Shark Drunk Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  English translation copyright © 2017 by Tiina Nunnally

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in Norway as Havboka, by Forlaget Oktober AS, Oslo, in 2015. Copyright © 2015 by Morten A. Strøksnes and Forlaget Oktober. Published by agreement with Copenhagen Literary Agency, Copenhagen.

  This translation has been published with the financial support of NORLA.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Strøksnes, Morten Andreas, 1965– author. | Nunnally, Tiina, 1952– translator.

  Title: Shark drunk : the art of catching a large shark from a tiny rubber dinghy in a big ocean / Morten Strøksnes ; translated by Tiina Nunnally.

  Other titles: Havboka. English

  Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016044185 (print) | LCCN 2016048634 (ebook) | ISBN 9780451493484 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780451493491 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524711238 (open market)

  Subjects: LCSH: Shark fishing—Norway. | Greenland shark—Norway. | Fishing—Norway. | Sailing—Norway.

  Classification: LCC SH691.S4 S7713 2017 (print) | LCC SH691.S4 (ebook) | DDC 338.3/727309481—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2016044185

  Ebook ISBN 9780451493491

  Cover design by Oliver Munday

  Interior illustrations by Egil Haraldsen

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Map

  Summer

  Autumn

  Winter

  Spring

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  A Note About the Author

  Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea or walked in the recesses of the deep?

  —Job 38:16

  Detail left

  Detail right

  Summer

  1

  Three and a half billion years. That’s the time it took from the moment the first primitive life-forms developed in the sea until Hugo Aasjord phoned me one Saturday night in July.

  “Have you seen the weather report for next week?” he asked.

  We’d been waiting a long time for a very specific forecast. Not sunshine or heat, not even the absence of rain. What we needed was the least possible wind in the seas between Bodø and Lofoten—or, to be more precise, in Vestfjorden, the “western fjord.” If you need calm waters in Vestfjorden, you better not be in a rush. Its tumultuous waters are notoriously temperamental. Even the slightest gust of wind from the west, south, or north can create significant waves.

  I’d checked the weather reports for weeks. The forecast was always for strong or gale-force winds. Never just a gentle breeze or light air, which would give us the calm seas we needed. Eventually I’d pretty much given up keeping track and surrendered to Oslo’s lazy summertime rhythm of hot days and bright nights.

  I was at a lively dinner party when my phone rang. When I saw the call was from Hugo—a man who hates phones and only rings to deliver important messages—I knew that our long wait had come to an end. We were finally going to try to catch the big fish.

  “I’ll buy a plane ticket tomorrow and arrive in Bodø Monday afternoon,” I told him.

  “Good. See you.” Click.

  —

  On the plane to Bodø I fixed my gaze on the land below. Through the oval window I could see mountains, forests, and plains, which I imagined as a raised seabed. A couple of billion years ago the entire earth was covered with water, except maybe for a few small islands here and there. Even today, the ocean still makes up more than 70 percent of the earth’s surface. It has been said that our planet’s name shouldn’t be Earth. Instead, it would be more appropriate to call it Ocean.

  When we reached Helgeland, the land opened into Norway’s majestic fjords, with swelling seas to the west, until finally the division between sky and water dissolved and the horizon became a shining gray color reminiscent of bird feathers.

  Every time I leave Oslo and travel north, I have the same sense of escape…escape from the inland and its anthills, spruce trees, rivers, freshwater lakes, and gurgling marshes. Good-bye and farewell, I’m going out to the sea, which is free and endless, rhythmic and swaying like the old sea chanteys sung across the oceans of the world on ships traveling to classic harbors like Marseille, Liverpool, Singapore, and Montevideo, while the deckhands hauled on the lines to set, trim, or reef the sails.

  —

  Sailors who have gone ashore can seem like restless visitors. They may never go to sea again, but judging by their talk and gestures, it’s as if they’re merely temporary visitors on dry land. They never lose their longing for the water. Yet the sea, which is calling them, has to settle for hopeful, if uncertain, replies.

  My great-great-grandfather must have felt the sea’s mysterious pull when he left inland Sweden and began walking west. Through valleys and over mountains, he traveled like a salmon along the great rivers, first against the stream, then with the stream until he made it all the way to the sea.

  As the story goes, he gave no reason for the journey other than that he had to see the ocean with his own eyes. It’s unlikely he had any plans to go back to where he’d come from. Maybe he couldn’t stand the thought of spending the rest of his life stooping over barren patches of land in a Swedish mountain village. Clearly he was an impulsive man, a dreamer with strong legs. He wandered all the way to the Norwegian coast, started a family, and then joined the crew of a freighter. A couple of years later, as fate would have it, the ship sank somewhere in the Pacific. Everyone on board drowned. As if the man had come from the depths of the sea and needed to return. As if that was where he belonged, and he’d always known it. At least that’s how I think of him.

