The Sons: Made in Sweden, Part 2

by Anton Svensson

  A total of one hundred and eighty-two kronor and fifty öre.

  He rushes to his room to get the slip of paper lying on a speaker that he built himself and that is as tall as Vincent. After a deep breath he unfolds the paper. Jacket 99.50. Wig 125. Cigarettes 14. Textile paint 28.50. Padding 20. Everything that he can’t swipe from somewhere. Well, he could, but a good plan exposes the perpetrator to the risk of getting caught only once, at the main hit. The bicycle, the getaway vehicle, is the only thing he can take without risk, if he does it the night before.

  “We’re missing one hundred and four kronor and fifty öre.”

  “Missing?”

  “Yeah. I need two hundred and eighty-seven kronor.”

  “For what?”

  “For Druggie-Lars. And I know where the rest is.”

  HE MEASURES TWO cups of milk, a little more than in the original recipe. Semolina, four tablespoons, for which he is usually more careful. Finally, salt, not much, a pinch between his index finger and thumb. He stirs the mixture in wide circles with a wooden spoon. He stirs the mixture in the saucepan continuously. The porridge can’t burn—if it does, neither Felix nor Vincent will eat it.

  Meanwhile, Felix sets the table. Plates, spoons, napkins, glasses. Pulling one of the chairs to the sink and kitchen cupboards, he takes down the sugar and the glass jar of cinnamon. Now that they’re alone, they have as much as they want.

  “Felix—wake Vincent up.”

  “I checked on him a while ago. How long is he going to be like that? Wrapped in gauze? His whole life?”

  “No, he won’t be. I’ll lure him out.”

  Then Felix goes, not to Vincent’s room, but to the laundry basket in the corner by the front door, the brown plastic one that is a little smaller than the one in the bathroom, which Mama can manage to carry down to the laundry room. He whips his arm around among the dirty underwear and socks and T-shirts and fishes out a pair of jeans too small for himself.

  “Felix?”

  Leo leaves the cooker for a moment and the saucepan he should be stirring. He sees a pair of jeans that he is certain belongs to Vincent go by in the hallway.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I was thinking, when we visit Mama . . . now, Leo. We can do what you said now—lure him out of the mummy.”

  Felix continues on to Vincent’s room and Leo grabs a leg of his pants.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because we aren’t going to, not yet.”

  “I’m thinking of asking anyway.”

  They both pull the jeans, Leo holding on tight until his little brother lets go of them but manages to also break free from Leo’s tight grip around his wrist.

  “If we . . . shit, Leo, if we get him to come with us, he’ll have to take off that fucking gauze bandage! Don’t you get it?”

  “And how do you think Mama looks?”

  Suddenly Felix stops mid-step.

  “How? What do you mean . . . ?”

  “Her face. She bled like a pig, right? How many bandages do you think she has? I don’t want Vincent to see her. Do you?”

  Felix realizes what his older brother is actually saying. He hardly saw the blows and doesn’t remember them, or any of what happened while his father was beating her. It’s as if the blows struck big black gaps into his memory.

  “Leo?”

  “Yes?”

  “How does she look, do you think?”

  Felix glances at his older brother, as if that’s all he dares to do, as if the answer will be smaller then.

  Leo saw the blows and even cleaned up Mama’s blood.

  “We’ll get to know soon, little brother.”

  It smells as if something’s burning.

  The semolina porridge. The fucking milk. Leo jerks the pan away from the burner, fills it with cold water, digs with the spoon, and throws the brown clump in the rubbish. He scrubs and scrapes the bottom of the pan, but it’s only when he finds the box with steel wool that the burned coating goes away.

  He measures grain and milk and salt like before and begins to stir around and around when he hears the door open, by someone who has a key.

  “Good morning.”

  A woman’s voice.

  Agnetha.

  She must have gotten the key from Mama or the social services lady.

  Leo runs to the window and opens it wide. She mustn’t think he can’t make fucking porridge.

