Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name (15 page)

The first car didn’t stop; the second did. The man was blond and wore a leather jacket over his Sami outfit. The woman had a higher hairline than I’d ever seen on anyone. I tried not to stare.

They didn’t speak English, but they understood “Karasjok” and “Sami Parliament.” They nodded yes, they were going that way, as though there was no other place they could be going.

Outside the window, all was white. Flat, snow-covered fields. In the distance, I saw a large shape hanging from a tree. A white plastic chair. The woman with the high hairline

pointed at it, and she, her husband, and I laughed together for longer than we needed to.

It took an hour and a half to drive from Kautokeino to Karasjok. The Sami Parliament was an enormous structure, half of it shaped like a teepee. It looked new, costly. We turned into the empty parking lot. The man and the woman said something to each other, and then to me. I ran to check. It was closed—today was Sunday. Anna Kristine had looked different today because she had been dressed for church.

The Sami couple asked where I’d like to go next, and I said the town center. Somehow they understood this and drove down a hill to a shopping area. Though the cars in the parking lot were empty, plumes of exhaust, veined with lavender, rose from their trunks. The cars had been left running while their drivers shopped.

The couple stepped out of the car, and I did, too. I shook their hands to thank them, and signaled that I was okay. They walked into the grocery store, and I was left in the parking lot, among the running cars.

I could get into any one of the cars and take off. I would drive a Ford, I decided, nothing obvious. I walked up to the window of a red one. The keys were in the ignition, the door unlocked. Discreetly, I looked around. No one was watching me. The lot was empty of people, all herded inside by the cold.

I would get in the car, pick up Henrik, and we would drive to his island in the west. Or to Russia. Together, he and I would raise this child.

I walked out of the parking lot, away from bad ideas. I saw a sign for a Sami museum and followed the arrows up a long hill. Once I was inside the entrance, my palms fell onto my knees. I heard panting.

I was panting.

I paid the admission price. I was the only visitor. The museum was simple, plain—a sharp contrast to the Sami Parliament. One room displayed Sami outfits from various regions. I recognized the ones from Inari, from Kautokeino.

A map of the stars, a full wall, illustrated how the ancient Sami had relied on the sky to navigate. Lines connected the Samis’ constellations. A skier, a reindeer, six stars for horns. I stood squinting at the galaxy of stars, making out shapes, until the museum closed.

I hitched back to Kautokeino.

My ride was Sara, pronounced
Sorra.
She was an older woman, plump. She asked what I was doing in Finnmark. I told her I was researching the Alta Dam protests.

“That was an interesting time,” she said. “You were here?” I said.

“No, I was born here but didn’t live here then.” At a young age, she was sent south to a Norwegian school, as were most of the Sami in Finnmark at that time. “The government wanted the children to learn Norwegian, so we were sent to schools where we slept and lived.”

“Boarding schools?” I said.

“Yes, boarding schools,” she said. She looked out the window on my side, as if she’d just seen one. “They don’t exist now. But the Alta Dam . . . I was so taken from my heritage that I was embarrassed when I saw the protesters.”

“Embarrassed?”

She nodded. “They chained themselves together, at their ankles,” she said, and pointed to her wrists, “and I thought,
Why are they doing this? Everyone thinks we Sami are wild beasts, and now they are showing this is true.
So yes, I was embarrassed. Shameful. But now I see I was wrong. It was important, the protests. I was thinking like the worst Norwegians. Not like Sami. I had been brainwashed. Not really, of course. But how much my mind was changed. How much my thinking was changed.”

Sara now worked for an organization that helped the Sami sustain their villages by manufacturing Sami handicrafts and exporting reindeer meat.

“How many Sami are there now?” I asked.

“The government says about fifty thousand to seventy thou-

sand in all of Lapland. But I think that’s wrong. I think it’s closer to two hundred thousand,” she said. “They tried to do a . . . what’s the word? Not a lottery.” She rubbed her eyebrows. “Like when Joseph and Mary were going to Bethlehem, they were going there to do what?”

“A census?”

“Census,” she said. “Yes, they try to do census, but many Sami didn’t want to be part of it. Many Sami didn’t want to be counted. They don’t think they are Sami, or they do, but to them, they don’t want to have to be a number.”

