by Peter Stamm
“Not anymore,” he said.
“Have you gone on climbing expeditions?”
“Sometimes.” Harald shrugged his shoulders. “We got along well. But he was a daredevil. I didn’t have any time that day. He went off by himself.”
“Did you not want to keep anything of his? Nothing?”
“What are we supposed to keep? His clothes? His books? It’s him I miss, not his things.”
Harald cooked for Kathrine. He opened a bottle of wine. It was a good evening. Harald talked about his voyages along the coastline, about the spring storms, and the tourists. In his younger days, he’d worked on container ships all over the world. He talked about exotic countries. When he asked Kathrine if she wouldn’t like to see Hong Kong or Singapore for herself, she wasn’t sure. “All those people,” she said. “And I bet there are bugs.”
“What about your mosquitoes?” said Harald, and laughed. “At least cockroaches don’t sting.”
“And did you have a girl in every port?”
“Well, it wasn’t like the Norwegian coastal line, that’s for sure,” said Harald. “Or would you go for a sailor?”
“We have a seamen’s mission. Do you know Svanhild?”
Kathrine laughed. She couldn’t imagine Svanhild as a sailor’s girl.
“I know one or two who’d have been happy with her,” said Harald, laughing as well. “She’s not the world’s greatest cook, but she can run a household when the man’s not there. She’s competent. And she has a kind heart.”
“You’re talking like an old fisherman. Like my first husband. Is your wife competent?”
“Very. Our marriage works best when I’m away. Then she can do whatever she wants.”
“And when you’re there, then she does whatever you want, is that it?”
“Then I do what she wants. She keeps an eye on me. Makes sure I don’t drink and smoke too much, or chase the girls.”
“So that’s what you like to do.”
Harald laughed, and then he stopped laughing.
“It works,” he said, and he finished his glass. “It’s all I can ask for. I know she’s got someone else.”
When Kathrine didn’t say anything, Harald went on: “She’s got a man she talks to. An analyst, a shrink, if you like. She sees him in the evenings too, how do I know what goes on there, I’m away all the time.”
Still, Kathrine didn’t say anything. Harald got a bottle of akvavit from the fridge, and a couple of glasses. He poured.
“I never asked her,” he said. “When Harald died… But why am I telling you all this?”
“Why are you telling me?” asked Kathrine. She said she was tired, and was going to bed.
When she was in the bathroom, Harald knocked on the door. She was in the shower, she shouted back. Then through the frosted glass of the shower cabinet, she saw that he’d come in. He moved about slowly and carefully. Finally he stopped. Kathrine saw him the way he must see her. She turned round, and turned the water off. Then she heard his cracked voice very close to her.
“I brought you a towel. I’m going out now.”
“OK,” she said, “thank you.”
When she emerged from the bathroom, he was sitting on the floor beside the door. He was pale, but there were little spots of red on his cheeks. He was smoking a cigarette. A column of ash fell off, and he brushed it nervously into the carpet.
“Thank you for taking me in,” said Kathrine, “I don’t know what else I would have done.”
Harald shook his head. “That’s how far gone I am. Using my dead son to try and get a woman…”
“Be quiet,” said Kathrine.
“What else have I got to offer?” said Harald. “My suffering.”
“I liked you the moment I saw you,” said Kathrine, “when we were on the bridge, and you pointed out that seal.”
Kathrine spent two days and two nights at Harald’s. On the afternoon of the third day, she took the train to Oslo. At the station, Harald asked her where she was going next.
“I’ve got a friend called Christian,” she said. “He’s Danish, lives in Aarhus. I’m going to visit him there.”
“Write to me,” said Harald. “And when you’re next in Bergen… stay with me anytime you like. With us. I’ll tell my wife about you.”
