Peter Stamm: Unformed Landscape

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.

Svanhild 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.