‘You can’t treat your ninety-year-old mother like dirt. I have taken the trouble to search for a good recipe, carry home exotic foods, and then stand in front of the stove for four hours and only because my son insisted on carrying on with an unwanted visit.’
She pointed to a stool in a corner of the hall.
‘Sit down,’ she said.
‘Are you going to stay on the floor?’
‘I may never get up again.’
Humlin sighed and sat down on the stool. He knew his mother was capable of staying on the floor the whole night if he did not follow orders. Her methods of emotional terrorism were tried and tested.
‘There’s something I’ve been meaning to speak to you about,’ she said.
‘I’m the one who came to speak to you. Can’t you at least sit up?’
‘No.’
‘Do you want me to bring you a pillow?’
‘If you can bring yourself to do so.’
Humlin stood up, went into the kitchen and opened a window. Every time his mother cooked the kitchen was transformed into something that resembled the remains of a bloody battle. On his way to the bedroom to fetch a pillow he stopped and looked angrily at the phone. He had the sudden inspiration to lift up the phone book; underneath it lay an advert for ‘the Mature Women Hotline’. As he was carrying the pillow back to his mother he wondered if he should use it to suffocate her instead of helping to make her stay on the hall floor more comfortable.
‘What was it you wanted to tell me?’ he asked.
‘I want to inform you of my activities.’
Humlin stiffened. Was she a mind reader? He decided on a counter-attack.
‘I know what you’re doing,’ he said.
‘Of course you don’t know.’
‘That’s why I came here to talk to you. You do realise how upsetting this is for me, don’t you?’
His mother sat up.
‘Have you been snooping in my private papers?’
‘If anyone in this family roots around in other people’s papers, it’s you. I don’t.’
‘Well, then you can’t know what I’ve been up to.’
Humlin shifted around on the stool trying to find a more comfortable position. It reminded him of the chair he had sat on in Burén’s office. I’m going to wait her out, he thought. I won’t say another word, I’ll just wait.
‘Let’s just agree on that then. I have no idea what you’ve been doing and I don’t know what it is you want to tell me.’
‘I’m writing a book.’
Humlin stared at her.
‘What kind of a book?’
‘A crime novel.’
For a moment Humlin felt as if he was going insane. He was the victim of a great conspiracy, the extent of which he was only now beginning to realise. All of the people around him seemed to be working on crime novels.
‘Are you happy for me?’
‘Why on earth would I be happy for you?’
‘You could be happy that your mother’s creativity has remained intact into old age.’
‘Everyone is writing a crime novel these days. Except me.’
‘From what I read in the papers that’s not true. You are working on one, but I can’t imagine it’ll be any good.’
‘Whatever the papers have been saying it isn’t true. But why wouldn’t mine be any good?’
His mother lay back down on he floor.
‘It’s good to know you won’t be competing with me.’
‘I’m the writer in this family, not you.’
‘In a few months that won’t be true. I hope you realise what a sensation it will be when an eighty-seven-year-old woman makes her debut with a crime novel of international stature.’
Humlin felt an impending catastrophe speeding towards him. The final defeat would be when his own mother was hailed as a more accomplished writer than himself.
‘What’s it about?’ he finally made himself say.
‘I’m not going to tell you.’
‘Why not?’
‘You’ll steal my ideas.’
‘I have never in my life stolen anyone’s idea. I happen to be an artist who takes his work seriously. Just tell me what the book is about.’
‘A woman who kills her own children.’
‘How original.’
‘She also eats them.’
Even with the window in the kitchen open the smoke from the food started to make him feel sick.
‘That’s what you’re writing about?’
‘I’m already on chapter forty.’
‘So it’ll be a thick book?’
‘I’m assuming it will be around seven hundred pages. Since books are so expensive these days I think it’s only right to write books that last longer.’
‘Tell that to my publisher.’
‘I already have. I told him about the book and he was very interested. He is planning to market us as the “Literary Family”.’
Humlin was at a loss for words, the same way he had felt when Burén told him what his shares were actually worth. His mother got up, picked up the pillow and went into the living room. Humlin stayed on his stool. I lost my footing, he thought. Again. Then, in a series of brief but sharply focused images he saw in his mind Leyla, Tanya and Tea-Bag. Tea-Bag and her smile, Tanya with her face turned away from his, Leyla with her ungainly body. Maybe helping these girls tell their stories is actually something worthwhile, he thought. A good deed, when all is said and done.
*
Humlin forced himself to swallow a few bites of the tangy Javanese dish that his mother had prepared. He also drank a few glasses of wine in preparation for what was to come. During the meal they did not mention the crime novel Märta Humlin was writing nor the crime novel Humlin was not writing. They avoided all topics that could lead to dramatic conflict, since they both needed to rest up for the one that would soon take place.
Humlin pushed his bowl away from him, even though it was still filled with food.
‘You have never understood fine cooking,’ his mother remarked.
