This Translation Tuesday, we serve a rich allegory, a domestic scene patiently rendered by Norwegian writer Roskva Koritzinsky. A Lonely Wrinkle on Her Forehead is an exquisite study of human-animal, mother-child positionality both immersive and instructive. Hear from translator Bradley Harmon on the deliberate language and detached tonality that defines this work:
“The work of Norwegian writer Roskva Koritzinsky is characterized by a cool, contemplative atmosphere, inhabited by a voice that is enigmatic and ethereal but, importantly, also patient and precise. Every sentence, every word she writes is important. For many writers, this might a style that is too concrete, too fixed, but with Koritzinsky it’s the exact opposite. The keyword is atmosphere, an atmosphere that blooms into an existential scale from her careful composition. For example, the reader will notice the somewhat strange use of the definite form of the nouns for mother, daughter, dog, and so on. Further, Koritzinsky is insistent on the use of ‘the mother’ or ‘the daughter’ rather than the more intimately relationally ‘her mother’ or ‘her daughter.’ While it is the case that using the definite article in English might be seen as an overtly literal translation of Norwegian, as to opposed to a more ‘natural’ rendition with the possessive article, Koritzinsky is adamant in maintaining the distance that this word choice conjures. This is consistent across her other stories but is particularly pronounced in this one.”
When she came home in the afternoon, the seven puppies had vanished.
Their mother was lying in a corner of the living room, whimpering. She felt its belly and made sure the puppies weren’t in there. So they must’ve been somewhere else.
She stood by the window and looked out at the landscape. The murky murmur from the woods and fields, it had scared her for the first few years she lived out there, but eventually she’d gotten used to it.
Forgotten it?
In any case, let it become a part of herself. The song from the countryside had seeped almost imperceptibly into the house, like poison.
She shuffled over to the couch and sat down. The dog bed was in the corner. The blanket on which the week-old animals had been lying was gone. Someone must’ve come into the house—the door was always unlocked, she’d always taken pride in it, to come from the city and do as they did in the country, put the key in a drawer and forget it was there, not so much out of trust in the neighbors as an entrenched notion that one was a stranger to the world. But then Someone had wrapped the blanket around the puppies and carried them outside. Their mother hadn’t defended them, she let it happen. Now she was lying in the corner of the living room, crying.
She took the next day off from work. Well, she didn’t have a full-time job, but she would help transcribe church documents, such as they were, two days a week she would sit in the basement of the municipal library with her neck bent, her fingertip pressed against illegible words, doodles of ink that gradually opened up to her—they looked like shy little flowers!—and revealed their meaning. There were births, there were deaths. There was disease and emigration. There was in general. . .
No, not today, not that today.
She drank her morning coffee outside in the garden. She was wearing a thin cotton jacket, she was a little cold. From far away she heard an engine running on endlessly. Once she almost drowned because of this sound. She had been five or six years old, they usually spent the vacations by the sea, and she had been out climbing a rock when she discovered a message in a bottle floating in the water a dozen feet from the shore. She had scrambled down the rock and reached out for the bottle, but that was when her eyes had fallen through the clear green surface to the sandy bottom. There was something soothing about it, like the sight of an unfurnished room, there was no other way to describe it, and there she had forgotten herself for a moment and begun to slide down and slide away. She had called out, but the roar of the ship’s engine had drowned out her cries. Soon her whole body was underwater, she was clawing at the rock and was about to lose her footing when her father came and pulled her up. He’d heard her voice through the noise. Even today she didn’t understand how that’d been possible. She suspected that there was more to it than that; some interpersonal connection for which a scientific explanation would be found in a hundred years.
In the kitchen, the mother dog had laid down under the table.
Once and awhile, she barked in her sleep, it sounded like a whale, the sounds rose and fell in the darkness of the animal’s body. She hesitated for a moment, then called the police to report the theft. She then contacted the local newspaper. The journalist assured her that they’d run a story out about it. Could they come by to take a picture of the empty puppy bed? She looked over at the sleeping mother dog. No, she didn’t want anyone in the house. But a photo would be so good for the article. No, that was out of the question.
