Unformed Landscape

by Peter Stamm

  Further Praise for Unformed Landscape

  “Swiss novelist Stamm’s spare, uncluttered, deceptively simple prose evokes a cinema verité quality: we are drawn into Kathrine’s world and can almost feel her struggles to grow up.”

  —Library Journal

  “One of the most eerily beautiful road stories to emerge in European fiction in years.”

  —Philadelphia Weekly

  “This brief Swiss-authored novel… is one of quiet power and understated tension.”

  —Playback STL

  “This is a novel of great delicacy, by turns chilling and tender, and full of subtle surprises.”

  —James Lasdun, author of The Horned Man

  “Set in a world with which few readers will be familiar—the winter-darkened landscape north of the Arctic Circle—Peter Stamm’s Unformed Landscape tells the deceptively simple story of a young woman’s first, brief journey into what is for her ‘the south.’ But this beautiful novel is more than that: an eloquent exploration of how disillusionment can give rise to bravery, and a testament to the virtues of understatement.”

  —David Leavitt, author of The Body of Jonah Boyd: A Novel

  “Peter Stamm’s portrait of the Norwegian Kathrine, his flat, cool rendering of her constrained life, reminded me of Jean Rhys’s wounded characters in other parts of the world. Kathrine skates on the crust of her cold life, a woman starved for light. The changes provoked in her by her journey are subtle, fragile, yet great. This is a haunting, elegant novel.”

  —Sandra Scofield, author of Beyond Deserving and Occasions of Sin: A Memoir

  “Deft and vivid as a poem, Unformed Landscape tells the story of a young woman trying to find—and forge—the shape her life should take. This lovely, haunting novel is a powerful reminder of both the isolation in which we humans struggle and the connections that make us real. Kathrine, her village, and her travels have found an enduring place in my imagination and in my heart.”

  —Jean Hegland, author of Windfalls: A Novel

  The nights were no longer properly dark, it was April. Kathrine had gotten up early, even though it was Saturday. She woke her son, fixed him his breakfast, and took him to his grandmother. She went home, buckled on her cross-country skis, and set off. She followed the snowmobile tracks until she reached the first height, and after that the wires that led up to the radio mast. Finally, after perhaps an hour, she moved away from that last landmark at a sharp angle, and glided out into the limitless white of the fjeld.

  At around noon she sat down to rest and have something to eat on a rock that broke through the snow. She ran her hands over the orange, yellow, and white lichens that covered the stone.

  Later on, when she was on the trail again, there was a sort of misty haze, and the sky lost its blueness, and got paler and paler. But she knew the way, she had been to the lighthouse many times, and even when the sun was finally gone from sight, and the light was so diffuse that everything blurred, she went on, and wasn’t afraid of losing her way.

  Kathrine had married Helge, she had had a child, she had divorced Helge. She went to the lighthouse, she stayed there overnight, and came back the next day. Her mother would look after the boy then, as she did during the days when Kathrine was at the customs office.

  After work, she went to her mother’s. The three of them would eat supper together, later Kathrine would pick up the child and go home. Eventually, the child learned to walk, and she didn’t have to carry him anymore. That was in summer. Then the days grew shorter, autumn came, the first snow, and then winter.

  The sun had disappeared weeks ago, and it no longer got light at all. Night lay over the landscape. The village was locked in darkness. The light of the streetlamps was like a space that no one left. It was forty kilometers to the nearest village, eighty on the road that led through the dead landscape into the interior and back to the coast. When it snowed, when it did nothing but snow, the road was closed. And then the little airport outside the village on a small plateau was also closed, and there were no buses and no flights, only the Hurtig Line vessels heading south in the evenings, and late at night to Kirkenes on the Russian border.

  It often snowed, and it was cold and dark. Kathrine’s father died, one morning he didn’t wake up. He wasn’t even very old. The pastor came and sat in the kitchen with her mother. Kathrine made coffee, then she took the child by the hand and went home. The pastor and her mother were still sitting in silence at the kitchen table.