The journey from Bergen to Oslo took seven hours. The train went over innumerable bridges, through tunnels and narrow valleys, past fjords and glaciers. In Oslo, Kathrine got on the night train. She dozed in her seat, she couldn’t sleep properly. When she changed trains in Malmo, she was dead tired. Eighteen hours after leaving Bergen, she finally arrived in Aarhus. She took a bus, and rode out to Christian’s address. She was surprised to find herself in front of a single concrete apartment block.
Christian’s name wasn’t next to any of the apartments, but there was a family called Nygard who were listed. A. and K. Nygard. A man just leaving the building held the door open for Kathrine, and she took the elevator up to the fifth floor. From the elevator column, a glass door led to a long narrow corridor off which the apartments opened. Kathrine looked down at the town. She was surprised how flat and monotonous it all looked. The streets were all alike, the houses, the colors. She saw a mailman going from house to house, cars stopping at traffic lights, and then driving on.
There was a straw star hanging on the door of A. and K. Nygard’s apartment, even though Christmas was more than a month ago. Kathrine rang the bell. A woman of about fifty in a stylish dress opened the door. Something about her face reminded Kathrine of Christian, perhaps it was the watery eyes, perhaps the soft, undefined features. The woman looked at Kathrine without saying anything. Kathrine asked if a Christian Nygard lived here.
“He’s not here,” said the woman.
Kathrine asked when Christian was expected back, and the woman said she didn’t know, he was installing some machinery in France.
“I thought he was back from there.”
“We thought he would be too. But there was some problem. Something technical. He wasn’t even able to be home for Christmas.”
The woman asked who she was, and when Kathrine said a friend of Christian’s, the woman looked at her suspiciously and said Christian had never mentioned her.
“We wrote each other e-mails.”
“The Internet has a lot to answer for,” said the woman, shaking her head. “I keep telling Christian he needs to get out, and not spend all his time in front of the screen. That Internet’s full of the most…”
She gestured dismissively. A small, gray-haired man poked his head out into the passage, and eyed Kathrine curiously. Then he disappeared again.
“I’m sorry I can’t help you,” said the woman.
“Have you got his address?”
“I don’t know if I should give it to you. If Christian hasn’t given it to you himself…”
The woman told Kathrine to wait. She shut the apartment door. After a while it opened again, and the woman handed Kathrine a scrap of paper with the name of a hotel in Boulogne written on it in old-fashioned writing, the Hotel du Vieux Matelot.
“That’s the Old Sailor Hotel,” said Christian’s mother, and she gave a high-pitched, somewhat artificial laugh. Kathrine thanked her, and left.
Five hours after arriving in Aarhus, she was on a train again. She had wanted to have a look at the town, but all the people on the streets had been too much for her, and finally she had taken refuge in a museum that was full of old runestones. She looked at them, but she felt restless, and by the time she was sitting in the train, she had almost no recollection of what she’d seen.
Kathrine felt disappointed. So many years she had been dreaming of a trip to the South. She had supposed that everything would be different south of the Arctic Circle. She had pictured worlds to herself, wonderful, colorful worlds full of strange animals and people as in the books of Jules Verne she had liked so much as a child. Around the World in Eighty Days, Journey to the Center of the Earth, 20,000 Leagues Under the S
ea. But this world wasn’t so very different from the world of home. Everything was bigger and noisier, there were more people around, more cars on the streets. But she had hardly seen anything that she hadn’t seen at home or in Tromso. There’s not a lot of room in a person, she thought.
In Hamburg, it was raining. There was an hour until the night train for Paris was due to depart. Kathrine stayed in the station, sat down at a table by one of the snack carts. She counted up her money, and thought about the way her mother had forever been counting her money, when they were still living in Sweden, and dreaming of having a fishing boat. Kathrine looked about her suspiciously, before she put the money back in her purse. In one corner sat a family from somewhere in Asia, with lots of luggage and quiet, well-behaved children.
