Unformed Landscape (11 page)

“We shouldn’t have done that,” he said.

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. It wasn’t right.”

“Were you thinking about your girlfriend?”

Christian didn’t reply.

“I’m not asking anything from you.”

“It’s all so complicated,” he said. “My girlfriend… I’ve got to talk to her, but… I always hoped things would be straightforward. That’s all I ever wanted. But now…”

“Welcome to the world,” said Kathrine.

He said he would write her an e-mail, and she repeated that she wasn’t asking for anything from him. He kissed her on the cheeks, and she asked him, and maybe that was a mistake, but she just had to ask, did he like her at all, a little bit at least. Yes, he said, but now I have to go. I’ll write you. Soon.

The train had stopped only briefly in Kolding, it had gone on, and two and a half hours later it was at its final destination—Copenhagen. There was just time for Kathrine to buy a ticket and a cup of coffee, and then she was already sitting in the train to Stockholm. From there, she would go on to Narvik, and take the Hurtig Line for the last stretch. She didn’t have much money left.

When she reached Stockholm at four o’clock, it was dark already. She found an Internet café near the station. It was a bare room in a community center, with a few computers standing on long tables. Most of them were occupied by youngsters, who were playing a game. They proceeded, heavily armed, down a subterranean passage, and shot at everything that moved. It was dark. The changing light
from the screens lit up the intent faces, which sometimes convulsed with shock or rage.

Kathrine checked her e-mail. She had been gone for almost two weeks, but there was very little in her mailbox. A pretty bland greeting from Morten on the day of her departure. Would she like to have coffee sometime. Some junk mail. Christian hadn’t written yet. Kathrine thought about writing him, then she let it go. She called up the home page of the village, and its Web camera. At 30-second intervals, the pictures emerged, always the same view from the town hall across the square to the post office and the Nils H. Nilsen fish factory. In the background the Elvekrog, and on the foot of the slope on the left, various houses and huts. Once, someone came out of the Elvekrog, the open door made a pale area on the screen and a blurry shadow, only a few pixels big. Kathrine looked at it more closely, and started to see other, barely discernible shadows, the inhabitants of the village. Then she started seeing shadows all over, as if the whole village had turned out onto the square to wave to her, but that was a delusion, a flickering, maybe it was snowing. The camera wasn’t very light-sensitive, and the image resolution was too low.

Kathrine read the latest village news. British journalists on visit to Nils H. Nilsen’s plant, she read. Leather-stitching course in community center, soccer juniors triumph in Vadso.

She thought of Morten, sitting in his office, writing his little articles. He had made himself some coffee with his
electrical immersion heater, had wondered whether he should go to the Elvekrog tonight, had looked up what was on TV. He had gone shopping on his lunch break, left his shopping at home, and managed to be back at work by two. On the town hall stairway there was a relief map of the Arctic territories, with the North Pole at the center.

Did Morten think about her at all? Another person disappeared, he wrote, a strange case. A young woman, a customs inspector by profession, well liked by all, with whom I spent a night, has disappeared, without leaving word.

What had she expected? Maybe Morten hadn’t even noticed she was gone. The village might be small, but one could easily go several weeks without seeing someone. What about Thomas? Had he reported her as missing? And did he miss her? Did she miss him, her mother, Randy?

If someone was missing her, if someone was worried about her, it should be an easy matter to follow her traces. You won’t find me, she had written on Thomas’s note, but the Hurtig route would keep a manifest of its passengers, or you could ask the stewards, or the captains. Harald would be able to supply a description. And she had shown her passport around, and in Paris she had taken out the last of the money from her account. She had read thrillers, she knew people left traces unless they were very canny and experienced. And she hadn’t been canny. She had known that no one would come looking for her. She was
a free woman, who gave a damn where she was anyway. You won’t bother looking for me, that’s what she should have written on Thomas’s note.

She logged onto a chatroom, but there were just a few crazies there, swapping perverted fantasies under assumed names. They must feel so pathetic, sitting in their living rooms, Kathrine thought. Their wives are asleep next door, and they’re firing their dirty imaginings into the ether. I wouldn’t like to meet them on the street at night, she thought, I suppose it’s better if they lie and pretend to be decent people.

