Unformed Landscape (14 page)

“It feels much longer to me,” said Kathrine. “It was only three weeks.”

She had gone on a trip, she said, gone south. And that Thomas had lied to her. The letter had been his family’s revenge. Is it not true then? No, it’s not true.

“You always were an honest child.”

“I spent a night with Morten.”

That wasn’t right of her, said her mother. Thomas had stopped… But her mother didn’t want to know. He stopped sleeping with me. A marriage is a marriage. Then should Kathrine have stayed with Helge? You have to do what you think is right. I don’t want to get involved in your life. Thank you.

But it wasn’t an argument. Kathrine’s mother didn’t argue. She stood in the doorway, saying, Lordy, girl, the things you get up to, and then she went into the kitchen. Your things, she called out, are in the garage. Thomas brought them back.

“I’m going out.”

“Will you be back for lunch?”

“Maybe.”

It was snowing. Kathrine had always loved snow, and she loved it even more when fresh snow was falling. She walked through the village. The old women who were standing outside the fishermen’s refuge with their Zimmer frames greeted her. The office workers came out of the town hall to drink Svanhild’s coffee. Morten wasn’t among them. Kathrine asked after him. He had taken the day off, presumably he’d skied out to the lighthouse. He’d been talking about doing that. He had bought some satellite navigation gear, and said he was going to try it out.

“What if it doesn’t work?” said Kathrine.

His colleagues laughed and shrugged their shoulders. “He knows the way.”

Kathrine went to the school. Even from a distance she could see the neon light outside the big classroom windows. The windows were stuck with brightly colored paper flowers that the children had made. Kathrine looked in at the window. She saw Randy sitting at one of the front desks. She was surprised. She had always imagined him as sitting at the back. He had a book in his hand, and was moving his lips. She could tell what a struggle it was for him to read. He was bending down over the book. His little body was all tensed up. Then the teacher went up to him, put her hand on his shoulder, and said something to him. Perhaps Randy did have something the matter with his eyes. The teacher had once made some reference to that, but Kathrine had never had the time to take him to the oculist at Kirkenes. Now she had the time.

She went up the steps and into the school. The smell of the stairway reminded her of her own school days, her fear of gym, of the other children, of her father, if she got bad marks. She remembered the mandarin oranges they stuck little candles in at Christmastime, and the teacher, who read stories aloud on Saturday mornings, about Stone Age children, and sometimes fairy tales. Kathrine went up to the door of Randy’s classroom. She heard the voice of the teacher, and of one of the little girls:

Kathrine left the school again. They all come through here, she thought. But when it’s over it’s over. Now he’s learning the same rhymes as we used to learn. What is my baby doing? What is my little deer doing? Now I’ll come to you once more, and then never again. A fairy tale, which one? Little brother and little sister. She had told it to Randy once. About the spring that whispers, who drinks from me will turn into a deer. Who drinks from me will turn into a deer. And then the little brother drinks from it, and so he turns into a deer. All afternoon, Randy was a deer, right until supper, when Kathrine told him deer don’t get to eat ambrosia-creamed rice.

Kathrine walked to the cemetery. It was snowing harder now. The houses all had lights on inside them, and some of the windows still had Christmas decorations up, straw stars, and strings of fairy lights, and lit-up plastic Santa Claus masks. They hadn’t had those when she was little. There were lanterns lit in the cemetery. You couldn’t see the individual tombstones under the snow, but Kathrine knew where her father lay. Her footsteps were the only ones to be seen. From a distance, she heard the school bell,
and then the shouts and yells of the children as they ran home. Kathrine saw one or two from Randy’s class walking up the hill. The children greeted her as she passed them on her way to the main street.

There weren’t many trawlers at anchor in the harbor. Randy was standing with a couple of other children at the dock, watching a fisherman greasing a pulley. Kathrine called Randy, and he turned and ran to her. Silently, he took her hand. Together, they walked back to their mother, their grandmother.

“Do you like going to school?” asked Kathrine.

“I’m the second best at gym,” said Randy.