‘You have never understood that I’m not hungry at midnight.’
‘If you don’t learn to appreciate fine food, let alone get your sex life in order, you will come to a bad end, mark my words.’
Humlin was taken aback by her frankness, but it also gave him the opening he needed.
‘I don’t think it’s my sex life that needs discussing. What about yours?’
‘I have no sex life.’
‘That’s your business, but what I do know is you spend your time on revolting and most probably highly illegal phone sex conversations.’
She looked at him with surprise mingled with amusement.
‘You sound like a policeman. I’ve always known that about you, that there wasn’t a poet’s soul in you but a policeman’s.’
‘What would people say if this came out?’
‘That you have the soul of a policeman?’
Humlin banged his fist on the table.
‘We are not talking about me, we are talking about you. I am not acting like a policeman, I am telling you that I want this disgusting phone business of yours to stop. I don’t understand how you can live with yourself. Don’t you have any principles? You are denigrating and humiliating yourself.’
‘There’s no need to get so worked up over it. The old men who call are very nice. Many are interesting people. A famous author is one of my most faithful customers.’
Humlin couldn’t help his curiosity.
‘Who is it?’
‘I would never dream of telling you, of course. Discretion is the foundation of this business.’
‘But you get paid for this, don’t you? Your business is nothing more than common prostitution.’
‘I have to pay my phone bill somehow.’
‘I take it you make a lot of money?’
‘Not a lot.’
‘How much?’
‘Between fifty and sixty thousand kronor a month. Of
course there are no taxes to pay in this line of work.’
Humlin couldn’t believe his ears.
‘You make fifty thousand a month by moaning into the phone?’
‘Basically.’
‘What do you do with all the money?’
‘Make Javanese bamboo dishes. I buy oysters to offer my children.’
‘But you’re doing something illegal! And you aren’t paying any taxes.’
His mother looked worried for a moment.
‘We have discussed the question of taxes in our board meetings. We have come up with a solution we find satisfactory.’
‘And what is that?’
‘We have written a will for all profits made by our company. All remaining profits will go directly to the state. That should be more than enough to take care of all back taxes.’
Humlin decided to hit as hard as he could.
‘If you and your girlfriends don’t stop with this at once I will anonymously inform the police of your activities.’
The intensity of her anger surprised him.
‘Didn’t I know it! There it is again, the policeman in you. I want you to leave my apartment this instant and never return. I am cutting you out of my will and I never want to see you again. I even forbid you to attend my funeral!’
When she finished she tossed the contents of her wine glass in his face. That had never happened before, in all of their most heated discussions. He was temporarily thrown and simply watched as his mother refilled her glass.
‘If you do not leave this apartment at once without making any further comments I will throw another glass of wine in your face.’
‘Mother, we need to talk about this. Please calm down.’
This time most of the wine landed on his shirt. Humlin realised the battle was lost, at least for the moment. He wiped off his face and shirt with his napkin and stood up.
‘We’ll talk about it when I get back from Gothenburg.’
‘I am never speaking to you again in my life.’
‘I’ll call you when I get back.’
His mother lifted her wine glass again. Humlin ran out of the apartment.
*
A mixture of snow and rain was falling outside. He did not manage to hail a taxi. Two drunk Finns begged a few cigarettes off him and then followed him in a threatening manner for several blocks. When he got home he was wet through and freezing. Andrea was sleeping. He had been hoping he would be alone. In order to avoid her sharp questions he buried the soiled shirt in the bottom of the rubbish. Looking at it, it occurred to him that the wine stains looked curiously like blood.
Since he was still worked up he decided against trying to sleep immediately. Instead he sat down in his study and tried to prepare for his second meeting with the girls in Gothenburg. Suddenly he was not so sure that Tea-Bag would meet him at the station and this made him disappointed, almost sad. He thought about what she had told him, the unfinished story. How much of what she had said was true? He couldn’t know, but as he sat there he started working on what she had said, filling in the blanks. In a way he felt he was taking her by the hand and leading her into her own story. He had never been to Africa but now it was as if he could finally go there in his imagination because he had found someone who made it come alive for him.
He walked into the kitchen and got a tea-bag that he put on his desk in front of him. It seemed to him that the small black specks behind the thin paper were letters, words, sentences, perhaps even songs that all told the real story of the girl with the big smile . . .
*
‘Why are you sleeping with a tea-bag in your hand?’
Andrea was bent over him. He had fallen asleep at his desk. He tried to get up but fell back into his chair. One of his legs had fallen completely asleep.
‘I’m asking you why you have a tea-bag in your hand.’
‘I was going to make myself a cup and fell asleep.’
Andrea shook her head as if he were a hopeless case. He massaged his leg until he heard the front door slam shut behind her. He could see through the weak dawn light that it had stopped snowing outside. He crawled into bed on the side that was still warm from Andrea’s body. He slept heavily without dreaming.