  “So you are already eating?”

  She stands in the doorway and peers in at someone stirring a pan and the table already set.

  “Not yet. Felix was supposed to cook the porridge but he can’t. You have to stir it all the time.”

  “And I’ve brought . . . well, now you have breakfast for tomorrow too. And in the other bag there’s lunch and dinner.”

  She opens the fridge, unpacks the bag, and puts some items in and the rest in the pantry.

  “Tomorrow morning you don’t need to come up here. I’ll fix it. I have made breakfast for those two since . . . well, forever.”

  Light knocks on the kitchen door’s frame and they automatically turn in that direction.

  Felix.

  “He doesn’t want it. The mummy doesn’t want to have any.”

  “Let him be, Felix. He can eat later.”

  The first bag is emptied and Agnetha is about to start on the next when she stops.

  “So . . . he still has that on him?”

  “Yeah. And I don’t think he should have it on. But Leo thinks so.”

  “That’s not at all what I said, Felix. I said that we shouldn’t force him. Not to take it off and not to come with us to visit Mama.”

  Strong, divided opinions. Agnetha sees what’s going on and turns to them alternately.

  “I agree with Leo on this. Bandages can’t be taken off you until you are ready yourself. Before you have, well, healed. I’ll stay with him when you visit her.”

  Now the porridge is perfect and Leo pours it into two of the three bowls on the table.

  “But there’s another thing I want to talk to you about.”

  She waits until Leo has rinsed out the pan and sat down, even until the cheese is spread on the first knäckebröd sandwich.

  “I woke up last night because of someone running in the stairwell. Or I think that’s what woke me. It sounded as if whoever was doing it passed by my door, all the way up to this floor. Then, just as I fell back asleep, I woke up again. Because of loud thumps. At least twice. Maybe three times. As if someone hit the wall. Then I didn’t hear anything else. Or I fell asleep again.”

  The boys began to chew, crumbly knäckebröd with cheese.

  But neither that nor the porridge covered with an extra layer of cinnamon and sugar tasted as it usually did.

  “The running. The thumping. Was it you?”

  Leo stares at Felix and Felix stares at Leo.

  “No. And I didn’t hear anything. Did you, Felix?”

  Felix hesitates, which Leo catches, but not Agnetha—he hesitates and speaks quietly.

  “No. Not me either. I didn’t hear a single sound.”

  ———

  It’s not very far to Falu Hospital. But it takes a long time to walk there. Felix is dragging his feet, more slowly every yard, and Leo knows what it’s about.

  “Hurry up now.”

  Anxiety, over an image neither of them wants to see.

  “Why? Are we in a rush?”

  “Mama will look how she looks.”

  Leo has already decided not to think about it. So he thinks about the ICA shop instead, and about the square and the guard who might ruin the job. He must convince Felix. Without him it will be difficult. It might work—but the odds of failure change. Felix’s job is to divert the shop’s security man: Click-with-the-baton. And Click is the single greatest odds reducer.

  They glimpse Falu Hospital on the other side of the park, the buildings sticking up beyond the planted trees. When they are a few minutes away,
Felix’s steps become even shorter, even more sluggish.

  “Little brother?”

  “Yeah?”

  “If you want to. Only if you want to, that is.”

  “What?”

  “I can look first. If Mama appears too bashed up, I can tell you, so you don’t need to look too.”

  The three buildings that make up Falu Hospital are situated together even though they are so different. A bright building fourteen stories high, a darker one with eleven stories, and one wedged between them, seven stories if you count the windowless bottom part. Different buildings in different colors. Exactly like three brothers.

  They stop at the hospital kiosk. Cut flowers are too expensive, but raspberry gumdrops, the kind Mama likes, don’t cost much. Leo pays with the fifty öringar that was recently in the coin compartment of the tin box, and then the right front pocket of his pants.

  Corridors. Elevator. Hospital smell.

  There are people in white clothes—some wearing name badges, who are here to heal, others in robes, here to be healed.

