Peter Stamm - Unformed Landscape

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. There 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.”

“But I’m not in any doubt,” said Kathrine, and tossed her cigarette end across the street. “I always thought I didn’t have any choice. And then when I was with Morten…”

“But basically, it doesn’t matter what a man says,” said Linn. “The main thing is having a good time.”

“I realized that I don’t really like Thomas,” said Kathrine. “I never liked him, from the start,” she said. “It’s strange. I think I loved him. Or something like that. I wanted to stay with him. But I never liked him.”

Thomas could never be a friend to Kathrine, just as Helge had never been her friend. She had never truly liked either of them, maybe that was why they had become her lovers, and then, a little fortuitously, husbands. Helge had been a wild man, and annoying because he never did what you asked him to. But Kathrine had soon realized that at the critical moment, he failed, drew in his horns. She had said as much to him herself. When it’s a question of your personal advantage, you draw in your horns. And Thomas? Thomas had represented the chance of beginning a new life. No longer to have to work, to have enough money, to be able to travel. Kathrine thought of the big house, the many lovely rooms, the garden. She thought of the afternoons when she had been visiting, sitting in the garden and reading. And Thomas’s mother had come out to her, offering homemade lemonade and cakes. She had sat down next to her, and embroidered one of her Bible verses, one of which she already had hanging in every room of the house. I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever . Thomas’s father, who had a Biblical citation for every situation, chose the verses, and Thomas’s mother embroidered them.