Unformed Landscape Read Online Free Page A

letter are going to your mother, Thomas, Morten, and anyone else who wants one.” He tore up the letter and dropped it in the wastepaper basket. He smiled.
    “Brother, brother-in-law, son,” he said. “Crazy the lot of them. You can’t take it seriously.”
    It wasn’t a question, it was a command.
    “I don’t know what it’s all about, but I never asked for a copy. I regard the matter as closed. I don’t want to hear anything about it.”
    When Kathrine thought about the office now, she could only think of the fitted carpet, which ran up the walls a little way, and always gave her the feeling of not quite having her feet on the ground. It was as though everything in the office had only provisionally been set down on that carpet, and sometimes it would disappear again, when the workers came to roll it up and cart it down to the street, and put it in the dumpster—when the head office in Oslo finally agreed to the long overdue renovation.
    He regarded the matter as closed, her boss had said, but Kathrine knew it wasn’t, that the letter would forever belying there, between the two of them, even if he believed, even if he knew it was all a lie.
    At around lunchtime, her mother had called her at the office. This was something she had done only once before, when Kathrine’s father had died. Kathrine assured her that it was all a lie, and her mother tried to calm her down. But Kathrine sensed the doubt in her voice, and quickly ended the call.
    Kathrine had gone out to lunch with her colleagues, as she did every day. She had looked at the other people in the restaurant, and wondered which of them had also received a copy of the letter. But nobody had betrayed any sign. Kathrine had had the sensation of being the only human, among lots of browsing animals. After lunch, she had stayed in the fishermen’s refuge and had holed up in her room all afternoon, and cried a lot.
    The following day she hadn’t gone into work, nor the day after. She stopped going. She hadn’t handed in her notice, she just stopped going, and the only thing that surprised her was that she didn’t hear from her boss at all.
    Kathrine sat in her room in the fishermen’s refuge. She thought about the office, about her boss, her colleagues. She looked out the window, and watched the workers going to the fish factory, the children going to school, the women leaving the houses to go shopping. She lay down, and she got up. Then it was already time for the office workers to be coming out of the factory and the town hall, to drink coffee at Svanhild’s. A few seamen were on thestreets, three old women with Zimmer frames stopped right in front of Kathrine’s window, just stood there, not talking, and finally went on.
    Once, she heard some noise from next door, and she wondered what it was like for the Russian fishermen who stayed here while their ships were in port, being serviced or repaired. In these rooms with their easy-to-clean, man-made surfaces. A damp cloth would wipe away all traces of them after they were gone, off at sea on one of the rusty trawlers, to live in a tiny cabin for a week or two of hectic work.
    Kathrine knew those cabins. She had inspected them often enough. Some of the seamen had pinups on their walls, and turned the music louder when she came along. She felt their eyes on her when she bent down to look under the bunks, and her overalls grew taut across her behind. Some of the time she didn’t mind it, and some of the time she felt scared. Others had pictures of saints or the Virgin Mary on their walls. On the bottom deck, where the sailors slept, the men slept three to a cabin. Kathrine looked in the cupboards, pushed aside empty tins of Nescafé. The vodka was usually kept behind the drawers under the bunks. Two or three bottles, rarely more than that. The seamen stood in the doorways. They wore felt slippers and rough knitted vests, and they smiled apologetically and said,
“No problem,”
when Kathrine wrote out the