Sleet: Selected Stories

“To keep warm?” she asked him. She could vaguely remember having seen people with toothaches wearing white cloths tied around their heads.

The forester looked down into the glass case as if into an aquarium until at last he saw what he was looking for. He walked around the case, which extended far out into the room, and pulled out a drawer filled with scarves. He picked up the first one he saw and after holding it up to look through the blotchy red transparent silk he asked the girl in rapid low syllables to wrap it up for him.

Afterwards he stood for a few moments on the steps outside trying to light a cigarette in the rain. Through the display window the girl saw him hurry past with his lips closed around the cigarette like a vice. Just before the bend in the road he stopped suddenly, took one of his delicate hands from his pocket and held it out in the rain, as if he were about to taste it. But he continued on again presently and was soon out of sight, even from the farthest of the store windows. It was odd, though. Very odd.

That night nearly everyone in the village knew about the forester’s scarf. Many were still discussing it long after the lights had been turned down and they lay awaiting sleep in their kitchen beds with a cat curled up on the blankets, the low tones of their conversation interrupted only occasionally by the sound of a car passing out on the road.

The next morning, as usual, the schoolteacher’s wife rode up to Cederblom’s on her bicycle. Her name was Alice. Though raised in the city, she was the daughter of a farmer from a neighboring parish. It was a clear day, the weather was warming up after the rain, and the door of the store stood wide open. As she was stepping across the threshold, Alice suddenly turned and ran back to her bike, as if she had forgotten to do something. She fiddled with the lock for a moment and then stuffed something into her handbag. When she came back up the steps her head was bare, but by the time she approached the counter she realized it was too late. A small group of women stood nearby fingering a roll of fabric, and they followed her all the way across the room with their eyes. She knew then that they had probably seen her wearing the forester’s scarf, had seen and understood the weakness that compelled her to hide it in her handbag. And because of this, the bag grew so heavy in her hands that she was barely able to lift it up. The shopgirl’s expression made it heavier yet. When it came time for her to place her order, Alice’s face flushed a deep red. Suddenly she couldn’t remember a single thing she meant to buy. But since she did not wish to acknowledge her alarm, not even to herself, she asked for a number of unnecessary things, whatever happened to pop into her head at the moment, including a pair of cuff links.

“That was stupid,” she thought to herself as soon as she asked for them, doubly stupid with all of these other women standing right there. And when the shopkeeper opened her bag to help her with the items, she hated him, for there in front of everyone he pulled out the scarf, set it on the counter, and remarked with poison in his mouth: “It would be a shame to put all of these heavy things on top of such a pretty little scarf.”

The forester rented an upstairs corner room in the teacher’s house. By midday he and the teacher’s wife were entangled in a net of speculation and suspicion. It was a wide net, still set at a distance, but with so many hands eagerly clutching it, their chances for escape were growing slim.

Of course, the talk of children is never worth heeding. Even so, children can be dangerous since they don’t have the tact to hold back the truth. The next day during lunch break the teacher was sitting at his desk in the classroom. Through the half-open door he could hear one girl chasing another through the hallway and he was just about to go out and tell them to stop it when the first girl was overtaken. Apparently unaware that he was still inside, the girls stopped abruptly just outside the classroom door.

“Who?” cried the second girl in a voice of raw excitement. “Who? Who? Who-who-who?”

“The forester!” panted the other.

The two girls ran off giggling, leaving the teacher alone with his shame. Heated misgivings began to tickle his mind like a sweet itching pain. When the children returned from recess he sat there at his desk, red in the face. At least it felt that way to him. And he had to look down to reassure himself that he wasn’t naked. Though the air of the schoolroom was rife with a midsummer heat, he buttoned his jacket and pulled the zipper on his sports shirt up all the way to his Adam’s apple. For the rest of the day he was not himself. He asked the students short, nervous questions, which he answered himself if the silence began to drag on too long. And he avoided the two girls from recess altogether, not even daring to look towards the window near their seats.