Unformed Landscape (5 page)

The hut was furnished with old furniture that had been replaced in the family house and had been brought out here. They were used pieces from the 1970s, and the curtains were old and faded as well. There were black-and-white photographs on the walls, earlier generations of
Thomas’s family. Serious-looking individuals in dark clothing, ships, the carcass of a whale on the ramp of an old port. Beside the doorway was an embroidered verse from the Bible. “Go ye home to the Lord, thy God, and hearken to His voice!”

Thomas sat there motionlessly. Kathrine shivered. She was bored. Half an hour later, Thomas was still sitting there, forty-five minutes, still. She returned to the road. When she reached her bicycle, she cast one more look back at the hut. After a while, the door opened, and Thomas stepped out into the snow. Kathrine pedaled quickly home.

She was only just back when a good-humored Thomas came in, saying he’d taken two minutes less than last time. Then he said he wouldn’t mind doing more sports, and he missed the contests. He told her about some of his triumphs, grabbed Kathrine’s forearms, and demonstrated a couple of grips. He didn’t even notice how cold her arms were. He laughed and said that when he’d left Tromso, he’d been the best fighter in the club. Then Kathrine said, you smell of beer, and I know you didn’t run to the airport.

She had followed him, she said, and he said, why, didn’t she trust him, and surely he could drink a beer without having to ask for permission. That wasn’t the point, Kathrine said, he had lied to her, he had been lying to her all along. But Thomas claimed he had only gone to the hut to check up on things there, his father had asked him to take a look at the stove, which wasn’t drawing properly. And when Kathrine drew up a list of his other lies, he replied
with fresh claims, and she was convinced he was lying to her. He made wild claims, contradicted himself, his whole life story got mixed up. First he was furious, then he got quieter and quieter, but he didn’t give up. When Kathrine said she was leaving, all he said was that she would see he hadn’t lied, it was all a conspiracy, he had some powerful enemies. She said he was crazy, and she left.

She went to Morten’s, but he wasn’t home. She went to the Elvekrog and drank a beer. Then she went to the fishermen’s refuge. Svanhild in her dressing gown answered the door. Kathrine apologized, but Svanhild said that was fine, she’d only been watching television. Kathrine said she needed a room. She was crying. Svanhild didn’t ask any questions. She got a key, and took Kathrine downstairs to the lower ground floor. She wished her a good night, and lightly brushed her arm with her hand. You’re all cold, she said, and she smiled.

Kathrine spent a week in the fishermen’s refuge.

Kathrine hardly went out on the street anymore since moving back to her apartment. She didn’t go to work, and she only left the house in order to buy necessities. The child often spent the night with his grandmother. He didn’t like coming home, now that Thomas wasn’t there. He said he’d rather be with his grandmother because he was allowed to bring friends back and his grandmother was a better cook. Kathrine didn’t mind. She sat in the apartment,
reading or watching television. On one of the days when the sun didn’t yet reach the village, but the mountaintops were bathed in light for a few minutes, Kathrine took her skis, and went out to the lighthouse, and talked to the lighthouse keepers.

When she got back late in the afternoon of the following day, she found a moving van in front of the house. She saw Thomas and Einar carrying furniture and cardboard boxes out into the street. She saw Thomas’s parents, and Veronica, also helping. She heard them laughing. The engine of the van was running. Kathrine waited and watched from a distance. She was surprised to see Veronica and Einar in the village, then she remembered that tomorrow was Thomas’s birthday. When the van had left, she went to the house. There was a letter from the bank in the mailbox, a statement. The customs and excise office had paid her her entire salary, even though she hadn’t been in since the middle of the month. Kathrine smiled. She walked up the stairs and let herself into the apartment. It was bare.

You might at least have tidied up after yourself, thought Kathrine. The state of the kitchen. Tidying up is half of life. She walked around the empty apartment. Where the bookshelf had stood there were now two piles of books on the floor, Kathrine’s children’s books, which she had saved for the boy, and a few American thrillers she had ordered from Tromso. That to her was America. Dark
crime-ridden cities. Rainy streets with a few lonely people on them.