The next day she awoke before dawn. She stayed in bed. In the window, the darkness gradually subsided, the light exploded within the blackness, drifting out into it like dust.
She couldn’t move. It wasn’t that dramatic, for the last year she had just felt very dizzy; disoriented, like after a very long trip. She couldn’t get the new rhythm under control, she reached for it, but it galloped away, and she was left in the street in a deafening disorder, empty-handed, confused.
Later that afternoon she awoke to the barking of the dog’s mother. The room was bathed in twilight, her mouth was dry and her head heavy. A sentence from a dream had lodged itself in her, now she couldn’t get rid of it, it bursts out of us like stars, it bursts out of us like stars. She sat up in bed. The dog barked again.
She stopped halfway down the stairs. The mother dog was standing at the front door, baring her teeth.
Mama? a voice sounded.
She ran down the remaining steps and grabbed the dog’s leash. She pushed the dog into the kitchen, hastily, and closed the door. She straightened up and brushed a few fallen strands of hair from her face. Her daughter had come into the hall, standing there with her backpack in her hand, smiling stiffly. She had cut her black hair short, there was something combative in the way she looked, there always had been, when she was a child, the daughter had loved to watch Japanese martial arts movies, with the main characters climbing up to monasteries and isolating themselves there, training and practicing one and the same exercise, a kick or a punch against a wooden block, for example, sometimes for years, so that one day they can break through it. The daughter had been crazy about these movies, lying on the sofa in the middle of the day, gawking even when the sun was shining outside, and although the mother was not really interested in such things, all these movies together had formed a mythology whose echoes reverberated in the chambers of her body, long after the daughter had moved out. When she walked her usual rounds in the woods, when she sat in the basement of the library transcribing, in short, whenever she carried her own weight around with her: a sense that she was building something inside herself, practicing something. That she was in the final stretch of training, just before the fateful test.
You’re here already?
The daughter, twenty-nine, nodded briefly, and what had just been radiating inside her had left. That’s what it’s like to have created a child: The glow of the world they carry within them is shed at the threshold as soon as they enter their parents’ home.
They cooked dinner together. That is, the daughter cooked while the mother sat at the kitchen table and kept her company – watching her – waiting for some miracle. Only after they had eaten did she tell them about the puppies. The daughter, who had just been about to bring the fork to her mouth, froze in mid-motion.
But, she asked, after the mother had explained all the details of the matter, who would steal seven puppies?
The mother pushed the plate away from her and crossed her arms. Her pupils glided slowly from right to left.
People are capable of anything.
The daughter stared down at the tabletop. That single, simple sentence, and already she felt as if she had been challenged to a duel with a potentially fatal outcome. (But the sentence was not a simple one! She wrote off mankind with the same ease with which one states bad weather! She could’ve screamed with rage.) Perhaps the mother was right. People were capable of anything. But stealing seven puppies? That seemed so far-fetched. But what else could’ve happened? That the mother dog had eaten them, of course, such a thing happened in the animal kingdom, even if the mother would never admit it to herself. Some people believed that they must always think the best of animals and the worst of people, ascribing sacred qualities to their pets and generally regarding people as predators. This attitude had always irritated the daughter. There was something unsound in writing off your own kind in this way, and something haughty in positioning yourself outside of it, as if you yourself belonged to the animals. As if you yourself were some sacred exception.
*
The daughter’s white shirt was hanging over the edge of the dirty laundry basket in the bathroom. As she brushed her teeth, her mother kept her eyes fixed on the garment in the mirror. After she finished, she picked it up. There was a yellow band along the inside of the white collar. She had lived in southern Spain for a while, long before the girl was born, and one morning she had been awakened by a storm. Through a crack in the curtain she discovered that the sky was sickly yellow. It’d been thundering, and the raindrops were pounding on the cement floor in the backyard. She’d stayed in bed and dozed in the yellow light, in the sound of the rain. When she got up an hour later, she went out onto the rooftop terrace; the night before, she’d hung freshly washed clothes to dry on the line. The white sheets and pillowcases were stained yellow, she gathered them up, carried them downstairs and washed them again, and then they were white again, without her understanding where the stains had come from. She’d later heard that it was sand from the desert, that such a thing sometimes happened, that a storm in Africa stirred up sand and carried it across the sea, that it ended up here in the city, as a yellow film on the windshields, on the paving stones, on freshly washed laundry.
