Chapter 20: Bergen

It rained on the day they arrived. This was not notable in Bergen, a city that received two hundred and thirty-nine days of rain per year and that wore its rain the way Longyearbyen wore its snow, as a defining condition, a permanent feature, the atmospheric constant around which the culture organized itself, producing a population that owned multiple raincoats and did not cancel plans for drizzle and that referred to heavy rain as "weather" and to the absence of rain as "unusual." The rain fell in sheets on the runway as the plane landed and it fell on the taxi that carried them from the airport to the apartment and it fell on the windows of the apartment, a two-bedroom flat on the third floor of a building in Sandviken, north of the city center, with a view of the harbor and the mountains behind the harbor and the clouds above the mountains, the layered landscape of Bergen — water, city, mountain, sky — visible through glass that was streaked with rain, the view partially obscured, partially revealed, the world outside presented in fragments.

Astrid stood at the window of the living room and looked at Bergen and the looking was a reacquaintance, a re-meeting with a place she had known and left and was now encountering again, and the encountering was complicated by the years between the leaving and the returning, the eight years during which Bergen had continued without her, had changed in ways she could see — new buildings on the waterfront, a tram line that had not existed before, construction cranes above the skyline — and in ways she could not see, changes in the culture and the mood and the daily life of the city that she would discover gradually, over weeks, the way she discovered everything, through observation rather than inquiry, through the patient accumulation of detail rather than the direct question.

The apartment was furnished. The institution had provided it, part of the sabbatical package, and the furniture was standard Norwegian institutional furniture — the same practical, unadorned pieces that furnished the apartment in Longyearbyen, the same sofa, the same shelving, the same kitchen table, the Scandinavian design ethic applied with the uniformity of a government procurement process, so that the interior felt simultaneously new and familiar, a different apartment that was also the same apartment, the same shapes in a different place. This was both comforting and unsettling. Comforting because the familiarity provided a continuity between the two lives, the Svalbard life and the Bergen life, a bridge between the phases. Unsettling because the sameness suggested that the change she sought might not be available in a new apartment with the same furniture, that the conditions she was trying to alter were not external but internal, not architectural but emotional, and that the sofa and the table and the shelving could not change what needed changing, could only provide the space within which the change might occur.

Erik began his work at the institute on the third day. He left the apartment at eight, walking to the campus through the rain, his umbrella — an object that did not exist in Longyearbyen, where the wind destroyed umbrellas within minutes and where rain was rare enough to be an event — held above his head with the slightly awkward grip of a person relearning a skill he had not practiced in eight years. Astrid watched him from the window, watched him walk down the street and turn the corner and disappear, and then she was alone in the apartment, alone in Bergen, alone for the first time in years without the structure of the vault to organize her day, without the temperature checks and the accession database and the walk through the tunnel and the minutes in the chamber to fill the hours, without the routine that had been her armor and her anchor and that was now, for the first time in eight years, absent.

The absence was physical. She felt it in her body, in the hands that reached for the keyboard to check the monitoring system and found the laptop closed and the monitoring system thousands of kilometers away, in the feet that moved toward the door at eight-thirty with the habit of the vault walk and that stopped at the threshold of an apartment that led to a street that led to a city that did not contain a mountain with a tunnel with a chamber with seeds. She felt it in the chest, in the space behind the sternum where the daily purpose of the vault had resided, the solid mass of responsibility that she carried with her and that was now, temporarily, not hers to carry, the weight lifted, the space it had occupied empty, the emptiness disconcerting and liberating in equal measure.

She went outside. She walked in the rain. She walked down to the harbor and along the waterfront, past the fish market and the Bryggen, the old wooden warehouses that leaned against each other like drunks, their facades painted in the colors that Bergen was famous for — red, ochre, white, burnt orange — colors that Astrid's eyes, after eight years of the Arctic palette of gray and white and blue, found almost painful in their intensity, the visual information so rich and so various that processing it required an effort she was not accustomed to, the eye scanning and cataloguing and absorbing a density of detail that Svalbard's spare landscape did not present.

And the trees. The trees were what struck her most. There were trees in Bergen. This was obvious, was banal, was a fact that any map or photograph would confirm, but the reality of trees after eight years without trees was not a fact that could be conveyed by maps or photographs. The trees were large, were present, were alive in a way that was different from the alive of seeds in the vault, were actively, visibly, undeniably alive, their leaves moving in the wind, their branches swaying, their canopies catching the rain and channeling it into rivulets that ran down the trunks and into the soil. The trees produced sound — the rustle of leaves, the creak of wood, the patter of rain on the canopy — sounds that the vault did not produce, sounds that were produced by growth, by the movement of living tissue in response to the forces of the environment, and the sounds entered Astrid's ears and her body recognized them, recognized them from a time before Svalbard, from the mainland years, the years when trees were part of the daily landscape and their sounds were part of the daily soundscape, and the recognition was a small homecoming, a return to a sensory world she had left and had not known she missed.