  On Sunday the pastor spoke of the water of life that poured out into the sea of eternity. Then, he said, every creature living there will swim freely. There will be quantities of fish. Because as soon as this water comes, the salt water will heal, and everything the river touches will remain alive forever.

  Then the congregation went outside, and went through the darkness and the deep snow to the cemetery. They had had to heat the soil for four days before the gravediggers had been able to shovel the grave.

  Spring came late that year. Kathrine had her twenty-fifth birthday in the autumn. Her mother baked her a cake as she did every year, and on Saturday they all went to the Elvekrog and had a party that was the talk of the village for long afterward.

  On Monday Kathrine inspected the Verchneuralsk. She had been in the office only a little while, writing a report, when the boss sent her out. The weather was stormy that day, out at sea the waves were high as houses, and everything that could sought the shelter of port. Thirty trawlers had already anchored, including some that had only meant to come back a week later. The boss had thrown away the faxes from the Coast Guard and said today’s going to be a hard day for everyone, today you’re all going to have to go out.

  The ships lay in the harbor, or were moored to the floating dock the Russians had built at the edge of the village. Groups of Russian sailors were standing all over the village. They stood there waiting and talking, and the villagers crossed to the other side of the street. The Russians were standing outside Rimi, and outside the other supermarket. They stood in front of the kiosk, they looked in the windows of the computer shop and the ship’s electronic shop. When Kathrine drove to the port, she stopped to search a group of Russians. Sometimes they would carry vodka in their plastic bags, or contraband cigarettes, that they would sell in the village.

  The Verchneuralsk had already been unloaded. Kathrine knew she wouldn’t find anything on board, not vodka, not cigarettes, but she always boarded the ship each time it was in port, regardless. Then Alexander, the captain, would ask her into his tiny cabin, and take down the table from its two hooks on the ceiling. He sat on the bunk, and left the chair to Kathrine, and they would talk a little, even though they could hardly understand each other. Each time, Alexander would offer her vodka, and each time she declined. She tried to explain to him that she wasn’t permitted to accept any hospitality from him, but he just laughed, and poured for her anyway, and she left it untouched. Then Alexander would make instant coffee and tell her about his wife and his two daughters, Nina and Xenia, about Murmansk, and then he said Kathrine ought to visit him there sometime. It was a beautiful city, he said, and he showed her some postcards. The Atlantica cinema, the swimming baths, the enormous statue of the soldier to commemorate the defenders of the Soviet polar regions in the great patriotic war. Sometimes he would take out his photo album, and show her photos of the harbors he had visited, pictures of the Shetlands, the Faroes, the Lofoten Islands, and he asked Kathrine why she didn’t get away from here at last.

  “You’re young,” he said, as if that was a reason to leave, “and you’re beautiful.”

  But she just laughed.

  The bad weather moved east. In the middle of the day the thermometer now climbed above zero, and the snow was old and hard.
Kathrine went out to the lighthouse, she hadn’t been there for a long time. She didn’t know who was on duty that month, but it hardly mattered, all the lighthouse keepers were the same anyway. They had been fishermen before, they were unmarried or widowed men who did the job for twenty years and seemed never to get any older, and who then died one day, and it was nothing. They kept the place clean and looked after the equipment and stared out to sea with big binoculars, and watched the ships go by. They were pleased when Kathrine came out to see them. They would talk a lot, tell stories of bygone times, about people who had died or emigrated a long time ago. They always told the same stories, talked uninterruptedly, and still they were as silent as the landscape.

  Kathrine went back to the village across the day-wide empty snowscape, past fjords and mountains, over smooth plains and gentle slopes. The fjeld looked like a drawing made of a few scribbled lines. Russia, Finland, Sweden, and Norway, up here they all looked alike. The borders were covered by snow, the snow joined everything up, and the darkness covered it over. The real borders were between day and night, between summer and winter, between the people.

