I want to row, Bengt says and looks into his eyes.
But the father doesn’t want to let go of the oars. The boat is aslant, and a small suitcase is tipping over. Bengt lifts one of the oars over the gunwale, which frees Berit’s lap and she can put her hands there now. The bird starts shrieking again over the tall island. Then the oar sinks, sinks until it’s almost hanging straight down from the gunwale. On one side, the water is rising over the planks. It seems like a lot, and the case of liquor gets wet.
Are you crazy? the father asks. Do you want us to tip over?
Bengt looks down at the oar. It sparkles as the blade turns. Then he looks at Gun and sees her hand, more than anything else, stroking the red collar. He has never seen her touch his father before, so he raises the oar again.
Let Bengt row, Gun whispers; you shouldn’t row the whole way.
So the father makes his way aft, and Bengt sits down to row. When the oars touch the water, he feels how heavy the boat is. The shore isn’t as far as he presumed either. In fact, he can still see the bus with its bright headlights pulling away from the large concrete jetty. But the long island has spun around and the glinting of its white rocks has gone out. The father puts his arm around Berit’s shoulder. Her shoulder is tremulous, but she doesn’t dare break free. Only Bengt notices this. The father’s arm is still there.
Slowly, the boat takes off. A little water still splashes inside every time the oars plunge into the sea, so much that Berit and the father are completely wet, but they don’t say anything. The father merely squeezes the son’s fiancée a little, just a little closer to him. He never noticed before how nice her shoulders feel. Bengt doesn’t really care and only reacts to it in fun. So to get back at the father, he mischievously leans back a little. This allows him to make more powerful strokes with the oars. But it also allows him to feel Gun’s knees digging into his back. She doesn’t move them away, even though she ought to know that he needs more room to row as fast as he is going. He becomes a little irritated by this, so he takes up even more space. The wake is getting rough and deep, and the depressions left by the oars are filled with sparkling foam. Above them, the sky is getting even brighter, but over the water’s black surface and a few feet above that it’s twilight. Now even the sailboat stops shining, and the mast is long gone. But underneath her black hair, Berit’s face is completely white.
Bengt turns around to see how much farther they have to go. At first, he’s unable to see it. At first, he can only see Gun’s shoulder. A shadow from the father’s hand lingers on her white blouse. After the shadow, he sees the island. He also sees the cottage. It’s by the narrow inlet, whose sand is dazzling through the dusk.
Are you tired, Bengt? Gun asks. Not reproachfully, but very gently. Now he needs to show her that he isn’t tired. Needs to show her that he is just as strong as his father. Needs her to see that he has enough strength to do what he has to do. She needs to know. Then she needs to be afraid. Soon, they will both be afraid, perhaps all three of them. He’s the only one who won’t be afraid, because he knows what he’s going to do. He whips the water with the oars, sending the ivory foam flying into the boat.
It’s just a little windy, he says while panting.
But it’s still calm, warm, and serene – and motionless. When he says it, however, no one smiles. Then Gun starts singing again but stops as soon as they approach the shore. She takes off her shoes, splashes into the water with her bare white legs, and pulls the boat up as far as she can, while chatting a little about this and that.
They are exhausted after carrying everything into the house. Bengt, for that reason, is sweaty, although Berit is cold. They unlatch the shutters and open the windows up to the night. They have put everything on the floor in the main room. Now they are sitting around the open fireplace and the charred fire for a while. They grab some beer and sandwiches and sit down to eat. Berit doesn’t want any beer, so the father is nice and goes on his own to get her some water from the can. Then he thinks it would be nice to have a nip. He opens a bottle and mixes his beer pretty strongly with some aquavit. Then Gun holds out her glass and gets a dash, too. But Bengt suddenly changes his mind and doesn’t want any at all. He is suddenly down, and he can’t help it.
You two can drink, he says.
