by Peter Stamm
Kathrine thought about Randy, who had spent an afternoon as a deer. A game. She thought of the masks she had worn as a little girl, and of the masked balls at the Elvekrog. The sweat running down into your eyes, and your vision impaired by the narrow slits. Thomas had once come home with a pig mask, but he hadn’t put it on. Kathrine imagined him in it. She looked into the narrow gap between the face and the mask, and she saw Thomas laughing uncertainly in the shadow of the other face, saw his pupils dart this way and that. She saw him standing alone in the lit-up room. She watched him from next door, the door was just ajar. He was standing there, naked but for the mask, with his upper body leaning back slightly. He grunted once or twice, first softly, then louder. Then he got down on all fours and crept around the room, and snuffled at the radiators, the furniture, the carpets. She saw him without a mask. Emerging from the bathroom, turning off the light, running to bed with short little steps, slipping under the covers next to her. She pushed the covers back. I want to see you. And all at once, Thomas had turned into a naked woman. He jumped out of bed, and ran off. He was an old woman, his skin was wrinkled, his hair white as snow. Stay here, she called after him. She got up. Thomas had vanished. All the doors in the apartment were open, the front door opened onto a snowy landscape. But it wasn’t her apartment, and not her village.
Kathrine gave a start. A window had opened on the screen.
“You have a personal message from harrypotter,” she read, “on your breasts are two fornicating frogs, two more frogs are fornicating on your thighs…”
She closed all the windows, paid, and left. The train to Narvik had left a quarter of an hour ago.
Kathrine ran through the streets of Stockholm. It was cold and rainy. People were clustered in front of the window of a television shop, watching a soccer game. Kathrine drank a coffee, and ate a hamburger. It was her first time in a McDonald’s. She liked it. It was bright and clean, and all the surfaces were laminated, as they were in the room at the fishermen’s refuge. Easy to clean.
In the corridor of the fishermen’s home there was a map that showed all the missions up and down the Norwegian coast, clean, bright buildings, well heated, and easily washable. All the rooms were the same. The heating was electric, meals were served at the same time, the food wasn’t good, but it wasn’t bad either. And Svanhild took care of everything and smiled, if you asked a question. She wore a white coat like the workers in the fish factory, and she always had a rag in her hand. When she came to the table after the meal, to ask if it had been all right, she wiped her cloth over the table, and when you went to the register to pay, and exchanged a few words with her, she wiped her cloth over the counter, back and forth, without looking. Often Svanhild didn’t say anything at all, and just wiped. Wiping was her language, it could mean anything at all.
In the village, people didn’t know much about Svanhild. She came from the south of Sweden, that was agreed, and sometimes she told stories about that, stories in which she herself didn’t play any part. It was as though she didn’t have a life, had never had any life. She was very gentle, and she had a beautiful voice. If you asked her long enough, she would sing the sad songs of her homeland, and a big hush fell over the restaurant.
Only once had Kathrine seen Svanhild be vehement, and that was when a couple of seamen had brought beer into the fishermen’s refuge. Svanhild had preached to them about the evils of alcohol, and when they laughed at her, she had turned them out.
She had never married. From time to time, directly or obliquely, a seaman would make a proposal to her, in jest or otherwise, and she would make a joke, and everyone laughed. When the seaman blushed and stammered, she would lay her hand on his arm and say, you need a young woman who’ll have babies to occupy her while you’re away at sea.
Kathrine followed a group of rowdy and laughing young people to a bar. The music was loud, and it was dark. Kathrine sat down at the bar, next to a woman who had her back to her. If someone looked at her, she smiled. But no one came and spoke to her. All the men she liked were with women, or in groups of other men. She smoked a cigarette, drank a beer. All around her there was laughter. The people knew each other, they often came here. And of course they didn’t look at Kathrine, or just fleetingly, the way they might look into a shop window when the shop is closed, and move on. It wouldn’t make the slightest difference if I wasn’t here, thought Kathrine, and she smiled. She could smile in such a way that it looked as if she didn’t care. I have to go back, she thought, I have no other choice. Take a job in Stockholm. Start a new life in Stockholm, or what people call a new life. But she was even more afraid of a new life than she was of her old one. Look for a job, an apartment. And where would she live until then? There was no fishermen’s refuge here. Maybe the Salvation Army, a home for young women. But she wasn’t a young woman anymore either. She was twice married, she had a husband and a child. She had to return.
