Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name (13 page)

A man stood in the doorway of the room, watching me. Henrik. “How long has it been?” I asked.

“Two days,” he said.

“I’m sorry to be so much trouble.”

“No trouble,” he said. “My aunt likes you.”

“Thank you for bringing me here.” I couldn’t look at him when I said this. There were many things I wanted to ask him, but I said nothing.

Henrik sat down in the chair next to the bed. His skin was wind-chafed, his lips full. He began to talk about reindeer.

“For the past two days I’ve been out with my reindeer,” he said. “But I’ll be around more in the coming days. If you need anything.”

“Reindeer?” I said. My voice was sore, deep. He closed his eyes to say yes.

“How many do you have?” I didn’t know why I cared. “Between two thousand and twelve thousand,” he said.

I mumbled something about being impressed.

“Can I tell you a secret?” he said. I nodded gravely, wanting his secret. “You don’t ask a Sami how many reindeer he owns. It’s like me asking you how much money is in your bank account.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. A second later, I understood what he meant. “Do you use a snowmobile to herd them?”

“Yes, that’s how I move them down from the mountains. I use a scooter—that’s what we call snowmobile.”

“What did herders do before snowmobiles? Skis?” I wanted to force my thoughts onto something other than Richard, Pankaj, my mother, the man.

“Yes, skis,” Henrik said.

I stared at the knife hanging from his waist in what looked like a holster. “Do you kill them with that?”

“This is for grouse, this knife. And for marking the reindeer. Everyone marks the ears of their reindeer,” he said. He searched his pocket for a pen, and then looked around the room for paper. On the back of an unused envelope, he drew two ears. “This is the left,” he said as he made two triangle-shaped slits. “And here, in the right, are three cuts, but higher.” He made the slashes quickly and without hesitation, the way some people write their signature. It was his mark.

Only people whose grandparents had herded reindeer were allowed to own them, he told me. In Norway, there were only five hundred permits given out, one permit per family. “I come from a big family of reindeer herders, you see,” he said. “Wait here, I’ll show you.”

I smoothed down my hair and rose higher up on the bed, my pillow propped behind me.

Henrik returned to the room and sat down in the chair, a photo album in his lap. He handed me a small paperback book.

“It’s the directory of all the reindeer herders’ markings,” he said. The book was arranged alphabetically by family name. He took the book, flipped to
Nilssen
, and handed it back to me. There were nine entries.

“That’s your last name?” I said. He nodded.

The directory listed each person’s name within the family, what town they lived in, what markings were on the reindeers’ left and right ears.

He pointed to his sister’s mark, his mother’s, his aunt’s, his brother’s. His sister lived in Oslo now, and didn’t herd anymore; she had sold her reindeer to Henrik.

“So your family has always lived in Kautokeino?” I asked. “Yes,” he said. “I also brought some pictures of the trip to

our island, you see.”

“No, I don’t see,” I said. He looked at me.

“I’m teasing you. Your English is very good. But you don’t have to say
you see
all the time. People don’t do that.”

“I see,” he said and smiled. “Thank you.” Then he told me

about his family’s island.

The island was off the west coast of Norway. Many herders preferred to keep their animals on an island; it was easier to contain them. The reindeer migrated toward the coast in the spring anyway, driven by mosquitoes and attracted by the coast’s cooler climate. The reindeer lived on the island until fall, when they were led back to Kautokeino.

Henrik was sitting close to me, as though he was telling me a bedtime story. He smelled like a hamster I used to own.

The album was decorated with beach balls. Each ball was a different color—pink, blue, yellow. The first photo was of his family packing the sleighs, preparing to lead the reindeer from Kautokeino to the water. “That’s me,” he said, pointing to a boy of about nine.

I looked at him, and then at the photo. He had the same wide, crooked smile.

“And there’s Anna Kristine,” he said, pointing to another picture. The photo was taken inside a
lavu
. She looked like she was waking up, with blankets still covering her legs. I stared at the picture, did my math. Even when she was younger, she looked old.

