Sleet: Selected Stories

by Stig Dagerman

  “Who?” cried the second girl in a voice of raw excitement. “Who? Who? Who-who-who?”

  “The forester!” panted the other.

  The two girls ran off giggling, leaving the teacher alone with his shame. Heated misgivings began to tickle his mind like a sweet itching pain. When the children returned from recess he sat there at his desk, red in the face. At least it felt that way to him. And he had to look down to reassure himself that he wasn’t naked. Though the air of the schoolroom was rife with a midsummer heat, he buttoned his jacket and pulled the zipper on his sports shirt up all the way to his Adam’s apple. For the rest of the day he was not himself. He asked the students short, nervous questions, which he answered himself if the silence began to drag on too long. And he avoided the two girls from recess altogether, not even daring to look towards the window near their seats.

  When he came home that afternoon he could hear the forester walking back and forth up in his room. Even though he felt like making a scene, he acted as if nothing was wrong, going out of his way to be friendly, nonchalant. But from this time on — perhaps without even realizing it — he began to collect evidence for his case. There is no detective so imaginative, no bloodhound or hunter so ruthless as a jealous husband.

  The next day at recess he borrowed a bike from one of his colleagues. He told his class he had to take a very urgent telegram to the station and that perhaps he would be returning a few minutes late. When he left he actually rode off in the direction of the station, but once he was alone on the road a short while later, he carefully turned off and rode down a little path through the woods. He rode quickly, the bicycle rattling over stones and roots. He would approach the house from the rear and take them by surprise. A few hundred yards from the back gate he slowed down, got off the bike, and leaned it against a tree. He would walk the rest of the way.

  At one point he stepped behind a bush and lit a cigarette to bolster his dignity in an otherwise undignified situation. The back gate was freshly oiled, so it didn’t creak. He stepped lightly through the yard, and above the sounds of the birds chirping and the rope repeatedly slapping against the flagpole, he could hear low voices coming from the bower. He drew in thick clouds of smoke from his cigarette as he peeked through the newly clipped bower entrance.

  They were lying there in the grass, even though there was a table they could just as well have been using. Granted, they were only drinking coffee and they lay on opposite sides of a large tray filled with coffee cups, plates, and a basket of cookies, but his wife was wearing a pretty scarf which he had never seen before. She was also smoking, which she never did. The tone of their conversation was so low that he couldn’t make out much of what they were saying, just bits and pieces really, though he was trying very hard.

  Recess, however, was short, much shorter than he had expected. So even before the teacher finished his cigarette he made his way around to the front of the house, threw open the door so that it could easily be heard, and stamped his feet on the floor as if he had snow on them. Then he moved over to the mirror in the hallway and blew smoke at his own flat reflection to impress it. A few seconds later he heard his wife’s footsteps on the porch steps. As soon as she came in and saw him, she stopped in her tracks. The scarf was no longer on her head.

  “Oh, it’s you,” she said. “I thought I heard a sound in here.”

  “So you did,” he said, flicking his cigarette on the floor and leaving it there for her to stamp out. Then he went back through the door and brusquely down the steps. He whistled as he passed the bower, which was completely silent now in the midday heat. But no — before he reached the gate he did hear the forester clear his throat and set his cup on a plate.

  While the teacher was riding back through the woods, he came unexpectedly upon a small woman whose clothes were drenched in sweat. Right where the path suddenly curved, she was collecting pine cones and putting them in a sack. Her name was Mrs. Mattsson, the mother of one of the two girls he’d overheard in the hallway. As he pedaled past her, he could tell from the expression on her face that she would come to ponder a great deal over this strange midday meeting in the middle of the woods when he was supposed to be at the school, teaching. Stupid, he thought. Stupid, but unavoidable.

  Alice got a broom and a dustpan from the kitchen and swept up the tobacco and ashes. Then she drank a few glasses of water and walked around opening windows to keep from suffocating. It was windy out, and she found this a great relief as she leaned out the big living-room window, allowing the breeze to fan the heat of her anxiety. But her relief was short-lived. A burning net with small unmerciful threads was closing around her body. She had to stick her hands inside her dress, dragging fingers across skin, to convince herself it was all just in her head. She wanted to run, but in a direction that did not exist, neither toward the bower nor toward Cederblom’s, nor the road, the school or the woods.

  Now it sounded as if someone was coming through the gate. She heard the latch clang as the gate banged shut beyond the bower. A moment later Alice saw the sweaty little woman marching across her lawn, a large sack trailing behind her in the grass. The woman passed very, very close to the bower. As Alice stood there at the window she bit her lip, hoping that the forester would not suddenly call out to her, or come charging out of there, eager to grab and pull her towards him as he often did when they were alone. Alice hurried out and met the woman on the steps of the porch.

  The woman stopped, dropped her sack on the stone walk and pulled the hair back from her sweaty forehead. Then she looked Alice in the eyes with an expression that was utterly inscrutable, neither kind not malicious. All the same, Alice found it confusing, and she couldn’t think of a single thing to say. She simply looked down at the sack and then past the sack toward the bower. She noticed then that Mrs. Mattsson was beginning to look off in the same direction, so she had to do something to divert the woman’s attention. She wet her tongue to ask the farmer’s wife what it was she wanted, but the little woman beat her to the punch.

