Neither Here Nor There Read Online Free PDF Page B

on radar screens, but the activity was frantic. Narrow swirls of light would sweep across the great dome of sky, then hang there like vapour trails. Sometimes they flashed across the sky like falling stars and sometimes they spun languorously, reminding me of the lazy way smoke used to rise from my father’s pipe when he was reading. Sometimes the Lights would flicker brightly in the west, then vanish in an instant and reappear a moment later behind me, as if teasing me. I was constantly turning and twisting to see it. You have no idea how immense the sky is until you try to monitor it all. The eerie thing was how silent it was. Such activity seemed to demand at the very least an occasional low boom or a series of static-like crackles, but there was none. All this immense energy was spent without a sound.
    I was very cold – inside my boots I wore three pairs of socks but still my toes were numb and I began to worry about frostbite – but I stayed and watched for perhaps two hours, unable to pull myself away.
    The next day I went to the tourist office to report my good news to Hans, the tourism director who had become something of a friend, and to reserve a seat on the following week’s bus. There was no longer any need to hang around. Hans looked surprised and said, ‘Didn’t you know? There’s no bus next week. It’s going to Alta for its annual maintenance.’
    I was crushed. Two more weeks in Hammerfest. What was I going to do with myself for two more weeks?
    ‘But you’re in luck,’ Hans added. ‘You can go today.’
    I couldn’t take this in. ‘What?’
    ‘The bus should have arrived yesterday but it didn’t get through because of heavy snows around Kautokeino. It arrived this morning. Didn’t you see it out there? They’re going back again today.’
    ‘Today? Really? When?’
    He looked at his watch with the casualness of someone who has lived for years in the middle of nowhere and will be living there for years more yet. ‘Oh, in about ten minutes, I should think.’
    Ten minutes! I have seldom moved so quickly. I ran to the bus, begged them not to leave without me, though without any confidence that this plea was understood, ran to the hotel, threw everything into my suitcase, paid the bill, made my thanks and arrived at the bus, trailing oddments of clothes behind me, just as it was about to pull out.
    The funny thing is that as we were leaving Hammerfest, just for an instant I had a sudden urge not to go. It was a nice town. I liked the people. They had been kind to me. In other circumstances, I might just have settled down and stayed. But then, I realized, such thinking was crazy. It was time to return to Oslo and the real world. Besides, I had a hat to buy.

3. Oslo

    I remember on my first trip to Europe going alone to a movie in Copenhagen. In Denmark you are given a ticket for an assigned seat. I went into the cinema and discovered that my ticket directed me to sit beside the only other people in the place, a young couple locked in the sort of passionate embrace associated with dockside reunions at the end of long wars. I could no more have sat beside them than I could have asked to join in – it would have come to much the same thing – so I took a place a few discreet seats away.
    People came into the cinema, consulted their tickets and filled the seats around us. By the time the film started there were about thirty of us sitting together in a tight pack in the middle of a vast and otherwise empty auditorium. Two minutes into the movie, a woman laden with shopping made her way with difficulty down my row, stopped beside my seat and told me in a stern voice, full of glottals and indignation, that I was in her place. This caused much play of flashlights among the usherettes and fretful re-examining of tickets by everyone in the vicinity until word got around that I was an American tourist and therefore unable to follow simple seating instructions and I was escorted in some shame back to my