The Cabin in the Mountains Read online

  He stopped and studied his fingernail again, holding it up, moving it about, trying to catch it in the faint green glow of light from the starboard lamp mounted on the side of the cabin. He flapped his hand vigorously. I heard his knuckles.

  ‘Where was I?’

  ‘You were saying I’ve bought an IKEA cabin.’

  ‘Ah yes, that’s right. Well, in the 1990s, the whole direction of this development changed. Why? Because for one, Norwegians had become rich. It takes time to realise it when you become rich. It took us twenty-five to thirty years before we understood we didn’t have to stay in special hotels, we had enough money to build our very own little luxury hotels in the mountains. Luxury cabins, like yours for example. Another thing, Robert – what the hotel-building people never saw coming was the feminism of the 1970s and 1980s. Suddenly there were no housewives slaving over hot stoves any more. And besides, the husbands and fathers were tired of staying at hotels. Men travelled on business a lot in those days. My father did. He was always away in Germany, France, Italy when I was a child. When they were on holiday they didn’t want to stay in hotels. People wanted all the home comforts, and they wanted them in the mountains. Now, with the oil, we could afford it. So since the 1990s we’ve had this explosion of people building new luxury homes in the mountains. We still call them cabins, but they’re second homes. I suppose you’re having Wi-Fi at your cabin?’

  His look challenged me to deny it, and I didn’t answer straightaway. Internet at the cabin was a sore point with me. Nina and I had discussed it at length, just as we had discussed whether or not to have underfloor heating in the hallway and bathroom. A third question on which we had not immediately seen eye to eye was the downlights she wanted installed in the living-room ceiling. They were dimmable, according to the electrician with whom we had discussed lighting and heating arrangements in the cabin. But I couldn’t help feeling they would bring a sort of lift-like or hotel-like anonymity to the place. So I didn’t really want Wi-Fi, or a pre-warmable cabin, or dimmable lift-lights embedded in the ceiling; but I had already travelled so far from my old, wooden dream that in the end I gave in.

  ‘Yes, we are,’ I finally said. ‘But not television.’

  Having conceded on all the other fronts, this remained my only real triumph. I saw Sverre nod and utter a small grunt of I-knew-it satisfaction as he turned away. We were passing under the slender arched bridge of the Årøysund. Ole, tall and thin, his back to us in the wheelhouse, turned the wheel over and we passed beneath the giant arches, the thrum of the motor briefly deafening, and then on into the open waters of the Oslofjord.

  *

  Ole had been in the same crowd as Nina in their teens and he and his wife, Gry Helene, had invited old friends from school days, university days and national service days to a reunion party at their cabin on Skrøslingen. The gathering was also to celebrate the fact that the cabin had been in the family’s possession for fifty years. Thinking over the account Sverre had given me of the evolution of Norwegian cabin culture, I was reminded of something Ole had told me some years earlier, in the days when we still had the hytta in Nøtterøy, and Ole would sometimes call us up and suggest we meet down on the little concrete jetty in the bay at Torød and he would take us out to Skrøslingen, only a fifteen-minute sail away. We were out in his boat setting lobster pots when he told me that this idyllic and even paradisal second home had come into the family’s possession all those decades ago by the merest chance. As a pre-testamentary gesture his great-aunt, the older of two sisters, had been given the choice: which would she prefer, the family’s dishwasher or the cabin on the island? Without much hesitation, it seems, she had gone for the dishwasher. As Ole remarked, it’s funny how things change; in the 1950s the dishwasher was a treasured labour-saving novelty and the island cabin a remote and infrequently used liability. Today the cabin was worth millions, and the marvellous machine had long ago rusted back into dust.

