‘The story doesn’t say,’ I tell her, ‘not the one Johannes taught me, at least, but someone did tell me that Øystein and Hjerki never forgot each other. He couldn’t bear hearing the tune for the rest of his life, because it would make him cry.’

  ‘It doesn’t make sense,’ says Mathilde. ‘Why would she marry someone else when she was engaged to a guy she was madly in love with and actually wanted?’

  ‘I don’t know, but anything could have happened, perhaps she was forced, perhaps she couldn’t wait —’

  ‘Couldn’t wait?’ she interrupted. ‘For what?’

  ‘This was the 1800s, girls had to get married as quickly as possible, they didn’t have time to endlessly scroll through all the maybe-maybe-nots on Tinder, their market value fell quickly.’

  ‘Their market value?’ Mathilde laughs mockingly. ‘You should publish that line of reasoning as a column in Aftenposten. But did things never go well for any of these women?’

  ‘If it’s any consolation, what’s special about this tune is that the man is left unhappy, he’s the one getting punished,’ I say.

  ‘He doesn’t get punished, he’s unhappy, yes, but she’s the one being punished. He is clearly being passive-aggressive by dancing with her at the wedding, then humiliating her by tearing off her belt and kicking her chandelier down,’ says Mathilde.

  She hands me the fiddle, I put it to my chest, which starts to pound when her fingers touch mine.

  ‘He winds up lovelorn over someone he cannot have, for the rest of his life. I’d call that a pretty brutal punishment,’ I say.

  C#

  MATHILDE

  It’s a tradition, says Andres, a tradition, says Johs, it’s how we always do it, always have done, how everyone has done, for generations, and I’ve never felt more rootless than I do here, continually being reminded of who they have been. ‘It’s like everyone here is a walking family tree,’ I said to Andres, ‘with a full overview of their heritage.’ My own personal interest in ancestry stops at my grandparents, but even that’s limited, because my dad’s parents died before I was born, and my mum’s and mother’s parents were unfit for the job, as Mum says without elaborating, but I remember the smell of smoke and alcohol in their hallway and the tense atmosphere at the dinner table. ‘It’s no secret that they both felt the wrong daughter had been left here on earth,’ says Mum from time to time, not self-pityingly, and with no hint of anything but directionless guilt, and it’s so painful each time that I just have to put my arms around her. ‘You’re perfect in every way, Mum,’ I say. ‘Well, almost,’ I might add if she’s in a good mood and she’ll then laugh and push me away.

  Mum and Cat first visited one weekend in June, and now, at the end of July, they are back for their summer holiday, ‘Since you obviously don’t want to come home, even now when Oslo is reopened and waiting for you with open arms,’ she said on the phone, and I could feel her scrutinising look all the way from here. ‘You look like you’re in love,’ she said when she came in June, ‘I’m in love with this place,’ I replied. And when she arrived yesterday she said, ‘You look happy,’ I must have lost five kilos in just a few weeks thanks to the increased physical activity and obsessive crush on Andres, which have boosted my metabolism. ‘Your mother was exactly the same, she never got fat, she burned more calories in her sleep than I did jogging, intensity and nerves, eh, the world’s most effective diet,’ says Mum, ‘but I wouldn’t have swapped,’ she adds, rubbing her belly and seeming content.

  Andres and I meet almost daily, and I’m thankful for the summer and the weather because there’s nowhere else we can meet but outdoors.

  One evening at the end of May I had sent him a text, after being unable to think of anything else for weeks since he drove me home on the quad bike. I was obsessed with him, I forgot to eat, couldn’t sleep, and just wandered alone and forgot about the rest of the world. Just a few minutes after my message asking if he could check a spark plug for me, he was at my door. I invited him in and he turned and glanced quickly at my car in the driveway before walking ahead of me into the hall. Then he stopped and stood with his hand against the wall, blocking the way into the kitchen. ‘Is there something you want?’ I asked. ‘Absolutely,’ he said.