After he says it, he realizes he said it very loudly. However, no one drinks anymore. Then the father catches something in his throat and spits it into the extinguished fire, causing Bengt to cringe. Now it’s time to make up their beds. There are two alcoves at opposite sides of the main room, one with a sliding door separating them. Both alcoves have bunks fixed to the walls. Bengt and Berit will sleep in the outermost alcove. Berit wants the upper bunk, says that sleeping too close to the ground gives her a headache. Then Bengt gives her the lower one. As they spread the sheets over the cold mattresses, he hears Gun laughing from the inner alcove. He thinks it’s an ugly laugh. He walks out of his alcove, but he still can’t hear what she’s laughing at.
They wash up in the little inlet directly in front of the cottage. Berit is the only one who goes straight to bed without washing. She isn’t feeling well. And to avoid freezing, she spreads her black coat over herself. The other three wade into the water. Gun goes out the farthest. The father is standing closest to her and splashes water on her legs. He has rolled his pant legs up to his knees, but Bengt has hardly rolled his up at all. He has absolutely no desire to go too far out into the water. The father and Gun have the soap. After the father rinses his face, he blows his nose into the water. Bengt cringes once again. Soon there are white rings of foam around them. The rings are resting perfectly still on top of the water and twinkle a little before they dissolve. After Gun pulls up her hair, she abruptly takes off her blouse and tosses it to the father. Bengt goes back inside.
It’s an infinitely long time before they come back. And so that it won’t get too stuffy in the room, Bengt has opened the window. He is lying very close to the brown wooden ceiling and listening to their voices from the inlet. His underwear was wet with sweat and he couldn’t find his pajamas, so he’s naked underneath the blanket. Lying there, he suddenly gives a start. Something strange has happened to their voices. They have changed all of a sudden: one is much deeper than before; the other is much lighter. Then he notices that the voices are coming from behind the closed sliding door. Hearing it makes him so blistering hot that he flings the blanket off. After he has cooled off again, he hears a loud splash from the inlet and after a short moment of silence, he hears another splash. Then he climbs down from his bunk and leans out the window. Nothing is visible in the inlet. But there are two piles of clothes in the sand, one that is dazzlingly white and one so dark that he can hardly see it. Soon, he can see their two heads, like two dark balls bobbing up and down in the water. But before the swimmers wade back to shore, he slowly pulls the curtain from his fiancée’s bed. It occurs to him that he never said good night to her. When he came back from the beach, she had drawn the curtain that separated the hallway from their alcove as well as the curtain to her bed. Now he is leaning soundlessly over her. She’s breathing like she’s sleeping. But her eyes are open.
Are you cold? he asks. Is that why you have your coat over you?
No, she whispers.
But she doesn’t touch him, even though she sees he is naked. Her hands are on her chest and clasped like a sick old woman.
Are you ill? he whispers.
She turns her head to the wall and closes her eyes. Playfully, he pulls some hairpins from her hair and covers her face with five locks of her own black hair.
No, she whispers. Just afraid.
Now he’s afraid, too.
Of what? he asks while listening for sounds outside.
So afraid of being alone, she whispers, wiping her hair away from her face. And afraid of your dad.
Now they are coming. He hears their soft pattering up the steps. He quickly hides himself behind the curtain of the fiancée’s bunk. Then, when the father and
Gun are inside the other room, they close the sliding door again. He can’t hear them anymore.
Don’t be afraid, he whispers sharply, I will …
But she never gets to find out what he would do. He leaves her all alone, and he closes the window. Then he goes out to the hallway, where he burns his feet on their wet footprints. He slowly opens the sliding door again and peeks through the small opening. No one’s in the other room and the curtain to their alcove is drawn. Then he creeps back to his alcove and climbs into his bed. But he leaves the sliding door slightly ajar, so that the room won’t get too stuffy.
Beneath him, he hears his fiancée tossing and turning now and then, not for long stretches of time, but often. Then the walls of the wooden cottage start to creak. Otherwise, the cottage is completely silent. Beyond the silence, the sea murmurs impatiently, like the audience at a theater. But it isn’t the noise that keeps him from sleeping – it’s the silence. Or, more precisely, what he can’t hear. And for a long time he waits for sounds that never come. He waits, for instance, to hear the clinking of glasses. He does hear it in the end, but only because he wanted to so badly. At almost the same time, he hears the father snoring. Now he can roll over to the wall. Now he’s able to fall asleep, almost instantly.