A drunk sat down next to Kathrine and said something to her. While she was in Bergen, she had bought herself an American thriller to read on the train. Now she took it out, opened it at random, and pretended to read. But the man wouldn’t leave her alone. He bent forward and looked in her face and said something that Kathrine couldn’t make out. Finally, she got up and walked away. The drunk followed her for a few steps, then turned back. Kathrine waited outside in the main hall. By the time her train came in, she was shaking with cold. She was glad there were still empty places in the sleeping cars. She was all alone in her compartment. It reminded her of the cabins on the Russian trawlers, only with a bigger window.
Slowly, the train rolled out of the station. Rain lashed against the window, and Kathrine saw the many lights in the city, and for the first time since setting out she had the feeling of being somewhere out in the wide world.
The train moved through the darkness, with only occasional clusters of lights. Kathrine undressed and placed her clothes on the suitcase, which she had stowed on the middle bunk. She lay down. The train swayed gently, and the monotonous sounds made her sleepy.
Kathrine was walking through an enormous department store. It was dark, only where she was was somehow lit up. The light stayed with her. There were no other people in the store, but she sensed she was not alone, that she was being watched. She knew she had forgotten something, but she didn’t know what. She knew she was dreaming, and at the same time she knew the dream was real, because she was dreaming it. Her shopping cart was empty. She walked through the store, between the long shelves that were like walls. She was frightened, even though she felt nothing could happen to her here, that nothing was real, that she was in a dream. She heard the noise of the train, but the dream didn’t stop. She was trapped in it.
Kathrine awoke when the light came on in the compartment. She saw two legs right in front of her face, and she heard the voices of the sleeping-car conductor and a young man. She wanted to speak, to tell the conductor that this compartment was reserved for women, and that there must be some mistake. But she didn’t say anything, and even shut her eyes when she noticed him stoop to have a look at her. Then the conductor went out, and the man shut the door and bolted it. He put his bags away and sat down on the bunk facing her, and when he saw her eyes were open, he said hello. “In here is for women,” she said in English. The man shook his head and replied that the compartments were not separated by sex. Then the word sex seemed to embarrass him, and he said, men and women.
Kathrine pulled her clothes, which she had beside her on her red suitcase, under her blankets. She was only wearing panties and a T-shirt, and she hoped the man would take one of the bunks over her head. But he remained sitting opposite her, and asked her where she was going, and when she said Paris, whether she knew Paris, and where she came from, and what her name was. He said his was Jurgen.
“Where are we?” asked Kathrine.
“Bremen,” said Jurgen. “Paris is beautiful. I’m going to Brussels.”
He explained that he was an intern with the European Commission, and when Kathrine said she was from Norway, he asked her lots of questions about fishing regulations, and wanted to know her views on catching whales, and the overfishing of the seas. He seemed to know all about Norway. More than I do, thought Kathrine, he knows more about my own country than I do. She said that where she came from, they didn’t hunt whales anymore. Then she said she was on her honeymoon, she didn’t know what prompted her to say that. Perhaps because she had been afraid, or perhaps just to get him to stop talking about Norway.
“Where’s your husband?” asked Jurgen.
Kathrine hesitated. She really didn’t want to talk about her marriage with him, and she said, “He’s waiting for me in Paris.” She thought, it really doesn’t matter what I tell him. And then she wanted to see what it felt like, lying to somebody, and making up a story. Her husband, she said, was a genetic scientist, and was giving a lecture at the University of Paris. And she herself? She was a dancer. She had attained international renown, and had been all over the world. But a couple of years ago, she had given up dancing, and was now living in Oslo with her husband. As stories went, it wasn’t very plausible. What was she doing in a second-class compartment, if she was a famous dancer? But Jurgen didn’t seem to suspect anything. He was just as stupid as she had been. He beamed, and asked her what places she had been to. She talked about going on tour in Europe, in the U.S., in Japan. And when Jurgen asked her about Japan, she was quite happy to tell him. She had once read a book about Japan. The trip had been fantastic. Every evening, she had had a show in a different city, and in the daytime, she had visited all the different temples and gardens.