Someone passed her a joint. She had never tried hash. Not with my job, she sometimes said. But she wasn’t working now, and she felt sad, and perhaps a little curious. She took a drag, and was going to pass it on. But no one was sitting next to her, and so she took another drag, and then gave the joint back to the woman who had given it to her. The woman smiled and said, hey.
The music in the bar was lovely. There was something glassy about it, and the rhythm seemed to fit with Kathrine’s heartbeat, her breathing, which kept accelerating. She made herself breathe more slowly, and before long she had the feeling she was only breathing out, or in and out simultaneously. It was as though she’d left the room, and was passing through a landscape, hovering over a landscape of sounds. When she shut her eyes, she saw brightly colored patterns that opened out like delicate fans or flowers. The patterns were yellow and purple and hemmed with black lines. They looked like gentle hills. It was beautiful, and Kathrine felt at ease. She opened her eyes and looked through a long tunnel or pipe. Someone had rolled up the carpet, with everything that was on it. Workmen had rolled it up, and carried it down to the street. Far away from her she saw people moving, getting up. But the music wasn’t finished yet. Why did they turn out the lights, she wondered, and she closed her eyes again. She was rolled up inside the carpet, and slowly the cold got to her. The colors were gone. It was dark, and Kathrine was shivering.
“Where d’you live?” a man asked her. The door was open.
“Nowhere,” she said, “I’m traveling.” She looked at her watch. “I’ve got a train to catch.”
She went to the station. Her mind cleared in the cold air. She was cold, but she was happy to be cold.
The train was already there, and she bought a ticket for a couchette from the conductor, and went into her compartment. She hoped she would be alone. One more night on a train, one more night in a couchette. Kathrine went out into the corridor, and looked out the window.
She felt sad and tired. She wanted to get back to her house and her village. She wanted peace. She wanted not to think for a while. She had seen so much in the last two weeks, so much that she had never seen before, and yet she had the feeling she hadn’t seen anything at all. That people had different faces, she had already known. She had known that there are some houses that are bigger and more beautiful than others. A thousand times a thousand makes a million, and it wasn’t necessary to go to Paris to find that out.
Hordes of downhill and cross-country skiers were walking along beside the train. They laughed and chattered. When the first of them climbed into Kathrine’s carriage, she fled into her compartment, shut the door, and drew the curtains. She heard the skiers clatter past outside. Then the door opened, and three women came in. Each had a tin of beer in her hand. They were laughing. Their ski suits smelled of mothballs.
The three women were traveling up to Narvik together, to go on a skiing holiday. They all lived in Stockholm, they explained, and they drank their beer, and they talked about their husbands or their boyfriends, who all seemed to be idiots. When they learned that Kathrine came from the Fin
nmark, they asked her about Narvik, and about Norwegian men. They wanted to know if there were good pubs and discos in Narvik. There’s a cinema, said Kathrine, and a library, and the three women looked at her with pitying expressions, and then spoke to her as if she were a child or handicapped person. They asked Kathrine where she lived, what her job was, if she had a boyfriend or even a husband. Kathrine said she had a child and a career, that she’d twice been married, that she was married to her second husband. At that the women were nicer to her. They introduced themselves: Inger, Johanna, and Linn. None of them had a baby, and they all worked in the same law office.