  As the snekke chugged past the dark rise of the headland at Torød I realised we would be passing where Nina’s old family cabin used to be. I tried to spot its exact location, but it was too dark, the wall of spiky pines across the hilltop too dense to see through. Memories of the many happy summers spent at that yellow-painted cabin flitted through my mind, a bright contrast to the soft darkness of the night at sea in Ole’s motor boat, the tips of the small wavelets glinting white in the lights from the boat as it pushed through the water. Swimming back and forth across the little bay at Torød in the morning. Long sunlit afternoon hours lying in a striped hammock suspended between tall pines reading John le Carré, now and then resting the book pages-down on my chest to sip from a glass of cold white wine, the pleasurable slight sway of the hammock. Studying the tiny bubbles clinging to the inside of the glass as though doing so was a matter of the greatest consequence. The unpredictable moment when one of them suddenly let go and shot to the surface. The cries drifting up the hill of the children playing in the swimming pool Stokke had recently built in front of his cabin – an innovation that had baffled me, when the surging blue-black sea lay just a short ramble away down a narrow track bordered with grass and cornflowers and the early summer-flowering plant that the English call cow parsley, whose delicate little white flowers, Nina told me, Norwegians call hundekjeks (‘dog biscuits’).

  Passing Torød we glided by the row of small, white wooden houses known as skipperhus (‘skipper’s houses’) at Årøysund, now bathed in the white light of the risen moon. For most of the way from Ormelet we had been sailing no more than a couple of hundred metres from the shore, but now Ole threaded the spokes of the wheel down through his hands and the snekke embarked on a long, slow curve that took us out to sea. I turned and looked back over my shoulder, hoping to catch a glimpse of the two white globes, like giant white golf balls waiting to be whacked off their tees, that stood on the brow of the hill on the opposite side of the bay at Torød from our old cabin. I had half-understood them to be listening stations erected by NATO during the 1950s. I couldn’t locate them and asked Ole, who told me that they’d been taken down about five years earlier. Perhaps advancing military technology had rendered them obsolete. Or the Norwegians, in some typical gesture of unilateral trust, had just decided they didn’t want them there any more.

  *

  Of the party itself I recall chiefly the incongruity of Sverre’s thumbing through the menus on his iPhone in search of a recording he wanted to play me of his great-grandmother singing a kulokk (cattle-call) while people danced close by to a particularly raucous DumDum Boys track. He told me his great-grandmother had been a budeie, a mountain milkmaid or shepherdess. Over the centuries these women had developed a unique system of calling to their cattle or goats, and communicating with one another across the mountains and valleys. Aware that the tradition was dying out, collectors had travelled the country in the 1950s and 1960s, recording samples of these songs. A CD of the recordings, including one short sequence featuring his grandmother, which was the oldest in the whole collection, had recently been issued by the Norwegian National Library and Sverre had transferred it to his phone. He liked to listen to it, he said, because the sound of his great-grandmother’s voice reminded him of the happy days of his childhood in the mountains above Flesberg in Numedal, where the family’s converted sæter was.

  It was past midnight. Most of the guests had left the candlelit intimacy of the narrow boathouse where we had been eating and drinking for the past two hours and had spilled out onto a short apron of grass that ran from the front door of Ole’s cabin to a small, sandy beach cradled on each side in the arms of low, smooth, light-coloured rocks known as skjærgård. A sound system had been set up and people were dancing on the grass. We were sitting on a bench outside the boathouse. Sverre’s wife, Tove, came up to us and Sverre introduced us. She was barefoot. With evident pride he told me she was a trained opera singer, so I was a little surprised when she took a packet of cigarettes from the top pocket of her denim jacket, shook one out and asked
me for a light –

  ‘No good asking him,’ she said with a nod towards Sverre. ‘He doesn’t smoke. But you look as if you do.’

  ‘Looks can be deceiving,’ I said. ‘I don’t smoke either.’

  She gave a little moue of disappointment and headed away towards a group of men who were sitting drinking beer on the rocks by the water. I saw her asking an Englishman I’d spoken to earlier. His name was Matt. He was in the oil business, working out a two-year contract for a Stavanger-based firm in their Oslo branch. He took out a lighter, flicked it open and she bent her head towards his cupped hands.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve ever met an opera singer before,’ I said, turning to Sverre.

  ‘She hasn’t had an engagement for a while,’ he said. ‘Right now she’s working as a supply teacher.’

