The Drifters (11 page)

‘We’ll go where they send us,’ one of the girls said.

‘At these prices you can’t be selective,’ the boy said.

So Britta stood by herself with her fists clenched, and when the travel man came to the stand-bys and said, ‘We have two seats for Torremolinos,’ she almost knocked him down as she leaped forward, and even when she was strapped in her seat she was afraid to relax, but when the huge SAS jet finally sped down the runway and left the ground, she was at last satisfied that her protracted dream was to be a reality, and disregarding the startled passengers around her, she threw her arms high in the air and shouted, ‘It happened!’

When the jet landed at Málaga and the two hundred Scandinavian tourists disembarked, a curious thing happened. As they entered the airport they ran into another
two hundred whose vacation had ended and who were returning to Scandinavia, and as the two groups passed, there was vibrant excitement showing in one set of faces, dejection in the other, for the first were coming into sunlight, the latter were heading back into the tunnel. Men tourists on their way home masked their faces in stolid acceptance, consoling themselves with the fact that as between modern Sweden and archaic Spain, there was really no choice; any man in his right mind would prefer Sweden with its insurance, its fine hospitals, its even finer schools and its just, democratic government freed from clerical influences. But the young girls, tanned by the wintry sun, did not so deceive themselves; they had loved Spain and wanted to remain, at least till summer reached the north-lands, and their faces were often clothed in gloom: ‘I don’t want to go home. I don’t want to go home!’ they seemed to be chanting, like the chorus in some Scandinavian saga.

Britta Bjørndahl’s first view of Spain, exceeded her expectations: for once the travel posters had not lied. The day was bright and there was a sun, with fleecy clouds drifting in from the Mediterranean and warmth nestling against the mountains to the north. A covey of yellow buses pulled up to the airport entrance, and as the newcomers piled in, they saw the SAS jet refueling, like some huge bird impatient to return to its nest. Britta nodded to it as she went past. ‘Go home!’ she whispered. ‘I shall not be needing you again.’

The trip from Málaga to Torremolinos required less than twenty minutes but it represented a journey from one civilization to another: golf links waiting in the sun, small restaurants with patios open to the sky, glimpses of a Mediterranean more deeply colored than sapphire, and surprisingly, a cluster of twenty-seven skyscrapers marking the official beginning of the town. The buses sped directly through Torremolinos, turned left toward the sea, and pulled up in a neat convoy before a new seventeen-story hotel called the Northern Lights, whose staff was completely Scandinavian. With the efficiency that came from handling such incoming groups twice each week throughout the year, the blond young men behind the desk distributed numbers and room keys as fast as the tourists entered the lobby and handed them printed cards which explained how to get to their rooms and from there to the dining hall. Within six minutes of having descended from
the bus, Britta was carrying her small bag off the elevator onto the sixteenth floor. Pushing open her assigned door, she found a Swedish girl who introduced herself as Sigrid and who said within the first minute of greeting, ‘I have to go back on Friday.’

Britta’s first question was one she would repeat constantly for the next two weeks: ‘Is it possible to find work here?’

‘Absolutely impossible. Not a job to be had.’

‘But suppose there was,’ Britta persisted. ‘How would I find it?’

‘I started with the manager here. He told me he gets fifty inquiries a week from girls like us. About the best you can do is select some bar and hang around till they know you. If anything’s available, they’ll tell you.’

‘Where are the bars?’ Britta asked.

Sigrid laughed and said, ‘Go down, turn right, stub your toe and you’ll bump into seven. But you have to make up your mind. Swedish, or German, or American?’

‘Do they go by nations?’

‘Of course. So do the restaurants.’

‘Could I get a job as waitress?’

‘Not a chance. I tried that too.’

‘What about the bars?’

‘The Swedish are the cleanest … and of course you know the language. But you don’t meet men with money … or who can give you a job. The German bars are the most fun and you do meet …’

‘I couldn’t work with Germans,’ Britta interrupted, and Sigrid, aware that she was Norwegian, said no more.

‘The American bars are ugly places and very noisy. I can’t stand them, but you do meet men from the military bases and they do have money.’

‘Can they find you a job?’

‘No. But the money you can scrounge allows you to hang on till you find a job.’