The four women got undressed. At first, Kathrine felt ashamed in front of the others, but then Johanna said something about Inger’s paunch, and the three of them started to compare bellies and thighs, and they were amazed that Kathrine was so slim, and that there was no trace of her pregnancy. It was so long ago, said Kathrine. And she got a lot of exercise in the course of her work.
“You could make more of yourself,” said Linn, who was lying on the bunk opposite Kathrine.
“My husband doesn’t care,” Kathrine said quietly. “It doesn’t make any difference.”
“That’s what you say. And anyway, you’d just be doing it for yourself.”
“I don’t want to make anything of myself,” said Kathrine.
Johanna, who was lying above them, told them to quiet down, she wanted to sleep, so that she’d be in shape for the Norwegian men.
“As if your Eirik ever gave you any peace,” said Inger and laughed, “the bull of Lulea.”
“Peace from his snoring, you mean,” said Johanna, and gave a demonstration of Eirik’s snoring. “No, honestly,” she said, “I’m dead tired.”
“Girls,” said Inger.
Linn had gotten up.
“Scoot over,” she said quietly, “or do you want to sleep?”
Kathrine slid over to the wall, and Linn crept in under the blanket next to her. Kathrine had never lain in bed with a woman. She had never had that many girlfriends, and the village was so small that there was never any reason to stay the night with one of them. You visited each other, stayed until late, but at the end of the evening you still went home.
Kathrine lay on her side, and Linn lay facing her. They both held their heads propped on their hands. Their faces were very close, and Kathrine lowered her gaze, and played with her hand on the pillow.
“Did you run away?” Linn whispered, so quietly that only Kathrine could hear.
“My husband lied to me,” said Kathrine. “Everything he said to me was a lie.”
“They all do that,” said Linn. “You never know what you’re up against. The best thing would be not to tell each other anything at all.”
“I followed him once. He said he was going for a run. And then he was just sitting at the table in a hut.”
“And you left him for that?”
“It was all lies. There wasn’t a word of truth anywhere.”
“Did he have someone else?”
Kathrine said that’s what she had thought to begin with. But no, she was almost certain that he was faithful to her. If it had been that, she added, it would have been easier to understand.
“What about you?”
Kathrine said her arm was hurting. She turned to face the wall, and dropped her head onto the pillow. Linn pushed her head next to Kathrine’s, and laid her hand on her shoulder.
“Your hair smells good,” she whispered. “Do you use conditioner?”
“Tar soap,” said Kathrine, and giggled briefly. “Once I had someone else… twice. We hardly ever slept together, Thomas and I. Not for months. And then I met this old friend…”
“You don’t have to apologize,” said Linn.
“It felt so humiliating,” said Kathrine, “the fact that he’d stopped wanting…”
“Are you crying?”
“I’m all right.”
Linn said her boyfriend wanted to sleep with her the whole time. At first, she had liked it, but by now it was getting boring.
“He always does the same things. I think he has maybe three variations. After ten seconds, I know which it’ll be. And if I don’t feel like it, or if I have a headache, I mean really a headache, then he gets all offended, and says I have a problem, and I need to see a specialist. At least it’s over quickly.”
“Do you love him?”
“Men love. Women are loved.”
Linn laughed softly, and asked what he was like in other respects, Kathrine’s husband. Kathrine said she had no idea, everything he had told her was a lie.
“But you must know what he’s like. I mean what he does, what he says, if he helps in the house, how he treats you when his friends are visiting. All that. He was around all the time.”
Kathrine thought back. Then she said Thomas wasn’t a bad man. He had aims, he knew what he wanted, and he was nice to the kid, even though he wasn’t the father.
“He brings him presents, and me too.”
“Well, what else do you want? And if on top of that, you’ve got this old boyfriend, with whom you…”
“I want a man I love,” said Kathrine. “I want to love my husband.”
“And now you’re going back to him?”
“I don’t know. Why did he lie to me so much?” Kathrine sobbed quietly. Linn drew her close, and stroked her head, the way Kathrine did with her kid when he was upset and couldn’t sleep at night, and crept into bed with her and Thomas.
