Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name (19 page)

We followed the twigs Olaf had speared through the snow. This time, there was no fire, no lingonberry juice. In the near distance, I saw teams of huskies pulling three sleds of tourists. Men, women, and children, dressed in red or blue snowsuits. They waved hello, and I didn’t wave back.

Henrik was waiting for me on a bench outside the hotel lobby. He stood when he saw me, as if I was a doctor bringing news.

“Was it her?”�

I nodded.
Was Henrik my second cousin? My uncle?
�

“How was it?” he asked.�

“She didn’t ask about my brother,” I said. “She’s completely �

forgotten everything.”

“The wilderness can do that,” he said. He paused. “There are some things that it’s better not to know.”

The hotel seemed to be melting.

“I’ll take you back to Anna Kristine’s,” Henrik said, proud of himself for offering. He was a boy trying to be a man.

We drove in the afternoon darkness. I pretended I was asleep so I wouldn’t have to talk. The closer we got to Kautokeino, the more incensed I grew. Anna Kristine had known who I was, had known who she was to me. In the distance, the lights of Kautokeino shone red. A city on fire.

Anna Kristine greeted us at the door. I nodded perfunctorily and hurried past her to my bedroom. I packed quickly and checked the bus schedule. Nothing that night.

“Are you okay?”�

Henrik was standing in the doorway.�

“Fine.” I refolded a sweater I had already folded and stuffed �

it into a corner of my suitcase.

“I’m going out and check on the reindeer,” he said. “I’ll come by tonight. Maybe you want to go to the bar.”

I glared at him. “I’m leaving tomorrow.”

“I’ll drive you to Karasjok so you can get the bus from there. It’s easier.”

I couldn’t force myself to be kind.

“Sorry about your mother,” he said. “Sorry it didn’t go as you wished.”

He was sorry for me; Anna Kristine was sorry for me. Being sorry for someone was a way of saying something wasn’t your fault.

He left. I put everything in my suitcase and sat on it to close it. I wanted it to break. To be angry about it breaking. To be angry about something small and ultimately fixable.

Anna Kristine was in the kitchen, preparing dinner. I smelled meat.

I stood in the living room, staring at the door that was blocked by the couch. I knelt on the couch’s sagging green cushions and twisted the doorknob. It wouldn’t turn.

I got up and tugged the couch away from the wall. It was heavy; its feet scratched the floor. I tried the door again. Locked.

After my mother disappeared, my father locked her belongings in her study. After a year, he moved everything to the storage unit. People took up more space when they were gone.

Anna Kristine was behind me now. She said something in Sami.

“My father’s room,” I said, and pointed at the door. “My father. Your son,” I said, and pointed at her.

She stared at me. If she hadn’t been so old, I would have knocked her over. She nodded and stepped out of the room. She and Pankaj were the same, keepers of secrets.

Anna Kristine returned to the room and whispered something to me. Her bony fingers held a key. An ordinary key attached to a short red thread.

Anna Kristine’s hand made flat circles on the wall until she found and lifted the switch. Darkness. She left and returned with a flashlight.

I illuminated the room with quick slashes, then focused on one corner at a time. A poster of Saturn, a poster of a squirrel. A screwdriver, a radio, a lamp, a book. A bike helmet on top of a rolltop desk. A dozen pens thrown into a jar shaped like the head of a pig. I held one in my hand. The cap had been chewed raw, as if by an animal.

It was a boy’s room, similar to Jeremy’s. What had I been hoping to find? Had I really thought that the insane man’s room would be littered with terrible writings, with guns and violent collages?

I thought of the missing pictures in Anna Kristine’s photo album, the dried glue that framed their absence. I recognized the desire to erase someone. I sat down on the bed, still made neatly, its pillow, small and gray, on the floor. Anna

Kristine sat next to me. She extended her cold hand to mine, and I took it in my palm, her fingers like small branches on a dying tree. I pulled her close to me and kissed the top of her head.

At dinner Henrik told Anna Kristine I was leaving. She spoke in a quick flurry, and Henrik translated.

“She says you are welcome to stay,” Henrik said. “She says you can live here if you wish.”

No day would pass without a reminder of my father. “There’s nothing I could do here,” I offered as explanation.

“All the women move to Oslo.”

