‘I’m not ready. I think I’m going to Spain.’
‘Spain!’ He sat up in bed, and with his left hand on her breast, asked, ‘What do you mean you’re not ready? What about this?’
‘I enjoy being in bed with you,’ she admitted. ‘I enjoy sex. But I don’t think we’d make a good family. I’m not ready.’
‘What’s the matter, Britt?’
She sat up beside him, drawing her knees to her chin and adjusting the covers. ‘I think it’s because I want to see those places in the sun that you and Father dream about. I don’t want to talk to Ceylon or listen to it. I want to see it.’
‘Britt! Ceylon’s nothing. In Tromsø you have a hundred sailors who have been every place in the world, and they’ll tell you the truth. Most places are just as dull as Tromsø.’
She would not be persuaded, and as they sat side by side in bed, completely naked, huddled in the blankets, they argued about life and marriage until passion overtook them again, involving them in wild, wintry love-making, but later, when Britta was dressing to go home, she realized that this was the finish.
‘I don’t think ‘I’ll bother to see you any more,’ she said at the door.
‘That’s a hell of a word to use for Merry Christmas,’ Gunnar growled. ‘I’m not going to bother.’
‘It’s exactly the word I was looking for.’ She closed the door and walked through the starry night to her own bed.
Her break with Gunnar made it imperative that she get to Torremolinos, and she took a realistic survey of her finances. She had less than forty dollars saved and needed a hundred and fifty—assuming Mr. Sverdrup could get her one of the cheap fares. She asked him about this, and he said, ‘That much I can promise you. Now what’s the money situation?’ When she told him, he said, ‘Forty is a long way from a hundred and fifty, but you’re young and you must make the effort. This could prove the difference in your life.’
He showed her how, if she worked through the month of January and saved every penny of her salary, she would come close to the necessary figure. Also, he thought that perhaps she could get night work at a shop that was overhauling its shelves after Christmas, but this proved illusory, so she found a substitute: she could type his reports to the central office in Copenhagen, and she did so, night after night.
Shortly after the New Year, Mr. Sverdrup received fresh posters showing vacations in Spain, and as he lifted the old one from the window he asked Britta, ‘You want this for your room?’ She was tempted to grab it as a memento of a land she had grown to love, but before her hand could reach out she saw the poster as a temptation, the first of many substitutes with which she would line her room as recollections of lost dreams, and she refused. ‘No posters for me. I want the real thing.’
It was this stubborn dedication to reality that encouraged Mr. Sverdrup to take her into his complete confidence. Waiting till she reported after work one cold, dismal Monday night, he told her, ‘This week, no typing. But I’ve something I must tell you.’ He led her into his back office and sat her on a chair. ‘Exactly how much money have you?’ he asked. She showed him the results of her frugality, and he said, ‘Miss Bjørndahl, you have just enough.’
‘No!’ she protested. ‘I will not go down there as a pauper. I’ve got to have seventy-five dollars’ spending money.’
‘You have,’ he said.
‘How do you add?’ she asked.
‘This way,’ he said. ‘I’m not supposed to tell prospective clients this, because naturally we want them to pay full fare. But if you wait to buy your ticket till the very last moment, and if we have any empty spaces on the plane, we’ll sell you one of those places for … how much do you guess?’
Since her fare had already been dropped from ninety-five dollars to seventy-five, she knew it could not go much lower, so she guessed: “Sixty-five?’
‘You can have the whole thing for twenty-six dollars.’
Britta sat with her hands in her lap and said nothing. This was bound to be a trap … a joke. She knew that no one could fly-in a jet to Spain, live in a good hotel with all meals paid, and have a top-flight fifteen-day vacation for twenty-six dollars—and she was not going to be made a fool of. So she said nothing.
‘Did you hear what I said?’ Mr. Sverdrup asked.
‘Yes. Twenty-six dollars. What for? The sandwiches?’
‘For everything. Plane, hotel, food, tips, buses. Everything for fifteen days.’
‘Do you mean it?’ she asked quietly.
