The assistant train engineer, named Eirik, was entertaining disappointment in the tavern after hearing news that his junior colleague Alexander would be made full engineer, an insult considering Eirik’s seniority and years of loyal service to the company. He had had nine plum brandies when Alexander entered the tavern, nodding his small greetings all around but making no announcement of his advancement, which somehow was worse than if he had, for it was plain just to look at him that he was distending with pride. He took a seat beside Eirik and laid a palm on his back. Eirik felt a measure of pity in that hand, and he rolled his shoulder to remove its weight. Alexander volunteered to buy Eirik a drink but he declined. “Thank you all the same, but I’m not quite destitute yet.”
“I wish you wouldn’t take it that way,” said Alexander.
“Wishing is a pastime for disappointment, nothing more,” Eirik replied. “Take it from one who knows.”
Now Alexander became serious, and he spoke with an edge to his voice Eirik had never heard before: “Look, now. We’ve got to work together. Tomorrow morning and each morning after. You and I have always got along well enough; I do hope there won’t be any problems between us now.”
Eirik found himself regarding the ringed baby flesh of the man’s neck, imagining what it would feel like to grip it in his hands. And in that same unsettling way one realizes he’s left the door to his home ajar, Eirik knew that he could kill Alexander. Not that he would, but that it was possible.
“There won’t be any problems coming from me,” Eirik said, and he excused himself, bowing exaggeratedly before weaving from the tavern and into the road. He went home for his supper but found no solace there, his foul mood compounded by his wife’s miserly cheese portion. His wife was always miserly with her cheese portions but the amount he received that night was even more scant than usual. He sat at the table alone, staring at his empty plate and considering his private theory, which was that his wife secretly ate the cheese herself while he was at work.
“More cheese,” he called.
Her voice, from the larder, was unemotional: “There is none left.”
“How in the world did we eat through an entire wheel in less than half a month?”
“What can I tell you? You eat it, and then it’s gone.”
“But I don’t eat it, that’s just the problem.” He moved to the kitchen and found her stacking plates, her back to him. “You eat it!” he said.
She stiffened, then turned to look at her husband, loathing everything about him: his weak chin, his sour odor, his lopsided mustache, his stoop. The thing was, she really did secretly eat the cheese. No sooner would Eirik leave for work than she would go for the hidden wheel and tug away a goodly sized piece, savoring this in a corner nook otherwise unused save for this lone and lonely activity. But she was unsatisfied in most every aspect of her life, and the cheese was one of the very few pleasures she had. And now it appeared that this, too, would be stolen from her. All right, then, she thought. Take it all, even my smallest happiness. Reaching her arm deep into the cupboard, she removed the hoarded cheese and laid it on the counter before making for the privacy of the attic, where she wept in the full-throated style, feeling just as sorry for herself as a person could ever hope to feel.
Eirik stood awhile, swaying and listening to his wife’s jerky, breathy sobbings. He knew he should move to comfort her but found the desire to do so entirely absent, being far too excited about this unexpected surplus of Gouda. I’ll pay her a visit after a snack, perhaps, he thought, and brought the cheese to the dining room table, consuming the entire half wheel in addition to a bottle of elderberry wine, afterward passing out in his chair and suffering through a cycle of horrific dreams and visions: Alexander furiously copulating with his wife while eating his, Eirik’s, cheese; his wife lying on the table nude while Alexander carved elegant swaths into her broad white calf with a paring knife, for she herself was fashioned from cheese; that his penis was cheese which broke off while he urinated; that his penis was cheese his wife nibbled on while he slept—all through the night like this, and so in the morning, in addition to the state of his head from the wine and plum brandy, his sense of peace was compromised as he set out for work.
He arrived at the station ten minutes late with bloodshot eyes and a halo of fumes swarming his head. Alexander recognized the man’s impairment and felt a professional impulse to chastise him.
“So you kept it up last night?” he asked.
“I did what I had to do.”
“And now?”
“Now I’ll do the same.”
