Art: Samia Singh

He listens to her voice with a rapt attention. Sometimes when her voice crackles he strains to hear, pushing the receiver hard against his ears.

He has begun to suffer from tingling ears. It is lonely, very lonely. But it is a sort of being and most times he does not think about it. It is of no importance at all during most part of the day. Sometimes like an addict he gets huge throbbing pangs of yearning ballooning inside him, bulging out from his stomach, his chest, hovering around him in a hazy shimmer. To be able to talk, to be able to hold a hand, to be able to pour a cup of tea and say casually, the flavor is just right today, to be able to say, get me a warm bottle of rum or close the goddamn door, or just a face he can see once in a while. Any face, ugly pretty, any.

He looks in the mirror. It is chipped in one corner. It got chipped the day it was hung, like a bad omen. Tea had put small posies of flowers sticker along the crack to hide it. Now when he looks in the mirror he can see her, tongue out, sticking the small flowers.

The sea is warm and a flock of gannets soar in the sky. Agnar goes cod fishing. He has a trawler and he sails alone. He likes to be alone. There is an expanse of blue, beneath him and above him. He likes to lie down and feel the movement of the boat and to watch the blue cloud flecked sky sway slowly, tilting to the left then to the right. He feels he is alone in the universe. It gives him a feeling of power of becoming at the same time, significant as well as irrelevant. Then the gannets become him and he them. He wishes he could soar to the cliffs and the deep fjords. He wishes he could go deep in the ocean. He wishes he was not human. And that if he wishes hard, it may become so. A feeling of exhilaration lifts him up. It is a giddy feeling that he will fall from the vortex that he is spinning out of control.

He feels guilty at having so much pleasure. It is not right, he mumbles as he feels the April sun fall warmly on his skin. He picks out a handful of raisins from his pocket and chews them, slowly, deriving the maximum juice that it has to offer. The taste is bitter sweet and it fills his mouth. The saliva is pungent. It is not right, he repeats.

The tourists will come to stay in the cottages of Lauklines. They will drive down from Tromso. There are some scenic fjords around Lauklines. Marcus, his friend, caters to these tourists for these few months then moves southwards to Bergen.  He runs a publishing house in Bergen and moves to Vikna and Lauklines in the tourist season. Agnar lives here all the time. Tea cannot understand why he has no ambition. She would compare him with Marcus and with Jensen who is a dentist and Ragmar who runs a school. Even Agnar’s sister Ingrid runs a catering business in Buskerud. Everybody moves, always. She would say this with big round eyes. I want to see the world, one country in every continent.

Agnar wants to lie horizontal, I am no Viking. He dozes off and wakes with a start. The gannets are diving deep in the water. There is a frenzy of bubbling white water. They dive cleanly and break the surface in foam of eruption. He squints at them then sits up. It is time to get back.

He boils potatoes to go with the poached cod for dinner and sharpens his pencils. He sketches gannets, soaring in the sky, their wings stretching wide. It is dark outside. Rorvik the main village of Vikna is very sparsely populated. His nearest neighbor is almost a mile away. He puts on the radio and listens to distant far away voices. When he was a child he actually believed that there were tiny miniature people living inside the radio whose sole purpose of existence was to keep playing the songs that the listeners demanded. In his imagination they scampered and hurried across the wires locating songs or singing them in their tiny voices. Agnar wants to be the child again who can have innocent fantasies.

The phone does not ring. He waits another hour and then defeated calls.

Tea’s voice is without any body. She appears occupied. She talks as if she is talking to some one else. Funny when she was here she would talk to others as if she was talking to him. He would hear her talking to others and smile at the things that were meant for him. She would smile and talk all the time.  Now she talks to no one. She is ill. She is in the psychiatric ward. She had slit her wrists.

Agnar she mumbles, what will happen to you, if I die.

He lies, I will sit and cry and die, die.

