Hanna
Ruby’s a good listener, I’ll grant her that, unlike most people who’d rather talk about themselves. Usually, it suits me fine to let them prattle on so that I don’t have to answer any questions. But then she asks me more questions about growing up in Norway, and the memories bubble up again.
“What was your sister’s name?” she says. “My twin was called Lucy. You see, my Mum adored the Beatles but Dad was a Rolling Stones fan, so when it came to naming us, they each got to pick one. I was Ruby, after ‘Ruby Tuesday,’ and she was Lucy. ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.’ ”
Then I find myself speaking your name. I can’t remember when I last said it out loud, and it feels awkward on my tongue. “My sister’s name was Liv.”
The two names—Lucy and Liv—hang there in the silence between us. We are each missing half of ourselves. But we two mismatched halves don’t make a whole, for neither of us can ever be whole again.
It’s unnerved me, her telling me she, too, had a twin. I feel for her. And feeling anything tends to be dangerous, in my experience.
It’s too late, though. I drop my guard. And before I can stop them, a few more of those memories leak out.
*
Our house in Narvik was the last one in town.
It sat a little apart from the others, overlooking the harbor at the end of the road where the land began to sweep skyward toward the mountain peaks.
The town had once been just another small fishing village, but it quickly grew when the railway was built to transport iron ore from Sweden through the mountains to the coast. The harbor remained ice-free through the long, dark winters, allowing ships from all over the world to come and fill their bellies at the quayside all year round, feeding the ever-growing demand for the ore.
We felt like outsiders there at first, even though we’d moved only twenty miles up the fjord, but our neighbors soon made us feel welcome, and Liv and I were quickly assimilated into a close-knit community of friends at the local school.
Our best friend, Nina Hansen, lived in the first house along from ours, and we’d call for her and her brother, Per, each morning and walk the half mile to school together, more of our classmates joining us as we went along.
Per was a year older than the rest of us, tall and strong with a thatch of straw-blond hair.
From the start, he wasn’t like the other boys, who either ignored us or played stupid tricks to try to get our attention.
He always walked alongside the three of us girls, seemingly interested in our conversations about our schoolwork and the books we’d been reading, and he asked me a lot of questions about the farm we’d had and our father’s fishing hut.
“Mamma wants Per to be a lawyer, but he wants to be a fisherman,” Nina told us, on one of our early walks together.
“Well, why would anyone want to sit in an office all day when we live in a land like this?” Per retorted, sweeping an arm wide to take in the mountains and the fjord.
Liv laughed. “Hanna’s just the same. Can’t sit still for more than a couple of minutes and goes out in all weathers. Unless she’s got her nose buried in a book, of course, in which case she’s off in a world of her own.”
Per shot me an approving grin. “You’re an explorer then, Hanna, like me.
I’ll have to show you the mountains one of these days.
There are some great places to ski.” True to his word, as we grew older, we’d often go off on our skis together, when winter held the land tight in its icy grip, while Liv and Nina stayed at home with their knitting and sewing.
The year Liv and I turned nineteen, our world began to change.
Liv had taken up a post as a teacher in the local school and, when not reading stories from our father’s books to the little ones in her class, was busy falling in love with Erik Terland, another of the teachers.
I found it harder to settle on a career, but I tended our home and the garden, while Mamma was out at work.
I had also taken a job at the only bookshop in town.
It was owned by Mr. Mosling, a descendant of the original settlers who’d founded Narvik back in the days when it was just a little collection of farms clustered around the harbor.
When we first moved to the town, I’d visit it almost daily.
I used to spend so many hours there reading the books that I think Mr. Mosling decided I might as well make myself useful in return.
One day he asked me to lend a hand dusting the shelves and polishing the glass case on the counter, in which was displayed a handsome, leather-bound book of old Norse sagas.
He clearly approved of the job I’d done because, when I’d finished, he offered me a few regular hours’ paid work. I accepted with alacrity.
The best days were when a new consignment of books would arrive for me to unpack.
