The End of the Ocean

Dedication

To Jesper, Jens, and Linus

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter One: Signe

Chapter Two: David

Chapter Three: Signe

Chapter Four: David

Chapter Five: Signe

Chapter Six: David

Chapter Seven: Signe

Chapter Eight: David

Chapter Nine: Signe

Chapter Ten: David

Chapter Eleven: Signe

Chapter Twelve: David

Chapter Thirteen: Signe

Chapter Fourteen: David

Chapter Fifteen: Signe

Chapter Sixteen: David

Chapter Seventeen: Signe

Chapter Eighteen: David

Chapter Nineteen: Signe

Chapter Twenty: David

Chapter Twenty-One: Signe

Chapter Twenty-Two: David

Chapter Twenty-Three: Signe

Chapter Twenty-Four: David

Chapter Twenty-Five: Signe

Chapter Twenty-Six: David

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Signe

Chapter Twenty-Eight: David

Chapter Twenty-Nine: Signe

Chapter Thirty: David

Chapter Thirty-One: Signe

Chapter Thirty-Two: David

Chapter Thirty-Three: Signe

Chapter Thirty-Four: David

Chapter Thirty-Five: Signe

Chapter Thirty-Six: David

Acknowledgments

Translator’s Note

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter One

Signe

Ringfjorden, Sogn og Fjordane, Norway, 2017

Nothing stopped the water. You could follow it from the mountain to the fjord, from the snow that fell from the clouds and settled on the peaks to the mist that rose above the ocean and again became clouds.

The glacier grew every single winter. And every summer it melted, releasing drops, drops that became streams, which found their way down, driven by gravity, and the streams accumulated, becoming waterfalls, rivers.

We were two villages that shared a mountain and a glacier. We had them for as long as we could remember. One side of the mountain was a vertical wall, where the Sister Falls descended. They crashed straight down for 711 meters toward Lake Eide, a deep green body of water after which the village was named, Eidesdalen, and which provided fertile growing conditions there for animals and human beings.

Eidesdalen, Magnus’s village.

They couldn’t see the fjord in Eidesdalen; they weren’t accustomed to having the taste of salt on their lips. The salt was not carried by the wind and they could not smell the ocean. But they had their water, the water without taste, the water that made everything grow—and later Magnus said that he had never missed the ocean.

On the other side of the mountain it was milder, less harsh. Here the water accumulated in the River Breio, the salmon’s river, the water ouzels’ river, the freshwater mussels’ river. It forced its way through a crevasse in the landscape, forming this chasm with millions of drops every second, in waterfalls, in streams, and in calm, smooth stretches. When the sun shone, it became a luminous ribbon.

The River Breio continued all the way to Ringfjorden, and there, in the village at sea level, the river met with salt water. There the water from the glacier became one with the ocean.

Ringfjorden, my village.

And then they were together, the water from the glacier and the water from the ocean, until the sun absorbed the drops once more, drew them up into the air as mist, to the clouds, where they escaped the force of gravity.

I’m back now. Blåfonna, the glacier that once was ours, has forced me to return. There is no wind when I reach Ringfjorden. I am obliged to use the engine to travel the final stretch, and the clattering sound drowns out everything else. Blue glides through the water and leaves only small ripples in its wake.

I can never forget this landscape. “It has created you, Signe,” Magnus once said. He meant it had imprinted itself in me, the way I walk with my legs slightly bent, as if I were always confronting a hill. Nonetheless I am surprised now when I see it again: the summits, the falls, the vertical meeting the horizontal.

People travel here from far away to see this landscape and find the sight to be “beautiful, fantastic, amazing.” They stand on ship decks as large as football fields while enormous diesel engines spew out exhaust fumes. They stand there and point and gaze at the clear blue water, the bluish-green hillsides where fragile houses cling tightly to forty-five-degree-angle slopes. More than one thousand meters above them are the mountains, the earth’s stripped, sharp edges, breaking against the sky, with a sprinkling of white that the tourists love. “Wow, it’s snow,” they say, whether it’s winter or summer.