“I’d like to have a baby,” said Linn. “What’s it like to have a baby?”
“I don’t know. He’s going to school already.”
“Why don’t you stay with us at Narvik?” Linn gave Kathrine a gentle shaking, as if to show her something. “It would be fun. We’ve got two double rooms.”
“I don’t have much money left.”
For a moment there was silence. Then Linn said Kathrine could come as her guest. The hotel wasn’t very expensive, and she had a good salary, and it would be for her own benefit, it would be like a present to herself, because she quite often felt superfluous. Johanna and Inger had known each other long before she ever came on the scene, they had been friends at university, and they were a little older than her, and also they did downhill skiing, while she did cross-country. Kathrine was bound to be better at cross-country, so perhaps she could give her some tips, and interpret for them, and show them the sights of Narvik, only please not the library.
Linn talked for so long that Kathrine had changed her mind again, and was going to say no, but then Linn said, I like you, and Kathrine said, I like you too, yes, and thank you very much.
“You mustn’t thank me,” said Linn, gave Kathrine’s shoulder another shake, and slipped off the bunk and back to her own bed.
At noon the next day, they had to change trains, and then the new train crossed the Norwegian border. It traveled through snowy valleys. Inger looked out the window the whole time, in the hope of seeing reindeer, and Johanna asked Kathrine questions about Norway that she was unable to answer.
The hotel was high above the station and close to the ski lift. The woman at the desk was red-cheeked and plump, and wore a traditional green dress, which Inger and Johanna laughed at as they all walked up to their rooms. Linn and Kathrine shared a room. From the window, they could see down to the fjord, and the black dockworks, where iron from Kiruna was loaded.
The next day, Kathrine borrowed a set of cross-country skis from the hotel, and went out onto the trails with Linn. When it had gotten dark early in the afternoon, the mountain with its illuminated slopes looked like a Christmas tree. The lights sparkled in the water of the fjord.
“It’s beautiful,” said Linn, “the night.”
“Maybe,” said Kathrine. “Come on, let’s go back.”
They ran into Johanna and Inger in the sauna.
“No men anywhere,” said Johanna, but Kathrine was happy they were on their own. After the sauna, they rested, then they went out to a steakhouse. The
re at last they saw men, a group of Frenchmen, standing by the bar, who turned to look at the women when they walked in, and afterward too. When Inger went to the washroom, one of the Frenchmen began a conversation with her, and they could be heard laughing together. But then she returned to the table, and said, “What an idiot.”
The three Swedish girls had never tasted reindeer meat. Kathrine said they should definitely try it. If only so that Inger finally got to see something of one. Inger and Johanna ordered hamburgers, but they tried some of Linn’s and Kathrine’s, and they had to admit the meat tasted good with the cranberry sauce on it.
After that, they went to the cinema, there was a science fiction film that none of them especially liked. But then what else were they going to do?
“The library’s probably shut already,” said Johanna, and grinned.
The four women walked through the night streets of Narvik. The snow had already melted away on the pavements, and refrozen, and melted again and refrozen, until it was an inch-thick sheet of ice. It had been sprinkled with gravel, but the four women kept slipping anyway, and held onto each other like drunks. They probably were all a bit drunk. They climbed up the steep little lane that led to their hotel.
“No men,” said Johanna. “Norway is just as shitty as Sweden.”
Johanna and Inger went inside, while Linn and Kathrine stayed outside, to smoke one last cigarette.
“She doesn’t mean it that way,” said Linn.
“How does she mean it?”
“Her boyfriend is a bastard. He throws himself onto anything that moves. He’s come on to me before now. And Inger… he and Inger…”
“Does Johanna know…?”
“Yes, you should be pleased with the one you’ve got.”
“I think I could have forgiven him for everything. But somehow it’s past all that now.”
“In our calling, if there’s any doubt, it’s innocent until proved guilty.”