Quisling

The photograph on the wall of the surgery shows a climber jumping from Stor Horn to Lil Horn. That’s my son, says Morten Harboe Bain, the doctor I’ve come to see about the shiny spot on my toe, dead crystals I think.
       First climbed in 1910, the year his father was born. A Naval Officer from Northern Ireland. Dr. Bain calls a colleague across the corridor. “She knows more about frostbite than I do, she’s a good skier.”
       Together they look at the shiny spot. The ions have slowed to nothing but the circulation is good. It seems I’ll be fine and just when I think it’s time to go — he wants to show me something. He zooms in on a map of Northern Ireland. A farm. They were the only Protestants in a Catholic area. There were no problems back then. But that was a hundred years ago. He thinks for a moment: it was a hundred years ago.
       The summer those three boys reached the summit of Svolværgeita. Just three days before they’d made the first ascent of Stetind — a mountain that looks like a sharpened pencil. Two days later, another first ascent. Riding high, maybe that’s why they’d bet an innkeeper a bottle of wine that they’d make it to the horns of the Goat.
       One of those boys — quite drunk now — became a Supreme Court judge. When the Nazis caught him insulting a picture of Vidkun Quisling, who ruled by the grace of Hitler, he was lucky they didn’t shoot him.
       Even his name sounds slippery and rootless — Quisling.
       When those dirtbag climbers were making their first ascents in Lofoten he had an audience with the king. He’d graduated top of his class in military school. Later they would shoot him for treason.
       Climbing vertical walls dampens the nervous response. Maybe that’s how he learned to take a leap in the void.
       I collaborate with nothing but snow. After midnight when they got back to town. Imagine them drinking that bottle of wine. The sun still levitating over the trampoline of water.

Laurence O’Dwyer | Rengård
Contents | Mudlark No. 79 (2024)