Two Writers, Not Lovers, and Norwegian Butter
Illustration: Somnath Bhatt. T was sitting on a tall wooden stool in the kitchen and the kitchen was made of wood and the tea he drank was lemon from Russian teaware that came from China and he ate dark chocolate, the bitter kind, while reading the paper. Ben Lerner was on the front page of a literary magazine, hiding most of T’s face and the spread he held open with sticky fingers showed Teju Cole walking the streets of Oslo with a tall journalist. The radio was on, T sang along to an ’80s song. She was watching him. The day was in the afternoon. The rain was pouring down hard but still there was a little open patch of sky somewhere further back, closer to the horizon. You could see it from T’s kitchen window.
T is an author, well-known at home in Bergen, but mostly unknown outside of home and outside of Norway. All during her five-day trip she would try not to think about how T was eleven years younger than her deceased father. And anyway, she wasn’t here to think about her father, she wasn’t here to think about anything at all.
Earlier today they had walked around together in a steady, lukewarm rain. The newness of summer was slowly fading and with the changing of the season it was possible to feel that something different would begin.
First, they rode on bicycles down a hill, down a hill, around, then down another hill. Once they got closer to the city center, they stepped off of their bikes and walked through narrow streets with hands firmly on the steering wheels. It started raining. She wore a trench coat that didn’t have a hoodie. She contemplated taking an umbrella out of her bag but wasn’t sure how she would balance it in one hand, with the bike in the other. She wobbled in her movements as if she hadn’t ridden a bike in years and the rain fell harder. The persistent downpour forced her to figure out how to balance and move forward at the same time. T didn’t have these worries, his raincoat protected all of him. The writer was from this place.
T took her around and around the city and it felt funny to call Bergen a city since you often saw the same people twice in one day but there was beauty to be found: in the water that embraced the city, like the center of a bowl, and there was beauty in how it showered down, steadily practically every day. Can you drown from too much rain? she asked like she was struggling, and the writer smiled.
T pointed at buildings where he had lived at some points in his life or where his parents had lived or where his grandparents had worked and she thought of how she had never known anyone who had had such a long history with a city and still never been disappointed enough by the place that leaving felt necessary.
As they walked with their bikes, more than ten people must have greeted them along the way. Some of these people stopped, all of them smiled and a couple of them touched T’s arm at the same time as they smiled. His broad body loosened up in their leisurely stroll as if he was pleased with the confirmation of others. The writer ooed and ahhed at the shared performance of greeting others. These people were old, and they were young and what mattered was that everyone recognized each other, everyone felt seen and because they were kind and knew T they saw her too. She shook their hands, offered them her name, and felt damper than these Bergeners, more observed than anyone else. They nodded acceptingly to the sound of her name like it was a word they had known from before, a character they had read about in one of his books, a lover they had met the week earlier or a step-daughter they had heard rumors of.
After the familiar faces said their hellos and goodbyes, T guided her and their bikes to a side street and showed her his favorite café, which was next to an art gallery. After they drank their coffees, they scrutinized the art on the walls, pointing and appreciating, smiling and sometimes laughing. The bicycles waited outside, leaning on each other and together they leaned on a lamppost. Afterwards, the bikes took them to the store where they bought groceries from a small place near