She lifted the shirt to her face, sniffed the fabric. So much about her daughter had once been so physical—dirty diapers, soiled bibs, wet swaddling clothes—but now there was nothing physical about her at all, she was like a marble statue or a photograph, cold and unscented. The yellow band—was it makeup? sweat?—offered an almost unbelievable sight, she stroked it with her fingertip, lovingly.
The daughter looked up at the ceiling, the same old cracks. She turned to the other side. What was she doing here? There was so much else, she was doing so well in her own life. Maybe that was why—
She closed her eyes. Yes. She had come “home” mainly because she was happy. Happiness was treacherous, always filling her with an intense need to travel back to all that she had left behind, to pull open the curtains and let the light burst through. Once in a while, in a fit of happy, arrogant generosity, she turned back to home sweet home, to give her mother a reason to light up. As if it was something she needed? Perhaps she did it mostly for her own sake. She wanted to show her mother that she loved her, just as you love someone you see in a crowd and say: I want you, because she believed that her mother loathed her in secret – the fact that the little sperm had won the race was neither her fault nor her merit. And perhaps all parents loathed their children for this reason: for not having chosen their parents for their incomparable personality or charming manner, and included in this dissatisfaction: the suspicion that the child would be in a completely different place if only it had been able to choose. The rest of life was a kind of detective work, it remained unclear for all involved to what extent the desired result was to see the suspicion invalidated or confirmed.
When the mother came down from upstairs, the daughter was lying on the sofa with her eyes closed and mouth open. Her laptop was open on the table, still lit up. Just as full of shame as when she read the girl’s diary many years ago, she squinted at the open document. She didn’t know what she had hoped to find, but the contents disappointed her. It was an excerpt from the paper the daughter was working on. She was proud of her daughter, but at the same time there was something unsettling in all this writing about politics and history, wars and conflicts. When, as a child, she’d been caught red-handed in one of her many little misdeeds and been asked to explain herself, the daughter had pointed to her own body each time, silent and with big, sad eyes. As if the body itself were an explanation.
As an adult, in the face of the world’s drama, she patiently worked with language, as if searching for the one word that would be able to open something, reveal something, and change everything.
The mother didn’t know why her daughter’s work caused her such discomfort, but that was the way it was. On television, there were continuous reports of rioters smashing shrines into rubble and burning cities, children running through the streets with bloody faces, and she, too, wanted to say something, or she wanted to cry, but she did not cry. The suffering was like a glowing mass, she felt, impossible to approach without going blind or bursting into flames. She narrowed her eyes at the horror. Her eyes closes when they met the light, a lonely wrinkle on her forehead, in it her horror could be read.
That night they both dreamed that the puppies had been found. In the dream they fought their way through the woods and reached the clearing where the small pond looked up to the sky like a blue, guileless eye. They crouched down and washed the sweat from their faces (in the mother’s dream, the daughter sat close to her, brushing spruce needles from her jacket with her hand; in the daughter’s, they sat side by side, silent, wrapped in deep peace). Only when they stood up again did they notice the cloth bag lying in the water, bobbing on the surface. One of the puppies had slipped out through a tear in the fabric, floating in the water, lying on its back, its paws pulled close to its body.
They ate breakfast in silence. The mother sat with her back to the window, the daughter on the opposite side of the table, with a view of the garden. It felt good to give the girl the seat at the table that was usually hers, the apple tree whose buds were about to blossom, there is a care of one’s own in everything that is neither demanded nor offered, a love in all the silent gifts, the seat with a view of the garden.
They didn’t bring anything else with, just put on their jackets and went out. The stream along the gravel road was overflowing with frog spawn, the water running sluggishly, a vein clogged with fat, as a child the daughter had often lifted the spawning strings and held them in her hands, although she had been strictly forbidden to do so.
They turned off the road and followed the path up an embankment and into the thicket of trees.
It was quiet in the forest.
