Free Unformed Landscape by Peter Stamm Page A

room was furnished with old pieces that didn’t go together. On the wall there was a color print of Venice. The heating was off, and the room took a long time to get warm, after Kathrine had turned the knob. The view out of the window was of a narrow street. There was no one around at all.
    So this was where Christian was staying, and this was his life, these little rooms in hotels, in some town or other. Kathrine wondered what he had in the way of possessions that he took with him, if he had books or pictures from home. Suddenly, she wasn’t sure whether it was such a good idea to come. They had liked each other quite well, but maybe there was a woman here whom Christian liked too. A woman who walked through these streets everymorning, who had caught his eye, whom he had spoken to in a café or a bar. A customs employee, thought Kathrine, called Chantal or Marianne, with a baby. Unhappy. Christian will meet her, they will drink wine together, he will show her the home page of his company, later on he’ll send her e-mails, which will say that the women in Denmark are different from the women in France. She will write back, first in the hope that the episode was more than that, because she will believe she’s found at least a friend, and then later on out of habit. Christian won’t make her happy, Chantal, or Marianne, or whatever her name is.
    Christian was no sort of Don Juan, he hadn’t so much as kissed Kathrine. But maybe he just hadn’t liked her. Her breasts were on the small side, too small, she thought. And she was too boyish altogether, she hardly had any hips. And she’d rather have been blond. Why didn’t she get her hair dyed, Thomas had suggested once, but she didn’t want to do that.
    Perhaps Christian liked women better who had big breasts and blond hair. Perhaps he liked exuberant women with long, painted fingernails. Women who laughed aloud and had a slinky walk like cats. Maybe French women were different, the way Portuguese women were different. That’s what he’d written to her after all, back when he’d been in Portugal. I’m sure, thought Kathrine, that he’s got a girl here and a woman there. He’ll be annoyed that I showed up. I’ll see him at breakfast, she thought, I won’tknock on his door. He can’t do anything about me staying here, it’s a free country, I can do as I please. But what’s that good for? It got darker in the room. Kathrine didn’t turn the light on. She was incredibly tired, she had never felt so tired. She lay on the bed, she thought about Thomas, she thought about her son, her mother, Alexander. It was as though she was thinking twice over, as though a second stream of thoughts were following the first, that only occasionally left her with a picture and penetrated her consciousness, a dark, blurry picture where you couldn’t make out much, a room, people who were doing things or had done something, some expectation or memory.
    She was afraid. She felt she was losing her mind. As if she were very old and had a life full of enigmatic encounters behind her, of which she had only a dim memory. There were hints of dreams, maybe dreams she had once had, and that now that they were coming at the wrong time, only frightened her. Stories waiting for their endings. There was something to be done, but she didn’t know what it was. Someone wanted something from her. People were crowding her. A shadow, which seemed to be her, was running off ahead, and she couldn’t catch up with it. There was a world waiting for her, just by her, an incredibly big, dark world, with laws of its own. Nothing went away. The other figures only moved when she moved. Just like the game she’d played when she’d been a child. You had your back turned to the others, and they ran toward you, and when you turned round,they stopped still. It was Kathrine’s turn, but she didn’t dare to turn away. She was afraid the others would jump on her if she turned her back.
    She didn’t move. She