In Every Moment We Are Still Alive

by Tom Malmquist

  That mural of the angel in the bathroom, the earplug tin, and the picture there on the desk, they’re the only ones I have left, collecting things is so pathetic, isn’t it? she says. I walk up to Karin’s desk and take a closer look at the angel.

  Is it a famous picture? I ask.

  I don’t know, I’ve asked around, no one seems to know. A friend of my father’s is a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, I showed him the postcard, he thought it had been done by an unknown jobbing illustrator, some passage from the Bible, anyway the postcard is from the fifties, it says so on the back. I like it, it makes me feel calm when I look at it. She leans forward, picks up the wine glass, takes a mouthful, and puts it back. I sit down once more. Karin disappears into the hall. It sounds as if she’s looking for something in a case or carrier bag. I get restless and nervous and can’t tell whether we’ve spent an hour together or talked through the night. It takes a while before she comes back. She polishes her glasses with a silk cloth and puts them on and starts blearily examining her fingernails. I had a brain haemorrhage, she says, adding immediately: When I was twenty-one. I’ve not been given the all-clear. I don’t know how to reply, but she doesn’t wait for my answer or any reaction, instead she says: I saw an angel at the hospital. She gets a paper tissue from the bedside table, dabs it against her tongue, and starts rubbing at a stain on one of her trouser legs.

  Karin, I had no idea.

  She clears the glasses and side plates. I want to help but she tells me to stay where I am and asks if I’d like green or black tea. I tell her I’m quite all right as I am. Once she’s done, she sits down on the bed again.

  A real angel, you mean? I ask.

  What’s a real angel?

  Yeah, stupid question.

  She describes the angel, it had a strong light around it yet it was still corporeal, with colossal swan-like wings, a solar being, it came at night, reminding her of those bookmark angels she had loved as a child. Karin suggests that the angel was a neurological phenomenon. A projection of her need for consolation. She goes back to the kitchen cubicle.

  But still, there it was right in front of me, I saw it, she says and turns off the tap. She comes to a halt just in front of me. Her grey-black cardigan reaches down over her thighs, her jeans are also grey-black, but her blouse is white with light-coloured wooden buttons.

  You should write about this, I say.

  But I do, she says.

  Yeah, I suppose so.

  Or what did you mean, exactly?

  I didn’t mean anything in particular, I say.

  You said there’s a noticeable depth in my poems, that made me happy.

  Yes, there is, I felt you had been through something, you had separated from someone, I say.

  Do you have to describe things in exact detail, or should you keep them secret?

  You’re a poet, I say.

  No one has ever called me a poet before, she answers after thinking about it.

  You are. I look up at a poster of a colourful sculpture which Karin has above her bed. I like that, I point out.

  It’s Niki de Saint Phalle, she says.

  Is that what it’s called?

  No, she’s the artist, she answers.

  I know that Karin is not seeing the film critic any more, and I’m too tired to be polite: Is it okay if I stay over on the sofa? Karin seems uncomfortable. I explain that the last train has gone, I’d have to wait two hours for the night bus. I can’t afford a taxi, I add. She drinks her tea in quick gulps.

  Yeah, sure, I guess that’s okay, she says.

  Shit, that’s really decent of you.

  She traipses into the bathroom. The door closes. I hear the shower. It sounds as if she has toothpaste in her mouth when she calls out:

  There’s a stain on the sofa, it’s only red wine, nothing else.

  Karin goes to sleep before I do. The only thing I can hear is a slight rumbling from the cast-iron radiator. It takes me a while to find the light switch in the bathroom. On the handbasin is a bottle of perfume. Apple fragrance. I open the bathroom cabinet over the handbasin. Arranged over four glass shelves is contact lens fluid, perfumed talcum powder, tampons, deodorant, cotton tips, a nail file, nasal spray, mouth ulcer cream. I sit on the toilet lid. I see the angel on the wall to the left above the handbasin. I noticed it the first time I was in her flat. Karin just chuckled at the time and said, I haven’t had time to paint over it yet. It’s been painted using a fine brush. Open wings in gaudy yellow. Flowing hair and a bright red breast in the form of a heart. Two fangs protrude from its upper lip. I study it for a long time. Then I turn my head towards the bathtub, an orange plastic mat inside it. Karin’s half-metre long hairs snagged in the floor drain.

