The Ferryman and His Wife

At a quarter past five on a rainy November morning, Nils Vik, an elderly ferryman on a Norwegian fjord, opens his eyes and begins the last day of his life. He shaves with a trembling hand, forces down breakfast despite persistent stomach trouble, and looks around the house where three generations of his family have lived. He writes a farewell on a postcard and props it against his coffee cup: He has left this house, and he will not be coming back. He says "Thank you, Marta" aloud to the empty kitchen chair of his dead wife, continuing a habit from their decades together, and winds the Omega watch she gave him for their silver anniversary. Then he hauls the old mattress outside and sets it alight. The mattress, with its decades of intimate stains, is too private to leave for strangers.

Nils walks through the house one final time, puts on his peacoat and skipper's cap, and pauses on the sofa in a pre-departure ritual. On the front steps he hears phantom sounds: Marta playing cards with their daughters, Eli and Guro, the coffee machine, doors opening and closing. He leaves the outdoor light burning, honoring Marta's insistence that a light always shine so he could navigate home. On the gravel road, a figure appears: Luna, the family dog, dead 20 years or more. She jumps up at him, whining and wagging, and accompanies him to the boathouse. He boards the MB Marta, a 36-foot oak ferryboat he purchased after the war. The diesel engine starts on the first try.

The house slips from view behind a column of smoke. On this last day, Nils resolves to trace his routes one final time. He consults his logbooks, around 25 small blue notebooks spanning decades of weather, fares, and observations. Luna asks what he remembers best. Nils settles on coming home late at night and the times when Marta, a light sleeper, came down in her cardigan and put her arms around him. As a sickly November light spreads, the dead emerge from the forest and mountainsides, standing along the coastal rock. They are his former passengers, hoping to be recognized. Marta is not among them. Throughout the day, at each stop, the dead board the boat or appear on shore, and Nils relives the stories that shaped his life.

He recalls his first paying passengers in 1948, a bickering farm couple, and his actual first voyage at 14, standing in for his indisposed father to ferry a nervous priest. He remembers his most famous passenger, the American actor Edward G. Robinson, ferried during the 1969 filming of Song of Norway, and his most unwelcome, a policeman named Trygve Stemland. Stemland used a false pretext to reach a remote island, where he slaughtered an entire family's dogs. Amid the carnage, Nils found a woman hiding in a hayloft clutching a puppy. He seized the trembling dog and fled. The puppy's name was Luna.

At Bu, Nils picks up Jon Anderson, a troubled teenager sent by a school headmaster to work aboard the boat in 1971. Jon arrived silent and bruised, bearing marks of abuse from his father, Gabriel. Over weeks he opened up, playing guitar in the wheelhouse. Nils recounts the evening he stood between Jon and Gabriel when the father tried to forcibly cut the boy's long hair, threatening to harm the man if he touched his son. Gabriel collapsed onto the chair, defeated. Jon later died young: he stole his father's car, drove at high speed with his lover, and plunged into the fjord.

At Selja, Nils picks up Jens Hauge, a lonely farmer who in 1966 traveled to the city every Saturday to meet women through a personal ad. Jens asked Nils for help, and for weeks Nils observed his awkward café dates and coached him on the return voyage. One Saturday, Caitlin Keegan, a hairdresser with Irish parents, arrived and looked Jens straight in the eye. When she visited the farm in a downpour, Jens despaired, but the next morning Nils found them late, and through the kitchen window he heard Jens Hauge laugh for the first time.

At Bakke, Nils picks up Ingrid Alstadsæter, a retired schoolteacher who reveals she moved to the fjord for Kari Aga, the local midwife, the woman she loved. In Ingrid's first year, Kari married and had three children. Nothing ever happened between them. Nils recalls his own partnership with Kari, sharing cigarettes and cognac after every birth he ferried her to. Late in 1983, the dying Kari asked Nils to deliver groceries weekly and tell no one. One April day, he found her burning every possession she owned. Together they silently fed it all to the flames.

At Sund, Nils picks up Robert Soth, an American photographer traumatized by the Vietnam War who became his closest friend. Nils asks the question he has long carried: Did Robert love Marta? Robert admits he did but insists he left before anything happened. Nils reveals how he discovered the truth: He found Robert's intimate photographs of Marta, images showing a woman he did not recognize, including one of her with a cigarette she never normally smoked. The discovery left him wild with rage.

Woven through these encounters are the memories of Nils and Marta's life together. He recalls seeing her at a bonfire and the August evening she arrived at his door on a bicycle with a punctured tire, claiming the village said Nils was the man to fix such things. He proposed less than a year later. He recalls Marta's political awakening, when she filled their home with anti-war activists and Nils retreated upstairs, feeling shut out. An old priest fired Nils as his ferryman for the family's political activity, but every boatman along the fjord refused to ferry the priest in solidarity, leaving his churches empty until he relented. He recalls Marta's first stroke, her loss of speech, her communication through a notebook in trembling letters. She accused: "YOU'RE ONLY LOYAL TO YOUR BOAT." He took the notebook and wrote: "I LOVE YOU. THAT IS WHO I AM." One October night, Marta had a second stroke. Nils chose not to call anyone; it would have been too late. They squeezed each other's hands. He whispered her name and promised to follow. When he withdrew his hand, her pulse had stopped. He lay beside her until light came down the fjord.

The boat also carries the memory of Nils's younger brother Ivar, a taxi driver with an alcohol addiction that destroyed his life. After years of estrangement and fragile reconciliations, Ivar asked to come home for Christmas. On the shortest day of 1979, Nils drove to Ivar's apartment to pick him up. The door was open. Ivar had taken his own life. Nils ran down the stairs and vomited into the snow.

As Nils passes beneath the bridge that ended his livelihood, the dead line its railings, watching the boat. At the bridge's opening, politicians had spoken of a new age, but none spoke to the ferryman whose work the bridge replaced. The boat becomes a night vessel approaching the open sea. The radio crackles to life with testimonies from people whose lives Nils touched: his brother Ivar, Jon Anderson, Ingrid, Robert, and his daughters. Eli recalls how at Marta's funeral, Nils knocked on the coffin with his wedding ring, as if to say they would speak soon. Luna curls up beside him. The dead fill the boat.

Then Nils feels Marta before he sees her. She comes up behind him, wraps her arms around him, and puts her hands over his eyes. He turns and looks at her in her cardigan. "How did you get across the fjord?" he asks. "I cycled, of course," she replies, echoing the night she first arrived at his door on that bicycle. Over the fjord he goes, moving toward a light in the darkness. Nils Vik closes his eyes, and the last day of his life is over.