In the morning, he is the first one to wake up. He forgot to close the shutter, so it’s very bright very early in the alcove. Behind the curtain, the fiancée is sleeping on her back. Her coat has slipped off, so he spreads it over her again. At his touch, she gives a start as though she were being punched and flings her hand over her face to protect herself. This upsets him, and he quickly leaves her. He opens the window and quietly climbs out. The rock is still cold underneath the coolness of the shade. He walks around the cottage just to see what it looks like in daylight. All but one of the green shutters are open. He stops in front of the closed shutter and lights a cigarette. He uses three matches for a single one. When he finishes it, no one has woken up yet. But he has a bad taste in his mouth.
Then he goes down to the shore, whistling quietly and carrying a flat stone in his right hand. Except for the inlet, the island is a single cliff, bordered by deadly, steep edges. He walks around the slippery edge and gazes absentmindedly into the naked sea. Faint smoke from invisible boats drifts against the horizon. Silent gulls are poised between the sun and the sea. Three sailboats have anchored by the low island. A quiet blue motorboat sweeps past the one on the right, its noise scarcely reaching him. A narrow, deep cleft runs through their own island, and the water can only surge through it when it’s really windy. It must not have been very windy for quite a while. The cleft is entirely arid and filled with dried-up seaweed and round little rocks. He tosses his flat stone away and meticulously selects a new one, one perfectly round and entirely shiny. For fun, it seems, someone has built a little smooth arch out of brown-painted wood over the cleft. And for fun, he walks over it. This side of the island is utterly barren; the rocks are as smooth as a person’s back. In the middle is a large, level depression where someone has laid soil and sowed grass and flowers. Now the flowers are wild and the grass is sparse. Despite this, he lies here on his back fiddling with the rock and looks up at the clear Sunday morning sky. After resting a while, he feels like a swim. Still lying there, he chucks the stone diagonally and hears it hit the bridge. He undresses and hides his clothes in the crevice, putting rocks over them. Since he still doesn’t remember where he left his swimming trunks, he doesn’t go back to the cottage to get them but instead goes out to the sea naked. He thought about diving from the cliff and straight into the green bottom, but since he is never brave when he’s on his own, he goes to the inlet instead – slowly. Partly because it’s cold and partly because he has the absurd feeling he has lost something.
Finally, he finds it. At the bottom where he is wading, he thinks he sees some dark shadows between his own steps. Suddenly, he realizes the shadows are footprints. This discovery makes him curiously anxious. He is no longer cold, and he follows the shadows farther and farther out, blocking the sun with his hands to see them better. There are two rows; first, far apart from each other, then, parallel and close, but where the bottom descended abruptly and steeply, they merge into a single large shadow. He treads into it with his foot, digging into it with his toes, deeper and deeper until it becomes a pit. He stands in it and cautiously looks around as if he were doing something dangerous. The water in the hole is warm. To avoid thinking about why he’s still there, he begins studying the coastline. It’s a few inches high and strikingly blue. He thinks he can see white spots amid all the blue – a bridge, a white house. He sees a black church tower, too. It protrudes from the edging like the point of a knife.
Then a shutter slams from the back of the cottage. His feet jerk from the pit. Fleeing almost in a panic, he thrusts himself into the deep part of the water. He swims with short, nervous strokes as he always does when no one is watching. When he hears someone coming down the stairs, he is already out in the inlet. Freezing, he creeps back to shore and hides behind some sparse bushes. Between the branches, he sees Gun standing on the steps. She is alone and wearing a red bathing suit. He hopes that she’ll wait until the commotion in the water has managed to subside. She walks slowly down to the shore and stands for a while with her hands on her hips, playing in the sand with her toes. Then she goes quietly, almost soundlessly, out into the water. He suddenly recalls his mother so vividly that he freezes up. Alma didn’t swim often; she was rather afraid of the water. Whenever she went in it, she had the habit of frightening the water, splashing it with her fat legs and screaming at it. She always embarrassed them at beaches, that is, when other people were there.
