The Dark Blue Winter Overcoat and Other Stories from the North

THE DOGS OF THESSALONIKI ^{KJELL ASKILDSEN}

WE DRANK MORNING COFFEE in the garden. We hardly spoke. Beate got up and put the cups on the tray. We should probably take the chairs up onto the veranda, she said. Why? I said. It looks like rain, she said. Rain? I said, there’s not a cloud in the sky. There’s a nip in the air, she said, don’t you think? No, I said. Maybe I’m mistaken, she said. She walked up the steps onto the veranda and into the living room. I sat there for another quarter of an hour, and then carried one of the chairs up to the veranda. I stood a while looking at the woods on the other side of the fence, but there was nothing to see. I could hear the sound of Beate humming coming from the open door. She must have heard the weather forecast of course, I thought. I went back down into the garden and walked round to the front of the house, over to the mailbox beside the black wrought-iron gate. It was empty. I closed the gate, which for some reason or another had been open; then I noticed someone had thrown up just outside it. I became annoyed. I attached the garden hose to the tap by the cellar door and turned the water on full, and then dragged the hose after me over to the gate. The jet of water hit at slightly the wrong angle, and some of the vomit spattered into the garden, the rest spread out over the tarmac. There were no drains nearby, so all I succeeded in doing was moving the yellowish substance four or five metres away from the gate. But even so, it was a relief to get a bit of distance from the filthy mess.

When I’d turned off the tap and coiled up the hose, I didn’t know what to do. I went up to the veranda and sat down. After a few minutes I heard Beate begin to hum again; it sounded as though she was thinking about something she liked thinking about, she probably thought I couldn’t hear her. I coughed, and it went quiet. She came out and said: I didn’t know you were sitting here. She had put on make-up. Are you going somewhere? I said. No, she said. I turned my face towards the garden and said: Some idiot’s thrown up just outside the gate. Oh? she said. A proper mess, I said. She didn’t reply. I stood up. Do you have a cigarette? she asked. I gave her one and a light. Thanks, she said. I walked down from the veranda and sat at the garden table. Beate stood on the veranda, smoking. She threw the half-finished cigarette down onto the gravel at the bottom of the steps. What’s the point of that? I said. It’ll burn up, she said. She went into the living room. I stared at the thin band of smoke rising almost straight up from the cigarette: I didn’t want it to burn up. After a little while I stood up, I felt unsettled. I walked down to the gate in the wooden fence, crossed the narrow patch of meadow and went into the woods. I stopped just inside the edge of the woods and sat down on a stump, almost concealed behind some scrub. Beate came out onto the veranda. She looked towards where I was sitting and called my name. She can’t see me, I thought. She walked down into the garden and around the house. She walked back up onto the veranda again. Once again she looked towards where I was sitting. She couldn’t possibly see me, I thought. She turned and went into the living room.

When we were sitting at the dinner table, Beate said: There he is again. Who? I said. The man, she said, at the edge of the woods, just by the big… no, now he’s gone again. I got up and went over to the window. Where? I said. By the big pine tree, she said. Are you sure it’s the same man? I said. I think so, she said. There’s nobody there now, I said. No, he’s gone, she said. I went back to the table. I said: Surely you couldn’t possibly make out if it was the same man from that distance. Beate didn’t reply right away, then she said: I would have recognized you. That’s different, I said. You know me. We ate in silence for a while. Then she said: By the way, why didn’t you answer me when I called you? Called me? I said. I saw you, she said. Then why did you walk all the way around the house? I said. So you wouldn’t realize I’d seen you, she said. I didn’t think you had seen me, I said. Why didn’t you answer? she said. It wasn’t really necessary to answer when I didn’t think you’d seen me, I said. After all, I could have been somewhere else entirely. If you hadn’t seen me, and if you hadn’t pretended as if you hadn’t seen me, then this wouldn’t have been a problem. Dear, she said, it really isn’t a problem.