Kathrine thought about Randy, who had spent an afternoon as a deer. A game. She thought of the masks she had worn as a little girl, and of the masked balls at the Elvekrog. The sweat running down into your eyes, and your vision impaired by the narrow slits. Thomas had once come home with a pig mask, but he hadn’t put it on. Kathrine imagined him in it. She looked into the narrow gap between the face and the mask, and she saw Thomas laughing uncertainly in the shadow of the other face, saw his pupils dart this way and that. She saw him standing alone in the lit-up room. She watched him from next door, the door was just ajar. He was standing there, naked but for the mask, with his upper body leaning back slightly. He grunted once or twice, first softly, then louder. Then he got down on all fours and crept around the room, and snuffled at the radiators, the furniture, the carpets. She saw him without a mask. Emerging from the bathroom, turning
off the light, running to bed with short little steps, slipping under the covers next to her. She pushed the covers back. I want to see you. And all at once, Thomas had turned into a naked woman. He jumped out of bed, and ran off. He was an old woman, his skin was wrinkled, his hair white as snow. Stay here, she called after him. She got up. Thomas had vanished. All the doors in the apartment were open, the front door opened onto a snowy landscape. But it wasn’t her apartment, and not her village.

Kathrine gave a start. A window had opened on the screen.

“You have a personal message from harrypotter,” she read, “on your breasts are two fornicating frogs, two more frogs are fornicating on your thighs…”

She closed all the windows, paid, and left. The train to Narvik had left a quarter of an hour ago.

Kathrine ran through the streets of Stockholm. It was cold and rainy. People were clustered in front of the window of a television shop, watching a soccer game. Kathrine drank a coffee, and ate a hamburger. It was her first time in a McDonald’s. She liked it. It was bright and clean, and all the surfaces were laminated, as they were in the room at the fishermen’s refuge. Easy to clean.

In the corridor of the fishermen’s home there was a map that showed all the missions up and down the Norwegian coast, clean, bright buildings, well heated, and easily
washable. All the rooms were the same. The heating was electric, meals were served at the same time, the food wasn’t good, but it wasn’t bad either. And Svanhild took care of everything and smiled, if you asked a question. She wore a white coat like the workers in the fish factory, and she always had a rag in her hand. When she came to the table after the meal, to ask if it had been all right, she wiped her cloth over the table, and when you went to the register to pay, and exchanged a few words with her, she wiped her cloth over the counter, back and forth, without looking. Often Svanhild didn’t say anything at all, and just wiped. Wiping was her language, it could mean anything at all.

In the village, people didn’t know much about Svanhild. She came from the south of Sweden, that was agreed, and sometimes she told stories about that, stories in which she herself didn’t play any part. It was as though she didn’t have a life, had never had any life. She was very gentle, and she had a beautiful voice. If you asked her long enough, she would sing the sad songs of her homeland, and a big hush fell over the restaurant.

Only once had Kathrine seen Svanhild be vehement, and that was when a couple of seamen had brought beer into the fishermen’s refuge. Svanhild had preached to them about the evils of alcohol, and when they laughed at her, she had turned them out.

She had never married. From time to time, directly or obliquely, a seaman would make a proposal to her, in jest
or otherwise, and she would make a joke, and everyone laughed. When the seaman blushed and stammered, she would lay her hand on his arm and say, you need a young woman who’ll have babies to occupy her while you’re away at sea.

Kathrine followed a group of rowdy and laughing young people to a bar. The music was loud, and it was dark. Kathrine sat down at the bar, next to a woman who had her back to her. If someone looked at her, she smiled. But no one came and spoke to her. All the men she liked were with women, or in groups of other men. She smoked a cigarette, drank a beer. All around her there was laughter. The people knew each other, they often came here. And of course they didn’t look at Kathrine, or just fleetingly, the way they might look into a shop window when the shop is closed, and move on. It wouldn’t make the slightest difference if I wasn’t here, thought Kathrine, and she smiled. She could smile in such a way that it looked as if she didn’t care. I have to go back, she thought, I have no other choice. Take a job in Stockholm. Start a new life in Stockholm, or what people call a new life. But she was even more afraid of a new life than she was of her old one. Look for a job, an apartment. And where would she live until then? There was no fishermen’s refuge here. Maybe the Salvation Army, a home for young women. But she wasn’t a young woman anymore either. She was twice married, she had a husband and a child. She had to return.

