All at once the sun appeared and struck him in the eyes. As he leaned over the desk to pull the blinds down, he saw Alice coming out of the bower toward the house. She was carrying the remains of their interrupted meal on a red tray, which cast a friendly reflection on the grass where she was walking. Her shoulders looked tired and she appeared to be leaning on the tray for support, bearing her fatigue and the beginnings of despair before her as she kept her eyes desperately fixed on the tray, trying to keep it all from tumbling out of her grasp. As he saw her there, the forester was moved by a sudden feeling of tenderness for the teacher’s wife. Leaning over the desk, following her quiet path to the house with his eyes, he felt the pleasure of this tenderness awaken in his body.
“You dear little woman,” he said through a closed mouth and a still throat. And yet the words seemed to rise out into the room and hover in its thick air, smelling of kindness, the forester’s kindness. He was overcome by an inexpressible sense of relief, and since he had no desire to figure out why it was he felt that way, he convinced himself that it was because of his tactful handling of this business with Alice and the school teacher. After Alice went back into the house he felt himself vaguely deserving of one more snort of brandy, and as a sort of reward he allowed himself perhaps slightly more than would normally befit a man of character.
He locked the bottle in the drawer again and took his rifle out of the closet. He laid it across the top of the desk and wiped away the dust that had collected on the barrel with a piece of blotting paper. Then he detached the breech and closed his eyes as he ran his fingers over its hard polished surface. For a whole week the rifle had been stowed away in the closet, and now, as he set the breech back into place, he did so with tender, gliding movements. He raised the rifle. Pulling the stock tight against his shoulder, he aimed it into the bower. It would have been nice if there were an owl out there to sight it on, or at least a sparrow or a few bottles. He had a pet notion about standing at the window or sitting in his chair, or perhaps even lying on the bed, and firing at bottles suspended from balloons. But there were neither bottles nor owls nor sparrows out there at the moment. Just then, however, the gate leading to the woods let out a loud squeak. And suddenly there was the teacher, coming down the path with a stack of books under one arm. He was smoking a cigarette and sweating profusely. Of course, it was very stupid of the forester, but by the time he realized that he was standing there in plain view aiming his rifle at the teacher, it was too late to do anything about it. Naturally the gun wasn’t loaded, but it was a very stupid thing to do in any case.
The teacher found his wife in the kitchen. She was at the sink, drying some coffee cups and dishes which until very recently must have been sitting on the tray. The tray was not hanging up as usual, but lying on the kitchen table with some spilt coffee still on it. He noticed each of these things before he greeted his wife. Then he sat down on a stool and prepared to drop the bomb.
“You didn’t come home the usual way,” commented his wife, wiping off the tray and hanging it on the wall.
“I went through the woods,” he said as he began weighing the books in his hand one at a time. “I thought it might be quicker. Maybe I was wrong.”
“Mrs. Mattsson came through the yard today. She also thought that was quicker.”
“Well, I won’t be doing that again,” her husband said, staring at her so intently that at last she couldn’t keep her own eyes still.
“Why’s that?” she said, hesitating.
Bang!
The teacher slammed the books down suddenly on the table. Then he allowed the silence to assert itself for a moment before he went on.
“I don’t feel like getting shot through the window,” he said at last with such nonchalance that the effect was doubly unnerving.
Alice sank down into a chair at the other side of the table, and then the two of them sat there looking deep into each other’s eyes for a few moments. This time her wide eyes fled nowhere. But the dumbstruck expression that hung on her face did not result from feelings of dread or a guilty conscience, as her husband imagined, but rather from pure astonishment.
“Shot?” she repeated, cracking a grin. It sounded so absurdly melodramatic.
Her husband rose slowly to his feet, but with his eyes sunk deep into her own, like those of a lion tamer.
“Just a minute ago the forester was standing at his window,” he said in a voice as even and nonchalant as before, “… aiming a rifle at me.”
