Unformed Landscape (6 page)

The bridge didn’t really interest Kathrine, but she felt lonely on the ship. The captain wore a fine uniform. He had a short reddish beard and lots of burst blood vessels on his cheeks, but he gave Kathrine a friendly smile. He didn’t talk much, and when one of the Germans, an old man in a sailor’s peaked cap, started talking in English about his war experiences, and how they had used the fjords to hide their submarines, he talked still less. The Germans had big binoculars, and after a while they started talking among themselves in German, and Kathrine didn’t understand what they were saying. She stood next to the captain, and from time to time he would hold the back of his hand against the horizon, and gesture, and say, seals, or rocks, or Risoyhamn at last. When Kathrine was the last person to leave the bridge, the captain shook hands with her and said she was welcome back at any time.

The
Polarlys
made two stops in the Lofotens. They crossed the Arctic Circle on schedule the next morning.

The captain refused to believe Kathrine when she said she had never been south of the Arctic Circle before. She had climbed up to the bridge again. They hadn’t had any money, she said, her father had worked in the fish factory, and if they went on holiday at all, they didn’t go any further than Kiruna. That was where her parents came from. The captain asked her if she was a Sami. Half, she said, through my father. She had attended the customs school in Tromso, and at twenty she had had a baby, and that meant holidays were out of the question. She was pleased she had been allowed to complete the course. Once, a couple of years ago, she had booked a week on Majorca, but then the boy had been ill, and she hadn’t gone. She still had to pay for it, though.

“If the child had died,” the man at the travel agent’s said, “… It’s funny. I’ve been watching the borders for years. But I’ve hardly ever been on the other side. Sweden, Finland, yes, but that’s all… never even been to Murmansk. I had a friend from there, but I never visited him. A sea captain, like you.”

“Things don’t look any different on the other side,” said the captain, and Kathrine said she knew. Then the captain asked her to have a coffee with him. They went down to the dining room together, which was almost deserted at that hour. A steward was just setting the tables for lunch.

The captain said Kathrine’s crossing the Arctic Circle for the first time was something to celebrate. “Welcome to the world,” he said, and she laughed. When he asked her
where she was going, and whether she was on holiday, she said she didn’t know, and no, she was just leaving.

“My honeymoon,” she said, and laughed. She took photographs of the captain, and he laughed as well, and wanted to take one of her, but she refused. The captain’s name was Harald, and he lived in Bergen.

“If you want,” he offered, “you can stay with me for a few days.”

Harald lived in a small wooden house painted yellow. His wife had gone to Oslo for a few days with a friend. Harald wanted Kathrine to sleep in their bed. He said he’d be happy with the nursery, he didn’t mind. But she refused. He showed her the nursery, and said that his son, whose name was also Harald, had died three years ago in a sports accident. Kathrine was surprised by the term
sports accident
, and asked him what had happened.

“It was while climbing. He fell. He was alone. The fall needn’t have been fatal. But he was alone.”

Harald looked much younger out of uniform. The rocks were bad here, he said, they weren’t solid. A piece of rock had broken off, and buried his son under it.

“He was eighteen. He didn’t miss anything. He did what he wanted. As for the girls…”

“I’m twenty-eight,” said Kathrine, “I don’t know if I’ve missed anything or not. What about you?”

“Forty-five.”

“Did you invite me because you knew your wife was away?”

“I wouldn’t have asked you if she’d been here.”

Harald laughed. He said he had to run a couple of errands in town. He gave Kathrine a key, and asked her if she’d be in for supper.

When Harald had gone out, Kathrine looked around the house. There was a picture of the family hanging in the hallway. The mother looked nice, the boy looked like her. The nursery no longer contained any traces of his having been there, no children’s books, no toys, nothing. It was a bright, clean room, and there were pictures on the walls that were like the pictures in hotel rooms, prints of watercolors, scenes from life in the South somewhere. Kathrine took some pictures of the empty room, she didn’t know why, and she thought, I shouldn’t be doing this.

Then she went into the kitchen to make coffee. She waited for the water to trickle through the filter. A door led from the kitchen to the garage, where there were a couple of bicycles, an ancient Volvo, and a Deepfreeze. Up on one wall were some dusty ropes and climbing harness, and a couple of battered-looking synthetic helmets. When Harald came back from town, Kathrine asked him if he did any climbing himself.

“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 Sea
. 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.