Peter Stamm: Unformed Landscape

The tourists had disappeared into their cabins, one by one. The lower deck was blocked off, but the doors to the upper deck were open, and Kathrine went out into the fresh air. She sat down on a chair that had been left out, and was slithering across the deck in the up and down of the waves.

All that could be seen was what the ship’s lights illuminated. A small circle of light, the deck and the bridge and the rain showers, the spray in the air, which was not cold. The sea rose and fell, its movements were powerful but almost silent. What was loud were the wind and the diesel engines that were shaking the whole ship.

Somewhere out there were Alexander’s men and the other fishermen. What about Alexander? He was dead, drowned, he wouldn’t be back. What if I fell into the water, thought Kathrine, maybe one of the trawlers would fish me up. They would fish me up with a lot of fish, perhaps they wouldn’t even be aware of it until they were back in port. But the sea was so big. And if you fell into it, the probability was that you would go to the bottom. No one was fished out. Lots of people drowned, but no one was ever found.

Kathrine stepped up to the rail. As the ship plunged into the waves, she saw the foaming sea below her. It would have been easy then.

Under the waves, the sea is quite calm, Christian had told her once. He had gone scuba diving in Spain or Portugal. You can swim under the waves, he had said, it’s only immediately below the waves that you start to feel their movement. But underneath, it’s calm and peaceful. All sound seems at once close and remote under water. Quiet, said Christian, but clear as glass. Kathrine knew that too, from the indoor pool in Tromso. That was where she had belatedly learned to swim, in the customs school, and she wasn’t very good at it.

She thought of the fish moving in the depths, through the calm water, in darkness, suddenly being plucked up to the surface in a net, into the storm. Thousands of fish, squirming fish, pulled up onto the deck of the ship, an enormous body of fish, tipped into the hold, where they continued to wriggle and finally suffocated, or were killed by the fishermen. Kathrine thought of the tuna fish in Boulogne, with their old, earnest faces that looked almost human. She thought of how people died. Whether you continued to try and swim. The brief moment when you went down, before you suffocated. When you stopped struggling for breath, stopped thrashing about with your arms. The instant in which he’d given up, and maybe swam a couple more strokes, not to get to the surface, there was no point, and he knew it. A couple of strokes. And the calm, the quiet under the water. The fact that the last moment is supposed to be happy.

The ship was picked up by a wave, and Kathrine had to grip onto the handrail to avoid falling into the water. The sea was now a long way below her, she saw the gleaming hull of the ship, and the water streaming off it. Before the ship dipped again, she let go of the rail, and ran the couple of yards back to the door, and stepped into the little room.

Kathrine looked out the window. The storm was now almost silent, and it seemed to be a long way off. She wiped her hand over the cold glass, over the bumpy layer upon layer of gloss paint, the brass rails. All at once she felt very feeble, and sat on the floor with her head against the wall. For a long time she didn’t think about anything, she wanted not to think about anything. She made slow circling movements with her hands over the fitted carpet. She thought, nothing can happen to me, I’m safe here. I’m going home now.

Finally, she stood up, and swayed through the long corridors of the ship, and down the stairs to the deck where her cabin was. The cheap cabins were all below the waterline. She heard the loud churning of the engines that drove the ship through the waves. For a moment, she thought of the gulf below her, the depth of the sea, death that was just a thin sheet of metal away. But it didn’t frighten her anymore. She thought of how many times the Polarlys had made this trip, through how many storms that were much worse. It was a question of the place, not the time. She had never been afraid when she had flown to Tromso with Thomas and Randy. She lay on her bunk, and the ship rose and fell. Then, as suddenly as the storm had begun, it stopped. The next day the ship was once again sailing through calm waters.

“Are you worried?” asked Harald. “You’re so quiet.”

“It was my mistake,” said Kathrine. “I cheated on Thomas. He was faithful to me. I lied to him.”

“You didn’t tell him everything,” said Harald, “and you had every justification in sleeping with another man.”

“Making love to another man, you mean,” said Kathrine.

She looked at the radar screen, on which the green shadow of the coastline was gradually moving past.

“You shouldn’t be so dogmatic about lies,” said Harald. “We all tell lies. What if you had never found out with him?”

“But I did find out.”

“You would have been the happy wife of a rich and successful man, living in a beautiful house. Imagine.”

“You mean I should go back to him, and pretend everything he told me was true?”

“Talk about it with him, and then forget it. It hasn’t changed anything.”

“If I could understand it. If there was a reason. But this…”

“What are we without our lies?” said Harald.

“It was so strange. You should have seen him, sitting alone at the table.”

“You want to know everything, don’t you? No secrets. What do you think you’d see if you cut someone open?”

Kathrine looked into Harald’s eyes, and shook her head.

“Lies aren’t secrets.”

Kathrine sat on the observation deck. The room was almost dark. The ceiling was a man-made sky, with hundreds of little lights for stars. Kathrine thought of the evening she had lied to Thomas, and how easy that had been. She had lied to Helge before him. She had lied to her parents and her teachers. She lied every day, every hour. It wasn’t hard. When her boss asked her about her weekend, when her mother asked her how her kid was doing at school. She even lied to herself. When she persuaded herself she was a good wife to Thomas, a good mother to her kid, that they were a happy family. That Randy didn’t need that much attention, was happier on his own, or among his friends. That his eyes were OK, if there was a problem, he would grow out of it. When she had convinced herself that everything would turn out all right, even though she knew nothing was.

Actually, compared to her, Thomas with his little hiding place was a liar on an insignificant scale. How lonely he must have been all those months. As he sat at the table in his parents’ hut, unable to go home, looking at his watch, how terribly lonely. And she hadn’t understood him, and had left him sitting there. She hadn’t been a good wife to him.

The Polarlys had sailed into the fjord, the lights of the village had appeared, and were getting brighter. The sea was quite flat. It was warmer than the air, and little mists formed over the surface of the water, rose up, and dispersed in the air. The ship was slowing down, and everything began to shake gently. The little glass tables on the observation deck jingled softly like glass bells.

Kathrine went up to the bridge, to say good-bye to Harald. He asked where she would spend the night. She said she didn’t know where her things were.

“I can’t let you leave the ship at half past one at night, not knowing where you’re going to sleep.”

“I’ll find somewhere. They’re all friends of mine, after all. I’m sure someone’s still in the Elvekrog.”

When Kathrine left the ship, she turned to look up at the bridge and wave, but she couldn’t see anyone behind the dark windows. Good luck, Harald had said. She had forgotten to ask him why he had shaved off his beard.