At once Alice’s face turned a flaming red, and her eyes collapsed. Of course, he couldn’t help noticing this. He turned somewhat dramatically and walked to the window, and Alice could do nothing but helplessly stare at his back. Her first impulse was to jump up, spin him around and hurl everything she could at him in defense of the forester. But then, as her emotions settled, she became calmer, more clear-headed, and by the time she pushed her chair back she had thought of a way to preserve everyone’s dignity, to placate everyone’s conscience, to restore everyone’s damaged feelings.
“Arne,” she said to him, repeating his name insistently until he finally turned around. “Arne, you have to go up there right now and demand an explanation. If not for yourself, then for my sake. Do you think I like the idea of being home alone with some lunatic who goes around aiming guns at people? If you don’t go up there right now I won’t feel safe in this house for another minute. Besides, it’s a crime. People go to jail for things like that! Tell him that!”
They started up the stairs together, Alice leading the way, keeping several steps ahead of her husband. As for the teacher, he followed reluctantly, half-stunned by an unexpected, though gratifying fact — or two facts. “Lunatic,” she had said. And in such an angry tone. And “it’s a crime.” “Besides, it’s a crime. People go to jail for things like that!” And so he went along.
Before he knew it, there they all were. The forester was standing before them in his doorway, his hair mussed. He blinked a few times stupidly, as if he’d been sleeping and was hastily awakened. Alice was abrupt. She didn’t even allow him to catch his breath.
“Sir, my husband said you were pointing your rifle at him when he came through the yard.”
The forester backed a few steps into his room, sat on the edge of his desk and fingered his knees. He let out a nervous, embarrassed chuckle.
“A mistake,” he said, looking at the floor. “I wanted to see if the rifle was clean. So I took it out and was sighting it on something in the yard, and … well, unfortunately Arne happened to come walking down the path just when … but like I said —”
“Yes, yes, of course,” said the teacher. “It was just a little unnerving. You know, to look up and see … well, you understand.”
On their way back down the stairs, the teacher leaned toward his wife and whispered, “Since when have you started calling him ‘sir’?”
Alice stopped and looked up at him with an almost frantic determination.
“Since today,” she said. “He made a couple of stupid comments about you coming home in the middle of the day. So then I told him I thought he was taking a few too many liberties of that sort around here. And as far as I was concerned it was going to stop. That’s what I told him. Just like that scarf he had the nerve to give me. I’m sure you’ve seen that.”
“No,” her husband lied.
When they reached the bottom of the stairs, Alice took the scarf down from the shelf. Her husband studied her smile, comparing it with others on similar occasions, trying to determine whether it was counterfeit. Alice likewise observed his expression as he turned the scarf over in his hands, and by the exaggerated attention of his eyes she could tell that he had already been aware of it. This worried her a little. She climbed out of herself and stood by, correcting every movement before she made it, so that each small gesture would carry absolute credibility.
That evening the forester did not come down for coffee as usual. For a while they could hear him pacing back and forth in his room
. Then he lay down on his bed. The springs creaked. Quite some time passed before they heard another sound from upstairs.
“He’s probably just feeling sorry for himself,” said Alice when her husband commented on the forester’s absence. “First because I snubbed him today, and now because of this business with the gun.”
It all sounded quite on the level. As the teacher spread honey on his roll he scrutinized all the different parts of his wife’s face, but everything held together. Later that night, just after they got into bed, they heard the forester’s heavy footsteps on the stairs. He left the house and headed straight out into the woods. The teacher lay back in bed, calmly and clearly weighing the various pieces of evidence against one another. On one side were all of the things that seemed to indicate guilt, on the other, innocence. His wife crept over into his bed. At first this made him glad, but then he grew suspicious, since he was almost always the one to take the initiative. He lay beside her silently running through two mental lists, first of the incriminating and then the vindicating evidence. But as he sank more and more deeply into the warmth of her body he became ever more convinced of her innocence. Until finally he felt freer and happier than he had in a very long time. He fell asleep quite late with a bit of her hair closed between his teeth.
