Somewhere Over the Sea by Halfdan Freihow

first chord sounds like a starting gun, but this time you’re prepared. You empty your eyes — and you sing. You sing! You don’t stumble, you don’t stutter, you don’t forget a single line, not so much as a word. You sing systematically and confidently and flawlessly
    I am a parrot from the jungle deep
    Where I was born a long time ago.
    My parrot mama said, because I couldn’t speak:
    Give him time, he’ll talk, I know
    and you don’t see it, but there are tears in two hundred eyes, tears of joy, tears of relief, proud tears, and when you’ve finished both your verses and the final chords die away and you bow deeply, the ovation is thunderous.
    We stand up, the whole room stands up, we clap and cheer and shout bravo and dry our tears, and you smile crookedly and happily and take another bow. You’ve done it; you’ve shown them that you can too, that you’re one of them.
    But I look at all these people who now stand applauding, hailing you for what you’ve just achieved on stage. They are the same people who, fourteen days ago, stood and watched you fall to pieces on the gravel field, and we all know that what you’ve done now is much more than show us you can sing in front of an audience. Because that day on the sports field you laid bare, you screamed out a nakedness that only a very few would confess to. And what’s more, tonight you have, on behalf of us all, surmounted it.

CHAPTER SIX
    D o you remember the day of the fire?
    I didn’t wake suddenly, because sleep was strong and held on tightly to the prey it had been hunting for most of the night. But the noise was stronger, an insistent knocking that didn’t belong here where only crying seagulls and bleating sheep have an established right to disturb the early-morning peace. Slowly and laboriously, as though constantly having to stop to decompress, consciousness rose to the surface. As it finally broke through I heard clearly: someone was shouting and hammering on a door.
    My first thought was you. What were you doing out, what had happened? A queue of possible and impossible answers at once formed, and then dissolved just as quickly, for in the bed beside me you too were waking up. I had slept in the guest room so that I could get up with you without waking Mom, and you must have come down to me at some point in the night.
    The sound of shouting and hammering did not stop. It only grew louder the clearer my head became.
    â€” Carry on sleeping, I’ll be right back, I said.
    I grabbed a pair of trousers and a shirt, threw them on, and staggered out the door and up the stairs. On the way into the living room I saw Mom coming out of the bedroom in her dressing gown, a sleepy question in her eyes. The Easter sun had already risen, and in the sharp backlight through the window we saw the outline of a woman. She stood there pounding with her fist on the terrace door. In the crook of one arm she was holding a small dog.
    I didn’t recognize her immediately, but Mom saw that it was the tenant of a neighbouring house a couple hundred metres behind us. When we opened up, we were met by a dissolved and tear-streaked face and a garbled, almost hyperventilated flood of words. We tried to get her to come in, but she wouldn’t, stood still with the dog squeezed under her arm and repeated the same shouted words over and over again. We recognized one of them: fire. At the same moment we realized that what we had taken for morning mist in the east was actually clouds of smoke coming from the house behind the barn.
    We knew that she lived alone there with her little daughter, and were suddenly gripped by an anxious fear. I grabbed her firmly by the shoulders and shook her and tried to fix her gaze: Is your daughter in the house? In reply she only wept and cried out fragmented sentences that were impossible to make any sense of. We repeated the