The Ice Palace
by Tarjei Vesaas, trans. from the Norwegian by Elizabeth Rokkan
I take a deep breath in.
I open the pages and begin.
Like a series of internal monologues. Like a slow suffocation. Like being held dangling over the edge of a precipice. Being icy cold, but muffled up in a sweaty warmth. Dark long nights, broken by the sharpest of short-lived daylights. Scuffing feet and the tinkling of the freeze. A susurration of trees dampening the shot-fire cracks emanating from the forming ice-lake. The familiarity and reassurance of friendship, its rules and patterns and comforts; a small community reliant on and of itself; an unacknowledged, unspoken disturbance rarely made manifest, summoned here, by the meeting of two children’s bare-souled minds, revealed in the reflection of a hand-mirror.
Something is unleashed. They haven’t the words for it themselves; the girls on the page are only eleven. Nor do they recognise it, this thing they have unveiled. It draws them like a magnet and we are caught alongside them; this invisible agency that we also don’t know and yet know better than ourselves.
I identify something here from an early friendship of my own, forged at the same age as that of the girls, Suss and Unn. An immediate recognition found in the eyes of another girl; our first few words exchanged over the delight in recognition of wearing the same school shoes, our shy first laugh of knowing and then fifty years of friendship, still growing. Ours was a prosaic meeting but the nature of the bond began, as it continues, as something other-worldly and deeply uncanny. In my version: a positive and only creatively nurturing communion of minds, imaginations and explorations, begun in youth, still unfolding. Here, for Suss and Unn, there was something else, its nature had a different pull: denied its flourishing, their spark of mutual recognition had time only to reveal a glint of its full mystery, and to hint at the hidden: the supernatural and the ugly as much as the precious, unique and beautiful. And so we, the readers, are all left with the unknowing, suspended in that place of what-ifs and questions. And the deathly compulsive alure of curiosity.
We know about the oppressive embrace of intense heat: the force of the sun weighing one down, its captive hold, the dancing images caught through sweat-blinkered eyes planting suggestions in the imagination. How it causes stupor and hysteria, as it did for example for the girls in Picnic at Hanging Rock, taken hostage and overcome as if in a trance, by the preternatural intensity of the Australian sun. We are familiar with the momentary tricks played on the mind as we flip and adjust between the dazzle of bright blinding sunlight, to the static, light-deficient stillness within the shadows, as Adela Quested experienced in the Marabar Caves in A Passage to India. But the freeze: the brooding and proliferating of ice, the crackling of frost and the settling of snow; this also captures and captivates. The freeze casts its incantation over us, mesmerises and enchants us and holds us in ice, completely. The ice palace is described upon the page and we translate it into images of our own augmenting: over-bearing, momentous, awe-inspiring, exquisite, supernatural, beyond belief, indeed unbelievable perhaps. That nature can transform in such secrecy, that it can create without blueprint and rules, that it realises power and beauty as if conjured out of thin air. This sorcery transcends boundaries of the page and of that between author and reader: we are hypnotised, within and out-with the book’s covers.
Suss moves through her familiar world, it is her skin, her breathing.
She recognises its nature and shies away from her fear of what remains unknown, at the edges, in the dark margins. I am not afraid of the dark, she intones, and she runs from it towards an absent light, even as she repeats her chant. After her moment of crossing over, with Auntie, when this distant and non-judgemental adult reassures Suss she has an ally and releases her from her stultifying promise, only then, can Suss transform her perception of ogrish dark shapes of the night-time roadside, into the presence, pleasant and soothing, of the woodwind players.
‘Nature’ makes its nature known through the extreme freeze, through the action of the freeze on water, on the townspeople, in the effect upon the trees laden with snow, the lake become solid. It speaks into the depths of Suss as she struggles to make sense of her awakening, unable as she is to find language to describe its portent; pressurised as she is by the adults to do so.
With the thaw comes her return to her friendship group, the loyalty, equality and the ease. And with this at last, I can exhale. Events have moved them all on, but together; together enchanted by things they could not resist.