“Were you learning a poem today?”

“All I can remember is the ending,” said Randy, and he stopped, as though he couldn’t walk and think at the same time. He stood in front of Kathrine, and breathlessly and earnestly recited the few lines he could remember:

“Would you rather be blind or deaf or dumb?” asked Randy, as they took off their shoes outside the apartment door.

“What sort of question is that?”

“I’d rather be dumb.”

After lunch, he ran out to play with the other children. Kathrine went into the garage. They had sold the car after her father died. Kathrine’s mother couldn’t drive, and Kathrine only had to for work. In a corner of the chilly building, next to the Deepfreeze, were a couple of large cardboard boxes, which Thomas had labeled “K” with his tidy writing, “K—books” and “K—kitchen,” “K—kid” and “K—casual clothes.” Next to them stood her cross-country skis. Kathrine picked them up, took them out, and slipped them on. Her mother came out to tell her to be careful, there was more snow on the way.

“Don’t worry, I’ll be careful,” said Kathrine.

She set off in the direction of the lighthouse. Visibility was poor, but she knew the way. Once she had left the village behind her, and was over the first hill, she hit a track, almost covered over by the fresh snow. She followed it. Kathrine went for a long time. She wasn’t cold, only her face felt chilly from the snow that was falling, harder now than before. She couldn’t see the track anymore. It was getting dark again, and it wasn’t even two o’clock.

An hour later, Kathrine saw someone coming toward her from a distance. It was Morten. She stopped. He had his head down pushing into the wind, and only saw her when he was a couple of yards from her. He got a shock.

“Does your new machine work?” she asked.

“Battery’s gone dead,” he said, with a grin. Then he said, “Hey, I’m glad you’re back!”

They embraced, but didn’t kiss. Their cheeks touched. Very cold, said Morten. But I don’t feel cold, said Kathrine. You’re not going out to the lighthouse, are you, asked Morten. Kathrine said she had gone out to meet him, and would come back with him.

“If you’re hungry…,” he said. “And I’ve got some hot tea as well.”

“You go on ahead.”

Morten went on slowly, and kept looking around at her. At five they were back in the village.

“Do you want to come to my place?” asked Morten.

“Let’s go to Svanhild’s.”

When Svanhild saw Kathrine, she came out from behind the bar, and, with a beaming smile, shook her hand. She asked where she had been, and wouldn’t let go of her hand. She said Alexander’s wife and his two daughters were there. She pointed to a table, where a plump blond woman sat, with a couple of girls almost as big as her. Kathrine recognized them from the photos Alexander had shown her.

“It’s three months since he’s disappeared now,” said Svanhild. “On Sunday we’re having a service for him in the church. We collected money so that they could come.”

Maybe the woman would stay, she said. There was no shortage of work. The girls’ names were Nina and Xenia.

Kathrine and Morten sat down at the table in the corner at the back, and Svanhild brought them coffee and homemade cake. The place was empty, apart from themselves and a couple of old workers from the fish factory.

“I’ve got some French cigarettes left,” said Kathrine.

“And Paris is beautiful?”

“I’ll show you my pictures, if you like.”

“Why did you go to Paris, of all places?” Kathrine didn’t answer. Then she told Morten about Christian, and that she had slept with him on the train. Then it was Morten’s turn not to speak.

“You weren’t there when I went away. I went looking for you, and you weren’t there. Are you jealous?”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t want to lie to you.”

Kathrine told him about Stockholm and Boulogne, and how she’d eaten shellfish for the first time in her life, and smoked dope for the first time. Morten listened and he laughed, but she sensed he was different from how he had been before.

“I have to get used to the fact that you’ve slept with him,” he said.

“I slept with Thomas as well.”

“That was a long time ago. Anyway, he’s your husband.”

“And with you. And you’re not my husband.”

Morten nodded. He said that, to begin with, they had thought she had done herself a mischief by disappearing like Alexander. Thomas had run to the Elvekrog, all excited,
and said they had to help him find his wife. He really said his wife, as if they didn’t all know who Kathrine was. Then when they had gone down to the harbor and asked after her there, the harbormaster had said he had seen her leave on the
Polarlys
.

