The Nix(198)

They made plans for most of the night. In the morning, he told her he was voyaging out to hunt cod to the northeast. He told her he’d be back in a week. She smiled. She kissed him goodbye. And she never saw him again.

When Freya was born, she was born to an occupied city. The Germans had come and removed most families from their homes. Soldiers lived in the houses now, while everyone else crowded into apartment buildings or schools or the church. Marthe shared a single flat with sixteen other families. Some of Freya’s earliest memories were from this time of hunger and desperation. They lived this way for four years before the Germans withdrew. On that day, in the winter of 1944, every living soul in Hammerfest was ordered to evacuate the city. Those who did fled to the forest. Those who didn’t were killed. The Germans burned the city to the ground. Every structure except the church. When the people returned, there was nothing left to return to but rock and rubble and ash. They lived through that winter in the hills, in caves. Freya remembers the cold, and the smoke from the fires they burned, smoke that kept everyone awake coughing and hacking. She remembers vomiting spoonfuls of acid and ash into her hand.

In the spring they emerged from shelter and began rebuilding Hammerfest. But they did not have the resources to make it what it once was. That’s why the city looks in places the way it looks now, cheap and anonymous, a testament not to beauty but to resilience. Marthe’s family rebuilt their house as best they could, even painting it the same color, that same salmon-red, and eventually, when Freya was old enough, Marthe told her the story of Fridtjof Andresen, her father. Nobody had ever heard from him after the war. They assumed he fled to Sweden, like so many others did. Sometimes Freya would go out to watch the fishing boats, imagining him on top of one searching the ocean for her. She’d daydream about his return, but then the years went by and she grew up and had her own family and she stopped wishing for his return and started hating him, then stopped hating him and began simply forgetting him. Before Faye arrived, she hadn’t thought about her father in years.

“I don’t think my mother ever forgave him,” Freya says. “She was unhappy most of her life, angry with him, or with herself. She’s dead now.”

It’s just past seven o’clock and the sunlight pouring into the kitchen is slanted and gold. Freya slaps her palms on the table and stands up.

“Let’s go to the water,” she says. “For sunset.”

She brings Faye a coat and on the walk down explains that sunsets are a precious thing in Hammerfest because they get so few of them. Tonight, the sun sets at eight fifteen. A month ago, it was setting at midnight. In another month, it will get dark at five thirty. And one day in mid-November, the sun will rise at around eleven o’clock in the morning, set about half an hour later, and that’s the last they’ll see of it for two whole months.

“Two months of darkness,” Faye says. “How do you bear it?”

“You get used to it,” she says. “What choice do you have?”

They sit on the dock in silence drinking coffee and feeling a cold breeze coming off the water and watching a copper-colored sun set over the Norwegian Sea.

Faye tries to imagine her father sitting high above the water, perched on the uppermost mast of a fishing boat, the wind reddening his face. What it must have been like for him, in comparison, at the ChemStar factory in Iowa—turning dials, recording numbers, doing paperwork, standing on the flat, dull earth. And what would he have been thinking as they left for Iceland, as he watched Hammerfest recede from view, leaving behind a home, a child. How long would he regret it? How big would that regret become? Faye suspects he regretted it forever. That the regret became his secret heart, the thing he buried most deeply. She remembers him as he was when he thought no one was looking, staring off into the distance. Faye always wondered what he was seeing in those moments, and now she thinks she knows. He was seeing this place, these people. He was wondering what might have been had he made a different decision. It was impossible to ignore the similarity of their names: Freya and Faye. When he named her Faye, was he thinking about the other daughter? When he spoke Faye’s name, did he always hear the echo of this other name? Was Faye just a reminder of the family he left behind? Was he trying to punish himself? When he described the home in Hammerfest, he described it as though he’d actually lived here, described it as though it were his. And maybe, in his mind, it was. Maybe next to the actual world was this fantasy, this other life where he inherited the farm with the salmon-red house. Sometimes those fantasies can be more persuasive than one’s own life, Faye knows.

Something does not have to happen for it to feel real.

Her father was never more animated, never happier, than when he spoke about this place, and maybe even as a child Faye recognized this. She understood that part of her father was always somewhere else. That when he looked at her he never really saw her. And she wonders now if all her panic attacks and problems had been elaborate attempts to be paid attention to, to be seen. She’d convinced herself she was haunted by ghosts from the old country because—even though she didn’t understand it in these terms—maybe she was trying to be Freya for him.

“Do you have children?” Freya asks, breaking the long silence.

“A son.”

“Are you close?”

“Yes,” Faye says, because, once again, she’s too embarrassed to tell the truth. How could she ever tell this woman that she did to her son what Fridtjof did to her? “We’re very close,” she says.