Aliss at the Fire

and as though he was carrying Asle to his baptism Kristoffer goes into the old house where they live and Brita stays standing and then Brita runs her hand through her hair so that it falls back from her forehead and her face is there like an empty sky and then Brita goes home into the old house, where she lives herself, into the old house where she has lived with him for years and years now, into her house, Brita goes into the house that became her own house, she thinks, she is going in to where she is, in her strange clothes and with her long thick black hair Brita is going into her house, into the old house that’s hers and his, she thinks, and so, if someone else has gone into her house, if someone else lives in the old house, then she herself probably can’t go in? if it’s not her house anymore? and so can she go inside it? she thinks, no she probably can’t? but it’s she and he who live there, no one else lives there, she thinks, they have lived there for years and years, the two of them, just the two of them, she thinks and then she notices the rain, she is standing outside after all, in the rain, in the darkness, and the wind is blowing, and it’s cold, and she can’t just stay standing here outside, she thinks, but he hasn’t come home. And where is he? Where has he gone? He must have gone out onto the fjord in his boat, but he still hasn’t come back, and she’s really worried about him, can something have happened to him? she thinks, why doesn’t he come back? but she thinks things like that all the time, she thinks, almost every day, because every day he rows out in his boat, he does, and she is almost always worried about him and thinks that now he really needs to come home, she thinks. And is today any different? Probably not, as far as she knows, she thinks. Everything is probably the same as always. Everything is the same as always. It’s an ordinary Tuesday in late November, 1979. And she is she. And he is he. But maybe she should still go down to the shore, go down to the boathouse, maybe she should still go look for him all the same? she thinks. Yes that’s what she’ll do, she thinks. It’s good to get outside for a few minutes, even if it is windy and raining, she thinks. It’s refreshing. She can’t just stay inside at home all the time. She spends much too much time indoors. Whole days, she often doesn’t set foot outside all day. No it’s not good. She needs to get out of the house too, every once in a while. And hanging around worrying like that, isn’t that pretty much what she does all the time? yes, well, but anyway she can still go down to the fjord, she thinks, she could surely do that, she thinks, and in any case why does she just stay standing here? if she wants to go she should go, she can’t stay standing here, she thinks, it’s a Tuesday in late November, 1979, and she is just standing there, she thinks, and then she starts to walk down the little road, but just now, wasn’t that him she had seen coming up the road? no it can’t have been him, it was probably just something she imagined, she thinks, but now she has to go down to the shore and look for him, it’s raining, it’s windy, and it’s gotten so dark now, it’s gotten so dark that she can hardly see to walk, and this, this frightful weather, and this cold, and why would he row out in a boat when the weather’s like this? she thinks, why would he do that? no, she doesn’t understand it, why doesn’t he want to stay with her? she thinks, instead he always rows out in that boat, that little boat, a little rowboat, and now he has to come home, she thinks, and she has gotten so worried, because he never stays out on the fjord so long, not in weather like this, and when it’s so dark, and so cold, she can’t remember him ever staying out so long before, and why doesn’t he come home? what’s wrong? and nothing bad can have happened, can it? she thinks, and maybe he’ll never come back? no she can’t think like that, she thinks, now she really does have to just go down to the shore, and she can just stand there on the pier for a while and look for him, because then, if she stands there, it might just happen that he’ll come back sooner, she thinks, because she’s done that lots of times before, yes, lots of times, really a lot, she’s gone down to the boathouse and the pier for a while, down to look for him, she has stood there so many times on the pier and waited for him to come back to shore, it’s probably the evening walk she takes most often, that, she thinks and she crosses the big road and she goes down the path and then she hears a woman call out Asle, Asle and she goes around the corner of the boathouse and she stops and there on the shore she sees that long thick hair of Brita’s and she hears Brita again calling Asle, Asle! and then she sees a little boat, one or two feet long, a pretty little rowboat, lying there floating in the black water and then she sees Asle’s head come up out of the fjord and she sees that his hands are flailing there in the waves and then she sees Brita run out onto the pier and Asle’s head disappears again under the water, his hands, all of him disappears under the water and then his boat is lying there and floating and being pulled farther out into the fjord and Brita jumps off the pier and starts to swim out into the fjord and the boat disappears behind a wave and Brita tries to swim as hard as she can, she fights, struggles forward, against the waves, and the waves push her back and Brita shouts Asle! Asle! there between the waves and she can see Asle’s head again, coming up there between two waves