  It’s him who has been pushing us the most. He is wonderfully impatient, Hello? he has texted on the few occasions that I didn’t answer his message within a minute, Are you missing me? he’ll write ten minutes after we’ve parted, and he’ll knock on my window at night, or sit on their steps and stare at me – straight past and straight through Kristin and the children in the yard – if I’m out sunbathing. But since the June evening when Johs rang the doorbell while Andres was in my bed, he’s become more careful. ‘We can’t meet here,’ he said, ‘the village beast has many eyes, everyone watches each other so fucking closely.’ It was the first time I heard him say anything negative about the place, about the people here, and I was surprised. ‘I don’t mind where we meet,’ I said, and now we meet in the forest mostly, far from the village, and I cycle and cycle, so much that I’ve developed visible muscles in my calves and thighs from all the cycling and walking. Andres drives the quad, always loaded with salt blocks or fence posts or other materials, to avoid lying to his family, I’ve realised, because he always does what he says he is going to do, which he also tells me about, in excessive detail.

  ‘You know you sound more believable if you don’t explain everything quite so meticulously,’ I tell him as we lie in the small forest clearing, on the rug I brought along in my bike basket.

  There’s a root digging into my back through the thin material, and it feels like ants are crawling all over me and into me, but I lie perfectly still, not wanting to initiate a single movement that might cause him to stand up and say that he needs to get on with the fencing or pruning, or whatever else he’s supposed to be doing. He falls silent, turns his head, and stares into the pine forest around us.

  ‘It’s totally dead between Kristin and me,’ he says, and I don’t say anything in reply, ‘it’s just practical – cooperation, if you know what I mean, and we cooperate very well, we really do, but we’ve hardly touched each other since Olav was born,’ he continues.

  He turns and stares at me with an almost desperate look in his eyes, like he has said something totally shocking, or something I ought to have been shaken by, at least, to justify him saying it. I don’t have the heart to tell him that he sounds just like many of my friends who have children. And I don’t tell him what I tell them: that to outsiders the realisation that a child changes the relationship is in no way as shocking as it seems to be for those involved, and that I also can’t understand why having to focus on a child that a couple jointly chose to bring into the world can be such a threat to their relationship.

  ‘Well, I want to touch you all the time, if it’s any consolation,’ I say, smiling and running my hand down the small hollow in his chest, his stomach and groin muscles become tight and contoured at my touch.

  I don’t want to know anything else about his and Kristin’s relationship, it interrupts the one we have and threatens to ruin it. At the same time I want him to have an outlet for his guilt, so that it doesn’t just grow and gnaw at and destroy him.

  Johs has told me about Andres’s anxiety. ‘He’s constantly on edge,’ he said, ‘I don’t think it’s a health or illness thing really, it’s just anxiety, as it were, and illness is a rational place to put it. Especially now. But it’s exhausting for those around him to deal with, it just never ends.’ Afterwards, it seemed like Johs regretted divulging so much. ‘He’s always been a lot smarter than me, more musical,’ he said, to make up for it, ‘did you know he’s got perfect pitch?’ It’s impossible to make sense of their relationship, maybe because I don’t have any siblings myself, but to an outsider the competing and affection seem like an irreconcilable mix, I can never tell if they’re angry with each other, or if they’re joking, or sometimes if they even like each other. Andres hops similarly between saying things like, ‘Johs should have packed his fiddle away years ago, he doesn’t have an ounce of talent,’ one minute, before saying, ‘You know, nobody is as dependable as Johs, there’s absolutely no one else I would rather go to war with.’ I have learned that if I approve of the criticism, if I agree that Andres is overly nervous or critical, or that Johs is slow and sluggish, as Andres often says, they’ll swing the other way and contradict me. And if I nod a bit too enthusiastically over the positive things they say about each other, they’ll dispute that as well.

  So I’ve gradually started learning the art of being silent, but the more I learn, the more I realise that I have more to learn. Signe is an absolute master at it, and I’ve started to realise that a perfectly timed silence is more effective than any other form of communication.

  ‘Poor thing, she works and works,’ says Mum as Signe zooms past on the tractor while we sit on the steps, sharing a cigarette. I raise my hand and wave, but I’ve become even more cautious around her.

  ‘I don’t think it’s a shame for her,’ I say, ‘Johs says that work is her calling in life.’

