Ulf flicked the last nut into his mouth.
“I shall have to go up into the mountains tomorrow.”
He nodded in the general direction of the tall pickup truck that was parked in the yard in front of the motel. There was a snow scooter on the truck’s trailer and an ATV as well, squeezed in between jerricans and large boxes.
“How long will you be away?”
The question sounded intrusive but he replied, “I figured you might like to come along. Sleep in a tent. See something completely different.”
She emitted a sound somewhere between a snort and a curious “What?”
“I mean it. It would be good for you,” he said in a low voice. “And good fun, too.”
Then he got up and started to fire up a barbecue that stood on the grass.
“Can you guess what musk oxen do if a train manages to brake in time?”
It sounded like the introduction to a joke.
“No?”
“They turn around and head-butt the locomotive.”
“It’s not true!” Jane said and giggled.
“It’s the truth,” Ulf confirmed without moving a muscle in his face.
He had sprayed the charcoal with lighter fluid and stood still with a match in his hand before turning to her, as if she had demanded an explanation.
“It’s got to soak in for a few minutes.”
She nodded.
“Look, I bought something special because you were coming.” He rooted around in the truck and pulled out a bottle. “It’s the local aquavit. Called Musk Ox.”
She examined the hairy animal on the label. It looked like a Star Wars creature.
They sat down with a tumblerful each. The smell of warm lighter fluid rolled over them in waves. Just like the shame and guilt she felt, being here with a strange man.
Ulf, too, seemed to become affected by the alcohol.
When she said “Are they a bit like buffaloes, then?” he burst out laughing and slapped his thighs.
“Buffaloes belong to a completely different group! Musk oxen are more closely related to sheep… Think of them as giant sheep,” he advised.
She had a vision of an implausibly large, bad-tempered sheep. And they were both laughing now, though not exactly at the same thing.
Abruptly, Jane became very still. She realized that she had laughed for the first time in seven months. She stood and strode out onto the grass.
“Did I say something wrong?” Ulf asked.
She sped up as she came closer to the charcoal grill and then focused all her strength into her right leg. Her foot struck a point low down on the lower half of the sphere. For a brief moment the whole thing floated in midair before the grill hit the ground. The lid shot off to the left and a cloud of ash and embers rose against the backdrop of the darkening sky.
Toward the end of the evening, Ulf told her about a remarkable ethological phenomenon. The playlist on his phone, which he had connected to two small loudspeakers placed on the windowsill, was running through its loop for the fifth time and had reached the marvelous hymn from The Lion King. She had reached the stage of hard drinking where you feel more and more aware of yourself and hence more lost than when you started drinking. Her left elbow was forever slipping off the smooth white armrest of her plastic chair, as if one of her arms were shorter than the other. She glanced sideways at Ulf while he talked. She was ready to like him for being a traveler, a rootless person who accepted no responsibility for others, even though such descriptions were often euphemisms for asshole. But, in Ulf’s case, everything indicated that he was a good person. There was nothing in it for him when he spent time listening to her, cooking and putting on thick workman’s gloves to pick up glowing lumps of charcoal. Or when he reached out his hand to her that day in the airport.
Ulf was telling her that if one approached a herd of musk oxen closely enough for the animals to feel threatened, they would form a circle around the calves.
“The calves are kept inside the circle?” Her consonants were slurred.
“That’s right. The heads of the adults are all turned outward, and their horns are lowered.”
“All pointing outward?” She grew smaller where she sat.
“Yes, outward. The cows decide how to form the protective circle. The mothers, in other words. And the massed horns form an impenetrable wall. Nothing must harm the calves behind this barricade. Not the wolves. Nor the bears. Nothing!”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing at all.”
10
“SO YOU HAVE never wanted to put together a family?”
Presumably, language differences explained this kind of thing, set phrases that simply didn’t work in translation. Jane imagined a family-making kit, a penis and a vagina screwed together, eventually creating a complete dollhouse.
“Well, no, what with writing and so on…”
Eva’s eyebrows rose almost imperceptibly as she lifted the teacup level with her self-confident, girlish breasts.
The explanation was too feeble and Jane tried again.
“I have never met the right man.”
“Of course, yes. No, I see,” Eva smiled toward Lars Christian, who was seated in a svelte angular armchair, tapping on his phone.
Jane clutched the edge of the seat cushion.
“But it’s not too late for you,” Camilla said.
“Thanks, honey,” Jane said and winked to her.
Camilla was sitting next to her mother on the sofa. They didn’t look alike.
Camilla had her father’s eyes with the flecked, blue irises of some husky dogs and cool, symmetrical features. She practiced rhythmic gymnastics four days a week. In America, she would have been the prettiest girl in school.
Jane turned to look out through the window, meant to offer a view across the lake and, beyond it, Oslo’s low skyline, but it had been blocked for the duration of her stay by the yellowing side of an old trailer. The Askeland-Nilsen house had been finished only the previous month: it was a Scandinavian dream home in glass and untreated timber, and so soberly designed that one forgot just how comfortable it was, with one bathroom for each family member and iPhone-mediated temperature control. The trailer housed a young Polish couple, who so far had laid the rolls of turf, fenced the entire site, and stained the wall timbers and were now putting down the terrace flags. He was named Andrej, or, probably, Andrzej, and, confusingly, she was Eva. Jane had taken note of bottles of vodka on a shelf above the gas stove in the trailer. She watched the Poles from the guest room (where she slept better than she had for the last six months) as they changed their small seating area into beds every night.
The hardest thing about staying with the Askeland-Nilsens, Jane had found, was to simulate normal breathing behavior: she couldn’t groan whenever she felt like it or keep holding her breath until she had to inhale desperately to rise to the surface. Also, she mustn’t kick objects left on the stairs or howl with rage if the toothpaste didn’t come out easily.
Camilla slid down from the sofa and sat instead on the rug near her father’s chair.
“I can’t help thinking that there are American men who feel threatened by women who… in all modesty… have got something done,” Jane said, sounding thoughtful.
Eva looked at her and sighed. For a moment, they shared a worldwide state of female anger. Then Jane turned away to observe Lars Christian.
Her visit was quite obviously Lars Christian’s doing: he was responsible for the invitation—not Eva. Jane also had a suspicion that Eva minded the intensity of that initial exchange of emails. When Lars Christian wanted to take her to the National Library in Oslo to show her the Letters from America collection—the bound volumes were not available for borrowing—something else suddenly came up and, taking Eva with him, he went off in the Volvo.