“But you think they should be counted?”

“Yes,” she said. “I do. It helps them get supports from the government. The government know nothing. They come up here and use our nature, our trees and oil and they treat us like we are nothing. Like we are sheep. ‘Move over, sheep!’ they say . . .” She trailed off. “And the Alta Dam disaster! They tried to sell the idea to the Sami by saying it would produce so many jobs. ‘So many jobs it will produce. Hundred jobs. More,’ they say. It created three jobs. Three! Those jobs were far away, in Narvik!”

The light in the sky around us was being squeezed out, like water from a rag. The song on her radio was the one about driving home for Christmas.

Sara turned to me then, as though she hadn’t taken note of me before. “You look like someone,” she said. “Have you been here before?”

“No,” I said.�

“You look like someone,” she repeated. “Let me think who.”�

She was going to tell me I looked like a man she knew. Within the next minute, I would learn the identity of my father.

“Yes,” Sara said and slapped her thigh. “I know who she is you look like.”

I exhaled. It was a woman. She was going to tell me I looked like a woman on an American sitcom. People often told me I looked like her.

“She lives outside Alta, this woman you look like. She is American, I think from California. She works at the Ice Hotel in Alta.”

“She works there now?”

“I saw her there a year ago. Maybe. Maybe nine months.

For my job, I travel all over Finnmark, I meet everyone.” “She looks like me?”

“She’s much older, but there is something similar. Or . . . maybe you are both American, that’s all.”

With fumbling fingers, I unzipped my backpack and took out the envelope with Eero’s pictures of my mother. I removed the photo that I liked the best, the one that looked least how I remembered her, and held it in front of the steering wheel. Perhaps by choosing this one, I was ensuring it was less likely it would be her that Sara recognized. She took her eyes off the road to study it.

“Is it an old photo?”

“Yes,” I said. “From maybe thirty years ago.” “Then maybe it’s her,” Sara said. “It’s possible.”

“Do you know her name?” I asked.�

“What is it?” she said. “I’m trying think.” She tapped the �

side of her head.

I was mouthing the word when she said it herself. “Olivia.”

Tongue to
Ice
�
‌

My mother had returned to Lapland. She hadn’t returned to her sisters in California. Or to New York, to us.

We had a funeral for you.

We approached Kautokeino. Sara asked where I was staying. I mumbled Anna Kristine’s name, pointed to a road.

“Anna Kristine’s famous around here,” Sara said.

Sara wanted to come inside to say hello to Anna Kristine. I claimed she wasn’t home, which turned out to be true.

I lay on the living-room couch, planning. I had been so certain when I had gone to San Antonio. I had held the address to Mr. Wells’s house in my hands as if it were an engraved invita-tion. A decade had passed. I was still chasing her.

I called the Ice Hotel. “You are lucky,” said the woman who answered the phone. “By mistake they built two extra rooms this year.” She had a heavy accent; she was not my mother. I made a reservation for the following night.

Henrik came over that afternoon. He wore a plastic lasso around his neck, wrapped a dozen times.

“You missed a great after-party,” he said, collapsing on the chair in my room. “What are you doing?”

“Looking at a map. I want to go to Alta, to the Ice Hotel tomorrow.”

“I can take you,” he said. “It’s on the way to Tromsø. I was going to go to visit a friend who’s working on an oil rig there. He’s having a party this weekend. You can come.”

“I’m not in the mood for a party,” I said, measuring distances on the map with my fingers. I told him I was looking for my mother. That I didn’t want to be alone when I saw her. “Would you want to—”

“I’ll come with you,” he said. He didn’t ask what my mother might be doing in Lapland or why I thought she might be at the Ice Hotel.

“Great,” I said. And then I said it again—this time, with enthusiasm. “Great.”

Anna Kristine insisted that I not pack up completely. She wanted to ensure I’d come back through Kautokeino, that she’d see me again. I picked out the clothes I would need and said good-bye to Anna Kristine. Pointing to a calendar, I showed her when I would return. She took my hand in hers and patted it three times—once for each day.