But the tourists don’t see the Sister Falls or Sønstebø’s summer farm on the mountain. They have long since disappeared. They can’t see the River Breio, which was the very first to go, before the ships arrived, long before the Americans and Japanese came with their telephones and cameras and telephoto lenses. The pipes are concealed underground, and the damage inflicted on the wildlife by the excavation work has slowly been concealed by vegetation.

I stand there with the tiller in my hand, moving slowly as I approach the village. I pass the power plant, a huge concrete building all by itself down by the water. It is heavy and dark—a monument to the dead river and waterfall. From there the cables stretch out in all directions, some of them cross over the fjord. They have even received permission for that.

The engine drowns out everything, but I remember the sound of the power lines, the soft humming, in wet weather, water against electricity, a crackling. It has always given me goose bumps, especially in darkness, when you can see how it sparks.

All four of the moorings for visitors at the wharf are vacant. It’s too early for tourists—the moorings are used only in the summertime, so I can take my pick. I choose the spot farthest out, mooring the craft astern and at the bow and put out a spring line to be on the safe side; the wind from the west could blow up without any warning. As I pull the throttle control completely astern, I can hear the reluctant gasps of the engine shutting down. I close the hatch to the saloon and place the bunch of keys in the breast pocket of my parka. The key ring is a big cork ball that ensures it will float—it produces a small bulge over my stomach.

The bus stop is where it has always been, outside the consumer co-op. I sit and wait—the bus comes only once an hour. That’s how it is here; everything happens seldom and must be planned. I have just forgotten about it after all these years.

Finally it appears. I am accompanied by a group of adolescents. They come from the high school that was built in the early 1980s, the new one, the nice one, one of the many things the village could afford. They talk and talk about tests and homework assignments. I can’t help but notice their smooth foreheads, soft cheeks; they are astoundingly young, without any marks whatsoever, without the traces of a life lived.

They don’t even bother to glance at me. I understand them well. For them I am just an aging woman, a little shabby and unkempt in a worn-out parka, with gray locks of hair sticking out from beneath a knitted hat.

They have new, almost identical hats, with the same logo in the middle of the brow. I hasten to take off my own and put it in my lap. It is of course full of fuzz balls. I start picking them off one by one and my hand fills up with lint. But there’s no point, there are too many of them to remove and now I don’t know what to do with them, so I end up sitting there with a loose mound in my hand. Finally I release it down onto the floor. The wool floats weightlessly down the aisle, but the adolescents don’t pay it any mind, and why should they look at a clump of gray lint?

Sometimes I forget how I look. After a while you stop caring about your appearance when you live on board a boat, but once in a great while when I see myself in a mirror on land, when the lighting is good, I am startled. Who is she, the person in there? Who in the world is that skinny old biddy?

It is strange—no, surreal, surreal is the word—that I’m one of them, the old people, when I am still so completely myself through and through, the same person I have always been. Whether I am fifteen, thirty-five, or fifty, I am a constant, unchanged mass. Like the person I am in a dream, like a stone, like one-thousand-year-old ice. My age is disconnected from me. Only when I move does its existence become perceptible—then it makes itself known through all its pains, the aching knees, the stiff neck, the grumbling hip.

But the young people don’t think about my being old, because they don’t even see me. That’s how it is, nobody sees old ladies. It has been many years since a young person looked at me. They just laugh youthfully and openly and talk about a history quiz they’ve just taken, the Cold War, the Berlin Wall, what grades they got. And nobody mentions the ice, not a word about the ice, about the glacier, even though it should be what everyone is talking about here at home.

Here at home—do I really still call it home? I can’t fathom it, after having been away for almost forty years—no, soon fifty years. I came home only to clean up after a death in the family, to grieve the compulsory five days after the funerals, first my mother’s, then my father’s. A total of ten days is all the time I have spent here during all these years. I have two brothers here, half brothers, but I hardly ever speak with them. They are my mother’s boys.

