The Drifters (10 page)

The suddenness of the proposal caught her unprepared, and its prosaic genesis offended her. As she lay there she could visualize the long years ahead. Her life would be an endless continuation of what it had been with her parents, and when she had children, locked in by the long Tromsø winters, they would develop their own dreams and crystallize them into prisons. It was an unlovely prospect, made more so when Gunnar began reciting the special problems they would face: ‘We won’t be able to find a house of our own, naturally, but if you continue at Mr. Mogstad’s and I get a few more raises at Mr. Nordlund’s, we can place our names on the list and maybe after eight or ten years we’ll be eligible.’

‘In the meantime?’ Britta asked.

‘We could live either with your parents or mine.’ The conversation ended and they drifted into desultory love-making, after which Gunnar fell asleep, convinced that he was now engaged, but Britta stayed awake, thinking that a proposal of marriage ought to be something rather more special than Gunnar’s had been, the vision of the future more challenging. When she caught herself humming ‘I hear as in a dream,’ she stopped angrily and muttered to herself, ‘I want no more dreams,’ and she decided then that she would have to tell Gunnar she could not marry him.

Always willing to face the reality of the moment, she shook him several times, and when he was awake, said, ‘Gunnar, I don’t think we ought to get married.’

‘Why not?’ he asked like a sleepy child who had not comprehended an adult comment.

‘I’m not ready. I think I’m going to Spain.’

‘Spain!’ He sat up in bed, and with his left hand on her breast, asked, ‘What do you mean you’re not ready? What about this?’

‘I enjoy being in bed with you,’ she admitted. ‘I enjoy sex. But I don’t think we’d make a good family. I’m not ready.’

‘What’s the matter, Britt?’

She sat up beside him, drawing her knees to her chin
and adjusting the covers. ‘I think it’s because I want to see those places in the sun that you and Father dream about. I don’t want to talk to Ceylon or listen to it. I want to see it.’

‘Britt! Ceylon’s nothing. In Tromsø you have a hundred sailors who have been every place in the world, and they’ll tell you the truth. Most places are just as dull as Tromsø.’

She would not be persuaded, and as they sat side by side in bed, completely naked, huddled in the blankets, they argued about life and marriage until passion overtook them again, involving them in wild, wintry love-making, but later, when Britta was dressing to go home, she realized that this was the finish.

‘I don’t think ‘I’ll bother to see you any more,’ she said at the door.

‘That’s a hell of a word to use for Merry Christmas,’ Gunnar growled. ‘I’m not going to
bother.
’

‘It’s exactly the word I was looking for.’ She closed the door and walked through the starry night to her own bed.

Her break with Gunnar made it imperative that she get to Torremolinos, and she took a realistic survey of her finances. She had less than forty dollars saved and needed a hundred and fifty—assuming Mr. Sverdrup could get her one of the cheap fares. She asked him about this, and he said, ‘That much I can promise you. Now what’s the money situation?’ When she told him, he said, ‘Forty is a long way from a hundred and fifty, but you’re young and you must make the effort. This could prove the difference in your life.’

He showed her how, if she worked through the month of January and saved every penny of her salary, she would come close to the necessary figure. Also, he thought that perhaps she could get night work at a shop that was overhauling its shelves after Christmas, but this proved illusory, so she found a substitute: she could type his reports to the central office in Copenhagen, and she did so, night after night.

Shortly after the New Year, Mr. Sverdrup received fresh posters showing vacations in Spain, and as he lifted the old one from the window he asked Britta, ‘You want this for your room?’ She was tempted to grab it as a memento
of a land she had grown to love, but before her hand could reach out she saw the poster as a temptation, the first of many substitutes with which she would line her room as recollections of lost dreams, and she refused. ‘No posters for me. I want the real thing.’

It was this stubborn dedication to reality that encouraged Mr. Sverdrup to take her into his complete confidence. Waiting till she reported after work one cold, dismal Monday night, he told her, ‘This week, no typing. But I’ve something I must tell you.’ He led her into his back office and sat her on a chair. ‘Exactly how much money have you?’ he asked. She showed him the results of her frugality, and he said, ‘Miss Bjørndahl, you have just enough.’

‘No!’ she protested. ‘I will not go down there as a pauper. I’ve got to have seventy-five dollars’ spending money.’

