Peter Stamm - Unformed Landscape

The nights were no longer properly dark, it was April. Kathrine had gotten up early, even though it was Saturday. She woke her son, fixed him his breakfast, and took him to his grandmother. She went home, buckled on her cross-country skis, and set off. She followed the snowmobile tracks until she reached the first height, and after that the wires that led up to the radio mast. Finally, after perhaps an hour, she moved away from that last landmark at a sharp angle, and glided out into the limitless white of the fjeld.

At around noon she sat down to rest and have something to eat on a rock that broke through the snow. She ran her hands over the orange, yellow, and white lichens that covered the stone.

Later on, when she was on the trail again, there was a sort of misty haze, and the sky lost its blueness, and got paler and paler. But she knew the way, she had been to the lighthouse many times, and even when the sun was finally gone from sight, and the light was so diffuse that everything blurred, she went on, and wasnt afraid of losing her way.

Kathrine had married Helge, she had had a child, she had divorced Helge. She went to the lighthouse, she stayed there overnight, and came back the next day. Her mother would look after the boy then, as she did during the days when Kathrine was at the customs office.

After work, she went to her mothers. The three of them would eat supper together, later Kathrine would pick up the child and go home. Eventually, the child learned to walk, and she didnt have to carry him anymore. That was in summer. Then the days grew shorter, autumn came, the first snow, and then winter.

The sun had disappeared weeks ago, and it no longer got light at all. Night lay over the landscape. The village was locked in darkness. The light of the streetlamps was like a space that no one left. It was forty kilometers to the nearest village, eighty on the road that led through the dead landscape into the interior and back to the coast. When it snowed, when it did nothing but snow, the road was closed. And then the little airport outside the village on a small plateau was also closed, and there were no buses and no flights, only the Hurtig Line vessels heading south in the evenings, and late at night to Kirkenes on the Russian border.

It often snowed, and it was cold and dark. Kathrines father died, one morning he didnt wake up. He wasnt even very old. The pastor came and sat in the kitchen with her mother. Kathrine made coffee, then she took the child by the hand and went home. The pastor and her mother were still sitting in silence at the kitchen table.

On Sunday the pastor spoke of the water of life that poured out into the sea of eternity. Then, he said, every creature living there will swim freely. There will be quantities of fish. Because as soon as this water comes, the salt water will heal, and everything the river touches will remain alive forever.

Then the congregation went outside, and went through the darkness and the deep snow to the cemetery. They had had to heat the soil for four days before the gravediggers had been able to shovel the grave.

Spring came late that year. Kathrine had her twenty-fifth birthday in the autumn. Her mother baked her a cake as she did every year, and on Saturday they all went to the Elvekrog and had a party that was the talk of the village for long afterward.

On Monday Kathrine inspected the Verchneuralsk. She had been in the office only a little while, writing a report, when the boss sent her out. The weather was stormy that day, out at sea the waves were high as houses, and everything that could sought the shelter of port. Thirty trawlers had already anchored, including some that had only meant to come back a week later. The boss had thrown away the faxes from the Coast Guard and said todays going to be a hard day for everyone, today youre all going to have to go out.

The ships lay in the harbor, or were moored to the floating dock the Russians had built at the edge of the village. Groups of Russian sailors were standing all over the village. They stood there waiting and talking, and the villagers crossed to the other side of the street. The Russians were standing outside Rimi, and outside the other supermarket. They stood in front of the kiosk, they looked in the windows of the computer shop and the ships electronic shop. When Kathrine drove to the port, she stopped to search a group of Russians. Sometimes they would carry vodka in their plastic bags, or contraband cigarettes, that they would sell in the village.

The Verchneuralsk had already been unloaded. Kathrine knew she wouldnt find anything on board, not vodka, not cigarettes, but she always boarded the ship each time it was in port, regardless. Then Alexander, the captain, would ask her into his tiny cabin, and take down the table from its two hooks on the ceiling. He sat on the bunk, and left the chair to Kathrine, and they would talk a little, even though they could hardly understand each other. Each time, Alexander would offer her vodka, and each time she declined. She tried to explain to him that she wasnt permitted to accept any hospitality from him, but he just laughed, and poured for her anyway, and she left it untouched. Then Alexander would make instant coffee and tell her about his wife and his two daughters, Nina and Xenia, about Murmansk, and then he said Kathrine ought to visit him there sometime. It was a beautiful city, he said, and he showed her some postcards. The Atlantica cinema, the swimming baths, the enormous statue of the soldier to commemorate the defenders of the Soviet polar regions in the great patriotic war. Sometimes he would take out his photo album, and show her photos of the harbors he had visited, pictures of the Shetlands, the Faroes, the Lofoten Islands, and he asked Kathrine why she didnt get away from here at last.

Youre young, he said, as if that was a reason to leave, and youre beautiful.

But she just laughed.

The bad weather moved east. In the middle of the day the thermometer now climbed above zero, and the snow was old and hard. Kathrine went out to the lighthouse, she hadnt been there for a long time. She didnt know who was on duty that month, but it hardly mattered, all the lighthouse keepers were the same anyway. They had been fishermen before, they were unmarried or widowed men who did the job for twenty years and seemed never to get any older, and who then died one day, and it was nothing. They kept the place clean and looked after the equipment and stared out to sea with big binoculars, and watched the ships go by. They were pleased when Kathrine came out to see them. They would talk a lot, tell stories of bygone times, about people who had died or emigrated a long time ago. They always told the same stories, talked uninterruptedly, and still they were as silent as the landscape.

Kathrine went back to the village across the day-wide empty snowscape, past fjords and mountains, over smooth plains and gentle slopes. The fjeld looked like a drawing made of a few scribbled lines. Russia, Finland, Sweden, and Norway, up here they all looked alike. The borders were covered by snow, the snow joined everything up, and the darkness covered it over. The real borders were between day and night, between summer and winter, between the people.

Once, Kathrine saw a few reindeer. They were standing in a little huddle, all looking in the same direction. It was spring, the nights were short and bright, but the snow wouldnt go away until early summer, and then only for a few months.

Kathrine had left Helge because he was a drinker and a violent man. He hadnt ever dared to hit her, but she despised him, and eventually threw him out of their apartment, and he didnt come back. She saw him every day when he came off work in the fish factory, and rode through the village on his old Harley, up to the tenement he now lived in with a couple of other workers, and then down to the port, and up and back down again. Then he would go to the Elvekrog and get drunk, and after midnight Kathrine would hear the sound of the bike for a last time, loud, and then getting quieter, until finally she couldnt hear it anymore.