He shrugged and translated for Anna Kristine. She spoke again and he translated. “This is true. And you have your boyfriend or your husband to return to, the father of your child.” After Henrik had translated this, he stared at his napkin. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I didn’t tell you.” I tried to picture Pankaj. Pankaj at the door greeting me. Pankaj at the door forgiving me. I would have to live with that.

I nodded. “Yes,” I said. “My fiancé.” I could conjure only a Cubist version of his face. His lips here, his eyes there and there.

“What’s wrong?” Henrik said.

“Nothing,” I said, and turned my attention to my plate. Anna Kristine asked about our trip, and Henrik recounted it

in Sami and translated her questions into English. His English grew worse and soon he checked his watch. He stood to clear the table—it was time to go to the bar. The candle had short-ened over dinner and I could now see Anna Kristine’s face unobstructed. I told myself a lie, that her eyes were like mine.

In the morning Anna Kristine was gone. She had left a pair of small red mittens outside my door, mittens she had knitted for my child.

Henrik came to pick me up, as planned. He had a pink gash across his cheek.

“What’s that on your face? The pink mark?”

“Frostbite,” he said. “I was wearing a new mask this morning—to see my reindeer. It didn’t cover that part.”

On the way to Karasjok we talked about his plans for the day. He would sleep, check on his reindeer again, go to the bar. “And you?” he asked. “Back to New York?”

The headlights of an approaching car bounded up like a sunrise.

“I don’t think so,” I said. I had not been sure until that moment.

We arrived at the bus station and I leaned in to hug Henrik. “Let’s do this properly,” he said. We both got out of the car.

Henrik lifted my suitcase from the trunk and placed it down between us.

I stepped toward him, removed my glove and raised my hand to his cheek. The frostbitten area was hot. I could feel his heartbeat through my fingers.

“Thank you,” I said.

He opened his mouth and closed it again, as though swallowing what he had been about to say. He placed his gloved hand over my bare one, pressing my fingers to his cheek for a moment longer.

From Karasjok, I boarded a bus to Rovanemi. I was relieved I didn’t have to pass through Inari, past Eero, again. In Rovanemi, I bought a pack of white stationery and envelopes. “You surprising me not being from here,” said the middle-aged woman working at the store. She wore glasses on a chain. “Everyone here is from here.”

“My grandmother lives in Kautokeino,” I told her. She nodded, as if she could have guessed as much.

In Rovanemi, I sat inside the train station, my ticket in my hand. It was the same waiting area where I had spent the night almost two weeks before. It looked different now, cleaner, with a poster of Santa Claus on the wall.
VISIT SANTALAND
, read the caption beneath his wind-chapped face.

I heard the whistle of the train, and moved outside, to the platform. It was a clear day, the ground beneath my boots like buttermilk. I expected to recognize the conductor—I had been

on so many trains, seen so many conductors—but he was new. He wore blue gloves and bowed as he took my ticket. “Helsinki,” he said.

“Jå,”
I said, nodding.

I sat by the window. As the train picked up speed, we passed a reindeer wandering into a woman’s garden. She used a broom to shoo it away.

I dozed into dreams that left me refreshed and wanting more. An hour had passed when I woke for good. We were farther south now, and more houses lined the sides of the tracks. We passed a group of children, all in bright hoods, climbing a hill, dragging red sleds. Their parents stood gathered at the base of the hill, laughing, waving, encouraging.

I surprised myself at that moment by having sympathy for my mother. I didn’t forgive her, but I could understand what had possessed her to do what she had done. I was a reminder of her past. She could not look at me without remembering, just as she couldn’t look at Eero without feeling like one of his fallen parishioners, someone he was obligated to serve and save. You could not erase a rape—you would always be either victim or survivor. But victimhood requires witnesses, and my mother chose to leave hers behind. Now I was leaving those who knew about me: Anna Kristine, Henrik, Eero.

And Pankaj.

If I returned to Pankaj now, I would be the daughter of a madman. I would be the child of rape, motherless, raised by a quiet man named Richard who Pankaj had always known was

not my father. Now Pankaj could not leave me; duty demanded that he stay to care for his wounded bird. I couldn’t live with that kind of condescension.

As the train picked up speed, I started a letter to Pankaj.

