The Last Chime

I should have turned around at the toll station.

That’s the kind of thing one says afterwards, and it is always a lie. I didn’t think of turning back. I thought about the petrol tank being half full, that the rental car smelled of someone else’s chewing gum, and that I had forgotten to buy something to eat in Alta. That was all. The thought that I should have turned around only came much later, and by then it carried the same weight as all such thoughts: it cost nothing.

The car was a white rental from Alta Airport, and I had had it for three weeks. It had acquired a scratch along the left door in a car park outside the library, which I had not reported. The radio was the only thing that worked properly, and it was the radio that started first.

There was something about the signal. Right after the turn-off to Kåfjord the broadcast dissolved into a steady crackle, and I did not turn it down because I thought it was the tunnel. It was not the tunnel. At the next bend the crackle took on a shape, a kind of rhythm, like someone trying to tune a guitar with a thumb on a single string, over and over again. I switched the radio off. The rhythm continued inside the car, a little weaker, like the smell of a cigarette smoked out in the hallway.

I said aloud to myself that it was tiredness. It does not help to say such things aloud.

It was a quarter to six, and it ought to have been light. It was September, and the sun did not set until late in the evening, but the fog had come in from the Altafjord from the middle of the afternoon, and now it lay over the road like a wet sheet. I drove on fog lights and fifty kilometres an hour. At a place along the road an orange power-company van stood parked with its lights off, and I remember thinking that the driver was probably sitting inside eating his packed lunch, and that I envied him. Then the van was gone in the mirror, and after that I saw no more cars.

The road narrowed noticeably after the van, or perhaps it was only the fog that made it feel narrower, stealing the edge lines centimetre by centimetre until I was driving more by memory and instinct than by actual sight. I rolled the window down a couple of centimetres to hear better, and the air that came in was denser than air ought to be, almost tangible, with a taste of salt and something metallic I could not place.

The silence outside was total in a way I had never experienced in a car before. No distant motorcycles. No tractor in a field. Not even the usual, far-off hum from a main road somewhere behind the horizon, the background sound one stops noticing in a city but which is always there, proof that other people exist somewhere nearby. Here there was nothing. Only my engine, the windscreen wipers, and the rhythm I had stopped hearing after a while because it never ceased.

I passed Vintersetnes without thinking about it at first.

Then the name came back to me.

Vintersetnes.

I had been here before. Many times.

My childhood home was out here. In those days the road had been part of everyday life, not something I passed on the way to a place I would rather not have gone to. I remembered the house, the winter around the walls and the fjord outside. Everything had been larger then.

I slowed a little.

I could not see the house from the road. The fog lay too thick.

I sat looking towards the place for a moment before I drove on.

The tunnel lay ahead of me.

I did not know why, but as I approached the entrance I had the feeling that I had left something behind me.

Or perhaps that I had driven past it.

I passed a last house, a yellow wooden house with dark windows and a snowmobile covered by a tarpaulin in the yard, and noticed that I, without deciding to, slowed further past it, as if a part of me wanted to give the inhabitants time to see me drive by, to witness that I had existed, in case it should become necessary later.

No lights were on in the house. I told myself that it only meant they were asleep, or away, and drove on into what now felt like a landscape without other people at all, only me, the car, and the fog that closed behind me in the mirror as quickly as it opened in front.

The mobile lay in the holder on the dashboard. Two bars. Then one. Then nothing. I put it down. There was something about losing coverage up here that felt more final than other places – as if the world behind me had ceased to exist.

I had spoken to Hanne from Oslo half an hour earlier, while I still had coverage. She is my editor. She had called the moment I sat down in the car outside my room above the hairdresser’s, and I had taken it, because I always take it.

“How’s it going?” she asked.

“Fine.”

“Fine,” she repeated. She has a way of saying your words back to you, a little more slowly, as if she were holding them up to the light. “How many pages do you have?”

“I have a lot. Mostly research, really.”

“How many pages?”

I heard my name in it, without her saying it, the way it stands on the covers of the three books that lay in cardboard boxes in a cellar in Oslo. “Eight,” I said.

“Eight pages in three weeks.”