‘Then there are jobs?’ Britta pressed.

‘Darling! More than a hundred Scandinavian girls work in Torremolinos. Not one of them found a job when she came here, but somehow they held on. And now they have good jobs, and I’m eating my heart out with envy to think that they managed and I wasn’t able to.’

‘Please, how did they manage … really?’

‘Three ways,’ Sigrid said, standing by the window and looking eastward toward Málaga, which lay in sunlight
between the mountains and the sea. ‘On the weekends Torremolinos gets many Spanish men from business offices in Madrid, and they all hope to find a sueca … that’s what they call us. They have a tradition of being generous with their mistresses … give them apartments … small allowances … and they don’t expect it to last forever. Second way is the Germans. They’re even freer with their money, but for a Norwegian, I suppose that’s out.’

Britta stared straight ahead at the outlines of Málaga, so Sigrid concluded: ‘What’s left is the way most of the girls manage it. The American soldiers flock down here each weekend—even sailors from Rota. And the big thing in their lives is to set up an apartment with a Swedish girl. They’re very generous, because they get paid well, but they’re loud and damned near illiterate. I thought about it … quite seriously … anything to get a foothold in Spain. But in the end I couldn’t take it. What would you talk about with an American soldier?’ She sighed, then said quietly, ‘So on Friday I fly back … if I don’t jump out this window first.’

Unhappy with this report, Britta said, ‘I’m hungry,’ so they went down to lunch and were given one of the best tables, and not once during her stay in the Northern Lights did anyone indicate in any prejudicial way that they knew she had made the trip at the cheapest possible fare. To the hotel staff she was another beautiful Norwegian girl who could be used to decorate the hotel and make it look something like the photographs in the advertising brochures, and they knew that if they treated her well, she might in future years return … at full rate.

In every respect Britta found the physical aspects of her vacation better than she had expected. The room was larger, the bedding cleaner, the view more spectacular. The food was good, with three courses at every meal, four plates to chose from in each course: one was strictly Scandinavian, with the accent on fish; one was Spanish, with emphasis on spices; one was French, with a new sauce every meal; and one was international and totally bland. Only the indoor swimming pool had a serious weakness: three girls to every man. In sum, the Northern Lights was one of the best tourist values in the world, even at top prices, and at $26.13 for fifteen days it was a miracle.

Yet Britta could not enjoy it, because every morning when she awakened she realized that the time of her
departure was one day closer, and this depressed her. She asked the hotel manager if he had any jobs, and he threw up his hands: ‘My dear girl! If I had fifty jobs I could fill them.’ She also stopped by the SAS offices, but they were fully staffed. ‘Girls who get jobs here don’t leave,’ the office director said. She tried the luxury hotels, one after the other, and found nothing. On Friday she bade her roommate goodbye; Sigrid had tears in her eyes as she left Spain, and that evening her bed was taken by Mette, a delightful girl from Copenhagen, the daughter of a newspaper editor.

Mette had firm ideas about how a vacation should be spent, and on the first night invited Britta to accompany her to the Arc de Triomphe, explaining, ‘When two blondes walk in together, a nicer type of boy swings into action, because he has to have a buddy, and to have a buddy you must be at least human. If a blonde goes out alone, she’s likely to pick up creeps who operate solitary.’

When they entered the discotheque they made a stir, with confident Mette leading the way, and before midnight she had arranged dates with two American soldiers from the base near Sevilla. The men were young and bright and noisy and had an apartment near the ocean. Mette said she’d like to see it, but Britta felt that this could come later. Before she shacked up with soldiers she would exhaust every possibility of a job; she was convinced that something dramatic would happen to save her from flying back to Tromsø and she would pursue every possibility that might help it to happen.

‘I’m not a prude about sex,’ she told Mette the next morning when the Danish girl returned to the hotel. ‘In a crisis I’ll take an apartment from the Americans. But what I really want is a job.’

‘You find one,’ Mette said, ‘and they’ll build a statue to you—in Copenhagen harbor, right beside the Little Mermaid.’ But later she admitted, ‘You were smart to go home last night. They just got drunker and drunker.’ But when midnight approached she said, ‘I will not spend Saturday night in a hotel room with another girl. Come on, I’ll treat you to the Arc de Triomphe.’

