Sleet: Selected Stories

They started up the stairs together, Alice leading the way, keeping several steps ahead of her husband. As for the teacher, he followed reluctantly, half-stunned by an unexpected, though gratifying fact — or two facts. “Lunatic,” she had said. And in such an angry tone. And “it’s a crime.” “Besides, it’s a crime. People go to jail for things like that!” And so he went along.

Before he knew it, there they all were. The forester was standing before them in his doorway, his hair mussed. He blinked a few times stupidly, as if he’d been sleeping and was hastily awakened. Alice was abrupt. She didn’t even allow him to catch his breath.

“Sir, my husband said you were pointing your rifle at him when he came through the yard.”

The forester backed a few steps into his room, sat on the edge of his desk and fingered his knees. He let out a nervous, embarrassed chuckle.

“A mistake,” he said, looking at the floor. “I wanted to see if the rifle was clean. So I took it out and was sighting it on something in the yard, and … well, unfortunately Arne happened to come walking down the path just when … but like I said —”

“Yes, yes, of course,” said the teacher. “It was just a little unnerving. You know, to look up and see … well, you understand.”

On their way back down the stairs, the teacher leaned toward his wife and whispered, “Since when have you started calling him ‘sir’?”

Alice stopped and looked up at him with an almost frantic determination.

“Since today,” she said. “He made a couple of stupid comments about you coming home in the middle of the day. So then I told him I thought he was taking a few too many liberties of that sort around here. And as far as I was concerned it was going to stop. That’s what I told him. Just like that scarf he had the nerve to give me. I’m sure you’ve seen that.”

“No,” her husband lied.

When they reached the bottom of the stairs, Alice took the scarf down from the shelf. Her husband studied her smile, comparing it with others on similar occasions, trying to determine whether it was counterfeit. Alice likewise observed his expression as he turned the scarf over in his hands, and by the exaggerated attention of his eyes she could tell that he had already been aware of it. This worried her a little. She climbed out of herself and stood by, correcting every movement before she made it, so that each small gesture would carry absolute credibility.

That evening the forester did not come down for coffee as usual. For a while they could hear him pacing back and forth in his room. Then he lay down on his bed. The springs creaked. Quite some time passed before they heard another sound from upstairs.

“He’s probably just feeling sorry for himself,” said Alice when her husband commented on the forester’s absence. “First because I snubbed him today, and now because of this business with the gun.”

It all sounded quite on the level. As the teacher spread honey on his roll he scrutinized all the different parts of his wife’s face, but everything held together. Later that night, just after they got into bed, they heard the forester’s heavy footsteps on the stairs. He left the house and headed straight out into the woods. The teacher lay back in bed, calmly and clearly weighing the various pieces of evidence against one another. On one side were all of the things that seemed to indicate guilt, on the other, innocence. His wife crept over into his bed. At first this made him glad, but then he grew suspicious, since he was almost always the one to take the initiative. He lay beside her silently running through two mental lists, first of the incriminating and then the vindicating evidence. But as he sank more and more deeply into the warmth of her body he became ever more convinced of her innocence. Until finally he felt freer and happier than he had in a very long time. He fell asleep quite late with a bit of her hair closed between his teeth.

Alice, on the other hand, lay awake for a long time, the scenes of the day replaying themselves over and over in her mind. Very cautiously she freed her hair from her husband’s mouth and moved away from him. When she lay down again on the cold sheets of her own bed, she wanted to scream from the pain of those fourteen days that separated her from happiness — that sweet, dangerous happiness, the happiness that bites. She did not cry out, but she did lie awake most of the night.

At dawn the forester came home from his night hunt. Alice awoke when she heard some sounds from the porch below, and she sat up quickly in bed. The room was very warm, so she got up and opened a window. She heard a heavy bang on the porch and not long afterwards some hard steps on the stairway. She remembered then how the forester had gone on the night hunt.