Gold, Winter — Tor Ulven (translated by Jordan Barger)

For example, I could start with that thuja, swaying there in the wind: a sort of conical, green bar mop. It wiggles elastically like a punching ball, or perhaps like certain types of playthings attached to springs, but more capricious, less mechanical (nomads: crunchy, squat bushes that blow through the desert with the sand and the dust, hook themselves to tree trunks, then bounce along like the clownish skeletons of pom-poms). The little tree has quite different ways of moving in the wind, especially light wind: the small barbs oscillate so that the top describes a gentle arc, or perhaps a circle (if the wind were to come from multiple directions), unlike the fruit trees (at least now, in winter) shimmering with the thinnest twigs, that look like the tentacles of sea creatures, or maybe insect antennae, but the trunk and the thick branches remain unphased by the season. If only I could describe the yard as it is now, without a past, almost colorless, three-dimensional, almost completely black and white, if only I could convey the sight of the yard, nothing else, as if I were a heartless, brainless eye, as if I were a video camera of words. A photograph of the driveway taken from another window, with fresh, gauze-thin snow, and a trail of footprints going in both directions (to and from the gate, as if feet could go forwards and backwards at the same time without contorting the body), dark as soot stains on a canvas (which is called fumage), blending together on the edges of the nonfigurative; but then cat tracks, the round, solitary marks of the cat's paws in the white, unmarked snow, on the other side of the footprints, apart from the others, unstraying from its usual path, the cat passes through the winter-clad humans and comes out the other side, unscathed, same as before. The yard is not just deserted, it is uninhabited, located on a desolate steppe, on a planet no has ever seen and never will. Then, after the mild weather has melted the snow that once lay in frothy strips over the branches, the trees would be wet and black like leeches. I would describe the berry bushes, where they sprout out of the snow like shrapnel or black spiders; how on the hill, between the twigs, you can see rotten leaves shoved underneath (the way you sweep dust under the carpet), a cleft cake of leaves, no longer brown, but black and leathery, silent when stepped on (not brittle like dry autumn leaves) and damp if torn to pieces, like soiled rags or wet paper. A pile. Held back by metal wire, supported by rusty rebar, the hinged frame of an old garden table (you can see the hole for the umbrella) rotting more and more, from below, from where the ground meets the planks, where the moisture from the humus is pulling vertically on the wood fibers, a bit like how teeth rot (not rectilinear, but uneven, like when a woman lifts the hem of her dress), but unlike teeth this gate is food for the earth, something it digests, until the gate breaks opens, or rather, disappears, and everything it holds back (which is closed by an iron lock with a titanium latch) escapes in the form of a slow-motion avalanche (the gate nearly impossible to close because the pile is too swollen, can you say: too swelled?). A hierarchy of time, rather than significance, that is painted backwards: the snow at the top (icy ash from the furnaces in the house); then a thick layer of leaves from the fruit trees, straight off the lawn and carried there in wheelbarrows (plus some maple leaves that have sprinkled onto the pile, directly from the tree that looms over the rusty wire fence); then, a rotting mishmash of rejected windfall fruit. Apples and pears in all stages of decay, some with a small brown spot on the side, others completely black with white mold crystals; then a mixture of grass: short, prickly grass from the underside of the mower flap, looser grass from the lawn, bundles of longer straw from around the tree trunks and flower beds, and a thick layer of grass, the storage of which begins as early as May; then there is an indistinguishable transition zone between soil and organic things whose shape can still be identified; and finally, at the bottom, a very thin layer of topsoil, oily topsoil, not quite clean, mixed with rotten twigs and bits of tinfoil or metal hinges (which were thrown out with the ashes), and more soil; everything else disappears into the earth. The trees stand so close together that the twigs, seen from above, touch each other, forming black threads in a sweeping net over the yard, so faint that it seems possible to breathe them in, absorb them into the lungs. Next to the compost heap, the garage, which protects no vehicle from the falling price of used cars, houses a heteroclite accumulation (this phrase has something erotic to it, an invitation to ridicule) of old trunks, punctured sofas, panel tables, ladders, tools, spools of wire mesh, loose carpets, rolled up plastic, cement blocks, worn out tires, mangled bicycles, tent stakes, clotted brushes in paint cans like candlestick drippings, coils of rope hanging from the ceiling, mouse droppings, hockey sticks, insecticides, dust. A laundry area separates the garage from the house.

But I will say nothing about the house, nothing about what it contains, who lives there, no, not that, I will describe the darkness in a book, perhaps, somewhere in there, and the beast of gold. In that darkness, there is a mysterious source of light, perhaps an oil lamp, that shines on a gaping monster, on lizard-like or toad-like eyes, on fins radiating from the back of its head, on a bearded man standing upright on the monster's head, or rather seeming to emerge from a hole in it, the light shining on the monster's teeth, spikes like thorns or cactus spikes, and on a small figure that appears between them. Scarlet wine burns in a glass, against black nothingness. A fish-tailed warrior, a male mermaid, carries the bowl with arms stretched backwards and upwards, in a crucifixion position. He floats on gold water. He is compelled to look down.

