Although his aggressive behaviour was frightening, I was struck, in the extremity of the situation, with the calm thought that in fact I had never seen him before, either. My way to and from work every day was always the same, always along this road, skidding on the frozen ruts, and I usually passed or saw the same people every time. I knew none of them, but in harsh weather a silent brotherhood of wintry endurance seems to arise.
This was the first time I had seen this bellicose little man. Although he was wearing a hood over his head, and a scarf was wrapped around his forehead, his eyes were visible — they were a pale and watery blue. He was crusted with frost and snow, but I could see he had dark and bushy eyebrows, a moustache that grew outwards and down, and a brown-red beard. More than this I could not see because he was, like me, wrapped up thickly against the cold.
‘Look, I’m sorry if you were hurt,’ I said, although the more I thought about it the less responsible for the accident I felt.
‘Goornak Town, that’s where you’re from! I’d know that annoying accent anywhere!’
I tried to step past him, get away from him.
‘When you come to Omhuuv, young man, you bloody behave yourself. You get that?’
I pushed past him, and staggered on across the frozen surface. He was shouting something after me, but because of the wind I could no longer hear his words.
I was shaken up by this unpleasant encounter, and not just because of the physical impact. Of course I was an outsider in the small town, a newcomer, but until that moment the worst I had experienced from local people was a mild curiosity about where I had come from and what I was doing in Omhuuv. In almost every case, the reactions were friendly.
I arrived at the theatre, warmed up in the office while drinking a cup of hot coffee with Jayr, then started my round of the daily chores. I was upset and preoccupied for an hour or two, but by the time we broke off for lunch I was back to normal.
As I walked home that evening, though, I kept an eye open for the man, distinctly wary of seeing him again.
The next morning, not far from where I lived, the man suddenly appeared. He seemed to have been lying in wait for me, because he dashed out of an alley that ran between two houses. He skidded forward like a man making a sports tackle, his feet thrusting at me and catching me on my shins. I fell violently to the side, on to the hard and impacted snow beside the edge of the road. One of the haulage trucks went by at that moment, narrowly missing my head.
I struggled to my feet, but my assailant was up before me. By the time I was upright again he had stumped off down the road, head low against his shoulders, his hands thrust deep into his pockets.
I hurried after him, grabbed his arm and spun him around.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ I shouted. ‘You nearly killed me!’
‘Then we’re quits, you bastard. Leave me alone!’
He pulled his arm away from me with surprising strength, and slithered on.
‘Look — what happened yesterday was an accident. That wasn’t! You attacked me!’
‘Call the policier if you have a complaint.’ He turned to look at me, and once again I saw that unremarkable but hostile face, the frosted eyebrows furrowed against the cold, the droopy moustache, the pale skin.
I grabbed hold of him again, angry and frightened, but with great ease he released himself from me and carried on up the road once more. He seemed immensely strong, for all his small build.
I brushed myself down, knocking the snow off my arms and chest. I tried to be calm, tried to put him out of my mind, but it was difficult.
I stared up the road after him, watching the way he moved. Everything about his body language evinced anger and hostility, a tightly coiled rage, compressed violently into his hunched body. I knew nothing about him except that from that moment on I resolved I would watch every step of the way when walking through the town.
Aching again from this second rough encounter, I stayed put. I watched him until he was out of sight, disappearing around a bend in the road, somewhere near the bus terminus. From the way he was waving his hands, I guessed he was still yelling at me.
Jayr said he was too busy to be bothered with Lord, so he delegated the preparatory work to me, as I had expected from the outset that he would. The great man’s arrival was not long away.
His image was already part of our daily background as Jayr had placed several of Lord’s rather ostentatious publicity photographs in the display cases by the theatre doors. I knew I had to buckle down to the task of obtaining the sheet of glass he had demanded.
My first problem was to locate somewhere that would supply plate glass of the high quality specified by him. There was nowhere at all in Omhuuv, and the businesses in the town I asked about this all told me that glass had to be specially ordered from a firm of glaziers in the neighbouring town of Ørsknes. Because I did not want to risk getting any detail wrong, I borrowed Jayr’s car and drove over to Ørsknes myself and contacted the glaziers. They were bemused by the exactitude of my requirements, but they obviously assumed it was for a shop front or window. Payment and delivery were soon arranged.
The fall of snow ceased during the night after I returned from Ørsknes.
When I was up and dressed in the morning I discovered that the long-awaited thaw had followed almost at once. The cold northeasterly wind at last dropped away, and had changed overnight into a balmy breeze from the south. For a day it seemed nothing in Omhuuv was going to change: the air trapped in the fjord had been chilled into what seemed to be a permanent freeze, and the snow in the streets and on the mountainsides was so deep, hard and solid that it felt that even a summer heatwave would never shift it. I walked the precarious streets with many of the other inhabitants of Omhuuv, still wrapped in protective clothes, sliding and skidding on the familiar frozen ruts, while a weak sun shone. But the hated north-easterly wind from the mainland was uncannily absent.
On the second day the thaw unmistakably began, with meltwater running through the streets, while the great frozen layers of impacted snow began to slide dangerously from the roofs. Seigniory workmen hurried from one building to the next, trying to control or manage the crashing of ice on to the pavements. Now at night I fell asleep to the burbling sounds of water running. There was water everywhere in the town, but most of it ran off into planned conduits leading down to the fjord.
All around the town streams and falls were appearing, and every day there were public warnings of likely avalanches in the hills above us. However winter was of course part of the normal life here, and long established avalanche barriers kept much of the danger out of the town. I was content to watch the steep mountainside I could see from my window, as it was transformed into a lacy pattern of white waterfalls.
On the third day the warm wind gave a daily rain shower, but it fell only in the late afternoons and helped speed the thaw. Every day was now a mild or even warm one, and the breeze from the south carried with it a smell that brought back to me memories of my childhood: somewhere in the warmer islands to the south of us the spring was already well established, and the wind bore scents of distant cedarwood, campion and herbs.
Jayr was more cheerful, because as the weather changed it seemed a signal of encouragement had gone out on some subconscious level. More bookings arrived with each delivery of mail or visit to the messaging service. Every morning he spent more than an hour on the theatre computer, selling and confirming seats for the long summer season ahead.
The sheet of plate glass I had ordered from the firm in Ørsknes was delivered as promised. It took the driver and his two mates, plus myself, to carry the bulky pane through the crowded backstage space and place it in the stage area. The driver gave me some padded mounts to rest it on, but it was obvious that it could not be left where it was.