Sleet: Selected Stories

Maybe he does know a good bit about life after all. He knows almost everything worth knowing about the art of scrounging soda from the hostess of the small steamer’s restaurant. And he knows what sherry tastes like, ever since he and a young college student shared half a bottle in the dining lounge one evening during a blind run. He has smoked eight different brands of cigarettes and discovered just how strong beer can get if you let it stew on the ship’s boiler. If asked, he can reveal the good and the bad about all of Sweden’s weekly magazines. And he can do the same when it comes to that great man of the people and defender of the arts who bought a notorious pornographic magazine off him — for research purposes, of course — and then bawled him out because the back cover had apparently gotten soiled in his tote bag. He also knows that if you want to be treated like a grown-up you should snap your head around and stare at the legs of any girl over a certain age who walks by you on the upper deck. For a week now he’s also known what it feels like to kiss.

He learns this one evening from Barbro after taking a dip alone in the small cove where the water is always warm from the canal. The boat is dark and quiet when he returns from his swim. A hanging kerosene lamp has been lit in the waiting hut by the ferry dock across the sound, where a couple dances silently to a distantly wailing gramophone. As he boards the boat he encounters Barbro in the twilight of the upper deck.

She says, “Would you like me to kiss you, Sune?”

He has yearned so long and so intensely to know what it’s like to kiss that he isn’t sure his lips will be able to endure it. He’s afraid they may suddenly burst and spatter blood on her teeth, her lips and chin. So he says no and tries to step aside to rid her of the temptation. But she pulls him toward her with such force that his soap and towel fall to the floor, and then she kisses him squarely on the mouth. And then? Well, nothing. Nothing bad, anyway. They sit down on a bench nearby and continue, and he learns a great deal that evening. For instance, he learns that his lips can glide apart during a very long kiss so that his teeth actually scrape against hers. Like a boat’s hull when it runs aground, he thinks. He’s done an awful lot of reading this summer. Or he can stretch out his tongue and feel with delight how hers wriggles back. Or he can bite tenderly into her lip. Oh, yes.

But a couple evenings later, when they’re alone again, she asks him if he’d like to take a walk with her on the island. Since he is still the unplayed string afraid of breaking, he says no to her. And then nothing more comes of it. She’s not about to force him. She doesn’t drag him into the woods by the canal, nor out upon the wet meadows, nor onto the naked rocks above the sighing sea. She leaves him alone with his poor body, which should bleed from all the torture he allows it to endure in its loneliness, from all the loathing he heaps on it during those long nights of white sin in the aft saloon. She leaves him there alone in the twilight on the rocky promontory above their little bathing spot, with its partial view of the sound, the sunken barge, the dark blue currents flowing slowly southward between the islands’ docks. Across the cove his eyes trail along two hundred yards of green, rocky shoreline to their own white vessel with its lifeboats fastened securely on the roof, its long line of gleaming portholes and windows, its foredeck crowded with yellow barrels of Baltic herring.