Sleet: Selected Stories

Suddenly Barbro comes out on the front deck in a swimsuit. She stands for a while in the sun and waves up to them, lithe, smiling, and confident. Odd that it doesn’t show on her, he thinks, and yet it doesn’t. There’s nothing there to indicate she’s in the habit of sneaking down to Paul’s quarters in the twilight and then sneaking back across the forward deck in the darkest hours of night. He doesn’t think she should have the right to look so clean. Something should happen to her milky, immaculate body so that anyone who lays eyes on it would know immediately what she’s been up to, but nothing does happen, and life is so unfair. She dives beautifully over the railing. The arc of the dive is so graceful that its ghost seems to hang in the hot air for a moment, quivering, as she disappears beneath the water. When she surfaces again her bathing cap shines, a white float against the blue water. Glimmering droplets cling to the fine hairs on her milky legs as she climbs slowly toward them on the path. Then as she makes her way across the shelf of exposed rock, beginning to remove her bathing cap, she smiles at him, smiles at all of them, and her hair springs forth radiantly. She turns then and walks beyond them ten yards or so, and that’s when he becomes aware of all the tension choking the air. There is thunder in this heated, innocent air, and all at once his smile disappears. His face hardens and he can’t help thinking that it will never soften again.

Go on, he thinks. Go down into the fo’c’sle. Go down there and let him hug you, let him bite you, let him have his way with you in every position imaginable.

Then Greta calls over to Barbro and her voice is so singular — so hard and sharp and icy — that he can’t help looking up at her in surprise.

“Bon soir,” she cries. “Bon soir!”

Then he looks at Alfhild, with her mouth slightly open and tongue peering out of its nest. The contours of her face are hardened, especially around the mouth. And it’s only then that he becomes aware of the strong bond uniting them, the feelings of mutual sympathy flowing among these three on the rock shelf, the one mourning her lost youth, the other her lost beauty, and the third mourning simply the lost, all that is and has been lost. He would like to put his head down on one of their shoulders and cry. He would like one of them to have a good cry on his shoulder.

“Your French is very good, Greta,” he says, caressing her with all six words.

“Bon soir,” says Greta and smiles her smile so full of bad teeth. But he isn’t put off by it so much now. At least it no longer makes him feel like throwing up. “Bon soir. The headmistress, she always said ‘Our Greta has a real gift for languages!’ At the home they always spoke of my gift for languages.”

What home? he wonders. What headmistress? Then, as usual, he can’t help himself. He begins to feel sorry for himself and so he tells them how he normally attends school, during the rest of the year, that is. Yes, normally he’s a student of French, from the fall through the spring. It’s only during summer vacation that he has to take this job. The only way of salvaging his pathetic life is by elevating it above the stench and the filth and the callousness all around him. He commends Greta on her language skills, though she can only say bon soir, and he makes up a story about a Frenchman who visited his school and pronounced it exactly the same way — exactly.

That’s when he notices Alfhild opening her mouth a couple of times to get in a word. And so after extolling Greta for her language aptitude, before moving on to the subject of his own mastery of English, he pauses for a second or two, and Alfhild seizes the moment to lift her pale face toward the clouds and turns toward both of them. He may only be fifteen-years-old, but still he can tell how years of anxiety have deepened the lines in this face, so faintly trembling now.

“Do you see this outline, right here?” she says as her fingers fumble blindly across her face. “This outline is exactly like Signe Hasso’s.”

“Yes,” he lies quickly, and with compassion. “It’s amazing how much you resemble her. You could easily pass as a relative of hers.”

And the sun shines down on the wicked and the good alike, on all the boats that clip along through the sound with their great flags trailing in their wakes, and on the long black barge train bearing roof tiles just like any other Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday, but not at all like a sunny Sunday in August. They sit there on the rock shelf for another half an hour or so sharing silences, occasionally trading words of little consequence and even less meaning. Close together they sit and smile, some thirty, fifty, seventy feet above their failures.