We didn’t say anything else for a while. Beate kept turning her head and looking out of the window. I said: It didn’t rain. No, she said, it’s holding off. I put down my knife and fork, leaned back in the chair and said: You know, sometimes you annoy me. Oh, she said. You can never admit that you’re wrong, I said. But of course I can, she said. I’m often wrong. Everybody is. Absolutely everybody. I just looked at her, and I could see that she knew she’d gone too far. She stood up. She took hold of the gravy boat and the empty vegetable dish and went into the kitchen. She didn’t come back in. I stood up too. I put on my jacket, then stood for a while, listening, but it was completely quiet. I went out into the garden, round to the front of the house and out onto the road. I walked east, away from town. I was annoyed. The villa gardens on both sides of the road lay empty, and I didn’t hear any sounds other than the steady drone from the motorway. I left the houses behind me and walked out onto the large level stretch of ground running right the way to the fjord.

I got to the fjord close to a little outdoor café and I sat down at a table right by the water. I bought a glass of beer and lit a cigarette. I was hot, but didn’t remove my jacket as I presumed I had patches of sweat under the arms of my shirt. I was sitting with all the customers in the café behind me; I had the fjord and the distant wooded hillsides in front of me. The murmur of hushed conversation and the gentle gurgle of the water between the rocks by the shore put me in a drowsy, absent-minded state. My thoughts pursued seemingly illogical courses, which were not unpleasant; on the contrary, I had an extraordinary feeling of well-being, which made it all the more incomprehensible that, without any noticeable transition, I became gripped by a feeling of anxious abandonment. There was something complete about both the angst and the sense of being abandoned that, in a way, suspended time, but it probably didn’t take more than a few seconds before my senses steered me back to the there and then.

I walked home the same way I had come, across the stretch of flat ground. The sun was nearing the mountains in the west; a haze lingered over the town, and there wasn’t the slightest nip in the air. I noticed I was reluctant to go home, and suddenly I thought, and it was a distinct thought: If only she were dead.

But I continued on home. I walked through the gate and around the side of the house. Beate was sitting at the garden table; her older brother was sitting opposite her. I went over to them; I felt completely relaxed. We exchanged a few insignificant words. Beate didn’t ask where I had been, and neither of them encouraged me to join them, something that, with a plausible excuse, I would have declined anyway.

I went up to the bedroom, hung up my jacket and took off my shirt. Beate’s side of the double bed wasn’t made. There was an ashtray on the nightstand with two butts in it, and beside the ashtray lay an open book, face down. I closed the book; I brought the ashtray into the bathroom and flushed the butts down the toilet. Then I undressed and turned on the shower, but the water was only lukewarm, almost cold, and my shower turned out to be quite different from and a good deal shorter than what I’d imagined.

While I stood by the open bedroom window getting dressed, I heard Beate laugh. I quickly finished and went down into the laundry room in the basement; I could observe her through the window there without being seen. She was sitting back in the chair, with her dress hiked far up on her parted thighs and her hands clasped behind her neck, making the thin material of the dress tight across her breasts. There was something indecent about the posture that excited me, and my excitement was only heightened by the fact she was sitting like that in full view of a man, albeit her brother.

I stood looking at her for a while; she wasn’t sitting more than seven or eight metres away from me, but because of the perennials in the flower bed right outside the basement window, I was sure that she wouldn’t notice me. I tried to make out what they were saying, but they spoke in low tones, conspicuously low tones, I thought. Then she stood up, as did her brother, and I hurried up the basement stairs and into the kitchen. I turned on the cold water tap and fetched a glass, but she didn’t come in, so I turned off the tap and put the glass back.

