A Summer of Drowning by Burnside John

Author:Burnside, John [Burnside, John]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Contemporary Fiction, Crime & Mystery
ISBN: 9781448130429
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2011-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

THE FISHERMAN’S HOUSE

AS THE PLANE rose and tilted away, I dipped my head and peered out of the window, thinking I should have been able to see Mother walking back to the car, but all I could make out was the green light off the land below and then, off to one side, a yellow windsock, swelling with the breath of the old Sámi wind god, Bieggaålmaj – an ordinary thing, but also a small item of local theatre, filling with light and ozone and summer wind. For a moment, it seemed as if time might stop; then the plane turned south and everything below began to dwindle: houses and supermarkets and roadside cafes set out in mapped impermanence over the earth, an impermanence that nobody ever thought about, though they lived it every day – and some of them were glad, I think, that nothing they did or made was ever really finished, or theirs for certain. Nothing they did would last; nothing was there for good. People like Kyrre Opdahl, and maybe Ryvold too, in his own way, stayed or chose to live here because they knew that, here, only the stories lasted. The stories, and the land from which the stories came. As different as they thought they were from one another, those two solitaries would not only have agreed that the stories are all there is, and that everything else is illusion, they would also have said, as Ryvold said once to the assembled company one Saturday morning, that the individual stories, the separate lives that we think we are living and the accounts we give of them, are continually assumed into one larger narrative that belongs to nobody in particular, but includes, not just everything that happens, but everything that might have been.

The plane circled for a moment above the island, then it turned southwards and in that instant everything I knew disappeared. Outside, Bieggaålmaj was blowing in from the Finnmarksvidda, a cold current that held the plane in the air like a bauble – but, before that, he had gusted across Mongolia, touched with the smoke from horse herders’ yurts and the blue of the steppe, because this wind, this spirit, had a memory that lasted forever, beyond locality and time and season, and he remembered other places, other seasons, other peoples sleeping and dreaming in their own settlements, all the way from here to Kamchatka. To him, all our stories were the same – even the story I was enacting, going to visit a man I had not only never seen, but had never really thought of as a creature of flesh and blood. Now, I couldn’t tell whether I was glad to be learning the truth at last, or annoyed to discover that he was real after all. For several minutes, Bieggaålmaj shook the plane as if he would pluck it out of the air and toss it into the sea; then, having followed a line of faraway islands down the western

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