  ‘I don’t understand why you can’t start going out with Johs,’ says Mum.

  ‘Yes, you do,’ I say, ‘don’t start getting desperate on my behalf.’

  ‘I think he’s handsome,’ says Mum.

  ‘Yes, he is handsome,’ I say, ‘handsome and boring. Anyway, he’s made it pretty clear that he’s not interested,’ I add.

  ‘I don’t believe that at all,’ says Mum, like she always does when I tell her I’ve been rejected or dumped, although I suspect that she believes it more than she pretends.

  On her way back Signe pulls up at my driveway, she must be pushing seventy and yet she leaps from the tractor more nimbly than Johs. She then walks diagonally across the lawn, bypassing the little patch of soil that Johs ploughed for me this spring and where I’d been planning to grow tomatoes and vegetables like carrots and potatoes, which I saw on Instagram that Andrea has also been doing in Rjukan. Johs laughed when I showed him, ‘Can things grow in Rjukan?’ he said, ‘You’ve got a good chance of it here at least,’ he continued. But then I started working at the school, and then came the sun and warm weather, then Andres, and now the seeds are just sitting untouched on a bench in the outhouse. Of course, Signe doesn’t so much as glance at my neglected project, she just looks at us, and something about her makes Mum stub out the cigarette she just lit.

  Signe stops a few metres away, says hello, and tightens the hair knot at the back of her head.

  ‘Is it another farm holiday?’ she says to Mum, who is now standing up on the steps.

  ‘Yes, my daughter has totally fallen in love with this place, so it’s the only way I can see her,’ says Mum, ‘but I can easily understand that, it’s really beautiful here in the summer,’ she adds.

  Signe doesn’t reply, she just turns and looks towards the mountains to the west. ‘That mountain is our weather forecast,’ Andres said last week when we went up to the summer farm for the night, ‘if there’s fog at the top there,’ he pointed to the highest point, ‘it’s guaranteed to rain. And in the evening, if there’s a hint of red over the mountain ridge there,’ he pointed west, ‘it will be sunny the next day.’ ‘Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight. Red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning,’ I said, ‘it’s universal, the same goes for the sunset behind Holmenkollen,’ I continued and was surprised to see Andres clearly blushing.

  ‘We’re having a little get-together tomorrow,’ says Signe. There’s a pause, as neither Mum nor I can quite grasp whether it’s an invitation or just information. Signe looks down at Cat rubbing against her legs, which is how he reacts to a threat, Mum always says, he’ll quickly identify the most threatening member of the pack and take a liking to them, a cunning little devil, you know.

  ‘Oh, lovely,’ says Mum in the end.

  ‘At seven o’clock,’ says Signe, ‘in the garden at home. At Johs’s place, that is.’

  Since Kristin’s girls’ night, I haven’t been invited to any more social events, apart from a couple of re-opening parties in Oslo that I’m not tempted by for a second. It’s actually a shame about Kristin because, except for Johs, she’s the only person I’ve met here who I think I could become good friends with. I can really understand what Andres saw in her, she is liberatingly unemotional, practical, steady, the total opposite of Andres, and I can understand how he thought that a Kristin was just what he needed. I would like to have a Kristin too. But, of course, that’s out of the question now, and I avoid her as much as possible. I see her in their garden now and then, constantly picking up after the kids, bending over tirelessly, and it gives me a pang of guilt, but at the same time, I think: she doesn’t want Andres, not the way I want him, she’s sick of him, according to what Johs said two weeks ago when we played the fiddle and drank home brew afterwards. Johs seemed almost contemptuous, after I’d spent too long looking at a photo of Andres as a child, ‘No wonder he turned out so handsome when he was such a cute kid,’ I said. ‘Did you know that Kristin almost left him last autumn,’ said Johs, ‘she couldn’t stand any more of his hangups, he was being so fucking impossible, unreasonable, almost psychotic, you need a lot of patience to put up with him.’ ‘What made her stay?’ I asked, obviously knowing the answer. ‘Beyond the children, of course,’ I added. ‘I don’t think there is anything beyond the children for her,’ Johs replied with warmth in his voice, ‘she values them above all else. So does Andres,’ he added, before looking at me.

