Beneath the Sun

By Hanne Marie Svendsen

Once upon a time.
    From chaos and fear comes the fairy tale. The beautifully dressed fairy tale steps out of the shadow plays of life, its confusion and tangles, but it only carries along whatever fits into the pattern: Once upon a time. And they lived happily ever after.
    Once upon a time there were three little men who lived in a house in the forest.
    These are the men that Margrethe Thiele will meet. She is lying in her bed dreaming that she is dead, standing on the windy hill looking at her life. She is an old woman; her vision is blurred although at times she can see very far. But she is also a little girl that believes in fairy tales and who visits the three little men that lived in a house in the forest.
    They were there, way back in the past. They were really there, in the world, or in what we call the real world. However, they didn’t live in a house but in a black-tarred hut. And it wasn’t in the forest but on the edge of the spruce plantation southwest of the lighthouse.
    They had lived there as long as anyone could remember. The townspeople called them Sem, Kam and Jafet after Noah’s three sons that stranded on a mountain and became the first men on the new earth. They themselves didn’t use any other names, but Jafet became Jaffe because it rolled easier off the tongue. Moreover, they were as like as three peas in a pod, if you didn’t look too closely, small and sinewy with dark complexion and lively yellow-brown eyes under wiry, grizzled hair. They made their living fishing from the beach and by fixing things for the folks that could afford having their things fixed. People thought they were skilled but complained that they couldn’t always understand what they said. They were different and didn’t belong to life in the community although they didn’t belong anywhere else for that matter. They kept to themselves and didn’t deal much with others.
    -And how can they live in such a mess, Margrethe Thiele’s mother said. She was by no means a tidy person herself. She was a carrot fairy that dashed back and forth between the house and the fenced-in kitchen garden where she would pick lettuce and parsley and pull edible roots from the soil. She reigned over pots of soup and preserves; she stuck flowers in water, brought in windblown laundry from the enclosure behind the lighthouse and was in charge of reality as if she always knew what she was doing and her chores had a hidden meaning. But in the evening, when Margrethe Thieles’ silent father came in after a day’s work, and she had attended to her husband’s supper and went to rest in her chair, her hands, that usually had a firm grip on things, suddenly became restless and unsure of themselves. It was as if she didn’t believe, after all, in the reality that she had mastered during the day.
    Later on she would climb up to the small bedroom and tell fairy tales to Margrethe and little Harold, Margrethe’s younger brother with the golden curls. She knew all the fairy tales in the world and talked about Snow White and Rose Red, the Princess in the Glass Mountain, Cinderella, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty as if they were close friends and relatives. Everywhere dangerous creatures lay in wait: witches, trolls, the elfin people, bad fairies, giant serpents and three-headed dragons. But the girls, that appeared somewhat wavering and spineless and were satisfied with things they should not have accepted in the first place, were always saved, not by their own hand, but because the king’s son or the poor lad who had gone to the end of the world, and even further than that, had struck out with his magic sword, awoken the sleepers, said the word that made the troll explode into a thousand pieces. And a prince always happened to pass by and ask the girl if she would like to come with him to the castle and be his beloved queen.
    Margrethe would rather be the king’s son or the poor lad who went out into the wide world.

Translated by Marina Allemano