Unformed Landscape (3 page)

Kathrine was tired. Thomas was certainly in bed by now. He had always been able to sleep. A clear conscience, he sometimes said, and laughed, and Kathrine hadn’t understood why. She had a clear conscience. She had never said she loved him. And she didn’t have any secrets from him. If there was something he wanted to know, he could ask her. But he never asked her about her life. She wasn’t even sure if he knew that she had been married to Helge. What I don’t know, he sometimes said, and laughed.

Thomas. That was his name. Her husband. My husband, she thought. He was thirty, two years older than she was. His family was his family. Everything else was a lie. Thomas, my husband, thought Kathrine. By the time they married, they hadn’t slept together for months. On their wedding night, she had induced him to do something that he later referred to as playing. But it wasn’t a game. And then they didn’t talk about it anymore. Thomas avoided the subject, as he avoided the thing itself. The thing, Kathrine said, and she laughed aloud. And since then, another half a year had passed without them sleeping together—or, as she said, making love.

“What did you marry him for?” asked Morten, when she told him about it.

“Because he loved me,” Kathrine replied.

My husband, said Kathrine, by the open window, Thomas, my husband. She smiled. A man going by on the opposite
side of the road looked across to her, a drunken seaman. He waved, and she waved back. He said something she couldn’t make out. She said something that might have been a greeting or a suggestion. The man shook his head, and went on. Kathrine shut the window.

On the upper story of Nils H. Nilsen’s fish factory, a few windows were lit up. Where foreign workers lived. Kathrine tried to imagine the rooms behind the windows, and the people who sat there, watched television or read. Who made love or ate dinner. She imagined someone over there looking across to her, to the window where she was still standing. And when she lay down on the bed again, she imagined someone over there seeing the light on in her room, but not seeing her, and wondering who it was who lived there. Continually wondered about it, every night. When every night there was someone different in the room.

Kathrine used to walk past the fishermen’s refuge every day. And now she was inside it, sitting by the window, eating the breakfast that was included in the price. When she stepped out on the street, she paused for a moment. It was as though she was waiting for herself, for the Kathrine who hadn’t doubted, hadn’t asked, hadn’t run away, and whose life had continued as before. She looked up the road, in the direction from which she used to come every morning. Then she saw Svanhild clearing the table inside. She waved, and Svanhild waved back and smiled, and Kathrine set off.

She walked down the street, quickly and without looking back. She thought of the day ahead and the work to be done. Her boss was already in the office. He was smoking. She opened the window, made coffee. Later, she picked up the mail, and brought the whole stack to her boss, without looking through it. He liked to do it all himself. It wasn’t much, in any case. Then he called her in. “This one’s not for me,” he said, and handed her an envelope that had his name on it, and two sheets of single-spaced typing. Kathrine read. She read, and sensed her boss looking at her. But he didn’t say anything. He waited.

“Don’t you dare show your face in our house again, ever. Leave our brother/brother-in-law/son alone! You have abused our hospitality and our trust, and brought filth into our house. We have seen through you, and refuse to be taken in anymore by a rotten bitch like you. Your lewdness and abomination you must bear by yourself.”

The telephone rang, but Kathrine only stared at it, her boss stared at it. Kathrine listened to it ringing and ringing, and finally stopping. One of her colleagues left the customs office on his way to inspect a ship that had just come in. Kathrine was still holding the letter in her hand, the second page of it. The first she had dropped onto the table. She read the last few sentences again.

“Good-bye, then, and for good. Catch yourself some other man, but spare Thomas, and spare us. We will not tolerate your presence in our house, under any circumstances! God will punish you for your misdeeds, you
whore! Because God knows the path of righteousness; while the path of godlessness leads to destruction.”

Kathrine sat down and stood up again. She took a cigarette from her boss’s pack, which lay on the desk. He lit it for her. She had dropped the second page of the letter on the desk as well. Her boss picked it up, and read aloud: “Copies of this letter are going to your mother, Thomas, Morten, and anyone else who wants one.” He tore up the letter and dropped it in the wastepaper basket. He smiled.