In the bedroom, some of her clothes were lying on the dusty floor. Her uniform. So Thomas didn’t know she wasn’t going to work anymore. You could at least have vacuumed, she thought. In the bathroom, in the little cabinet behind the mirror, were her toiletries. Kathrine looked at herself in the mirror. She put on some lipstick, which Thomas had given her once and she’d never used. Kathrine, she thought, funny name.

In the kitchen were a few gadgets she had bought and that Thomas had always thought were superfluous: a juice press, a grain mill, a rice cooker that had been used only once. The electric wok was gone. I thought that belonged to me, thought Kathrine, and forced a smile.

On the sideboard, there was a note from Thomas. He wrote that he had forgiven her. The apartment was ready, and he was expecting her. He wrote that he had picked up the boy at her mother’s. Kathrine had been puzzled to find only some of her things left there. Now she understood. This was another stage of the selection process. Once again, he had pulled out those things he didn’t care for, her old dresses, her kitchen things, her books. Her uniform. Why do you work? he had often asked. I earn enough for the three of us.

Kathrine went from room to room. She didn’t miss Thomas’s things, she had never liked them. She just missed
the television. Thomas had left her laptop behind. And the old clock radio, which she had bought with the first money she had earned. At fourteen, she had spent a summer filling shelves at Rimi’s, while the other children had gone on holiday with their parents. Thomas had long wanted to throw away the clock radio, he had an alarm with a CD player that was much better. You could choose some favorite music to wake you up in the morning. Only Kathrine didn’t have any favorite music.

She switched on the clock radio. The music sounded strangely echoey in the empty rooms. Time to get up, she said, or you’ll be late to work. Early bird gets the worm. She sat down on the floor. Not a lot, my life, she thought, there’s not much to show for it. She cried. She lay on her belly on the floor and sobbed long and loud. Then she got up. She wiped away the tears and the lipstick, and brushed the dust off her clothes. She went into the bedroom. She took down her old red suitcase, and packed a few clothes into it, and her father’s old camera, which he had loved but hardly ever used. The telephone rang. She went into the kitchen and at the bottom of Thomas’s note, she wrote: “You won’t find me.”

She left the house. At the ATM machine, she drew out most of her money, and then she went down to the harbor. She was there at half past eight. The Hurtig Line vessel was due in half an hour. Kathrine was afraid Thomas might go to the apartment, see his note, start looking for her, and come down to the harbor. But he didn’t come.
Presumably, he was eating with his family. Presumably, he expected her to turn up.

Kathrine sat in the waiting room. She got up, paced back and forth. She read the graffiti scratched in the varnish of the door frame, telephone numbers, declarations of love, obscenities. In the angle of the door frame, a black felt-tip pen had written: “Arwen and Sean came here in a rainstorm at 8.30 p.m., lost and in love.” Kathrine rubbed at it until the writing had disappeared, and her fingertips were warm with friction, and black. Then she cried again, not as hard as before, but quietly and in despair. As the ship drew in, she wiped away her tears.

Thomas and Kathrine. Lost and in love. No, she thought. She had believed Thomas loved her, but he had hardly even been aware of her. She was a good listener. The part she played in his life could have been played by pretty well anyone. But why was he out to impress her? She was inferior to him in every respect. Why did he continually have to rattle on about his feats, his adventures, his achievements? All the things he had told her. And what had she ever told him? He had never asked about anything in her life, and if she did happen to talk about it, he hadn’t paid any attention. So she had ended up keeping her stories to herself. Her stories.

She remembered reading once about how the dinosaurs had become extinct because the earth had been hit by a
comet. She was still upset about that weeks later, had woken up in the night and gone over to the window to look up at the sky. Later, there was a time she wanted the earth to be struck by a comet. But it didn’t happen. On Svalbard, they had found dinosaur prints.

A year ago, the entire staff of the customs and excise office had been flown out onto a ship by helicopter. The flight had been a lovely experience. Kathrine had seen the village from above, and then they had been winched down onto the ship’s deck in a basket, and, together with Coast Guard people, they had combed the whole ship. They hadn’t found anything. One of the Russian agents had tipped them off, but presumably it was just his way of settling a personal score. Things went on among the Russians that none of the customs people really could understand.