“And you just stopped looking for me after that?”

“You’re your own woman. You can go wherever you like.”

“I was afraid someone might try and keep me from going. I don’t know. I had the feeling I was doing something wrong. I felt like a criminal on the run.”

“I thought you wouldn’t come back. Most of them don’t come back.”

Morten said he had lately been thinking quite a lot about leaving. He knew some people at the national radio, and he could probably get a job in Tromso, or even in Oslo. Couldn’t she get herself transferred? If she got her job back, she might be able to, said Kathrine. Tromso, why not. That might have been the happiest time in her life, those months in the city, with her male and female colleagues, the parties, the cinemas.

“Why not,” she said. “Would you want me to go?”

“We wanted to leave together when we were kids.”

Then she asked him what had happened, when they had stowed away together to Mehamn. Ha, said Morten, and then he told her the story.

And then they stood around uncertainly outside the fishermen’s refuge, and Morten asked again if she wanted
to come up to his place, but he didn’t seem to be too sure about it. Helge rattled past on his Harley, and Kathrine said, no, she’d better go home. She wanted to see Randy, whom she’d neglected for so long.

Randy was a funny boy, said Morten. “Two weeks ago, I had his whole class in the studio. I talked to them about how you make a radio program. We recorded a little show, and Randy was the announcer. He was really good.”

Kathrine asked Morten if he could make up a tape for her, and he said he would.

“Sometimes,” he said, “when I listen to my shows, I think maybe no one’s listening at all. And my voice goes past all the houses, and out of the village, and as far as the transmitter reaches. It’s a weird feeling.”

Kathrine nodded. Then they parted.

Kathrine went to the customs office. Her boss was still there. He was sitting in his office, smoking, and reading the newspaper. He was happy to see her.

“I’ve got my sister-in-law and her husband visiting, and their three awful children,” he said. “So I’m doing a lot of overtime.”

“Why don’t you go to the Elvekrog?”

“My wife doesn’t believe me. She calls here to check up on me.”

Kathrine asked if anyone had been taken on in her old job. No, said her boss. She hadn’t given in her notice. He
had asked for unpaid leave for her, first one month, and then a second. But if she wanted to start again before that time was up, that was fine by him. Head office had sent along this guy from Vadso, a real stickler, who didn’t get along with the Russians. He was staying at Svanhild’s, and would probably be relieved to be able to go home. “Tomorrow?”

“Thanks very much,” said Kathrine. “What about next Monday? I’ve still got lots of things to sort out.”

Then her boss asked if she was back together with Thomas, and immediately he apologized, it wasn’t any of his business of course, but…

“But what?”

“We wondered about your taking off just like that.”

“Hardly just like that.”

“You mean the letter?”

“I think we’ve said enough.”

Yes, said her boss, and got up. He said he was happy she was back with them, and she said she was too. They shook hands. He walked Kathrine to the door. When she was already outside, he asked, “Anyway, where did you go?”

“I’ll show you the pictures.”

On her way home, Kathrine thought about the journey from Paris to Boulogne. She had taken pictures out of the window of the train. Blurry landscapes, an overcast sky, now and then a few houses, a village. A narrow road that went along next to the track for a while, two women on
horseback, a cemetery. But there were also things you couldn’t see in pictures: stopping in places whose names she’d never heard of. A place called Rue, which meant road. Then the landscape got very flat. The train crossed a river with hardly any water in it. When she went back the other way, it was full of brownish water. The floods, Christian had said.

Her free days went quickly. On the street, Kathrine was asked whether she had gone on holiday, and sometimes she showed people the pictures from her time away, and she barely recognized the places anymore. Once she saw Thomas coming toward her on the pavement. When he saw her, he turned and disappeared around the nearest corner. That night, his father called. Kathrine’s mother answered the phone. She was friendly in her submissive way, asked after the family, how they all were. Then Kathrine took the receiver out of her hand and asked him what was going on.