She walked under the trees. The rain fell on her jacket and on her hair and on her face and the rain was warm — warm compared to Svalbard, warm compared to the dry, cold precipitation of the Arctic, the rain liquid rather than frozen, the water in its fluid state, the state that made life possible, the state that activated enzymes and initiated germination and sustained growth, the state that the vault excluded and that Bergen provided in abundance, the two hundred and thirty-nine days of rain, the city perpetually moist, perpetually watered, the conditions for growth continuously present.

The days unfolded. Astrid walked. She walked in the morning, after Erik left for the institute, and she walked in the afternoon, before he returned. She walked along the harbor and through the parks and up the hillside to the Floibanen viewpoint, where the city spread below her in a panorama of rooftops and harbor and islands and sea, the view expansive, the horizon distant, the space between her and the edge of the world filled with the accumulated evidence of human habitation — houses, churches, schools, hospitals, roads, bridges, boats — the infrastructure of a city that had existed for a thousand years and that continued to exist through the daily effort of the people who lived in it, who maintained it, who invested in its future, who assumed that the city would persist and who acted on the assumption and whose actions made the assumption true.

She did not go to the clinic. She did not drive past the clinic. She did not look up the clinic's address on her phone or check whether Dr. Nordahl was still practicing or whether the reproductive endocrinology department still occupied the same floor of the same building. She did not do these things because the decision about the clinic was not a decision she needed to make now, was not a decision she needed to make at all, was a decision that belonged to a previous version of herself, the version that had been sealed and frozen and preserved at the temperature of six years ago, and that version was thawing, was changing, was becoming a different version, and the different version might or might not want the same things that the previous version had wanted, and the question of what the different version wanted was a question that required time and warmth and the conditions of growth to answer.

In the third week, she found a garden.

It was a community garden, a collection of small allotment plots on a hillside above the Sandviken neighborhood, each plot approximately ten square meters, each one tended by a local resident, each one planted with vegetables and flowers and herbs, the collective effort of twenty or thirty households producing a patchwork of green on the hillside, a mosaic of cultivation, each plot reflecting the interests and the skill and the attention of its gardener, some plots neat and geometric, the rows straight and the plants staked and the paths mulched, others wild and overgrown, the plants tangled and the weeds present and the overall impression one of productive chaos, the garden finding its own shape, the plants growing where they found favorable conditions and declining where they did not, the human intention and the biological reality negotiating their coexistence.

Astrid stood at the edge of the garden and looked at it and felt the pull of the thing she knew how to do, the thing she had spent her career doing in a different form, in a different temperature, in a different context: tending. The vault was a kind of garden. The vault was a garden in which nothing grew, a garden of potential rather than actual, a garden where the seeds were stored rather than planted, where the conditions of growth were prevented rather than provided. The community garden on the hillside in Bergen was the opposite of the vault: a place where seeds were planted and plants grew and the conditions were variable and uncontrolled and the results were uncertain and the gardener's role was not to maintain a constant state but to respond to changing conditions, to water when the soil was dry and to stake when the wind was strong and to weed when the weeds appeared and to harvest when the fruit ripened, the work reactive rather than proactive, the work of a person in relationship with a living system rather than a person maintaining a controlled environment.

She asked about the plots. She found the coordinator, a woman named Berit who lived in the building next to theirs and who managed the garden's waiting list and allocation, and Berit said that there was a plot available, plot seventeen, on the upper terrace, south-facing, good light, a bit weedy because the previous tenant had moved away in June and no one had maintained it since. Astrid took it.

She went to the garden the next morning with a pair of gloves she had bought at the hardware store and a trowel and a bag of compost and three packets of seeds she had bought at the garden center: radishes, lettuce, and kale, the fast-growing vegetables that could produce a harvest before the autumn cold set in, the vegetables that Bergen's climate — mild, wet, temperate — could support even in a late planting, the conditions of the southern Norwegian coast providing a growing season that was long enough for these crops, long enough for the seeds to germinate and the plants to grow and the leaves to develop and the roots to swell, the entire cycle from planting to harvest compressed into the weeks between August and October, the weeks of Astrid's time in Bergen, the coincidence of her availability and the garden's availability and the season's availability producing a window in which growing was possible.

