Walking Into the Night by Olaf Olafsson Page B

didn’t like it. She took such a long time to come up that he was afraid she’d left. Just before she appeared in the doorway, he’d convinced himself that he had lost her.
    Outside on the street he tried to keep to the shadows. They quickened their pace in the dusk, hand in hand beneath the cold church walls. From the open door came the sound of an organ. Then singing. They paused.
    An old woman came out of the church and looked at them. He glanced away.
    Klara turned around.
    “Let’s go into the church,” she said.
    “Why?”
    “ ‘I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys . . . for I am sick with love . . .’ Isn’t that what it says in the Bible? Let’s go inside.”
    The music enveloped them between the cold walls, the candlelight flickering in the draft. Above the altar Christ leaned against a pillar, his hands bound behind his back, the whip raised for the blow. The cross towered against a painted sky, in the distance a glow presaged the dawn.
    “Let’s get out of here.”
    “Why? It’s so beautiful.”
    He tore himself away from her and hurried out into the street. The hum calmed him.
    The window was open. They had turned off the lights, but it was still bright from the moon. She got out of bed and went to the window, listening to the din from a kitchen somewhere in the courtyard below, reaching out her hand absentmindedly to the moonbeam which fell onto the middle of the floor.
    “Close your eyes,” she said.
    He obeyed.
    “Come here. Come to me.”
    Naked, he rose hesitantly to his feet, took one step forward, then stopped.
    “Take my hand. I’ll guide you.”
    When he had taken three steps towards the window, she stopped.
    “Here. Right here. And keep your eyes shut.”
    He stood still. She ran her finger over his abdomen as if tracing a line.
    “Can you feel this?”
    “What?”
    “Above this line the moon’s shining on you, but it’s dark below. Can’t you feel it?”
    She stood beside him.
    “
I
can feel it,” she said after a brief pause. “It feels colder where the moon is shining on me.”
    He woke up in the night. She was standing in the middle of the room, facing the window.
    “Klara,” he said.
    She didn’t answer, just kept moving towards the door. He got out of bed and went to her. She was asleep. He led her back to bed.
    In the morning, when he told her, she smiled.
    “So I’ve started sleepwalking again? I always do it when I dream about my sister Lena.”
    It dawned on him in the midst of their lovemaking. She knelt on a chair before him, her back to him, took him in her hand and showed him the way. He held her hips in both hands. His shadow fell on her shoulders, moving back and forth. He looked up and suddenly realized that in the distance between two tall brown-stones he could see Jones’s building. He was shaken and all at once thought he could see him at the window. Looking at him, as if they were standing face-to-face, the walls gone, and with them the panes of glass. He jerked.
    “Is something wrong?”
    The next day he moved into a room on the other side of the hotel.

29
    “We used to spend the summers with our uncle, the Count. He had a long white beard and pale blue eyes. He collected music boxes and maps. His wife was dead. When it rained we’d read and gaze at the waterlilies on the pond outside. The horses would stand under the great oaks in the rain, but at night I sometimes saw them cantering in the marsh down by the lake. One of them, the white horse that belonged to my sister Lena, seemed to vanish when the moon shone on him.
    “We used to sleep late in the mornings. There were flowers in a vase on our dressing table when we woke up, and the maid would open the window and let in the light. ‘What time is it?’ I’d ask, without opening my eyes. There was a mirror on a little table over by the window; I could see the sky in it when I sat up in bed.
    “We drank our morning coffee out on the veranda and read our horoscopes.