You must be surprised to see me, Jatgeir says

  and I think that I probably can’t say that I was just pacing around my living room thinking that I should go see him, and definitely not that there’d been a knocking and pounding and hammering on the door for a good long time and then when I went to open the door there was no one there, and that I’d got a bit anxious and scared and so I’d thought I’d go see my old friend

  Come in, I say

  I believe I will, he says

  Come in old man, I say

  and Jatgeir walks through the door and I say it’s been a long time since we’ve seen each other, I honestly can’t remember when the last time was, it’s been so long, I say and Jatgeir says he’d almost say it must be several years and I say I can believe it and Jatgeir says no, he can’t remember exactly when the last time was

  No, our memory’s not as good as it used to be, I say

  True enough, he says

  That’s how things are with us, Elias, he says

  Elias, Jatgeir says

  Yes, I say

  When I got here I saw someone standing outside your door, he says

  Someone was standing outside my door, I say

  Yes, yes, I saw someone there, I saw it when I came around the corner of the house, he says

  and I don’t say anything

  And the strange thing was that he just suddenly disappeared, he says

  It was a man, I say

  No, I can’t say for sure, but I’m sure that someone was standing there, he says

  Really, I say

  And it wasn’t so strange that someone was there, the strange thing was that he suddenly disappeared, yes, vanished into thin air, he says

  It was eerie, he says

  Yes, I say

  and I think about whether I should tell Jatgeir after all that there’d been the sound of knocking, yes, practically pounding on my door, and that it had scared me, but

  maybe the best thing would be to not tell anyone about that, probably, because then everything would just get even more frightening, I’d get even more anxious, or maybe not, because at least now I knew for certain that some kind of ghost had been at my door, there couldn’t be any doubt about it now, or maybe there could, in some strange abstract way, abstract, yes, now that’s a word to use in this situation, but a ghost probably is abstract if it exists at all, because you can’t say it’s concrete, can you, a spirit without a body in some way is probably what a ghost is, or however you’d say it, but it was weird that Jatgeir knocked on my door right afterwards, could it be that the knocking was a sign he was about to come, a warning, an omen, as they say, but can that really happen, for someone to, for example, knock before they actually come and knock, no, it can’t be, things like that don’t happen, but anyway Jatgeir’s here now, but he needs to come in and not just stay standing in the doorway, I have to ask him again to come in and then I can offer him a cup of coffee

  You’ll take a cup of coffee, I say

  and Jatgeir just looks at me

  You’re not scared of ghosts? he says

  and I don’t really know what to say, and Jatgeir sort of answers for me, no probably not really, he says and I can only nod in response

  So that’s how it is, Jatgeir says

  and then it’s quiet again, and suddenly, without warning, Jatgeir says that he has to go home

  But you just got here, I say

  Yes but there’s something I forgot, he says

  I just realized it, he says

  So I’m going now, I have to hurry, he says

  and I say that well anyone can forget something, but he should come by again soon, I say

  But I actually just wanted to say a quick hello, he says

  I need to hurry, he says

  and I say I understand, yes, even though I don’t understand anything he’s saying, no

  Talk to you soon, Jatgeir says

  See you later, I say

  and I see Jatgeir turn around and start to walk away from the house, he’s walking slowly, and then he sort of disappears around the corner of the house, and I stay where I am looking out the open door and for some reason I decide that I want to leave the door open, but I can’t do that, it’s cold outside and I can’t leave the door open and let all the cold in, no, it’d be better if I took a walk, I’ll just put on my warm coat and then my black sailor’s cap, the one I always wear, and I don’t exactly know why I’ve worn a black sailor’s cap all these years, but there it is, so I’ll put my things on and head out to The Vaim General Store, because it’s probably open, but I can’t think of anything I need to buy, still I can just take a walk over there, I think, since I don’t know where else I could go, if there was a meeting at The Vaim Prayerhouse I’d have gone there, yes, I’d even go to Jatgeir’s house, if he hadn’t just been here, so if I want to see people I guess I’ll just go to The Vaim General Store then, but on Sunday there’s service at The Vaim Church, not that I’m a believer, but I go to the prayerhouse and the church anyway just to be with other people, and I’m kind of a believer too, in my way, and I look forward to going to church on Sundays, I think, so off I go to The Vaim General Store, because maybe I can talk a little with the guys who are usually

