The Sand Dark Sea

In that moment, with the sun against her cheek and the wind furious in her hair, she became more than just that morning. She became my every morning. Dasha was not one of those women who could stop you in your tracks, but if you did stop for a second glance, you would see beyond the wilt of the sun and the red bite of the wind. Like the dark blue in the deeper parts of the southern seas, her eyes would catch you and hold you. Her face was round and kind, the succulent beauty typified by Florentine visual expression, not the bone juts and hard lines of a runway culture. She was hearty and strong like the country of her birth. For me, others before, and others to come, Norway had always been a place of far northern mystique.

So close to the top of the world, it is not a stretch to imagine a land of fields smothered in snow or dark stones across a barren landscape, but the Norway I knew was a crawl of green against the broken ice. It was a short spring and I was there for but a moment, enough time to hear the crack and shudder of another glacial rift; to taste the food but miss the flavor. Dasha spoke English with the kind of precision that you did not find in native speakers. She was a waitress in a corset, spilling beer on battered floorboards. She did not fight the hands of groping men, but she endured the occasional hard stare. Not the best pickup technique I had ever seen, but also not the worst. I’d been to parts of the world where the technique was a grabbed wrist and a barked command.

Perhaps it was those silent stares of half-interest that first drew Dasha to me, an American with his face buried in a book. A dog-eared copy of Ibsen would have been appropriate, but it was Tom Hardy, a well-worn book. I’d found it at the bottom of a pile of old books, many of which were written in a language I couldn’t even begin to understand. One might assume that planning for a trip to Norway would include at least a half-assed attempt to learn the language. But I was in Norway by accident, tracking down a manuscript supposedly written in an unknown language. The language turned out to be Basque, a book stolen during World War II and lost to time until it turned up in an antique book shop, the same shop where I tracked down Tom Hardy. Far From the Madding Crowd was certainly of greater interest to me than an apothecary’s handbook written in a doomed language.

It must have been the end of her shift when Dasha sat down next to me, because she looked exhausted, puffing on her unfiltered cigarette. As a former smoker, the Turkish tobacco burning between her fingers made me salivate. She asked me to undo the knot in the back of her corset, which I did with some hesitation. When it comes to women, I am remarkably un-European. I never go after what I want. It was easier with Dasha, though, because at the time, I did not know I would come to desire her as much as I do now, so many years later.

I didn’t know if it was only because she spoke my language, but I found myself wanting to talk to her, and about things that I had never discussed with anyone. As the tavern closed around us, I admitted to her fears and anxieties that I kept buried. I told her about my fear of death and dying, of being forgotten, of becoming a living ghost. She assured me that everyone is afraid of dying, and that is precisely why they do not talk about death. As for legacy, she told me that there is good and bad in being remembered. Often times being forgotten means you led a quiet, peaceful life.

"What is so wrong with that?" she asked.

As for my anxiety about becoming a living ghost, she just shrugged her shoulders and said, “Someone always sees you. But do you see them?”

Later we found ourselves on a moor, listening to the wind howl across the open space. She sat closer to me than most Americans would like someone they just met to sit. Our thighs were touching, and at some point her hand was on my knee. I remember asking her what was beyond the darkness, what was out there in the black silence. She told me it was the sea, too far to be heard lapping the craggy beach, but close enough to catch a hint of the smell. I was staying at a hostel in town, not far from the apartment Dasha shared with her two brothers. When she invited me over, I had an expectation that our connection would amount to a one-night stand. But Dasha and I didn’t seem to have any sexual connection.

Her room was no room at all, just a nook separated from the rest of the house with a velvet curtain. There were cracks in the wall, the floorboards, enough places for the nipping wind to get through and fill the house with a sharp chill. Behind the curtain, her brothers argued while Dasha showed me how she danced. She was not petite, but also not large. She was somewhere in between, a reindeer herder’s daughter with hardened hands. She rose onto her toes with delicate ease, a lost Bolshoi. The way she took to her toes reminded me of the way my mother, under five feet tall, used to stretch to reach the cabinets above the fridge. That was long before the gnarl of arthritis had set in, long before she got lost in pain and dementia. Like my mother, Dasha would age and forget some of her grace, but she would always be beautiful. I could see her dirty blonde hair gone completely white, knitted in a single braid slung over her shoulder. Weary lines around the eyes, but in those eyes there would still be a young girl dreaming of dancing.