“Anna Kristine was with you? Did your whole family go?” I had spent a total of four afternoons with my aunts in California. Women who drank copious amounts of tea and wore large, dangling pendants. I couldn’t fathom going on a trip with them.

“Yes, everyone, every year. It takes six weeks to get out to

the coast, sometimes more, in the spring. Then six weeks to get back to Kautokeino in the fall.”

I returned my eyes to the photo album.

“And here’s a photo,” he said excitedly, “of a reindeer giving birth. Usually they give birth on the island and then the babies have all summer to grow strong and fat before we lead them to Kautokeino. But this one gave birth early, while we were still on the journey out to the coast.”

“So you put the baby on the sleigh for the rest of the trip?” “No, we leave them behind.”

“Alone?”

“Yes, but they catch up eventually. The mother waits for the calf to get stronger, you see. And then she leads it to the island. They know how to get there even when we’re out of sight.”

“But how do they know how to get across the water?” I asked. I was looking at another picture, this one of hundreds of reindeer boarding a large boat that would take them to the island. It was the kind of boat I’d seen take cars across water, but never animals. We both stared at the picture. “How do the mother and child get across without the boat? Does it come back for them?”

Henrik shook his head. “They swim to the island,” he said. “They know.”

Since I was young, I’d been interested in stories of mothers and children. After hearing them, I’d determine whether or not they applied to my mother and me.

Henrik’s reindeer story didn’t help me at all.

A number of pictures had been removed from the album. Hardened glue that once ran the periphery of the photos, holding them in place, now outlined their absence.

Henrik skipped ahead to pictures of the family leading the reindeer back in the fall. The reindeer were bigger, stronger, and the herders wore lighter clothing—floral dresses, shorts. Everyone was smiling, laughing. A thousand wrinkles in the sun.

“Do you dye your hair blond?” I asked. In his childhood photos, his hair was brown.

“No,” Henrik said.

“Oh,” I said. “I thought maybe you did. Everyone else in your family has dark hair.”

“My mother dyes it,” Henrik said. “Your mother dyes her hair?”

“No,” he said. “My mother dyes my hair.”

Henrik continued talking, pointing, but now I was weak again. My eyelids were heavy and stayed closed for a moment too long. Henrik must have noticed—he took the glass of water from my hand before I spilled.

“Sweet dreams,” he said.

For all I knew, it was morning.

Anna Kristine woke me up and led me down the hall to another bathroom, this one with a tub. She helped me undress. I slid

into the porcelain tub, and she left me alone. Sinking lower, I studied my legs under the surface. Bruises on the thigh and calf. I couldn’t remember how or why. Black hairs in every direction. It had been so long since I’d had leg hair I didn’t know what it would look like. I traced a hand over my leg, upwards. It was sharp, somehow pleasurable.

Pankaj liked to shave my legs. The first time he shaved them, he had come into the bathroom to talk. While sitting on the side of the tub, without a word, he lifted my right foot to the edge and lathered my leg. He shaved it well, quiet and methodical. When he was done, he put his hand on my heel and lowered my leg into the bath. Then he lifted the other one.

I sank into Anna Kristine’s bathtub until the water came to my ears. Under the surface, the sounds of tunnels.

Anna Kristine returned to the bathroom and frowned when she saw me. I had gotten my hair wet. She wrapped it in a towel and sighed. With rough strokes, she ran a comb with small teeth through my thick hair. I had underestimated her strength.

I felt well enough to dress and walk back to my room. Anna Kristine had remade the bed with fresh, crisp sheets. I slipped into them and closed my eyes.

Between naps, a small girl stared at me from the chair. She was maybe five years old, with wide eyes and a plump upper

lip. She was not real. I was prone to hallucinations while sick; I turned over and went back to sleep.

I woke up again, and still she was there, on the chair, removing a Band-Aid from her elbow. I didn’t know how she’d gotten into the room, or how long she’d been watching me.

I waved to her, and she waved back. In my sleep, I’d twisted and kicked my new bedding down to my feet. The girl slipped off the chair and pulled up the sheet, then the blanket, and then the bedspread, and tucked me in.