I decided today that I’m going to stay away for a while. Even as I write this letter I don’t know if I’m going to tear it up.

I told him about Eero, about my grandmother, about my mother and the man who had taken her on the river. I told him about Henrik and Kari. I detailed more than he would need or care to know; I wanted it to be impossible for me to return to him. I wanted it to be impossible for him to take me back.

I stood and walked the length of the train. I passed women and men sleeping and children peering into shopping bags. I passed a couple who had fallen asleep holding hands. Their grasp was awkward, like a handshake. Their mouths were both open, as if in shock. I returned to my seat.

I didn’t tell Pankaj where I was going. I wasn’t sure. I knew that in a few hours I would be in Helsinki, and that from Helsinki I might travel to Amsterdam. But that was all I knew. I didn’t know that in Amsterdam, while walking alone amid Afri-can tourists and drunken British lads, I would decide to accept the job at the subtitling company in Hong Kong. I didn’t know that on the day I arrived in Hong Kong I would be lured into a dressmaking shop by a broad-shouldered woman who would offer me a cold glass of seltzer. That I would leave with three new dresses to accommodate my expanding belly, and that this woman, Allegra, would become my friend.

I didn’t know that during the fourth month of my pregnancy I would take a tram up to the top of Victoria Peak, where I would borrow a pair of binoculars from an Australian man so I could make sense of the shapes below. I would end up marrying this man, a gentle and slow-moving man who worked at the embassy. He would know nothing about my past—only that my father was named Richard and that my mother had died when I was fourteen. Together we would raise my daughter in an apartment overlooking the bay. From a young age, we would tell her the truth about her father—that he was a good man, a philosophy professor, that one day she could travel to New York and meet him.

I didn’t know that on hot summer days, we would walk down to the beach and swim in the welcoming water. That we would dig holes in the sand, pretending to be digging to America. I didn’t know that I would be so successful at becoming someone new. I was not different—I knew who I was and what had happened—but still, in the eyes of my husband and child and everyone I would come to know on the other side of the world, I was neither victim nor the product of an act of violence.

And when I would hear people say that you can’t start over, that you cannot escape the past, I would think
You can. You must
. I would go months without thinking of Pankaj, of my father, of the frozen white river where I was made. Sometimes my daughter would pretend her dolls were ill and treat them with various remedies—a warm bath, soup, affection. I would

think of Anna Kristine then, and on some nights in bed, in that moment before sleep erased the day, I would picture the way the sky in Lapland looked the morning I left, how the train had sped south beneath a sky that was brighter than it had been in weeks. It had pulsed with reds and oranges, as though hiding a beating heart.

Acknowledgments
‌

I am grateful to the Sami poet Marry Ailoniedia Somby for her poem “Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name,” from which I drew inspiration and a title.

I am indebted to my friends and family in Scandinavia, especially Lars and Mia Wessman, and Linda Saetre, who was an untiring translator and travel companion at an aphotic time of year. Heidi Johansen at the Alta Museum in Norway patiently answered my questions, and the welcoming inhabitants of Kautokeino, Norway, tolerated my inquisitive presence. Thank you also to the ice hotels in Alta and in Jukkasjarvi, Sweden.

My gratitude to my agent, Mary Evans, for her unfailing encouragement, and to my editor, Daniel Halpern, at Ecco, for providing a nurturing home for this book. Also, Carrie Kania, Allison Saltzman, Millicent Bennett, Amy Baker, and everyone else at Ecco: Thank you.

I thank my first readers, Julie Orringer, Lisa Michaels, Sarah Stone, Ron Nyren, Ann Packer, Cornelia Nixon, Ann Cummins, Nancy Johnson, Angela Pneuman, and Eli Horowitz, as well as

those who provided invaluable help and input at the end: Sally Willcox, Amanda Eyre Ward, Devin McIntyre, Indu Subaiya, Debby Klein, Karen Duffy, and Vanessa Vida. Thanks also to Paul and Inger Vida, Heidi Julavits, Andrew Leland, Kevin Feeney, and to Galen Strawson, whose essay “Against Narrativity,” published in
Ratio,
made me curious about the kind of person who would see their past as unconnected to their present. In trying to answer that question, this novel emerged.