Northernmost by Peter Geye

Author:Peter Geye
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-04-13T16:00:00+00:00

[2017]

When, by four a.m., she still couldn’t fall asleep, she got out of bed and went to that now familiar spot at the window overlooking the town square. She would’ve sworn she could still see his footprints in the snow.

In the hours since Stig had left those tracks, Greta had tried to reason with herself. Why had she kissed him? Did that count as unfaithfulness? Would she do it again? The answer to each of these questions—and the countless others strafing through her mind—did not come in words, but rather in the commotion of her desire, now reverberating in her like one of the notes in “Vannhimmel.” Much as his footprints were still there in the snow, the skin where he’d touched her still held the impression of his hands. Her lips were still thrilled by the memory of his own. These palimpsests paused in her mind, but then funneled like a maelstrom into her belly. A flood of need that was sexual, but also something more. She wanted to kiss him again, she wanted him to undress her, to make love to her—but she also wanted the possibility of emotional deliverance, and this man had somehow offered it.

These thoughts made her feel foolish. Wanting him, believing in her yearning, her deranged notion that he could offer her a kind of salvation—it occurred to her that she was behaving like those people who visit Paris for a weekend and suddenly decide it’s their destiny to live in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. She was a grown woman, for crying out loud. With a family and a respectable life. She doubted she would ever even see him again. Which meant that she’d have to live with the longings of a single night. A single kiss. This notion—inevitable as it seemed—left her feeling more pathetic than ten years of a failing marriage had.

Her marriage, she thought. Her children.

The thought of Lasse and Liv roused hopelessness in her. Her love for them was fathomless. She could see them this very minute, as if they were asleep on the bed behind her. She could smell the sweetness of their hair. Could see Lasse’s T-shirt riding up his sleeping body, and Liv’s arms resting on the pillow above her head. It would be too much to disrupt that peace, wouldn’t it?

The answer to that last question was unambiguous. She spun away from the window, sat down at the desk, and picked up her phone. Within minutes she’d bought a ticket on the first flight to Oslo—going through Tromsø—later that morning. She called the front desk and asked them to arrange a taxi to pick her up in three hours, took a shower and readied herself, then packed her few belongings. It was not yet five o’clock.

She took the elevator down to the lobby and stepped outside. It was warmer than it had been, and the melting snow sent up a ghostly vapor that smelled briny. Or perhaps that was the breeze off the harbor.

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