Unformed Landscape by Peter Stamm Page A

the water off. Then she heard his cracked voice very close to her.
    “I brought you a towel. I’m going out now.”
    “OK,” she said, “thank you.”
    When she emerged from the bathroom, he was sitting on the floor beside the door. He was pale, but there were little spots of red on his cheeks. He was smoking a cigarette. A column of ash fell off, and he brushed it nervously into the carpet.
    “Thank you for taking me in,” said Kathrine, “I don’t know what else I would have done.”
    Harald shook his head. “That’s how far gone I am. Using my dead son to try and get a woman…”
    “Be quiet,” said Kathrine.
    “What else have I got to offer?” said Harald. “My suffering.”
    “I liked you the moment I saw you,” said Kathrine, “when we were on the bridge, and you pointed out that seal.”
    Kathrine spent two days and two nights at Harald’s. On the afternoon of the third day, she took the train to Oslo. At the station, Harald asked her where she was going next.
    “I’ve got a friend called Christian,” she said. “He’s Danish, lives in Aarhus. I’m going to visit him there.”
    “Write to me,” said Harald. “And when you’re next in Bergen… stay with me anytime you like. With us. I’ll tell my wife about you.”
    The journey from Bergen to Oslo took seven hours. The train went over innumerable bridges, through tunnels and narrow valleys, past fjords and glaciers. In Oslo, Kathrine got on the night train. She dozed in her seat, she couldn’t sleep properly. When she changed trains in Malmo, she was dead tired. Eighteen hours after leaving Bergen, she finally arrived in Aarhus. She took a bus, and rode out to Christian’s address. She was surprised to find herself in front of a single concrete apartment block.
    Christian’s name wasn’t next to any of the apartments, but there was a family called Nygard who were listed. A. and K. Nygard. A man just leaving the building held the door open for Kathrine, and she took the elevator up to the fifth floor. From the elevator column, a glass door led to a long narrow corridor off which the apartments opened. Kathrine looked down at the town. She was surprised how flat and monotonous it all looked. The streets were all alike, the houses, the colors. She saw a mailman going from house to house, cars stopping at traffic lights, and then driving on.
    There was a straw star hanging on the door of A. and K. Nygard’s apartment, even though Christmas was more than a month ago. Kathrine rang the bell. A woman of about fifty in a stylish dress opened the door. Something about her face reminded Kathrine of Christian, perhaps itwas the watery eyes, perhaps the soft, undefined features. The woman looked at Kathrine without saying anything. Kathrine asked if a Christian Nygard lived here.
    “He’s not here,” said the woman.
    Kathrine asked when Christian was expected back, and the woman said she didn’t know, he was installing some machinery in France.
    “I thought he was back from there.”
    “We thought he would be too. But there was some problem. Something technical. He wasn’t even able to be home for Christmas.”
    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,