  They enter a ward with three beds. Two empty, one with Mama in it.

  She is lying on the side that Papa didn’t beat, her face turned away.

  “It’s us, Mama.”

  She is startled. Maybe she was sleeping.

  “Vincent will come some other day.”

  Leo is hesitating at the door to the ward, and in the square between his right shoulder and the doorframe Felix can see in. It’s not an especially big square, but it’s protecting him, should Mama turn around. It’s like a television, and what you see on the screen isn’t quite real.

  “Hello, Leo.”

  Mama turns around and Leo moves quickly to the right, standing tightly against the doorframe so that the TV screen is gone. That means Mama’s face doesn’t look at all good.

  “Come in, my boys.”

  Mama’s voice is weak, but still Mama’s.

  Leo turns around to Felix.

  “Do you want to?”

  “No.”

  Leo shakes his head in response to their mother and she raises her weak voice as much as possible, almost calling out.

  “Felix, I want you to come in too.”

  “No.”

  “I want . . . I just want to hold your hand.”

  Felix clears his throat and remains behind the back that is blocking his view.

  “Are you in pain, Mama?”

  “Of course she’s in pain, Felix. You don’t need to ask that.”

  “I’m in pain.”

  Mama moans when she tries to raise her upper body a little, perhaps so she can see better.

  “But you can have pain in various places. Sometimes it’s invisible.”

  Then she gives up. It hurts too much and she slides back down the small distance she has struggled to move herself up.

  “But how do you look?”

  “It is not how I look now that’s important. In a few weeks, maybe a month, it will all be gone.”

  Then Leo moves back, revealing the square TV screen between his shoulder and the frame, and Felix sees her face.

  She has a thick bandage around her forehead, and medical tape over large parts of her face—a strip down over the bridge of her nose, another from cheek to cheek, a white cross that covers her purplish skin.

  “Here, Mama. Your favorite.”

  Leo goes in first and is about to put the bag of gumdrops on her stomach, then changes his mind and chooses the empty space next to her, the wrinkled sheet. But she moves it to the table jutting out next to the bed, which is part of the rolling cabinet and is the place where food is served.

  Then Felix makes up his mind and follows his brother. They sit, one on each side of the bed, while Mama adjusts her position, grimacing strongly. She wants to be able to see them both equally—grimacing and smiling at the same time.

  “How sweet of you. Raspberry gumdrops. I’ll eat them later.”

  It is sometimes hard to hear because she is speaking so quietly. Her mouth is hardly moving and Felix thinks of a ventriloquist he saw on television, who also spoke without it being seen, just a little at one corner of his mouth every time the puppet was pretending to talk.

  Her right eye is the worst. Swollen shut.

  Felix longs for Leo’s shoulder and the television screen. If he looks too long at her eye, maybe Mama will go blind and there will be no eye left under the swelling, only a black gap. He still doesn’t remember what happened, but maybe the hole works like one of the black gaps in his memory. The ones beaten into his head when Papa beat up Mama.

  “And Vincent, is he well?”

  She turns to Leo since he is the oldest.

  “Absolutely. Agnetha is with him while we’re here.”

  “Is he eating okay?”

  “Like usual. I’m taking care of everything.”

  The other eye is clearer, but tired. And in it, where it should normally be white, it is very red—like burst blood. Felix decides to just look into this eye, not the other one, when it is his turn to talk to her.

  Burst blood is better than black gaps.

  “Yes, Vincent is fine. He can eat all the coconut balls he wants.”

  What happens then is exactly what Felix knew would happen. Leo’s gaze drills into his cheek, through it, but he takes no notice. You have to say what you have to say.

  “Because we have who knows how many under the bed.”

  For the first time Mama’s voice is more than just a whisper. And her tired eye, with the burst blood vessel, looks at him in the way only she sometimes does.

  “What . . . Felix, listen to me, what are you talking about?”

  And then the tip of Leo’s gym shoe kicks hard against his ankle.