He wonders in the night, will he really die. Maybe not. Definitely not. He will maybe visit Sula, go meet her grandpa, make peace with him, maybe walk out for a smoke and maybe suddenly sit and cry, loud ugly sobs. May be.

A sheep bleats in the night and a dog barks. He gets up to check the latch, pauses for a moment at the door. There is a whiff of halibut that wafts across from the shed. He didn’t want to clean the devil today. It was the large one, the largest this season.  They all hang in a row in the shed, the cod, the trout, the salmon and the char. It is warm now and they need to be cleaned early.

He dreams of walking on the pebbles in the clear water. The shoals are smooth on his feet. He carries a yellow pail. He carries the halibut in the pail. He releases the halibut in the foaming water. The fish looks at him with round eyes and sheds a drop of blood. It rises up, clear and smooth. He picks it up. It shimmers. A dragonfly is trapped inside along with flecks of quartz. I will give it to Tea, he says aloud and the morning sun kisses his eyes.

He looks with sleep filled eyes and says

Hello,  is anyone there ?

A load of tourists pass by, shrieking and laughing. The trailer carries the fishing gear. It is still early. He potters about the room. Cleans the kitchen, wipes the bathroom floor, and cooks a slab of reindeer steak. It sizzles hotly on the rack. The fat splutters and catches a spark. The smell lifts up to the ceiling. The sweet geitost, the brown caramelized goat cheese is taken out in a platter. The rakfisk, salted trout is sliced into thin slivers. A jug of juleol is kept ready. All this is done, meticulously, lovingly. A bunch of cream rein rose is arranged in the fat plump jar.

The windows are thrown open and one can see the rolling fields and then the sea. In summer it is all so beautiful, so tranquil. It warms the cockles of one’s heart. That is what Tea would say. Her blond hair cut in a short page flitting and whipping against her eyes in the hard blowing wind. But in winters it all turns white. The green is a distant memory. Tea railed against white. She hung bright red and blue curtains and hung yellow rice paper shades brought from Tromso. She wove a green rug and placed it beneath the snug fat easy chair. In the night she would get up and say, the golden elk is here. He could hear the noise of movement and worried about his vats of cured fish lying out in the open. The elk never came in. one could see it sometimes, a dark blurred shadow flitting across the white expanse to disappear in the woods beyond.

He thinks what went on in tea’s head? Her slim taut young body? What did it feel when walking, running, sitting down in the grass, making love. What did it think to see itself from afar? Thus. When he kissed, her mouth was slightly freshly acidic. When he touched her, her skin had tiny eruptions that felt rough. He loved to feel the roughness. He loved his thumb to bump a little bit. He loved to prod her swollen lips with his. She had funny swollen lips as if a bee had stung her.

She would laugh and say, but that’s what happened when I was tiny. I was stung by a bee. Her face would be solemn.

He didn’t know what she wanted. I want you; she would say and hold him. She would have nightmares and get up sobbing. She wouldn’t let him go to the sea. She wouldn’t let him go the harbor. He would unclasp her hands and talk baby talk with her. He wanted to be alone. It was not that he did not love her. He loved her but then it was the sea that loved him more. I need to have the sea in my vision. I need to hear it pounding in my veins, to feel the rolling waves beneath my skin. I am the golden elk, I want to live so I can die old, I want to breathe and eat and sleep, I want to be the snow, the foam, the fish and all. I want to journey in my mind, the arctic sun, and the screaming whales. The mermaid’s song. I want so little I want so less.

Let’s go to Sula. You can have the sea, she would plead and because he was unyielding she would insist till an ugly row erupted. He couldn’t understand what they fought for.

He could see the trawlers sailing out. The sea was calm today. He had put a sign near the fork by the road. Breakfast. He had set the table outside and put on a chequered cloth. He set the food and then pulled out the sketchbook and began drawing the berries sitting snugly in the plate. He did it with a lot of patience and continued till a bunch of people trooped in out of curiosity. He served them smilingly, the cod and the meatballs and the soup. He made coffee for them and enjoyed their enjoyment. Marcus called a few times to check if he could handle anymore.

