The Lover From an Icy Sea (38 page)

The drive from Positano to Capodichino Airport was relatively short. They found the airport; found the rental car return; dropped off the car; collected their baggage; checked in; proceeded to their departure gate; waited a brief twenty-five minutes; boarded for the first leg of their flight. Within minutes, they were airborne.

Kit had forgotten neither his obligation nor his promise to fulfill it. At the same time, something about this particular flight felt distinctly unerotic. Naples to Milan was domestic: perhaps that was it. In duration and distance, the flight felt like New York to Buffalo; Miami to Tallahassee; Los Angeles to Sacramento. It could’ve been that. But Daneka also felt different to him. She sat with her purse in her lap, her knees pressed together, her feet flat on the floor. When she wasn’t peering out the window, she was checking her watch.

They remained silent. An hour and a half later and right on schedule, they landed in Milan.

Chapter 48

At Malpensa Airport, they made their way easily from their arrival gate, through Customs, and on into the international lounge, where they found their departure gate and settled in to await their boarding call. The Italian Customs officials, Kit noted with some amusement, had been distinctly uninterested in Daneka. Whether it was her lack of make-up in combination with the peasant plainness of her dress, or rather the boisterous presence of a group—just behind them as he and Daneka came through—of tall, blond, scantily-dressed and strikingly good-looking girls in their late teens or early twenties, Kit couldn’t be certain. What he could be certain of, however, was that Daneka had also registered their presence. From the unguarded and Danishly disdainful expression she wore on her face, it was clear to Kit she wasn’t feeling any particular solidarity with this group of Nordic sisters.

“
Swedes!” she hissed and nudged him forward towards the waiting lounge before promptly collecting both their passports from an official whose attention was clearly focused elsewhere—and so, who hadn’t even bothered to compare the portraits in their documents with the faces of the two people standing in front of him.

They found a couple of empty seats and sat down. Other passengers continued to stream into the lounge alone or in pairs, occasionally in families, and Kit began to wonder what had become of the girls. He announced his intention to wander over to the smoking section to have a cigarette. Daneka simply nodded.

Apart from wanting to satisfy his curiosity, Kit had had another thought that was now directing his feet to the duty-free shopping area. While en route, he passed by Customs—the girls were still there. Other passengers were being waved through with barely a glance, much less an inspection of their carry-on luggage. The girls’ bags and knapsacks, by contrast, seemed to be under intense scrutiny. Kit wondered ironically what weapons the Customs officials might be looking for as they satyrically emptied out the contents:  thongs, bikinis, underwear—even birth control paraphernalia—all the while exchanging smiles with the girls and quips with their colleagues. One in particular appeared to have enough command of English to use it with the girls, all of whom had no problem responding to him—or even trading quips with one another—in English. The official then provided translations for his colleagues, whose chortles and smirks told Kit whatever part of the story wasn’t directly audible.

He eventually found what looked like a well-stocked shop; went first to the cigarette section where, not finding his beloved Lucky Strikes, he at least found non-filter Camels—and grabbed a carton. He next went looking among the selection of champagnes for a bottle of Veuve Cliquot; found it and took two; thought about Daneka’s mother and went looking among the bottles of port; found a twenty-year-old tawny and took it; made his way to the register, presented his boarding pass and paid for all of it with his credit card. In five minutes, he was on his way back to their departure gate via the smoking section, where he spent another five minutes in quiet gratitude for Italy’s laissez-faire
attitude in the matter of certain personal vices. A country in which smokers and non-smokers could comfortably coexist was, Kit thought, one he could get easily used to.

As he passed once again by Customs on his way back to their gate, he saw the same group of girls he’d seen twice before. Their mood seemed to be striking an uncomfortable balance between dour and tense as the charade of baggage inspection began to impinge upon the less frivolous, less fanciful fact of airline schedules and final departure calls. Youth and beauty had their privileges, Kit thought, but also their price. He suspected the ordeal would continue right up until the final, nervous minute, but that even Italian Customs officials would then have to defer to a flight schedule and let the girls get to their gate.