  there at The Quay, and then I’ll probably remember some little thing I can buy, but I was just there to do my shopping a couple days ago so I can’t think of anything I can buy today, but the guys at The Quay will definitely be there, at least some, today too, so I can probably talk to them for a bit, the way I sometimes do, not that often, I’m not one of the guys who hangs around there all the time, but I don’t want to stay home anyway, I need to calm my nerves, as they say, so let’s put on that sailor’s cap and outer coat and these good solid shoes and then I’m off, yes, and I put them on and go out the door, and shut the front door behind me and then I walk down the side road to the country road and then I take a left and then go straight down to The Vaim General Store, no, I don’t want to think about that knocking on the door, or that short visit from Jatgeir either, I think and without thinking about either thing I walk fast, because it’s a cool night, and I try to think of something I can buy at The Vaim General Store, but I can’t think of anything, so I don’t even need to go into the store, I can just go down to The Quay and talk for a bit with the guys there, because over there, yes, there are some guys standing there the way there usually tend to be, and that’s good, isn’t it, because there isn’t always someone there even if there usually is, but they don’t look too talkative today, they’re just standing there silently with their heads bent, not how they usually stand there, they usually stand there talking a little and usually laughing about this or that, so nothing’s the way it usually is today, I think and then they hear me walking up and everyone looks up at me and then they look back down again and it doesn’t look like any of them are going to say here comes our prayerhouse man today, or here comes our churchman, no, it doesn’t look like any of them has anything at all to say today, but I’ll probably still go over to them, there’s nothing else I can really do since I’m already on my way towards the guys on The Quay, and I go down to them, I stop, don’t say anything, and none of them looks at me, they just stand there looking down and now someone’s got to say something

  Not too chatty today are you, I say

  and it takes a long time before one of them looks straight ahead instead of down

  Yes, it’s sad, he says

  and I stand there and wonder what he means, what he’s saying is sad

  That he’s gone, yes, he says

  And you were such good friends, you and him, another one says

  and again it’s silent

  What are you talking about, I say

  and all the guys standing there, maybe four or five guys, look up and lean towards me

  Yes, I say

  That he’s gone? I say

  Yes, Jatgeir, he says

  What do you mean? I say

  Jatgeir died today, he says

  and he looks at me not understanding

  Jatgeir, I say

  and no one says anything

  You haven’t heard? one of them says then

  Heard what? I say

  That Jatgeir died today, he says

  and I shake my head

  No, but, I say

  He was found floating in the sea, dead, next to his boat, he says

  I was just talking to him, yes, it can’t have been more than half an hour ago, I say

  and they look at me again, not understanding

  But he was found several hours ago, drowned, one of them says

  I just saw him, yes, I talked to him right before I came down here, and it’s not that long a walk, I say

  No, he was found a couple hours ago, drowned, one of them says

  She, yes, that common-law partner of his, right, she found him floating in the sea next to his motorboat, he says

  And she couldn’t manage to pull him back onto land, and then she found a rope and she tied him to the dock and then, he says

  And then I came walking by, he says

  And then she shouted I had to come help her, and when I went down there I saw Jatgeir lying there floating in the cold water with his nose pointing up in the air, he says

  and again no one says anything and I think now that’s too much for me, that’s just too much, I don’t understand anything in the world anymore, because I was just talking to Jatgeir, and he was as alive and well as ever, and didn’t we talk about how I should visit him, no, we didn’t talk about that, but still, I think

  I was just talking to Jatgeir, I say

  Yes, right before I came here, I say

  Yes well then he rose up from the dead, one of them says

  Yes like another Christ, he says

  There’s a lot you can accuse Jatgeir of, but he wasn’t some other Christ, another one says

  But you know more about that kind of thing than we do, a third one says

  The doctor came and looked at him and declared him dead, there was nothing to do to try to save him, one says

  and it’s silent, totally silent, and my thoughts kind of go back and forth without them being thought, and I’m frozen in place, just standing there

  Yes, the two of you were good friends, one says

  Yes, I say

  Yes, even if you were a prayerhouse person, Elias, and he sure wasn’t, one says

  and again it’s silent, and I think that I probably can’t just stay standing here, I have to keep going, whatever that means, I think

  Yes, it’s sad, one says

  Very sad, another one says

  And so unexpected, he says

  Because he’s spent his whole life on the water, another one says

  I can’t understand it, a third one says

  No, I say

  It’s like there’s nothing you can say about it, one says

  and then what they’re saying turns into a droning buzz of voices, and I can’t tell the difference between what one of them is saying and what the others are saying, the words and the sentences blend into one another the same way my thoughts are blending into one another, and I was just talking to Jatgeir, but, no, I can’t understand it, and then it probably was him who knocked on my door, yes, after he’d already drowned, yes, that’s how it must have been, that’s the only explanation, if I can call it an explanation, and it’s spooky, I think, but why did he come by to talk to me after he was dead, yes, like back in the old days, as if nothing had changed, no, probably no one can understand things like that, I think, it was like he came to say goodbye, I think, and I guess I can’t do anything but go back home now, because what else can I do then, I don’t have anywhere else to go

