Chapter 1 The Station

Brevikholm is not on the map the way the mainland towns are. It lies in the strait the old charts call Skjoldvik, four hundred metres off the nearest rock that shows on the survey, and it shows on the survey at all only because a surveyor in 1911 made a mistake with his compass and put the island where there was nothing but water. The weather station was built on the mistake. Six of us lived on it. That is the whole of how it happened. The station is a low building of concrete, painted white when it went up in 1948 and now the grey of a thing that has been waiting a long time for the next coat. A kitchen at the east end. A dormitory at the west. Between them the wire room, and the wire room is where the radios are, and the barometer, and the log book, and the small grey thing on the shelf that is not a radio and that I will come to. My name is Erik Dahl. I was the station-master. I was fifty-three years old in the winter of 1961, and I had been on Brevikholm for eleven of those years, and I will tell this the way the log book tells things, which is the only way I know how to: in the order it happened, with the times written down. The times are the whole of what that winter was. The sun went under on the fourteenth of November at ten past three in the afternoon, and it would not come up again until the sixteenth of January. Two months. The people who came before us called it the long dark, and they had a word for it that I have never used because it is not a word you use with strangers. The mainland long dark is not this. On the mainland you can drive to a town and turn on a light and be in among people. This is a dark with no edge to it. You cannot see where the sky stops and the sea begins. The strait goes black the way the inside of a closed eye goes black, and the only things that tell you where you are are the station with its light in the window and the seal-rocks with their cord on them, and both of those are things we put there, and one of them is a thing we did. Torsten came in from the mainland on the eleventh with the last of the supplies and did not leave again until the following February, and he brought a bag of mail and a new belt for the pump and the last of the lamp oil, and he stood in the kitchen doorway with his coat still on and looked at the six of us eating and said, "It is going to be a long one." "You have been here before," I said. "Twice. Never at this time of year. There is a difference and I did not know what it was until I came in through that door." He hung his coat on the fourth peg, and the fourth peg has been Odd's peg since the station went up, and Odd looked at it, and Torsten moved it to the fifth. That is the sort of thing that is worth writing down. Nobody argued about it. There was no row. Torsten moved a coat and Odd let him, and that was the first thing that happened on Brevikholm that winter that nobody has ever been able to explain. We ate. Sven had made fish soup out of what the boat had brought and the salt cod that had been in the store since August, and he put bread on the table that was hard enough to knock a tooth out of it, and he stood at the end of the table while we ate the way he always stood, with his arms folded, watching the six of us the way a man watches a boat he has just finished caulking. "You'll want the lamp turned down early tonight," he said. "There's a swell coming that I can feel in the legs of the table." Nobody asked him how. He has been cooking on this rock for nine years and he can feel a swell in the legs of a table, and the rest of us have stopped finding it remarkable and started finding it useful. Afterwards I wrote in the log. 16:20, sun below horizon, wind west three, swell moderate rising, generator checked and running, boiler good, stores counted. Then I wrote the line I have written every day for eleven years and which was, on that afternoon, the most ordinary line in the world. *Long dark begins. Six on station.* I shut the book and went down the corridor to the wire room and put the light on and sat down at the short-wave set, because Halvard was on it, and because a man in the twentieth week of a polar night does not want to be alone in a room with a clock in it. Halvard did not look up. He had the headphones round his neck and one earpiece on and the set was making the sound it makes on a night with nothing on it, which is not silence and is not static either. It is a hiss with a slow rise and fall in it, like water running in another room. "Anything?" I said. "Nothing," he said. "Nothing on any band. Nothing on the emergency set. Nothing since Tuesday." He took the earpiece off and let it hang. "You are going to write tonight's log and you are going to write the same thing you wrote last night." "Wind and temperature." "You are going to write *long dark, six on station*, and you have written it eleven times since the fourteenth." He turned round in the chair. The chair had a bad caster and it had been squeaking since 1948, and it squeaked now. "Erik. I have been on this rock four years. In my first winter I wrote that line forty times and I stopped counting at forty. This is the first winter I have wanted to count." "Then count." "I counted eleven," he said. "And I did not like it, and I could not tell you why, and it is not the cold and it is not the dark, because I have had both of those. It is that nobody has said anything to anybody in this room for four days. The whole station has gone quiet the way a house goes quiet when somebody is upstairs who is not coming down." The set hissed. Out of the window there was nothing at all, which is the thing people from the mainland never believe until they have seen it. Not darkness. Nothing. A black that has a surface to it, like a wall put up a yard off your face. I went to the shelf. That is where the small grey thing was, and it was where it had always been, and I have thought about that evening a great deal since. It was the size of my hand. It was grey. It had a dial on the front that did not point to anything, because there were no numbers on the dial, only a short line and a long line, and a mark that might have been a stop. It had a grille where a speaker would be, and the grille was not a speaker, it was a flat plate with a hundred small holes in it, and I know what a speaker looks like, and this was not one. It had no wires. It had no plug. There was a socket in the back of it and the socket was empty and it was not a socket for a plug, it was a socket for something that had been in it once and was not in it now. "It is not connected to anything," Torsten had told me in September, and had told me again in October. "No feeder, no earth, no battery. I took the back off in the summer. There is nothing in there that a man could get a current out of." "Then why does the shelf hold it up," I said, on the fourteenth of November, to nobody, in a wire room, at a quarter past four in the afternoon. Nobody answered, because there were only the two of us and Halvard had his headphones on again.