第2章 The Six

There were six of us on Brevikholm in the winter of 1961, and if you want to know what a place like that does to a man you want to know the six, because the island is only rock and the six are what happened on it. I was the station-master. Erik Dahl, fifty-three, eleven winters, from a farm at Vossnes that had four hundred acres and a wood that had been sold off before I was born. I came out here at forty-two because a man my age is not wanted anywhere that has a roof that leaks, and because I was told by a man in an office in Trondheim that a station-master who does not talk is an asset. He was right about that. He did not ask me the other question. Karin Voss was the meteorologist. Twenty-nine years old, out of Trondheim, three winters at the station and the first two of them without any idea what the braiding was, because Ingrid had died the winter before Karin came. Karin is the only one of the six who has ever been able to read the sky the way the rest of us read the log book, which is to say in numbers. She can tell you the temperature of the strait at four fathoms by the look of it. She takes her readings three times a day whether the sky is there or not, and she writes them down, and the column of figures in the back of the log is hers and it has never had a gap in it in three years. Halvard was the radio operator. Forty-one, from Bergen, and the only man of us who came here because he wanted to. He had a house in Bergen he could have been sitting in. He came out for the winter of 1958 and asked for a second year and then a third, and the reason he gives is that it is the last place in Norway where a man can hear a frequency that nobody else is listening on, and he has spent four years proving that every night at eight. Torsten was the engineer. Thirty-four, from the mainland, from somewhere he has never once named, and he is a big man with bad hands and a way of taking a thing apart that does not damage it, which is a skill and not a knack. He keeps the generator, the boiler, the pump and the light. He does all of it. There is no second engineer because there has never been a budget for a second engineer, and the reason there has never been a budget for a second engineer is that Brevikholm is four hundred metres from the nearest rock that shows on the survey, and a man in an office in Trondheim has a chart with a mistake on it. Sven is the cook. I do not know where Sven is from. He came out in 1952 and he has never said, and nobody has ever asked him in my hearing, and that is not a thing you decide to do on purpose. You just find that eleven years have gone by. He cooks for six and he can feel a swell in the legs of the table and he is the only man on this rock who has never once looked frightened of the long dark, and I have never worked out whether that is because he is not frightened or because he is and has made a trade of it. Odd is the boat. That is the job and that is what we call him, and his name is Odd Haugen and he is forty-nine and he was born on the mainland side of the strait, which you can see from here on a clear night, and he has kept the boat for nine years. He is the only one of the six who goes out on the seal-rocks. That is the thing you have to understand about Odd, and you cannot get it from the log book. The seal-rocks are a shelf of rock about a mile out in the strait, and on the ebb they come up about four fathoms and stand out of the water like the back of something. The people who came before us used to set cord on them. Not rope — cord, braided, three strands, done by hand, in a particular way, and the whole of the point of it was that a cord laid on those rocks holds the sound of a gale coming across the strait the way the rim of a cup holds water, and a man out on the rocks in the dark can put his hand on the cord and know how bad it is going to be for an hour. Ingrid Haugen was Odd's wife. She died in the winter of 1958, which is the winter Halvard arrived, which is the winter I stopped writing anything in the log book except weather. Ingrid was the one who braided. Not Odd. Ingrid. And when she died Odd did not stop going out to the rocks, and he did not stop braiding, and he has done both every ebb since, alone, for three winters, and he has never once explained that to anybody, and I have never once asked him, and there is a thing in this account about that and I have got to it in the end and it is the reason I am writing any of it down. There were six of us and the station is thirty-one metres long, and here is what thirty-one metres is. Kitchen, four stools, a table. Wire room, short-wave, emergency set, the barometer, the log book, the shelf. Dormitory, six beds, three of them in the room and three in the room off it, and the beds are in the order they were put in, and the order is Torsten, Halvard, Sven, Odd, Karin, and me, and I am in the bed by the door because a man who has slept in the bed by the door for eleven years does not know how to sleep anywhere else. Thirty-one metres with six men in it for two months is a thing that breaks something. It does not matter how good a station is. It does not matter what a man is like. Six people, thirty-one metres, and no darkness to go out into, and the whole of your life arrives on your own doorstep twice a day and sits down. So we built rules. Not because we are a tidy people. Because it is the alternative. Eleven in the morning, the readings go up. Karin does them, out loud, and the rest of us are not required to listen and most of us do not. Two in the afternoon, Sven and Torsten on the generator and the boiler. Four in the afternoon I write the log. After four, nobody speaks to anybody about anything that is not the station, and the rule is not mine, it is Halvard's, and he made it in his first November and it has never been broken and it has never been explained. At six we eat. At seven I read the barometer and write it down. At eight Halvard is on the set and everybody else is in their own room or in the kitchen, and that is the pattern, and that is what two months of it is. The sixth thing about the six is that we were, before the fourteenth of November, a station with a very good record. Eleven winters. The generator log has no gaps. The stores were counted twice a month for eleven years by a man who did not trust anybody else to count them. When the relief boat came in the spring of 1960, the officer on the quay in Trondheim read our log on the deck in the rain and said, in front of the boat's crew, that Brevikholm was the best-run station on the coast. I wrote that in the log. In the margin, in pencil, because I have always thought that the sort of thing ought to be written down twice. And then the sun went under on the fourteenth of November and did not come up until the sixteenth of January, and it turned out that eleven good winters is a thing you did to the island and not a thing you did with it, and that the island had been waiting the entire time for somebody to be on it in the dark with the record in front of them.