He was amused at her inability to accept the evidence, then said, ‘Britta, in this world there are many people who want to help the young. Our company reasons that since the plane must fly down anyway, and since we’ve already paid for the hotel for the entire year, it’s better to have the vacant spaces filled by young people who can profit from the experience than to operate half-empty. I could have told you this a month ago but I wanted to test you—to see if your desire was strong enough to make you sacrifice.’
Britta was afraid she might cry, so she made no reply.
‘So you have enough money,’ Mr. Sverdrup said. ‘Go home and make your plans. The airplane leaves February 3 at five o’clock in the morning. But …’
‘I knew there had to be a but …’
“It’s a small one, but it’s irritating. As of this day, we have empty seats. I’m sure that tomorrow we’ll have empty seats. But if the plane were to fill rapidly—for some unexpected reason—well …’
‘I’d not be able to go?
‘Not to Spain. But in Copenhagen there will be other planes flying to other places.’
‘I want to go to Spain,’ she said firmly.
‘And I want to get you there. But in everything there is always a negative chance. You may wind up in Greece.’
The days that followed were taut with anxiety. Each morning as she went to work in the darkness Britta would stare at the new poster in the window. At lunch she would leave the waterfront and hurry to the main street, and in the silver haze produced by the sun as it scurried along beneath the horizon, she would look through the door at Mr. Sverdrup and he would nod, signifying there was still a vacancy. In the evening, after work, she would stop by his office and do whatever typing had piled up, refusing money for this service, and each night as she helped him close the office she would hear his reassuring words, ‘Copenhagen says “Still a vacancy.” ’
She got her passport in order, said her goodbyes to Gunnar, who was certain she would be back to marry him, and grew much closer to her father than she had ever been before. Often, late at night, she would go to his small room with its posters and maps and sit with him as he traced explorers’ routes across the Indian Ocean, insatiable in his desire to know all things pertaining to his island. And he would play The Pearl Fishers as they talked, so that she would hear his voice coming to her through a veil of chanting priests or the songs of Singhalese fishermen, and she developed deep compassion for this taciturn man whom life had treated so shabbily.
When Britta told me later of her departure, she said of her father, ‘He was a lot smarter than I suspected. He’s the one who first sensed the truth about my going away … the real reasons. And he guessed correctly that I hadn’t admitted them to myself … wasn’t even conscious of them.’ Her father wanted to broach the subject but remained tongue-tied, as always, and took refuge in lesser topics. ‘Things with you and Gunnar finished?’ he asked hesitantly. When she nodded, he said, ‘Not surprised.’ He had known, of course, that like many young people in Tromsø—and throughout Norway for that matter—they had been living together, but this had not bothered him. He supposed that if Gunnar proved a good sort, she would marry him in due course, and if not, it was proper that she find out for herself. ‘He seemed limited in spirit,’ he said. Then, frightened because this observation had brought him close to fundamental reasons, he shut his mouth and looked down at his maps. After a long pause he said, without looking at her, ‘You’ve a good clean spirit, Britt. Keep it th
at way.’
She also wanted to talk but was afraid of the deeper proddings that were impelling her toward Spain, so, like her father, she retreated to trivialities: ‘It would be disgraceful if I got to the airport and there were no seats. Imagine saying all those goodbyes, then reporting back to work as usual to Mr. Mogstad.’
‘What’s he like?’
‘Miserable.’
‘Your mother seems to like him.’
‘He’s miserable.’
‘Perhaps when you come back …’ The words were those any parent concerned about his daughter’s first employment might have said, but to Bjørndahl they were as dangerous as fire, for they brought him face to face with the real question: Would she come back? He looked at his daughter, and without either of them speaking, they acknowledged that she was leaving Tromsø for good … was fleeing Norway with a stern resolve never to return. ‘I wonder if she knows the reasons?’ Bjørndahl asked himself. He longed to speak openly with his daughter, for she pleased him. Even though she had a striking beauty, she was sensible. If she was fleeing Norway, he was sure she had good reasons.