When I’d calmed down, I went into the living room and sat down to leaf through an engineering periodical. The sun had gone down, but it wasn’t necessary to turn the lights on yet. I leafed back and forth through the pages. The veranda door was open. I lit a cigarette. I heard the distant sound of an aeroplane, otherwise it was completely quiet. I grew restless again, and I got to my feet and went out into the garden. There was nobody there. The gate in the wooden fence was ajar. I walked over and closed it. I thought: She’s probably looking at me from behind the scrub. I walked back to the garden table, moved one of the chairs slightly so that the back of it faced the woods, and sat down. I convinced myself that I wouldn’t have noticed it if there had been someone standing in the laundry room, looking at me. I smoked two cigarettes. It was beginning to get dark, but the air was still and mild, almost warm. A pale crescent moon lay over the hill to the east, and the time was a little after ten o’clock. I smoked another cigarette. Then I heard a faint creak from the gate, but I didn’t turn around. She sat down and placed a little bouquet of wild flowers on the garden table. What a lovely evening, she said. Yes, I said. Do you have a cigarette? she asked. I gave her one and a light. Then, in that eager, childlike voice I’ve always found hard to resist, she said: I’ll fetch a bottle of wine, shall I?—and before I’d decided what answer to give, she stood up, took hold of the bouquet and hurried across the lawn and up the steps of the veranda. I thought: Now she’s going to act as if nothing has happened. Then I thought: Then again, nothing has happened. Nothing she knows about. And when she came with the wine, two glasses and even a blue check tablecloth, I was almost completely calm. She had switched the light on above the veranda door, and I turned my chair so I was sitting facing the woods. Beate filled the glasses, and we drank. Mmm, she said, lovely. The woods lay like a black silhouette against the pale blue sky. It’s so quiet, she said. Yes, I said. I held out the cigarette pack to her, but she didn’t want one. I took one myself. Look at the new moon, she said. Yes, I said. It’s so thin, she said. I sipped my wine. In the Mediterranean it’s on its side, she said. I didn’t reply. Do you remember the dogs in Thessaloniki that got stuck together after they’d mated, she said. In Kavala, I said. All the old men outside the café shouting and screaming, she said, and the dogs howling and struggling to get free from one another. And when we got out of the town, there was a thin new moon like that on its side, and we wanted each other, do you remember? Yes, I said. Beate poured more wine into the glasses. Then we sat in silence, for a while, for quite a while. Her words had made me uneasy, and the subsequent silence only heightened my unease. I searched for something to say, something diversionary and everyday. Beate got to her feet. She came around the garden table and stopped behind me. I grew afraid, I thought: Now she’s going to do something to me. And when I felt her hands on my neck, I gave a start, and jumped forward in the chair. At almost the very same moment I realized what I had done and without turning around, I said: You scared me. She didn’t answer. I leaned back in the chair. I could hear her breathing. Then she left.

Finally I stood up to go inside. It had grown completely dark. I had drunk up the wine and thought up what I was going to say—it had taken some time. I brought the glasses and the empty bottle but, after having thought about it, left the blue check tablecloth where it was. The living room was empty. I went into the kitchen and placed the bottle and the glasses beside the sink. It was a little past eleven o’clock. I locked the veranda door and switched off the lights, and then I walked upstairs to the bedroom. The bedside light was on. Beate was lying with her face turned away and was asleep, or pretending to be. My duvet was pulled back, and on the sheet lay the cane I’d used after my accident the year we’d got married. I picked it up and was about to put it under the bed, but then changed my mind. I stood with it in my hand while staring at the curve of her hips under the thin summer duvet and was almost overcome by sudden desire. Then I hurried out and went down to the living room. I had brought the walking stick with me, and without quite knowing why, I brought it down hard across my thigh, and broke it in two. My leg smarted from the blow, and I calmed down. I went into the study and switched on the light above the drawing board. Then I turned it off and lay down on the couch, pulled the blanket over me and closed my eyes. I could picture Beate clearly. I opened my eyes, but I could still see her.

I woke a few times during the night, and I got up early. I went into the living room to remove the cane; I didn’t want Beate to see that I’d broken it. She was sitting on the sofa. She looked at me. Good morning, she said. I nodded. She continued to look at me. Have we fallen out? she said. No, I said. She kept her gaze fixed on me, but I couldn’t manage to read it. I sat down to get away from it. You misunderstood, I said, I didn’t notice you getting up, I was lost in my own thoughts, and when I suddenly felt your hands on my neck, I mean I see how it could make you… but I didn’t know you were standing there. She didn’t say anything. I looked at her, met the same inscrutable gaze. You have to believe me, I said. She looked away. Yes, she said, I do, don’t I.