She didn’t move. She stood by the window and waited, just waited for the figures to disappear. It was cold in the room. Kathrine pulled her uniform out of her suitcase, and put it on. She looked at herself in the mirror, ran her hands over the stout material of the overalls. A customs inspector, she thought, but it didn’t help. She took the bedspread off the bed, rolled herself up in it, and lay down on the floor next to the radiator, which was slowly getting warm. She cried silently to herself. She was afraid.
Kathrine didn’t know how much time had passed when she heard a knock on the door. She was still lying on the floor next to the heater. It was dark in the window, she could see a slice of sky, but no stars. She heard Christian’s voice. Kathrine, he called, are you there? Yes, she called back, I’m coming.
When she saw Christian’s shocked expression, she almost had to laugh. She threw herself around his neck and said, I’m so glad you’re here. He held her a little awkwardly, gave her little pats on the back, and asked if she was all right. And what she was doing here. And how she had found him. And why she was wearing her uniform. They let go of each other. Kathrine sat down on the bed. Christian switched on the overhead light and shut the door. Then he sat on the bed, a little bit away from Kathrine.
“Your parents told me where you were.”
“You saw my parents? Did she let you in?”
“Have you got time for me? I don’t want to… have you got a girlfriend here?”
“A girl in every town,” Christian laughed. “I have so much work to do…”
“What time is it?”
“Nine o’clock. Shall we go and eat something? The restaurants close early in winter here.”
Kathrine went into the bathroom. She left the door slightly ajar, and talked to Christian while she got changed. He asked her what she felt like eating.
They ate in a bistro near the hotel. It was cold. The waiter pushed a paraffin stove nearer to their table, but it didn’t help much. The food was not especially good. The wine warmed Kathrine up, and gradually dispelled her confusion. Christian asked why she’d left, what she’d come here for. And she told him about Thomas’s lies, and her flight. She told him how she’d followed Thomas to his parents’ hut, and how he’d sat there motionless. That she’d been frightened. She didn’t talk about Morten.
“Why does everyone up there have those little huts? What happens in them?”
“They go there on Saturdays,” said Kathrine. “They sit at tables, and drink coffee or beer. And on Sunday, they go back home again.”
Christian laughed.
“Since I’ve left, I haven’t seen the sun,” said Kathrine. “I felt frightened.”
“Are you frightened now?”
“I’m not sure. It might come back. I don’t know what I’m doing here.”
“Fear is the possibility of freedom,” said Christian, and he smiled. “How did you like Paris?”
Kathrine said she hadn’t seen much of Paris. Christian pulled a yellow envelope out of his briefcase, and took a pile of photographs out of it.
“I was there last weekend,” he said. “Do you want to see the pictures I took? I picked them up today.”
They looked at the photographs together. The waiter brought coffee, and offered them each a calvados. He filled their glasses up to the brim.
Paris looked the way Kathrine had imagined it, the way she’d seen it in travel brochures and book illustrations. A beautiful city under a blue sky.
“It’s beautiful, even when it’s raining,” said Christian. “You should have seen it.”
“What happens now?” asked Kathrine.
“I go home in two days. It took longer than we planned, but we’re done now. The final run-through is tomorrow.”
He asked if she had enough money, and if she felt like visiting the factory tomorrow, and having a look at the machinery.
“Do you want to meet me for breakfast?” he asked, once they were back at the hotel.
“OK,” she said. “Christian…?”
“Yes?”
“I’m not going back.”
“I see.”
“And thank you. Thank you for dinner.”
The fish factory was in a little southern suburb of the city. Kathrine and Christian took the bus. They walked the last bit along the cliffs. The sky was still overcast, but it was starting to clear in the west, and the sea had a white sheen in the sun.
“Has the sun come back where you are?” asked Christian.
“Probably, for a couple of days now,” said Kathrine. “Hard to say. It comes back so slowly. You hardly notice.”
She hated the darkness, she said.
In the factory, Christian gave her a white coat and a white gauze hood. He waited for her outside the women’s locker room. He was in a coat and hood as well.
“It’s crazy,” said Kathrine. “I come to France for the first time in my life, and I see a fish factory. I haven’t even seen the Eiffel Tower.”
“You’re right, this isn’t much different from Nils H. Nilsen’s,” admitted Christian. “Sorry. I didn’t think of that.” He pointed to a machine. “A Baader 142 Princess Cut Slaughtering machine.”
“I wish you’d saved it to impress your other girlfriends,” Kathrine said, laughing.
“If we leave early tomorrow, we can go and see the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Would you like that?”
Kathrine hesitated.
“Sure… well, I don’t know what your plans are,” said Christian.
“What about you? What do you want?”
“I’ll be happy to show you the Eiffel Tower,” said Christian. They passed long rows of male and female workers who picked the split fish carcasses from the conveyor belt, and trimmed them to filets with a few swift knife strokes, and tossed the pieces on another conveyor belt. Kathrine remembered her father, the way he stood there, slightly hunched forward, his back hurting. He turned around, and threw her a half a fish, which she caught and threw back. That’s a nice fish you caught, said her father, and he carried on working. They were paid for piecework.
“But you’ve seen it all before,” said Christian.
Kathrine said she’d go back to town, she wanted to walk on the beach. He said the test run was starting at ten o’clock, it wouldn’t take much longer. Actually, the tests had all been done, and this was more by way of a demonstration for the management.
“After that we go for lunch, and drink wine and calvados, and I should be all done by around two o’clock.”
He took Kathrine back to the locker room. They arranged to meet back at the hotel in the early afternoon. Kathrine washed her hands, dropped her coat in a blue laundry tub, and left the factory.
She walked back to the main street, and the bus stop. The next bus didn’t leave for another half an hour. There was a café by the bus stop, called Aux Travailleurs de la Mer. Two men were sitting, playing lotto. The numbers were flashed up on a screen. Kathrine drank a café au lait, and then she went out. Two children were staring in at the café through the big windows, others were sitting on wooden benches alongside a bumper car, which was not yet or no longer in operation. Kathrine had liked the music in the café, men with gentle voices, singing in French. Everything was gentler here, the language, the voices, the children’s games, the weather, the air, which was damp and wrapped itself around her, and the wind that blew in off the sea, and wasn’t cold, but still took her breath away.