The Nix(197)

Freya breathes heavily and looks at Faye with what feels like impatience or disdain.

“Is he still alive?”

“Yes, but his mind is going. He’s very old.”

“What did he do in America?”

“He worked at a factory. A chemical factory.”

“And did he have a good life?”

Faye thinks about this for a moment, about all those times she saw her father alone, keeping his distance from others, desolate, in his own self-made prison, standing for hours in the backyard staring into the sky.

“No,” she says. “He always seemed sad. And lonely. We never knew why.”

Freya seems to soften at this. She nods. She says, “Stay for dinner, then. I’ll tell you the story.”

And she does, over bread and a fish stew. It’s the story Freya’s mother told her when Freya was old enough to understand it. It begins in 1940, the last time anyone heard anything about Fridtjof Andresen. Like most young men in Hammerfest, he was a fisherman. He was seventeen and had recently graduated from the dockside work given to children, the cleaning and gutting and filleting. He now worked on the boat, which was an all-around better job: more lucrative, more fun, so much more thrilling when they’d drag up whole big nets of cod and halibut and the evil-looking, foul-smelling wolffish, which everyone universally agreed was better to catch than to gut. Whole days spent out on the water, losing track of the days because in the summer in the arctic the sun never sets. And feeling proud of the mastery he achieved with his trade’s various tools, the buoys and nets and kegs and lines and hooks stored in the hull just so. His favorite thing was sitting lookout atop the highest mast because he had the sharpest eyes on the boat. He had a gift; everyone said so. He spotted the schools of blackfish that steered into the bay all summer long, and seeing a boiling spot on the water he yelled “Fish-o!” and all the men would roll out of bed and put on their caps and get to work. They’d lower the rowboats, two men per craft—one to handle the oars, the other, the net—and they’d spread the net between them and he’d direct the whole operation from up top until the school reached them and they’d encircle the fish and hoist the whole churning mass of them triumphantly into the boat. There was power in that, their control over the wild sea, feeling unstoppable even while they sailed too close to jagged shores that would doom their ship to sinking if they weren’t such capable sailors.

Fridtjof could spot the fish better than anyone in living memory. He had the sharpest eyes in town, and he bragged about this constantly, whenever they were in port. He said the ocean was a piece of paper only he could read. He was young. He had a bit of money. He spent time in bars. He met a waitress named Marthe. It might not be accurate to say he fell in love with her. More like they were both feeling certain common teenage longings and they made themselves available to satisfy them. The first time they made love it was in the hills near her family’s house, after he’d waited for the bar to close and walked her home and they lay in the tough grass under a gray-white sun. Then she showed him around the land, the big house painted salmon-red, the long pier over the water, the long line of spruce trees, the field of barley. She loved it here, she said. She was a charming girl.

That was the summer the war came. Everyone thought Hammerfest was too remote to be of any concern, but it turned out the Germans wanted the city to disrupt Allied shipping to Russia, plus it would serve as an effective resupply base for their U-boats. The Wehrmacht was coming, was the word that spread up Norway’s coast, from dock to dock, boat to boat. There was talk on Fridtjof’s ship of escape. They could make it to Iceland. Start a new life there. Or keep going. There were ways to get from Reykjavík to America, some said. But what about the submarines? They wouldn’t bother their little fishing boat. But what about the mines? Fridtjof would spot them, they said. It could be done.

Fridtjof wanted to believe what some of the older men said, that the Germans were more interested in the docks than in the city, that they would leave everyone alone as long as there wasn’t a resistance, that their fight was with Russia and Britain, not Norway. But rumors had been spreading about happenings in the south: surprise attacks, burned villages. Fridtjof didn’t know what to think. On their next landing in Hammerfest, the crew would make a decision: stay or go. Anyone who wanted to stay was free to do so. Anyone wanting to risk the voyage to Iceland would bring all the supplies he could manage.

The only one who didn’t have a choice was Fridtjof. Or at least that’s how it seemed to him, when the older guys took him aside and said they needed his eyes. Only he could spot the mines that made the waters out beyond the islands so treacherous. Only he could read the swirls and eddies that signaled the presence of a U-boat. Only he could see the shapes of enemy ships way out there on the horizon, far enough away to avoid them. He had a gift, they all agreed. They’d be dead without him.

That night he waited for the bar to close and went to see Marthe. She was so happy to see him. They made love in the grass again and afterward she told him she was pregnant.

“We’ll have to get married, of course,” she said.

“Of course.”

“My parents say you can live with us. We’ll inherit the house someday.”

“Yes. Good.”

“My grandmother thinks it’s a girl. She’s usually right about these things. I want to name her Freya.”