The Sound I Miss

I arrived in Trondheim in the middle of a January snowstorm. In the eleven months since, I have learned to cycle on ice and to eat brown cheese without pulling a face. I have also accepted that in December the sun barely bothers to climb above the hills before giving up in the early afternoon. Whenever my mother or my friends back home ask me what I miss most about Guatemala, they expect me to say my mother's black beans, or the volcanoes, or the light. Like a good daughter, I have always gone along with it. It isn't true, though, and I have only recently admitted to myself what the real answer is.

What I miss are the cohetes. For anyone who has never been woken at five in the morning by a string of firecrackers going off under their window, the appeal is difficult to explain. In the neighborhood of Guatemala City where I grew up, they were set off for everything: a saint's day, a birthday, a wedding, a football victory, a baptism, or, as far as I could ever tell, a perfectly ordinary Tuesday. For twenty-nine years I complained about them. I cursed the neighbors who lit them, I slept with earplugs, and I swore that the day I left the country, I would never once miss that racket.

Trondheim, by contrast, is the quietest place I have ever lived. My apartment overlooks a courtyard where, for most of the year, nothing louder than a bicycle bell is heard from one week to the next. Down by the river, the old wooden warehouses lean over the water in shades of ochre, red and mustard, so tidy that they look freshly painted every morning. My neighbors are unfailingly polite; they nod in the stairwell, hold the door, and then vanish behind it as if they had never existed. I have grown to love the silence, or so I told myself until October.

On my birthday, my mother called at what was five in the morning in Guatemala and one in the afternoon here. She held her phone out of the window while my uncle lit a string of cohetes in the street, exactly as he has done on every birthday I can remember. Through the tiny speaker, it sounded like someone crumpling a paper bag. I laughed, and then, to my own astonishment, I sat down on the kitchen floor and cried for the better part of an hour. It wasn't the noise itself I had been missing, I realized, but what the noise meant: that somebody, somewhere close by, had woken up thinking about you.

Since then, I have found a forty-second recording of cohetes online, and on a few of the long, dark mornings of December I have played it at full volume in my kitchen. Last Sunday, at eight in the morning, a few seconds after the final bang, someone knocked on my door. It was Mr. Haugen from the third floor, a retired engineer with whom I had exchanged perhaps a dozen words all year, holding a dish towel and looking genuinely alarmed. "Is everything all right? What on earth was that?" he asked. I invited him in, made him coffee, and spent the next hour explaining cohetes, my uncle, and a country where saints are celebrated before sunrise. When he finally stood up to leave, he paused in the doorway and asked, quite seriously, whether I might play it again next Sunday, "only perhaps a little later in the day."