The Attic Without A Name
We bought the farmhouse in the autumn. Stein had wanted a farmhouse for most of the thirteen years of our marriage, and I had wanted a house that was warm in January, and this one, the estate agent insisted, was both. The estate agent was a woman from Trondheim who drove a small yellow car and who handled the sale with the brisk courtesy of someone who did not, herself, intend to live in the house. She gave us the keys in the kitchen and said the previous owners had gone to live with their daughter in Bergen, and she did not stay for coffee.
The house was built in 1886. The floor plans, which we had in a beige folder from the municipal archive, showed four rooms on the ground floor, three on the first floor, and an attic reached by a ladder from the first-floor landing. The floor plans were drawn in a fine ink hand and initialled by someone called O. H. Haugen, who had apparently surveyed the property in 1954 and had been thorough, because the margins of the paper carried measurements of the well, the barn, and the distance to the treeline.
We lived in the house through the autumn. Stein repaired the roof. I painted the kitchen. We got a cat from a woman in the next valley whose cat had had kittens, and we called the cat Grete, and she hated us for the first two weeks and then loved us with a completeness that I had not expected. The rooms were warm. The house was, as the