  Once, Kathrine saw a few reindeer. They were standing in a little huddle, all looking in the same direction. It was spring, the nights were short and bright, but the snow wouldn’t go away until early summer, and then only for a few months.

  Kathrine had left Helge because he was a drinker and a violent man. He hadn’t ever dared to hit her, but she despised him, and eventually threw him out of their apartment, and he didn’t come back. She saw him every day when he came off work in the fish factory, and rode through the village on his old Harley, up to the tenement he now lived in with a couple of other workers, and then down to the port, and up and back down again. Then he would go to the Elvekrog and get drunk, and after midnight Kathrine would hear the sound of the bike for a last time, loud, and then getting quieter, until finally she couldn’t hear it anymore.

  Sometimes Kathrine would visit a girl friend, or girl friends would visit her, and their children would play together until they were tired, and their mothers carried them home.

  The older one became, the harder it was to bear the darkness and the cold. That’s what everyone said, and it might well be true. The old people didn’t say anything, they sat silently at home, watched television, and waited.

  People went visiting, or they received visits. Front doors were left unlocked, and there were always lights on in the windows. They went out in their cars, and drove from house to house. They met in the fishermen’s home, or the pub, the Elvekrog. They drank tea and coffee, and told each other stories. They drank beer until they had forgotten the dark.

  The men, as the joke had it, didn’t want to marry in winter, because then the wedding night would go on for three months. A joke that went around a lot. Why didn’t he get married in winter? Because then the wedding night would have lasted for three months.

  They married in summer, and in winter they got divorced, and then you spent a night with another man, who would make an effort. A night in another bed, other hands, other words that still came to the same thing. Stay awhile, won’t you, come under my blanket, it’s cold, turn around. What is it you want? I don’t know. Don’t say anything.

  Kathrine ate lunch with her customs colleagues at the fishermen’s home, where Svanhild cooked, and where the agents from the Russian fishing companies sometimes stayed, and the engineers and the seamen when the ships had to be refitted.

  At a party in the Elvekrog, Kathrine met Christian, a Dane who was spending a couple of months in the village, to supervise the installation of a new automatic weighing machine in the fish factory. Christian looked exactly the way Kathrine imagined a Dane would look. Everything about him was bright, his eyes, his skin, his hair. He wasn’t fat, but his face and hands were soft and indeterminate. He had a mild voice, and a laptop with an Internet connection. Kathrine visited him a couple of times in his apartment on the edge of the village. He showed her his company’s home page, and Kathrine waited for him to kiss her, but he didn’t kiss her.

  Christian left. By now, Kathrine herself had an Internet connection, and they exchanged e-mails for a while. Sometimes Christian’s e-mails came from other countries he was visiting to supervise the installation of other pieces of equipment in other fish factories. At first, he would always write enthusiastically about those countries, then he would only write about his work, and eventually his e-mails started coming from Aarhus again, where he lived and where the company he worked for was based.

  Kathrine told Alexander about Christian. Alexander had never been to Aarhus, but he had heard it was a beautiful city.

  “Why don’t you go and see him there sometime?” he asked. Kathrine laughed.

  Alexander said, “You expect too much from other people. You’re responsible for your own life.”

  “Did you study psychology?” asked Kathrine. “You sound like someone who’s studied psychology.”

  “No problem,” said Alexander, and he drank the vodka he’d poured for Kathrine, and hung the table up from its two hooks on the ceiling.

  That evening the Verchneuralsk left, and for the first time in months Kathrine went to the pub. She had left the boy with his grandmother. She went home with a man, and spent the night with him. He was a former boyfriend of hers. Two weeks later, the Verchneuralsk came back, with its hold full of fish and ice.