  Part of me has absolutely no desire to attend a party where Andres and Kristin will be present, but another part has become obsessively curious about their relationship, about her, how he relates to her, looks at her, talks to her. And by the time Mum and I walk out the door I’m almost looking forward to it. When we enter Johs’s garden, Andres and Kristin are the first people I see; Andres is holding Olav by his arm. And when Andres makes eye contact with me – while surrounded by the others, while loaded with confidence and a kind of superpower – I feel intoxicated, and it reminds me of being in the classroom with Jakob. He stares at me, right over Kristin’s head as she bends down to wipe something off Olav’s shirt, and raises his eyebrows at me, almost invitingly. I walk towards them, feeling myself tremble as I run my hand through my hair.

  ‘Hi,’ I say, ‘hi Olav, you look very nice today,’ I say, smiling at the boy, who has been dressed in a white shirt for the occasion.

  ‘Yes, well, he did look nice,’ says Kristin, laughing and looking at Andres, ‘before someone thought it was a good idea to leave him alone with a melting ice-cream.’

  Before I can answer, Johs starts playing the fiddle from the steps of the old wooden storehouse. The guests, who appear to consist mainly of Johs and Andres’s relatives and a couple of neighbours, all stomp the beat with one or both feet silently on the grass; I stand there watching them, curious about the purpose of this stomping, whether it’s an expression of approval, or whether it’s to participate, or to show off, look, I can find the rhythm as well. I laugh when I notice Mum’s right foot starting to move, out of sync, she looks excited. Imagine, a totally authentic village party.

  When I look up from all the feet, I lock eyes with Andres. He laughs at me, he laughs with me, and I could almost explode with joy in that small moment of realisation that he was watching me and understood what I was thinking.

  Signe has set the long table outside, there are more than twenty of us, and when Johs has finished playing, she goes up the steps, stands beside him and tells us that dinner is served, then two of Johs and Andres’s cousins bring out large, elaborately decorated plates of cured meats, salads and home-baked flatbread; I realise that she must have been planning this little gathering for some time, and that Mum and I had been invited at the last minute. I wonder who persuaded her, and hope it was Andres, although I expect it was Johs. Throughout the dinner Mum whoops with delight at every single detail, and I’m embarrassed by how constantly surprised she is at their knowledge of table etiquette. I can see her through Signe’s eyes, but Signe looks amused by Mum’s reactions. She sits at the end of the table and Johs sits next to me; he had rushed down the steps and caught me before I could get my bearings, and Andres and Kristin wound up sitting at the other end of the table with their children.

  ‘Nobody could drink like Johannes,’ Johs and Andres often say, ‘he’d get so drunk he’d be unable to stand or walk, but could still play the ass off anyone.’ All the stories about him attest to him being morbidly alcoholic, among many other morbid things, but at some point at the beginning when I thought they were expecting pity, or at least sympathy, there was an awkward silence; and I realised that all the stories about Johannes are meant to be entertaining, admired and applauded – totally in keeping with what I suspect his personality was like. The way they romanticise his alcohol abuse, while shaking their heads at the poor drug addicts living in the social housing on the estate, is fascinating.

  ‘This is delicious,’ says Mum, ‘is the meat from your farm?’

  ‘Yes, my brother made the fenalår last year,’ says Signe. ‘But we don’t have pigs, so the ham is from our neighbour, he’s got the biggest pig-shed in the county.’

  ‘Do you farm organic?’ asks Mum while helping herself to the meat platter.

  ‘No, we don’t,’ says Signe with a smile.

  ‘Isn’t that more climate-friendly?’ asks Mum. I’m probably the only person here who understands that she thinks she’s making polite small talk, she is less concerned than most about the environment, especially if she doesn’t get grandchildren, as she often says, and I don’t think she has a clue what organic farming involves.

  Johs straightens himself up in the chair beside me, he looks nervous. But Signe carries on smiling kindly, albeit somewhat condescendingly.

  ‘It’s more complicated than that,’ says Signe, ‘organic farming produces far fewer crops, so to maintain production we’d have to cultivate unspoilt areas, like marshland, which would lead to far higher CO2 emissions.’

 

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