Windswept

I have stacks of unfinished short story sketches and skeletons floating around, practically all of them in Norwegian, and none of them in even a near-finished state, but this particular (very short) one somehow came out in English and for some reason it wrapped itself up quite nicely and even now, after days of scrutinising it, I am still quite pleased with it. Feel free to comment!

Prologue

He is in the driver’s seat of a mid-sized sedan, aquamarine in colour, parked on the pavement outside a dry cleaner’s in Morristown, New Jersey. He is waiting for his colleague to pick up and drop off shirts. It is an overcast Monday morning in November. The commuter traffic on the road opposite is reflected in the dry cleaner’s window and shifts across the blue and red lettering of the neon sign, making it hard to see the insides of the shop. People squeeze past the car and send him annoyed glances. He wonders if perhaps he should not be parked on the pavement like this.

He is struck by the newness and sameness of the world. He finds the newness exhilarating and the sameness puzzling, almost as if he had expected the sky to be green and the grass to be blue. A constant fluttering in his abdomen has been keeping him both alert and dazed since well before he arrived at JFK yesterday and was taken on a speechless tour through Queens and lower Manhattan and on to the suburbs of New Jersey. He saw rivers of yellow cabs in twilit canyons below towering skyscrapers. He saw steam rising from manholes just like in the movies. In New Jersey, the trees were bare and the fields a yellowish green, just like home. But the trees are bigger here. Earlier this morning they drove through long, greyishly translucent tree tunnels.

***

This is to come: In half an hour he will have parked the car outside the octagonal office building which is his new workplace and he will enter the elegant atrium and follow his colleague across the newly polished marble floors, past the elaborate fountain that smells slightly of chlorine, and they will take the elevator to the fourth floor where he will be received by his new superiors who will inquire about his journey and wellbeing before sitting him down in a meeting room to explain their expectations.

In the meeting room will also be a young woman with nice curves who is the office assistant and whose job it will be today to make him feel in place. She will show him the kitchen area with the coffee and vending machines. She will administer his access card while making American small talk that he will be uncertain how to respond to. She will smile and put her hand ever so lightly on his arm. She will show him to his desk and introduce him to his new colleagues, among whom will be a slim woman from Rajasthan with silky black hair, shiny white teeth and eyes like deep wells. ‘How dark she is,’ he will think wordlessly to himself as he takes her small hand in his, but in the coming days he will see that her darkness is offset by the flash of her smile and the sparkle in her eyes. In a few weeks she will drive him and two other colleagues confidently across the George Washington Bridge back to the bright lights of Manhattan and he will follow her through the lobby of the Marriott Marquis and up to the rotating restaurant on the forty-seventh floor where he will make her laugh and sparkle with his quick wit and burlesque stories and later they will go dancing at Webster Hall and her radiance will merge with that of the city and her confidence likewise and he will kiss her and she will succumb to him that one night only, after which she will have his undivided heart but he won’t have hers, because even if her boyfriend will be miles away he will still be her boyfriend.

Over the coming weeks he will sense her presence by the heat that she radiates and the silent sigh of her breath as she walks by, and his heart will freeze over. Almost daily he will find himself across from her in meeting rooms and he will clench his teeth until his jaws hurt. Then slowly and unnoticeably his anger will subside and give way to bitterness, then to disappointment, and finally to indifference, at which stage he will find his clenched teeth and cramped smiles loosening and their conversations becoming less forced and increasingly straying, and as his heart’s ice-cover finally thaws it will dawn on him that he is every bit as smitten as before. This will come almost as a relief to him, and then she will be gone.

But before she leaves they will meet in an overcrowded pub on Bleecker Street where they will greet each other warmly and spontaneously touch hands for an instant. On this last night they will go for dinner at TriBeCa Grill and for nightcaps and transgender antics at Lucky Cheng’s, and after a rare evening of spirited conversation and much laughter they will say their final farewells through the open back door of a yellow NYC cab. Later that night he will weep himself dry at the loss. And unbeknownst to him, so will she.