  Yes, okay, see you later, I say

  and there’s a sound like thanks you too or something like that from the guys there on The Quay and then I turn around and start to walk home

  See you at the prayerhouse, one of them says behind me

  Or in church, another one says

  Yes and of course at Jatgeir’s funeral, a third one says

  and I think that it’s unbelievable, but Jatgeir was a good person, and my only friend in Vaim, yes, probably the best friend I had in my whole adult life, and if he’s gone now, yes, then he’s gone, that’s for certain, and as for what he believed or didn’t believe, we never talked about that, and he probably never set foot in The Vaim Prayerhouse or The Vaim Church either, but what does that mean, no, I thought, and I thought that this drowning had something to do with Eline in a way, that he couldn’t stand living with her anymore, that he got careless and fell into the sea because of that, either he was going to just check on his boat or he was going for a little ride, but if that was what happened then it should have really happened a long time ago because Eline had been living in his house for a year and a day, she just moved in, just did what she wanted, yes, that’s really it, she got on board his boat some way or another, and Jatgeir couldn’t get her off his boat, she was just there, on the boat and later in his house, and who knows, maybe it was because he’d named his boat Eline that she dared to do it, I didn’t know, but why in the world had he named his boat Eline and then someone named Eline came on board and moved in with him, no, it was impossible to understand, I think, and I think that now I’ll go straight home and then I’ll pull myself together and pray for Jatgeir, I think, and I’ll miss him, because if you could say I had any friend at all in Vaim it was Jatgeir, in all of Vaim his was the only house I’ve ever been in, and he was the only person who ever came through the door of my humble home, I never really got to know the people I met at The Vaim Prayerhouse and in The Vaim Church, and I probably won’t ever get to know them either, but after this Eline moved in with Jatgeir, yes, it wasn’t so nice to see him anymore, I kind of got the feeling that Eline didn’t like me coming to visit, and she most likely didn’t like Jatgeir coming to see me either and that’s why he stopped coming over to my house, and I stopped going over to his house too, so it was not least because of that that it was such a surprise to see him standing outside my door today, and then this, yes, that he drowned today, and around the same time he was talking to me, no, it’s unbelievable and you can’t understand it either, but anyway he probably came over to say goodbye maybe, that’s what must have happened, and now I have no one I can say I’m friends with in Vaim, there are just these prayerhouse people and church people left, but they don’t really count since I’ve kind of never got to know them, we kind of just belonged to the same organizations and so now I’m even more alone than I’ve ever been before, and there, yes, there, I can feel that it’s like Jatgeir’s near me, but it’s not that I can see him, and he seems happy and it’s like he’s waving goodbye and he says that it’s good where he is now, and I feel like Jatgeir is looking down at me now from somewhere above me, but not that far above me, and I get the feeling that he now knows everything that’s going to happen in the future, with me too, and he somehow takes it all in with a happy calm, and I could probably say in Christian words that he is in God’s peace now and in the light of Christ’s cross, but I feel like those are kind of just meaningless words and I raise my arm and I wave at him and it’s like he raises his arm and waves at me and with a kind of joy he says it’s good here, and I, walking up the road in Vaim, I raise my hand and wave at the sky, at where I feel like Jatgeir is, and everything feels right, but what would someone think if they saw me doing this, but after all there isn’t anyone who can see me, yes, except for Jatgeir