The mother walked ahead, the daughter behind her. They didn’t exchange a word, but as they approached the pond, they stopped for a moment and looked at each other briefly. The mother pushed the branches aside and stepped out into the clearing. A few twigs floated on the surface of the water, nothing else. They should’ve taken provisions with them; something to eat, perhaps, or at least a thermos. Now there was no reason to sit down and rest a little in the cold sunlight, nothing to hide the disappointment that nothing was out there waiting for them.
On the way home, the mother tried to start a conversation, but the girl’s answers were terse, not exactly unfriendly, more as if she had drawn the curtains and sunk into the armchair with her legs drawn up, letting her chin fall on her chest. She was alone with herself, it was a decision, so thought the mother. It was a decision that she made over and over again.
It was the daughter who first saw the bundle.
When the house at the end of the dirt road came into view, she saw something lying on the stone steps, something that wasn’t there when they left. She stopped and put her hand to her mouth. The mother, who had turned her gaze up to the stale morning sky, looked first at her daughter, then in the direction of the house. When her eyes spotted the bundle of cloth, she resolutely went over to the stairs and unknotted the blanket. The puppy was lying there with its eyes closed, squirming like a newly hatched larva, whimpering softly. She sank down on the stairs and put the bundle in her lap. When she ran her finger over his head, he sniffed at her hand. He opened his mouth and wanted to drink, he looked well fed, he had opened his mouth more out of instinct than because of actual hunger.
The daughter came and sat next to her. Her eyes were shining. She leaned over and stroked the soft puppy fur with the tip of her nose.
My God, she murmured.
The mother nodded, her face controlled as she said:
But there’s only one.
Yes, that was true. There was only one.
They carried the puppy into the house and laid it on the living room floor. The mother dog came running out of the kitchen and immediately began to nudge the little creature with the tip of her nose, licking it impetuously to cleanse it of the place where it’d been. After licking it carefully, the mother dog lay down and nursed the puppy. While the puppy kicked and sucked and grunted sleepily, she looked up at them with sad brown eyes.
They ate lunch in silence. Then the daughter disappeared upstairs to the second floor. When she came down a little later, she had slung her travel bag over her shoulder. They said a quick goodbye, a car came rolling down the driveway, a young man behind the windshield, a raised hand, a cautious smile, the daughter hugged her mother and ran to the car with quick steps. When the mother went into the bathroom to wash her face with cold water, the white shirt was still hanging over the edge of the dirty laundry basket.
*
That evening, the woman fell asleep with the puppy in her lap. In her dream, she was lying and floating on the open sea. She was both in her body and not, at the same time: she felt the waves gently cradling her, but her gaze had risen out of her body and toward the firmament, looking down on her as she lay on her back amid all the blueness. Somewhere a little further out in the sea she saw a glowing yellow jellyfish just under the surface, it contracted and expanded again like a breathing, burning muscle. Its long strands spread in all directions and glided through the water like rays of light. Some of them brushed the skin of the woman lying there, floating in the water; she did not feel it, but her gaze saw it: thin scorching threads between the glowing pain and her.
Translated from Norwegian by Bradley Harmon
Rosvka Koritzinsky (b. 1989) published her first book in 2013, the short story collection In Here Somehere, which was nominated for the Terjei Vesaas debut prize and awarded with the Aschehoug debut prize. Her second book, the novel Flame and Darkness (2015), received critical acclaim. Her third book, I Haven’t Yet Seen the World (2017), was nominated for the prestigious Nordic Council Literature Prize in 2018 and has been translated into Danish, German, Russian, Spanish and Swedish. Her fourth book, No One Holy, was released in 2022.
Bradley Harmon (b. 1994) is a writer, translator, and scholar of Scandinavian and German literature and philosophy. His translations have appeared in Poetry, The Cincinnati Review, Denver Quarterly, Firmament, Plume, Swedish Book Review, West Branch, and elsewhere, and he was a 2022 ALTA Emerging Translator fellow. His translations of other stories by Koritzinsky have appeared in Astra and Chicago Review, and his translation of the story “I Haven’t Yet Seen the World” earned second place for the inaugural Anne Frydman Translation Prize.
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