[1897] I am not the first man who ever buttoned his coat and boarded a ship and followed his silence north. Nor am I the first made mouthy by what discovered him there. Indeed, how many stories have men like me lived to tell? If life is what I found on my return, among the wooden crosses and gravestones below the Hammerfest hillside. I remember that wan early morning, the sun too low and faint to hold the fog at sea. The tender's oarlocks squawked in awful harmony with the gulls tilting above. The hills were scabrous gray, the scree poised as ever to bury the village. I remember all this. And old Magnus Moen on the oars, a man my age and one I'd known all my life, speaking no word to me. He only beat his oars against the harbor water while muttering into his coat. I remember Bengt Bjornsen's horse and carriage, too, rolling along Grønnevoldsgaden. I could see his charge. A woman dressed in black seated beside him and the pastor in his frock standing on the back rail. I mouthed a prayer, that this meager procession was not for my daughter, gone two years. The thought of her turned my eyes to the mailbags sitting above the bilge on the deck of the tender. We'd not heard from Thea since we sent her off. Not one word, kind or otherwise. For all we knew she was drowned or buried. By the time Magnus tied off on the wharf, the horse and carriage had disappeared. It wasn't yet eleven o'clock as I stepped ashore and turned to look from where I'd come. As though I could see those hundreds of miles behind me. But all was gone. Lost in the fog if not in my memory. The mailboat Thor out at anchor? The mountains of Sørø and the sea beyond? Even the birds and the sound of the birds? All was gone. Only North remained. I could point North and remember the snow and still believe in it. I did believe in it--and not much else. Magnus tossed the mailbags at my feet, then climbed from the tender and stood beside me on the wharf. I felt in my pockets as though I had a krone to offer him. But all I found was my pipe and pouch, so I packed the bowl and Magnus offered me a light and we stood together and smoked. "There's a bit of the Draugen about ja, Odd Einar." Magnus thumbed his hat and looked out from beneath his bushy eyebrows. He puffed on his pipe and shook his head. "It's a hell of a thing. Coming back here on a day such as this. Take a slow walk home, ja?" He pushed his hat back off his head and ran a knobby hand over his balding crown. "Give them a chance to see you." He snuffed out his pipe and tied a second line to a cleat on the wharf. "And God bless you, friend. God bless you and Inger." I watched Magnus set his hat right. He put his reindeer hide gloves on and shouldered the mail sacks. He turned to leave but then set his load down once more, slipped a glove off, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a few coins. He picked from them two øre and offered them to me. I felt my face flush and tucked my cheeks into my coat's collar. "I'm all set, friend," I said. "Odd Einar, stop at Bengt's bakery before you head home. Buy a loaf and some butter. I've known you since we were runts. I don't like the look of you now. A hungry man is a sad thing." He pushed the money into my hand and put his glove on again, slung the mail sacks over his shoulder, and this time walked off. He didn't whistle, Old Magnus. The Grønnevoldsgaden was swallowed by fog as I walked up it. The whole village was, as though it burned for the second time. On the corner of the Strandgaden, the electric streetlights flickered on and Inger's auntie was standing there on the cobbles with her cane and palsied foot. She looked up and saw me, turned and limped away. I tried to call out, but there was no voice in me. As if mocking my dumbness, a pair of shrieking gulls banked low. I watched them wing back toward the harbor and then crossed the street and walked to the bakery. Its dark windows were filled with loaves covered by flour sacks. Baskets of Bengt's pepparkaka and kanelbolle were sitting on the far end of the counter. On the other, jars of butter and jams were stacked in small pyramids. I felt the coins in my pocket, and stepped to the door. It was locked, so I stepped back into the street and closed my eyes and felt the gnawing in my bowels. I stood there long enough for what remained of me to notice its reflection in the bakery window: ugly and gaunt and tired as the pilings on the wharf. It would take a month of Inger's black pot to bring me back to life. With just that thought I went to the entry next to the bakery and opened it and climbed the narrow staircase and stood atop the landing and knocked on my door. How much time had I spent imagining this homecoming? Always it had been Inger answering the door, her hair down, the warmth of the stove and the brightness of the lamp glass falling from our room. If I'm being honest, I allowed myself Thea, too, sitting at the small table with a cup of tea and her knitting, humming some hymn or laughing. And in the darkest and coldest junctures of my northern straits, I saw her eyes turning up to meet mine and her smiling lips saying Papa! The thought of her saved me more than once. I knocked again and stood leaning against my