  * * *

  —

  Karin’s flat suddenly feels like a collection space for silence, a process that has only been underway for an hour, yet the extent of the silence already exceeds everything. The dusty mullions, the cracked white paint, the thirties bathtub with claw feet, the hob with its sooty cast-iron pan support, the little coffee percolator on the shelf of flared grey limestone. I sit on the floor with my mobile and make a call, I leave a message:

  Hi, Karin, it’s me again, can you get back to me, please, okay, bye, hope everything is fine, okay, bye.

  I insert one of her favourite albums into the CD player, Joni Mitchell’s Song to a Seagull and the song ‘Night in the City’. I stand in the kitchenette by the window. Karin answers at last:

  Hi, sorry, I need to think, really sorry.

  Shoots of the jasmine bush push through when I open the window.

  Where are you?

  In Djurgården, I’m taking a walk with Caro, it’s not about you, Tom, I know it sounds like a bit of a cliché putting it like that.

  I jump up and sit on the broad window seat. There’s a droning of bumblebees and hoverflies.

  I think I’m mainly just surprised, I say.

  Look, I’m so sorry, Tom, I just don’t think I’m ready for a new relationship, I’ve got too much baggage, I need to think.

  I don’t know what to say because you’re not saying anything, I respond.

  Sorry, she answers.

  Okay, but I’m sitting in your flat now, maybe it’s not a good time to be waiting for you here, then, or what?

  Sorry, but I really need to think. There’s a spare key in a cup in the kitchen just next to the coffee percolator, the one with a key ring like a lightbulb.

  Okay, I’m sure I’ll find it.

  If you could just lock the top lock and throw the key in through the letter box, she says.

  Okay, yeah yeah, but can we be in touch later?

  Sorry for just leaving like that, I haven’t been feeling right lately, sorry, you’re great, Tom, but it’s all gone too fast for me.

  On the way to the train I call Karin again, she doesn’t answer, I leave yet another message:

  Hi, Karin, I put the keys through the letter box like you said, I drank all the milk, I bought you some more, I cleaned a bit as well, or tidied, I vacuumed the hall and picked up my own crap, I listened to your Joni Mitchell albums, I understand what you mean, I agree, more interesting than Dylan, I think my favourite is ‘Amelia’ from Hejira, okay, sure, maybe it’s a bit weird but I couldn’t stop myself buying you another album, I was passing by the Vinyl Window anyway, Two Steps from the Blues, Bobby Bland, don’t think you’ve listened to him, start with track five, ‘Lead Me On’, good soul, no, better just listen through, well anyway, this is an idiotically long message, sorry, take care of yourself, and call me if you like.