  —

  It was the sea that gave birth to the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud. The sea inspired his expansive language, which carried both him and poetry into the modern era with “Le bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) from 1871. The poem is told from the perspective of an old freighter that wants to experience the freedom of the sea and hurtles recklessly down a great river until it reaches the coast and enters open waters, only to encounter a violent storm and sink to the bottom. There it becomes one with the ocean:

  And from then on I bathed in the Poem

  Of the Sea, infused with stars and lactescent,

  Devouring the azure verses; where, like a pale elated

  Piece of flotsam, a pensive drowned figure sometimes sinks.1

  From the airplane I tried to reconstruct more of “The Drunken Boat” from memory. I know the swells attack the skerries like frenzied herds of cattle. And on the ocean floor a Leviathan rots among swaying clumps of kelp, which reel the drunken boat in close, wrapping it in their tentacles. Above the dark abyss of the maelstrom, the boat hears the mating calls of the sperm whale. It sees dead-drunk shipwrecks swarming with sea lice and hideous snakes, golden singing fish, electric crescent moons, and black seahorses—things that people only imagine they’ve seen…

  The boat is pummeled by the sights, experiencing the frightening and liberating power of the sea, the constant surge and spray, until it becomes languidly, numbingly sated. Then the boat begins to yearn for the dark and quiet river pools of its childhood.

  Rimbaud had never seen the
ocean when he wrote this poem at the age of sixteen.

  2

  Hugo Aasjord lives on the island of Engeløya in the municipality of Steigen. To get there from Bodø you have to take the northbound catamaran ferry, traveling between islands and small, weather-beaten communities that cling like barnacles to the rocky coast. After about two hours the ferry docks at Bogøy, a small village with a bridge that crosses over to Engeløya.

  Engeløya is like a microcosm of Norway. Typical Norwegian fjord country on the side facing the mainland; archipelago and white shores on the seaward side. The belt of land farthest south and by the sea consists of fertile farmland. Beyond that is a forested strip where moose and other wildlife live. Finally, valleys and mountains, of which Trohornet (2,116 feet above sea level) is the tallest. There are good reasons why people have lived here for nearly six thousand years. This island, which you can easily bike around in a couple of hours, gave them ample opportunities for fishing, hunting, and farming.

  Hugo is standing on the wharf and has good news for me. Apparently we have bait. A Scottish Highland bull was butchered a few days ago, and the remains are out in a field, ready for me to pick up. “That can wait until tomorrow,” Hugo says as we drive across the bridge to Engeløya and pull up in front of his house, complete with a tower on top, a gallery in the basement, and an unimpeded view to the west, toward Vestfjorden. The square tower, designed by Hugo, could have served as a stage set for Henrik Ibsen’s play The Master Builder.

  Arriving at Hugo’s property, it’s easy to imagine that you’ve entered a pirate’s lair. Scattered around the garage are objects that have been plundered from the coast. Lining the path to the gallery, the prow of an old ship and several huge old anchors stand like exhibition pieces or trophies. In the backyard is a propeller that once belonged to an English trawler that went down off the island of Skrova. On the shed hangs a Russian sign that Hugo fished out of the sea. He thought the sign belonged to a Russian ship, but it turned out to be an election poster from a district outside Arkhangelsk. Next to the main shed Hugo has built a couple of other sheds, plus a stable housing two Shetland ponies, named Luna and Veslegloppa. Various boats have always been stored in the main shed or nearby. He’d sold the Plattgatter, a mahogany boat with a flat transom that always looked like it was yearning for the Riviera.

  Hugo has never eaten a fish stick in his life. Nor does he have any plans to do so. For dinner we have soup made from freshly picked shoots of stinging nettles and lovage, lentils, and homemade moose sausage along with a couple of glasses of wine. Then we go downstairs to the gallery. Hugo’s oil paintings are largely abstracts, but people up in the north have a tendency to regard them as actual landscapes depicting the sea and coastline, meaning, of course, scenes from their own lives. That’s easy to understand, since the paintings shimmer with the characteristic light found only near the ocean north of the Arctic Circle, especially in winter. Hugo’s style is marked by an easily recognizable arctic blue from the cold, clear days of darkness, which, by the way, are actually not dark at all. The entire spectrum of light exists, although dimmed or imploded. The colors of the sky take on a deep, encapsulated glow, while the northern lights can flare up at any moment like psychedelic improvisations.

  Some of the paintings he’s working on are of Battery Dietl, on the seaward side of Engeløya. There, on the coast, the Germans built the largest and most expensive fortification in northern Europe during World War II. It housed more than ten thousand people, a combination of German soldiers and Russian prisoners of war. Battery Dietl became one of northern Norway’s biggest towns, with a movie theater, hospital, barracks, dining halls, and even brothels with women brought from Germany and Poland. Spread out through the area were also radar installations, weather stations, and command centers filled with newly developed technology. The cannon battery was intended to cover all of Vestfjorden. It had a range of twenty-five to thirty miles. Today the bunkers still extend several stories underground. Even though hundreds of Russian prisoners died there as forced laborers, Hugo senses a peacefulness in the secluded area.

  In his paintings, Battery Dietl shows up only as a group of cubist shapes.

  —

  Hugo’s work as an artist has a wide range, to say the least. Several years ago Hugo put on exhibition a cat that had been naturally embalmed. Dying, it had taken refuge inside the wall of an old cowshed down the road from Hugo’s house. When it became known that Hugo was going to show the cat at the Biennale in Florence, he was asked by the local newspaper, Avisa Nordland, “Is a dead cat art?”

