3

The ferry turned the cape that separates the bay of Kirkenes from the Lundby fjord, leisurely entering the fjord´s wide mouth. And as soon as Kirkenes fell out of view, all signs of civilisation were at once gone. No roads could be seen on either side of the fjord, no houses, no power pylons. No tell tale signs of man´s activities could be seen anywhere. The only man made object in the huge landscape was the ferry itself, steaming close to the southern shore, heading for an isolated village at the edge of the world.

The Africans, sitting at the other side of the passenger deck, looked as miserable as always. But the young woman, sitting up at the front looked completely at ease, reading a book, and ignoring the landscape as it slowly drifted by. She was going to Lundby voluntarily, moving into the house that her grandparents probably abandoned when the local iron mine was shut down some thirty years ago, and Bjorn could not help wondering about her motives.

The complete journey from Kirkenes to Lundby takes about an hour, with the ferry taking just under forty minutes, and a connecting bus ride to the village itself taking another twenty minutes, so Lundby is a bit out of the way for daily commuting, not least because there is no shortage of affordable housing in Kirkenes. Moving to Lundby without having a job there would make little sense, unless she was terribly attached to her grandparent´s house. But her cold indifference to both his attempt at small talk and the grand surroundings of the ferry, made it seem most likely to Bjorn that she had found a job at the village, and was moving out there to be closer to work.

Bjorn had looked up the history of Lundby on the web in preparation for his move, and this was how he had learned that the village had been completely abandoned for close to thirty years. There had been a short lived attempt to set up a fish processing plant at the village immediately after the shut down of the iron mine, but it flopped almost as soon as it opened, and the village was permanently abandoned shortly after this when the local ferry company decided to terminate the service.

During the following thirty years, houses out at Lundby have at best been used as vacation homes during summer, with people having to bring all their necessities with them for the stay, and the ferry service did not re-start before quite recently when the foreign minister got his plan to set up a single national asylum seekers´ centre in the village pushed through parliament.

However, just as important as the new asylum centre was the decision to re-open the mine. Parallel to pushing through his idea for a national asylum centre in parliament, the foreign minister arranged for the transfer of the mine and port from the municipality of Kirkenes to an old school friend for a very favourable price. And although this political favour was met with a lot of criticism at the time, the net result has so far been one of increased economic activity which in turn has resulted in some people moving back to the village.

And one of those people returning to Lundby, was the woman up by the front window, quietly ignoring her surroundings while reading her book. Had it not been for the latest political maneuvering in Oslo, Lundby would still have been an abandoned village, the mine would still be closed, and the ferry in which Bjorn and the other passengers were sitting would not be sailing the current route. A few powerful men in Oslo had set in motion a chain of events that had led to this, forever altering the direction of the lives of everyone on board the ferry.