Unformed Landscape

by Peter Stamm

  She walked back to the main street, and the bus stop. The next bus didn’t leave for another half an hour. There was a café by the bus stop, called Aux Travailleurs de la Mer. Two men were sitting, playing lotto. The numbers were flashed up on a screen. Kathrine drank a café au lait, and then she went out. Two children were staring in at the café through the big windows, others were sitting on wooden benches alongside a bumper car, which was not yet or no longer in operation. Kathrine had liked the music in the café, men with gentle voices, singing in French. Everything was gentler here, the language, the voices, the children’s games, the weather, the air, which was damp and wrapped itself around her, and the wind that blew in off the sea, and wasn’t cold, but still took her breath away.

  She wondered how her life might have been different if she’d been born here, and had lived here. Randy would be sitting on a bench beside a bumper car. She would speak French, her name would be Catherine. She would be a better cook maybe, and dye her hair. But I wasn’t born here, she thought, so there’s no point in even thinking about it. I am as I am, and that’s it. For always.

  A line of cars emerged from a side street, decorated with white ribbons and flowers. When they had turned onto the main street, they veered about dangerously. The drivers must be drunk, and the people in the cars looked very serious as they passed the bus stop.

  Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue, thought Kathrine. What did I borrow when I married Helge? With Thomas, it was a pearl necklace of Veronica’s. And blue? A little blown glass bird that someone had given to her when she was a little girl. And old and new? Thomas didn’t get it, he called it all a superstition. The best day of my life, thought Kathrine.

  The bus drove up a green hill into the town. On one side of the road was a cemetery, on the other a soccer field. A man who had four blue dots tattooed on the back of his hand and something written on his arm that she couldn’t read had sat down in front of Kathrine. She only just got a glimpse of it as the man raised his arm to press the stop button. He got off at the railway station.

  Kathrine rode on as far as the sea, and went into the aquarium. “For those who love the sea,” it said on a sign outside. There was almost no one there but children with their parents, and she felt rather out of place. She saw jellyfish, sharks, strange spider crabs, enormous red creatures that kept trying to scramble up the black back walls of the aquarium, and kept falling back. There was piano music coming out of loudspeakers. The tuna fish looked very serious, and had ancient faces. There was a dark room that looked like the deck of a trawler. Kathrine read the signs on the walls, which were written in English and French. Another world, and the catch depended entirely on the decisions the skipper took. After God, he is the master of the ship. Kathrine thought about Alexander. He certainly hadn’t believed in God. No more than she did herself, or most of the people in the village, no matter what Ian said. Life was too hard where they lived, they didn’t have time for things like that. It’s a tough job, it said on one sign, life isn’t lived by the normal rhythm of day and night, but by the rhythm of the sea and the schools of fish.

  At the exit, there was a notice board, where visitors could leave a note of their impressions. “I loved the spider crab because there so big”—a child’s writing. Randy would have liked those too, thought Kathrine. At the souvenir shop she bought him a postcard of a spider crab, and a kit for a model trawler, bigger than the Verchneuralsk, bigger than Alexander’s ship.

  The sea was yellow-green and the sky a grayish blue. The wind was blowing hard, and sheets of sand blew past Kathrine’s ankles. It was as though the ground was shifting under her feet. She walked along the beach, thinking that it was the same sea that battered the rocks thousands of kilometers to the north, the same sea as the one in which perhaps Alexander had drowned, on which the Verchneuralsk continued to fish without him, on which Harald would soon be under way again, taking his Polarlys to the north. It was the sea she had so often sat beside when she’d felt unhappy, and had gone out on the Kongsfjord, and sat on the beach there while the child played. There was still sand in her shoes when she was in Paris.

  Kathrine went into Boulogne Cathedral. A choir was rehearsing. She stopped and listened, when a young man walked up and spoke to her. She didn’t understand what he wanted. She shook her head, and he went away.

