Sleet: Selected Stories

From this height it’s even possible to see the black hatch leading into the fo’c’sle where Paul sleeps. He is the only one of the regular crew who doesn’t go home at night because he’s quarrelling with his wife. One evening after his swim, while Sune sits alone shivering on the promontory, he sees Barbro climb down through the hatch. He sits there for a long time after she closes the hatch behind her. Eventually his shivers subside, but she has not come back up. He takes up his notebook and sketches the boat and the dock. He draws the same picture four times, and yet she still has not come back up. A large well-lit motorboat passes by out on the sound, disappearing at last around the point with its muted drone. Not even when its wake finishes slapping against the rocky shore nearby has she come up again. He is anxious. Somewhere inside him something hurts. He undresses and swims out. The bottom disappears beneath him in the shimmering, dusky reflection as warm, sticky water laps into his mouth. But none of it makes any difference: she still has not come out from the fo’c’sle and he lacks the will to drown himself as he had vaguely hoped. After the swim he walks into the empty waiting hut on the dock, leaving the door wide open as he carves his name and the date of this night into a beam. Not even before he has finished doing this does she appear again from the hatch. At some point later he finds himself on the foredeck drawing the distant rock shelf and the old barge half-sunken into the mud, the spiny outline of the woods, and the moon rolling above it all. Essentially this same moon shines over victory and defeat. Later that night as he lies pitifully naked beneath a blanket in the aft saloon, he hears her in the middle of his dream sneaking back across the deck and whimpers like a dog until her steps disappear.

It’s Sunday now and he has just been caught by the cook’s husband make-believe fencing with some bushes up above the dock. So he’s moved off across the cove to lie by himself atop the high exposed shelf of rock. Lying there on his side he sketches and thinks, and for a while at least he believes that he may have things figured out. The boat slumbers, casting its wide black shadow into the depths of the sunlit cove. Only the cook’s spindly husband stirs on the dock in his white shirt, his hands resting together against his lower back as he kicks a stone or two into the water before swinging round.

Then the little dishwasher Greta appears with Alfhild, the pale Sunday waitress. Out for a Sunday stroll, the pair head up the path with their elbows linked. At the shelf of high exposed rock, they stop beside him and look down. He can feel himself starting to sweat intensely under his official newsstand jacket, although nothing in particular is going on.

“Bon soir,” Greta says. “Bon soir, bon soir.” He doesn’t have to look up to know what she looks like right now. She’s almost certainly smiling, with her thin upper lip pulled back taut above her teeth, which look like they’re covered in cement, sweating cement. The deep wrinkles in this young old woman’s face fan out around her eyes, giving birth to an ancient Chinese every time she laughs. He detests those wrinkles, those revolting teeth.

“You, sir, should rub suntan lotion on when you’re out sunning yourself,” says Alfhild, who never misses a chance to remind folks how she usually works as an extra in the movies. She claims the outline of her face from her temple down to her chin is similar to Signe Hasso’s — no, that it is exactly like Signe Hasso’s — and she often traces this outline with her frail index finger when she thinks someone is looking at her, maybe even sometimes when she’s alone.

“Next thing you know,” Paul quipped recently. “Next thing she’ll be showing us how her thighs are just like Marlene Dietrich’s.” And then he added cynically, “And I got no objections there. The hatch is always open.” Sune hadn’t laughed, because at that moment he hated him. The last few nights this week, just before falling asleep, he has fantasized about surprising the two of them with an ice pick. But in his fantasy he never drives the pick into them, he just brandishes it nobly above their smutty, obscene, sweating bodies to make it clear he has the means if not the will to do it.

“What are you drawing?” asks Greta. He slams the notebook shut, embarrassed. But then he is embarrassed to be embarrassed and so he opens it again and shows her everything.

Then they sit there, the three of them, looking out over the sound. Someone has just launched a small flotilla of toy sailboats from a rowboat, and they are soon running gently over the water’s surface southward before the wind like a gaggle of white geese.

“You didn’t get those,” Greta says, pointing to his note pad. Her nails are exceptionally dirty.

“I didn’t get that either,” he says and gestures to a hawk, tracing its small black arc of menace over the sound.