Sleet: Selected Stories

Suddenly two pieces of a brightly-colored scarf were lying in the forester’s lap. And Alice wasn’t standing firmly rooted in front of him any longer. With a sob choked between her teeth she ran out in wild, reckless flight. This of course only strengthened the forester’s conviction that he was in the right. Those capable of maintaining their composure always imagine they’re in the right.

The door slammed behind Alice.

“Hysterical idiot,” he thought to himself, without an ounce of compassion. Then he sank back into an undignified slump. “She’s closed that door for the last time.” At that point a little more brandy seemed like it would do the trick. And so he filled up the glass. A few moments later he took up his rifle and aimed it out at the sky. But no brandy bottle came sailing beneath a balloon through the thin, cold, morning mist.

The teacher had heard voices in his dreams. But the bang of the door shook him from those dreams and brought him sitting up in bed. When his wife slowly turned the doorknob on her way back into the room, he lay back again with the painful assurance that he knew everything now. As he wrapped the blankets around himself, his memory of the night’s pleasures remained as yet in his limbs. It was humiliating for him to think that he had so recently made love with an unfaithful woman. It made him an accomplice of sorts to the infidelity without strengthening the force of his indignation. Nothing can paralyze the will like the memory of pleasure. When she entered the room, he feigned sleep.

She decided to wake him. The tender warmth of her attempts to entice him from sleep convinced him, eventually, that something had happened between her and the forester. Perhaps the affair had come to an end. But the thought was no comfort to him. The most humiliating fact of all remained: while he was asleep she had loosened herself from his embrace and gone up to another man’s room. Betrayal in absentia was possibly forgivable — it was like letting down your own soul. But to betray the warm body of someone there beside you was an unpardonable offence. The teacher’s body stiffened at her touch, but finally he had to go through the motions of waking to keep from giving himself away. He began a long and awkward, theatrical waking scene, stretching his body in every direction, yawning and then mumbling a number of incomprehensible half-phrases from the depth of his throat. Alice ran her hands along the skin beneath his pajamas. With his eyes still closed he grabbed her wrist deliberately and removed it from his body, wishing to demonstrate just how much his subconscious condemned her unfaithfulness. As soon as his eyes were fully opened she crept from the edge of the bed in close to his body.

“Arne,” she said. “Take me with you.”

“Where?” he blurted out suddenly in a voice that sounded much more awake than he wanted it to.

But Alice was so desperately afraid of being stranded again in the desert — so afraid of the desert itself — that she did not pick up on the tell-tale inconsistencies in her husband’s voice.

“On the school trip,” she said, on the verge of sobbing. She searched for her husband’s eyes, for eyes that would love her, that would look at her as they did a few hours before, black and glazed over from lust.

Then he sat bolt upright in bed and looked out the window, into the yard. And there and then any memories of lust that remained disappeared altogether. His body grew heavy and dignified, as if pregnant. “School trip,” he thought. And suddenly images from school appeared in his mind — images at first glance innocent, but put into their proper context, terrible: two girls’ heads leaning together, their eyes sweeping over him cursorily, shamefully; one girl shouting out “the forester!” in the corridor; a small group of teachers abruptly ending their conversation as he entered the staff lounge; a whole bus filled with heads drawn together, a host of eyes fixed on them for four hundred miles. No thank you!

“That’s out of the question,” he said curtly. He could now be as awake as he pleased.

“But why?” she pleaded, believing to the very last that there must be some technicality, some matter of policy, placing obstacles before them.

Her husband settled back against the headboard, pulling his shoulders back as if engaged in some gymnastics performance. He folded his hands on his stomach, a man pregnant with his own honor. Because I’m ashamed would sound idiotic. Because I’m afraid would sound cowardly.

“Because I’m a man of character,” he said. This, on the other hand, sounded terrific.

But as soon as the words passed his lips, his wife transformed before his very eyes into a tight bundle of laughter. Shaking in paroxysms of laugher she rolled around on the bed.