I will walk right over them.
Right through the meadow.
But no, I had better not,
Because all those pretty flowers
Would be crushed and squashed…
Kathrine left the school again. They all come through here, she thought. But when it’s over it’s over. Now he’s learning the same rhymes as we used to learn. What is my baby doing? What is my little deer doing? Now I’ll come to you once more, and then never again. A fairy tale, which one? Little brother and little sister. She had told it to Randy once. About the spring that whispers, who drinks from me will turn into a deer. Who drinks from me will turn into a deer. And then the little brother drinks from it, and so he turns into a deer. All afternoon, Randy was a deer, right until supper, when Kathrine told him deer don’t get to eat ambrosia-creamed rice.
Kathrine walked to the cemetery. It was snowing harder now. The houses all had lights on inside them, and some of the windows still had Christmas decorations up, straw stars, and strings of fairy lights, and lit-up plastic Santa Claus masks. They hadn’t had those when she was little. There were lanterns lit in the cemetery. You couldn’t see the individual tombstones under the snow, but Kathrine knew where her father lay. Her footsteps were the only ones to be seen. From a distance, she heard the school bell, and then the shouts and yells of the children as they ran home. Kathrine saw one or two from Randy’s class walking up the hill. The children greeted her as she passed them on her way to the main street.
There weren’t many trawlers at anchor in the harbor. Randy was standing with a couple of other children at the dock, watching a fisherman greasing a pulley. Kathrine called Randy, and he turned and ran to her. Silently, he took her hand. Together, they walked back to their mother, their grandmother.
“Do you like going to school?” asked Kathrine.
“I’m the second best at gym,” said Randy.
“Were you learning a poem today?”
“All I can remember is the ending,” said Randy, and he stopped, as though he couldn’t walk and think at the same time. He stood in front of Kathrine, and breathlessly and earnestly recited the few lines he could remember:
I hope you stay there nice and bright!
Little flowers, I’ll move on;
I just want to pick a bunch;
That’s enough for me today,
Little flowers blue and white.
“Would you rather be blind or deaf or dumb?” asked Randy, as they took off their shoes outside the apartment door.
“What sort of question is that?”
“I’d rather be dumb.”
After lunch, he ran out to play with the other children. Kathrine went into the garage. They had sold the car after her father died. Kathrine’s mother couldn’t drive, and Kathrine only had to for work. In a corner of the chilly building, next to the Deepfreeze, were a couple of large cardboard boxes, which Thomas had labeled “K” with his tidy writing, “K — books” and “K — kitchen,” “K — kid” and “K — casual clothes.” Next to them stood her cross-country skis. Kathrine picked them up, took them out, and slipped them on. Her mother came out to tell her to be careful, there was more snow on the way.
“Don’t worry, I’ll be careful,” said Kathrine.
She set off in the direction of the lighthouse. Visibility was poor, but she knew the way. Once she had left the village behind her, and was over the first hill, she hit a track, almost covered over by the fresh snow. She followed it. Kathrine went for a long time. She wasn’t cold, only her face felt chilly from the snow that was falling, harder now than before. She couldn’t see the track anymore. It was getting dark again, and it wasn’t even two o’clock.
An hour later, Kathrine saw someone coming toward her from a distance. It was Morten. She stopped. He had his head down pushing into the wind, and only saw her when he was a couple of yards from her. He got a shock.
“Does your new machine work?” she asked.
“Battery’s gone dead,” he said, with a grin. Then he said, “Hey, I’m glad you’re back!”
They embraced, but didn’t kiss. Their cheeks touched. Very cold, said Morten. But I don’t feel cold, said Kathrine. You’re not going out to the lighthouse, are you, asked Morten. Kathrine said she had gone out to meet him, and would come back with him.
“If you’re hungry…,” he said. “And I’ve got some hot tea as well.”
“You go on ahead.”
Morten went on slowly, and kept looking around at her. At five they were back in the village.
“Do you want to come to my place?” asked Morten.
“Let’s go to Svanhild’s.”
When Svanhild saw Kathrine, she came out from behind the bar, and, with a beaming smile, shook her hand. She asked where she had been, and wouldn’t let go of her hand. She said Alexander’s wife and his two daughters were there. She pointed to a table, where a plump blond woman sat, with a couple of girls almost as big as her. Kathrine recognized them from the photos Alexander had shown her.
“It’s three months since he’s disappeared now,” said Svanhild. “On Sunday we’re having a service for him in the church. We collected money so that they could come.”
Maybe the woman would stay, she said. There was no shortage of work. The girls’ names were Nina and Xenia.
Kathrine and Morten sat down at the table in the corner at the back, and Svanhild brought them coffee and homemade cake. The place was empty, apart from themselves and a couple of old workers from the fish factory.
“I’ve got some French cigarettes left,” said Kathrine.
“And Paris is beautiful?”
“I’ll show you my pictures, if you like.”
“Why did you go to Paris, of all places?” Kathrine didn’t answer. Then she told Morten about Christian, and that she had slept with him on the train. Then it was Morten’s turn not to speak.
“You weren’t there when I went away. I went looking for you, and you weren’t there. Are you jealous?”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t want to lie to you.”
Kathrine told him about Stockholm and Boulogne, and how she’d eaten shellfish for the first time in her life, and smoked dope for the first time. Morten listened and he laughed, but she sensed he was different from how he had been before.
“I have to get used to the fact that you’ve slept with him,” he said.
“I slept with Thomas as well.”
“That was a long time ago. Anyway, he’s your husband.”
“And with you. And you’re not my husband.”
Morten nodded. He said that, to begin with, they had thought she had done herself a mischief by disappearing like Alexander. Thomas had run to the Elvekrog, all excited, and said they had to help him find his wife. He really said his wife, as if they didn’t all know who Kathrine was. Then when they had gone down to the harbor and asked after her there, the harbormaster had said he had seen her leave on the Polarlys.
“And you just stopped looking for me after that?”
“You’re your own woman. You can go wherever you like.”
“I was afraid someone might try and keep me from going. I don’t know. I had the feeling I was doing something wrong. I felt like a criminal on the run.”
“I thought you wouldn’t come back. Most of them don’t come back.”
Morten said he had lately been thinking quite a lot about leaving. He knew some people at the national radio, and he could probably get a job in Tromso, or even in Oslo. Couldn’t she get herself transferred? If she got her job back, she might be able to, said Kathrine. Tromso, why not. That might have been the happiest time in her life, those months in the city, with her male and female colleagues, the parties, the cinemas.