The weight of water - Anita Shreve [20]
How many times I have had in my mind the image of leaving Laurvig, and seeing from the harbor, along the coast road, our own cottage and others like it, one and a half stories tall, with such a profusion of blossoms in the gardens around them. This area in Norway, which is in the southeastern part of the country, facing to Sweden and Denmark, has a mild climate and good soil for orchards and other plants such as myrtle and fuchsia, which were in abundance then and are now. We had peaches from a tree in our garden, and though there were months at a time when I had only the one woolen dress and only one pair of woolen socks, we had fruit to eat and fresh or dried fish and the foods that flour and water go together to make, such as porridge and pancakes and lefse.
I possess so very many wonderful memories of those days of my extreme youth that sometimes they are more real to me than the events of last year or even of yesterday. A child who may grow to adulthood with the sea and the forest and the orchards at hand may count himself a very lucky child indeed.
Before we had reached the age when we were allowed to go to school. Evan and I had occasion to spend a great deal of time together, and I believe that because of this we each understood that in some indefinable manner our souls, and hence our paths, were to be inextricably linked, and perhaps I knew already that whatever fate might befall the one would surely befall the other. And as regards the outside world, that is to say the world of nature (and the people and spirits and animals who inhabited that tangible world), each of us was for the other a filter. I remember with a clarity that would seem to be extraordinary after so many years (these events having occurred at such a young age) talking with Evan all the long days and into the nights (for is not a day actually longer when one is a child, time being of an illusory and deceptive nature?) as if we were indeed interpreting for each other and for ourselves the mysterious secrets and truths of life itself.
We were bathed together in a copper tub that was brought out once a week and set upon a stand in the kitchen near to the stove. My father bathed first, and then my mother, and then Karen, and lastly, Evan and me together. Evan and I were fearful of our father’s nakedness and respectful of our mother’s modesty, and so we busied ourselves in another room during the times when our parents used the copper tub. But no such restraints had yet descended upon us as regards our sister, Karen, who would have been, when I was five, seventeen, and who possessed most of the attributes of a grown woman, attributes that both frightened and amazed me, although I cannot say it was with any reverence for her person that Evan and I often peeked behind the curtain and made rude sounds and in this way tortured our sister, who would scream at us from the tub and, more often than not, end the evening in tears. And thus I suppose I shall have to admit here that Evan and myself, while not cruel or mischievous by nature or necessarily to anyone else in our company, were sometimes moved to torment and tease our sister, because it was, I think, so easy to do and at the same time so enormously, if unforgivably, rewarding.
When our turn for the bath had come, we would have clean water that had been heated by our mother in great pots and then poured into the copper tub, and my brother and myself, who until a late age had no shame between us, would remove our clothing and play in the hot soapy water as if in a pool in the woods, and I remember the candlelight and warmth of this ritual with a fondness that remains with me today.
Each morning of the school year, when we were younger and not needed to be hired out, Evan