  * * *

  —

  I find the telephone number for Stockholm City Court on the Internet. I am passed between different departments and every time I speak to someone new I have to explain about my being the single parent of a child and how Karin has suddenly passed away. Every time they respond with something along the lines of: Okay, what’s your case number? Finally when a district court clerk says I’
ve come to the right person she asks if she can call me back. Her voice sounds young, no older than twenty-five, she’s precise and pleasant. Half an hour later she calls on my landline. I answer at my desk and make a note of her name: Najma. I’ve brought myself up to speed now, she says, there doesn’t seem to be any simple or quick way for you to become the father in a legal sense. Okay, I answer. The city of Stockholm has to apply for a summons through Södermalm City Council, she continues. What does that mean? Your daughter has to take legal action against you, she can’t do that herself, of course, she’s a baby, the city of Stockholm has to do it on her behalf. Legal action against me? It’s not as bad as it sounds, that’s just the terminology we use, your daughter will be the petitioner and you’ll be the plaintiff. The city of Stockholm? Yes, you have to call a case officer at Södermalm City Council, we have to receive a summons, the local council administration must, in accordance with the sixth chapter and ninth paragraph section two of Parental Law, report to the city court that your daughter does not have a custodian, I think it’s the Social Services Department that must then nominate you as the custodian, the only thing you have to do is accept the plaintiff’s case. Well, I am her father, aren’t I? For you to be able to act for your daughter you must first have custody of her, this is the quickest way, a court decision on your paternity will take time, a paternity investigation will have to be done, and it will require an ombudsman who can represent your daughter in the case, and it will need materials on which to base a decision. Okay, okay. In other words it’s quicker to make a decision on a custodian than a decision on paternity, she says. I really don’t understand, I’m saying yes, I’m not denying it, am I? That doesn’t matter a bit, that’s how the law is. Is this crap written in the nineteenth century or something? I don’t know, she answers. Barons slept with the milkmaids and denied paternity so they wouldn’t have to pay child support? There are some laws today that leave a certain amount to be desired, she says. So if Karin had told some bureaucrat old bag at the Social Services office that I was the father of the child then this whole crock of shit would never have happened? Exactly, she answers. A woman’s word is considered more trustworthy than a DNA analysis from the National Board of Forensic Medicine, and my voice, the voice of the father, doesn’t mean shit? The best thing you can do now is to make sure we get a summons in so that a decision can be made on a specially designated custodian. This is diabolical, I say. I understand your frustration, really. Even if I become the father in a legal sense, the Social Services will require that there has to be a trustee to say yes or no to my financial decisions until Livia’s an adult. I can understand your concerns, she says, but I interrupt her: They’ll supervise me as a father. Supervise may be a slightly strong word to use here. They’ll clip my wings as a father. I understand what you mean. What hurts me most of all about this bullshit is that a simple marriage certificate that you can sign after getting to know each other for fifteen minutes in a bar seems to count for more than living together for ten years. Is a marriage licence worth more than a family’s history? The telephone line hisses. Hello, I exclaim. Yes, I can hear you, I am listening, unfortunately I’m not allowed to give legal advice in my position. I never asked for it. In my opinion you should contact an experienced lawyer who can help you, as for the Social Services there isn’t much you can do, that’s how heavily the marriage licence counts. I cough, down a mouthful of my Coca-Cola, and say: Karin was sick before, she got a cyst on her brain that almost did away with her, she came home after a month at the hospital, I proposed, it was Christmas 2004, she said yes. I really am very sorry, she murmurs. Okay, what did you say I had to do to get custody?

  I have four banana boxes with me and two plastic bags when I move in with Karin on Metargatan one Sunday in the winter of 2003. The rest of my stuff I have thrown away or dumped in my parents’ attic in Huddinge. Only when moving do I actually touch all my belongings. A point of contact with the past is established, which goes beyond memory. Even an eraser or a couple of bent picture hooks in the hand can feel irreplaceable. Before I go to bed that night I slip into a hot bath. I look around. Something in the bathroom is different. I can’t say what it is and don’t understand why it makes me feel ill at ease. I guess I’m tired after the move and disoriented after a difference of opinion with Karin about a mirror I’ve brought, a Baroque plaster copy. There’s a seraph at the top of the frame and, at the bottom, a demon from hell. Whenever I looked into that mirror, in my old flat in Huddinge, my pale and malleable face seemed to peer back at me, squeezed in between those two eternal figures. Karin finds the mirror kitsch and depressing. I don’t like it much either, but as far as I’m concerned it’s a matter of principle; I don’t want everything in the flat to chime with Karin’s parents’ homely and bourgeois taste in interior design. Karin’s mural ought to be visible from the bathtub. I lean forward. She has painted over the angel. And not with a roller either. She has carefully filled in the red and yellow lines with a fine brush, using a white covering paint that is shinier than the rest of the wall. I pick at the glass fibre weave. Karin must have done it this morning while I was cleaning my empty flat in Huddinge, but I can still see the angel; from certain angles it’s lit up by the ceiling light.

  * * *

  —

  Livia touches my mouth and nose with hands that remind me of Karin’s testing a piece of fruit for ripeness. I kiss her, she doesn’t like that. Her nails are thin as paper, the Neonatal nurses advised me to keep them short by simply tearing them off, apparently you can do that with newborns’ nails. But I can’t, I’m worried I might pull off the whole nail. I trim them with clippers, so carefully that I can only do it when she’s fast asleep.

