Seven Minutes of Sun

The sun leaves Rjukan on a Wednesday in September and does not come back until the middle of March.

This is not weather. This is geometry. The town sits at the bottom of a valley so steep and so narrow that for six months the sun passes behind the ridge without ever clearing it, and Rjukan spends the winter in a kind of permanent blue afternoon, lit but not sunlit, which is a distinction you do not understand until you have lived it.

Sanna has lived it for forty-one winters.

She is aware of what the guidebooks say. They say the town without sun and they say it with a shiver, and they print the photograph of the mirrors on the mountain — the three great heliostats installed in 2013 that track the sun and throw a patch of real light onto the market square, about six hundred square metres of it, all winter.

Everyone asks her about the mirrors.

The mirrors are fine. The mirrors are, genuinely, a marvel, and on a February Tuesday you will find forty people standing in that bright patch in the middle of a dark town doing absolutely nothing, and it is one of the strangest and best sights in Norway.

But the mirrors are not the day.

The day is the twelfth of March.

On the twelfth of March, give or take, the actual sun clears the actual ridge for the first time, and hits the actual square, for about seven minutes.

Sanna's grandfather used to close the shop. Her father closed the shop. Sanna closes the shop, and puts a sign on it that says the same three words her grandfather's sign said, and walks up to the square with everyone else.

There are people who make a point of not going.

There is always a contingent. It is sentimental, they say. It is a tourist thing now. It is seven minutes of a star doing what stars do, and grown adults standing in a square applauding it is embarrassing, and anyway the mirrors have made the whole business redundant.

Sanna has heard this every year of her life. Her own brother says it every year of his life.

Her brother has attended every year of his life.

Here is what happens.

At about 11:30 the square starts filling. Nobody organises this. There is no announcement, and the one year the tourist board tried to make an event of it with a stage and a compère it was so universally hated that they never tried again.

People bring flasks. The old ones get the benches, without anybody deciding this. Children are extremely bored, because children have no idea, and the boredom of the children is part of it.

At about 11:44 the top of the ridge goes gold.

And nobody says anything. That is the part outsiders never expect. There is no countdown. Nine hundred people stand in a cold square and go completely silent, and the light comes down the face of the mountain — you can watch it come, it takes maybe ninety seconds, a line of gold moving down a grey wall — and it crosses the roofs and then the upper windows and then it is on the square and on all of you at once.

And it is warm. That is the thing nobody believes. Seven minutes of March sun at sixty degrees north, after sixty-five days, and you can feel it on your face.

Then somebody always laughs. It is never the same person. And once one person has laughed the whole square goes up and everybody is talking at once and hugging people they do not like, and the children have caught it without knowing what it is and are screaming and running in circles.

Seven minutes.

Then it goes behind the western ridge and the square is blue again, and everyone goes back to work, and the shops reopen, and by two o'clock you would not know.

Sanna's brother stands at the back with his arms folded, every year, saying nothing, for seven minutes.

She has never once mentioned it.

That is what you do for a brother.