Unformed Landscape Read online

  Svanhild didn’t ask Kathrine why she wanted a room, she only asked her how long she wanted to stay. Kathrine said, “One night, maybe longer,” and Svanhild gave her a key. It was late.

  The room was small and much too warm, full of a dry electric heat. It had a smell of dust, even though all its surfaces were sealed, the laminated floors, the PVC wall panels, the cheap melamine furnishings.

  Kathrine tipped open the window as far as it would go and switched on the television, which was fixed to the wall on a metal arm. She chose an English-language news channel, and turned the volume down so low that she could hear the speaker, but not make out the words. She lay down on the bed. The cover wasn’t old, but it was full of cigarette holes and stains that washing had only driven deeper into the material. She stood up and went over to the window. The room was on the lower ground floor, the window was only just above ground level.

  Kathrine looked out onto the street she walked down every morning on the way to work. She thought of the people who had been in this room before her, seamen, fishing agents, engineers. Perhaps Christian had slept here his first few nights, before he had found an apartment. Perhaps he had watched her go by in the morning, smoking a cigarette out of the window, from that strange vantage. Before they had met. On one of those winter mornings when you had to look at the clock to know whether it was day yet, or not. When it didn’t get light at all, or just an hour or two at midday. Maybe Christian had observed her. She couldn’t remember, was it he who had spoken to her in the Elvekrog, or vice versa. She had the feeling that that woman who walked past this window every morning was not herself, the feeling that she had turned into someone else, a stranger, a chance visitor in an unfamiliar village, in a year that had just turned. She had taken the ship on the Hurtig Line, had got off on a whim, and had taken a room. Tomorrow, she would travel on, and forget the name of this village.

  Kathrine was confused, and her confusion frightened her. It was as though she had lost all her orientation, as though she had stepped out of her life like a house, a house she was viewing now from the outside, from below, from a foot above the ground, from the point of view of a dog, or a child, the child she had been when her parents had first come to the village. She rambled through her memories. There was no more before and after. Her whole life seemed to lie ahead of her, like this village. All the people she had known were still there, including her father, who had died four years ago, and Alexander, and Christian, who was somewhere in Portugal, or France, or Spain. Nothing changed, nothing had changed. She could go to school, she thought, and attend her early lessons again, and then go on to the Elvekrog, and dance with Helge. He would get her pregnant. Down in the port, the Verchneuralsk was docking, Christian was just coming off work in the fish factory, he left town again, the baby was born, Kathrine was sixteen and smoking her first cigarette, was kissing a boy for the first time. She was sitting with Morten in the old German harbor fortifications, and they were looking across at the village and planning a trip to Paris that they would never make. Kathrine was going to the library, taking books out she could not yet understand, that no longer interested her. She was drinking coffee with Alexander. Her father got ill, her son got ill, Kathrine got ill. Helge came home drunk. The winters were endlessly long. Kathrine was visiting her friends, and their kids played together. Then her second marriage, and the celebrations at Thomas’s parents. Her mother spent the whole day helping out in the kitchen. When Kathrine came to get her, she refused. She had borrowed an apron from Thomas’s mother, and Kathrine felt ashamed for her. Thomas and the other men were sitting in the den, smoking cigars, and the women were sitting in the living room, drinking tea. Kathrine didn’t know what to do with herself.

  It wasn’t until she thought about Thomas that some order came to her thoughts. His life was going somewhere. He had always known what he wanted, and where he was going. He had grown up in Tromso, done well at school, had gone on to college, and worked at a job. Then his grandmother had died, and his parents moved to the village, to their big house, one of the nicest in the village, with a big garden. Thomas’s father had taken early retirement, and spent his days reading the Bible and managing his money. Thomas’s mother was active in the community, got herself voted onto the school board and the library committee.

  Then Thomas came into the village, and became production manager at the fish factory. Kathrine first met him at the church bazaar, where he was helping his mother at the kindergarten stall. They were selling little crafts things the children and the mothers had made in the course of the year. Kathrine was there with her little boy, and Thomas right away started talking to him, but keeping his eyes all the time on Kathrine. She had found him disagreeable then, and hadn’t liked the way he was with the child. As if he were the father. The child had liked him, maybe he missed not having a father. That’s what everyone always said. The child needs a father.

  Later on, Thomas had gone over and joined them when they were all drinking hot chocolate and eating cake in the community center. He had asked whether the chair next to her was free, and then sat down before she could answer. He had talked about himself, about growing up in Tromso, about his travels. Kathrine hadn’t liked him any better, but the boy was beaming as he hadn’t for a long time, and was all excited. Thomas gave him something, a little toy. Helge was sitting at a corner table with a couple of colleagues. They had brought beer, and were drinking and talking noisily about the bad fish yields of the last few months, and about bikes, and about women. Once, Helge looked across to Kathrine, and grinned at seeing her sitting together with Thomas. Thomas was his boss, but Helge wasn’t interested in Kathrine or the baby anymore, not after Kathrine had told him he didn’t have to pay her any more maintenance, and just to leave her alone.

  Then Thomas had called Kathrine a couple of times, had asked her out for a coffee, and then for dinner. She had accepted the invitations, she no longer remembered why. Maybe, like the little boy, she was dreaming of a family, a big house, and a life free from worries. Then he had invited her back on Sunday, her and the child, to meet his parents. It had been a ghastly occasion, stiff and full of little embarrassments and humiliations. But when Kathrine had stepped out onto the glassed-in balcony to smoke a cigarette, Thomas had come after her and kissed her, and she had kissed him back, in the dull despair that had come over her in that chill house.

  Everything thereafter had been a mistake. Kathrine had been overrun by Thomas’s purposefulness, dazzled by the stories about his past and his future. That evening they had slept together for the first time, a rushed job in Kathrine’s living room, while the child was in the bedroom, playing with a train set Thomas had given him. Thomas had knelt in front of the sofa. He hadn’t even taken off his clothes.

  That day, Kathrine had met Thomas’s sister Veronica, and Einar, her husband. At the time they were living with Thomas’s parents, in the big house. Einar owned the little computer store on the main street. But the business wasn’t doing well, and Veronica and Einar decided to go back to Tromso. Then Thomas said the apartment in his parents’ house would be empty. If we take it, he said, then we can get the whole house, when my parents are dead. But that was later on, when they were already married, and when Thomas was already living with Kathrine.

  Thomas knew what he was after. When he started talking about marriage, it hadn’t even crossed Kathrine’s mind. His life represented a bold stroke through the unformed landscape of her life. Like the pistes for a snowmobile, marked with poles in the snow, his life cut across hers, with an objective and a destination. It was possible that Thomas himself didn’t know why he had chosen this particular path, but he had put down the marker poles, and it was a way that could be gone, and that he was going to go with her.

  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-draw
n 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.