Is anybody there? I say

  and I don’t hear anything, and I think that I should say it again

  Anybody there? I say

  and it’s not like I expect to get an answer, and I don’t get any answer either, but where can the person who was knocking have disappeared to, he or she has to be somewhere, nothing else is possible, because thin air can’t knock on a door, or can it, no, but the wind can shake and rattle a door or other things, that’s true, but I heard so clearly that there was knocking, hard and for a long time, it was quiet and then there was another knock, but a careful one, no, I have to figure this out and I slip on my clogs and I go out the front door and I go over to the corner of the house, no, no one’s there, could it maybe be someone playing a joke on me, but now who would do that, maybe some kids, but there aren’t any kids living around here, there’ve been fewer and fewer children born in Vaim over the years, but now this is actually creepy, maybe it was a ghost, that’s possible, yes, everything seems to point to it being a ghost that was knocking on the door, and I’ve never had any doubt that ghosts exist, even if I’ve never seen or heard one before today, but no, it can’t have been a ghost, and so it must have been a person, because there’s no animal that can knock like that on a door, no, and it can’t have been the wind, because it’s not windy now, there’s no wind, so in that case—yes well what can it have been, it must have been a person, but I can’t see anyone anywhere, and there’s fresh snow too, so that means I can go look for footprints in the snow, I just need to go inside and get a torch and then walk around the house and see if I see footprints, and of course I need to check the road, or path I guess, that goes down to the main road, and then, yes I need to put on some warm clothes, because it’s got cold outside, I think and I go inside and put on my big thick jacket and pull a cap down over my ears and then I take the torch that’s hanging in its place in the hall and then I go right outside and I go around the house and I shine the light both ahead of me and to either side, but there aren’t any footprints, not straight ahead of me and not to either side, and not on the road either, and it can’t have snowed since the knocks, no of course not, and since there’s no wind it can’t be that snowdrifts have covered the footprints, no, I don’t understand, whoever knocked on my door must have vanished into thin air as they say, it’s strange, I can’t understand it, I think, and it’s cold outside so I guess I better go back in, this knocking is what it is, I think, most likely the knocking was just something I imagined, I think and I go to the front door and I stamp my feet to knock off the clumps of snow from my clogs, and then I realize that I need to turn off the torch, there’s no reason to have it on in the light from the house, I think, I turn off the torch, knock the snow off my clogs, go into the hall, slip off my clogs, take off my jacket and cap, shut the front door, but this was really strange, I think, so I must just have heard wrong, heard something that wasn’t there, just imagined that someone was knocking, yes maybe I felt so alone that I imagined someone knocking at my door, yes, that might be what happened, I can’t think of any other reasonable explanation, but there, yes, there’s a knock at the door again, and this, this isn’t something I’m just imagining, that’s a knock, and there’s another knock, yes, not just knocking, yes, there’s a real hammering on the door, yes, pounding, yes, it sounds almost like a thunderclap, no, not quite that bad, but almost, yes, almost like a thunderclap, but just almost, and there, there’s another knock, but not quite as hard now, no, this, I think, no, I’m not imagining this, I’m really hearing it, there’s no doubt about it, but now should I open the front door again even though I couldn’t see anyone there the last time I opened the door, yes I probably should, I think and I go over to the door and now I hear something like a slow knocking and then, suddenly, I yank the door open and shout in an extremely irritated voice

  Yes who is it?