Henrik asked me to drive Anna Kristine’s car. He’d been out until four, and had to wake up at seven to herd his reindeer. I let the car warm up for five minutes—not long enough. I had to drive with my gloves on. I sat on my left foot to keep it warm.

As we passed by Masi, Henrik stared at the river. His mouth

was open, as though he wanted to say something. I fixed my gaze on the road ahead. Five kilometers later, when I dared to look at him, Henrik was asleep. He slept sitting straight up. Pankaj could never fall asleep in the car.

The Ice Hotel was constructed entirely of snow and ice. It looked like an architect’s version of a child’s dream fort. A permanent structure made of wood had been built next to the ice structure. Reception.

Six women stood behind the reception desk. All were young, and none was my mother. A relief—I wasn’t ready to see her. Twenty tourists, many of them Asian, waited in line.

A woman named Mariann checked us in. Tonight, she told us, was the official opening. Given the late snowfall this year, they hadn’t been able to start constructing the hotel as early as scheduled. There wasn’t enough snow to build the structure, and it hadn’t been as cold as necessary to keep the hotel from melting. “Artists from around the planet—they have just been sitting around waiting,” Mariann said as she handed me a registration card.

The card asked for my address. My father’s house in Rhinebeck, the apartment I shared with Pankaj in Morningside Heights—neither seemed like home. When I pictured their interiors, their shapes were
Room at Arles
slanted, the walls

collapsing. I asked Henrik for Anna Kristine’s address and scribbled it on the blank line.

We were instructed to go to the activity center, two rooms over in the wood building, to get outfitted for our stay. It resembled a ski store, with tall shelves of boots stocked in one room; in the other, snowsuits hung according to size. They still held the shapes of previous users—shoulders, knees, elbows.

I chose a small blue suit; Henrik picked out a red one, a men’s medium. We were fitted for boots, gloves, hats. An entire uniform was necessary to find my mother.

I studied every female employee. My mother had blond hair when I last saw her, but fourteen years had passed. A brunette across the room was wearing suede pants, a black sweater. I moved closer. She was speaking German.
Look at the ears
, I told myself.
Just look at the ears.

Henrik and I dragged our suits and boots and luggage to the lockers. A troll-like woman gave us a key. All around us, men, women, and children stripped down to their long underwear— light blues and pinks and faded reds, the colors of laundry mistakes. I took my snowsuit into the women’s restroom. I’ve never changed in public.

I returned to the luggage room and stood watching Henrik from six feet away. He saw my stare. “What?” he said.

“Nothing,” I said. When you believe anyone could be your mother, you begin to think anyone could be your brother, your lover, your son.

We tried to enter the Ice Hotel, but we were stopped a few feet in by a woman with a shovel. She said something to Henrik. “It’s not done yet,” he translated for me. “Let’s go for a walk until six. That’s when the party starts.”

With flashlights, we walked down the road. We watched a school bus stop, kids file out.

When we tired of walking, we lay down side by side on a clearing just beyond the road, staring upward.

“Can I ask you something?” he said.

“You don’t have to,” I said, and I told him about my mother. When I was finished, he reached his hand out toward mine but didn’t touch it. “Are you sure you want to do this?” he said.

I nodded at the dark sky.

At six, a man in a reindeer-skin poncho sounded an animal horn. The doors to the Ice Hotel opened, and everyone filed in, two by two. A chandelier, its tears made of ice, hung from

the ceiling of packed snow. Sculptures of Norse gods, like glass statues, lined the main hallway.

“I didn’t know it would be this beautiful,” Henrik said. I nodded absently. Where was she?

We were led to a large room at the end of the hallway: the Ice Bar. A sheer block of ice spanned the length of the room, thirty feet. A sculpture of a harp stood in one corner. We made our way to the bar. No mother. Instead, five bartenders, all women, who needed to read the menu to make the drinks. “First night,” they said.

Henrik ordered the house specialty, and I ordered water. The drinks were served in square ice glasses. Henrik toasted my glass with his. I moved to the center of the room, and Henrik followed. Everyone had changed into outfits more appropriate for a club than an igloo—leather pants and boots, suede or wool ponchos. Henrik and I were the only guests still wearing our snowsuits.