  Posing a question that really wasn’t a question, she lifted the sack and said, “Mind if I walk across your yard? This sack, it’s so heavy, and it’s shorter for me this way.”

  It sounded all right. If she’d only held her eyes still it might have sounded even better. But they were wandering all over, inside the house and back out again, up to the forester’s bedroom and down to the yard, between the apple trees, hovering for a moment like a hawk, unmoving, over the bower. It was as if she could see down into it, even though she was standing there on the walk beside Alice, breathing heavily from her exertion.

  “Naturally, Mrs. Mattsson,” said Alice at last, reaching down to help the woman with the sack.

  But Mrs. Mattsson would not accept her help. She became suspicious, in fact, when she saw that Alice was so eager to assist her, and so she found various pretexts for dawdling there in front of the porch. There were invisible cats to lure out of the bushes, flowers to admire and aromas to savor as she let her eyes wander over the yard and the house.

  “It’s such a nice place you have,” she said, looking Alice in the eyes one last time. Then, at last, she picked up the sack and began to move off. “Strange folk here,” thought Alice, “never saying hello or good-bye, looking at you with such insolence whenever they feel like dropping by, whenever they feel like leaving.”

  Then of course it had to happen — as the woman was trudging away, just as she was opening the front gate — the one thing that Alice most feared. The forester called out to her.

  “Alice! Where the hell are you?”

  At that moment Alice seemed to be hearing his voice for the very first time. Her entire body went stiff. The gate took an eternity to close and when at last the latch clanged it brought her back to life. She rushed back up the porch steps, in through the hallway, and up the stairs to the second floor. The sitting room door was wide open. Rushing in, she locked it behind her and collapsed in a big chair. A few moments later the forester was kno
cking at the door. Though she refused to open it at first, she finally gave in and did so, only to find him standing there in the hallway, filling his pipe with tobacco, oblivious to everything.

  Thoroughly preoccupied by this task, he glanced up and said, “What the hell’s wrong with you?”

  Alice lost control of herself. She couldn’t bear such apathy. The present situation was so foreign to her that she found herself completely incapable of mastering it. All the dread over what had already happened between them, dammed up throughout the spring by new caresses, clandestine pleasures, all of it flowed out from her now in a long shriek, an outburst of shame and fear.

  She had already imagined many times before that she knew what her defiance might lead to, but she’d really only toyed with the thought of ultimately getting caught. She had allowed her thoughts to race skywards like rockets, had reveled in their blinding glare as she burrowed her head into his flesh. They often pulled down the shades in his room for a few hours in the middle of the day to pretend it was night. They made one another strong, each by seeking protection in the other. She crept inside him as into a cave, and in the soft warmth of that dim retreat the hostile outer world seemed comically weak, laughable, small. The long periods between their short respites in the forester’s room had been like bridges between small, delightful islands. And it was these bridges that enabled her to understand the sensual bond she was developing with this man, her lover, a bond that grew stronger with the passage of time. They were bridges of memory — memories of a fingertip on a breast, a bite on the shoulder, a kiss on the neck, a long hand gliding down her back.

  The fear of discovery had been but a game, for until now she had not been alone for a single moment. But now she realized at last that discovery would strand her, alone — so terribly alone that nothing could possibly help her, least of all this man who stood in her room stuffing his pipe with his short, stunted lover’s movements. She found herself standing on one of those bridges again, but it was a bridge connected to nothing. She was surrounded by water. Whichever way she turned only fog and darkness lay before her. And discovery no longer seemed a game. It was no help that she was once strong. It made no difference that she had once been able to slip into his arms and build a wall of his flesh. Because discovery wasn’t like a flash of light, blinding one moment, gone the next. No. Discovery was a state of monotonous suffering. It was the endless gossip of a few hundred hicks, farmers, lumber workers, local hot-shots, not to mention all of their wives. That’s what frightened Alice the most. The air was filled with Mrs. Mattsson’s eyes. And it was this thought that made her suddenly cry out.

  “I’m tired of this! I’m tired of having the whole village peeking around the corner. I’m tired of people grinning whenever I step out the front gate. I’m tired of people clustering together and whispering as soon as they see my bike on the road. I’m tired of being the forester’s whore!”

  “Alice, has someone said that?”

  “And you! You’re so stupid, you can’t see anything. If you were the least bit concerned about me you wouldn’t let me go through this! But you don’t give me the respect of a scroungy dog … you … you … you!”

  By then the forester had wrapped his arms around her head. She had his shirt-sleeve in her mouth and once the words stopped coming she found herself frantically tired. And in that state she allowed herself to be led into his room. She lay on his bed, stroking the flowered bedspread with her fingers. It was raining outside. The running water blurred the windowpanes. Outside in the bower the rain was probably ruining her cakes, overflowing the cups and the cream dish, but she couldn’t bring herself to go down there. Instead she just lay on the bed listening to the forester, who had moved to his desk and sat fiddling with a pocket-knife.

