Peter Stamm: Unformed Landscape

Once, she heard some noise from next door, and she wondered what it was like for the Russian fishermen who stayed here while their ships were in port, being serviced or repaired. In these rooms with their easy-to-clean, man-made surfaces. A damp cloth would wipe away all traces of them after they were gone, off at sea on one of the rusty trawlers, to live in a tiny cabin for a week or two of hectic work.

Kathrine knew those cabins. She had inspected them often enough. Some of the seamen had pinups on their walls, and turned the music louder when she came along. She felt their eyes on her when she bent down to look under the bunks, and her overalls grew taut across her behind. Some of the time she didn’t mind it, and some of the time she felt scared. Others had pictures of saints or the Virgin Mary on their walls. On the bottom deck, where the sailors slept, the men slept three to a cabin. Kathrine looked in the cupboards, pushed aside empty tins of Nescafé. The vodka was usually kept behind the drawers under the bunks. Two or three bottles, rarely more than that. The seamen stood in the doorways. They wore felt slippers and rough knitted vests, and they smiled apologetically and said, “No problem,” when Kathrine wrote out the receipt for the fine. She felt sorry for the men with their hand-drawn calendars, on which they crossed off the days, and the weeks, and the months until they could go home again. But they had an apartment somewhere, maybe a wife, and one or two kids. They had chests where they kept their clothes, and walls where they had their pictures. They had what Kathrine no longer had.

After Thomas had moved in with her, he had gradually taken over her life and her apartment. He had been generous, and bought expensive, new things. He hadn’t liked her furniture, he had mocked her collection of books until she gave them to the library or simply got rid of them. And every time they tidied up — and Thomas liked nothing better than spring cleaning — she noticed that something disappeared, until there was hardly anything left. A dust trap, he said. You never look at that, what’s the point of it. She had supposed that was love. She had thought they were building something together, but it was just Thomas building her into his life, trying to mold her, to train her, until she suited him, and suited the type of life he planned to lead. Until her own apartment was as foreign to her as his parents’ house, as he was, and as the life she led with him.

Kathrine had been living in the fishermen’s refuge for four days when the letter came. She stayed another three. She didn’t go into the office anymore. She sat in her room, and only left it to get something to eat, in the afternoons, when there was hardly anyone left in the restaurant. Svanhild didn’t ask any questions, but she was very friendly, sometimes she just stood next to the table while Kathrine was eating, without saying anything. After a week, Kathrine moved back into the apartment.

She noticed right away that Thomas had moved out, that the apartment was empty, even though there was nothing missing. Presumably, he was back with his parents, in the rooms that had been set aside for the three of them, that he had fixed up weeks ago, and never wanted to show her. A surprise. Our nest, he had once said, a snug nest for us.

Kathrine stood in the apartment, on which they had already canceled the lease. In two weeks, at the end of January, she would have to go. The potted plants were all dry, and presumably past saving. The key to the mailbox lay on the kitchen table. When Kathrine opened the fridge, a sour smell wafted out. She emptied the rest of a milk carton into the sink, picked up a half-eaten bar of chocolate, and sat down in the living room. She opened the mail from the past days, some junk mail, a Christmas card from Christian in Boulogne, France. It was pretty there, he wrote, but he was going back to Aarhus in a couple of days. Then Kathrine read the letter from Thomas’s family, which they had copied to her here as well. She read it again.

“Hated Kathrine, how long have you been playing your mean games with our brother/brother-in-law/son? Are two lawful husbands not enough for you, must you amuse yourself with other men too, so blinded by lust that they agree to play your games? You go hopping from one bed to another, just exactly the way you feel like, and as fancy takes you. You’re a deceitful snake. In bygone ages, people would stone harlots like you, but we, we pray for you, that God in His great mercy may forgive you your unchastity.”

Kathrine read the letter from beginning to end, read the signatures, every name, every letter. They had all set their names to it — Thomas’s parents, his sister Veronica, and Einar, his brother-in-law. Kathrine was put in mind of death announcements in the newspapers, in which brothers, sisters, children, nieces, and nephews all took their leave of the deceased. She herself was mother, daughter, sister-in-law, and daughter-in-law. A divorced and remarried wife. Then she thought of Einar, the brother-in-law. Einar, of all people. Kathrine laughed, and was surprised at the sound of her laughter in the quiet apartment. It wasn’t her laugh at all. She laughed to hear herself laughing. Strange, she thought, that you cry alone, but never laugh. I’ve never laughed alone before.

She felt certain that it was Einar who had written the letter. She remembered the evening he had kissed her goodbye on the mouth, the feeling of the tip of his tongue between his thin, dry lips, the smell of his breath when he talked to her, and got far too close to her. A smell she couldn’t describe, and the very thought of which still disgusted her today.

She imagined Thomas reading the letter, back home with his parents. She thought of how he’d always brought the mail into the kitchen. He had insisted on being the one who always emptied the mailbox, even when Kathrine got home before he did. When he had moved in with her, he had made some joke, and taken the key to the mailbox off her key ring. He got the mail, took the big knife out of the kitchen drawer, and slashed open all the letters, one after another. He took them out of their envelopes, opened them out, and smoothed them down with his hand. He punched holes in them, and only then would he read them, one after another, and afterward he would file them away in his binders.

Kathrine punched holes in the letter from Thomas’s family, pulled down the binder labeled “T. family” off the bookshelf, and filed the letter. She smiled as she thought Thomas would be satisfied with her work. But he would certainly have read the letter too, perhaps before it was sent, perhaps he had even helped write it. Only he hadn’t signed it.

There was also a file marked “K. family.” Thomas had started it for Kathrine, even though she never got mail from her family. Her father had broken with his own family over some old incident sometime, and it was a wonder that they had showed up at his funeral. And her mother’s family had never been happy about her marriage, and contact was limited to birthday and Christmas cards, and the occasional telephone call.

When Kathrine saw the file for the first time, she had laughed. Then she noticed it was one of Thomas’s little bits of malice, one of the innumerable bits of malice he perpetrated every day, when he took the two files and weighed them in his hands, “K. family” and “T. family.”

Kathrine had detested Thomas’s family right from the start. The way they behaved to Thomas and Kathrine from the first day. As though they were already married. The off-color remarks during lunch and afterward, and the way they didn’t shut the door when they went to the bathroom, and wandered around the house in their underwear when Kathrine was visiting, even the first few visits. Look what a progressive family we are! And the way they talked about money the whole time. See how well off we are! And the feeling they tried to give her that Thomas was quite a catch for her. As a single mother. And with her background.