Unformed Landscape (2 page)

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.

S
vanhild didn’t ask Kathrine why she wanted a room, she only asked her how long she wanted to stay. Kathrine said, “One night, maybe longer,” and Svanhild gave her a key. It was late.

The room was small and much too warm, full of a dry electric heat. It had a smell of dust, even though all its surfaces were sealed, the laminated floors, the PVC wall panels, the cheap melamine furnishings.

Kathrine tipped open the window as far as it would go and switched on the television, which was fixed to the wall on a metal arm. She chose an English-language news channel, and turned the volume down so low that she could hear the speaker, but not make out the words. She lay
down on the bed. The cover wasn’t old, but it was full of cigarette holes and stains that washing had only driven deeper into the material. She stood up and went over to the window. The room was on the lower ground floor, the window was only just above ground level.

Kathrine looked out onto the street she walked down every morning on the way to work. She thought of the people who had been in this room before her, seamen, fishing agents, engineers. Perhaps Christian had slept here his first few nights, before he had found an apartment. Perhaps he had watched her go by in the morning, smoking a cigarette out of the window, from that strange vantage. Before they had met. On one of those winter mornings when you had to look at the clock to know whether it was day yet, or not. When it didn’t get light at all, or just an hour or two at midday. Maybe Christian had observed her. She couldn’t remember, was it he who had spoken to her in the Elvekrog, or vice versa. She had the feeling that that woman who walked past this window every morning was not herself, the feeling that she had turned into someone else, a stranger, a chance visitor in an unfamiliar village, in a year that had just turned. She had taken the ship on the Hurtig Line, had got off on a whim, and had taken a room. Tomorrow, she would travel on, and forget the name of this village.

Kathrine was confused, and her confusion frightened her. It was as though she had lost all her orientation, as though she had stepped out of her life like a house, a
house she was viewing now from the outside, from below, from a foot above the ground, from the point of view of a dog, or a child, the child she had been when her parents had first come to the village. She rambled through her memories. There was no more before and after. Her whole life seemed to lie ahead of her, like this village. All the people she had known were still there, including her father, who had died four years ago, and Alexander, and Christian, who was somewhere in Portugal, or France, or Spain. Nothing changed, nothing had changed. She could go to school, she thought, and attend her early lessons again, and then go on to the Elvekrog, and dance with Helge. He would get her pregnant. Down in the port, the
Verchneuralsk
was docking, Christian was just coming off work in the fish factory, he left town again, the baby was born, Kathrine was sixteen and smoking her first cigarette, was kissing a boy for the first time. She was sitting with Morten in the old German harbor fortifications, and they were looking across at the village and planning a trip to Paris that they would never make. Kathrine was going to the library, taking books out she could not yet understand, that no longer interested her. She was drinking coffee with Alexander. Her father got ill, her son got ill, Kathrine got ill. Helge came home drunk. The winters were endlessly long. Kathrine was visiting her friends, and their kids played together. Then her second marriage, and the celebrations at Thomas’s parents. Her mother spent the whole day helping out in
the kitchen. When Kathrine came to get her, she refused. She had borrowed an apron from Thomas’s mother, and Kathrine felt ashamed for her. Thomas and the other men were sitting in the den, smoking cigars, and the women were sitting in the living room, drinking tea. Kathrine didn’t know what to do with herself.

It wasn’t until she thought about Thomas that some order came to her thoughts. His life was going somewhere. He had always known what he wanted, and where he was going. He had grown up in Tromso, done well at school, had gone on to college, and worked at a job. Then his grandmother had died, and his parents moved to the village, to their big house, one of the nicest in the village, with a big garden. Thomas’s father had taken early retirement, and spent his days reading the Bible and managing his money. Thomas’s mother was active in the community, got herself voted onto the school board and the library committee.

Then Thomas came into the village, and became production manager at the fish factory. Kathrine first met him at the church bazaar, where he was helping his mother at the kindergarten stall. They were selling little crafts things the children and the mothers had made in the course of the year. Kathrine was there with her little boy, and Thomas right away started talking to him, but keeping his eyes all the time on Kathrine. She had found him disagreeable then, and hadn’t liked the way he was with the child. As if he were the father. The child had liked him, maybe he missed
not having a father. That’s what everyone always said. The child needs a father.

Later on, Thomas had gone over and joined them when they were all drinking hot chocolate and eating cake in the community center. He had asked whether the chair next to her was free, and then sat down before she could answer. He had talked about himself, about growing up in Tromso, about his travels. Kathrine hadn’t liked him any better, but the boy was beaming as he hadn’t for a long time, and was all excited. Thomas gave him something, a little toy. Helge was sitting at a corner table with a couple of colleagues. They had brought beer, and were drinking and talking noisily about the bad fish yields of the last few months, and about bikes, and about women. Once, Helge looked across to Kathrine, and grinned at seeing her sitting together with Thomas. Thomas was his boss, but Helge wasn’t interested in Kathrine or the baby anymore, not after Kathrine had told him he didn’t have to pay her any more maintenance, and just to leave her alone.

Then Thomas had called Kathrine a couple of times, had asked her out for a coffee, and then for dinner. She had accepted the invitations, she no longer remembered why. Maybe, like the little boy, she was dreaming of a family, a big house, and a life free from worries. Then he had invited her back on Sunday, her and the child, to meet his parents. It had been a ghastly occasion, stiff and full of little embarrassments and humiliations. But when Kathrine had stepped out onto the glassed-in balcony to smoke a
cigarette, Thomas had come after her and kissed her, and she had kissed him back, in the dull despair that had come over her in that chill house.

Everything thereafter had been a mistake. Kathrine had been overrun by Thomas’s purposefulness, dazzled by the stories about his past and his future. That evening they had slept together for the first time, a rushed job in Kathrine’s living room, while the child was in the bedroom, playing with a train set Thomas had given him. Thomas had knelt in front of the sofa. He hadn’t even taken off his clothes.

That day, Kathrine had met Thomas’s sister Veronica, and Einar, her husband. At the time they were living with Thomas’s parents, in the big house. Einar owned the little computer store on the main street. But the business wasn’t doing well, and Veronica and Einar decided to go back to Tromso. Then Thomas said the apartment in his parents’ house would be empty. If we take it, he said, then we can get the whole house, when my parents are dead. But that was later on, when they were already married, and when Thomas was already living with Kathrine.

Thomas knew what he was after. When he started talking about marriage, it hadn’t even crossed Kathrine’s mind. His life represented a bold stroke through the unformed landscape of her life. Like the pistes for a snowmobile, marked with poles in the snow, his life cut across hers, with an objective and a destination. It was possible that Thomas himself didn’t know why he had chosen this particular path, but he had put down the marker poles, and it was
a way that could be gone, and that he was going to go with her.