‘You have,’ he said.

‘How do you add?’ she asked.

‘This way,’ he said. ‘I’m not supposed to tell prospective clients this, because naturally we want them to pay full fare. But if you wait to buy your ticket till the very last moment, and if we have any empty spaces on the plane, we’ll sell you one of those places for … how much do you guess?’

Since her fare had already been dropped from ninety-five dollars to seventy-five, she knew it could not go much lower, so she guessed: “Sixty-five?’

‘You can have the whole thing for twenty-six dollars.’

Britta sat with her hands in her lap and said nothing. This was bound to be a trap … a joke. She knew that no one could fly-in a jet to Spain, live in a good hotel with all meals paid, and have a top-flight fifteen-day vacation for twenty-six dollars—and she was not going to be made a fool of. So she said nothing.

‘Did you hear what I said?’ Mr. Sverdrup asked.

‘Yes. Twenty-six dollars. What for? The sandwiches?’

‘For everything. Plane, hotel, food, tips, buses. Everything for fifteen days.’

‘Do you mean it?’ she asked quietly.

He was amused at her inability to accept the evidence, then said, ‘Britta, in this world there are many people who want to help the young. Our company reasons that since the plane must fly down anyway, and since we’ve already paid for the hotel for the entire year, it’s better to have
the vacant spaces filled by young people who can profit from the experience than to operate half-empty. I could have told you this a month ago but I wanted to test you—to see if your desire was strong enough to make you sacrifice.’

Britta was afraid she might cry, so she made no reply.

‘So you have enough money,’ Mr. Sverdrup said. ‘Go home and make your plans. The airplane leaves February 3 at five o’clock in the morning. But …’

‘I knew there had to be a
but …
’

“It’s a small one, but it’s irritating. As of this day, we have empty seats. I’m sure that tomorrow we’ll have empty seats. But if the plane were to fill rapidly—for some unexpected reason—well …’

‘I’d not be able to go?

‘Not to Spain. But in Copenhagen there will be other planes flying to other places.’

‘I want to go to Spain,’ she said firmly.

‘And I want to get you there. But in everything there is always a negative chance. You may wind up in Greece.’

The days that followed were taut with anxiety. Each morning as she went to work in the darkness Britta would stare at the new poster in the window. At lunch she would leave the waterfront and hurry to the main street, and in the silver haze produced by the sun as it scurried along beneath the horizon, she would look through the door at Mr. Sverdrup and he would nod, signifying there was still a vacancy. In the evening, after work, she would stop by his office and do whatever typing had piled up, refusing money for this service, and each night as she helped him close the office she would hear his reassuring words, ‘Copenhagen says “Still a vacancy.” ’

She got her passport in order, said her goodbyes to Gunnar, who was certain she would be back to marry him, and grew much closer to her father than she had ever been before. Often, late at night, she would go to his small room with its posters and maps and sit with him as he traced explorers’ routes across the Indian Ocean, insatiable in his desire to know all things pertaining to his island. And he would play
The Pearl Fishers
as they talked, so that she would hear his voice coming to her through a veil of chanting priests or the songs of Singhalese fishermen, and she developed deep compassion for this taciturn man whom life had treated so shabbily.

When Britta told me later of her departure, she said of her father, ‘He was a lot smarter than I suspected. He’s the one who first sensed the truth about my going away … the real reasons. And he guessed correctly that I hadn’t admitted them to myself … wasn’t even conscious of them.’ Her father wanted to broach the subject but remained tongue-tied, as always, and took refuge in lesser topics. ‘Things with you and Gunnar finished?’ he asked hesitantly. When she nodded, he said, ‘Not surprised.’ He had known, of course, that like many young people in Tromsø—and throughout Norway for that matter—they had been living together, but this had not bothered him. He supposed that if Gunnar proved a good sort, she would marry him in due course, and if not, it was proper that she find out for herself. ‘He seemed limited in spirit,’ he said. Then, frightened because this observation had brought him close to fundamental reasons, he shut his mouth and looked down at his maps. After a long pause he said, without looking at her, ‘You’ve a good clean spirit, Britt. Keep it that way.’