With her mother Britta was punctilious, helping with the meals, washing the dishes afterward and answering questions with unusual courtesy. When Mrs. Bjørndahl asked what had happened with Gunnar, Britta said, ‘I’m afraid it’s ended.’ She gave no details, and Mrs. Bjørndahl closed the conversation by saying, ‘He’d have made a good son-in-law. Your father liked him.’
On the second of February, Britta rose with an anxiety that she could not mask, for this day would tell whether there was to be an empty seat on the plane. At ten in the morning Mr. Sverdrup would receive a telegram from Copenhagen summarizing details, so at ten-thirty Britta told Mr. Mogstad that she wished to be absent for a few minutes, and while he carefully parted his mustache, pondering whether to allow her to leave or not, she walked out. At the travel office she found that Mr. Sverdrup had also stepped out, and she asked his assistant if any news had come from Copenhagen, but nothing was known, so she waited in growing apprehension.
Finally Mr. Sverdrup returned, his wax flower bobbing briskly in the pale light. ‘Good news!’ he cried as soon as he saw Britta. ‘As of last night … seats. You will fly to Copenhagen in the morning. And if you can’t get on the plane to Torremolinos, we’ll fit you into one of the others. Morocco, Greece—who knows where you’ll be tomorrow night?’
‘I’ll be in Spain,’ Britta said.
Because there was little difference between night and day, the airplane to Copenhagen always left Tromsø at three in the morning, so Britta did not go to bed; she talked with her father for the last time, and he said, ‘I’m not going with you to the airport.’ She felt very close to her mother and talked with her too, but as she did she heard the ghostly strains of the cavatina, and its desperate longing so tore at her heart that she returned to where her father sat alone, leafing through his books. ‘I wish I were going with you,’ he said, but what he meant was: ‘I wish I’d had the courage to cut loose years ago.’
At the airport she kissed Gunnar perfunctorily, mainly because he had brought along some of his friends and would be embarrassed if she did not make believe they were still lovers. When the time came for her to say goodbye to her mother she experienced a flood of emotion, and in the passing of a second, acknowledged to herself the real reasons why she had fought so desperately to get to Spain. ‘I’m leaving Tromsø for good. I can’t abide the dull orderliness … the years that never change … the heavy system of the same old things. I don’t want to wait ten years before I begin my life. I want no more of the tunnel.’
Then, to her own surprise, she blurted out the truth to her mother: ‘I’ll not be coming back … not ever. Tell Father.’
Mrs. Bjørndahl grabbed her arm, intending to force an explanation of this extraordinary announcement, but Britta pushed her away and ran to the plane, dashing up the stairs before her mother could reach her.
At Copenhagen there was a two-hour wait as the three planes chartered by the travel agency were loaded. The first, headed for Spain, had large numbers of tourists, and the agency man whom Britta questioned said he thought all the stand-bys would have to fly on the second, which was headed for Morocco. ‘It’s a great place. You’ll like it.’ The third plane, also well patronized, was heading for Greece, but on this one, there were definitely no vacancies. So it was either Morocco or Torremolinos, and Britta began to pray.
There were six stand-bys this day, five young girls and a boy from a university in Sweden. They all said they didn’t care much where they went so long as there was sun, so Britta proposed: ‘If you don’t care, and if there’s only one seat on the Torremolinos plane, could I have it?’
‘We’ll go where they send us,’ one of the girls said.
‘At these prices you can’t be selective,’ the boy said.
So Britta stood by herself with her fists clenched, and when the travel man came to the stand-bys and said, ‘We have two seats for Torremolinos,’ she almost knocked him down as she leaped forward, and even when she was strapped in her seat she was afraid to relax, but when the huge SAS jet finally sped down the runway and left the ground, she was at last satisfied that her protracted dream was to be a reality, and disregarding the startled passengers around her, she threw her arms high in the air and shouted, ‘It happened!’