  Kathrine had never been inside a Catholic church before. She was impressed by the many candles, by the beautiful Virgin Mary, and the statues everywhere. She lit a candle herself, and put down the suggested money. A candle for what, or to what? For Christian and me, she thought. But Christian was nothing more than friendly. She asked herself what he would have done if she hadn’t turned up. He appeared not to have a girlfriend. But maybe he frequented prostitutes. Or he surfed the Web, or got drunk in a bar, or just sat there at a table, like Thomas did in his parents’ hut. And waited.

  He didn’t want anything from her. He wasn’t interested in her. Maybe he wasn’t interested in women. She had never seen him with one. And now he was friendly, just as he was always friendly, wanting to show her Paris, and then put her on a train that would take her back to Bergen or to Narvik, where she would get on a ship. He would give her a kiss on the cheek, and wish her a good trip and give her money if she asked him for some. And in a few weeks’ time he would send her an e-mail from some other country.

  What was she thinking? What did she want from him? She wasn’t sure if he was more to her than a friendly face in a foreign land. She would have let him kiss her then, when he was in the village, and she didn’t have anyone. She would let him kiss her now. She would sleep with him, she wanted to sleep with him. He meant more to her than Thomas did, maybe. But Thomas was her husband, she had made some promises to him, and he had made the same promises to her. He was a liar, but that promise was one he would keep, Kathrine was sure of that. He would never understand her, he would never touch her, but he would give her and her child a home, and would look after them if they were sick. His mother would too, and his father, Veronica, and Einar. They would look after her, they would buy her Christmas presents and birthday presents. Just as Kathrine would buy presents for them. She would.

  She left the cathedral. The wind pushed the last of the clouds away to the east. Kathrine took deep breaths of the cold air. She felt as if she could breathe only when it was light. She thought of the Arctic night, those dark months in the village. Then she felt as though she was taking in the air through her skin, as though everything was dissolving and melting into a dark mass. All the people, all the objects, the houses, the snow, and the rocks overlaid one another like shadows and merged into a big, shapeless darkness.

  Kathrine went back to the hotel. It was one o’clock. She packed her things, paid for the room, and went to the station. A train had just left. The next one was going in an hour. She sat down in the station café and ordered a beer.

  She looked through the high windows and had a view of tower blocks on the other side of the square, a piece of sky, clouds. Before the train came in, Christian appeared in the café. He sat down opposite Kathrine. He didn’t speak, just looked at her with a beaming, or a drunken, smile. He ordered a café au lait.

  “Café olé,” he said, and laughed awkwardly. “I’m a bit drunk, I’m afraid. I don’t like to drink in the daytime. But it was a sort of farewell party. The French…” He laughed.

  Kathrine made a face.

  “I didn’t want you to come on my account…”

  “I wouldn’t mind going back to Paris,” he said when she didn’t say any more. “That’s true. I don’t know when I’d get to see it again.”

  “And then?”

  “Well… then I suppose we both go back.”

  “Thomas emptied out my apartment.”

  “Is that your second husband?”

  She shrugged her shoulders, and told Christian what she hadn’t told him before. He didn’t say anything, and she wasn’t sure whether he was listening to her or whether he
was too drunk. When she was finished, she said, “I don’t know what to do with myself. I don’t have very much money left. Eventually I’ll have to go back. To Thomas, I suppose.”

  “Is it just because of the money?” Christian asked. “Because if you need some…”

  “Where else would I go? I can’t start a new life.”

  “I sometimes have the feeling my life hasn’t even begun,” he said. “I’m glad you didn’t see my room in Aarhus.” He laughed. “I’ve got a picture of the Danish national soccer team up on the wall. I would have taken it down long ago, if I’d had any idea what I was going to put up in its place.”

  “But you get around so much.”

  “That’s one possibility. Flight,” said Christian, and smiled at her. “Compared to me… you’ve had a baby, you’ve been married a couple of times. That’s a life.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’ve got a girlfriend in Aarhus. She’s a nurse. She goes and sees my parents when I’m not there. She trades recipes with my mother.”

  He laughed. Kathrine felt sorry for him. She smiled and said, “Shall we go back to the hotel?”