“Brother, brother-in-law, son,” he said. “Crazy the lot of them. You can’t take it seriously.”

It wasn’t a question, it was a command.

“I don’t know what it’s all about, but I never asked for a copy. I regard the matter as closed. I don’t want to hear anything about it.”

When Kathrine thought about the office now, she could only think of the fitted carpet, which ran up the walls a little way, and always gave her the feeling of not quite having her feet on the ground. It was as though everything in the office had only provisionally been set down on that carpet, and sometimes it would disappear again, when the workers came to roll it up and cart it down to the street, and put it in the dumpster—when the head office in Oslo finally agreed to the long overdue renovation.

He regarded the matter as closed, her boss had said, but Kathrine knew it wasn’t, that the letter would forever be
lying there, between the two of them, even if he believed, even if he knew it was all a lie.

At around lunchtime, her mother had called her at the office. This was something she had done only once before, when Kathrine’s father had died. Kathrine assured her that it was all a lie, and her mother tried to calm her down. But Kathrine sensed the doubt in her voice, and quickly ended the call.

Kathrine had gone out to lunch with her colleagues, as she did every day. She had looked at the other people in the restaurant, and wondered which of them had also received a copy of the letter. But nobody had betrayed any sign. Kathrine had had the sensation of being the only human, among lots of browsing animals. After lunch, she had stayed in the fishermen’s refuge and had holed up in her room all afternoon, and cried a lot.

The following day she hadn’t gone into work, nor the day after. She stopped going. She hadn’t handed in her notice, she just stopped going, and the only thing that surprised her was that she didn’t hear from her boss at all.

Kathrine sat in her room in the fishermen’s refuge. She thought about the office, about her boss, her colleagues. She looked out the window, and watched the workers going to the fish factory, the children going to school, the women leaving the houses to go shopping. She lay down, and she got up. Then it was already time for the office workers to be coming out of the factory and the town hall, to drink coffee at Svanhild’s. A few seamen were on the
streets, three old women with Zimmer frames stopped right in front of Kathrine’s window, just stood there, not talking, and finally went on.

Once, she heard some noise from next door, and she wondered what it was like for the Russian fishermen who stayed here while their ships were in port, being serviced or repaired. In these rooms with their easy-to-clean, man-made surfaces. A damp cloth would wipe away all traces of them after they were gone, off at sea on one of the rusty trawlers, to live in a tiny cabin for a week or two of hectic work.

Kathrine knew those cabins. She had inspected them often enough. Some of the seamen had pinups on their walls, and turned the music louder when she came along. She felt their eyes on her when she bent down to look under the bunks, and her overalls grew taut across her behind. Some of the time she didn’t mind it, and some of the time she felt scared. Others had pictures of saints or the Virgin Mary on their walls. On the bottom deck, where the sailors slept, the men slept three to a cabin. Kathrine looked in the cupboards, pushed aside empty tins of Nescafé. The vodka was usually kept behind the drawers under the bunks. Two or three bottles, rarely more than that. The seamen stood in the doorways. They wore felt slippers and rough knitted vests, and they smiled apologetically and said,
“No problem,”
when Kathrine wrote out the receipt for the fine. She felt sorry for the men with their hand-drawn calendars, on which they crossed off the days, and the weeks,
and the months until they could go home again. But they had an apartment somewhere, maybe a wife, and one or two kids. They had chests where they kept their clothes, and walls where they had their pictures. They had what Kathrine no longer had.

After Thomas had moved in with her, he had gradually taken over her life and her apartment. He had been generous, and bought expensive, new things. He hadn’t liked her furniture, he had mocked her collection of books until she gave them to the library or simply got rid of them. And every time they tidied up—and Thomas liked nothing better than spring cleaning—she noticed that something disappeared, until there was hardly anything left. A dust trap, he said. You never look at that, what’s the point of it. She had supposed that was love. She had thought they were building something together, but it was just Thomas building her into his life, trying to mold her, to train her, until she suited him, and suited the type of life he planned to lead. Until her own apartment was as foreign to her as his parents’ house, as he was, and as the life she led with him.