An uneasy beginning, then. They spoke little as the hours went by. Eirik’s pain and insult were stubbornly insistent but he knew he would get through the day, and that the next day would not be quite so bad. In passing time, he thought of the loveliness of a glass of brandy, the first glass after a shift, the way it drew down his throat and coated his insides with flammable heat, afterward leaving an aroma of smoked plum smoldering in his nostrils and mouth when he exhaled. It was very invigorating, that first plum brandy, and he began to look forward to the tavern with earnest, uncomplicated appreciation. His anger diminishing, he decided he would buy his wife a wheel of cheese on the way home from the tavern, and that he would encourage her to eat as much as she wanted, in plain sight—just so long as he could have his fair share as well. And when this ran out, so what if they had to buy another? Perhaps he wasn’t a full engineer, but he earned a good wage and there was room for occasional extravagances so long as they weren’t too dear. Eirik hit his stride with his coal spade and the flames shimmied and spit in the firebox. Sweat ran off his nose and chin and into his eyes, and this was agreeable to him. Life was not such a trial after all, he mused. It wasn’t easy, but then, how dull an experience it would be if it were so. He began to whistle, and this meant that he was happy.
Alexander sensed the change in his partner’s mood, and felt calmer for it. Allowing his mind to drift, he fell to thinking of the difficulties of his youth: his mother dead mere months after his birth; his father, waylaid from sorrow, vanished one autumn morning, never to return, never sending word. From the start Alexander was instilled with the knowledge that whatever shape his life took, it was up to him alone to sculpt it, and so to have risen to the level of engineer, he couldn’t help but feel proud of himself. Surely this is understandable, but half an hour shy of Bury, he made the mistake of verbalizing his satisfaction: “My maiden voyage as engineer,” he said. “I can’t deny it, but it feels good.” He turned to Eirik, who said nothing, but looked stonily ahead. Alexander said, “Won’t you allow me a moment of boasting, old friend?”
“Boast away,” Eirik said. “I won’t stop you.”
“Why can’t you be happy for me?”
“Who’s to say I’m not?”
“But how would I know if you were?”
Eirik jammed the spade in the coal tender. “What do you want me to do?” he asked.
Alexander became sheepish. “Typically, when a man has a turn of good luck, his fellows will offer their congratulations.”
At this last word, Eirik’s black mood returned, a virulent poison which leached through to the deepest parts of his soul. Alexander’s neck looked velvety soft to the touch, and Eirik’s fingers began to twitch and grip. He resumed his feverish shoveling and as the train barreled along the rails he waited for his hatred to ebb, but it never did, and in fact it only doubled and redoubled, so that he felt lost to it. Resignedly, he waited for the best moment to exorcise this feeling.
The train eased into the station at Bury. Alexander peered out, an attitude of calm defining his person. He turned to Eirik, meaning to offer some minor encouragement or compliment, when he saw his co-worker was watching him with a fanatical look, his eyes dreadful, grotesquely transformed. The look made Alexander wary, and he asked, “What’s the matter?”
“You want me to congratulate you?” Eirik asked.
“Don’t you feel it’s in order?”
“Indeed it is. But you’re certain you want me to?”
What manner of test was this? Would Eirik strike him with a fist? Well, then, better to have it out. Alexander was a healthy man, if portly, and had seen his share of tavern battles—he was not afraid of the stingy wretch who stood before him. Resting his hand on the brake lever and gripping it in his fist, he struck an upright and confident pose, and said, “I’m certain, Eirik. Let’s have it.”
The spade stuck out at an angle from the coal tender. Later, speaking to his cellmate, Eirik would muse that it was as if the spade were leaning toward him, offering itself for assistance. He swung it in a quick, tight circle, bringing the edge down on Alexander’s hand, severing cleanly the man’s foremost three fingers, while the fourth hung as if on a hinge. This swayed up and back and Alexander stood there watching the blood drain from the stumps with the look of a man who had just witnessed a baffling illusion.
“Congratulations,” Eirik said. He collected the fingers with the spade and tossed them into the churning firebox.