“Eight good pages.”

“That’s not what I’m asking.” There was silence on the line. I heard her stirring a cup. “I’m saying this as a friend. You write best when you’re afraid. That’s what I’ve read of yours that’s best, and it has always been that. The problem is that you’ve become so good at hiding it from yourself that you no longer notice it. You go north and read old protocols, and that’s fine, but I think you do it to avoid writing.”

“I’m going to a church this evening,” I said.

“That sounded like an excuse.”

“It’s not an excuse. It’s the church the book is about.”

“Is it?” she said. Not questioning. Just warm. “Good. Call me when you get back.”

I had hung up and sat for a while with my hands on the wheel. Then I had driven, and it was not until now, in the fog, that I understood I had lied to her. I did not have eight good pages. I had nine lines, which I had written on the back of a receipt three weeks earlier, and I had not touched them since.

It was the receipt that had brought me here.

I must explain it, because otherwise everything else is just a man driving himself lost.

First morning in Finnmark, before I had found any room, before I had been to the library or the historical society or any of the things I had planned, I sat at the petrol station in Alta with a coffee and a sausage I did not want. It was one of those tables with fixed stools made so that no one would sit for long. Outside a trailer stood idling. I had the flight behind me, and a book I could not get into in front of me, and I just sat there, thinking of nothing at all.

Then the image came. I know it sounds theatrical, but that is how it happens. It does not come as an idea; you cannot feel it approaching. It is simply there, whole and sharp, as if someone has switched on the light in a room you did not know existed. A man stood on a shore. He stood with his back to me, in oilskins that were too big for him, and there was a storm, and he was not looking at the sea; he was looking up towards a crag where a white house lay. A large white house, and I understood that it was a church, even though I could not have said why. And under the church, under the crag, under the shore where the man stood, there was something that would not stay lying down.

That was all. Ten seconds, perhaps.

I wrote it down on the back of the receipt for the sausage. Then I asked the man behind the counter if he knew where such a church might lie, and he looked at me as if I had asked the way to the moon, and said that it was none of my business. I asked two others that day. An elderly woman at the pharmacy. Someone collecting post next to me in the shop. All three said the same thing, without hesitation, and all three looked away afterwards.

Talvik Church.

The only building in the village that remained after 1944.

I had not heard of Talvik before that day. I looked it up on the phone, sitting at the coffee station, and the first hit was an article saying that the church “lies on one of the most exposed points along the Altafjord, but according to the churchwarden has never suffered damage of any significance.” It said no more. I read it three times. Then I booked a room for three weeks.

Reidar was the one who put me on the trail. He sat at the historical society in Alta, in a room that smelled of paper and old coffee, a lean man of seventy with carpenter’s hands and a voice that never rose above conversation level. I had explained that I was a writer, that I needed local history, that I was writing something about the coast in the nineteenth century. He had nodded, stood up without a word, and come back with three boxes that had not been opened since the nineties.

We sat there for six hours the first day, and I still remember the room better than I remember many places I have lived for years: the narrow, tall stove in the corner that ticked when it warmed itself, a sound that resembled a clock without quite being one; the dust that hung in the single strip of light from the window, visible only there, as if the rest of the room had decided to keep itself clean; the smell of old paper, coffee grounds and something faintly chemical I never managed to identify, perhaps glue, perhaps preservative from the boxes themselves.

Reidar moved slowly through the material, with a care that bordered on reverence, as if each photograph might break if he put it down too hard. I sat with a loupe he had given me, without asking if I wanted it, and bent over a faded picture of a congregation gathered in front of a church I did not yet know I would inhabit for a brief, dense moment later. Fifty, perhaps sixty faces, stiff in the long exposure time, none of them smiling, the way no one smiled in photographs from 1883.

“There,” said Reidar, and laid a thick finger at the edge of the picture, almost outside the frame. “Look at the back row.”

I looked. A figure, less sharp than the others, as if he had moved just as the shutter clicked, while everyone else stood mouse-still for several seconds.

“He’s the only one moving,” I said.

“He always is,” said Reidar, without explaining what he meant by that, and went on to the next box.