  The hotel lobby was dark. On the stairs, Kathrine asked Christian what different places he had been to.

  “All over,” he said. “Shall I show you the pictures?”

  “Have you got them here?”

  “Yes,” he said, letting himself into his room. “I’ll show you.”

  His room was even smaller than Kathrine’s. She sat down on the bed. There was an open suitcase on the floor, a pair of socks soaking in the washbasin. On the tiny table, which—as if to catch its fall—had a TV suspended over it, there was an old Danish newspaper, and a little model fighter plane, almost finished.

  “To pass the time,” said Christian, “a Messerschmitt Me 109. The fastest plane in the world, in its day. Before the war.”

  He picked up the model, flew a couple of loops with it round Kathrine’s head, and then went on the attack with machine-gun fire.

  “Don’t do that,” she said.

  He apologized for the mess in the room. Tidying up is half of life, Kathrine thought, but she didn’t want to be thinking about Thomas just now.

  “It’s your room,” she said.

  “The less you make yourself at home, the easier it is to leave,” he said.

  He had got a pile of red and yellow envelopes out of his suitcase. He sat down next to Kathrine, and showed her the photos. He looked at them, one after another, and then passed them to her with a brief introduction, sometimes just a word or two. Most of the pictures were of buildings and landscapes, the sea, a few of the sky, and cloud formations. At the end were pictures of people. A group of men in white coats in front of a fish factory. Sometimes Christian was in the pictures himself. The men stood close together, their arms were around each other’s shoulders, someone had cracked a joke, and they were all laughing. Colleagues of mine, said Christian. Portugal, he said, Grimsby, that’s in England, Bremerhaven, Holger, he’s a friend of mine, Vancouver. “Rome,” he said, and he handed Kathrine a picture of him with the pope. “The Holy Father.”

  “Are you Catholic?”

  “Yes,” he said. “There’s not many of us in Denmark.”

  “What’s it like, being Catholic? I visited the cathedral here.”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never been anything else. Nice.”

  There followed more pictures of seaside towns, fish factories, harbors, and ships. A man hoisting two gutted fish aloft, and smiling.

  “I follow the fish,” said Christian. “Wherever the fish go, so go I.”

  “Why follow the fish?” asked Kathrine. “There are fish all over.”

  “They move through the ocean in schools,” he said. “I can’t imagine it. How far they swim. Whether they know each other. There are so many of them. They multiply.”

  He said he imagined that fish liked being together.

  “If they stay together, they must enjoy each other’s company.”

  Kathrine laughed, and keeled over backward onto the bed. She pushed her shoes off, drew up her feet, and rested her hands on her thighs. Christian turned to look at her. She smiled, and grinned at him. “What sort of feelings do you have? Or are you a fish?”

  “We could leave today,” he said. “I’m finished here. If we hurry, there’s a direct train to Paris at four o’clock. I know a pretty little hotel there.”

  They arrived in Paris a little after six. From the Gare du Nord, they went straight to the Trocadero. They crossed the square between the two wings of the Palais de Chaillot. The Eiffel Tower was all lit up and beautiful.

  “It looks exactly the way I imagined it,” said Kathrine. She bought a little bronze-colored model of it from a pavement dealer, and then got another one for Christian. “Souvenir,” she said, and he said, “Are we having a good time?”

  “Yes,” said Kathrine. “Oui. Shall we go up?”

  “Do you want to?”

  Christian pulled a face, and Kathrine laughed.

  “Danes don’t have a head for heights. Is that it?”

  “The suitcase,” claimed Christian.

  They took the elevator up to the second platform. That’s enough, said Kathrine, as she looked down. She took one picture with Christian in it, and one without. For public and private recollections, she said.

  “Now I’ll have something to tell people about, too,” she said. And suddenly she found herself crying.

  “You mustn’t feel sorry for yourself,” said Christian. “Haven’t you got some sort of tower up there, too?”

  “The tallest radio mast in Norway,” said Kathrine, and wiped her tears away, “but you can’t go up it. I’ve never cried as much as I have this month.”