  He went back to thumbing through the menus on his phone, explaining to me at one point that it was a new one and he was still having trouble finding his way around it.

  The mood of the music changed. ‘Just my imagination’, an old Temptations ballad, came on. I was getting bored waiting for Sverre to find this recording, and wondering if I should just get up and leave him to it. I glanced at my watch a couple of times. About to mutter some excuse and move away, I suddenly noticed the two people who were dancing in the sand by the water’s edge, away from the main group of dancers on the grass closer to the cabin. In the bright moonlight I could see it was Tove. She was dancing with the Englishman. They were dancing in such an intimate and sensual way that I couldn’t help glancing over at Sverre, to see if he had noticed; but he appeared completely bound up with locating the recording of his great-grandmother. Without losing the sensuous rhythm of the song she wriggled out of her denim jacket and tossed it behind her, onto the rocks. It landed with one sleeve just trailing in the water. She was wearing a tank top underneath, and a short white linen skirt that was almost luminous in the moonlight. As I watched, a pulse of waves from a passing launch broke against their knees. She laughed loudly, almost lost her balance and grabbed on to Matt’s T-shirt.

  At the sound of her laughter Sverre did look up. He stared down at the water for a long three seconds through half-closed eyes before returning to the screen. I carried on watching. The Englishman was wrapping and sliding his hands through the air around her, as though he were softly sculpting the outline of her body. The erotic charge between them was palpable and so strong that I fully expected Sverre to do something, I don’t know what, interrupt in some way, put a stop to it. But he never did. Seemingly hypnotised, he held the rectangular, fog-white glow of the screen ever closer to his face, still tapping and swiping at it with the tip of his index finger. Then suddenly his face broke into a radiant smile and he turned to me:

  ‘Here it is,’ he said. ‘Listen.’

  He raised the phone and held it parallel to my left ear. Above the sensuous sounds of the Temptations I could just about hear a woman’s voice, unaccompanied, harsh and high, coming from the phone’s little speaker:

  Kitti Åla, kitti Killarros, kitti Grilå,

  kitti Imå, kitti Grimå, kitti Hongje, kitti Flångje,

  kitti Sylflidflångje

  kitti venaste geita mina!

  There was a tinny and even slightly tortured quality to the sound and my first thought was that his great-grandmother sounded like an animal herself. Yet there was something beautiful about the voice. Frail and far off, as though somehow – and this was the distinct impression I had – as though somehow she was still up at the sæter in Numedal, singing as we sat there listening, and the sound of her voice only now reaching us from 1912, much as the light we see when looking at a star at night might have begun its journey millions of light years ago, and the star itself already be dead by the time the light reaches us.

  ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘Nothing. Åla, Killarros, Grimå, those are the names of the goats. She sings about how lovely they are.’

  He pulled the phone away from my ear and slid it back into the top pocket of his jacket. Draining the aquavit in his glass, he stood up.

  ‘Want another?’

  I held up my two-thirds-full glass of beer to show him I was okay. He nodded and disappeared through the dark doorway into the boathouse where the bar was set up. It was the last I saw of him that evening.

  *

  Ole ferried Nina and me back to the mainland in the morning. She was due back at work in Oslo after the Easter break and we got into the car and drove straight through Nøtterøy and Tønsberg and onto the E6. We got held up for some minutes in Tønsberg as the bridge opened to let a ship through, and at the village of Stokke, a few miles outside Tønsberg, traffic was backed up for miles with cabin-owners heading back to Oslo after the break.

  We turned off and took the country road that passes through Klevjerhagen. Klevjerhagen was a small, idyllically beautiful country village with predominantly old, white houses. The Norwegian countryside is full of them, but for me what rules them out as possible places to live is their uniform lack of a pub or small shop or any public gathering space. This was a feature I commented on several times to Norwegian friends, who would concur mournfully in my disappointment, sometimes adding that this lack of a social focus in country villages was one reason Norwegians travelling in England were so appreciative of the whole culture of the English country pub as a place of social connection.

