1In the same year, far to the north, there was a harbour town at the mouth of a cold bay. Above the town, on a hill of birches, stood a wooden house with an iron stove in its kitchen. An old woman named Marit lay dying in that house, in the middle of winter, in a storm.
2She was ninety-one. For fifty of those years she had been the midwife of that coast. She had gone out in boats and on skis and in the cabs of snow ploughs. There was hardly a family on the bay that she had not seen at its worst hour and its best, which are often the same hour.
3Her son Henrik came on the last ferry before the boats stopped. He was forty-four, an engine man on cargo ships, with burn scars on both hands. He had not been in that house for nine years.
4The quarrel had been a plain one. He had wanted her to sell the house and come south to the city, near a hospital, near him. She had said no. He had said that she had always cared more for other people's children than for her own, and that he had eaten his supper alone on a hundred nights while she was out catching them. She had said that this was true. Then neither of them had found a way to say the next thing, and nine years went by.
5He climbed the hill with the snow blowing flat across the road. A young woman opened the door. This was Aino, who was twenty-six, and who was the midwife of the coast now. Marit had trained her. She had been sleeping in the kitchen chair for a week.
6"She has been asking the time of the ferry," said Aino. "Since Tuesday."
7Henrik went in. His mother was very small in the bed. Her hands lay on the blanket, and they were the only part of her that had not changed. They were wide, strong, quiet hands. She opened her eyes and looked at him, and she knew him.
8"You are thin," she said.
9"You are one to talk," said Henrik. And he sat down, for his knees had gone weak, and he took one of the hands.
10She could not say much. Her breath was a short ladder, and each word used a rung. Toward evening she said, "The book. Read me the names."
11Aino brought it from the kitchen shelf. It was not one book but four grey ledgers bound together with a strap. Marit had written in it every birth she had ever attended, from the first, when she was a girl of twenty-two, to the last, when she was seventy-three and her knees would no longer take the stairs.
12Henrik had seen that strap all his childhood. He had hated it a little. When the strap came off the shelf, his mother went out the door. He had never once opened it.
13He opened it now, and he began to read.
14Each line had a date and a house and a name. Boy, Erik, to Anna at the net sheds. Girl, Solveig, at the lighthouse, feet first, well. There were nineteen hundred and twelve of them. He read them aloud in the lamplight while the storm leaned on the house, and his mother lay with her eyes shut and her lips moving. She was not saying the names after him. She was saying them just before him.
15But there was more in the book than names. In the margins, in smaller writing, she had set down what went wrong and what she had learned from it. Bleeding after. Sent for the car too late. Next time send at the first sign and be thought a fool. And lower: The Larsen boy. Shoulder held fast behind the bone. Her knees up hard against her chest, and a hand pressing down above the bone, not on the belly. Do not pull the head. It came. Remember this.
16And some lines had a small cross beside them, with no name, only a date and a house. He had not known there were so many of those. Under each cross she had written what she would do differently. Under the early ones she had written a great deal. Under the later ones there was less to write, and there were fewer crosses.
17"She made us learn the margins by heart," said Aino quietly, from the door. "All of us she trained. She said the names were for her and the margins were for us. She said every cross in that book had to buy something, or it was only a cross."
18Past midnight he came to a year he knew, for it was the year of his own birth. He slowed. He knew the story. She had never hidden it from him. She had told him when he was ten years old, plainly, in the kitchen, because she said a child should not have to walk on a floor with a hole under the rug.
19He had not come from her body. A girl of seventeen had borne him in a fishing hut at the end of the bay, in a storm like this one, and had died of it. The midwife had taken the baby home in her coat. That was all he had ever asked to know. He found the line.
20Boy. Mother Signe, 17, alone, at the far huts. Boy came well. She bled. I did everything I knew and it was not enough. She asked me was he whole. I said yes. She died in the fourth hour. I have caught nine hundred and I could not keep this one girl. I will keep her boy.
21And beside it there was no cross. Instead the margin was full. It was full to the edge of the page, and it ran round the corner and up the other side, in forty different inks.
22Smiled, eleven weeks. First tooth. Walked today, from the stove to the door, and sat down angry. Fever, two nights, I did not go out to the Olsens, I sent the car. Reads. Top of his class in sums. Took the clock apart. Put it together. Fourteen: taller than me. Went to sea today. The house is very quiet.
23The last entry on the page was nine years old. He is right about the suppers. I should have said so.
24Henrik sat with the book open on his knees. For forty years he had believed that he was written in the world's margin and the other children on its lines. Every other child on the coast had one line in that book. He had a page with no room left on it.
25"Mother," he said. But she was asleep, or further off than sleep. So he said it anyway, the next thing, the one that had taken nine years. "You were right about the house. I should have said so."
26Her hand tightened on his. It may have been an answer. It may have been only the body. He decided he did not need to know.