She cleared the weeds. She turned the soil with the trowel, breaking up the compacted surface, incorporating the compost, creating the conditions for germination: loose soil, adequate moisture, organic matter, the basic requirements that all seeds needed, the conditions that the vault excluded and that the garden provided. She made furrows with her finger, shallow trenches in the soil, each one a centimeter deep and twenty centimeters apart, and she placed the seeds in the furrows — the radish seeds small and round and red-brown, the lettuce seeds tiny and flat and black, the kale seeds small and round and dark — and she covered them with soil and watered them with the watering can from the garden shed and she stood up and looked at the plot and the plot was a rectangle of dark, damp earth with nothing visible, no sign of the seeds she had planted, the surface uniform and quiet, the work she had done hidden beneath the surface, the way all beginnings were hidden, the way the radicle was hidden, the way the embryo was hidden, the way the important things — the things that would determine what grew and what did not, what emerged and what remained — happened in the dark, in the soil, in the invisible space where the seed and the water met and the question of viability was answered.

She went to the garden every day. She checked the soil. She watered when the rain was insufficient, which was rare in Bergen but which happened, occasionally, a day or two without rain, the soil surface drying slightly, the need for supplementation, the gardener's intervention in the natural process. She weeded. She waited.

On the sixth day, the radishes germinated. Two small cotyledons, the seed leaves, the first photosynthetic organs, heart-shaped and pale green, pushing through the soil surface in four places along the row, each pair of cotyledons a flag, a signal, a declaration: I am here, I am alive, I have left my dormancy and entered the world.

She crouched beside the row and looked at the seedlings and felt the feeling she had felt when she saw the radicles on the agar plate in the growth chamber in Longyearbyen, the feeling that was not surprise but recognition, the recognition of life persisting, of potential becoming actual, of the dormant becoming active, and the feeling was stronger here, in the garden, in the soil, in the open air where the rain fell and the wind blew and the sun, when it appeared between the clouds, lit the seedlings from above with the full-spectrum light that no fluorescent tube could replicate, the light that contained every wavelength the plant needed, the light that was not artificial but original, not simulated but real, the light that had powered every photosynthetic organism for three and a half billion years.

She told Erik about the garden at dinner. She told him about the plot and the seeds and the radishes germinating and the soil and the weeding and the feeling, and the telling was its own kind of germination, the words emerging from the interior where they had been forming, pushing through the surface of the daily conversation into a new register, a register that was not professional and not logistical but personal, intimate, the register of a person sharing the experience of discovering something about herself, something she had not known, something that the conditions of her previous life had not allowed her to discover.

"I like growing things," she said, and the sentence was simple and the sentence was enormous, the seven words containing a revelation that was obvious from the outside — she was a seed banker, of course she liked growing things — but that was, from the inside, from the interior where the feelings lived and the seed coat enclosed the embryo and the water had been entering for months, a revelation, a discovery, a fact about herself that she had buried beneath the vault's mission of preservation, beneath the professional identity of the custodian, beneath the sealed, cold, carefully maintained surface that she had presented to the world and to herself for eight years.

She liked growing things. She liked putting seeds in soil and watering them and watching them emerge. She liked the uncertainty of it, the not-knowing whether the seed would germinate, the risk of failure, the exposure to conditions she could not control. She liked the warmth and the rain and the soil under her fingernails and the smell of the earth after watering, the specific, complex, microbial smell of living soil, soil that was not sterile agar but a community, a biome, a world of organisms interacting and competing and cooperating in the dark, the soil that was as complex and as alive as the seeds it supported.

Erik listened. He listened with the attention he had been giving her for months, the attention that was patient and steady and that did not demand more than she was offering, that received what she said and held it and reflected it back in the form of questions that were gentle and precise.

"What do you want to grow?" he said.

And the question was about radishes and it was not about radishes and Astrid heard both registers and she sat at the table in the apartment in Bergen with the rain on the windows and the trees outside and the harbor in the distance and she thought about what she wanted to grow and the thinking was the thinking of a person who was no longer frozen, who was no longer sealed, who was no longer maintaining the conditions that prevented change, and the answer that formed in her mind was not a word but a feeling, a feeling that she had carried for years in the sealed interior and that was now, in the conditions of Bergen, in the warmth and the rain and the garden and the conversation and the presence of the man she loved, emerging, pushing through the coat, the radicle of a new possibility, the beginning of a growth that she could not predict and could not guarantee and that she was, for the first time in six years, willing to risk.

"I don't know yet," she said. "But I want to find out."

And the sentence was the truest thing she had said and the bravest thing she had said and it sat between them on the table like a seedling in a pot, small and green and alive and pointing upward, toward the light, toward the future, toward the conditions that would determine what it became.