When his mother was gone again, he sees that Gun has stopped. The water is up to her knees now, and with cupped hands she pours water over her thighs so that she won’t be cold. Believing she is alone, she pulls down the strap of her bathing suit and vigorously rubs her back. Almost immediately, she pulls the strap back up. Even so, her shoulder was naked for just a brief moment. But in that moment, he was able to figure out what it was about her that he hates. It is her body.
He also learned why he hates it. He hates it because it’s so unlike his mother’s, because it’s so beautiful, and because it’s so relaxed. The entire time she wades into the water – and that time is infinite – he keeps on hating her. He sees her body under the water, green like glass. But when she starts to swim, it is white. And when she floats on her back, her body shimmers through the water like a white stone. Then he picks up a black rock off the ground and throws it in her direction. He didn’t mean for it to hit her, and it doesn’t. He just wants to startle her. She whirls around in the water and looks in the rock’s direction. Then, when she sees a wide ring on the surface, she swims very calmly to shore, most likely thinking it was a fish. As she swims, he realizes why he threw the rock. He also realizes why he has to get revenge. It’s because her body has shimmered so in the water. It’s because her body is tainted. It’s because it is so beautiful. Furthermore, he realizes that he has been waiting for her all morning. The rock has waited, too.
When he goes back inside, the sliding door has just been shut. It’s warm inside, and her footprints have already dried. When he opens the sliding door, he hears the father snoring, so he closes it again. He darts to his alcove and yanks the curtain from his fiancée’s bed. He pulled the other curtain, too. When he lies down on her coat he sees that she’s awake. Then he becomes aroused and excited, caressing her and then kissing her. She says that she is ill. She said the word ill in that telltale way women do when men ought to know why they are ill without having to ask. With those words, his lips dry up, he releases her shoulder, is irritated, and lies silently next to her.
Draw the curtain, she whispers, someone might come.
He doesn’t draw the curtain but instead hopes that someone will actually come and see him lying there. When some footsteps approach the door, he kisses her again and rather violently. But when the footsteps t
urn in the opposite direction, he sees that her lip is bleeding. Then he lies silently on her coat for a long time, pondering whether she is really sick. The first time he knew her, he always tried to remember the date, so that in the future he would be able to know whether it was true or not. He can’t remember anymore. So he is upset with her.
Breakfast is late because the father has slept in. They eat it on the porch outside the kitchen. There, they have a view of the long island, just a small portion of the mainland, but a large portion of the sea. While Berit sets the table and Gun clatters about in the kitchen, Bengt and the father are sitting on the red folding chairs at the green wooden table. The father is looking at the sea, which he hasn’t seen in a long time. But Bengt is smoking and looking at the clothesline that stretches from the porch railing to a little pine tree. Gun’s white blouse is hanging out to dry, and the father’s silk shirt is flapping next to it, almost dry. For the first time, except for in his thoughts and dreams, he realizes that his father has another woman. So it’s difficult for him to tear his eyes away from the line.
The father is pleased and content, and for the first time in a long time, he is happy to eat. When he is happy, he likes to touch women, so he grabs Berit by the hips – as a joke, of course. She stiffens up and starts dropping the glasses, but the father doesn’t notice. The one who notices is Bengt, but when Berit looks at him, he still refuses to make eye contact with her. Just then, Gun emerges from the kitchen with fried eggs, but the father still doesn’t let Berit go. Laughing, he says to the son:
Take over!
Gun leans over the table. She is wearing her bathing suit and a yellow silk robe over it. For just a brief, brief moment, Bengt actually wants to touch her, just to get back at his father, of course. But he doesn’t, after all. A gust of wind thrashes the clothes on the line, so he looks at that instead.
A Moth to a Flame Page 14