  “Nothing, Mama. Felix is just prattling on.”

  Too late. She is their mother. She knows them. She knows why one says something and the other one doesn’t want to talk about it anymore. And even though she didn’t see the kick on the leg, she perceived it somehow anyway.

  “Leo? Felix? What have you done?”

  The two brothers sit there silently as they meet their mother’s swollen, bloodshot eyes. Leo doesn’t want to talk about it. And Felix doesn’t know why he said what he said. It sort of slipped out of him. Like when you vomit—first you can’t help it and then you can’t swallow it.

  “There’s a whole lot of boxes of different sweets, and almost a hundred drink cartons with straws. All under Vincent’s bed.”

  Now the words slipped out of him again. It was easier to say it than to hold it in or swallow.

  “Leo and Felix—look at me. Talk to me, really. What’s under Vincent’s bed—did you take it from somewhere? Steal it?”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  They answered at the same time. Rather, Leo got it out a little bit before. In any case, Mama tries to make eye contact with him. Her eye, the one Felix wasn’t able to see moments ago, somehow looks out of the swollen, blue eyelid.

  “Leo? You do not steal from other people. You know that. You are fourteen, not a child anymore.”

  Her voice is no longer weak. It is distinct and clear and when anger forces her to raise it a little, Felix realizes that she is missing a tooth on the right side. That’s why she didn’t eat any of the gumdrops, which are as chewy as rubber. It hurts to chew.

  “Coconut balls and fruit drinks? Where did you take them from, Leo?”

  Her eldest son meets her gaze. He does not try to avoid it because he has made up his mind not to do so.

  “I promise. I will return everything under Vincent’s bed.”

  “How?”

  “I’ll just leave it outside. The place I took it from, I mean. So they’ll find it.”

  He didn’t think it was possible. But Mama looked sadder now than when they came.

  “That’s not enough, Leo, do you hear me? You also have to apologize.”

  “Mama, the door was open and I went in. It was just lying there. And I thought . . .
Vincent would be happy.”

  Felix hasn’t spoken for a while. He said enough already. But he knows his brother is lying and it feels strange because his mother’s body seems to shrink at the same time. It becomes as small as her voice, which barely comes out of her at all.

  “Leo, you’re the oldest. That’s how it is. It means you have responsibilities at home as long as I am lying here. But that doesn’t mean you can solve problems that way. Do you hear me? I can’t bear it if you do that too . . .”

  She regrets it, in the middle of the sentence. But it is too late—Felix knows what she was thinking, who it is that she meant Leo is solving problems like. Leo knows it too—Felix sees it in his lips, which become narrow when he is angry.

  “I can’t apologize. Mama? If I did . . . don’t you get it? Everyone would talk about it. It’s better as it is. Now no one knows. Can’t it just stay like that?”

  “No. You must do it. That’s what it means to be the eldest.”

  Fourteen years old. That is what he is. Surely that’s not so damn old, right?

  He would like to leave now. Disappear, to somewhere away from Mama, who doesn’t understand. But he promised Papa he’d take over.

  “Listen, Mama? The social services lady—what will she say, for example?”

  It seems he’s challenging Mama, threatening her. He doesn’t really mean to do it but that’s how it sounds.

  He tries to explain one more time.

  “I just wanted Vincent and Felix to . . . I’m sorry. It won’t ever happen again.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  And suddenly Mama looks terribly tired again. The eye sinks back into the swelling, as it was when they first arrived.

  “We’ll talk about this again later. When I come home.”

  ———

  Felix hugs Mama tightly before they go. She kisses him lightly on the cheek and whispers that she loves him. Leo doesn’t hug her, he can’t. He just mumbles goodbye. Then they don’t say a word to each other on the way through the bright hospital corridor, and in the elevator Felix stands on one side and Leo on the other. It feels as if there is a great distance between them.

  “What a big elevator. About as far as I can jump in the long jump.”

  Leo doesn’t meet Felix’s gaze when he answers.