He spotted Daneka, already in line to board, and made his way forward to join her. “I bought a little something for your mother—also for us,” he said as he opened the top of his shopping bag and showed her the contents.

“
You’re an absolute darling, darling,” she said and pinched his cheek. They walked down the inflated, wormlike umbilical cord joining building to jet. Until that moment, Kit had ignored—and not thought to ask—what airline they were flying to Copenhagen. He now did.

“
Why, SAS, darling—but of course!” Daneka answered as if there were simply no reason to consider any other.

As they prepared to enter the aircraft itself, Kit got his first look at what, he supposed, gave Scandinavia its particular fame; also of what—if she was any indication of the bounty to come once they landed in Denmark—promised to be eye-candy as deliciously vanilla as her Italian counterparts had been deliciously chocolate. ‘Judicious’ took precedence over ‘delicious,’ however, and he resolved to keep his saccharine metaphors to himself. The flight attendant looked at Kit briefly, then looked at Daneka. Whether the attendant’s thoughts in that instant mulled into metaphor, or simply into calculation, Kit couldn’t determine. However, she did seem to reach some personal decision with regard to Daneka—on the basis of what, exactly, Kit couldn’t even begin to guess—and addressed her in what Kit supposed was Danish.

“
God morgon!
” she said. “
Får jag be om biljetterna, tack
.”

“
Javisst
,” Daneka answered—Kit supposed—for them both. And although his head told him there was absolutely nothing extraordinary about the fact that she’d be perfectly at ease in her own language, he still couldn’t help marveling at the miracle of it, and of her, speaking in sounds he couldn’t even begin to decipher.

With a gesture, the flight attendant pointed them in the direction of the aisle at the further side of the cabin. “
Här borta är det
.”

“
Tack så mycket
,” Daneka again answered for them both.

It was only once they’d managed to stow their carry-on luggage and get buckled in that Kit allowed himself to express his quiet admiration, practically bubbling over since he’d heard her utter her first syllable. “So that’s Danish. It’s beautiful! And you’re beautiful speaking it!”

Still settling in, Daneka looked at Kit as if over the rims of a pair of ill-fitting glasses. “That wasn’t Danish, darling.”

Kit stared at Daneka in complete befuddlement. She took a moment to savor her easy conquest, buckled her seatbelt and straightened out her dress, then turned back to him and pretended to look once again over the rims of the same pair of ill-fitting glasses. “That was Swedish.”

He blinked. “Swedish? You also speak Swedish?” Then, after a slight pause, and before getting the obvious answer to a senseless question: “But why were the two of you speaking Swedish?”

Daneka might’ve blushed with pride if it hadn’t all been too obvious. “Danes have no choice in the matter, Kit. Nor, by the way, do Finns, Norwegians or Icelanders. Swedish, darling, is the first language of Scandinavia—and the language we all learn even before we learn English. If you ask the Swedes, by the way, they’ll tell you it’s not the first, but the only language of Scandinavia—so why should the rest of us even bother with our own silly little dialects?”

Kit was beginning to suspect that Swedes and all things Swedish were not so perfectly popular as he’d always assumed—at least not among a certain subset of Danes. His suspicions were only further confirmed as the giddy group of girls they’d only recently left behind came bouncing down the aisle towards their seats somewhere in the rear of the plane. Daneka acknowledged their presence by taking a sudden and intense interest in the tarmac outside her window—more particularly, in the heat waves rising up from it. Not wishing Kit to be deprived of the spectacle, she gently but firmly took his face in her hand and steered his gaze out.

“
Isn’t it fascinating, darling, how the heat seems to make the air almost boil! I don’t know that I’ve ever seen something so marvelous, have you?”

