“Mm. And both...”
“...hate.” Oleg grinned. “That’s when we grew roots. That was how you became my father.”
“Mm. A bad father.”
“Rubbish.”
“You think I was an average father?”
“An unusual father. Lousy grades in some subjects, world’s best in others. You saved me when you came back from Hong Kong. But it’s funny, I remember the little things best. Like the time you tricked me.”
“I tricked you?”
“When I finally managed to beat your Tetris record, you boasted that you knew all the countries in the world atlas in the bookcase. And you knew exactly what was going to happen after that.”
“Well...”
“It took me a couple of months, but by the time my classmates looked at me weirdly when I mentioned Djibouti, I knew the names, flags and capital cities of every country in the world.”
“Almost all.”
“All.”
“Nope. You thought San Salvador was the country and El Salvador—”
“Don’t even try.”
Harry smiled. And realised that was exactly what it was. A smile. Like the first glimpse of sun after months of darkness. Even if a new period of darkness lay ahead of him, now that he had finally woken up, but it couldn’t be worse than the one that lay behind him.
“She liked that,” Harry said. “Listening to us talk.”
“Did she?” Oleg looked off to the north.
“She used to bring the book she was reading, or her knitting, and sit down near us. She didn’t bother to interrupt or join in the conversation, she didn’t even bother to listen to what we were talking about. She said she just liked the sound. She said it was the sound of the men in her life.”
“I liked that sound too,” Oleg said, pulling the fishing rod towards him so that the tip bowed respectfully towards the surface of the water. “You and Mum. After I’d gone to bed I used to open the door just so I could listen to you. You used to talk quietly, and it sounded like you’d already said pretty much everything, understood each other. That all that needed adding was the occasional key word here or there. Even so, you used to make her laugh. It was such a safe sound, the best sound to fall asleep to.”
Harry chuckled. Coughed. Thought that sound carried a long way in this weather, possibly all the way to land. He tugged dutifully at his own fishing rod.
“Helga says she’s never seen two grown-ups as in love with each other as you and Mum. That she hopes we can be like you.”
“Mm. Maybe she ought to hope for more than that.”
“More than what?”
Harry shrugged. “Here comes a line I’ve heard too many men say. Your mother deserved better than me.”
Oleg smiled briefly. “Mum knew what she was getting, and it was you she wanted. She just needed that break to remember that. For the pair of you to remember Old Tjikko’s roots.”
Harry cleared his throat. “Listen, maybe it’s time for me to tell—”
“No,” Oleg interrupted. “I don’t want to know anything about why she threw you out. If that’s OK with you? And nothing about the rest of it either.”
“OK,” Harry said. “It’s up to you how much you want to know.” That was what he used to say to Rakel. She had made a habit of asking for less rather than more information.
Oleg ran his hand along the side of the boat. “Because the rest of the truth is bad, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“I heard you in the spare room last night. Did you get any sleep?”
“Mm.”
“Mum’s dead, nothing can change that, and for the time being it’s enough for me to know that someone other than you was guilty. If I discover that I do need to know, maybe you can tell me later on.”
“You’re very wise, Oleg. Just like your mother.”
Oleg gave him a sardonic smile and looked at the time. “Helga will be waiting for us. She’s bought some cod.”
Harry looked down at the empty bucket in front of him. “Smart woman.”
They reeled their lines in. Harry looked at his watch. He had a ticket for an afternoon flight back to Oslo. He didn’t know what was going to happen after that; the plan he had worked out with Johan Krohn went no further than this.
Oleg put the oars in the rowlocks and started to row.
Harry watched him. Thought back to the time he used to row while his grandfather sat in front of him, smiling and giving Harry little bits of advice. How he should use his upper body and straighten his arms, row with his stomach, not his biceps. That he should take it gently, never stress, find a rhythm, that a boat gliding evenly through the water moves faster even with less energy. That he should feel with his buttocks to make sure he was sitting in the middle of the bench. That it was all about balance. That he shouldn’t look at the oars, but keep his eyes on the wake, that the signs of what had already happened showed you where you were heading. But, his grandfather had said, they told you surprisingly little about what was going to happen. That was determined by the next stroke of the oars. His grandfather took out his pocket watch and said that when we get back on shore, we look back on our journey as a continuous line from the point of departure to the point of arrival. A story, with a purpose and a direction. We remember it as if it were here, and nowhere but here, that we intended the boat to meet the shoreline, he said. But the point of arrival and the intended destination were two different things. Not that one was necessarily better than the other. We get to where we get to, and it can be a consolation to believe that was where we wanted to get to, or at least were on our way towards the whole time. But our fallible memories are like a kind mother telling us how clever we are, that our strokes with the oar were clean and fitted into the story as a logical, intentional part. The idea that we may have gone off course, that we no longer know where we are or where we are going, that life is a chaotic mess of clumsy, fumbled oar strokes, is so unappealing that we prefer to rewrite the story in hindsight. That’s why people who appear to have been successful and are asked to talk about it often say it was the dream — the only one — they’d had since they were little, to succeed in whatever it was that they had been successful in. It is probably honestly meant. They have probably just forgotten about all the other dreams, the ones that weren’t nurtured, that faded and disappeared. Who knows, perhaps we would acknowledge the meaningless chaos of coincidences that make up our lives if — instead of writing autobiographies — we had written down our predictions for life, how we thought our lives would turn out. We could forget all about them, then take them out later on to see what we had really dreamed about.
Around now his grandfather would have taken a long swig from his hip flask, then looked at the boy, at Harry. And Harry would have looked at the old man’s heavy eyes, so heavy that they looked like they were going to fall out of his head, as if he were going to cry egg white and iris. Harry hadn’t thought about it at the time, but he thought about it now — that his grandfather had sat there hoping his grandson would have a better life than him. Would avoid the mistakes he had made. But perhaps also that one day, when the boy was grown up, he would sit like this, watching his son, daughter, grandchild row. And give them some advice. See some of it help, some get forgotten or ignored. And feel his chest swell, his throat tighten, in a strange mixture of pride and sympathy. Pride because the child was a better version of himself. Sympathy because they still had more pain ahead of them than behind them, and were rowing with the conviction that someone, they themselves perhaps, or at least their grandfather, knew where they were going.