  Sometimes, when the weather was very bad, Kathrine would listen to the forecast on the radio. The wind strengths and the places, Jan Mayen, Greenland, Svalbard, Newfoundland, the Pole. Then she would think about Alexander and his crew. Even though she knew the ship quite well, she couldn’t imagine it in the darkness, somewhere far out to sea, with the waves crashing over her decks, and the men hauling in nets in the continual rise and dip of the waves, day and night. She hoped they were all right.

  It got to be autumn, and winter. The year came to a close, and the next one began. Then it was spring.

  This morning was silvery and clear. A strong wind blew off the Barents Sea, and the waves were topped with foam. Christian was working in Portugal now, and he wrote that the peach trees were already in flower there, and that the Portuguese women were quite different from the Danish women or the Norwegian women. Kathrine wrote that she was going to get married again, and Christian offered his congratulations. She was happy when it rained for the first time in the year, and overnight the blanket of snow was half-melted away.

  Kathrine married Thomas, they had known each other for just six months. Thomas didn’t fancy a honeymoon, he had already been all over. He talked about Africa. He said Africa was his favorite country. When Kathrine said she had never been south of the Arctic Circle, he laughed and said he didn’t believe her. It was true, she said.

  In the summer, Kathrine and her colleagues caught a Russian who had smuggled ten thousand Ecstasy pills over the border. They arrested him, it wasn’t difficult. He smiled, and kept apologizing for the trouble he had put them to. “No problem,” he said, when he was put on the ship to Vadso, where he was tried and sent to prison. When he was released, he disappeared, and was never seen in the village again.

  Kathrine discussed his case with Alexander. She said that sooner or later every smuggler got caught, and it was dangerous to get mixed up with drug dealers. Alexander laughed and winked at her. She shrugged her shoulders, and ignored the vodka he’d poured for her, and drank the coffee. Alexander said he hadn’t been paid in three months. She offered him money, but he refused, and gave her a loaf of Russian bread.

  Once, when it was winter again, and a violent storm was blowing at sea, the Verchneuralsk stayed in port overnight. Kathrine had visited Alexander in the course of the afternoon. He had given her half a codfish in a plastic bag with ice. That evening, on the way home, Kathrine saw Alexander and his men heading for the pub. She raised the bag with the fish in it, and waved. The men didn’t see her. She shouted something to them, but the words were blown away in the gale.

 
; The snow fizzed horizontally through the light shed by the streetlamps. When Kathrine got home, Thomas was already there. He was sitting with the little boy in the kitchen. They were playing a game.

  “Here comes Mama,” said Thomas, and he kissed Kathrine.

  “I’ve got some cod for tonight,” said Kathrine, but the child made a fuss, and then so did Thomas. He said he was going to get hot dogs from the kiosk, and then he disappeared.

  The boy was sitting at the table. Kathrine put her arm around his shoulder.

  “Have you done your homework?” she asked. “Do you like Thomas?”

  “He’s nice,” said the boy. “We played a game together.”

  “Did you win?”

  “We’re still playing,” said the boy.

  Kathrine moved one of the wooden figures on the board forward a square, and said, “I’ll help you.” Then the child said, “God sees everything,” and moved the figure back, and held it there until Kathrine went out into the corridor to take off her shoes.

  “And what shall I do with the fish?” she asked when Thomas came back.

  The next day Alexander was reported missing. A woman everyone knew said she had seen him walking out of the village at half past one at night. She said she hadn’t been able to sleep. And he had been just the same as ever, not drunk. They looked for Alexander for several days, but didn’t even manage to find any traces of him in the snow, and eventually the Verchneuralsk left port without him.

  Kathrine sat looking out the window in the fishermen’s refuge. She walked through the village. The sun hadn’t appeared for a couple of weeks now. The lights were on in the windows of the houses. The streetlamps were on night and day, and even the graves in the cemetery had lights on them. At Christmas, Kathrine thought of Alexander’s wife and his two daughters. She wanted to write to them, but she didn’t know what to say, and so she let it go. Thomas gave Kathrine an electric wok.