mother, and walked up the gravel road. Stones stung her feet through the thin shoe soles. As she drew closer to the farmhouse, a small dog with a curled tail burst out of the bright green grass.
At the window, a pale figure lifted a curtain. The door opened, and a man with thick brown hair appeared on the steps. He extended a calloused hand and rolled out the r's of his name.
"Ragnar."
She said her own name slowly, wishing she could explain how her mother had named her after Sophie Charlotte, the elector of Brandenburg's beloved wife who had died young. Usually, the explanation helped her get to know people. But her dictionary was at the bottom of her suitcase.
The dark hallway smelled of sheep's wool and rain gear. She slipped off her gritty shoes and left them next to the pile of rubber footwear. Above the door to the kitchen hung a driftwood painting of a three-gabled farmhouse. Ragnar padded across the floorboards in his socks. Looking too big to be indoors, he said things she barely understood.
Wife's dead. No children.
In the awkward silence, she heard the rub of cloth against the wooden wall. A third person was breathing in the dark hall.
"My mother," Ragnar said.
An old woman with narrow shoulders offered, and quickly withdrew, a slender parched hand, then moved along the wall into the kitchen, her sheepskin shoes swishing over the floor. Ragnar picked up Charlotte's suitcase. She followed him into a small bedroom, dark but for the light from the small window. A chest of drawers stood against the window. A child-sized chair separated the two beds. On it stood a candle next to a book. Egilssaga. She and the old woman would take turns undressing in the narrow space.
When he set the suitcase down on the bed, the comforter made a sound like a person exhaling. At the foot of the bed was a wooden box full of uncarded wool. A carved plank bore words about God's eternal embrace. It hung on the paneled wall above the bed. Making rocking gestures with his arms, Ragnar explained.
From my father's boat. Dead.
Everyone but the three of them seemed to be dead.
The floorboards were splintered and the window casement warped. Above the old woman's bed hung a small oil painting of a farm with a chlorophyll-green home field, next to it a photograph of an ancestor with a stiff priest's ruff.
"Coffee?" he asked.
When she nodded, he looked relieved. Through the thin walls, she heard him talking in the kitchen. A wave of loneliness washed over her. Until this moment she had been moving constantly, caught between then and the future, but now she felt the finality of having arrived. She felt alone like on the day her mother had left her at the new school.
Beyond the open window, earth and sky met at the horizon. She was sealed in. She'd wanted to leave Berlin, not slip off the edge of the earth. But it was not so much a matter of geography as of time. The years of her old life had run out. She swallowed hard.
Here, not there.
Under the neatly folded underwear in her suitcase, she found her old address book and brought it to the window. The names of her classmates were written in a childish script. Her eyes blurred over those who had not survived the war.
Folded up between the pages, she found the advertisement and read it again.
Farmers in Iceland seek strong women who can cook and do farm work.
No mention of companionship, certainly not with this ungainly farmer. Still, his hesitating manner and his stained gray sweater suggested a pleasant humility. Perhaps he'd be more at ease outdoors. She placed her clothes in the chest of drawers. At last there was nothing left in her suitcase but her paintings. No place to hang them in this bedroom.
A shuffle of slippers, and he was back. Smiling awkwardly, he beckoned her to follow him into the kitchen. He seemed to have forgotten about the coffee. Fish sizzled in a pan, and potatoes rattled in a pot. He gestured toward the two place settings. The rest of the table was covered with stacks of bills and receipts. He placed these on the floor, opened the cupboard, and brought out a cracked plate. She sensed this would be her own special plate until it broke or she left.
The old woman gestured toward the steaming fish and potatoes. Then she drizzled a woolly smelling fat over her food. With their eyes on her, Charlotte did the same. Mother and son chewed the saltfish in silence while Charlotte had the feeling she'd interrupted a conversation begun long before she arrived.
There's a hole in the fence out by the main road. That chicken isn't laying.
The old woman dropped her gaze, and Charlotte studied the thick gray braids, looped against her sun-dried neck. The shiny hair appeared to have sucked the juice out of her face.
That night, Charlotte waited in the hall outside the bedroom until the swish of skirts stopped. When she heard the bed boards creak, she tiptoed into the room, slipped off her clothes, laid them at the end of the bed, and crept under the stiff sheets.
A sliver of moonlight revealed the old woman's stony profile, still but for the lips, vibrating with each breath. A cow lowed in the home field. On the moor, a horse neighed.
But sometime in the night, Charlotte's two worlds collided. She hadn't expected the ghost of Max—full of blame and love—to cross the Atlantic, to follow her up the hillside. His lean body pressed against hers in the narrow bed. He whispered about Monet's blues and greens. And she felt safe. But he wouldn't stay the night. When he slipped away into the mist, tears slid down her cheeks and into her ears.
A Creature Going Ashore
The sunlight drifted through the panes of the little window. Facing the old woman's empty bed, Charlotte dressed slowly. A burlap apron hung on a hook. She tied it around her waist and went to the kitchen. A rust-colored cat sat hunched over a saucer, picking at fish bones. Somewhere outside, milk pails rattled.
Between the kitchen and the cowshed, she made her plan for hitchhiking back to Reykjavík. Getting off the boat, she'd seen smoking chimneys in the town. They'd need maids— maybe German tutors—in those big houses.
A lamb grazed on the shed roof. Charlotte ducked her head under the wooden frame of the door and entered a shed that was dark but for one small window. Unlit oil lamps hung on the walls of piled stone. Under her feet, she felt the grit of a dirt floor. Her lip curled at the stench of ammonia, and she nearly tripped over a tub of soaking overalls.
Ragnar stepped out from behind the wooden framework that separated the cow stalls from the washroom. In this setting he looked almost graceful, walking toward her, trailing his fingers along the cow's spine. Nourished perhaps by the warmth of the animals, his voice had a resonance.
"Good morning."
She imitated the greeting as best she could. A follow-up phrase came to mind, but the words knotted her tongue. She watched him pour milk from a bucket into a waist-high canister that stood in the center of the room.
The angular haunches of cows rose above the wooden framework that separated one stall from the other. The cows' tails were looped up with string attached to the splintered beams over their heads. The old woman wore a
