More Bitter Than Death

by Camilla Grebe

  “I’m not asking you to understand, Malin. Prayer is not like writing a wish list to Santa Claus. It’s about having a conversation with God.”

  The room is silent. There is only the hum of traffic from outside, and a solitary leaf twirls past the window in a gust of wind.

  Hillevi sits motionless, her small hands resting on her knees and those green eyes fixed on me. It feels as though she’s looking through me, into the wall, and past it. All the way into the black hell of her marriage.

  Then we hear a muffled sound through the wall. Sven’s voice somewhere out in the lobby.

  Thudding.

  A shrill voice, a woman’s voice. And then Sven’s more somber voice again, adamant.

  They’re having some sort of conversation. An argument? The woman sounds upset.

  Hillevi turns to Aina, looking at her questioningly. Sirkka squirms.

  Then the door flies open and someone rushes in, a woman dressed in black with her coat on and blue plastic shoe covers in her hand, which I realize Sven must have been trying to make her put on.

  It’s Kattis.

  “He killed her!”

  Before she even makes it into the circle, she screams the words with such force that Sofie almost falls off her chair, bumping her leg into the table, causing the little blue glazed ceramic vase that my sister made in pottery class to fall to the floor with a crash.

  “Oh no.” Kattis puts her hands over her mouth. “Oh no, what have I done?” She drops down onto her knees and carefully picks up the shards, holds them delicately in the palm of her hand, runs her finger over the glazed azure-blue surface. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Oh my God, I didn’t mean for that to happen.”

  Aina and I look at each other, and I squat down next to Kattis on the floor.

  “Hey, Kattis. It’s just a little vase, and an ugly vase at that. It’s totally fine.”

  But tears and snot are running down her cheeks.

  “I shouldn’t have come here,” she mumbles. “I destroy everything. Everything I touch . . . turns to shit. It would do the world a favor if he got rid of me.”

  “Listen, it was just a stupid little vase. It doesn’t matter. What’s important is that you’re okay. Now sit down and tell us . . .”

  “Who’s dead?” asks Hillevi, who seems to be the only one able to formulate the question.

  But Kattis doesn’t respond, just collapses onto the waiting chair, hides her face in her hands, and sniffles loudly. “He killed her. He murdered her. In front of her own child!”

  Aina gets up and walks over to Kattis. Puts her hand squarely on Kattis’s upper arm. “Hey, Kattis. Tell us the whole story from the beginning.”

  “No!” Kattis roars, leaping out of the chair. She shakes off Aina’s arm. “No, I’m not doing this anymore. Don’t you get it? He killed her and now he’s coming after me. I know it.”

  Aina firmly guides Kattis back onto the chair and gently removes her coat as if she were a little kid. Holds her firmly by the shoulders and forces Kattis to look into her face. “You have to tell us what happened.”

  “Henrik, it’s Henrik. Don’t you get it? He killed his new girlfriend and now he’s going to kill me.”

  “Henrik, your ex?”

  Kattis nods and looks up at the rest of us for the first time. She takes a deep breath and begins, “The police came this morning. A guy who was delivering flyers found Henrik’s girlfriend murdered. Her daughter, she’s five, was sitting in a pool of blood under the kitchen table next to her dead mother, drawing. And now he’s going to kill me!”

  Kattis wails the last part. Like a wounded animal.

  “But do they have him in custody?” Sirkka asks.

  Kattis just shakes her head. Looks down at the floor and whispers, “I can’t take it anymore.”

  Sven has his good side.

  Under that shabby corduroy blazer and those shapeless blue shirts, Sven is a truly empathetic man, and his worn Birkenstock sandals have shuffled many a mile, down all sorts of roads.

  He carefully helps me onto one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs in the kitchen, makes coffee, which, even though it’s too cold and too weak, tastes better than any coffee I’ve had in ages. He listens to my incoherent description of the meeting, lets me vent all my dejection and anger, doesn’t interrupt me, just sits there and picks at his pipe without actually lighting it. He wouldn’t dare. Aina could be back at any time with the food she walked down to Söderhallarna to pick up.

