She wondered how her life might have been different if she’d been born here, and had lived here. Randy would be sitting on a bench beside a bumper car. She would speak French, her name would be Catherine. She would be a better cook maybe, and dye her hair. But I wasn’t born here, she thought, so there’s no point in even thinking about it. I am as I am, and that’s it. For always.
A line of cars emerged from a side street, decorated with white ribbons and flowers. When they had turned onto the main street, they veered about dangerously. The drivers must be drunk, and the people in the cars looked very serious as they passed the bus stop.
Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue, thought Kathrine. What did I borrow when I married Helge? With Thomas, it was a pearl necklace of Veronica’s. And blue? A little blown glass bird that someone had given to her when she was a little girl. And old and new? Thomas didn’t get it, he called it all a superstition. The best day of my life, thought Kathrine.
The bus drove up a green hill into the town. On one side of the road was a cemetery, on the other a soccer field. A man who had four blue dots tattooed on the back of his hand and something written on his arm that she couldn’t read had sat down in front of Kathrine. She only just got a glimpse of it as the man raised his arm to press the stop button. He got off at the railway station.
Kathrine rode on as far as the sea, and went into the aquarium. “For those who love the sea,” it said on a sign outside. There was almost no one there but children with their parents, and she felt rather out of place. She saw jellyfish, sharks, strange spider crabs, enormous red creatures that kept trying to scramble up the black back walls of the aquarium, and kept falling back. There was piano music coming out of loudspeakers. The tuna fish looked very serious, and had ancient faces. There was a dark room that looked like the deck of a trawler. Kathrine read the signs on the walls, which were written in English and French. Another world, and the catch depended entirely on the decisions the skipper took. After God, he is the master of the ship. Kathrine thought about Alexander. He certainly hadn’t believed in God. No more than she did herself, or most of the people in the village, no matter what Ian said. Life was too hard where they lived, they didn’t have time for things like that. It’s a tough job, it said on one sign, life isn’t lived by the normal rhythm of day and night, but by the rhythm of the sea and the schools of fish.
At the exit, there was a notice board, where visitors could leave a note of their impressions. “I loved the spider crab because there so big”—a child’s writing. Randy would have liked those too, thought Kathrine. At the souvenir shop she bought him a postcard of a spider crab, and a kit for a model trawler, bigger than the Verchneuralsk, bigger than Alexander’s ship.
The sea was yellow-green and the sky a grayish blue. The wind was blowing hard, and sheets of sand blew past Kathrine’s ankles. It was as though the ground was shifting under her feet. She walked along the beach, thinking that it was the same sea that battered the rocks thousands of kilometers to the north, the same sea as the one in which perhaps Alexander had drowned, on which the Verchneuralsk continued to fish without him, on which Harald would soon be under way again, taking his Polarlys to the north. It was the sea she had so often sat beside when she’d felt unhappy, and had gone out on the Kongsfjord, and sat on the beach there while the child played. There was still sand in her shoes when she was in Paris.
Kathrine went into Boulogne Cathedral. A choir was rehearsing. She stopped and listened, when a young man walked up and spoke to her. She didn’t understand what he wanted. She shook her head, and he went away.
Kathrine had never been inside a Catholic church before. She was impressed by the many candles, by the beautiful Virgin Mary, and the statues everywhere. She lit a candle herself, and put down the suggested money. A candle for what, or to what? For Christian and me, she thought. But Christian was nothing more than friendly. She asked herself what he would have done if she hadn’t turned up. He appeared not to have a girlfriend. But maybe he frequented prostitutes. Or he surfed the Web, or got drunk in a bar, or just sat there at a table, like Thomas did in his parents’ hut. And waited.
He didn’t want anything from her. He wasn’t interested in her. Maybe he wasn’t interested in women. She had never seen him with one. And now he was friendly, just as he was always friendly, wanting to show her Paris, and then put her on a train that would take her back to Bergen or to Narvik, where she would get on a ship. He would give her a kiss on the cheek, and wish her a good trip and give her money if she asked him for some. And in a few weeks’ time he would send her an e-mail from some other country.
What was she thinking? What did she want from him? She wasn’t sure if he was more to her than a friendly face in a foreign land. She would have let him kiss her then, when he was in the village, and she didn’t have anyone. She would let him kiss her now. She would sleep with him, she wanted to sleep with him. He meant more to her than Thomas did, maybe. But Thomas was her husband, she had made some promises to him, and he had made the same promises to her. He was a liar, but that promise was one he would keep, Kathrine was sure of that. He would never understand her, he would never touch her, but he would give her and her child a home, and would look after them if they were sick. His mother would too, and his father, Veronica, and Einar. They would look after her, they would buy her Christmas presents and birthday presents. Just as Kathrine would buy presents for them. She would.
She left the cathedral. The wind pushed the last of the clouds away to the east. Kathrine took deep breaths of the cold air. She felt as if she could breathe only when it was light. She thought of the Arctic night, those dark months in the village. Then she felt as though she was taking in the air through her skin, as though everything was dissolving and melting into a dark mass. All the people, all the objects, the houses, the snow, and the rocks overlaid one another like shadows and merged into a big, shapeless darkness.
Kathrine went back to the hotel. It was one o’clock. She packed her things, paid for the room, and went to the station. A train had just left. The next one was going in an hour. She sat down in the station café and ordered a beer.
She looked through the high windows and had a view of tower blocks on the other side of the square, a piece of sky, clouds. Before the train came in, Christian appeared in the café. He sat down opposite Kathrine. He didn’t speak, just looked at her with a beaming, or a drunken, smile. He ordered a café au lait.
“Café olé,” he said, and laughed awkwardly. “I’m a bit drunk, I’m afraid. I don’t like to drink in the daytime. But it was a sort of farewell party. The French…” He laughed.
Kathrine made a face.
“I didn’t want you to come on my account…”
“I wouldn’t mind going back to Paris,” he said when she didn’t say any more. “That’s true. I don’t know when I’d get to see it again.”
“And then?”
“Well… then I suppose we both go back.”
“Thomas emptied out my apartment.”
“Is that your second husband?”
She shrugged her shoulders, and told Christian what she hadn’t told him before. He didn’t say anything, and she wasn’t sure whether he was listening to her or whether he was too drunk. When she was finished, she said, “I don’t know what to do with myself. I don’t have very much money left. Eventually I’ll have to go back. To Thomas, I suppose.”