  and I almost leap right out the door I’m so surprised by my own voice and when I jump it feels like I’m breaking through some kind of gentle comfortable wall, or how can I put it, it’s not warm or cold, and then I stood there outside the front door, all alone, and I looked all around, up, down, behind everything, but there was no one and nothing, no, this, I thought, no, I can’t tell anybody this, not even Jatgeir, because they’ll think I’ve gone crazy, because there’s no way to believe that I’ve heard this, yes, it’s probably like the people who heard voices and everyone thought they were crazy and sent them to The Madhouse in Bjørgvin, so I’m not going to say anything about this, not a word to anyone, I thought, but what could it have been, or who, that’s a better way to put it, no, there was no way to understand it, it was inexplicable, as they say, it was actually spooky, yes, it was so frightening that I didn’t really want to go back to my room, but I had to, I had to lie down for a bit on the bench and rest, I think and I go and lie down on the bench and spread the blanket over me and I think that it feels like I need someone to talk to, but I don’t have too much contact with other people, well, yes, I had a little contact with my family, even that’s tapered off too in recent years, after my parents died, those two sisters of mine never had all that much to do with me, to tell the truth, and then they got married and lived in other parts of the country, where the men they married came from, that’s where they lived, each with her husband, and they’d had children too, one had two daughters, the other had a son, and then, the children, yes, I was these children’s uncle but all of them were grown now, good and grown up, or almost grown up, and I wasn’t in touch with my sisters much, so I hadn’t had any contact at all with those two girls and that one boy I was uncle to, to tell the truth I wasn’t even entirely sure of their names, yes well one was named Karen Elise, or maybe they wrote it Karen-Elise, if it wasn’t Marte Elise actually, and then there was Gudrun Anna or Anna Gudrun, and there couldn’t be a hyphen between Anna and Gudrun or Gudrun and Anna could there, no, I didn’t think so, but I couldn’t be sure of that either, and as for which of the two was named what I’d never managed to learn that, but the other sister had a son, and his name was Olaf, and that was easy to remember since he was named after my father, after my and my sisters’ father, but his two sisters, my aunts, it was even worse with them, not that their names were so hard, they were Gudrun and Olaug, both fine names, and I knew that they were named after my father’s parents, yes, my grandmother was named Olaug and my grandfather was named Gudmund, that’s how it was, if I’m not remembering that all wrong, but even I couldn’t be wrong about something like that, but I could never remember which one was Gudrun and which one was Olaug, no, but I usually managed to get through situations that could have been embarrassing by talking about both Olaug and Gudrun in general, but is that something I should be thinking about now, no, definitely not, certainly not after I heard a mysterious knocking at my door without there being anyone there knocking, no matter how long I tried to find them, and now I realize I’m feeling anxious, and I think I’ll just go drop by Jatgeir’s house, even if it’s been a year and a day since the last time I did that, because to try to soothe this anxiety a little I’ll just go and see him, this anxiety doesn’t feel good at all, no, and to tell the truth it’s been years now since I’ve visited Jatgeir and to tell the truth he’s the only person in Vaim I ever visit, so if I’m going to do it again it might as well be now, to put it that way, but it kind of hasn’t been the same since she, what was her name again, yes, Eline, right, since she came back with him on his boat after he’d taken his boat trip to Bjørgvin during the summer holiday like usual, the way he always used to do every summer, but many years back, yes, time goes by so fast that it’s already many years ago now, he didn’t come back home alone, no, that summer he brought a woman back with him, and not just any woman either, but someone who up until then, that’s what people said anyway, was married and living on Sartor, but she’d grown up in Vaim and funnily enough the boat Jatgeir had had all those years was called the Eline, and maybe that was why the woman he brought back home was called Eline too, so now Jatgeir was living with her, in sin, at least that’s what some of the prayerhouse people said, and it was hard to believe Jatgeir would do something like that, come dragging some married woman back to Vaim who’d left Vaim a long time before, someone barely anyone in Vaim even remembered and wouldn’t have remembered if it weren’t for this going and kidnapping the bride, yes that’s what they called it in the countryside, kidnapping the bride, people talked about how her husband might come to Vaim one day to get his wife back and he’d beat Jatgeir to death, or at least beat him up badly, because the man she was married to was surely a big strong man, and a fisherman on Sartor, or for all I knew he was just glad to get rid of his wife, that was