Alice, on the other hand, lay awake for a long time, the scenes of the day replaying themselves over and over in her mind. Very cautiously she freed her hair from her husband’s mouth and moved away from him. When she lay down again on the cold sheets of her own bed, she wanted to scream from the pain of those fourteen days that separated her from happiness — that sweet, dangerous happiness, the happiness that bites. She did not cry out, but she did lie awake most of the night.
At dawn the forester came home from his night hunt. Alice awoke when she heard some sounds from the porch below, and she sat up quickly in bed. The room was very warm, so she got up and opened a window. She heard a heavy bang on the porch and not long afterwards some hard steps on the stairway. She remembered then how the forester had gone on the night hunt.
She went out to the porch in her bare feet anyway, just to see what had caused the loud noise. A large white bundle was thrown on the floor. Startled, she stopped short before a stiff white wing with blood on its tips, a frozen mangled block of blood and feathers. The dead bird, the raw morning mist creeping through the yard, the threatening silence that hovered over the village, all of it flung her back inside the house, where she stopped before the mirror. She stood there looking into it, massaging the color back into her cheeks and feeling rather sorry for herself, so frightened, so alone.
Suddenly she thought, ‘I have to talk with him. Right now. He has to help me. He can’t leave me alone like this.’
She took the scarf down from the shelf and wrapped it around her head. Then she listened for a moment, and when she heard no sign of her husband stirring in the bedroom, she ran lightly up the stairs. She barely dared to touch the steps, she was so afraid of getting caught. And she didn’t knock on the forester’s door, because a knock would almost certainly wake her husband if he was still sleeping. So instead she just opened it, very slowly.
She opened it so slowly, in fact, that the forester was caught completely off guard. Standing there on the threshold, Alice felt a chill run through her body. Her first impulse was to turn and run back down the stairs, since what she saw filled her with a disgust so complete that she could not endure it without screaming. Or so she thought at first. There are certain situations we do not wish to see our loved ones in, as the unworthiness of their behavior damages our own pride. Their very pitifulness becomes in every sense our own. And in such situations, it is only by breaking from them that we can salvage some part of our own dignity.
The silence drew out to an exasperating length, but the forester did not yet notice Alice standing there in the doorway. Her eyes filled slowly with warm tears. Offended, abandoned, she absorbed every detail of the scene before her. The glass in the forester’s right hand was nearly full. What indulgence! “When he’s had enough of me,” she thought, “he switches to brandy.” She took in his profile, his swollen, red, drunken, sated profile. How could she have ever loved it? Or had she never really seen it before? And then the left hand. She stared particularly long at what he was doing with that hand, for this was what held her captive and filled her with such disgust.
In his lap rested a dead squirrel, a large splendid creature that he’d shot while out on the hunt. With his left hand he was caressing it, not so much tenderly as amiably, as one might do to a pet. His expression was not at all cruel, but rather pleased. “Just like he looks when women give themselves to him,” thought Alice. “A caresser who can only love with his hands.”
Of course, he was bound to notice her eventually. No one can be the object of such intense thoughts without somehow sensing it. A sharp thought scratched his cheek. He turned slowly toward the door, his caressing hand clenched in defense. The moment he set eyes on Alice he tried to stand up to put his dignity back on its feet, but with a motion of her hand she enjoined him to remain seated.
To be caught sitting! If only he’d been standing then at least he could have looked down at her. He felt himself diminishing before her eyes until his shoulders were little more than a hanger for his forester’s coat to dangle on.
“What are you doing here?” he asked in a dark voice. He tried to get rid of the glass as discreetly as possible.
