pappa was out in his fishing boat, away catching quicksilver shoals of herring in the autumn and skrei cod in the winter.
Every evening Mamma would say, “Light the lamp, girls,” and Liv and I would carefully set a match to the wick so that the light would shine out into the darkness, guiding Pappa home.
In summer, drunk on sunlight, we loved nothing more than spending days in the rorbu, the fishing hut with a turfed roof beside the water.
The hut had been built by our father’s father, who had also been a fisherman.
It was set in its own little kingdom a couple of miles along the coast from our house, sitting snugly in a bay tucked into the arms of the hills.
A scattering of skerries and rocks across the entrance kept the inlet hidden from the fjord, and the mountains rose steeply behind it, like the walls of a fortress.
A freshwater spring flowed from deep within the hills, providing water for drinking and washing.
The hut stood on rocks at the deeper end of the bay, jutting out on tall stilts, allowing Pappa to bring his fishing boat alongside to load and unload his nets.
Farther round the bay sat the shed we called the sea barn, next to an A-framed fish rack above the pebble beach where the shallower water allowed us to haul up the smaller rowing boat alongside a plank-built jetty.
When we were old enough, Liv and I grew adept at climbing the rungs of the frame to hang up the gutted and split fish carcasses to dry.
We didn’t mind sharing a few with an otter, which brought her pups to the shore in the spring, all the while warily watching out for the white-tailed eagles that swooped low over the sea from the mountaintops.
A trick of the tides meant our bay was a good one for beachcombing, with all sorts of bits and pieces washing up there.
There was plenty of driftwood for the stove, and Liv and I would spend hours searching for shells and sea glass along the beach, arranging them on the shelf Pappa put up to accommodate our collection.
We loved playing games of make-believe, too, with the dolls he made for us from sailcloth and string, princesses in our hidden domain.
While we played, sitting out on the porch at the front of the hut, the water shimmering in shades of aquamarine beneath us, he mended the nets and creels he used on his boat and told us stories of the gods and heroes, fairies and trolls who once inhabited our world.
We learned that the mountains surrounding us were really giants who’d been turned to stone, and the sea was the domain of the god AEgir and his wife, Rán, who used her net to catch sailors and drown them.
Our favorite story, though, was a folk tale about a girl who meets a great white bear one day.
Before he disappears, she learns he is a prince in disguise, who is banished to be imprisoned in a castle that lies east of the sun and west of the moon, on the far side of winter.
The girl meets many challenges as she searches high and low for him, traveling on the four winds.
At long last, she reaches the place where trolls have locked up many people, including the prince.
She frees them all, and she and the prince live happily ever after.
“Let us ride on the back of the great white bear,” we’d cry, as soon as Pappa finished the story, and he’d smile and put down his nets so we could clamber onto his broad back as he crawled around the hut, our very own prince in disguise.
“If we were ever imprisoned by trolls, would you come and find us?” I asked him one day, as he was giving us a swimming lesson in the sea.
He nodded, considering my question seriously. “I would travel on the four winds, to the far side of winter, to come and free the two of you, my julefuglen,” he told me.
Little did we know that those same winds would snatch Pappa from us one day.
In the winter of 1930, just after we’d celebrated our tenth birthday, the merciless sea claimed him and his boat in one of the fierce storms that swept that wild coast. Bits of wreckage were found, but Rán, the sea goddess, never gave us back his body.
The farm had to be sold, though we kept the fishing hut, and we moved up the fjord to Narvik, where Mamma had found a job as a secretary in the mayor’s office.
All we had to remember our father by was a love of the wild homeland around us and his collection of books, which held the stories he used to read to us in the evenings as we perched on his lap beside the fire.
We missed him terribly, but every July we’d take the milk boat down the fjord and spend a few weeks staying in the little red hut, still full of the ropes and creels and neatly mended nets that bore the imprint of his handiwork, and our collection of shells, driftwood, and sea glass.
We could run wild there, taking the rowing boat out among the skerries and gathering cloudberries on the islands.
We bathed in the ocean of summer light, swimming through ribbons of kelp with Pappa’s spirit still holding us, just as his strong arms once had as he taught us to swim.
Liv and I looked so alike that even Mamma sometimes muddled us, a trick I used to my advantage when I was trying to get out of finishing my sewing and escape into the open air again.
My sister was a lot more patient than I was, and her stitches were always perfect.
She even enjoyed making our bunads, the traditional outfits we wore on May 17 each year to celebrate Constitution Day, embroidering the woolen pinafores with intricate tendrils and white daisies in the design our mother had taught us to sew.
“This is our pattern,” Mamma had explained, as she helped me try to follow the faint pattern of petals she’d drawn on a square of muslin for me to practice with.
“The daisy is the flower of our region. So, you see, this little flower represents all the generations who have come before us, and when we wear our dresses, we are carrying them with us, honoring their lives by living ours well.”
In spite of Mamma’s patient tuition, though, my stitches were never very neat.
I’d bribe Liv to finish my sewing for me with the licorice sweets she loved.
I bought them with my hard-earned wages from carrying the milk cans from local farms in the early hours of the morning down to the harbor to meet the milk boat.
To my mind, the sacrifice was well worth it.
Each winter’s night, even though Pappa was gone, Mamma would still say, “Light the lamp, girls.” Then the lantern would cast its glow onto the snow beyond the window, helping us remember him. “Never forget,” Mamma told us. “We must always find a way to make a light shine in the darkness.”
I still light a candle, even now, when the long winter nights seem too much to bear. It casts its glow from the window, a slanted square of gold holding back the darkness just a little.