another rumor going around, that that’s how it was, it was probably one of the guys at The Quay below The Vaim General Store who’d said that maybe it was like that, and if only there was a meeting tonight in The Vaim Prayerhouse I could have some company there, but there wasn’t, and I’d never gone to see anyone other than Jatgeir, for many years, earlier I used to go by and see him a lot, and Jatgeir would come see me at least as often, but ever since he’s had a common-law partner, as they call it, yes, then it’s like he wasn’t the same anymore, so now it could go a year and a day between times that I saw him, not that she, yes, his partner, yes, Eline minded at all when I did stop by once, after such a long time, no, she retreated to the kitchen and then maybe poked her head out and asked if she could make us a cup of coffee or something and then Jatgeir said that might taste good and I said yes please, thanks, that’d be great, and then Jatgeir and I sat there and everything was like the old days, but only almost like it used to be, because everything was kind of completely different, it was like Jatgeir had become a different person somehow, even if he looked exactly like the same old Jatgeir, but something had changed, no question about it, he had become shy in a way he never used to be before, more withdrawn, like he had to be careful all the time and he couldn’t just say whatever he wanted anymore, he had to think it over almost before he said anything, to make sure he didn’t say anything that might be offensive, or whatever the term is, and the only thing I could think of that had changed was her, Eline, who had moved in with him, and even if she had come quietly and unnoticed her being there wouldn’t have stayed unnoticed, if you can put it that way, because the living room was unrecognizable, the pile of old newspapers in the middle of the floor, old issues of The Northern Herald, the pile that had grown week after week, and would have filled up the whole room sooner or later, I’d thought, and driven Jatgeir out of his own living room, now the pile of newspapers was gone, and where multiple years’ worth of newspapers had once stood there was now just a gaping void that you sort of couldn’t help looking at the whole time, and then the curtains, they had been the same for all those years but now they’d been replaced by curtains with a pattern of large flowers in all kinds of colors, while the ones that had been there before had been brown, not even the sofa cushions were the same old cushions, and I just couldn’t bring myself to ask where the old newspapers had gone, the old curtains, no, nothing was the way it was before and that meant I didn’t really like going to visit him either, because he never came by to visit me anymore, but who else could I go see, probably no one, to tell the truth, so I’d probably better stay at home, I thought, and if I was going to go somewhere I’d have to wear good shoes and my nice warm coat, but it was probably best for me to just stay home, and not worry about whatever that knocking was, it was most likely just something I’d imagined, I thought and then I must have dozed off, because I woke up, and the first thing I thought about was that knocking there’d been on the door before I lay down, yes, I just couldn’t understand it—but there was another knock, hard, yes, so hard it made me jump, I must have fallen asleep, I don’t know for how long, and now a knocking suddenly woke me up, and I sat up on the bench, and now there was more knocking on the door, hard now too but not as hard as before, no, this, and I stand up and go out to the hall and there’s another knock on the door, but now it’s pretty soft, no, it was just something I was imagining, there’s nothing else it could be, so now I won’t open the door, if there’d been footprints in the snow I’d know for sure that there were just some kids playing a joke on me, that it was a prank, and now these kids had hidden somewhere or other and were laughing about how they’d tricked me, had even scared me, yes, but I guess that’s fine, they could do that, there wasn’t that much for kids in Vaim to do, probably the only fun they had was what they came up with themselves, but it’s strange I hadn’t thought of that before, that it was a kid, not a ghost, I must have turned into someone who’s easily tricked and easily scared too, I’d started believing in all kinds of things, but there’s another knock, and now as hard as can be, so I probably need to open the door again, and if there’s no one there then at least I’ll know that there are some rascals lurking in the dark somewhere giggling and snickering and having a good laugh about how they’d tricked me again, but this time they won’t see me looking scared at least, they sure won’t, not that, no, not this time, and there’s another knock, a little harder than last time even, and now I’ll open it right away, so, over to the door, yank it open— and look, but but can you believe it, if it’s not Jatgeir himself standing there, no, who would believe it, I’m going around thinking that I should drop by Jatgeir’s house and he must have been thinking the same thing, because if it isn’t Jatgeir himself standing here in person

 

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