As it happened, she had driven quite a long way past their area. They agreed that she would return to the highway and drive back toward Oslo. At a certain exit ramp she was to turn off and stop at a parking lot by the side of the road.
While she waited in the car, she pondered the reaction her Norwegian relatives would expect from her when they met for the first time. Would it strike the right note to do a full, shrieking outburst of joy, American-style? Only last night, she had observed three of these on TLC, though the happiness turned into childish pouting when one of the participants failed to find the wedding dress of her dreams.
She had started with genealogy, mostly because she wanted to have something to tell Dr. Rice and others who cared to ask.
I thought I ought to find out about my roots. It feels important at this point in time.
To her surprise, no one seemed surprised. It was a fact that, unlike most of her childhood friends, she had never bothered turning up in Stoughton for the May 17th procession on Norway’s national day. She had never been to Little Norway before it closed, hadn’t even owned a coffee mug inscribed Uff da! Generally, concern about biological origins wasn’t her thing. She was Writer-Jane, the intellectual among them. Fundamentally, she had decided that the all-American worship of family history was fascistoid. Once, at a dinner party, she had ended up in a heated discussion on the subject: a friend had several times used the words pure bloodline to describe her links to the old country in Europe. It didn’t help that the country was Germany.
All the same, she had become hooked the moment she opened MyHeritage.com and clicked the Start button. She sat in front of the screen for days on end. As the blank fields in her family tree gradually became populated, the growing orderliness felt good. She dug out the histories of her distant relatives in cuttings libraries and registers, and found that they had the grand, inclusive sweep of novels, which she missed being able to write. Rooting around in digitized records and parish documents constantly reminded her that death, viewed from far enough away, amounts to no more than faded ink on dry paper.
For some time before she set out on the journey, she had been exchanging emails with unknown, reserved Norwegians, who were typically better schooled in the English language than her undergraduates. It was a liberating kind of correspondence. The recipients of her queries knew nothing about her other than fragments of distant family relationships:
“It would seem to indicate that either my grandfather or my great-grandfather changed his name from Askeland to Ashland. Also, it confirms that Hjertrud Askeland, whose descendants live in Salinas, have nothing to do with this matter. I feel we have reached a conclusion and can only reiterate that I am very grateful for…”
Lars Christian Askeland-Nilsen had seemed really fascinated by her project. Unasked, he had searched the collection Letters from America, held in the National Library in Oslo, and found correspondence between the man who begat Jane’s branch of the family and the people he had left behind in Norway. Lars Christian translated extracts from these letters and sent them to her. She Googled him and discovered pictures taken at a cross-country run: his running shorts were tight and shiny and his smiling face was splattered with mud.
But the brutality described in the translated letters was hard to take.
“I had no idea that malaria was so prevalent in Texas at the time. Not to mention the Indians,” Lars Christian commented.
Three of Fredrik Melchior Askeland’s letters from the middle of the nineteenth century were left. In them, he listed the five children he and his wife had lost; the youngest was just seven months old. The references to their deaths were made with the absolute minimum of emotion, and interspersed with notes on the weather and accounts of the autumn harvests—so-and-so many barrels of rye and bushels of corn, and I have to tell you that little Martha was taken from us this past August.
“This F.M. Askeland, what is his problem? His wife doesn’t seem too bothered either. The children’s mother!” Jane wrote in an excitable email.
“I have come to think that the reason is their very strong belief in God,” Lars Christian wrote in reply. “They profoundly believe that they will meet their children again.”
She had liked his answer. She imagined Lars Christian writing to her while wearing his tiny, shiny shorts. The more they wrote to each other—it was a huge number of messages, though she began to wonder if she hadn’t sent many more than she had received—the stronger her wish to go to Norway became. Lars Christian had uploaded pictures of family skiing trips, apparently in perpetual sunshine. She imagined being with them in the pictures.
She hesitated with her hand on the door handle, then inhaled deeply, left the car, and went to meet the Askeland-Nilsen family. The ground was scattered with wet leaves. The rumbling highway traffic drowned her too-early “Hi.”
The daughter hung back behind her father. Her mother stepped forward.
“Jane?”
They shook hands. The fourteen-year-old, too. Her hand was warm, slightly moist, and she kept glancing at her father.
“Any moment now, I’ll start looking for family characteristics,” Jane said with a laugh as she scanned each one of them. It wasn’t her true reason. All three seemed to have dressed for a moderately severe hike. The morning mist had left drops clinging to their pale eyebrows and trickling down the synthetic material of their anoraks.
It wasn’t Lars Christian but Eva, his wife, who took the lead. “You must be tired. Have you had breakfast?” Her hands moved about like little birds as she spoke.
Lars Christian’s light voice interjected with scraps of information that were more or less irrelevant. “If you’d like a cup of coffee, we’ve got some cake at home.”
“President Obama had a tough time the other day!”
“Camilla has looked forward so much to showing you our new house.”
The girl stood straight-backed, her eyes following the talk. All three of them were beautiful. They could have been sports stars, of the nice polite kind that answer the TV interviewer’s questions factually. Long-distance runners, for instance. Lars Christian’s face was so narrow, with crisply defined features, that the skin seemed loose here and there. Eva was just as slim, which gave her a youthful look. Her hairstyle was practical, her face freckled and her eyelashes so pale they were almost invisible. Their daughter was long-limbed and innocent: she made Jane think of perfect, green apples in a new, transparent plastic bag. Suddenly, she regretted not having hugged them all while there was still a faint chance. If only she could leave the rental car behind, join them in their Volvo and sit in the back next to the shy teenager and pick up faint traces of the family’s smell in her nostrils.
9
THE IDEA HAD been to camp just inside the boundary of a national park and use it as a base for observing the herd of musk oxen, just like everybody else did: safari tours were laid on, there were authorized guides and sets of guidelines about the recommended safe distances—all that is required for potential encounters between large wild animals and modern people. But the day they arrived at the reserve, she in charge of the rucksack and Ulf of four aluminum boxes the size of coffins, the musk oxen had moved northward. It meant they had to drop Ulf’s plan to drive his all-terrain vehicle along the graveled tracks that had been cleared by the Norwegian army when the area had been used for ordnance training. Instead they had to prepare to proceed on foot. At first, she thought it was a good thing.