The night grew shorter and the chill had become a cold ache in the air. We drank some vodka to warm our cores, but it was a small measure. It was then that Dasha laid down on her cot and opened her arms for me. We squeezed together on her modest bed, our noses nearly touching. I forgot for a moment the romance of the evening and began to consider my breath. Pickled eggs, ham of unknown age and origin. But then I breathed in the musky scent of her exhalations, detecting cigarette smoke and beer, a hint of something sour. It was not what would traditionally be considered pleasant, but it somehow elevated her attractiveness. I finally understood why Shakespeare would deny comparisons of his mistress and the sun. Love, or at the very least attraction, is not easily undone by the mitigations of reality. Our conversations were both prosaic and inspiring, but never less than intimate.

Dasha was awake before me, which pleased me. After having been the overnight guest in many homes all over the world, waking up before my hosts always made me uncomfortable. She brought me what passes for coffee in that part of the world, black tar, and raw sugar. She was wearing my sweater, blue knitted wool with holes in the sleeves and shoulders. Her jeans were tight enough to show the cigarette pouch bulging in her back pocket, and the cuffs were tucked into her fur-trimmed boots. She looked like she belonged on a fishing trawler, or on television as the spokeswoman for Norwegian sardines. She asked if I minded that she was wearing my sweater. I didn’t. She gave me a fleece, one belonging to her brother. It smelled vaguely of fish. She said it would keep me warmer than the sweater. I could tell by the way she was moving that she had a plan for the day, something she wanted me to see.

Crossing the moor was no more difficult than navigating the cobblestone streets of the town. We followed the treads of an ATV for about a mile before reaching a high concrete wall with steps up the side. There was a bit of graffiti on the wall, which upon closer inspection turned out to be a stylized swastika. Seeing the symbols always made me uneasy, and looking at Dasha atop the wall I was momentarily paranoid. She had walked past it without giving it a second look. We were close to that part of the world where fascism once reigned supreme and still existed in small pockets. I stood staring at the symbol for so long that my interest caught Dasha’s attention.

“Children,” she said with a casual shrug. “They think they know the world. They have ideas, but are they always the right ones?”

I told her that the ideas children have are rarely the right ones, but some of them are beautiful. This was ugliness; industrialized hate. She came down the steps again and offered me her hand. I took it and she dragged me up the steps after her, the strength in those arms equaled only by the fierceness in her heart. At the top of the wall, the sea spread out before me like a rippling puddle of oil. The water was dark, the effect of the black sand beneath. In Beowulf, when the Geats first land in the kingdom of Hrothgar, the beach they rode across must have looked like this, black sand glittering with light. On the horizon, a ship moved toward the north, probably a cargo vessel. I imagined the men on the ship looking toward land seeing the beach as only a blurry line in the distance. The sun was warm on the wall, so Dasha removed my sweater. It was in that moment as her hair settled back to her shoulders that I glanced over at her and appreciated how beautiful she was.

She knew she would never be a ballerina. Her life began near this sea and it would probably end near this sea. She would marry and have children, probably return to the family farm, return to the way of the Sámi, but her beauty was the kind that never fades. It radiated from every inch of her, like bottled sunlight.

When I went to catch my plane later that afternoon, Dasha left me at the front entrance of the tiny airport. She kissed me on the cheek and, for the first time since we met, she said my name. I said hers back like it was new as if I had not just spent sixteen hours so close to her that I could hear her every breath. The plane was a single-engine aircraft and the take-off was one of the worst I have ever experienced, but the pilot just laughed it off. As I looked out the window, the town grew smaller and more non-descript the higher we went. But the wall between the moor and the sea stood out against the treeless landscape. There was a person there on the narrow concrete walk. Man or woman, old or young, I couldn’t tell from that distance, but I imagined it was Dasha. Wherever I go, no matter how many years come between me and that sea wall, every touch of morning light will bring her back to me. There she will be, looking out across the ocean, remembering how as a young dancing girl she would glide like water across the sand.