Keith D. Heiberg 5-13-2016

Keith D. Heiberg 5-13-2016

9k words

Santa’s Diamonds

(first draft)

by J. S. Rypa

For Kevin

1964 – 2014

Solve et coagula.

(Separate and reunite.)

—Alchemical motto

Virginia, your friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth or knowledge.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus….

—Francis P. Church, The New York Sun, 1897

Much Madness is divinest Sense—

To a discerning Eye—

—Emily Dickinson

Was Yeobright’s mind well-proportioned? No. A well-proportioned mind is one which shows no particular bias; one of which we may safely say that it will never cause its owner to be confined as a madman, tortured as a heretic, or crucified as a blasphemer. Also, on the other hand, that it will never cause him to be applauded as a prophet, revered as a priest, or exalted as a king. Its usual blessings are happiness and mediocrity.

—Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native

Go straight to the heart of danger, for there you will find safety.

—Chinese Proverb

This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events,

real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.

Contents

Descent 3

Flying Out of Hell 7

Descent

On the morning after Midsummer’s Eve, Mom knocked on my door. “Liv! Your father isn’t back yet. Walk down and send him home.”

I groaned and wrapped the pillow around my ears.

Mom knocked again. “Get up, sleepyhead! The sun is high in the sky!”

It’s an old joke. In June here in Trondheim, so close to the Arctic Circle, the sun only dips below the horizon for a couple of hours. Without heavy curtains, no one would get a decent night’s sleep.

Mom knocked a third time. “Let it go!”

That’s not fair. She was quoting my nightshirt, of Elsa from Frozen. But I croaked, “I’m up!” and kicked off the covers. After Mom’s footsteps descended the stairs I stumbled to the shower. By the time I got to the kitchen there was a huge mug of coffee waiting for me. Oh, and food. The usual suspects: Smoked salmon, sliced hard-cooked eggs, muesli, yogurt.

Mom was banging around the kitchen, singing something by Abba.

Slurping my coffee, I waited for the caffeine to kick in. “Remind me not to marry a morning person.”

“Oh, when I was your age in Minnesota, I had trouble getting up, too. But then I came here and married your father, and now I look forward to every day!”

“Minnesota’s in a different time zone.”

“But look how bright it is outside!” She began belting out an off-key version of “Here Comes the Sun,” which was my cue to head out the door.

The street was still quiet. The Kristiansten Fortress, on a hill east of town, looked like a lopsided starship that landed in the wrong place. Maybe aliens accidentally locked the keys inside—this was before coat-hangers—and had to stay and blend in with the locals. Looking toward the harbor, red tile roofs descended in an orderly fashion—this is Norway, after all—to the dull green spire of the cathedral, surrounded by brilliant green trees. The glittering curve of the Nidelva River wound through it all like the Midgard Serpent, biding its time for the final rematch with Thor. In winter, when the power company opens a dam, thrill-seekers put on wet suits and surf, but this morning all was peaceful. On a smaller hill off to the west lay the ruins of the upstart King Sverre’s Castle, ambitiously named Zion after King David’s castle in Jerusalem, now reduced to a folk museum. Beyond that, the popular nature area Bymarka, complete with huts where Resistance fighters hid from the Nazis. I liked to run there, but not this morning.

Hearing a loud CLACKETY CLACKETY CLACKETY, I pressed myself against the red clapboard siding of a house as Per Nguyen skateboarded toward me in a serpentine slalom down the hill. Skateboards were banned for 11 years, and the skaters took pride in their rebel status, spray-painting “NFP” everywhere, for “No F---ing Posers.” When the ban was lifted I got a board but never saw the appeal, so I gave it to Per. We called him “Per Gynt” because he had the same combination of naiveté and roguish charm as Ibsen’s anti-hero. And because he hated the nickname.

Per held up two fingers. “Peace, Pocahontas.” They called me that because I inherited dark hair from my dad, who’s Sami. And because I wear it in long braids to make me look exotic in blonde Norway. And because I carried a Pocahontas backpack until I was 16.

I returned his sign. “Victory, Churchill.”

