Unformed Landscape Read Free Page A

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, ahouse 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 inthe 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 missednot