Kathrine had been living in the fishermen’s refuge for four days when the letter came. She stayed another three. She didn’t go into the office anymore. She sat in her room, and only left it to get something to eat, in the afternoons, when there was hardly anyone left in the restaurant. Svanhild
didn’t ask any questions, but she was very friendly, sometimes she just stood next to the table while Kathrine was eating, without saying anything. After a week, Kathrine moved back into the apartment.

She noticed right away that Thomas had moved out, that the apartment was empty, even though there was nothing missing. Presumably, he was back with his parents, in the rooms that had been set aside for the three of them, that he had fixed up weeks ago, and never wanted to show her. A surprise. Our nest, he had once said, a snug nest for us.

Kathrine stood in the apartment, on which they had already canceled the lease. In two weeks, at the end of January, she would have to go. The potted plants were all dry, and presumably past saving. The key to the mailbox lay on the kitchen table. When Kathrine opened the fridge, a sour smell wafted out. She emptied the rest of a milk carton into the sink, picked up a half-eaten bar of chocolate, and sat down in the living room. She opened the mail from the past days, some junk mail, a Christmas card from Christian in Boulogne, France. It was pretty there, he wrote, but he was going back to Aarhus in a couple of days. Then Kathrine read the letter from Thomas’s family, which they had copied to her here as well. She read it again.

“Hated Kathrine, how long have you been playing your mean games with our brother/brother-in-law/son? Are two lawful husbands not enough for you, must you amuse yourself with other men too, so blinded by lust that they agree to play your games? You go hopping from one bed
to another, just exactly the way you feel like, and as fancy takes you. You’re a deceitful snake. In bygone ages, people would stone harlots like you, but we, we pray for you, that God in His great mercy may forgive you your unchastity.”

Kathrine read the letter from beginning to end, read the signatures, every name, every letter. They had all set their names to it—Thomas’s parents, his sister Veronica, and Einar, his brother-in-law. Kathrine was put in mind of death announcements in the newspapers, in which brothers, sisters, children, nieces, and nephews all took their leave of the deceased. She herself was mother, daughter, sister-in-law, and daughter-in-law. A divorced and remarried wife. Then she thought of Einar, the brother-in-law. Einar, of all people. Kathrine laughed, and was surprised at the sound of her laughter in the quiet apartment. It wasn’t her laugh at all. She laughed to hear herself laughing. Strange, she thought, that you cry alone, but never laugh. I’ve never laughed alone before.

She felt certain that it was Einar who had written the letter. She remembered the evening he had kissed her goodbye on the mouth, the feeling of the tip of his tongue between his thin, dry lips, the smell of his breath when he talked to her, and got far too close to her. A smell she couldn’t describe, and the very thought of which still disgusted her today.

She imagined Thomas reading the letter, back home with his parents. She thought of how he’d always brought the mail into the kitchen. He had insisted on being the one who
always emptied the mailbox, even when Kathrine got home before he did. When he had moved in with her, he had made some joke, and taken the key to the mailbox off her key ring. He got the mail, took the big knife out of the kitchen drawer, and slashed open all the letters, one after another. He took them out of their envelopes, opened them out, and smoothed them down with his hand. He punched holes in them, and only then would he read them, one after another, and afterward he would file them away in his binders.

Kathrine punched holes in the letter from Thomas’s family, pulled down the binder labeled “T. family” off the bookshelf, and filed the letter. She smiled as she thought Thomas would be satisfied with her work. But he would certainly have read the letter too, perhaps before it was sent, perhaps he had even helped write it. Only he hadn’t signed it.

There was also a file marked “K. family.” Thomas had started it for Kathrine, even though she never got mail from her family. Her father had broken with his own family over some old incident sometime, and it was a wonder that they had showed up at his funeral. And her mother’s family had never been happy about her marriage, and contact was limited to birthday and Christmas cards, and the occasional telephone call.