He was so surprised he almost ran over Mrs. Heimdal, who was stepping off the bicycle lift up the hill. But she wasn’t on a bike, just dragging a huge cooler on wheels. All the old ladies take the regular “meat bus” across the border to Sweden, to stock up on cheap cuts of meat. They laugh and gossip and knit, and the border guards don’t give them any trouble.

Mrs. Heimdal nearly belted Per with her purse, but he sped away before she could wind up for the swing. So she just sat down on the steps of a shop and waved me over.

“Liv, you should check on your father. Bygul and Trjegul looked upset.”

Those were the store cats. When Dad was single he had an old calico named Professor Tolkien. But when Dad started dating Mom, the professor disappeared. Maybe he didn’t like Americans. Then two cats appeared at his back door, big Norwegian forest cats, like the ones who pull Freya’s chariot. Dad knows a sign when he sees one, so he took them in to honor the Norse goddess of love, and named them Bygul and Trjegul, meaning Bee-gold and Tree-gold, honey and amber, both sacred to Freya.

Speaking of surprises in love, rumor has it that during the Second World War a local hero of the Norwegian resistance was captured by the Nazis and sent to a concentration camp. He escaped, joined the French resistance, and came back with a tough savvy French wife. But when I asked Mrs. Heimdal if that’s really how they met, she just smiled, wagged a finger and quoted The Little Prince: On ne sait jamais. One never knows.

She rose to her feet, dragging the empty cooler behind her. But it thudded and swayed as if it were already full.

I smiled. “Are you taking meat to Sweden? Like carrying coals to Newcastle?”

Pass dine egne jævla saker! she snapped. Mind your own damn business!

With a shrug I clomped down toward the river and started across the Gamle Bybru, the Old Town Bridge. Dad’s bookstore, Turi Antikvariat, stood on a quiet side street near the Nidaros Cathedral. He specialized in Sami literature, sagas and eddas from Iceland, and unpredictable monastic collections from Ireland or England. The monks claimed Norse deities as Catholic saints, giving a Christian twist to the original Pagan tales. I used to curl up in his lap as he taught me Old English, Old Norse, the Semitic languages, or sang Sami joiks until I fell asleep. Sometimes he would close up the shop and work in the peace and quiet until the wee hours. But he had never been out all night before.

Some motion in a tree on the other side resolved into Bygul and Trjegul, climbing down headfirst, as Norwegian forest cats do. By the time I reached the back door of the shop they were flicking their tails with impatience. Letting myself in with Mom’s key, I called out, “Dad?” as the cats raced to his office. From the door I could hear a CD of Sami chants just ending and starting again: “No beginning, no end.” When I got there the cats were sinking their strong claws into his legs, but he didn’t flinch. They turned and raced out.

“Dad?” I asked again, trying to keep the fear out of my voice.

He was slumped forward in his chair, his hands palm-up in his lap as if he’d been reading a large, heavy book. Wrapped in his Sami shaman’s cloak of feathers and iron discs, his face obscured by the knotted strings of his headdress, he might have been asleep. His traditional drum of reindeer hide lay behind him, with its birch frame and Y-shaped reindeer antler he used to play it. The cosmic map painted on the drumhead showed the upper world and lower worlds, reindeer and boats in “Middle Earth,” separated by wavy lines with gaps where the shamans could pass through.

I shut off the CD. “Are you okay?” Gently I pushed aside the knotted strings.

For the first and only time in my life, I screamed.

#

I don’t remember what I babbled to the dispatcher, but she promised to send an ambulance. After what felt like years in the thundering silence of the shop—and smelling stale cigarettes, though Dad never smoked—I heard sirens and ran out to flag them down. But they were police cars, racing toward the Archbishop’s Palace.

“Help! Here! My dad!” I tried to call out, but my voice was little more than a squeak.

Finally Dad’s ambulance arrived. When the paramedics saw his waxy skin they got very quiet. But they promised to do everything they could.

Walking east, back up the hill, I felt as if I had walked west, into the ocean. Gasping for breath. Hard to move my arms and legs. Everything the wrong color. All the sounds muffled.

