“It’s all happening,” Ulf muttered while they redid the packing, leaving the heaviest equipment behind in a shed near the railway track at an outpost called Hjerkinn. The air around them seemed to radiate darkness. What little she could see of the surroundings looked like nothing she had seen before—the erratic beams of the head lamps fell on stacks of tar-coated timber, abandoned construction machinery, piles of gravel and stunted trees, bent and twisted by the wind. It didn’t look like a place meant for people.
Ulf led the way past a station building, older than the birth of railways by the looks of things. He walked three paces ahead of her, staring at his cell phone, which he had used all day to stay in touch with local contacts who had suggestions about where to find the musk oxen. A few minutes later, they arrived at a building that had an outdoor lamp spreading a feeble light. Ulf unlocked a door and went inside.
“Where are we?” she asked once she had wrenched the rucksack through the doorway.
“The wild reindeer center,” Ulf mumbled.
He crossed the room and found the light switch. They were in a large hall with yellowish wall paneling and a staircase painted moss-green. Ulf walked upstairs and waved at her to follow. Given how far they had gone into the wilderness, the first floor was absurdly modern—all glass partitions, nameplates, computers. Ulf rolled out a camping mattress on the smooth carpet.
“We’ll start walking at sunrise,” he said, a taciturn explorer in the middle of an office landscape.
“Do you think we’ll find them?”
He stroked her cheek and the gesture seemed simply reassuring.
“Yes, I do. And the territorial groups are due to join up, which is precisely what we have come here to observe.”
She reflected on Ulf’s tendency to make technical observations and assume that she would know what he was on about. The conclusion must presumably be that he was an absent-minded professional nerd as well as, maybe, a fascinating lone wolf. So far, they had spent only one and a half days together.
When she phoned him at four-thirty one morning, she had been sitting in the rental car in front of the Askeland-Nilsens’ house. This moment, she had felt, was the nadir of her life. As the dawn lightened the air above the Oslo fjord, turning the world an insubstantial shade of gray, she sensed the weight of all she had drunk the day before, and all she had said and done. Ulf offered her a final option, her very last way out. She imagined Ulf as he had been. On the plane. The way he had looked at her when he thought she wouldn’t notice. She wanted to let herself topple over backwards and find herself supported.
Whatever. Things could not get any worse.
“Do you remember saying something about a friend in Norway?”
There was no need to say anything else. She escaped further humiliation.
“Can you manage to drive to Dombås?” His voice was just as pleasant as she had remembered it.
“Where is that?” she asked.
“Follow the E6.”
“Are you sure?”
“About how to get here?”
She thought he was trying to be funny and smiled with tears running down her cheeks.
On the way up the valley, she experienced the familiar feeling of having just learned how to breathe, and that it was something she still needed to practice. As the day grew brighter and the sky bluer, her sense of alienation increased. She stopped a couple of times, climbed out of the car to take in yet another beautiful view, finding everything dizzyingly unreal. What was she doing here? Why was she standing in this place, alone, next to a car that wasn’t hers, just off a road she didn’t know in a country she had never been to before and staring out into its landscape? Had she really spoken with Ulf on the phone or imagined it?
He hugged her when she arrived. She leaned her head against his chest and tried to make herself stop sobbing.
“It will work out. Surely you remember that Inuit saying?”
Realizing how good it felt to be held by him, she suppressed the heightened sense of strangeness that came with his smell, his hands resting on her back.
Ulf was staying in a run-down motel, a wooden one-story shack, once painted red. It had a reception area at one end. Every room had its own small terrace furnished with two plastic chairs and a plastic table with an ashtray on it. On Ulf’s table, there was also a dead pansy in a white pot marked Grand Jardin des Fleurs.
The evening was exceptionally mild for Norway in October, or so Ulf said. They settled on the terrace and started drinking beer—she drained the first glass in one go, as if she had just crossed a desert.
She told Ulf everything. She soon found herself using technical narrative devices and had little pangs of nausea every time she gave her story a touch of foreshadowing or a new plot twist. Ulf chewed nuts from a bag of chili-flavored peanuts, and grinned toward the sun that warmed them. He put his head empathetically to the side as he listened and said “oh, no” or “yes, I see” or “I see what you mean.” His beard wasn’t as neatly trimmed as it had been before. He wore glasses, which he hadn’t done on the plane, with frames made of transparent, bright-red plastic of the kind one might buy in order to look young but which no young person would have bought.
When she had concluded the last chapter in the tale of her five days in the house of the Askeland-Nilsens, Ulf asked, “So, you just left?”
“I sneaked outside and set off down the drive.”
“Why not tell them the truth?”
She shrugged and raised part of her upper lip, then realized how many of her youthful facial expressions had come back during the last six months or so.
“Because you wanted to make a fresh start,” Ulf went on. It was a statement, not a question.
But it hadn’t been that simple.
“I didn’t want to end up being angry with them. And didn’t want to place them in a situation in which they’d be bound to say something idiotic.”
“Like what?”
“How are you? for instance.”
Ulf grabbed a handful of nuts and his forehead creased.
“Or, even worse: You’re so strong, I wouldn’t have been able to carry on,” she added.
The hand that was transferring the nuts to his mouth stopped halfway.
“Did you contact them today, after you left?”
“Goodness, no.”
“But won’t they wonder where you are?”
“Shouldn’t think so.”
“So, they haven’t even called to find out how you are?”
“No. I’ve only had one call. It was the rental car people, who wanted to know how long I wanted to keep the car.”
Ulf’s lips moved as she spoke. It made for an oddly intimate impression. She really appreciated the way he hadn’t made a big performance about how eccentric it was to drive a whole day in order to pour out your life story to a man you had only met once and had nearly snubbed. It spoke well of his character, somehow.
“What do you think the girl is feeling?”
“I think the entire family is relieved that I left.”
“Did you feel sad?”
“Feel sad?”
Her tone of voice suggested that feeling sad was simply pathetic.
“Ill at ease?”
“If I did, it would have been an entirely natural emotional response to the situation.”
The sentence was problematic. Sitting at the table, she occupied more space now. Her mouth had become broader. She had lost track of how much she had drunk. And how many pills she had taken.
The view from Ulf’s terrace could have been magnificent if it hadn’t been for the building that stood in the way. It had apparently been erected in the same joyless spirit as the motel. The windows were boarded over and the text on the wall said Dombås Cinema. The ridge of its roof was almost exactly level with the tops of the mountains.