  The detour via Klevjerhagen added as much as forty minutes to our journey time back to Oslo, but at least it was forty minutes on the move through green, gently rolling countryside. There was something dreamlike about the landscape, and I was reminded of what Sverre had said during our conversation the previous evening, about how he was training himself to dream lucid dreams by asking himself ‘Am I dreaming?’ in the middle of his waking day. He had mentioned a dream he had had recently in which he had woken up in sleep to the fact that he was dreaming, and thereupon acted out all sorts of amusing impossibilities such as putting his hand straight through a closed door, speaking and breathing while walking fully clothed on the bed of the ocean, abruptly deciding to dance up to the top branches of a tall pine, flitting about between them, sometimes falling in a swift swoop towards the ground – like a man bungee jumping, as he described it – and leisurely pulling out of his dive moments before he hit. From somewhere Sverre had discovered that the writer Robert Louis Stevenson was similarly fascinated with the pursuit of the waking dream and he told me he had even adopted a piece of advice he had come across in Stevenson, that by settling to sleep with arms stretched out above the head the sleeper could heighten the chances of such a dream occurring. As we slowed to navigate the zebra-striped and almost pyramidal metal speed bumps through Klevjerhagen, I remembered the only occasion on which I had ever had what I suppose Sverre meant by a lucid dream. It involved flying too. By comparison with his oneironautics, mine was a strangely low-key adventure in which I found myself able to swim through the air by dint of a strenuous breaststroke that kept me suspended a few inches above the worn carpets of what seemed to be an old hotel or mansion. I was able to make my way around corners and through open doorways, but conscious most of the time of the enormous and exhausting effort involved, and aware that even a momentary lapse of concentration would lead to a belly-flop onto the floor.

  *

  It seems that Sverre’s life was more dream-like than most. Several weeks after the gathering on Skrøslingen I arranged to meet Ole in Oslo for lunch and to pick up a green woollen hat of which I was particularly fond and which I had left on his boat. We ate at Justisen, on Møllergata, not far from the IT place where Ole worked as a programmer. Justisen is a rambling and crannied restaurant and beer hall that meanders over two floors with long wooden balconies overhanging a central inner courtyard. As the weather was fine we sat up on one of these. We both had the day’s special – meatballs, potatoes and cabbage – and afterwards sat over a beer. In due course our conversation turned to the reunion over the Easter weekend.

  At one point
I asked him how his friend Sverre was, adding that it wasn’t every day you met someone who was married to an opera singer, and especially one who smoked. I had thought about Sverre several times since that evening on the island. He had become one of those people you meet only briefly but who arouse in you a curiosity about their life and fate. In part it must have been his fascination with the subject of lucid dreaming that made him stick so vividly in my mind. That, and a kind of impersonal sympathy I felt for him each time I recalled the way his wife had danced with the Englishman. The way he had watched them for a few seconds before averting his eyes. I couldn’t fathom his lack of a reaction, but in the light of what Ole then told me it made a sort of sense.

  Four years ago, he said, his friend had developed testicular cancer. It had resisted all forms of treatment, and finally he had accepted that it could only be dealt with by chemical castration. He can’t have sex any more, said Ole. But Tove’s quite a bit younger than him, she’s in her late thirties, eleven or twelve years I think is the difference. And they came to an agreement about it. He lets her have boyfriends, and as long as it’s nothing permanent Sverre looks the other way.

  I said how terrible it must be to have something like that erupt into your life.

  Ole nodded his agreement. ‘In the beginning he took it very badly,’ he said. ‘In fact, I’ll tell you something. In complete confidence?’

  He looked over his beer at me with raised eyebrows. I nodded my assent.

  He put the glass down.

  ‘Sverre and I are members of the same kayak club, on Kalvøya. You know, where the rock festival used to be? That’s how I got to know him. A few weeks after the treatment was over we arranged to meet there. It was a Saturday morning. We were supposed to be going out in my boat for a couple of hours, but at the last moment he said he wasn’t feeling up to it and I should go alone. Well, what happened was that while I was away he walked off with a coil of rope and a plastic bucket and he went into the woods and hanged himself from the branch of a tree.’