“Thank you,” I said, and coughed. From the bedside table, she handed me the glass of water, now full again, and I took a sip. When I handed it back to her, she tried to match her own fingerprints to the ones I had left on the glass.

“What’s your name?” I said.

The girl giggled. From her shoulder hung a purse shaped like a clock. The time on the clock was ten after ten. From inside the purse, she pulled a book and began to sing a lullaby. I didn’t understand a word, but I nearly cried. I looked at the cover; the book was turned upside down.

Later, I was awake, and the girl was gone.

I put my hands between my legs and then on my stomach. A calendar hung from a wall. As I pulled it down, a thumbtack fell to the floor.

I turned the calendar pages backwards from December. I

counted and counted again. Seven weeks had passed since my last period.

It had been the night Pankaj and I went to see
The Ice Man Cometh
at a theater downtown. The play was long, three hours, and awful, and he convinced me to walk out before intermission.

“Your job,” he said, “has made you immune to bad art.” We stopped at a used bookstore on the way home, and

Pankaj bought a paperback of the play. On the subway, he skimmed through it and dog-eared the scene where we’d walked out.

At home, we climbed to the roof and sat on a slowly deflat-ing air mattress. We’d left it there in August, during the heat wave, and now it was fall. We kept our coats on. “Do you want to sit on my lap and talk about the first thing that comes up?”

It was a dumb joke. He had said it several times to me, and, I was sure, to other women before.

“Shut up,” I said, and pulled up my skirt. I wrapped my legs around him, crossing my ankles at the base of his spine.

Anna Kristine set the dinner table for the two of us. My first meal out of bed. She handed me matches to light the candles, and served us each a bowl of stew. I looked away as she hoisted herself up onto her seat. The chairs were of average height.

I took a spoonful of the stew. The taste of reindeer.

“It’s good,” I said, and smiled. She smiled back.

“Anna Kristine,” I said. “I’m pregnant.” I gestured with my hands to indicate a protruding belly.

It took her a moment to understand what I was saying, that I wasn’t full. “Yes,” she said, and nodded. She pointed to her temple and then to her eye, and then to her temple. She’d known that first night.

She rose from the table and returned with a picture of herself, taken maybe fifty years earlier. In the photo, she was reclining on one of the sleighs the family used when leading the reindeer to the island. The sleigh was the shape of a small boat. She was wearing a bright, floral-patterned housedress that stretched across a pregnant stomach. Her hands rested on top of the mound, clasped and proud.

“Daughter?” I said.

She stared at me. I pointed at the picture again, at her stomach. “Your daughter?” I said.

She shook her head no.

I motioned to Anna Kristine to excuse me for a moment. I retrieved the photos of my mother from my backpack. I had never shown them to Anna Kristine, only to Henrik. I selected my favorite one and held it out to her.

“My mother,” I said.

Anna Kristine nodded as I handed it to her. “Do you recognize her?” I said.

Anna Kristine didn’t answer. She seemed to see something in the picture.

“Did you know her?” I said. I gestured toward her and then to the photo. I held my breath.

Anna Kristine shook her head no.

After dinner, sadness surrounded Anna Kristine. We sat in front of the TV, watching
Fanny and Alexander.
I tried to follow the plot, while Anna Kristine repaired her shoes. They were pointed at the tips, like elf slippers. She was sitting still, a vague look in her eye. To the right of her head, a doorknob jutted out from the wall. The couch was blocking a door I hadn’t noticed until now.

Anna Kristine felt my stare. She looked at me and smiled wanly, and for a moment, I wanted to tell her everything. I wanted to cling to her and tell her that sitting in front of the TV with her reminded me of watching
Some Like It Hot
with Dad every Christmas. His choice. I wanted to tell her how his laugh sounded like someone gurgling, how recently he had died. My father was dead. Not my real father, but Dad. I felt a surge of forgiveness toward him.

I wanted to tell her about my mother, about my biological father, about how I had never wanted children but now, suddenly, knowing that I was pregnant, I couldn’t imagine not

having a child. I wanted, I wanted, I wanted. I wanted so much that what I wanted most was not to want. I wanted to talk and talk until there was nothing left to tell.