Oh, biographies! Anna Bae the Younger loved them. She loved the sentences in them. The way the sentences presented themselves as if what they said had actually happened. They were able to compress enormous timelines and state that it was like this or that, and that this is how this links to that. Right now she was reading a biography of the writer Arthur Rimbaud. She liked Rimbaud better than any other writer. Everything he said and did and wrote was rebellious! She would also dearly love to shout “fuck!” in the face of everything. She would also love to run away from home again and again.
* * *
She was sitting reading on a sofa that was green. She ran her hand over the fabric, it was an old sofa with a complicated pattern of flowers and leaves, and the flowers and leaves were in raised shiny velvet. It was uneven, and it felt good to run her hand over it. She, Anna Bae, was the third leaf, she thought as she sat there on the sofa and stroked her hand over the fabric, and looked at her hand, it was almost identical to her mother’s hand, and as far as she could remember, that was almost identical with her mother’s mother’s hand. It was as if this hand lived its own life, it had moved down through the generations so it could continue to stroke the uneven, good-to-touch velvet on the sofa. As she stroked with her hand, which she no longer felt was a part of her, but felt more and more like some strange creature that was rubbing up against the velvet, against the sofa, she read about Rimbaud’s mother, who was called Vitalie: “Although Vitalie’s social life was confined to the church, shopping, and occasional games of whist, she somehow managed to meet a French army officer in 1852,” and she threw herself back in delight:
* * *
SOMEHOW SHE MANAGED IT!
* * *
Sometimes when you read, it’s like certain sentences strike home and knock you flat. It’s as if they say everything you have tried to say, or tried to do, or everything you are. As a rule, what you are is one simmering, endless longing. And that was how this sentence struck Anna Bae’s consciousness, like a quivering arrow of truth. That said: it’s possible. To meet a French army officer. Or simply to manage whatever it is you are longing for. That seems impossible to manage. That blankets you like destiny. It would seem that Anna Bae’s destiny was to be the third leaf, Anna Bae who was sitting on the same old sofa, stroking the hand that no one had managed to dispense with over the sofa that had been there for three generations. Her destiny was to be here, to live in this house, to walk in the fields outside the house, to gather the sheep from the mountain, never to go deeper into civilization than the hill down to the shop, and certainly never to talk to anyone other than the two neighbors who lived on the farms closest by. To buy books on the Internet. Her destiny was to be filled with a simmering, endless longing. That was her destiny, unfortunately! But Vitalie managed, all the same. One might wonder how. Anna had to ponder how, because of the way it was written, and nothing more was said. In one way or another, she had managed (this confined soul) to meet an officer. In 1852. She had just read that Vitalie Cuif, from the age of five, had been a mother to her two brothers and wife to her suddenly widowed father, that she sacrificed everything for the family until the age of twenty-seven, by which time she had become a bony, prim woman with scraped-back hair. Not a particularly promising starting point for meeting someone. But then she met this officer, somehow. And as a result, she gave birth to Arthur Rimbaud. Before the officer left the family when Arthur was six. Scraped-back hair! Anna, twenty-six, loosened her hair, which was pulled back into a ponytail, leaned back on the green sofa and, while stroking her hand over the uneven, good-to-touch pattern, came to the conclusion that the meeting between Vitalie and the officer could only have happened in the following way:
* * *
Her starting point was Nick Cave’s song “(Are You) The One That I’ve Been Waiting For,” where he sings, among other things: “I knew you’d find me, ’cause I longed you here.” So, if one was to believe Cave, it was possible to long someone to you. One could imagine that Vitalie’s longing lay like a well-hidden egg in her chest and purred unseen with glorious, secret dreams. And inside the egg lay her longing, which was not going to transform into a bird. No, it was shiny and thin, like a fishing line. The line lay coiled in Vitalie’s chest and grew and grew like a baby bird until one day, one day she was lying on the bed, staring up at the ceiling and listening to her father tramping around in the next room—she was so fed up with that tramping! She couldn’t bear that tramping anymore!—it started to tap on the shell that was inside her chest. The line tapped and tapped until it managed to break a hole in the shell, and then it wound out and through her chest, found its way through her ribs and out through her skin, and then it started to move about the room, in slow, undulating movements. Then it found a window, bored its way through the window frame and glass out into the air. Then it carried on down the road in the same slow, swinging movements. And anyone with extremely good hearing might have heard it buzzing, or humming, through the air. The line swung and looped around the town until it found an officer that took it by surprise. Something felt right about this officer. This officer was the one it had to be! The line pierced through his uniform, through his skin, found its way in through his ribs and wrapped itself around his heart. The officer felt an inexplicable pull. He was pulled through the town, his legs just walked and walked, until he finally found himself standing outside a window. There was an alluring light in the window, it was a dark winter’s night outside, and there was a warm light in the window. He made a snowball, threw it at the window. Who was in there? A young woman. She stood there with her arms hanging by her side, and then she opened the window. She was very beautiful! Nothing prim about her, no scraped-back hair. Her hair was loose and her cheeks were flushed.
* * *
Anna didn’t know if they had windows that could be opened in 1852; in fact, she wasn’t sure if they had windows at all. She thought they had windows. She got up from the sofa and looked out at the vast fields around her. They were yellow, covered in a sharp layer of frost. Farther down, the fjord came into the bay, lay in it, held it tight. Later in the evening, she would stand here and watch the trailers creeping up the mountainside like moving constellations. Anna went over to another window, looked up toward the road, the streetlights were just coming on, emitting a pale halo. The forest was black. She went into the kitchen and looked out the window. The fjord, the forest. She let down her hair. She took a knife and carved her name into the kitchen table, and the year: “Anna Bae, 2004.” Now she was ready. She ran her finger over the letters on the table, and just knew it. Everything was buzzing. She was warm and happy.
* * *
Then she heard a low sound, a kind of humming, in the air. She looked out and to her great surprise saw a UFO landing on the field over there. It was shaped like two soup dishes glued together with a row of flashing lights around the middle. Anna stood there staring and waiting to see if a door would open, if a ladder would drop down. But nothing happened. It was as though it was waiting. Who are they waiting for? Anna thought as she pulled on her boots and jacket. Is it me? she wondered as she walked over the frozen grass that crunched under her boots. It wasn’t a big UFO, she could see that, smaller than she had imagined UFOs to be. And it wasn’t silver, as she thought they were, but dark. Dark. And—she refused to believe it. She walked right up to it and put her hand on the UFO wall. It was covered in a green fabric, just like the one on her sofa. Exactly the same. The UFO was covered in green velvet in a complicated pattern of flowers and leaves. Some of the flowers and leaves were in raised, shiny velvet, and it was uneven and it felt good to stroke your hand over it. It was the strangest thing Anna Bae had ever experienced. To stand there and stroke and pat a UFO.