Unformed Landscape Read Online Free PDF Page A

her laugh at all. She laughed to hear herself laughing. Strange, she thought, that you cry alone, but never laugh. I’ve never laughed alone before.
    She felt certain that it was Einar who had written the letter. She remembered the evening he had kissed her goodbye on the mouth, the feeling of the tip of his tongue between his thin, dry lips, the smell of his breath when he talked to her, and got far too close to her. A smell she couldn’t describe, and the very thought of which still disgusted her today.
    She imagined Thomas reading the letter, back home with his parents. She thought of how he’d always brought the mail into the kitchen. He had insisted on being the one whoalways emptied the mailbox, even when Kathrine got home before he did. When he had moved in with her, he had made some joke, and taken the key to the mailbox off her key ring. He got the mail, took the big knife out of the kitchen drawer, and slashed open all the letters, one after another. He took them out of their envelopes, opened them out, and smoothed them down with his hand. He punched holes in them, and only then would he read them, one after another, and afterward he would file them away in his binders.
    Kathrine punched holes in the letter from Thomas’s family, pulled down the binder labeled “T. family” off the bookshelf, and filed the letter. She smiled as she thought Thomas would be satisfied with her work. But he would certainly have read the letter too, perhaps before it was sent, perhaps he had even helped write it. Only he hadn’t signed it.
    There was also a file marked “K. family.” Thomas had started it for Kathrine, even though she never got mail from her family. Her father had broken with his own family over some old incident sometime, and it was a wonder that they had showed up at his funeral. And her mother’s family had never been happy about her marriage, and contact was limited to birthday and Christmas cards, and the occasional telephone call.
    When Kathrine saw the file for the first time, she had laughed. Then she noticed it was one of Thomas’s little bits of malice, one of the innumerable bits of malice heperpetrated every day, when he took the two files and weighed them in his hands, “K. family” and “T. family.”
    Kathrine had detested Thomas’s family right from the start. The way they behaved to Thomas and Kathrine from the first day. As though they were already married. The off-color remarks during lunch and afterward, and the way they didn’t shut the door when they went to the bathroom, and wandered around the house in their underwear when Kathrine was visiting, even the first few visits. Look what a progressive family we are! And the way they talked about money the whole time. See how well off we are! And the feeling they tried to give her that Thomas was quite a catch for her. As a single mother. And with her background.
    Kathrine had grown up as an only child. Once, she’d taken Thomas back to her mother. They had spent a nice afternoon together, and gone ice fishing. But after that, Thomas had always found excuses, and her mother hadn’t minded that Thomas never came to visit again. Go to him, she said, what would you do here anyway, his parents’ house is so much bigger.
    They had visited his family continually. There was always something going on—holidays, a birthday, a summer party. They were continually in his parents’ big house, and Kathrine had forever had to listen to what a wonderful family it was, and how everyone stuck together, and how stupid and bourgeois all the other people in the village were.
    The big house had a sauna, and sometimes when Kathrine was visiting, the father had lit the furnace and said, right, now we’re all going to the sauna. At first Thomas hadn’t wanted to go, but then his father had said, before the Lord we are all the same, and had laughed, a strange, rather nervous laugh, and then they’d all gone in the sauna together. Kathrine had wrapped up in