This is all to come, to flow over him like a river or for him to labour through.

***

He tries once again to locate his colleague through the shifting reflections in the dry cleaner’s window. The throng squeezing past the car is getting larger and some are gesturing angrily for him to get out of the way. In a few moments, a police car will pull up next to him, lights flashing, and an officer with a gun holstered at his side will tap on his window and order him off the pavement, which he will do, heart thumping, slowly squeezing through the crowd and back onto the road and around to the back of the shop, where his colleague will eventually find him and laugh at his shaken demeanour, and together they will rejoin the commuter traffic on this grey November morning.

© 2008 Anders Blehr

It seems everyone is cutting down trees these days. It may have to do with our northern latitudes; we don’t want anything obstructing the rare rays of the sun that happen upon these corners.

Last summer, I finally got around to cutting down and uprooting the unkempt bushes that the former owner of our then apartment had planted decades ago, and which had been growing wildly for the last five years or so. During the process, I came across a sapling maple tree that had managed to take root in the tangle of struggling bushes and decided to let it stay. It grew just at the corner of our terrace, and I happily envisioned a tall maple tree in that very location some years ahead. You see, I happen to like trees.

We no longer live in our then apartment. The new owner has not quite moved in yet, though. And then today, as she is out of town, she called to ask if we could water the flowers she has put in the pots on the terrace. Sure, I drove over and watered away, throwing sideway glances at the maple tree shining with virgin green in the spring sun. I thought that its chances of continued survival had been diminished now that it had a new ‘owner’, so I decided to take action and got out a spade from the basement and dug it up, put its long lanky length into the car and drove it home to our new house, dug a hole in the front garden and put it in, heaved heavy and pungent earth on top of its slightly damaged roots, and continued watering away.

Looking at it now, in dusky darkness, it’s not looking entirely happy at having been uprooted like this; its leaves are drooping, but it has kept its vibrant green. I watered it once again earlier this evening, and I’m crossing my fingers that it will survive the transition. Because if it does, it has a long and prosperous life ahead of it. I’m fully intending not to move again for at least 20 years, and I like trees.

Why do I always find myself running? It seems my thoughts are always somewhere up ahead with myself trailing behind, desperately trying to catch up. Then this morning, slowly strolling to daycare holding my youngest’s damp hand in mine, taking time to share her wonder at the tiny marvels along the road, I found my thoughts slowing down and myself catching up, at last present in the present. Not at all a bad place to be.

There’s a pebble beach stretching east from San Vicente de la Barquera in Cantabria, Spain.  The beach is intersected by a cliff protruding towards the sea, looming over the pebbly ground.  Most people just pass it by; backs turned, faces towards the wind, the sea and the sun.

But if you turn around to face it, if you should walk up close and put a hand on it, you will notice that it is perforated with smooth and perfectly rounded stones of various sandy hues.  Some are almost completely embedded in the cliff wall, barely discernable, while others are literally hanging by a thread and can be pulled free from the rock by hand.

And then it strikes you: These stony insets, these perfect pebbles, they were worn smooth, polished by the waves on some beach or riverbed eons ago, literally, before being carried along and buried in sediments that over the eons turned to rock, encapsulating them forever in stony darkness.

Until now, that is.  As the cliff is being washed by the waves at high tide, pounded by the sea during winter, gnawed at by the seasons, they’re resurfacing.  And slowly, one by one, they come free and tumble to the ground.

As you stand there, feeling the smooth roundness of the embedded pebbles with your hand, you may find one that’s almost free from the rock.  Maybe you’ll pull it loose, weigh it in your hand, wonder if you should take it home, put it on the mantle.  Don’t.  Instead, try this:

Let it go.  Watch it fall, see it land among the pebbles at your feet.  Notice how undistinguished, how indistinguishable it is.  See it.  Know.  That pebble is not from this world.  Then stir the pebbles around with your foot.  It’s there and yet it’s gone.  Vanished, invisible.  Eons erased, just like that.

