kjell
Sunday. Everything is shut on Sundays here, so I walked the lit ski track that runs through the woods in the middle of the island. The lysløype. People skied past me in the dark with headlamps and dogs, all of them in a hurry, all of them about seventy.
Met my downstairs neighbour properly. Kjell, 74, used to skipper the pilot boat, lives alone, bad knee. He clears the path and the bottom three steps with a red shovel and says the rest of the staircase is my business. On my first day he gave me a reflector to hang on my coat. "Refleks. Or you'll be run over in this dark." I wear it.
I asked him about the knocking. He hadn't heard anything. He doesn't climb my stairs, his knee.
"The house knocks," he said. "Old wooden houses knock in the cold. Mine knocks all night."
I said it knocks three times, at half eleven in the morning, on the door.
He thought about that. "Then it's a polite house."