When the shop was quiet, and Mr. Mosling was occupied with his accounts or out for lunch at the Royal Hotel, I’d read books behind the counter, careful not to crease the pages or bend the spines.
I’d spend some of my wages on books to take home and read aloud in the evenings while Liv and Mamma were occupied with their sewing and knitting, giving me a good excuse to avoid such pastimes.
When Erik and Liv needed someone to chaperone them to the cinema and the Friday-night dances, I’d go along with Nina and Per for company.
By that time, Per had left school too, of course, and become a fisherman, contrary to his mother’s wishes.
He was always good fun on those evenings out, if a bit wild once he had a couple of glasses of aquavit inside him.
I wasn’t expecting it when he called for me on one of my days off in March, when the snow was at its best on the higher slopes and the sky arched blue above us. I was attempting to dig over the potato patch in preparation for the spring planting.
“Come on, Hanna,” he urged. “We can get to the Storsteins’ hut by lunchtime if we go now. You’ll still have time to finish your digging before the sun goes down. I’ll give you a hand with it when we get back.”
It seemed to have been a particularly bitter winter that year—although perhaps that had as much to do with the news trickling in from the world beyond our horizons as it did with the weather. It didn’t take much urging for me to pull on my boots and gather up my skis.
We fell into a steady rhythm, skiing side by side, as we took the path through the woods, passing between the fir trees wearing their heavy lace petticoats of snow.
As we began to climb, the dense branches of the conifers gave way to a finer screen of birches, their silvered trunks fading to rust at the tips.
We passed the ancient one we called the Grouse Tree.
A younger sapling had sprung up at its foot, and the two had become so closely entwined that the larger, older tree, twisted and bent by the snows of many winters, had wrapped itself round the younger one in a protective embrace, helping it grow strong and straight to reach the light.
The two trunks rubbed against each other when the wind blew, making a hoarse rasping sound, like the call of the bird whose Norwegian name was storfugl, giving the tree its nickname.
It was hard going climbing up onto the plateau, but the carpet of snow was crisp and fresh, and it sparkled as if strewn with a million diamonds when the clouds parted as we neared the top.
We reached the hut and leaned on our poles, gulping lungfuls of the icy air.
From up there, even the Norwegian naval ships, which dwarfed the fishing boats in the harbor, looked tiny.
Per pulled off his woolen cap and grinned at me in triumph, his blond hair spiky with sweat. “Worth the effort!”
We propped our skis against the wooden wall, lifted the latch on the hut door, and went in.
Like many of the little huts dotted across the mountains, this one had only the most basic of furnishings—a table with a bench built along one wall, a single window, and a pot-bellied stove.
A supply of wood and kindling had been left in one corner, and we quickly got the fire lit.
Per collected a panful of snow, and we set it on the stove to heat, then settled down to eat the lunch of brunost sandwiches I’d packed for us, while we waited for the coffee to brew.
“These are delicious,” Per said, waving a half-eaten sandwich at me. “What’s the secret?”
“A lot of butter, then a thick layer of the brown cheese, a little sugar, and just a tiny sprinkling of cinnamon,” I replied, through a mouthful.
“But I’m getting a bit fed up with eating brunost every day.
I can’t wait for spring to come so we can have fresh lettuce and radishes and go out in the boat to catch mackerel in the fjord. ”
He laughed. “And then before we know it, we’ll be picking wild raspberries and eating crayfish again in the summer, taking the boats out to the islands to swim…”
He tailed off, his expression growing serious for once as he gazed down toward the ships in the harbor.
I knew what his silence meant. He was thinking of the troubles beyond our borders.
The newspapers were full of headlines about German forces occupying Czechoslovakia, threatening peace in Europe.
It seemed far removed from our shores. And Norway had officially stayed neutral during the Great War.
Even so, I knew many Norwegian sailors had been killed when their vessels were sunk by German U-boats.
I shivered as I followed the direction of his gaze: another war might have repercussions for us all.
“How’s the training going?” I asked. He’d joined the home guard and had been away on a military camp just last week, practicing maneuvers with the other volunteers.