Sometimes clients from the Old Country hired Dad to find lost keys or pets. Sometimes they wanted him to guide the souls of relatives who’d gotten sick, started wandering toward Hel, the land of the dead, and couldn’t find their way back. Sometimes he went on his own to learn from older, more powerful shamans, or to maintain connections with his spirit helpers. When he went trance-walking I would play his drum and chant in Sami, sending him energy for the journey. If I had been there last night I could have called the ambulance right away. It’s all my fault!

Neighbors stood on street corners, craning their necks toward the flashing lights. “Did you see?” they asked.

“Gone,” I whispered.

“Well, it’s really just symbolic,” a woman shrugged. “Norway doesn’t have coronations anymore, just benedictions. The crown isn’t even bestowed on the monarch.”

An old man chimed in, “They’re not the original regalia anyway. Those were stolen by the last archbishop after the Reformation.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

They stared at me. “Didn’t you hear? The royal regalia are gone! Stolen!”

With a snort I turned away and panted up the hill. It seemed to take a full year, as I got hot, then cold, then hot again. Every so often I had to stop and wipe the sweat from my eyes, or pull my sweater closer. By the time I got home the hospital must have called, because Mom was waiting at the door. “I called him Raven Boy,” she sobbed in the open doorway. “He called me Ptarmigan Girl!”

Neighbors stopped and stared, so I pulled her inside. Then I realized that my own face was streaming with tears. Tried to make her tea but my hands were shaking too badly, so I just sat at the kitchen table. Words tumbled out of her but I could only nod, tighten my jaw and look up at the ceiling.

When Mom went to bed, wrapping herself in sheets which still smelled like Dad, I did what I always do when I’m under stress: Put on my running shoes and pounded up and down the hills in Bymarka. There was one creepy moment. I stopped at St. Olaf’s Leap, catching my breath and enjoying the wider perspective, when I smelled cigarette smoke and heard a man’s voice whisper, in a Finnish accent, “She went up here!” So I took off again.

We have a saying, Å svelge noen kameler: To swallow some camels. When you to have to do something unpleasant. Eventually Mom and I went to the hospital to sign papers and collect Dad’s things. They congratulated me on how stoic I was and said I would have made a good Viking wife. They promised an autopsy. They said Dad was in his 80s, these things happen. They looked at me, trying to estimate my age. (I just turned 18, you bastards.) They gave us a sympathetic smile.

After we got home Mom went straight to bed. But I couldn’t bear the silence, so I sat in the living room and watched TV, mostly news reports about the regalia. One commentator said it was obviously right-wing militants, another said it was obviously left-wing students, blah, blah.

Around midnight I was finally tired enough to go to sleep. But when I stood up I saw his chair and realized he’d never sit in it again. All of my dams burst. I ran to my room and sobbed into my pillow so I wouldn’t wake Mom.

In the middle of the night I woke with “Let it go!” running through my head. Wild with rage, I tore off my nightshirt, balled it up and stuffed it deep in the wastebasket. Don’t f—ing condescend to me, bitch! You can’t fix my father’s death with a pop song!

Sitting in my hard desk chair, hugging my knees, I finally got back to sleep. In a dream I walked up to the attic in our house—which doesn’t have an attic—and opened a door. The walls and roof were torn away. Instead of our neighborhood outside, tundra. The Sami homeland. Rocks, lichens, reindeer moss, grasses, wildflowers, dwarf birch, cloudberry. In the distance, sitting on a rock, was a small boy with dark hair and skin. My father. He was looking up at the sky with great intensity. I followed his gaze but could see nothing. Finally a black dot appeared. A raven. He circled lower, looked straight at me, then soared away. When I looked down again, my father was gone.

#

People talk about the stages of grief like stations on a pilgrimage. You’re supposed to go through one, then the next, and the next, then BAM! you’re done. But that’s not what it’s really like. You reach the final stage, acceptance, and think it’s over. Suddenly waves of grief drag you to the bottom of the ocean. Darkness, silence, pressure, blessed numbness. Then acceptance, waking to the sun and birds and coffee. Then something sets you off again. A face. A voice. A kind word. Over and over.