“You don’t normally ask me that,” replied Alice. She could feel the rough wood of the threshold pressing against her bare feet. It hurt them, but right now that pleased her. It was all right for something to hurt as long as it reminded her of the obligations she had to her hate. Gently she untied the forester’s colored scarf and took it from her hair.
The forester maintained his calm, making no attempt to stop her. He didn’t jump up with a lover’s entreaties: “How could you be so cold? How could you reject something I gave from the heart?” No. And he made no move to charge forward, grasp her in his arms and conquer her, though he recognized this as one possible way of dealing with the situation. Instead he just sat there, calmly formulating his defense. She had caught him sitting down — caught him. And that’s just what he felt like, a captive. It was like being hauled before a judge, though she had accused him of nothing. He sat there devising a defense in any event, and what defense is more effective than that of toppling the very moral base on which your accuser stands?
The forester slowly turned away from her. He looked at his glass. There wasn’t much in it. As befits a man of character, it was almost fully empty. So he lifted it from the desk pad, and holding it up as an argument for his own excellence he turned to her again with vehemence. There was an ominous shine to his eyes. “I!” he thought with an exclamation mark. “I cannot even sit in my rented room and have a few drops of brandy in solitude! And as for my prey, why can’t I take it up to my expensive room without you being scandalized? And that you — you, of all people — should say it!” (though she had, in fact, said nothing). “You! … So attached to hypocrisy that you force others to be hypocritical! Force them to swear to you that they never touch a drop! Coerce promises that they will never kill for pleasure! You’re trying to drag me down, that’s what you’re doing. Down to your own level. Do you think I can’t see that?”
But he was not about to give her the pleasure. Now he would be the one to set the trap, as if he couldn’t figure out why she chose to intrude on him at this time of day. He raised the glass to his lips and took a drink, a little nip to clear his throat.
“Didn’t we agree not to see each other like this for a couple of weeks?”
His voice was thick with suppressed emotion. This sudden attack on his dignity nearly brought tears to his eyes, or at least a misty haze. The steam of the fury boiling within him dampened the windows of his soul.
Then at last it happened. The scene. The Big Scene. Enough to make him want to shade his eyes, something he would gladly have done
if decorum did not prohibit it. Alice’s bare white feet now crossed that threshold of pain and stood on the soft rug inside the room. They were trembling, both from a desire to kick him and a longing to run away. And yet, contrary to his expectations, she did not yell. Her voice was a tightly stretched wire onto which her words stepped delicately. If one single word were too heavy the entire wire would snap.
“You have it good,” she said to him. “You have your rifle and your brandy. You don’t have to lie awake all night. No one talks about you in the stores. No one gossips about you in their kitchens. No one thinks you’re ridiculous. No one finds you shameful, because you’re not cheating on anyone — no one but me. Who doesn’t cheer when someone deceives a deceiver? Two weeks is easy for you. A nice little holiday. Imagine, fourteen days that you don’t have to kiss and caress me. How wonderful! Imagine not having to be in love for fourteen whole days. What an enviable position you’re in.”
But her words appeared to have no effect on the forester. And, truth be told, he wasn’t touched by them in the least, for the simple reason that he didn’t understand — or even hear — a single thing that Alice said. He just sat there waiting for her to end so that he could say his line — The Line — the one that would bring him peace of mind and clearly establish who was right and who was wrong. Even a playwright who suddenly discovers that One Irresistible Line in the midst of a frantic dress rehearsal couldn’t have more eagerly awaited the perfect moment to make his voice heard.
Finally Alice was quiet. Her feet no longer shook. They stood firmly planted on the forester’s rug, and they would not move till she heard his lips pray for forgiveness. Not that she felt particularly forgiving — but who can resist wielding the power to answer a prayer? The forester sat up in his chair and it squeaked. He straightened his back. His eyes became steady and his face stiff. His hand firmly closed upon the glass. “Lucky it’s not plastic,” thought Alice. “If it were plastic you’d be lost.”
Sleet: Selected Stories Page 9