  Goodbye Jatgeir, I say

  And thank you for our time together, I say

  and I see Jatgeir, see his hand and arm, disappear into the dark sky

  III

  SHE CALLED ME FRANK, FROM THE FIRST time we met she called me Frank—hi Frank, nice to see you, she said to me, or something like that, it was in Bjørgvin, it was at the restaurant called The Fowl where I’d gone with the two guys I fished with on the Elinor, the three of us did all kinds of fishing on that ship back then, and then it would sometimes happen that if we’d had a good catch and got a good price for the fish that we’d take a little trip to Bjørgvin, dock at one of the quays on The Wharf, spend a night there usually, getting in sometime in the afternoon and leaving at dawn or sometime the next morning, it depended how late a night we’d had, to tell the truth on how drunk we’d got, it was Eivind and Lars and me working on the ship then, an old ship that Eivind’s father owned, but he’d been scared of the sea so he was rarely or never on board the Elinor, I didn’t know why the ship had that name, Eivind had asked his father about it of course, but his father hadn’t wanted to answer and refused to, a bit abruptly, one thing for sure anyway was that Eivind’s mother, his father’s wife, wasn’t named Elinor, for whatever that’s worth, but anyway Eivind’s father got a full half share of what we made fishing since he owned the boat and the equipment, or maybe not quite half, we thought it was too much, more than was reasonable, so we usually rounded down a little, to put it that way, but anyway never mind that, when we’d had a good catch and had a lot of money to spend, yes, then we’d treat ourselves by paying a visit to a restaurant in Bjørgvin, and we always went to The Fowl, they had good country cooking there at a more reasonable price than the other places, the other places in Bjørgvin we knew of anyway, but to tell the truth there weren’t that many, I probably hadn’t, and probably haven’t to this day, been to any other places in Bjørgvin besides The Fowl, and well I’ve been to The Bus Café and The Coffeehouse, but those are probably the only places I’ve been, usually I always ended up at The Fowl, that’s how it was with that, and that’s what happened that day too, yes, the day I met Eline for the first time, and it happened quite simply like this, that Eline came over to the table where Eivind and Lars and I were sitting with our meatball dinners, she put both her hands on the edge of the table, looked straight at me, I don’t remember exactly what she said to me, but she said Frank, hi Frank, nice to see you again, she said, it was something like that, so I guessed she must have made a mistake and thought I was someone else, or maybe she just said Frank because that’s the name she came up with, I never dared to ask her about it even though she kept calling me Frank for the rest of her life, but still I looked up at her, I must have, but I don’t remember what I said, maybe I didn’t say anything, but I remember that either Eivind or Lars said that actually my name wasn’t Frank, my name was something totally different, my name was Olaf, nothing else, just Olaf pure and simple, but this woman who’d come over to our table, and who was now standing there clutching the edge of the table, maybe because she’d had a bit too much to drink and so had to hold herself up, she didn’t listen, she looked me straight in the eye and said something that implied that she knew me, yes, that we knew each other well, we were old friends, or long-time acquaintances anyway, but I couldn’t remember having ever seen her before, of course it was possible that I’d drunk so much the time we met that I couldn’t remember meeting her, but that wasn’t really very likely, it was true enough that I did have a bit to drink sometimes, quite a lot sometimes, yes, but I was rarely or never as drunk as all that, no, and there she stood looking at me, yes, and I was seeing her for the first time, that I could remember at least, yes, it was a long time since I’d drunk enough to not remember what happened, things like that happened only when I was really young, and only a couple of times then, before I learned to eat enough and not overdo the drinking, but on that day, at The Fowl, the day Eline stood there at our table, pretty drunk even though it was a weekday, and called me Frank, and wouldn’t stop, she had decided my name was Frank and so that was my name, nothing to discuss, I was Frank, and in all the years we eventually lived together she never once called me Olaf, only Frank, and I have to admit that it took me a long time to get used to also being called Frank, as well as Olaf, to tell the truth I never really got used to it, and that wasn’t so strange since she was the only person who called me Frank, everyone else used my real name, Olaf, no more, no less, Olaf pure and simple, but actually it was fine to be called Frank too, I got used to it, so it was no wonder that people in Sund started calling me Frank-Olaf, or Olaf-Frank, and calling her, Eline, Franka, or sometimes Frenka, or Frenke-Franka or Franke-Frenke, almost no one ever used her actual name, Eline, neither in Sund nor in Vaim, she mostly went by Frenka, or Franke-Frenka, probably no one, yes, except me, ever called her Eline, and actually it was pretty rude that they never called her Eline, her real name, although actually her birth name was Josephine, she told me that once, privately, and that’s the name on her tombstone, so there aren’t many people, aside from the few so to speak initiates, yes, actually maybe just the few people who came to her funeral, where the pastor used her real name, Josephine, who know what Eline’s, or Frenka’s, or Franke-Frenka’s real name was, and even in Vaim they completely stopped calling her Eline, same as in Sund, or they called her Eline as long as she lived with Jatgeir, or the man called that, even though his real name was Geir, pure and simple, and they faithfully called her Eline too for the first couple years after he passed away, but ever since the two of us were living together, and after they found out in Vaim that my birth name was Olaf but that everyone in Sund called me Frank, yes, then everyone called me that in Vaim too, but it was back at The Fowl, on that day many many years ago, that I was so to speak rebaptized Frank, and with Eivind and Lars as witnesses, or godfathers, I could probably say—Frank, so I’m Frank now, might as well get used to it, even if I don’t recognize myself in that name, the way I did in the name Olaf, when I went by Olaf, the name my parents gave me, but now Eline, still standing there, has asked me if I wanted to dance

 

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