  Livia’s clothes are kept behind the door of the guest room. In the drawers are some small cloth bags of dried lavender that Karin made. She took the lavender from the flowerbeds at her parents’ summer house. Quite apart from the protection they give against moths, she liked the scent of lavender, she kept one of the cloth bags tied to the bedpost, and she used to rub her fingers against it before she fell back on the pillow with her hand over her nose. I dress Livia: dove-grey baby trousers with knee pads and a striped cardigan in the same colour, size fifty-six. Also a cap, tights, and socks. The clothes smell of lavender but mainly of pine, the wood the drawer is made of. Karin bought the clothes two weeks before we went in to the maternity ward of the Söder Hospital. That afternoon she was caught out when I appeared in the doorway, bags in my hands from the supermarket. She was resting her neck against the back of the sofa. Her black singlet was drawn up over her navel. I got the idea she had been whispering secrets to her belly and listening for answers. The clothes were on the kitchen table. Karin had arranged them so that they looked like a perfect outline of an infant child. She kept her eyes on me when I touched them, and told me that she had bought them with her mother the other day.

  Do you like them? she asked.

  And what did I do then? What was I doing while Karin was picking out clothes for our child?

  * * *

  —

  It takes me an hour to come up with the idea of some cut flowers, and another hour to find a florist who has carnations in the right colours. The flower hall on Birger Jarlsgatan. The florist, a man roughly my age, claims that the carnations are red and white. This is a simplification, they are the same colour as the jumper Karin was wearing that first time I saw her at Stockholm University. I pay 1,560 kronor for just over one hundred carnations. I can’t afford any more, that’s all the money I have in my account. It’s Thursday, 26 August 2004, and I catch the number 59 bus on Rådmansgatan. I press the bouquet so hard against my chest that the water seeps out of the wrapping paper, the crotch of my jeans gets wet, I look as if I have peed myself. The bus stops outside the entrance to the Karolinska University Hospital in Solna. I want to charge about and run. I daren’t. I don’t want people staring at me. On the lower level of the NeuroCentre is the Bistro Amika, it looks like a roadside café, I go in
side and get rid of the wrapping paper. Patients with turban-like bandages around their heads, by mobile drip stands, in wheelchairs, leaning on walking frames. A nurse stops me in one of the corridors on floor six. She’s wearing white clogs and carrying a tray, on it a small plate with a half-eaten cheese sandwich and a stainless steel jug.

  It’s not visiting hours now, she says, and tries to establish eye contact.

  I have to get to R16, I answer, hiding my crotch behind the bouquet.

  This is R16, who are you visiting? she asks.

  My partner, she came in this morning.

  Who is your partner?

  Karin, I answer.

  Karin who?

  Karin Lagerlöf, she came in from Karolinska in Huddinge this morning, she’s having emergency surgery. She surveys the corridor and says:

  Room 604, it’s on the left after the food trolley there, she just got some sedatives, she’s sleeping. Then she glances down at my offering and adds: But this is the Neurology ward, no flowers.

  It’s her birthday today, I answer.

  Lovely, but you have to leave them outside, we have to think of the patients, some of them have allergies.

  Can’t I just quickly show them to her? I ask.

  No one’s allowed to bring flowers, she answers, pressing down with her elbow on the door handle of what seems to be the entrance to the staff room. I stand there dithering for a while before I go back the same way I came, there’s a trash can in the elevator hall. It looks like a composting bin and it’s overflowing with wilted bouquets with handwritten cards. I bin the carnations.

  * * *

  —

  On top of the bathroom cabinet is an old jam jar half-filled with sand. Karin cycled off on her own to fetch the sand before we left Gotland in the summer of 2009. She explained that sand with soap is good for the body, it exfoliates, clears dead skin. The jar is where it was left. I know that Karin used to look at it while brushing her teeth, especially in the winter-half of the year. It stinks when I open the lid, as if something has decomposed in there. I strain and boil the white sand, then pour it back into the jam jar, which I put on the bookshelf so I can see it from the bed. I continue throwing away rusty hairpins, old tubes of ointments and deodorants, half-empty toothpastes and dirty earplugs. In a plastic bag under the handbasin I find an unopened carton of contact lenses, contact lens fluid, and a tube of lens drops. There’s a receipt at the bottom; Karin paid 738 kronor for it all at Östermalms Optik. She was out that whole day, tracking down the right lenses. I want to save the contact lenses as a memento for Livia but I change my mind and throw the whole bag in the bin bag. On the middle shelf in the bathroom cabinet lies Karin’s hairbrush. Her hairs are still snagged in its plastic teeth. She didn’t have time to prise them out and throw them away as she usually did. The brush is thick with hair, I smell it, I press it to my mouth.