exhaustion, which was the only thing in this world as fierce as my hunger. How many moments such as this had passed since that boat came to rescue me from the fog? Moments when my weakness settled on me and my memories went back to the wastes of Spitzbergen, with nothing but blankness and distance before me. I was no more sated as I stood on the landing outside our door than I'd been on the Kross fjorden. My guts were tight as fiddle strings. I put my rawboned and filthy hand on the doorknob, drew a breath, and heard the hinges screech as the door swung open. Darkdarkdark. As dark as the Lofoten 's coal bunker, but smelling faintly of potatoes. My stomach loosened and then turned and I poked my nose down into my collar, for I did not trust that sweet scent. If I had learned anything it was that a hungry man will smell his supper a hundred times before he gets a spoonful. I stepped in and tried to blink the darkness into light. But it would not go and so I pulled the door shut behind me and crossed the room blindly and pulled back the curtain. I unlatched and opened the window, and the room was charged with the briny smell off the harbor. When I turned around to see my home again, my breath would not come. Not for a full half minute. The pallet in the corner had been folded in half and tied with twine. Inger's rosmåling, which before had sat proudly on a shelf above the hearth, was gone. So, too, were the chairs around the table. In a tin bowl on the shelf I found a single potato, sprouting and black, then carried it over to the window to inspect it in the light. Against my better judgment I took a bite. It made me retch and I spit it out and threw the rest toward the stove, where it landed in Inger's cook pot and jiggled the handle of her wooden spoon. The promise of a meal set my teeth on edge, and I crossed the room in two long strides to look in the pot. A dead mouse lay on the bottom beside the potato. A fine soup for a starving man. Across the room, in the chest of drawers beside the bed, I found a ball of yarn and her old needles and a halffinished mitten. The lamp atop the chest was empty of oil, though the matches still sat in the wooden box. I lit one and played it around the empty room. That place had never been a home, but to discover such emptiness and what came with it? Well, there were no words to describe it. I let the match burn out and closed the window and walked back down to the street. A fresh wind came over the hills as I stood outside the bakery again. All this distance I had come. All this distance and with all my sorry hope. And for what? Damn it all, I thought. Put me back on the wastes. Leave me for the ice bears. "Herr Eide?" Someone stood ten paces down the road with a basket hung over her arm. One of Thea's friends. Her father was a rope maker named Skjeggestad. I once bought my line from him. "It's me?" I said. My voice came out hoarse, and I coughed and bent at the waist and swallowed as I righted myself. I turned away, my shame sharp. She didn't leave, though. When I looked at her face again, I could see she was amazed. "And you're Skjeggestad's daughter?" "Hilde--" "Of course. Hildegard Skjeggestad. Thea's friend. My daughter's friend." Her eyes were wide and disbelieving. "The bakery is closed," I said, as if to excuse my being there on the street. Her mouth was open to speak, but no words came. Had she not heard me? "Our room," I began, but then looked down at my garb, such as it was. My pants were threadbare and tattered at the cuff. My coat, a castoff from a stevedore in Vardø, was stained at the breast and missing every other button. My shirt had been on my back for weeks and smelled foul enough to prove it. And my socks, stiff with blood and worn through at the heels, would be the first things I'd burn. Only the boots on my feet, fine komager boots made from Spitzbergen reindeer hide, offered any proof that I wasn't a Draugen after all. "You've not seen Thea, then? Or heard news?" "But Fru Eide and the pastor . . ." she finally said, turning to look up the Grønnevoldsgaden, even pointing there. "Thea?" I asked, nudging my chin in the same direction. Now she looked afraid. She might have even been crying. "Herr Bjornsen, he's also gone to the cemetery." She took a step back, making a wide berth for me. I saw my reflection again. "I beg your pardon," I said. "I'm just home." Now I pointed at myself in the window as though it were explanation enough for my condition. "It was a long trip. I was in Vardø only two days ago. Five full days at sea before that. I was made to work for my passage, you see? Loading coal--" "Excuse me, Herr Eide." She had in her basket a bunch of carrots and radishes. She took a carrot and handed it to me and said, "Fru Eide has gone to the cemetery." And then, as if I were finally joining the conversation, I said, "But who has died?" She stepped past me and said, "I must go, Herr Eide. My mother is waiting." "Of course," I said. "Thank you. Give your mother and father my greetings." I stood outside the bakery gnawing on the carrot, stem and all, as Hildegard hurried away. Excerpted from Northernmost: A Novel by Peter Geye All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