“There was one man who used to send me roses every day. He followed us on our entire tour, and saw every performance. He was besotted with me. He was on the board at Sony, a very rich man. He filmed me with a video camera, even though that wasn’t allowed. A tiny little thing. A prototype. Not for general sale. He was in charge of developing new products.”
She stopped. She didn’t enjoy inventing stories. She felt wretched doing it, and she couldn’t think of what else she was going to tell Jurgen. She couldn’t talk to him if she was lying to him. She felt even more alone than she had felt before Jurgen had come into the compartment, and the more she went on, the more baffled she was by Thomas.
“So what is it exactly that your husband does?” asked Jurgen.
“Look, I’ve got to go to sleep now,” she said. “I’ve got a hard day ahead of me.”
Jurgen took off his pants and shirt. He was wearing light blue underclothes, and he didn’t seem at all awkward. Kathrine asked him whether he had sisters. Yes, he said, three sisters, why? He turned round, and made his bed. He scratched his bottom. Kathrine felt reminded of a theology student who had done his internship in the village, she couldn’t remember his name now. She smiled. Jurgen lay down. He asked her if she’d like to hear a joke. She asked him how old he was. Nineteen, he said, and she said she was tired, and good night.
Kathrine thought about the theology student. He had spent one winter in the village, and had helped the vicar with the community work. He had organized the church fair. Rune was his name, and he had come from Oslo. For a whole month he’d gone around the village, trying to talk people into making things to sell at the church fair. Kathrine had told him there was no point in such a small village.
“I make something for you to buy, and you make something for me to buy. Where’s the sense in that? I might as well make something for myself.”
“If you make something, I’ll buy it,” Rune had replied. But Kathrine hadn’t made anything. At most, she made coffee for him, he was slightly in love with her, she had noticed. Perhaps he had said something to that effect too. Then she had met Thomas at the bazaar. And Rune had been sensible, he had known she wouldn’t leave the village, and that it was no place for him. And he had left.
Rune had asked Kathrine to go to church, but she had never gone, not then or later. She didn’t believe in God. Almost no one in the village believed in God, perhaps not even the vicar, who was a nice man, and did his job same as everyone else.
Only Ian believed in God. Ian was the Scotti
sh priest whom Kathrine sometimes met on the street, who worked as a missionary with the Russian seamen. The first time she had seen him had been on a trawler, and she took him for a Russian. She had looked through his rucksack for contraband, but it was only full of Bibles. Ian belonged to an international organization that had been founded to convert people in the Eastern bloc countries, and was now fighting the spread of radical sects. He had set up a little prayer room on the lower floor of the fishermen’s refuge. He asked the seamen along, made them cups of tea, talked and sang and prayed with them, if they wanted. When Kathrine ran into him, he was always in a woolen hat, and with an old rucksack full of Russian Bibles. Then he said how unhappy he was in the village, and how lonely, and she walked with him a bit, and tried to comfort him. She asked him why he didn’t get himself posted somewhere else, and said he surely couldn’t buy happiness for others at the expense of his own unhappiness. But Ian said Jesus had brought him here, and Jesus would take him away again. She said the Hurtig Line brought you here, and will take you away again.
“The people here believe in God, they just don’t believe in Jesus,” Ian said once, “they believe in the Creation, but they don’t believe in love.”
“Well, Creation exists,” said Kathrine, “whereas love…”
Then Ian said he wished she and her husband could be brought together again. Kathrine said Helge wasn’t her husband anymore, and Ian said he would still pray for both of them. And now Thomas wasn’t her husband anymore either, and Kathrine wondered whether Ian would pray for them too, and she hoped it wouldn’t help. She thought of her son as if he were Thomas’s rather than her own.
For the church bazaar, Ian had glued sand and shells onto little picture frames, dozens of little ornamented picture frames, but no one had wanted to buy them. Finally, Rune had bought a couple, and given one to Kathrine. He put a picture of himself in the frame. Kathrine threw away the frame after Thomas had made fun of it. She kept the picture.