I lean my head against the bus window, look at the changes. The area is more built up, the buildings closer together; a new construction project consisting of white prefabricated houses with small windows clings tenaciously to the hillside. The bus passes the indoor swimming pool. It has a new roof and there is a big blue sign at the entrance: Ringfjord–Water Fun. Everything sounds better in English.

The bus climbs upward, inland, and a couple of the young people get off at the construction site at the top, but most of them remain seated. We ascend, the road changes, narrows, becomes full of potholes, at almost the exact same time we drive into the neighboring municipality. This is where most of the young people get off. Apparently they still don’t have a high school out here, still don’t have an indoor swimming pool, here in the town of Eidesdalen, the little brother, the loser.

I get off with the last of the young people, stroll slowly through the center of the village. It is even smaller than I remember. The general store has been shut down. While Ringfjorden has grown, Eidesdalen is a fraction of its original size. But it’s not for Eidesdalen’s sake that I have come today, I can’t cry for Eidesdalen anymore—that battle is over, it ended many, many years ago. It is now the ice that has brought me here, Blåfonna. I take the dirt road leading to the mountain.

Even the national newspapers write about it. I have read the articles again and again and can hardly believe the words. They are extracting ice from the glacier, pure, white ice from Norway, and marketing it as the most exclusive ingredient: to be put in a drink, a floating mini-iceberg, surrounded by golden liquor. But not for Norwegian customers, no—it is for those who have really deep pockets. The ice is to be shipped to desert nations, the homes of oil sheiks, and there it will be sold as if it were gold, white gold, to the wealthiest of the wealthy.

It starts snowing, winter’s final spasm, April’s way of thumbing its nose, as I climb toward the mountain. There are little pools of frozen water on the road, rimmed with crystals. I put my foot down against the thin surface ice covering a small puddle, shatter it, hear it break—but it’s no fun any longer, not the way it once was.

I grow short of breath. It’s steep and farther than I remember.

But I finally reach it, finally I see the glacier. Dear, dear Blåfonna.

All glaciers melt, I know that, but it’s something else witnessing it. I stop, just breathe. The ice is still there, but not where it used to be. When I was a little girl, I walked from the edge of the glacier almost all the way to the mountain cliff where the waterfalls disappeared below, where the glacier and the waterfalls were connected. But now the glacier is located high up on the mountainside. It’s a long way, one hundred meters perhaps, between the cliff and the blue tongue. The glacier has moved, as if trying to escape, get away from humans.

I continue climbing through the heather. I have to feel it, have to walk on it, touch it again.

Finally I have ice under my feet, every step makes noise, a slight crunching sound. I keep going and now I can see the extraction area, the gouges in the grayish-white glacier, and deep gashes in the blue interior, where the ice has been cut away. Beside it there are four large white bags that are full, ready for pickup. They use chain saws, I’ve read, chain saws that are not lubricated, so the pieces of ice won’t be sullied by oil.

Nothing should surprise me anymore, all the things human beings do. But this, this tears something open inside of me, because Magnus must have sat at a board meeting and smilingly approved this, maybe even applauded it.

I walk closer. I have to climb to come right up against it, as the gouges were made where the glacier is the steepest. I take off one mitten and place my hand against the ice—it is alive beneath my fingers, my glacier, a huge, calm animal that sleeps. But it is a wounded animal and it can’t roar—it is being drained minute by minute, second by second, it is already dying.

Too old to cry, too old for these tears, but nonetheless my cheeks are damp.

Our ice, Magnus, our ice.

Have you forgotten about it, or did you perhaps not even notice that the first time we met it was with melting ice from Blåfonna in our hands?

I was seven, you were eight, do you remember? It was my birthday and I was given a present of water, frozen water.

All life is water, all life was water, everywhere I turned, there was water. It gushed from the sky as rain or snow, it filled the small lakes in the mountains, lay in the form of ice in the glacier, it flowed down the steep mountainsides in thousands of small streams, accumulated into the River Breio, formed a flat surface in front of the village in the fjord, the fjord that became the ocean when you followed it west. My whole world was water. The ground, the mountains, the pastures were just tiny islands in that which actually was the world. I called my world Earth but thought that it should actually be named Water.