“Is it just because of the money?” Christian asked. “Because if you need some…”
“Where else would I go? I can’t start a new life.”
“I sometimes have the feeling my life hasn’t even begun,” he said. “I’m glad you didn’t see my room in Aarhus.” He laughed. “I’ve got a picture of the Danish national soccer team up on the wall. I would have taken it down long ago, if I’d had any idea what I was going to put up in its place.”
“But you get around so much.”
“That’s one possibility. Flight,” said Christian, and smiled at her. “Compared to me… you’ve had a baby, you’ve been married a couple of times. That’s a life.”
“What about you?”
“I’ve got a girlfriend in Aarhus. She’s a nurse. She goes and sees my parents when I’m not there. She trades recipes with my mother.”
He laughed. Kathrine felt sorry for him. She smiled and said, “Shall we go back to the hotel?”
The hotel lobby was dark. On the stairs, Kathrine asked Christian what different places he had been to.
“All over,” he said. “Shall I show you the pictures?”
“Have you got them here?”
“Yes,” he said, letting himself into his room. “I’ll show you.”
His room was even smaller than Kathrine’s. She sat down on the bed. There was an open suitcase on the floor, a pair of socks soaking in the washbasin. On the tiny table, which — as if to catch its fall — had a TV suspended over it, there was an old Danish newspaper, and a little model fighter plane, almost finished.
“To pass the time,” said Christian, “a Messerschmitt Me 109. The fastest plane in the world, in its day. Before the war.”
He picked up the model, flew a couple of loops with it round Kathrine’s head, and then went on the attack with machine-gun fire.
“Don’t do that,” she said.
He apologized for the mess in the room. Tidying up is half of life, Kathrine thought, but she didn’t want to be thinking about Thomas just now.
“It’s your room,” she said.
“The less you make yourself at home, the easier it is to leave,” he said.
He had got a pile of red and yellow envelopes out of his suitcase. He sat down next to Kathrine, and showed her the photos. He looked at them, one after another, and then passed them to her with a brief introduction, sometimes just a word or two. Most of the pictures were of buildings and landscapes, the sea, a few of the sky, and cloud formations. At the end were pictures of people. A group of men in white coats in front of a fish factory. Sometimes Christian was in the pictures himself. The men stood close together, their arms were around each other’s shoulders, someone had cracked a joke, and they were all laughing. Colleagues of mine, said Christian. Portugal, he said, Grimsby, that’s in England, Bremerhaven, Holger, he’s a friend of mine, Vancouver. “Rome,” he said, and he handed Kathrine a picture of him with the pope. “The Holy Father.”
“Are you Catholic?”
“Yes,” he said. “There’s not many of us in Denmark.”
“What’s it like, being Catholic? I visited the cathedral here.”
“I don’t know. I’ve never been anything else. Nice.”
There followed more pictures of seaside towns, fish factories, harbors, and ships. A man hoisting two gutted fish aloft, and smiling.
“I follow the fish,” said Christian. “Wherever the fish go, so go I.”
“Why follow the fish?” asked Kathrine. “There are fish all over.”
“They move through the ocean in schools,” he said. “I can’t imagine it. How far they swim. Whether they know each other. There are so many of them. They multiply.”
He said he imagined that fish liked being together.
“If they stay together, they must enjoy each other’s company.”
Kathrine laughed, and keeled over backward onto the bed. She pushed her shoes off, drew up her feet, and rested her hands on her thighs. Christian turned to look at her. She smiled, and grinned at him. “What sort of feelings do you have? Or are you a fish?”
“We could leave today,” he said. “I’m finished here. If we hurry, there’s a direct train to Paris at four o’clock. I know a pretty little hotel there.”
They arrived in Paris a little after six. From the Gare du Nord, they went straight to the Trocadero. They crossed the square between the two wings of the Palais de Chaillot. The Eiffel Tower was all lit up and beautiful.
“It looks exactly the way I imagined it,” said Kathrine. She bought a little bronze-colored model of it from a pavement dealer, and then got another one for Christian. “Souvenir,” she said, and he said, “Are we having a good time?”
“Yes,” said Kathrine. “Oui. Shall we go up?”
“Do you want to?”
Christian pulled a face, and Kathrine laughed.
“Danes don’t have a head for heights. Is that it?”
“The suitcase,” claimed Christian.
They took the elevator up to the second platform. That’s enough, said Kathrine, as she looked down. She took one picture with Christian in it, and one without. For public and private recollections, she said.
“Now I’ll have something to tell people about, too,” she said. And suddenly she found herself crying.
“You mustn’t feel sorry for yourself,” said Christian. “Haven’t you got some sort of tower up there, too?”
“The tallest radio mast in Norway,” said Kathrine, and wiped her tears away, “but you can’t go up it. I’ve never cried as much as I have this month.”
“Any other place you have to have gone to?” asked Christian.
They took a taxi, and drove through the city, down the Champs-Elysées, over the Place Vendôme and past the old and new opera houses. Kathrine took pictures out of the window, and by the time they reached the hotel, the roll of film was finished. The hotel was in a little side street.
“We could share a room,” said Kathrine. “That would save money.”
“I don’t know if they have rooms with twin beds here.”
“I don’t mind sharing a bed,” said Kathrine. That was saying too much and not enough, she thought, while Christian talked with the elegantly dressed, dark-skinned lady at the desk. He tried to talk French. The woman was very patient, but before long she had switched to English.
“If you prefer, we could move another bed into the room.”
“No, no, that’s OK.” Christian blushed, and Kathrine turned away and went over to a stand full of leaflets on various tourist attractions. She took one out about a Village Gaulois, and looked at it. There were pictures of wooden huts, and types who resembled the characters in the Asterix comics she had read when she was little. Kathrine thought about the Sami village at Jukkasjarvi, where her father had worked at the time he met her mother. He had called it the Lapp Zoo, when he’d had to depict the traditional way of life of the Sami for the benefit of tourists. As a little girl, Kathrine had gone there often. Her mother had made a Sami costume for her, and had worn one herself, even though she looked rather strange in it. Her family had traveled up to Kiruna from south Sweden before the war. Kathrine’s grandfather and great-grandfather had both worked in the iron mines, enormously strong fair-haired giants. Her mother was blond as well, and looked typically Swedish. Her grandfather, whom Kathrine had never met, was a devout and strict man. When his daughter came home and told him she was getting married and was pregnant, he almost murdered her. And when he learned that the father of her child was a Lapp, he stopped speaking to her. There was no church wedding, her father had threatened the priest, and none of the family members appeared at the registrar’s office, in the town hall.
Kathrine had often asked herself how her father had won over his mother, how he had managed to seduce the strictly brought-up girl, who was also fully a head taller than he was. The Sami have more testosterone than the Swedes, her father had said, and laughed. But Mother had said he wanted to buy a fishing boat. “He wanted to get out, and I wanted to get out, too.”