When the jet landed at Málaga and the two hundred Scandinavian tourists disembarked, a curious thing happened. As they entered the airport they ran into another two hundred whose vacation had ended and who were returning to Scandinavia, and as the two groups passed, there was vibrant excitement showing in one set of faces, dejection in the other, for the first were coming into sunlight, the latter were heading back into the tunnel. Men tourists on their way home masked their faces in stolid acceptance, consoling themselves with the fact that as between modern Sweden and archaic Spain, there was really no choice; any man in his right mind would prefer Sweden with its insurance, its fine hospitals, its even finer schools and its just, democratic government freed from clerical influences. But the young girls, tanned by the wintry sun, did not so deceive themselves; they had loved Spain and wanted to remain, at least till summer reached the north-lands, and their faces were often clothed in gloom: ‘I don’t want to go home. I don’t want to go home!’ they seemed to be chanting, like the chorus in some Scandinavian saga.
Britta Bjørndahl’s first view of Spain, exceeded her expectations: for once the travel posters had not lied. The day was bright and there was a sun, with fleecy clouds drifting in from the Mediterranean and warmth nestling against the mountains to the north. A covey of yellow buses pulled up to the airport entrance, and as the newcomers piled in, they saw the SAS jet refueling, like some huge bird impatient to return to its nest. Britta nodded to it as she went past. ‘Go home!’ she whispered. ‘I shall not be needing you again.’
The trip from Málaga to Torremolinos required less than twenty minutes but it represented a journey from one civilization to another: golf links waiting in the sun, small restaurants with patios open to the sky, glimpses of a Mediterranean more deeply colored than sapphire, and surprisingly, a cluster of twenty-seven skyscrapers marking the official beginning of the town. The buses sped directly through Torremolinos, turned left toward the sea, and pulled up in a neat convoy before a new seventeen-story hotel called the Northern Lights, whose staff was completely Scandinavian. With the efficiency that came from handling such incoming groups twice each week throughout the year, the blond young men behind the desk distributed numbers and room keys as fast as the tourists entered the lobby and handed them printed cards which explained how to get to their rooms and from there to the dining hall. Within six minutes of having descended from the bus, Britta was carrying her small bag off the elevator onto the sixteenth floor. Pushing open her assigned door, she found a Swedish girl who introduced herself as Sigrid and who said within the first minute of greeting, ‘I have to go back on Friday.’
Bri
tta’s first question was one she would repeat constantly for the next two weeks: ‘Is it possible to find work here?’
‘Absolutely impossible. Not a job to be had.’
‘But suppose there was,’ Britta persisted. ‘How would I find it?’
‘I started with the manager here. He told me he gets fifty inquiries a week from girls like us. About the best you can do is select some bar and hang around till they know you. If anything’s available, they’ll tell you.’
‘Where are the bars?’ Britta asked.
Sigrid laughed and said, ‘Go down, turn right, stub your toe and you’ll bump into seven. But you have to make up your mind. Swedish, or German, or American?’
‘Do they go by nations?’
‘Of course. So do the restaurants.’
‘Could I get a job as waitress?’
‘Not a chance. I tried that too.’
‘What about the bars?’
‘The Swedish are the cleanest … and of course you know the language. But you don’t meet men with money … or who can give you a job. The German bars are the most fun and you do meet …’
‘I couldn’t work with Germans,’ Britta interrupted, and Sigrid, aware that she was Norwegian, said no more.
‘The American bars are ugly places and very noisy. I can’t stand them, but you do meet men from the military bases and they do have money.’
‘Can they find you a job?’
‘No. But the money you can scrounge allows you to hang on till you find a job.’
‘Then there are jobs?’ Britta pressed.
‘Darling! More than a hundred Scandinavian girls work in Torremolinos. Not one of them found a job when she came here, but somehow they held on. And now they have good jobs, and I’m eating my heart out with envy to think that they managed and I wasn’t able to.’
‘Please, how did they manage … really?’
‘Three ways,’ Sigrid said, standing by the window and looking eastward toward Málaga, which lay in sunlight between the mountains and the sea. ‘On the weekends Torremolinos gets many Spanish men from business offices in Madrid, and they all hope to find a sueca … that’s what they call us. They have a tradition of being generous with their mistresses … give them apartments … small allowances … and they don’t expect it to last forever. Second way is the Germans. They’re even freer with their money, but for a Norwegian, I suppose that’s out.’