Yes
, Kit thought—but thought it only to himself. Probably no fewer than ten thousand times in his life. He also remembered having been stoned once—and so fascinated by the itinerary of a slug across a windowpane that he’d watched it for almost an hour. The spectacle of the slug—by contrast with the simmering of heat waves on this tarmac—had been fireworks.

“
Yes, darling. It’s absolutely riveting.” Slightly more riveting, of course, was the parade of young legs, hips and breasts walking just past his shoulder and which made his sockets scream with the strain of peripheral vision as he pretended to stare directly at the tarmac. “Riveting!”

“
Well,” Daneka said with a huff. “I’m glad we agree on something!”

The girls, meanwhile, had passed on and out of even his peripheral vision. Kit reflected: however close his bladder might come to bursting during the next two hours and five minutes aloft, he might be better advised to abjure a trip to the toilet.

The captain’s voice came over the intercom and droned on as captains’ voices the world over tend to do. “
Mina damer och herrar
… ” Kit listened, academically, to the length of his address. The language had its sing-song charm, no doubt about it. But he decided on the spot he preferred it out of a woman’s mouth—as he did most foreign languages. He was about to ask Daneka for a translation when he noticed that several of his fellow male passengers were chuckling. Daneka, he observed at the same time, was turning a bright shade of red. From the ruthlessness with which she pursed her lips, Kit suspected it was not embarrassment she was feeling, but something a bit more visceral. He opted for discretion.

The captain paused momentarily, and Kit thought he’d finished. Then, however, the same voice came back over the public address system in English. The news he delivered was anything but extraordinary: welcome on board; crew members by name; tentative departure and arrival times; weather conditions at ten thousand meters. So what’s the big deal? Kit wondered. Then, in a slightly clumsier English because the vocabulary for it was not canned, had not been repeated—with minor variations—three or four times a day over the course of twenty years, the captain extended a special welcome to a group of young ladies on their way back to university, in Uppsala, who’d apparently represented Sweden—and “rather amply,” he added, though ‘amply’ sounded to Kit’s ear more like ‘apple-y’ —in Milan’s annual wet T-shirt competition.

Unfortunately for Kit’s clear comprehension, but quite fortunately for his cynical sense of humor, the captain’s reach with English-language metaphors greatly exceeded his grasp. He (the captain) wanted to say, in conclusion, that ‘it had been his privilege to personally attend the competition, and that he could assure all present, and especially the young ladies, that no flag had been left unfurled, no stone unturned.’ As for ‘the lassies’—and here Kit suddenly had a vision of bare-breasted collies—‘they’d displayed their very best for God, King and country.’ He then suggested that the same country that had given a solid piece of Swedish engineering to the world and had had the temerity to call it a ‘Volvo’ was a country that would, no doubt, find a way to commemorate these lovely ladies’ accomplishments with an engineering feat of equally extrapopalonius finesse—or something to that effect.

“
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen for flying SAS, and have a good day.”

Have a good day indeed!
Kit thought as he caught a glimpse of Daneka out of the corner of his eye and saw that she was no more amused by the English translation than she’d been by the original address in Swedish. He kept his comments to himself and prepared to enjoy another quiet flight.

Unfortunately, however, the captain had neglected to turn off the public address system, and the entire cabin could hear his ongoing conversation in the cockpit. It was in Swedish, and so Kit caught none of it. He could, however, deduce from the snickers and occasional guffaws from several of the passengers around him—male and female, he noted, though Daneka was decidedly not among them—that the content was probably rather burlesque. At one point, former snickers and occasional guffaws became a general uproar. Just then, a flight attendant whom Kit hadn’t seen up until that moment went running past him up the aisle and in the direction of the cockpit. He caught only a glimpse of rather nicely curved calf muscles and a skirt bouncing to mid-thigh as she ran. The last thing he heard before the address system went dead was the voice of a woman—perhaps an octave or two higher, and several decibels louder—than he would’ve thought appropriate for collegial discourse.