  He was telling her that of course he understood everything. He knew very well what it meant in a little hick town like this when people began to gossip about a married woman and another man. But really, it had only been that thing with the scarf that was stupid. He admitted it. Perhaps that could be thought of as proof of something. But otherwise hadn’t they always been careful? Had she ever been in his room when her husband returned from school? Had he ever so much as touched her when someone else was around? Had they ever been seen together on the road or in the park? And hadn’t they been very careful about their meetings? Think how she would mention to her husband that the forester was expected to be out in the woods the whole next day, and then how she would stand there in the kitchen the evening before, preparing his lunch to put all suspicions to rest. Hadn’t he always left the house early on those mornings, biding his time in the woods until he was sure that school had begun? Only then would he make his way back as discreetly as possible, always along the back roads and hidden paths, ready at any moment to dive into a nearby bush at the slightest hint of a sound.

  “You seem to forget that Arne came home today,” said Alice. “We could just as well have been in your room then.”

  “Arne came home,” he repeated calmly. “Maybe he saw the scarf on the hat shelf, wondered where it came from, drew his own conclusions. It must have put him at ease when he snuck up only to find us having coffee in the bower.”

  “And Mrs. Mattsson,” said Alice. “What about her? It never occurred to her to use our yard as a shortcut before, and she’s been passing by here all her life.”

  “Mrs. Mattsson,” the forester echoed. He began carving a ruler with his knife. “She probably passed Arne in the woods and got curious.”

  “How could you be dumb enough to call out to me like that when you knew she was here!”

  “I thought she was gone. Besides, there’s nothing strange about me calling out to you. I’ve been living here quite some time.”

  “But you swore at me! And men only do that to their mistresses.”

  “Alright, I’ve been a little careless,” said the forester calmly as he tried to look out through the tear-blinded window. “I admit it. Maybe we’ve both been a little careless. You didn’t have to wear my scarf into the store. But listen. There’s nothing that can’t be fixed — not even carelessness. You fix that by being twice as careful as before. We’re going to be so cautious that everyone will feel stupid about their suspicions. If we’ve ever looked at each other when we’re having our coffee at night with Arne, then from now on we’ll never give each other as much as another sidelong glance. Do you think you can control your eyes?”

  “If you can, I can,” said Alice. Suddenly she felt very tired. She watched the rain as it ran down the window. A butcher’s shop window, she thought and laughed a little — just a small laugh, barely noticeable. Not that the forester noticed it anyway. He was busy unzipping his tobacco pouch. He took out a small pinch and crumpled it to separate the leaves.

  “We’ll be polite to each other,” he said. “But no more. Definitely no more.”

  “Definitely not,” she said. “Definitely not. Definitely not.”

  The forester was surprised to hear her say it a third time. Sometimes she would tease him with her goddamned superiority by repeating his words in her voice, but with his tone. It was like looking at yourself in a broken mirror. “How long are you going to keep that up?” he would ask her. “As long as I damn well please,” was her usual reply. And she would damn well please for a very long while until at last he threw her violently to the bed, her lips, like charged magnets, dragging his own helplessly toward them.

  The rain poured and poured. The forester had just lit his pipe and was drawing smoke in through his childishly rounded lips. On his desk ticked an alarm clock which usually rang at one in the afternoon when the blinds were drawn. “Definitely not,” thought Alice, though she couldn’t remember why. The forester took the pipe from his mouth.

  “The trick is simply to wait,” he said, fingering its stem. “Do you think you can learn to wait?”

  “For what?”

  “For the right moment. Isn’t Arne going on some school trip?”

  “June si
xth,” said Alice. She was now sitting on the edge of the bed, looking out at the sky, which had begun to clear over the yard. Her eyes were fixed in the middle of a cloud, beyond the forester’s head. He had to stand up to compete for her attention. He paced back and forth in the room, each time stepping barely to the side for her feet, but never touching her.

  “Two weeks,” he said, stopping in front of the window. “Can you wait that long?”

  She was looking at his back as he said this. “Shake just a little,” she prayed. But the forester’s back was completely still. She rose from the bed and moved across the silent carpet toward the door, looking back over her shoulder to see if the mute back would notice her. But it was blind and noticed nothing.

  Yet when her own back brushed against the door, the forester stirred and turned slowly. He sat back on the window sill.

  “Alright,” he said. “For two weeks we’ll forget about each other. Do you think you can manage?”

  But Alice didn’t exactly respond as he’d expected. Curtseying in the doorway with grace and mockery, she said, “Until we meet again, Herr Forester.”

  When he was alone, the forester sat down again at his desk and began to leaf through a book about hunting. He decided to go out on a night hunt, so he wound up the alarm clock and set it for midnight. Then he stole to the door and turned the key. In one of his desk drawers was a small bottle of brandy, something he saved for special occasions, to help stiffen his resolve in difficult times. He took a glass down from the shelf and poured a little, very little, into it. He poured the exact amount that a man of character would pour. Holding the glass up to the light, he was pleased with himself that he had poured such a moderate amount. Then he tossed it back in one painful gulp. He poured out the same amount a few times more, and each time he was equally pleased by the strength of his character.