‘Hi,’ I said.
Tor Einar turned in a slow studied manner. Here was a guy who had plenty of time.
‘Hi,’ he said. ‘May I enter?’
‘Step right in.’
He did so in the same precise punctilious way I had associated with his personality from the first moment I saw him. It was as though he had thought through his movements a couple of times before he executed them. All with a smile playing on his lips.
He raised his hand and waved in greeting to Nils Erik.
‘What are you two talking about?’ he said in broad dialect.
Nils Erik smiled.
‘We’re talking about fish,’ he said in his version of the dialect.
‘Fish and fanny,’ I said in mine.
‘Salty fish and fresh fanny or fresh fish and salty fanny?’ Tor Einar asked.
‘What’s the filleting difference, can you tell me that?’ I said.
‘Yes, now listen here: salty sole and sole salt, they’re not the same thing. Nor are fish and fanny. But they’re close. Incredibly close.’
‘Sole salt?’ I queried.
‘Yes. See, now you’re saying it.’
He laughed, hitched up the knees of his trousers and sat down beside Nils Erik.
‘Well?’ he said. ‘Have you done a round-up of the week?’
‘That’s what we were doing,’ Nils Erik said.
‘They seem to be a good bunch,’ Tor Einar said.
‘Are you thinking about the teachers?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘In fact, I already know them all, apart from you two.’
‘But you’re not from here?’ Nils Erik said.
‘My grandmother lives here. I’ve been up every summer and Christmas since I was small.’
‘You’ve just finished gymnas as well, haven’t you?’ I said. ‘In Finnsnes?’
He nodded.
‘You don’t know someone there called Irene, do you?’ I said. ‘From Hellevika?’
‘Irene, yes,’ he said, brightening up. ‘Not as well as I’d like, I must admit. How come? Do you know her?’
‘That would be saying too much,’ I said. ‘But I met her on the bus on my way here. She seemed nice.’
‘Are you meeting her this evening? Is that the plan?’
I shrugged. ‘She’s coming anyway,’ I said.
Half an hour later we were walking up the hill from the flat. I was drunk in that pure merry way you can be from white wine, when your thoughts collide with one another like bubbles and what emerges when they burst is pleasure.
We had been at my place, I thought, and this filled me with pleasure.
We were colleagues and on our way to becoming friends, I reflected.
And I had written a damn good short story.
Pleasure, pleasure, pleasure.
And then there was this light, dim down among humans and things human, attended by a kind of finely honed darkness which became diffused in the light though did not possess or control it, only muted or softened it, high up in the sky it was gleamingly clean and clear.
Pleasure.
And there was this silence. The murmur of the sea, our footsteps on the gravel, the occasional noise coming from somewhere, a door being opened or a shout, all embraced by silence, which seemed to rise from the ground, rise from objects and surround us in a way which I didn’t formulate as primordial, though I sensed it was, for I thought of the silence in Sørbøvåg on summer mornings when I was a child there, the silence above the fjord beneath the immense Lihesten mountain, half-hidden by mist. The silence of the world. It was here too, as I walked uphill, drunk, with my new friends, and although neither it nor the light we walked in was the main event of the evening it played its part.
Pleasure.
Eighteen years old and on my way to a party.
‘That’s where she lives,’ Tor Einar said, pointing to the house I had strolled past one evening a few days ago.
‘Big house,’ Nils Erik said.
‘Yes, she lives with someone,’ Tor Einar said. ‘His name’s Vidar and he’s a fisherman.’
‘What else!’ I said, stopping at the door and raising my arm to ring the bell.
‘Here everyone just walks in,’ Tor Einar said. ‘We’re in Northern Norway now!’
I opened the door and went in. From upstairs came the sound of voices and music. Smoke hung in the air above the stairs. We quietly removed our shoes and went up. The floor above was open plan with the kitchen straight ahead, a living room at the back to the left, presumably the bedroom was at the back on the right.
There was a group of perhaps ten people in the living room chatting and laughing, squeezed around a table covered with bottles and glasses, cigarette packets and ashtrays. They were all stocky, many had moustaches, age-wise they ranged between twenty and forty.
‘Here come the teachers,’ one of them said.
‘Perhaps we’ll be given detention this evening,’ another said.
Everyone laughed.
‘Hi, folks,’ said Tor Einar.
‘Hi,’ said Nils Erik.
Hege, the only woman there, got up and fetched some chairs from the dining-room table by the window.
‘Sit yourselves down, boys,’ she said. ‘If you need glasses you’ll find them in the kitchen.’
I went in and stood alone staring up at the mountainside behind the house while mixing myself a screwdriver. For a moment I lingered in the doorway observing the people around the table, thinking they looked like trolls sitting there with their variously coloured drinks, depending on what they mixed with their vodka — a variety of juices, Sprite, Coke — with their pouches of tobacco from which they made endless roll-ups and with their moustaches, their dark eyes and the succession of stories, thinking how they came from the four corners of the earth to meet here once a year and act out their exotic natures among their own kind.
However, it was the other way round. They were the rule and I was the exception, the teacher among fishermen. So what was I doing here? Shouldn’t I be at home writing rather than here?
It had been a mistake to go into the kitchen alone. Nils Erik and Tor Einar had already been through the introductory rites, they were now comfortably ensconced alongside the fishermen, and I could have done that too, tagged along behind my colleagues and slipped in without being noticed.
I took a swig and went in.
‘And here we have the writer!’ one of them said. I recognised him at once, he was the fisherman who had dropped by to see me on the first day, Remi.
‘Hi, Remi,’ I said, proffering my hand.
‘Have you been on a name-learning course or what?’ he said, grasping it. Shook it up and down in a way that had not been done since the 1950s.
‘You’re the first fisherman I’ve ever met,’ I said. ‘So of course I remember your name.’
He laughed. I was pleased I’d had a drink before we left. If I hadn’t I would have stood tongue-tied in front of him.
‘The writer?’ Hege said.
‘Yes, he writes, this guy does. I’ve seen it with my own eyes!’
‘I didn’t know that,’ she said. ‘Do you have such fancy ideas?’
I sat down and nodded to her while smiling semi-apologetically and taking the tobacco pouch from my shirt pocket.
For the next hour I said nothing. I rolled cigarettes, smoked, drank, smiled when the others smiled, laughed when they laughed. Looked at Nils Erik, who was pretty drunk and seemed to be in on the jokey tone but wasn’t, he was different, there was something light and Østlandish about him, always on the outside. Not that they rejected him, because they didn’t, it was just that his jokes were of a fundamentally different character, which in this context seemed to expose him. He made puns, they didn’t, adopted a variety of roles, made faces and raised and lowered his voice, they didn’t. When he burst into laughter it was somehow unrestrained, bordering on the hysterical, it struck me; that too was completely different from them.