She also wanted to talk but was afraid of the deeper proddings that were impelling her toward Spain, so, like her father, she retreated to trivialities: ‘It would be disgraceful if I got to the airport and there were no seats. Imagine saying all those goodbyes, then reporting back to work as usual to Mr. Mogstad.’

‘What’s he like?’

‘Miserable.’

‘Your mother seems to like him.’

‘He’s miserable.’

‘Perhaps when you come back …’ The words were those any parent concerned about his daughter’s first employment might have said, but to Bjørndahl they were as dangerous as fire, for they brought him face to face with the real question: Would she come back? He looked at his daughter, and without either of them speaking, they acknowledged that she was leaving Tromsø for good … was fleeing Norway with a stern resolve never to return. ‘I wonder if she knows the reasons?’ Bjørndahl asked himself. He longed to speak openly with his daughter, for she pleased him. Even though she had a striking beauty, she was sensible. If she was fleeing Norway, he was sure she had good reasons.

With her mother Britta was punctilious, helping with the
meals, washing the dishes afterward and answering questions with unusual courtesy. When Mrs. Bjørndahl asked what had happened with Gunnar, Britta said, ‘I’m afraid it’s ended.’ She gave no details, and Mrs. Bjørndahl closed the conversation by saying, ‘He’d have made a good son-in-law. Your father liked him.’

On the second of February, Britta rose with an anxiety that she could not mask, for this day would tell whether there was to be an empty seat on the plane. At ten in the morning Mr. Sverdrup would receive a telegram from Copenhagen summarizing details, so at ten-thirty Britta told Mr. Mogstad that she wished to be absent for a few minutes, and while he carefully parted his mustache, pondering whether to allow her to leave or not, she walked out. At the travel office she found that Mr. Sverdrup had also stepped out, and she asked his assistant if any news had come from Copenhagen, but nothing was known, so she waited in growing apprehension.

Finally Mr. Sverdrup returned, his wax flower bobbing briskly in the pale light. ‘Good news!’ he cried as soon as he saw Britta. ‘As of last night … seats. You will fly to Copenhagen in the morning. And if you can’t get on the plane to Torremolinos, we’ll fit you into one of the others. Morocco, Greece—who knows where you’ll be tomorrow night?’

‘I’ll be in Spain,’ Britta said.

Because there was little difference between night and day, the airplane to Copenhagen always left Tromsø at three in the morning, so Britta did not go to bed; she talked with her father for the last time, and he said, ‘I’m not going with you to the airport.’ She felt very close to her mother and talked with her too, but as she did she heard the ghostly strains of the cavatina, and its desperate longing so tore at her heart that she returned to where her father sat alone, leafing through his books. ‘I wish I were going with you,’ he said, but what he meant was: ‘I wish I’d had the courage to cut loose years ago.’

At the airport she kissed Gunnar perfunctorily, mainly because he had brought along some of his friends and would be embarrassed if she did not make believe they were still lovers. When the time came for her to say goodbye to her mother she experienced a flood of emotion, and in the passing of a second, acknowledged to herself the real reasons why she had fought so desperately to get to Spain.
‘I’m leaving Tromsø for good. I can’t abide the dull orderliness … the years that never change … the heavy system of the same old things. I don’t want to wait ten years before I begin my life. I want no more of the tunnel.’

Then, to her own surprise, she blurted out the truth to her mother: ‘I’ll not be coming back … not ever. Tell Father.’

Mrs. Bjørndahl grabbed her arm, intending to force an explanation of this extraordinary announcement, but Britta pushed her away and ran to the plane, dashing up the stairs before her mother could reach her.

At Copenhagen there was a two-hour wait as the three planes chartered by the travel agency were loaded. The first, headed for Spain, had large numbers of tourists, and the agency man whom Britta questioned said he thought all the stand-bys would have to fly on the second, which was headed for Morocco. ‘It’s a great place. You’ll like it.’ The third plane, also well patronized, was heading for Greece, but on this one, there were definitely no vacancies. So it was either Morocco or Torremolinos, and Britta began to pray.

There were six stand-bys this day, five young girls and a boy from a university in Sweden. They all said they didn’t care much where they went so long as there was sun, so Britta proposed: ‘If you don’t care, and if there’s only one seat on the Torremolinos plane, could I have it?’