Sticking out of the snow there is a brown plastic bucket with four apples in it. The strawberry patch looks fragile in elongated, parallel plots, and likely there are bulbs frozen in the flowerbed waiting for a spring signal (if you would, please ignore this anthropomorphism), but they don't appear, the crocus, the narcissus and the red tulips. No, not the blood droplets on the snow, under the waving light of the headlamps, I wouldn't write about those, nor the overconfident jump (in order to impress her) he made around a corner, his forehead hitting a rock with an audible thump, just under the brim of his knit cap, the headlamp going off suddenly as if switched off, him lying down, her scream, and the blood droplets on the snow, the ones that made the nausea and dizziness spiral through my whitened body, my stupid, cowardly face twisting away from this hematological trifle, turned aside by half-forgotten traumas of my own. Not the drops of blood, which were so thick and hot that they pierced through the snow crystals (Weren’t the sacrificial pits in petroglyphs traditionally painted red? The longboats were also red, and so were the horn-playing men who were drawn with erect penises. Never mind, an escapist association.), but the moss, perhaps, the gray moss on the boulder, rough and dry as stubble, on those trees, especially the plum trees with gnarled bark, where the moss settles in like eczema, almost impossible to shake off without destroying the bark, but also quite harmless to the tree, just as the human body harbors multitudes of bacteria without even noticing, all those microorganisms that have lived on humans for hundreds of thousands of years without ever being discovered, a completely alternative, autonomous microuniverse in the body, soundless, lightless (as opposed to the stars, which we discovered as soon as we could see and think), presumably free of any pain, thus a very tiny paradise in each body, a stupid tiny paradise, with no need to see the stars in the sky, navigate by them, let alone gaze into their constellations, decipher them, no need to overcome their own inner struggle, certainly no connection between that bacterial universe and this eventful room; the dead and unknowing cosmos a host body (no, not a body), a host structure for the living and unknowing bacterial organism, along with the commonality that neither of them can think or feel (probably an unwelcome association). But I would include the open rings that slowly expand around the tree trunks, because trees output a certain heat, or maybe just reflect it, so that the snow (in mild weather) opens up, like when burning a hole in paper, around the trunks, and, if it is springtime, melt until you can see the sodden grey of last year’s grass, more and more grass, until a sort of grass island appears around the tree, losing its initial round shape and morphing in relation to the sun, the shape of the ground and the distance to the nearest tree; for at a certain stage of development towards spring, the melted area between two trees will connect, at first only in a narrow channel, but then it widens almost hour to hour, day to day, visibly, until the whole area between the two trees is without snow, and the melting front continues to veer towards a third three, and so on, until the area covered by snow is smaller than the one without snow (and at that time, colorful bottle rockets, with a kind of red plastic nose on one end and a sooty stick on the other, are unavoidably uncovered, they retain the reminiscent smell of toy cap guns). Finally, the snow melts away drop by drop in pockets of shade and insulation (for example in the crook between the compost heap and the garage and the neighbor’s garage, where the sun never reaches) with black dirty edges (like the collar of an overworn shirt) and rivulets of ice, while the south facing grass on the soaking wet hill has all turned bottle green.

One of the men wears a scarlet robe with gold edges, and he carries a gilded staff over his shoulder, with a large orb on top. The man on his right has a long black beard hanging down over his chest, which is covered by a saffron robe, and his right hand is clasped around something that looks like a knife or dagger. The bowl they adorn has blue decorations on a white base, the lid is propped against the edge, a silver spoon sticking out. The bowl stands on a glass dish that looks nothing like ice, but instead dark, congealed water, from a bubbling eddy in a faraway beck surrounded by thick shrubbery, or perhaps just boiling syrup, or amber. From this dark glass, a peel descends in serpentine fashion, in a spiral, as it was first cut from the top part of the lemon, the knob at the top of the peel points downwards like the nipple of a bent-over woman, over one side of the dish falls a shadow from the peel, which thus bends downwards from the fruit itself, where it lies on the edge of the glass dish and shines chrome yellow, the white inside of the peel like a contour of snow on the fruit’s flesh, narrowing white meridians up towards the poles (the fruit’s center); the lemon is cut open, the peel still faint, after whoever peeled it took two steps back, into the darkness, and looked at the table. On the folds of the thick tablecloth, probably of velvet (it looks like a Persian carpet), lies a shining apple with stem and leaves, the leaves not green, but rotten brown.