And other than that? She had never been anywhere. She hadn’t seen anything, and she had nothing she could talk about. Once, as a little girl, she had stowed away on one of the Hurtig Line ships, along with Morten. They had got as far as Mehamn, five hours away, and then they had been discovered by a crewman, or else they had given themselves up because they were bored, or cold, or hungry, down in the hold.

But was that really what happened? Her mother told the story over and over. How the Mehamn harbormaster had called them to him, and given them something to eat, and put them on another ship the next morning. The local
paper had run a report, two young stowaways. Her mother had cut out the article and saved it with the family photographs. Now you’ve been in the newspaper, she had said.

And what about Helge and the baby? Once the baby was there, there was no point in asking herself how it could have come to that. What was done was done. That was what her father had always said to her mother, what’s done is done. When he had to sell his boat, either because the fishing grounds were almost fished out, or the price of fish was going down, or because he was ill or not a good fisherman, who could say. When he went to work in the fish factory, not difficult work, but he was already sick. And when Kathrine went to visit him in the factory, she was about fourteen, and asked him, isn’t it boring to do the same thing all day long, he would say what’s done is done. As if it didn’t matter that he had once owned a boat. But it wasn’t true. In the village, nothing was ever done.

Kathrine had sworn to herself that she would never work in the fish factory. That was later, when she was hardly speaking to her father, when he was drinking, drinking more and more. Never the fish factory.

She sat in the German fortifications with Morten. It was cold, they were sitting there in wintertime, and they both swore, never the fish factory. They made plans, travel plans, plans for a life. Their plans were more real than their life. Morten went away. He went to Tromso to work, he went round the world. Two years later, he was back, it was as though he’d never left. He took a job in
the fish factory, a desk job, that was something else. And later on, he got a job with the council, he was responsible for the village’s home page, and the little radio station that transmitted for an hour or two each day. News, weather reports, the hour for the migrant workers, the phone-in. We congratulate Peder Pedersen on his sixtieth birthday. The male voice choir from Berlevag will now sing. And Kathrine went to work for the customs. Training in Tromso, three stints of three months, the best time of her life.

I could get myself transferred, thought Kathrine. Start a new life. She could have gotten herself transferred, but she never did. And somehow the time had passed, she had hardly been aware of it. One village or another. Earlier, there had at least been a cinema. Now there were just bingo evenings.

Slowly the lights of the village slipped by. The night wasn’t cold, but there was a stiff wind. Even so, Kathrine went outside, once the village could no longer be seen from the panorama deck. The further the ship steamed on its course, the larger the village seemed to become. Then it slowly disappeared behind a spit of land, and there was only the orange reflection of its lights visible in the clouds. It got lighter, and for a little while it almost looked as though an artificial sun were rising behind the rocks. The sea swell
got stronger, and as Kathrine went inside, she saw a couple of seabirds flying low over the water into the beam of the searchlights and then straight back into the dark again. Snowy rocks glimmered on either side of the fjord. And then the ship was out on the open sea.

W
hen the
Polarlys
docked in Hammerfest the next day, there was already the first hint of light in the sky. The layover was an hour and a half, and Kathrine left the ship to become a member of the Polar Bear Club. She had twice been to Hammerfest before, once with her father and once with Thomas, and each time she had wanted to join, but first her father, and then Thomas had said that was just nonsense and a waste of money. In the clubhouse, she paid her subscription, and was given a postcard, and a polar bear brooch in mother-of-pearl. Elvis had once wanted to join the Polar Bear Club, but they hadn’t taken him. You had to apply in person. Elvis Rex. Kathrine had had to laugh, each time she saw the sign in the CD shop
in Tromso. She went back on board, and for a while she felt happy and cheerful.

The next morning, she inspected the bridge, along with three German couples. A steward had asked her at lunch the previous day whether she would like to have a look at the bridge and the engine room. The usual program. He had asked how far she was traveling, and Kathrine had said as far as Bergen. Four days yet, said the steward, good, welcome on board the
Polarlys
.