That’s how vast time is.  That’s how insignificant it is.

A truly astounding read! A swooping, compassionate, heartbreaking, ruthlessly brutal, uplifting and oh so human chronicle of the rise and fall of a ruthless yet frail mafia Don (’bhai’), of the corrupt yet honest policeman who hunts him down, and of all the intertwining tangles of lives past and present that brush up against each other in at first glance seemingly irrelevant ‘insets’ that in my view are the true heart of this 900 page epic. Lost for further superlatives, I can do nothing but happily recommend ‘Sacred Games’ to anyone with half a heart.

I was in my very early 20s the first time I left Scandinavia. I had a friend whose friend’s parents had a house in Torrevieja, Spain, and I was invited along for a few weeks in summer. We interrailed down, through Denmark, Germany, France and on to Spain’s Costa Blanca, making pit stops in Paris and in Villeneuve-la-Guyard, a small village south-east of Paris where my friend’s friend had au paired the previous year. I was relishing it, the differentness of the world.

Then in Torrevieja I found myself stranded among fellow Scandinavians and Germans, could even get menus and order food in Norwegian in the restaurants. But that’s an entirely different story, the point here being that, once back in Norway, I faithfully stowed away for future use the pocketful of pesetas, mostly 25 Ptas coins, that I’d brought with me.

Then two years later I was again headed for Spain, a little more prepared and determined not to seek out any Norwegian colonies this time. I brought along my pocketful of pesetas coins and carried them faithfully through Germany and France until we hit Spain: It wasn’t just the monetary value that had made me carry the weight, I also strongly wanted to see them put to their designated use, to see them back in circulation. So there was a certain satisfaction to handing them out, be it to buy cerveza, helado or Fanta naranja.

That was then, this is now.

We’re moving house again. I’ve spent a fair chunk of the day down in the garage, going through boxes that are still not entirely empty after our last 3 relocations (to here, to London, and then back here). In particular I went through a number of tall ‘hanger boxes’ with suits, jackets, dresses and blouses (items in the latter two categories are chiefly my wife’s), and found that the boxes tended to have lots of loose items floating around at the bottom. I emptied the left-over hangers, umbrellas, poster rolls and whatnot onto the garage floor, after which I also spotted three coins, one of them a half corroded Norwegian tenner. I picked up the tenner and put it in my wallet.

I realised I needed garbage bags to dispose of the broken umbrellas, wiry drycleaner’s hangers and whatnot that now lay in a pile on the floor, so I went to our local corner shop and bought a roll. And then, upon paying, I found again that certain satisfaction at putting the tenner back in circulation, at putting money to its designated use again.

(I can’t say the same, though, for the two British pennies that lay alongside the tenner on the garage floor; they were ruthlessly and mercilessly disposed of. I guess I’m less of a sentimental fool nowadays, albeit only slightly.)

Why this? Why now? How so, windswept? And those gloomy trees, what are those about?

The question it all boils down to is this: To blog or not to blog? I read this morning (or was it yesterday?) that some 120 new blogs are created every single day. Free will counts for little in the face of such a flow! At this rate it’ll be a mere 200 years or so until every single individual on Planet Earth has his/her own blog! Imagine digesting the latest musings from a juvenile member of Borneo’s last lost tribe over your morning double decaf lowfat mocca frappucino! That’d be the day!

So, be that the day as it may, I figured now is as good a time as any to take my presumed and presumably dormant writer gene for a test ride. A snippet here and a snippet there may with time add up to something - or at least contribute to strengthening the synapses between blurry thought and somewhat insightful prose.

Windswept is me having the wind pound my ears as it demarcates land and sea at some land’s end. The trees are very specific trees just outside my family’s mountain cabin, shrouded in mist on a summer’s day long gone. Wind and mist both have the effect of stilling my mind and sharpening my senses, sometimes making of me a very aware passenger of those transient pinpoints in space and time that we call here and now.

That’s it for now. A beginning, maybe.