  Hugo grew up on both sides of Vestfjorden. He has always lived near the sea and also spent a considerable part of his life on boats. Only once did he venture inland for any length of time, when he went to Münster, Germany, to study art. He was the youngest student ever admitted to the city’s renowned art school. Back then, many wounded veterans of World War II wandered the streets—men who were disfigured, on crutches, missing an arm, or sitting in wheelchairs. His fellow students were young radical Germans who vocally expressed their criticism of the Vietnam War, while the Second World War remained off-limits. Hugo would sometimes take the train north to Hamburg, because along the way the consistency of the air changed, becoming rawer, with a faint whiff of the sea.

  After graduation, Hugo returned to Norway with certificates confirming that he had mastered the classical techniques of painting, graphic art, and sculpture. He also brought with him a different kind of baggage. The fact that he was part of the radical German student milieu in the 1970s still clings to him in a vague sort of way. It has nothing to do with politics, because Hugo has never been particularly radical in that sense. Nor does it have to do with personal style, in spite of his round glasses, mustache, and long black hair. It has more to do with an unconventional attitude about how things should be done and how life should be lived. Münster also left him with a nefarious addiction: watching reruns of the German TV crime show Derrick every day at five o’clock. And God help anyone who disturbs him.

  —

  After Hugo shows me his new paintings, we go up to the attic room. From there we have a view of Engeløya and its lush terrain. It’s a mild summer night. Dew has settled on the grass and the black fields to the south, and a blanket of silence lies over the slumbering land. Even a whisper can carry a long way.

  All around us is a bountiful deciduous forest of birch, rowan, willow, and aspen. I go through the open door of the balcony at the prow of the house, which resembles a ship’s bridge. It’s far from quiet out there. The forest is shaggy with pollen and dripping with chlorophyll. A backdrop of birdsong opens up. I hear snipes, curlews, and woodcocks. My ears need a little time to distinguish one from another. The black grouse clucks, the thrush chatters, the cuckoo sings coo-coo. Finches, sparrows, and titmice chirp. Curlews often make a melancholy and lonely whistling sound, but they can shift tempo at any moment, sounding then like a good-natured machine gun. Let’s call it friendly fire. Somewhere out there, one bird makes a dry sound, like a coin clacking against a table.

  A short-eared owl comes flying past, swooping low. Its long wings flap unsteadily. In the distance, the fjord is smooth and white. The snow hasn’t yet melted from the island’s black mountaintops, which are high enough that over the years three fighter planes have slammed into them. Two Starfighters crashed in the early 1970s, and in 1999 a German Tornado came down after the two pilots had ejected. Both were picked up by small boats trolling in the waters of Skagstadsund.

  The birdlife says a lot about the difference between the islands of Engeløya and Skrova, which is on the other side of Vestfjorden. Engeløya is an agricultural community. Skrova is a fishing village, where everything, including the way of thinking, is different. There are only seabirds on Skrova. The birds of the forests in Engeløya can sing with enchanting beauty, whereas the seabirds around Skrova often have hoarse, croaking voices. But some of those seabirds can dive down to 650 feet, practically flying through the water and con
stantly changing direction as they close in on panicking shoals of herring or sprat.

  Offshore of Skrova, the sea level dramatically plunges a thousand feet. There, on the coast, Hugo and his wife, Mette, are in the process of fixing up Aasjord Station, an old fishing outpost and cod-liver-oil mill.

  As the name suggests, Hugo’s family owned Aasjord Station for a couple of decades before it was shuttered and sold in the early 1980s. Now Hugo and Mette have bought it back. The place had fallen into serious disrepair, but they’ve partially restored it to its former glory, with even bigger plans for the future.

  As for Hugo and me, Aasjord Station is going to be the home base for our shark hunt.

  —

  Back inside, Hugo tells me the story of the rams, which would be a strange tale coming from anyone else, but it’s somehow normal for him. I’m not sure why he thought of it now, but he does tend to meander from topic to topic. Once, he adopted a practically newborn ram because the farmer thought there was something wrong with it and was going to put it down. Hugo felt sorry for the ram and took it home. The ram moved into the kitchen, and he and Mette planned to slaughter it in the fall. A few weeks later Hugo was in a shop and happened to run into the same farmer, who casually remarked that it was a shame for the ram to be alone. So the farmer dropped by with another ram of the same rejected category.

  Over the following months and years Hugo and his family fed the rams until both were big and strong—and completely unmanageable. It was no longer safe to let them near the kids or the dogs, so Hugo loaded them on board his boat and took them out to an islet where they could stay and graze.

  They grew big and strong and forgot how to say thank you. Whenever Hugo passed the islet they would often swim toward his boat, their wet, heavy wool pulling them under, and then Hugo would have to rescue them. One beautiful summer day, Hugo calmly attempted to go ashore. Not sensing any danger, he was halfway out of the boat when one of the rams charged him. Hugo pulls up the sleeve of his sweater to show me a big scar on his upper arm and ends the story with this physical exclamation mark.