The Unseen by Roy Jacobsen

Author:Roy Jacobsen [Jacobsen, Roy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Europe, Fiction, Fishing, Historical, Literary, Scandinavia, Sea Stories, Sports & Recreation, Travel
ISBN: 9781848666092
Google: 4SVwCgAAQBAJ
Amazon: B016IOF38K
Publisher: Hachette UK
Published: 2016-08-24T23:00:00+00:00

31

Hans Barrøy treads on a nail and injures a toe, it turns septic. He limps more and more with every day that passes and has to go to a hospital on the mainland and have it amputated. On his return, he walks with a stick, they have cut off not one toe but two, because he left it so late, and now he can’t travel to Lofoten, Maria decides.

“Hva a we goen’ t’ live on?”

“Tha can’t go t’ sea with a stick,” she says.

Uncle Erling completely agrees when he drops by in his boat at the start of the New Year. Hans will have to let one of the men see to the fishing tackle this winter, he says, take a half-catch share in payment and stay at home, fish close to the shore, with tha stick, ha ha.

Hans acquiesces and sends Erling off with half of his gear, he remains on the new quay with his family watching the Barrøyværing depart without him for the first time in fifteen years.

This happens on the morning of January 3.

Those who have to go to work in the barn, go to the barn. While Hans stands looking around him. It is a curious situation and there is nothing to look at. There is the horizon, here is the land. He can hear the sea. But that is it. Now he walks away to collect all the materials he can find and starts making benches in the new boathouse. He continues without a break until he is finished the following day. Two benches. Then he tells Barbro he wants to teach her how to bait lines.

“A know hvur t’ do that already,” Barbro says.

“But tha’s got t’ bi able t’ mend ’em too,” Hans says. “And coil ’em up neat.”

Barbro can’t do that. Barbro likes to put bits of herring onto the hooks and tries to wind the lines carefully into the tub, but the tangles get worse the more she struggles. But Ingrid can do it well, when she isn’t at school. And Maria too, when she isn’t in the cowshed or cooking.

*

It was a strange winter, a winter without emptiness, loneliness or gravity. The finest winter in Ingrid’s life, nothing short of a summer. Even the weather was as it should be. Hans and Martin got up at the crack of dawn every morning, as in the busiest periods of the year, ran four tubs of line across the water between Barrøy and Havstein and fished on the seaward side of the island whenever the weather permitted. They also fished with nets.

More and more nets.

In the middle of January the first fish-drying rack saw the light of day. They hadn’t had a rack on Barrøy before, apart from the one where they dried the nets. First there was one, then a second. By the end of March they had three, all on the hills in the west. There they dried the twelve tons of fish they caught in the course of

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