It was pale haired Jenna, last season. She had come to help Marcus and one day in a heady summer swirl he had found himself thinking more and more about her. Jenna of long hair and Jenna of throaty laugh. Jenna who was older and Jenna who didn’t want him all the time.

Agnar sometimes feels very old, much beyond. He lies down in the night and gets out of his body to examine it. The long torso, the flat stomach, the strong legs. He touches the scalp and feels the roughness of bristles near the neck. He touches the chest and tries to imagine what Tea felt while touching them. What made her so mad? He can’t fathom.  He rouses the body and wakes it up and makes it go in the shed, he sets about cleaning the trout, char and the cod. He works in the night. The shed has to be kept clean for the fish to cure properly. He cleans the trout and char. removes the gills and guts clinically then rinses them, one by one under the sink. That done he scrubs clean his hands. The gutted fish is lovingly marinated in a basin of vinegar. He pauses for a cigarette then squints through the smoke. He thinks nothing all the while. All his senses concentrated on the pleasure of smoking. He likes working in the night. It soothes his mind and heart as well.

The vinegar is drained off and the fish lie now on a basin of rock salt, their bellies bulge out with the brine. A pinch of sugar is sprinkled then a pressure is put on the fish to brine better. He has rows of bucket on the shelf which are about to be cured. He needs to slow down their raking by putting them in fresh salt brine. Some he shoves in inside the freezer. In winters he just pushes the vats outside.

He sells them by the quay side. Serving the fillets with raw onion and sour cream or mustard with dill. He loves food as he loves the sea. Sometimes he goes to Tromso, maybe once a month catching the hurtigruten and getting down at the church, visits the art gallery, sit in the church of Elverhoy and buys some Chinese souvenirs from Storgata.

Life goes on and he doesn’t demand much from it. He had lost his parents at an early age in a car accident. He has no other siblings and this house has been inherited by him. In the tiny upstairs room his father’s tackling gear still rest in the cupboard, as his mother’s lace bedspreads. This life is good for him.

But he can understand in a faint way that Tea needed other things. She was like a butterfly. He should stop thinking about her in past tense. She will outlive him he knows. She is fifteen years his junior. He is forty two now.

He goes fishing next day. The sea is blue and the waves that ride over are crested with white. How would it feel to close your eyes and mouth and sink deep, going straight feet down? To be in the mother’s womb. He remembers reading the stories from the Poetic Edda, the story of Njord and Skadi. Skadi was devoted to the mountains while Njord was the sea God and because they could not decide whether to live by the mountains or by the sea, their marriage failed. Tea was a mountain goddess. He sees a face floating alongside.

The bathtub had been streaked with red. The floor was awash with pink. The smoked salmon lay mouth open on the skillet. The gas had burnt the food to charcoal. It had been full two hours before she was found; Agnar had gone to see off Jenna. He had returned in his old van, late in the evening. The house had been dark and cold. It was winter and everything was shrouded in white. He thinks how long it takes the blood to congeal. He knows about fish blood and game blood. He guts the animals and handles blood and gore all the time. But human blood? How long it takes the body to get cold. While a person sits in the living room and drowns a beer, some one else drips drop by drop blood. He often thinks it was the dripping sound that alerted him. He insists. Though Ingrid, his sister always counters, but that could not have been the case. He also knows that was not the case. But somewhere in his mind a trick plays and replays. The blood always drips and a butterfly always gets captured within the drop. Poor poor Tea and poor Agnar.

But I am not poor. I am that, that can be a gannet. The boat sways in the water rudderless. He lies on the floor and feels the sway. From high in the sky the gannet, stretching its wings wide, looks down. A tiny speck in the water, a man lying spread eagled, almost miming the gannet’s flight. The man soars high in the blue, high higher till a pinpoint blue vanishes into the deep shimmering sea.