Winter Stories – Ingvild H. RishØi

(Translated by Diane Oatley, Publisher – Seagull Books 2019)

The three short stories in this collection are translated from Norwegian by Diane Oatley and brought out by the brilliant Seagull Publications whose endeavour to bring translated works to the limelight from across the globe has immensely expanded our visions and enjoyment in reading of words and worlds that another language can conjure up. And I was immensely glad for the company of this collection of short stories in the winter nights as I heralded in another year.

Ingvild H. Rishoi as per the book jacket made her literary debut in 2007 with a short story collection La Sta (Do Not Erase), her second collection was Historien om fru Berg (The Story of Mrs Berg). She has also written two acclaimed picture books for children.  Winter Stories was awarded the Critics’ Prize for best adult fiction as well as the Brage Prize for best work of short fiction in 2014.

These stories are each a tale of lonely individuals striving against the odds and encountering their resilience amidst it all. In ‘We Can’t Help Everybody’, a young single mother struggles to provide all her daughter could want. In line after line as we readers see the mother’s reflection on memories that have brought her here to this moment as they struggle to find enough bus fare to reach home, she brings out the terror and joy of being a parent while simultaneously trying to quell the feeling of not being a good enough one “Because when Alexa looks at me, she sees an adult”. All the things she wishes she could tell her daughter, she tells us instead. In a recollected memory of when she meets her friend at the art with two screaming boys at her either side, she looks at Alexa quietly standing with a milk carton beside her mother and asks, “How have you managed not to spoil her?” And she thinks, “I don’t know what I answered. But I know what the answer is; Had I been able to, I would have spoiled her so very, very much.” And as much as she is struggling to make ends meet, the moment when her five year old daughter admits in tears to peeing and getting her underpants wet all the time, she says what her child want her to say.

‘Nobody likes kids who wet themselves!’ Alexa says.

At that I stand up.

I put my hand under her chin.

‘Alexa,’ I say.

She squeezes her eyes shut.

‘Do you know what we’re going to do now?’ I say, ‘We’re going to go into the shopping centre there and buy you a pair of panties.’

And that’s what she does, not because she has enough money, but knowing that it is the right thing to do, remembering her mother’s words echoing through memory’s dimmed pages, “the third time you go under, you drown”. And we know that the drowning is metaphorical, we all need saving.

Ingvild H. Rishoi’s characters stumble and fall and get back up, in small moments of victories. In the next story ‘The Right Thomas’, we meet an ex-convict striving to overcome his personal shortcomings and build a relationship with his son. Stuck inside his head, we can see how much of a trouble he has in encountering another person, a salesperson in this matter to get a pillow for his son who will be visiting. Admitting defeat he heads to the bar, albeit unwillingly led in by an old classmate, Vibeke. He unravels parts of his past, including his prison days as well as this extraordinary woman who is the mother of his son – a woman who reads and forgives and has not left him even though she could have. He almost gives up on the plan he had so carefully crafted of how he would spend the day with his son and he unravels his sense of being lost while sitting at the bar,

‘Why do you say that?’ Vibeke says.

‘I don’t have everything ready,’ I say.

‘What is it that you don’t have?, she asks.

‘A pillow,’ I say. ‘I told you. There was a woman who refused to help me.’

…

‘Will you pull yourself together if I buy a pillow?’ Vibeke asks.  

As the book jacket rightly summarizes, what these stories illustrate is how small victories and the unexpected compassion of virtual strangers can have a profound impact on us. The author crafts these stories with an acute sense of how fragile the human condition really is.

In the last story, ‘Siblings’, we have seventeen year old Rebekka, running away from home with her two half siblings who are seven and four years old in tow. She does so as we slowly realize in order to escape being taken in by social services because her Dad died, leaving her Mum in not a condition to look after three children. However, it is Rebekka who the social services would remove and it was she who was the one who looked after her siblings. So she does what she has to do, runs away- with a plan she draws up overnight. Which fails a bit, inevitably. While we reach the end of the story, in a moment of quietness as the two younger kids talk to each other, we have a moment of triumph.

‘Do you understand what I’m doing?’ I say

She nods.

‘You’re trying to take care of them,’ she says.  

The stories were remarkable to me in one aspect, none of the characters are too judgemental, despite being let down by ones who should have been there for them or by a system that fails to truly help them find a standing ground. In all its quiet beauty, despite the wintry settings into which a ray of sunshine can bring respite, it is the words and the stories that spread a warmth instead. I am also reminded of something I read while reading about Joan Didion, a great soul, who the world lost recently. It said, all stories leave immediate survivors – and I am assured that this is indeed true.