Someone passed her a joint. She had never tried hash. Not with my job, she sometimes said. But she wasn’t working now, and she felt sad, and perhaps a little curious. She took a drag, and was going to pass it on. But no one was sitting next to her, and so she took another drag, and then gave the joint back to the woman who had given it to her. The woman smiled and said, hey.

The music in the bar was lovely. There was something glassy about it, and the rhythm seemed to fit with Kathrine’s heartbeat, her breathing, which kept accelerating. She made herself breathe more slowly, and before long she had the feeling she was only breathing out, or in and out simultaneously. It was as though she’d left the room, and was passing through a landscape, hovering over a landscape of sounds. When she shut her eyes, she saw brightly colored patterns that opened out like delicate fans or flowers. The patterns were yellow and purple and hemmed with black lines. They looked like gentle hills. It was beautiful, and Kathrine felt at ease. She opened her eyes and looked through a long tunnel or pipe. Someone had rolled up the carpet, with everything that was on it. Workmen had rolled it up, and carried it down to the street. Far away from her she saw people moving, getting up. But the music wasn’t finished yet. Why did they turn out the lights, she wondered, and she closed her eyes again. She was rolled up inside the carpet, and slowly the cold got to her. The colors were gone. It was dark, and Kathrine was shivering.

“Where d’you live?” a man asked her. The door was open.

“Nowhere,” she said, “I’m traveling.” She looked at her watch. “I’ve got a train to catch.”

She went to the station. Her mind cleared in the cold air. She was cold, but she was happy to be cold.

The train was already there, and she bought a ticket for a
couchette
from the conductor, and went into her compartment. She hoped she would be alone. One more night on a train, one more night in a
couchette
. Kathrine went out into the corridor, and looked out the window.

She felt sad and tired. She wanted to get back to her house and her village. She wanted peace. She wanted not to think for a while. She had seen so much in the last two weeks, so much that she had never seen before, and yet she had the feeling she hadn’t seen anything at all. That people had different faces, she had already known. She had known that there are some houses that are bigger and more beautiful than others. A thousand times a thousand makes a million, and it wasn’t necessary to go to Paris to find that out.

Hordes of downhill and cross-country skiers were walking along beside the train. They laughed and chattered. When the first of them climbed into Kathrine’s carriage, she fled into her compartment, shut the door, and drew the curtains. She heard the skiers clatter past outside. Then
the door opened, and three women came in. Each had a tin of beer in her hand. They were laughing. Their ski suits smelled of mothballs.

The three women were traveling up to Narvik together, to go on a skiing holiday. They all lived in Stockholm, they explained, and they drank their beer, and they talked about their husbands or their boyfriends, who all seemed to be idiots. When they learned that Kathrine came from the Finnmark, they asked her about Narvik, and about Norwegian men. They wanted to know if there were good pubs and discos in Narvik. There’s a cinema, said Kathrine, and a library, and the three women looked at her with pitying expressions, and then spoke to her as if she were a child or handicapped person. They asked Kathrine where she lived, what her job was, if she had a boyfriend or even a husband. Kathrine said she had a child and a career, that she’d twice been married, that she was married to her second husband. At that the women were nicer to her. They introduced themselves: Inger, Johanna, and Linn. None of them had a baby, and they all worked in the same law office.

The four women got undressed. At first, Kathrine felt ashamed in front of the others, but then Johanna said something about Inger’s paunch, and the three of them started to compare bellies and thighs, and they were amazed that Kathrine was so slim, and that there was no trace of her pregnancy. It was so long ago, said Kathrine. And she got a lot of exercise in the course of her work.