The woman asked who she was, and when Kathrine said a friend of Christian’s, the woman looked at her suspiciously and said Christian had never mentioned her.
“We wrote each other e-mails.”
“The Internet has a lot to answer for,” said the woman, shaking her head. “I keep telling Christian he needs to get out, and not spend all his time in front of the screen. That Internet’s full of the most…”
She gestured dismissively. A small, gray-haired man poked his head out into the passage, and eyed Kathrine curiously. Then he disappeared again.
“I’m sorry I can’t help you,” said the woman.
“Have you got his address?”
“I don’t know if I should give it to you. If Christian hasn’t given it to you himself…”
The woman told Kathrine to wait. She shut the apartment door. After a while it opened again, and the woman handed Kathrine a scrap of paper with the name of a hotel in Boulogne written on it in old-fashioned writing, the Hotel du Vieux Matelot.
“That’s the Old Sailor Hotel,” said Christian’s mother, and she gave a high-pitched, somewhat artificial laugh. Kathrine thanked her, and left.
Five hours after arriving in Aarhus, she was on a train again. She had wanted to have a look at the town, but all the people on the streets had been too much for her, and finally she had taken refuge in a museum that was full of old runestones. She looked at them, but she felt restless, and by the time she was sitting in the train, she had almost no recollection of what she’d seen.
Kathrine felt disappointed. So many years she had been dreaming of a trip to the South. She had supposed that everything would be different south of the Arctic Circle. She had pictured worlds to herself, wonderful, colorful worlds full of strange animals and people as in the books of Jules Verne she had liked so much as a child. Around the World in Eighty Days, Journey to the Center of the Earth, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. But this world wasn’t so very different from the world of home. Everything was bigger and noisier, there were more people around, more cars on the streets. But she had hardly seen anything that she hadn’t seen at home or in Tromso. There’s not a lot of room in a person, she thought.
In Hamburg, it was raining. There was an hour until the night train for Paris was due to depart. Kathrine stayed in the station, sat down at a table by one of the snack carts. She counted up her money, and thought about the way her mother had forever been counting her money, when they were still living in Sweden, and dreaming of having a fishing boat. Kathrine looked about her suspiciously, before she put the money back in her purse. In one corner sat a family from somewhere in Asia, with lots of luggage and quiet, well-behaved children.
A drunk sat down next to Kathrine and said something to her. While she was in Bergen, she had bought herself an American thriller to read on the train. Now she took it out, opened it at random, and pretended to read. But the man wouldn’t leave her alone. He bent forward and looked in her face and said something that Kathrine couldn’t make out. Finally, she got up and walked away. The drunk followed her for a few steps, then turned back. Kathrine waited outside in the main hall. By the time her train came in, she was shaking with cold. She was glad there were still empty places in the sleeping cars. She was all alone in her compartment. It reminded her of the cabins on the Russian trawlers, only with a bigger window.
Slowly, the train rolled out of the station. Rain lashed against the window, and Kathrine saw the many lights in the city, and for the first time since setting out she had the feeling of being somewhere out in the wide world.
The train moved through the darkness, with only occasional clusters of lights. Kathrine undressed and placed her clothes on the suitcase, which she had stowed on the middle bunk. She lay down. The train swayed gently, and the monotonous sounds made her sleepy.
Kathrine was walking through an enormous department store. It was dark, only where she was was somehow lit up. The light stayed with her. There were no other people in the store, but she sensed she was not alone, that she was being watched. She knew she had forgotten something, but she didn’t know what. She knew she was dreaming, and at the same time she knew the dream was real, because she was dreaming it. Her shopping cart was empty. She walked through the store, between the long shelves that were like walls. She was frightened, even though she felt nothing could happen to her here, that nothing was real, that she was in a dream. She heard the noise of the train, but the dream didn’t stop. She was trapped in it.
Kathrine awoke when the light came on in the compartment. She saw two legs right in front of her face, and she heard the voices of the sleeping-car conductor and a young man. She wanted to speak, to tell the conductor that this compartment was reserved for women, and that there must be some mistake. But she didn’t say anything, and even shut her eyes when she noticed him stoop to have a look at her. Then the conductor went out, and the man shut the door and bolted it. He put his bags away and sat down on the bunk facing her, and when he saw her eyes were open, he said hello. “In here is for women,” she said in English. The man shook his head and replied that the compartments were not separated by sex. Then the word sex seemed to embarrass him, and he said, men and women.
Kathrine pulled her clothes, which she had beside her on her red suitcase, under her blankets. She was only wearing panties and a T-shirt, and she hoped the man would take one of the bunks over her head. But he remained sitting opposite her, and asked her where she was going, and when she said Paris, whether she knew Paris, and where she came from, and what her name was. He said his was Jurgen.
“Where are we?” asked Kathrine.
“Bremen,” said Jurgen. “Paris is beautiful. I’m going to Brussels.”
He explained that he was an intern with the European Commission, and when Kathrine said she was from Norway, he asked her lots of questions about fishing regulations, and wanted to know her views on catching whales, and the overfishing of the seas. He seemed to know all about Norway. More than I do, thought Kathrine, he knows more about my own country than I do. She said that where she came from, they didn’t hunt whales anymore. Then she said she was on her honeymoon, she didn’t know what prompted her to say that. Perhaps because she had been afraid, or perhaps just to get him to stop talking about Norway.
“Where’s your husband?” asked Jurgen.
Kathrine hesitated. She really didn’t want to talk about her marriage with him, and she said, “He’s waiting for me in Paris.” She thought, it really doesn’t matter what I tell him. And then she wanted to see what it felt like, lying to somebody, and making up a story. Her husband, she said, was a genetic scientist, and was giving a lecture at the University of Paris. And she herself? She was a dancer. She had attained international renown, and had been all over the world. But a couple of years ago, she had given up dancing, and was now living in Oslo with her husband. As stories went, it wasn’t very plausible. What was she doing in a second-class compartment, if she was a famous dancer? But Jurgen didn’t seem to suspect anything. He was just as stupid as she had been. He beamed, and asked her what places she had been to. She talked about going on tour in Europe, in the U.S., in Japan. And when Jurgen asked her about Japan, she was quite happy to tell him. She had once read a book about Japan. The trip had been fantastic. Every evening, she had had a show in a different city, and in the daytime, she had visited all the different temples and gardens.
“There was one man who used to send me roses every day. He followed us on our entire tour, and saw every performance. He was besotted with me. He was on the board at Sony, a very rich man. He filmed me with a video camera, even though that wasn’t allowed. A tiny little thing. A prototype. Not for general sale. He was in charge of developing new products.”