But he was not about to give her the pleasure. Now he would be the one to set the trap, as if he couldn’t figure out why she chose to intrude on him at this time of day. He raised the glass to his lips and took a drink, a little nip to clear his throat.
“Didn’t we agree not to see each other like this for a couple of weeks?”
His voice was thick with suppressed emotion. This sudden attack on his dignity nearly brought tears to his eyes, or at least a misty haze. The steam of the fury boiling within him dampened the windows of his soul.
Then at last it happened. The scene. The Big Scene. Enough to make him want to shade his eyes, something he would gladly have done if decorum did not prohibit it. Alice’s bare white feet now crossed that threshold of pain and stood on the soft rug inside the room. They were trembling, both from a desire to kick him and a longing to run away. And yet, contrary to his expectations, she did not yell. Her voice was a tightly stretched wire onto which her words stepped delicately. If one single word were too heavy the entire wire would snap.
“You have it good,” she said to him. “You have your rifle and your brandy. You don’t have to lie awake all night. No one talks about you in the stores. No one gossips about you in their kitchens. No one thinks you’re ridiculous. No one finds you shameful, because you’re not cheating on anyone — no one but me. Who doesn’t cheer when someone deceives a deceiver? Two weeks is easy for you. A nice little holiday. Imagine, fourteen days that you don’t have to kiss and caress me. How wonderful! Imagine not having to be in love for fourteen whole days. What an enviable position you’re in.”
But her words appeared to have no effect on the forester. And, truth be told, he wasn’t touched by them in the least, for the simple reason that he didn’t understand — or even hear — a single thing that Alice said. He just sat there waiting for her to end so that he could say his line — The Line — the one that would bring him peace of mind and clearly establish who was right and who was wrong. Even a playwright who suddenly discovers that One Irresistible Line in the midst of a frantic dress rehearsal couldn’t have more eagerly awaited the perfect moment to make his voice heard.
Finally Alice was quiet. Her feet no longer shook. They stood firmly planted on the forester’s rug, and they would not move till she heard his lips pray for forgiveness. Not that she felt particularly forgiving — but who can resist wielding the power to answer a prayer? The forester sat up in his chair and it squeaked. He straightened his back. His eyes became steady and his face stiff. His hand firmly closed upon the glass. “Lucky it’s not plastic,” thought Alice. “If it were plastic you’d be lost.”
“I am a man of character,” said the forester. He emphasized the “I” and looked sadly dignified when he said it, as if he were eminently pained by having to remind her of such a self-evident truth. He then finished his drink, and not even the brandy could make a dent in the stiff composure of a face so controlled by that sentiment.
For Alice this marked the end of it. She suddenly found herself standing there staring down into Mrs. Mattsson’s face. Mrs. Mattsson’s eyes stared harshly and judgementally back into her own. “You have no character,” the eyes told her. “You’re an impenitent, lost soul, disgraced in this village.” She wanted to cry out. But the lonely — in the truest sense of that word, lonely — they don’t bother to cry out their despair, since the very act would be meaningless. The deserts don’t hear. But she could do things with her hands that even a desert couldn’t ignore. She could scratch the desert sand until its desert face bled.
Shhhht!
Suddenly two pieces of a brightly-colored scarf were lying in the forester’s lap. And Alice wasn’t standing firmly rooted in front of him any longer. With a sob choked between her teeth she ran out in wild, reckless flight. This of course only strengthened the forester’s conviction that he was in the right. Those capable of maintaining their composure always imagine they’re in the right.
The door slammed behind Alice.
“Hysterical idiot,” he thought to himself, without an ounce of compassion. Then he sank back into an undignified slump. “She’s closed that door for the last time.” At that point a little more brandy seemed like it would do the trick. And so he filled up the glass. A few moments later he took up his rifle and aimed it out at the sky. But no brandy bottle came sailing beneath a balloon through the thin, cold, morning mist.
The teacher had heard voices in his dreams. But the bang of the door shook him from those dreams and brought him sitting up in bed. When his wife slowly turned the doorknob on her way back into the room, he lay back again with the painful assurance that he knew everything now. As he wrapped the blankets around himself, his memory of the night’s pleasures remained as yet in his limbs. It was humiliating for him to think that he had so recently made love with an unfaithful woman. It made him an accomplice of sorts to the infidelity without strengthening the force of his indignation. Nothing can paralyze the will like the memory of pleasure. When she entered the room, he feigned sleep.
She decided to wake him. The tender warmth of her attempts to entice him from sleep convinced him, eventually, that something had happened between her and the forester. Perhaps the affair had come to an end. But the thought was no comfort to him. The most humiliating fact of all remained: while he was asleep she had loosened herself from his embrace and gone up to another man’s room. Betrayal in absentia was possibly forgivable — it was like letting down your own soul. But to betray the warm body of someone there beside you was an unpardonable offence. The teacher’s body stiffened at her touch, but finally he had to go through the motions of waking to keep from giving himself away. He began a long and awkward, theatrical waking scene, stretching his body in every direction, yawning and then mumbling a number of incomprehensible half-phrases from the depth of his throat. Alice ran her hands along the skin beneath his pajamas. With his eyes still closed he grabbed her wrist deliberately and removed it from his body, wishing to demonstrate just how much his subconscious condemned her unfaithfulness. As soon as his eyes were fully opened she crept from the edge of the bed in close to his body.
“Arne,” she said. “Take me with you.”
“Where?” he blurted out suddenly in a voice that sounded much more awake than he wanted it to.
But Alice was so desperately afraid of being stranded again in the desert — so afraid of the desert itself — that she did not pick up on the tell-tale inconsistencies in her husband’s voice.
“On the school trip,” she said, on the verge of sobbing. She searched for her husband’s eyes, for eyes that would love her, that would look at her as they did a few hours before, black and glazed over from lust.
Then he sat bolt upright in bed and looked out the window, into the yard. And there and then any memories of lust that remained disappeared altogether. His body grew heavy and dignified, as if pregnant. “School trip,” he thought. And suddenly images from school appeared in his mind — images at first glance innocent, but put into their proper context, terrible: two girls’ heads leaning together, their eyes sweeping over him cursorily, shamefully; one girl shouting out “the forester!” in the corridor; a small group of teachers abruptly ending their conversation as he entered the staff lounge; a whole bus filled with heads drawn together, a host of eyes fixed on them for four hundred miles. No thank you!
“That’s out of the question,” he said curtly. He could now be as awake as he pleased.
“But why?” she pleaded, believing to the very last that there must be some technicality, some matter of policy, placing obstacles before them.