At the discotheque Britta saw the two American soldiers, but they were standing at the bar, so glassy-eyed drunk they did not even remember the girls. Nothing happened. The music was tremendously loud and good, and there
seemed to be about the same number of young people as the night before, but no men dropped by their table to talk, so about two in the morning Mette in desperation walked to the bar and reminded the almost-unconscious Americans who she was. It was agreed that she would sleep at their place again, whereupon she returned to Britta and said, ‘You can come along if you like,’ but Britta said, ‘No thanks. I don’t object to a little sex, but the man has to be awake when it starts.’

She walked home alone, and it was on this night, as the stars were brilliant above the mountains and music came from every bar, that her panic began: ‘Oh God! I’m going to miss the whole thing. In nine more days the plane will return and drag me back into the tunnel.’ Without realizing what she was doing, she began whistling softly the cavatina from
The Pearl Fishers
, and its languid melody, so appropriate to southern Spain at night, tormented her with its vision of lost paradises. She passed a score of bars crowded with weekend visitors, and twice Spanish gentlemen from Madrid accosted her in gallant hyperbole, and she thought: Don Energetico, one false step and you’re going to have a Norwegian mistress on your hands.

When she reached her hotel she could not go in. She could not bear to see that clean Scandinavian lobby, that antiseptic, lonely room with its distant view of Málaga: Oh God, I am so afraid. I am so alone. In the dark night she wanted to weep, but felt that it was beneath her Norwegian dignity to do so. Biting her lip to restrain the tears, she started back toward the center of town, an eighteen-year-old girl determined to find a solution, any solution to her problem.

Nothing happened. She drifted into four different bars and out again before any of the men could talk with her. She went down to the silent beach and walked eastward along it, hundreds of apartments towering above her. ‘There must be someone up there,’ she said to herself, ‘who’s as lonely as I am. But how in the hell do you find him?’ She kicked the sand and wandered back to the center of town, where some American soldiers wanted to talk with her, but they were drunk. She tried another bar, but it was German, so she walked right out, and in the end she had to go back to her hotel. It was four in the morning and Mette was not home.

‘There must be some way,’ she told herself repeatedly, falling asleep in a chair with her clothes on.

Each day at noon she surprised the Scandinavians and astonished the Americans and Britons by appearing in her bikini, wearing a loose robe and sandals, headed for the seashore. ‘You’re not going swimming?’ guests asked. ‘Why not?’ she asked. ‘Sun’s out.’

On the way to the beach an icy wind whipped at her ankles, tossing her robe aside, so that men could see her excellent legs and beautiful torso. They whistled at her and made sly suggestions, and as she passed them she thought: If you clowns only knew how easy it would be if you had any guts. One proper word. One decent invitation.

Along the windswept beach the municipality maintained a series of low walls constructed of wattle and reed plaited in ancient peasant patterns, and they provided good protection against the wind. Each day, snuggled close to those walls, a few hardy Scandinavians and Germans came to profit from what sun there was, and whenever Britta came among them and threw off her robe, revealing her flaxen hair and handsome body, the sunbathers stopped whatever they were doing and admired her. Invariably some German athlete would ask where she was from, but she found it impossible to talk with him.

Actually, when one was protected from the wind, the beach wasn’t bad, and before long she had accumulated the tan she had dreamed of, but occasionally she would look up from the sand and see on the roadway beside the beach English and American ladies in overcoats, and everything would seem contrary and strange.

After lying in whatever sun there might be for an hour or so, Britta would leave the windbreak and dash down to the water’s edge. Without testing the ice-cold waves, she would grab a deep breath and run into the sea until the water reached her waist, then plunge beneath it and swim underwater for a few minutes. The water, always colder than she had expected but warmer than it ever was at Tromsø nearly paralyzed her at first, but the exercise was so invigorating that she found real joy in swimming and gasping and shaking her blond hair free, and after fifteen minutes of this she would run from the sea, dash across the beach and rub herself vigorously with a towel, finding in her ability to withstand the cold a courage to face the disappointments she was encountering in Torremolinos.