He showed me census rolls, written in ink that had faded to a rust-brown shade I associated more with old blood than old writing. He showed me a letter from a telegraphist in Kåfjord to his sister in Trondheim, dated 1886, in which the man complained, in a handwriting that grew more and more unsteady down the page, that “the clock here never goes right, no matter how many times I set it.” Reidar pointed to maps drawn by hand, told of fjord arms and wrecked ships in the slow, interrupted style of a man who had learned, through a whole life with local history, that the worst thing one could do with the past was to promise it more than it could keep.

“The church that stood there before this one,” he said, and leafed forward a printed sheet with a drawing of a simpler, older building, “was built in 1737. The timber was felled here in Alta, transported across. It served the congregation for a hundred and forty-seven years, almost without a single problem worth mentioning in the protocols.”

“What happened to it?”

“The night of 16 January 1882,” he said, and the voice took on a different weight, a cadence I recognised from people telling stories they had heard so many times that they had almost become their own memories, “there came a storm no one in the village had ever seen the like of. The wind took the church, literally, lifted it straight off the foundation, as if the building weighed no more than a shed. They found the remains scattered over a field two hundred metres away.”

“Did anyone die?”

“No people. But they lost almost all the fittings. Only the bell and a few objects were saved from the ruins.” He put the drawing carefully back in the folder. “They spent a year and a half building the new one. Consecrated 17 October 1883. This time they built it stronger. Well guyed, it says in the church book. As if they knew it would be tested again.”

“And the bell? The one that was saved?”

“Still hangs there, officially.” He made a small pause on the word officially, a pause I only noticed afterwards. “The church book says the building is supposed to have had two bells at one time, the original and one that supposedly came from Sørvær, a church further out on the coast. I have never managed to find out what happened to the other one. Some papers suggest it was sold south sometime early in the twentieth century, but no figures quite match. The baptismal font, on the other hand, is documented: originally from the same place as the aforementioned bell, used when they consecrated both Kåfjord Church in 1837 and the church in Hammerfest two years later.”

“So things move between the churches up here.”

“Everything moves between the churches up here,” he said, with a little smile that did not quite reach the eyes. “Fittings, bells, stories. Nothing in Finnmark really has one home. Too much has burned, too much has been moved away in time. What survives, survives because it learned to travel.”

He was silent for a moment, and added, almost as an afterthought: “Talvik Church was, by the way, the only building that remained in the whole village after the war. The Germans burned everything else during the retreat in ’44. The vicarage, the boathouses, the school. The church stood untouched.”

“Does anyone know why?”

“Officially, lack of time and shifting wind direction.” He looked at me for a long time before he continued. “Unofficially I have never met anyone from the village who believed that explanation.”

“What do they believe instead?”

Reidar leaned back in his chair, hands folded over his stomach, in the posture of someone who had clearly told this many times before, to many different listeners.

“It’s the story my grandmother told me, which she had from her own mother, who in turn had it from someone who actually stood there that day. So take it for what it is. A story that has gone through at least four generations rarely manages without embellishment.”

“I understand.”

“There are several versions. In one a young officer came right up to the church door with torch and can, ready to light, and suddenly collapsed, unconscious, without any explanation their doctors found later. In another the whole troop simply refused to enter the church ground at all, soldiers who otherwise had burned farms without hesitation, as if their legs simply stopped obeying them at the gate. In a third, the one grandmother herself preferred, an officer is said to have gone alone into the porch to look around, and come out again only minutes later, grey in the face, and ordered the troop on without a word about why.”

“What do you yourself think happened?”

“I think,” said Reidar slowly, “that it is impossible to say which, if any, of the versions is true. What I notice is what is the same in all three, no matter who tells them, no matter how much they have embellished the rest. It is always something about the church itself that frightened them. Not the troop that changed its mind out of compassion or strategic considerations. Something about the building itself that made them keep away, something none of them, either then or since, has ever managed to explain.”

He looked out the window for a moment before he continued.

“That’s what makes the story worth keeping, I think. Not whether it is true. But that so many different people, over so many years, have never managed to agree on anything other than exactly that one point.”