  “Any other place you have to have gone to?” asked Christian.

  They took a taxi, and drove through the city, down the Champs-Elysées, over the Place Vendôme and past the old and new opera houses. Kathrine took pictures out of the window, and by the time they reached the hotel, the roll of film was finished. The hotel was in a little side street.

  “We could share a room,” said Kathrine. “That would save money.”

  “I don’t know if they have rooms with twin beds here.”

  “I don’t mind sharing a bed,” said Kathrine. That was saying too much and not enough, she thought, while Christian talked with the elegantly dressed, dark-skinned lady at the desk. He tried to talk French. The woman was very patient, but before long she had switched to English.

  “If you prefer, we could move another bed into the room.”

  “No, no, that’s OK.” Christian blushed, and Kathrine turned away and went over to a stand full of leaflets on various tourist attractions. She took one out about a Village Gaulois, and looked at it. There were pictures of wooden huts, and types who resembled the characters in the Asterix comics she had read when she was little. Kathrine thought about the Sami village at Jukkasjarvi, where her father had worked at the time he met her mother. He had called it the Lapp Zoo, when he’d had to depict the traditional way of life of the Sami for the benefit of tourists. As a little girl, Kathrine had gone there often. Her mother had made a Sami costume for her, and had worn one herself, even though she looked rather strange in it. Her family had traveled up to Kiruna from south Sweden before the war. Kathrine’s grandfather and great-grandfather had both worked in the iron mines, enormously strong fair-haired giants. Her mother was blond as well, and looked typically Swedish. Her grandfather, whom Kathrine had never met, was a devout and strict man. When his daughter came home and told him she was getting married and was pregnant, he almost murdered her. And when he learned that the father of her child was a Lapp, he stopped speaking to her. There was no church wedding, her father had threatened the priest, and none of the family members appeared at the registrar’s office, in the town hall.

  Kathrine had often asked herself how her father had won over his mother, how he had managed to seduce the strictly brought-up girl,
who was also fully a head taller than he was. The Sami have more testosterone than the Swedes, her father had said, and laughed. But Mother had said he wanted to buy a fishing boat. “He wanted to get out, and I wanted to get out, too.”

  The tourists had snapped pictures of Kathrine, the little Lapp girl among the reindeer, and her father had given them a ride once around on the reindeer sleigh. The authentic life of the Sami. After work, they had taken off their costume, and driven home in the old Volvo, to their two-room apartment. Her father had switched on the television, and her mother worked out how much money they still needed for their fishing boat.

  The hotel receptionist gave Christian a key. She called him Monsieur and Kathrine Madame.

  “Madame,” said Christian, unlocking the room.

  “I feel like…,” she began, and then stopped short.

  “Shall we have something to eat?” asked Christian. He said he knew a good restaurant in the area.

  They walked for about a quarter of an hour through dimly lit streets, then finally he admitted he had gotten lost. They had to stop three separate people before someone told them the way.

  The restaurant was in a dark courtyard. Outside it was a stall with fruits de mer in baskets on ice. It was still early, there were not many people there.

  “Why don’t your people eat shellfish?” Christian asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Kathrine. “I suppose because there’s enough fish.”

  “Do you feel like trying? I’ll show you how to eat oysters.”

  He ordered a plate of fruits de mer, and showed her the way to extract the snails from their little houses, and how to get the oysters and the other shellfish off their shells. Kathrine was astonished to think she had never eaten shellfish before, but she didn’t especially like it.

  “They don’t taste of anything,” she said.

  Christian cracked a lobster claw for her. They drank white wine, ordered a second carafe, and left their water alone. Their hands touched, and once, Christian held out a morsel of lobster to Kathrine on his fork. Then they drank bitter coffee and calvados, and ate ice cream with hot chocolate sauce. The waiter came along with a little copper can, and poured molten chocolate over the ice cream until they called stop. The restaurant was now full. It was hot and noisy. Kathrine felt drunk with the wine and everything else.