Peter Stamm: Unformed Landscape

Thomas knew what he was after. When he started talking about marriage, it hadn’t even crossed Kathrine’s mind. His life represented a bold stroke through the unformed landscape of her life. Like the pistes for a snowmobile, marked with poles in the snow, his life cut across hers, with an objective and a destination. It was possible that Thomas himself didn’t know why he had chosen this particular path, but he had put down the marker poles, and it was a way that could be gone, and that he was going to go with her.

Kathrine was tired. Thomas was certainly in bed by now. He had always been able to sleep. A clear conscience, he sometimes said, and laughed, and Kathrine hadn’t understood why. She had a clear conscience. She had never said she loved him. And she didn’t have any secrets from him. If there was something he wanted to know, he could ask her. But he never asked her about her life. She wasn’t even sure if he knew that she had been married to Helge. What I don’t know, he sometimes said, and laughed.

Thomas. That was his name. Her husband. My husband, she thought. He was thirty, two years older than she was. His family was his family. Everything else was a lie. Thomas, my husband, thought Kathrine. By the time they married, they hadn’t slept together for months. On their wedding night, she had induced him to do something that he later referred to as playing. But it wasn’t a game. And then they didn’t talk about it anymore. Thomas avoided the subject, as he avoided the thing itself. The thing, Kathrine said, and she laughed aloud. And since then, another half a year had passed without them sleeping together — or, as she said, making love.

“What did you marry him for?” asked Morten, when she told him about it.

“Because he loved me,” Kathrine replied.

My husband, said Kathrine, by the open window, Thomas, my husband. She smiled. A man going by on the opposite side of the road looked across to her, a drunken seaman. He waved, and she waved back. He said something she couldn’t make out. She said something that might have been a greeting or a suggestion. The man shook his head, and went on. Kathrine shut the window.

On the upper story of Nils H. Nilsen’s fish factory, a few windows were lit up. Where foreign workers lived. Kathrine tried to imagine the rooms behind the windows, and the people who sat there, watched television or read. Who made love or ate dinner. She imagined someone over there looking across to her, to the window where she was still standing. And when she lay down on the bed again, she imagined someone over there seeing the light on in her room, but not seeing her, and wondering who it was who lived there. Continually wondered about it, every night. When every night there was someone different in the room.

Kathrine used to walk past the fishermen’s refuge every day. And now she was inside it, sitting by the window, eating the breakfast that was included in the price. When she stepped out on the street, she paused for a moment. It was as though she was waiting for herself, for the Kathrine who hadn’t doubted, hadn’t asked, hadn’t run away, and whose life had continued as before. She looked up the road, in the direction from which she used to come every morning. Then she saw Svanhild clearing the table inside. She waved, and Svanhild waved back and smiled, and Kathrine set off.

She walked down the street, quickly and without looking back. She thought of the day ahead and the work to be done. Her boss was already in the office. He was smoking. She opened the window, made coffee. Later, she picked up the mail, and brought the whole stack to her boss, without looking through it. He liked to do it all himself. It wasn’t much, in any case. Then he called her in. “This one’s not for me,” he said, and handed her an envelope that had his name on it, and two sheets of single-spaced typing. Kathrine read. She read, and sensed her boss looking at her. But he didn’t say anything. He waited.

“Don’t you dare show your face in our house again, ever. Leave our brother/brother-in-law/son alone! You have abused our hospitality and our trust, and brought filth into our house. We have seen through you, and refuse to be taken in anymore by a rotten bitch like you. Your lewdness and abomination you must bear by yourself.”

The telephone rang, but Kathrine only stared at it, her boss stared at it. Kathrine listened to it ringing and ringing, and finally stopping. One of her colleagues left the customs office on his way to inspect a ship that had just come in. Kathrine was still holding the letter in her hand, the second page of it. The first she had dropped onto the table. She read the last few sentences again.

“Good-bye, then, and for good. Catch yourself some other man, but spare Thomas, and spare us. We will not tolerate your presence in our house, under any circumstances! God will punish you for your misdeeds, you whore! Because God knows the path of righteousness; while the path of godlessness leads to destruction.”

Kathrine sat down and stood up again. She took a cigarette from her boss’s pack, which lay on the desk. He lit it for her. She had dropped the second page of the letter on the desk as well. Her boss picked it up, and read aloud: “Copies of this letter are going to your mother, Thomas, Morten, and anyone else who wants one.” He tore up the letter and dropped it in the wastepaper basket. He smiled.

“Brother, brother-in-law, son,” he said. “Crazy the lot of them. You can’t take it seriously.”

It wasn’t a question, it was a command.

“I don’t know what it’s all about, but I never asked for a copy. I regard the matter as closed. I don’t want to hear anything about it.”

When Kathrine thought about the office now, she could only think of the fitted carpet, which ran up the walls a little way, and always gave her the feeling of not quite having her feet on the ground. It was as though everything in the office had only provisionally been set down on that carpet, and sometimes it would disappear again, when the workers came to roll it up and cart it down to the street, and put it in the dumpster — when the head office in Oslo finally agreed to the long overdue renovation.

He regarded the matter as closed, her boss had said, but Kathrine knew it wasn’t, that the letter would forever be lying there, between the two of them, even if he believed, even if he knew it was all a lie.

At around lunchtime, her mother had called her at the office. This was something she had done only once before, when Kathrine’s father had died. Kathrine assured her that it was all a lie, and her mother tried to calm her down. But Kathrine sensed the doubt in her voice, and quickly ended the call.

Kathrine had gone out to lunch with her colleagues, as she did every day. She had looked at the other people in the restaurant, and wondered which of them had also received a copy of the letter. But nobody had betrayed any sign. Kathrine had had the sensation of being the only human, among lots of browsing animals. After lunch, she had stayed in the fishermen’s refuge and had holed up in her room all afternoon, and cried a lot.

The following day she hadn’t gone into work, nor the day after. She stopped going. She hadn’t handed in her notice, she just stopped going, and the only thing that surprised her was that she didn’t hear from her boss at all.

Kathrine sat in her room in the fishermen’s refuge. She thought about the office, about her boss, her colleagues. She looked out the window, and watched the workers going to the fish factory, the children going to school, the women leaving the houses to go shopping. She lay down, and she got up. Then it was already time for the office workers to be coming out of the factory and the town hall, to drink coffee at Svanhild’s. A few seamen were on the streets, three old women with Zimmer frames stopped right in front of Kathrine’s window, just stood there, not talking, and finally went on.