*
He was at the Central station at exactly a quarter to two. He looked around but saw no one who smiled at him, everyone seemed despondent as if on their way to undesirable destinations. He was just about to give up when someone touched his arm.
Tea-Bag was smiling.
The train left the station with a jerk just after they had stepped on board.
9
EVERYTHING WAS GOING well until they reached Hallsberg. There Tea-Bag disappeared without leaving a trace. But before she left, she had continued to tell the story she had abruptly cut short in Humlin’s apartment. There was something so unbelievable about her narrative that Humlin started to think it was probably true. She had told him – in her broken but clear Swedish – how she had managed to reach Sweden from the internment camp in Spain. Humlin wondered if there could be anyone quite as alone as a young refugee on her way through a Europe that was as forbidden to those without legal access as if it had been fenced off with high walls and barbed wire.
As far as Södertälje she had sat motionless in her seat and had not even – this irritated him since he felt she should have shown more gratitude – reacted when he bought a ticket for her from the conductor. She had simply sunk down into her thick jacket and stared out of the window. Humlin tried to poke a hole in her silence by asking her a number of essentially meaningless questions but she had not answered, and after a while he wondered what he thought he was trying to achieve. They went through a series of tunnels in Södertälje and when they were back in daylight it was as if the darkness of the tunnels had inspired her. She removed her jacket and he couldn’t help but notice that she had a very beautiful body.
‘Do you want me to tell you about the monkey?’ she asked.
‘Please,’ he said. ‘But why don’t you finish the other story first. You were in the rowing boat that had started swaying from the wake of the barge. There were shirts hanging out to dry. You waved even though you didn’t see any people.’
‘I’d rather tell you about the monkey.’
‘You should always finish the stories you tell. Unfinished stories are like restless ghosts. They will continue to haunt you.’
She looked at him attentively.
‘I assure you I know what I’m talking about. Unfinished stories can become one’s enemies.’
Slowly, hesitantly, she started up her narrative again. At points she spoke with a certain amount of reluctance, as if she wanted to smash parts of her story because it caused her too much pain.
*
I continued to drift in that boat. Time was no longer of any importance. I think the boat trip lasted three days and three nights. I only rowed in to shore the few times I passed a small village and wanted to buy some food with the last of my money. In one of the villages there was a black man in the market that I had decided looked as if it sold the cheapest food. This was the shop I always looked for, the one with the dirty façade and the broken sign. He looked at me with serious eyes but when I smiled he smiled back. He said something to me that I did not understand. But when I answered him in my own language, the language that was already beginning to feel foreign to me, he jumped up from his rickety chair and answered me in the same language.
‘My daughter!’ he said. ‘You come from my country. What are you doing here, who are you, where are you going?’
I thought it was best to be careful in my answers. This man was one of my people, but he sat on a strange chair in a foreign land. Perhaps he would contact the police who would come down with their dogs and make sure I was thrown in jail. I did not know. But it was as if I had no more energy for subterfuge. I couldn’t run away or even give false answers. All of my lies felt meaningless, as if they were simply going to bounce back into my mouth and choke me. I decided
to tell this man the truth.
‘I have escaped from a Spanish refugee camp.’
He frowned. I could see in his face all the lines and scars he had received from many dangers and sorrows.
‘How did you get here?’ he asked.
‘I walked.’
‘My God! You have walked from Spain?’
‘I have also drifted along the river in a boat.’
‘How long have you been travelling?’
When he asked me that question, I suddenly knew the answer. I thought I had lost all sense of time, but suddenly I could see the long line of white stones in my head. I counted them all.
‘Three months and four days,’ I said.
He shook his head in disbelief.
‘How have you managed? Where have you found food? Have you been alone? What is your name?’
‘Tea-Bag.’
The man was tall and strong, but his hair was already starting to turn white. He leaned forward and looked me in the eyes.
‘You have been alone for a long time but now you are my daughter. At least for a while. Soon Monsieur Le Patron will be back and then you can’t stay, since like the white man that he is he has explained to me he can only tolerate one black person at a time.’
I still did not trust him. Even though he looked me straight in the eyes, allowing me to see deeply into him, I never forgot that I was trespassing on forbidden territory.
‘What is your name?’ I asked him.
‘Zachary. But in our language my name is Luningi.’
My father’s name! Now I was the one who opened my eyes wide and hoped he could see through my eyes to the village where my father had lived until he was one day taken away.
‘My father’s name was Luningi.’
‘I have my name after an uncle who dreamed of a mountain. He set out to find it and never returned. We think he found the mountain and decided to stay because it was so beautiful. Perhaps he is still there deep inside it. What do you and I know, what does anyone really know? Where is it you are going, my daughter?’
‘To Sweden.’
Luningi frowned again.
‘Is that a city? I have heard the name before.’
‘It is a country, to the north.’
‘Why are you going there?’
The Shadow Girls Page 12
