Jane and Lars Christian had rounded off her second evening with several glasses of red wine while watching a Norwegian variant on Curb Your Enthusiasm—Lars Christian did simultaneous translation and it was enjoyable. Jane was on her way to the bathroom when she noticed the door to Camilla’s bedroom was open a bit. The corridor light made a straight, narrow line that seemed to guide one’s steps across the carpet all the way to the bed where it lit up Camilla’s face on the pillow. Jane stopped and watched through the crack. It felt as if she was standing in the drizzle outside a huge generating station and sensed its power despite the stillness. For a long time, she stayed there with her hand on the door handle but her mind moved elsewhere in time and space. Someone came along and Jane said, unthinkingly, “She is breathing.”
Eva stared at her, looking bewildered. Then she firmly shut the door to her daughter’s room before vanishing into the bathroom without another word.
“Such a pity that you didn’t bring any of your books,” Lars Christian said. “They should be translated! Listen, Camilla…” and he bent over his daughter who was doing splits on a shaggy rug and touched her lightly with his foot. “Didn’t you say you’d order Jane’s books on Amazon?”
Camilla looked up at him.
“Yes… I thought maybe The Age of Plenitude. They have it in paperback as well.”
“No need for you to worry about the price, Camilla,” Lars Christian said. “We’ll pay. Of course. Besides, it will be good to have the proper bound volumes. Then Jane can sign them. Is that all right?”
Hearing this must have made Eva consider the possibility that Jane would be staying as long as it would take to send a parcel from the US to Europe.
“We were thinking of a trip in the car this weekend,” Lars Christian said. “Once Martin is back home. We could visit some things worth seeing. Is that OK with you?”
“Yeah!” Camilla said.
Jane looked across to Eva, who nodded in agreement. Ever since Jane had arrived, the family had been worrying away about their immediate surroundings: Would she find them disappointing? But she hadn’t expected to find majestic peaks rising above ice-blue fjords—it would be like believing the Grand Canyon could be viewed from a suburb in Washington, DC.
“That sounds very nice. Even though I’m perfectly happy with this,” she said and gestured toward the trailer.
11
ONCE INSIDE THE door of the motel room, she crashed on one of the beds and drew her knees up to her chest. And moaned.
“The whole bed is moving.”
“It’s because I’m pushing at it,” Ulf told her.
“Why do you want to bring me along to go camping?” she said. Her mouth was buried in the pillow and her voice had the tone of someone about to lose a wrestling match.
“It’s not camping, it’s research.”
A long silence, apart from the sound of alcohol-thinned blood being pumped through her ears. She realized that her question hadn’t been answered and repeated it with her eyes closed.
“Because I’m your friend in Norway,” Ulf replied.
Jane made a dissatisfied noise into the pillow.
“Because I like you. I told you so on the plane.”
He reached above her to open the window. A mild-mannered breeze blew down from the hillsides, entered past the gingham curtains, and touched the crest of her hip, where her sweater had slipped up. Ulf went to the bathroom and stayed in there for a long time. She assumed that he followed some elaborate evening ritual; he had a large toiletry bag for a man. Then he came back and sat down on his bed, which was separated from hers by a wooden board that cut her line of vision. To see him, she had to raise the leaden weight that was her head. His eyes were two blue fishes, each one immobile inside its individual glass bowl within a red plastic frame.
“Ulf, I’m a sixteen-year-old girl, totally inexperienced. And terrified. You won’t even get to undo my bra before I start screaming.”
“So, I won’t try.”
He stroked her hair. It was nice for as long as the window stayed open.
“You know, I like you, too, I think.”
“But?”
She inhaled, quickly, deeply.
“But you have no idea what it feels like to admit it.”
Dombås looked like an administrative outpost in Alaska with a tourist market thrown in. The sun beat straight down onto the sidewalk and filled the shopping street with still, amber light. Jane’s state was such that she needed an effort of will to place one foot in front of the other. Ulf, on the other hand, seemed unaffected by the day before. He was wearing a slightly fitted anorak and tight, dark-blue cargo trousers. She had glimpsed his back last night: slim and shadowed by muscular ridges.
“Do you know what the Inuit call a musk ox?” he asked.
“Surely they have seven hundred different names for it?” Jane said.
She had wanted to make him laugh.
“No, they don’t. A musk ox is ‘umingmak.’ The bearded one.”
“So, should I call you umingmak?” She felt herself blush as she said that. Without planning to, her voice had gone up at least half an octave.
She followed Ulf across the parking lot. As he entered the sports shop, an electronic bell pinged. He held the door open for her. A small, silver-haired man wearing a cardigan stood behind the shop counter, so he was probably the owner. A blonde woman in her twenties was unpacking clothes and placing them on a table. Jane assumed that the young woman was the owner’s daughter. Ulf chatted in Norwegian with her while she measured Jane. He might be telling the assistant all kinds of things about Jane.
Finally, the assistant said in English, “I think we had better begin with the first layer. The innermost one.”
She ushered Jane to a wall with a pegboard that displayed a collection of thick, well-designed cardboard containers, each one with its own illustration of models in underwear standing with their legs apart against a mountain backdrop. Men, women, and children, like an extended family of stunningly beautiful, weather-beaten superheroes.
Ulf’s family.
“Wool or synthetic fibers?” asked the assistant.
Ulf was full of good advice at times. At other times, he seemed to be arguing with the people in the shop who presumably knew a thing or two about sports equipment but lacked his hiking experience. But Ulf lost interest once Jane had chosen the most expensive set of underwear in merino wool and then the most expensive rainwear. He hung around while she bought a sleeping bag, an inflatable pillow, a tent, freeze-dried foods, a set of pans, a knife, a hat with a mosquito net and a couple of aluminum bottles.
The owner helped with choosing the right rucksack. The system of straps must be adjusted to fit her back, which was, he suggested, particularly nice and straight. It felt good to be prepared for all eventualities. It occurred to her that she had always been ill equipped. Always missing something, whatever she set out to do.
“Musk oxen? Then you must bring binoculars.”
Gosh, she should’ve thought of that herself.
Now and then, a price tag would lie belly-up. The cost of everything seemed perverse. She went to the changing rooms with a down-filled anorak under her arm, sat down on the stool, and took two pills before confronting her face in the mirror. She suddenly remembered a red-haired mother of two in the therapy group Dr. Rice had practically forced Jane to join—at the time, it was a fact that the red-haired woman had only one child, but it was usual for the members of the support groups to include the dead in their narratives, as if to make it clear they had not been forgotten: