To the Back of Beyond(26)

The public room was empty when Thomas walked in. Next to the bar was a glass case with Alpine cheese and other milk products. He cleared his throat and sat down at a table to wait. Finally, a rather short, slim woman with black hair walked in, greeted him, and approached his table. There was something Slavic about her, and Thomas thought about the Russian troops who had been this way a couple of hundred years ago. He ordered coffee. When the woman brought it to him, he asked about a room. All they had was the dormitory room, she said, but he was the only guest so far. Dinner was at seven. Thomas watched her as she walked back to the bar and disappeared through the door at the back. She might have been wearing rubber boots, but she moved with a grace that seemed out of keeping with a place like this.

He sipped his coffee and browsed in the local paper that was lying on the table. A while later, the woman came back and said she could show him the lodgings now. She led him past the kitchen and up a narrow set of steps to the attic. In the low, gabled space there were about a dozen narrow mattresses laid out on the floor, with folded gray army blankets on them and pillows in red-and-white-checked slips. A little daylight came in through a narrow window at the front. A single low-watt electric bulb hung over the door. It was cool up here, and there was a clean sour smell of milk and dust and hay. The landlady said again that dinner was at seven and went down. Thomas made up a bed for himself on the mattress under the window. It was just after six, and he lay down and listened to the sounds coming up from downstairs. Shortly before seven he could hear the clatter of silverware, and he went downstairs.

In the public room a long table had been set for ten people, and a little way off, a table for one. Thomas sat down there and watched as the big table filled. The farmer and four children were joined by a young man and an old man, while the farmer’s wife and a plump young woman did the serving. The young woman brought Thomas his dinner and wished him a good appetite. He was starving and began to eat right away, while the group at the long table joined hands and the farmer spoke a blessing so quietly it was as though he felt ashamed in the presence of the unknown guest. For a while after that, nothing could be heard but the scrape and clatter of knives and forks. Only gradually voices joined in the sounds of eating, someone asking for a dish or the tea, the young man made a joke, the plump girl retorted, the farmer’s wife intervened. Thomas could barely understand half of what was being said, but for the first time since he had set off, he felt lonely. All the time he was walking, he felt oblivious of himself, and whenever he thought of Astrid and the kids, he was with them. Now he had the painful sensation of no longer belonging to a community, that he was a stranger in this small, familiar world. One setting at the long table had remained free, and he imagined what would have happened had he sat there, and held hands with his neighbors, and said grace with them, and ate and drank and later helped clear the table and do the washing up. In an upland farm an extra pair of hands was always welcome.

Flies buzzed around his table, and irritably he kept having to shoo them away. No sooner had he put down his silverware than three of them alighted on his empty plate. He had ordered a half liter of red. He could feel the alcohol take effect and didn’t finish the jug. He looked at his half-empty glass and remembered that other one he had left outside his house four days ago now. As he stood up, he momentarily lost his balance and had to cling to the back of his chair. He wished everyone a good night, and walked around the long table and up the stairs to bed.

It had been warm in the public room, but the temperature upstairs had plummeted, and even though Thomas spread three of the dampish wool blankets over him, it was a long time before he stopped feeling cold. The voices from downstairs seemed louder now. Then there was another bout of plate rattling, footsteps, and somewhat later, from another corner of the building, a radio and running water, and somewhere else again, the banging of a door and distant shouts.

Thomas woke early the next day, but he couldn’t force himself to get up and drifted off again. When he awoke the second time, it was after nine. Over the past few nights, he’d had all sorts of dreams, some of them almost waking dreams, and during the day too he had been pursued by images, fantasies that seemed more real than the landscapes he was passing through. But this last night he had dreamed nothing at all, and while he washed himself at the small basin in the passageway, he felt that outside of this one moment, the dusty smell, the running water, the distant sounds from the cowshed and the kitchen, the gloomy light, and the cold of the metal tap as he turned it off, nothing else existed.

In the public room the shy little girl was about to sweep the floor. His breakfast was already on the table, and when Thomas sat down, the girl silently brought him a thermos of coffee and a small jug of warm milk. When he asked to settle up, she called her mother, who was busier than she had been the day before and didn’t say much either. Thomas didn’t dare leave a tip. He said thank you and went up to pack. It was after ten when he hit the trail.

The narrow path zigzagged up the slope. Here and there were a few fir trees dotted about, but the higher Thomas climbed, the barer the vegetation grew. Lines of rock showed through the slope. The gray-brown pastureland was full of humps and hollows, in some of the dips cotton grass grew out of the boggy ground, in others tarns had formed in whose water clumping strands of narrow leaves, some two or three feet long, seemed to hang like the hair of drowned women. The sky had clouded over, in the scattered light the karst looked almost white, the water in the tarns bottomless and black.