A faint wind blows. These leaves which first turn yellow along with the other leaves, then brown, and finally black, but do not fall off in harvest, they hang there all winter, almost invisible because they have the same color as the branches; only when the wind blows do they become noticeable, they quiver rapidly and effortlessly as if they were tied to the twigs with sewing thread, like a shrunken ski lift, leading one to think of some distant country's habit of hanging garlands or scraps of written promises in trees for religious purposes, except that these leaves lack any color or mystery, it is a mystery when they actually fall off, for they are never there in summer; so, at some point between winter and summer they must drop off, something that goes completely unnoticed, they have simply ceased to exist, and not until next winter will a new brood (if you can put it that way) of black leaves have taken the place of the former, and there they will flit in the wind, when there is wind, like the corpses of little birds, until they fall off, displaced, perhaps, by the fresh, spring-green leaves. True, he did not remain motionless long. Despite the shock, or just surprise, of the unlikelihood of this happening to him, of usually being so good at skiing, of the one he loves coming to save him, at any rate, he began to puff himself up, without making a sound, while, after her short, bird-like scream (to release excess pressure), she transformed into an efficient and practical thinking person, fiddled with his skis, stumbled, decided she should unbuckle them, then unbuckled them, while I sank down, or rather tried to stay upright, leaning on the poles, turning chicken with goosebumps from this trivial accident that didn't even include me, the flowing blood was not even mine, it was his, and I did not even make a feeble attempt to help, terrorized by my own vestibular system, physiologically speaking. As if from a speeding merry-go-round, I watched her rummage through the pockets of her anorak and find what she was looking for, a pile of white paper napkins that she had taken with her from the ski lodge where we had sat half an hour earlier with sodas, or to be legally correct, the napkins she had stolen; for we were of that age (the early teenage part) when theft (even of comparatively insignificant things) represented as it were a kind of sweet delight, a startling novelty, that at the same time, rather than a rebellion, was a cunning evasion of the rules of decent and responsible behavior that are laid like insect eggs in our wintry souls, if you can put it that way, by the authorities (and these eggs eventually hatched the buzzing flies of conscience, for most of us, but not then), and she divided this pile of paper napkins (which proves that theft sometimes pays off), and laid about a third of them on the wound, which was evidently bleeding profusely, so much so that the paper napkins were quickly soaked with blood, so that she had to replace them with a fresh pile, these paper napkins, which were really intended to wipe away the remains of jam, pastries, waffles and coffee grounds, but had now acquired an unintended medical function. Once his knit cap was lined with napkins, he pulled it over his forehead, put the headlamp back on, then was able to get up and keep moving; apparently when he finally came home, the cap had a large and partially congealed bloodstain, but it wasn’t noticeable because the cap was navy blue, and his sister (who worked in a hospital) emphasized the significance of this scenario by telling a horror story about a motorcyclist who had crashed and was happy to have been wearing a helmet, got up from the wreckage of the accident, took the helmet off, found it was full of brain matter, and died afterwards. During the treatment of the injury, she discovered that I was of no help, instead I was taking care of myself, sitting half-crouched on a stump, cradled in my own rotating nausea, she more noted than asked (with the hint of a wicked smile) that I hadn't been able to handle it, and I muttered a telling grunt which, unfortunately, given the context, was not to be misunderstood. I needed something to drink, she realized, so she took out her thermos, unscrewed the cork resolutely, poured tea into the mug, and then into my mouth, and as she did so, she touched my cheek, fleetingly, with two fingers that were beginning to grow cold and numb, a comforting birdwing touch. That is what I remember best, that and the terrible shame glued together with a number of things: the joy of her caring act; her being loved by another, which I experienced in a reserved or sacrosanct way; and her fingers touching my cheek with a blushing trace of shame behind them, not a stroke for a clown's cheek, more like a stroke for a weakling, a stroke of pity and gentle mockery, not of interest or admiration (but that is perhaps the most beautiful thing: to this day I do not know whether she, perhaps, nevertheless, showed a trace of affection towards me, as I did towards her, probably not). None of that. Just the yard, black with trees and white with snow, and the house, perhaps with a yellow flash in a window, from the headlights of a passing snowplow. If I could write, I would describe it. And at the end of the planked table, already a small pond of meltwater, the frosty flaps of an orange plastic tarpaulin, some leftover tile laid on as a weight, a worthless two-by-four left in the water, moldy brown, sopping wet, in the process of rotting, slowly, negative two or three degrees, and, crooked, bloated, curled between ice and wooden planks, for some reason, a handmade banner advertising MAS GIFTS, S&CRAFTS, AKE RAFFLE, INGO and SATURDAY, in large fonts, black on canary yellow. But I can't. Something else has me in its power. In the shallow but dark water, I can now see a gold glittering monster, the liplike edges along the mouth glistening red, the spiky teeth lining the heavy, greedy maw, and from the maw a naked figure falls out, a man of gold, who one might think is fleeing from his own scream, from the cruel monster of capitalism, or from time itself, but who, in the torpor of his unmoving panic, does not save himself from anything, but remains there, shining in the darkness of a perfect, helpless calm, an inexpressible masterpiece of goldsmithing, down there in the shallow, black ice-water, surrounded by the cakey, chalky late-winter snow that is greyed by exhaust and soot particles, not white, not clean, not empty.

***

Tor Ulven is one of the most influential Norwegian writers of the 80’s and 90’s. His suicide in 1995, at the age of 41, cut short a writing career consisting of five books of poetry and six books of prose. His work concerns the absurd battle between accepting meaninglessness and weaving meaning into our lives. Jan Sjåvik writes: “It is ironic that a writer with Ulven’s sense of human transitoriness should have been able to come closer to literary immortality than most.” 

Jordan Barger is a translator of Yahya Hassan, Sigbjørn Obstfelder and Tor Ulven.