Sleet: Selected Stories

The forester slowly turned away from her. He looked at his glass. There wasn’t much in it. As befits a man of character, it was almost fully empty. So he lifted it from the desk pad, and holding it up as an argument for his own excellence he turned to her again with vehemence. There was an ominous shine to his eyes. “I!” he thought with an exclamation mark. “I cannot even sit in my rented room and have a few drops of brandy in solitude! And as for my prey, why can’t I take it up to my expensive room without you being scandalized? And that you — you, of all people — should say it!” (though she had, in fact, said nothing). “You! … So attached to hypocrisy that you force others to be hypocritical! Force them to swear to you that they never touch a drop! Coerce promises that they will never kill for pleasure! You’re trying to drag me down, that’s what you’re doing. Down to your own level. Do you think I can’t see that?”

But he was not about to give her the pleasure. Now he would be the one to set the trap, as if he couldn’t figure out why she chose to intrude on him at this time of day. He raised the glass to his lips and took a drink, a little nip to clear his throat.

“Didn’t we agree not to see each other like this for a couple of weeks?”

His voice was thick with suppressed emotion. This sudden attack on his dignity nearly brought tears to his eyes, or at least a misty haze. The steam of the fury boiling within him dampened the windows of his soul.

Then at last it happened. The scene. The Big Scene. Enough to make him want to shade his eyes, something he would gladly have done if decorum did not prohibit it. Alice’s bare white feet now crossed that threshold of pain and stood on the soft rug inside the room. They were trembling, both from a desire to kick him and a longing to run away. And yet, contrary to his expectations, she did not yell. Her voice was a tightly stretched wire onto which her words stepped delicately. If one single word were too heavy the entire wire would snap.

“You have it good,” she said to him. “You have your rifle and your brandy. You don’t have to lie awake all night. No one talks about you in the stores. No one gossips about you in their kitchens. No one thinks you’re ridiculous. No one finds you shameful, because you’re not cheating on anyone — no one but me. Who doesn’t cheer when someone deceives a deceiver? Two weeks is easy for you. A nice little holiday. Imagine, fourteen days that you don’t have to kiss and caress me. How wonderful! Imagine not having to be in love for fourteen whole days. What an enviable position you’re in.”

But her words appeared to have no effect on the forester. And, truth be told, he wasn’t touched by them in the least, for the simple reason that he didn’t understand — or even hear — a single thing that Alice said. He just sat there waiting for her to end so that he could say his line — The Line — the one that would bring him peace of mind and clearly establish who was right and who was wrong. Even a playwright who suddenly discovers that One Irresistible Line in the midst of a frantic dress rehearsal couldn’t have more eagerly awaited the perfect moment to make his voice heard.

Finally Alice was quiet. Her feet no longer shook. They stood firmly planted on the forester’s rug, and they would not move till she heard his lips pray for forgiveness. Not that she felt particularly forgiving — but who can resist wielding the power to answer a prayer? The forester sat up in his chair and it squeaked. He straightened his back. His eyes became steady and his face stiff. His hand firmly closed upon the glass. “Lucky it’s not plastic,” thought Alice. “If it were plastic you’d be lost.”

“I am a man of character,” said the forester. He emphasized the “I” and looked sadly dignified when he said it, as if he were eminently pained by having to remind her of such a self-evident truth. He then finished his drink, and not even the brandy could make a dent in the stiff composure of a face so controlled by that sentiment.

For Alice this marked the end of it. She suddenly found herself standing there staring down into Mrs. Mattsson’s face. Mrs. Mattsson’s eyes stared harshly and judgementally back into her own. “You have no character,” the eyes told her. “You’re an impenitent, lost soul, disgraced in this village.” She wanted to cry out. But the lonely — in the truest sense of that word, lonely — they don’t bother to cry out their despair, since the very act would be meaningless. The deserts don’t hear. But she could do things with her hands that even a desert couldn’t ignore. She could scratch the desert sand until its desert face bled.

Shhhht!