27He read on, through the names, to the last one. In the fifth hour of the morning her breath went up its short ladder and did not come down again. It was very quiet. Aino put her fingers to the old woman's throat, and then she stopped the kitchen clock, as is done in that country.
28Henrik did not weep yet. He sat and held the hand while it cooled, and he thought: nineteen hundred people are asleep along this bay tonight because of this hand, and their children, and theirs. Where has it gone? It has not gone. It is asleep in all those houses.
29Then someone beat on the door.
30It was a man in a thin coat, white to the knees with snow, and he was half carrying a woman. They were newcomers. They had come that autumn from a hot country a long way south, and they lived in the grey housing by the harbour. The man's name was Daud and his wife was Halima. She was great with child, and bent over, and making a sound through her teeth.
31"The road is closed," Daud said. His words in that tongue were few and he used all of them. "The telephone says two hours, three hours. People say, go up the hill, the old woman, she is the one. Please. The old woman."
32Aino looked at Henrik. The old woman lay ten steps away with a sheet drawn up.
33"Bring her in by the stove," said Aino. "I am the one now."
34Henrik would have gone out and stood in the snow. He was an engine man. But Aino put the lamp in his burned hands and said, "Hold that where I tell you," and so he stayed.
35It went quickly, as it does when it is not the first. The mother was strong and she did not waste her breath on screaming. The head came, dark and wet. Aino said, "Good. Good. Now the rest." And the rest did not come.
36Henrik saw Aino's face change. She worked with her fingers, and spoke gently, and then she spoke less gently. The child's head was out in the world, turning a dark colour, and its body was held fast inside. The mother pushed until the cords stood out in her neck, and nothing moved.
37"The shoulder," said Aino, and her voice had gone thin. "It is behind the bone. I have never had one. Not alone." She looked up at him, twenty-six years old. "I have four minutes. Perhaps five."
38Henrik said, "The Larsen boy."
39She stared at him.
40"It is in the book. I read it tonight. Her knees up against her chest. A hand above the bone, pressing down, not on the belly. Do not pull the head."
41"Yes," said Aino. The colour came back into her voice. "Yes. Daud, her leg, like this, hard, hold it. You, put the lamp down. Give me your hand. Here. Above the bone. The heel of your hand. When I say, press down and toward me, as if you were shutting a heavy drawer. Not yet. Now."
42He pressed. He had freed seized bolts in engine rooms in heavy seas, and he knew how to push hard and slow at once. He felt something under his hand that was not an engine. It held. It held. Then it turned, like a key in a stiff lock, and gave.
43The child came out all at once into Aino's hands, long and slack and the colour of a storm cloud.
44It did not cry. Aino laid it on the mother's belly and rubbed its back hard with a towel. She cleared its mouth and blew across its face, and she said, in a voice Henrik knew, for it was his mother's voice exactly, "Come along now. Come along. That is enough of that."
45The storm cloud went pink from the chest outward. The small face folded up. And the child drew the world into itself and gave it back as a roar.
46Daud sat down on the floor and put his head on his knees. Halima laughed and wept and said a long thing in her own tongue, with the child on her breast. It was a girl.
47When the cord was cut and the mother was wrapped and the kettle was on, Halima looked around the kitchen. "The old woman," she said. "She is sleeping? I wish to thank her."
48Aino told her. She told it plainly, for that was how she had been taught. The old woman had died in the next room, two hours before the knock on the door.
49Halima was silent. Then she said, "But she was here. He said her words." And she pointed at Henrik.
50"Yes," said Henrik. "She was here."
51"What will you call the girl?" asked Aino.
52"Asha," said Halima. "In my country it means life. I do not know what it means in other places. It is an old name. Nobody knows how old."
53Henrik took down the book. He turned to the last written line, which was eighteen years old, in his mother's hand. He was not a midwife, and he had no right to write in it. He took the pen from the kitchen drawer and wrote in it anyway, beneath her last line, in the square letters of a man who labels pipes.
54Girl, Asha, to Halima and Daud, at the house on the hill, in the storm. Shoulder held behind the bone. Did as Marit wrote for the Larsen boy. It came. Marit died this same night, two hours before. This is number one thousand nine hundred and thirteen. It is hers.
55Then he wept, at the kitchen table, with the book open and the ink drying and a new voice complaining by the stove. Aino let him. She was washing her hands.
56The plough came through at ten in the morning, and the car behind it, and the mother and the girl were taken down to the town in good order. The storm blew out to sea.
57Henrik did not go back to the ships that winter. Somebody had to keep the stove, and split the birch, and sit with the people who climbed the hill all that week to stand a moment at the door. There were hundreds. Most of them had a line in the book. He let each one find it.
58He kept the house, and he kept the stove when stoves went out of fashion, and when he was old he left both to a woman named Asha, by a road too long to tell here. You will come to that house again, on the last night of this book.
59But first there is a lie to be told, and untold. A book is only as good as the truth of what is written in it. Now hear of a number.