  “In a way I know exactly how Kattis feels. You know? I totally know what it means to be hunted, to always wonder who’s hiding in the shadows under the trees in the park, always needing to walk on the side of the street with the best lighting, sticking close to the people out walking their dogs or groups of kids, just to avoid that feeling of being exposed, alone, vulnerable.”

  “I understand,” Sven says.

  “But you still lose. You’re always on your guard.”

  “I understand,” Sven says.

  I look at him for a moment, noticing that he’s repeating himself, affirming my comments as if he really did understand.

  It’s dark outside the window. Sven and I are the only ones in the office. The women from the group have all gone home. Some of them were arguing. Others, like Sofie, were quiet and seemed troubled.

  Reality bites. Isn’t that what people say?

  “I’m just so scared that he’ll kill her too.”

  “I understand,” Sven says.

  I can’t help laughing. “Sven, when you say that, I feel like I’m one of your patients. You know that, right?”

  His hand is on mine now, big, warm, dry, the way my dad’s hand felt when I was little, infinitely safe, a touch I could get lost in.

  But Sven doesn’t laugh.

  I glance at him again. His gray hair is slicked back, revealing his high, tan forehead. The wrinkles around his eyes are deeper than usual. He looks tired, maybe indifferent.

  And I see a tired man in his fifties whose wife just left him but who is nonetheless able to set that aside to listen to me go on and on. Suddenly I’m curious how he’s doing, a little ashamed that I’ve been so fixated on my own problems. I’ve actually never asked him how he’s doing since Birgitta left him after all those years, how he’s managing on his own with the loneliness and Scandinavia’s dark autumn evenings.

  “How are you doing, anyway?” I ask, glancing up at him. And as if on cue, he reaches for the cigarettes sitting next to his pipe on the table. He takes one out and slowly places it in the corner of his mouth, leaning forward for a match.

  “You shouldn’t smoke in here,” I say. “You know Aina will go ballistic.”

  But he just shakes his head as if he has other things to think about and doesn’t pay attention to my warning.

  “What do you want me to say?” Sven replies. “It’s a living hell.”

  I nod in silence, sensing that he’s about to confide in me for real. “Are you lonely?”

  He nods without answering and looks down at his nicotine-stained fingers, studying his nails.

  “How long has it been now?” I ask.

  “She moved out a month ago.”

  “What happened?”

  “She said she’d had enough, that she couldn’t handle my lies anymore.”

  “Lies? Did she catch you?”

  Sven nods and takes a deep drag. The cigarette glows brightly in the dark room like a sparkler.

  “Who with?” I ask.

  “What do you mean, who with?” Sven looks at me, confused, as if he doesn’t understand the question, and suddenly I’m filled with doubt.

  “Who did she catch you with?” I ask.

  “What the hell? Why does everyone have all these preconceived ideas?” Sven asks, and then gets up and starts pacing back and forth across the room with his cigarette in his hand. I can’t tell if he’s mad at me or just upset about the situation in general.

  “Did I say something stupid?”

  “I . .
. no, I don’t know. Somehow everyone thinks she left me because I was cheating on her with other women.”

  “Well, weren’t you?” I say.

  “Yes, I was sleeping with other people. She was too, actually. We had an open relationship. But people have such a hard time grasping that; they only see stereotypical pictures of what love is, the heteronormative nuclear family, you know.”

  He studies me from across the room, as if he’s wondering whether I’m open-minded enough to understand what he’s saying.

  “Huh,” I say. “I am honestly surprised. I’m totally not making any judgments about it, but I just never . . . guessed.”

  “Things are not always what they seem,” Sven says.

  “I guess you’re right.”

  “Birgitta slept with plenty of other men over the years. And women.”

  “I see,” I say, thinking of the plump, gray-haired woman, her full lips and weathered face, her linen suits and chunky silver jewelry, the immediate authority she radiates when she walks into a room, how she fills the space with her confident, powerful presence.

  Why shouldn’t she have lovers? Male or female.

  Sven sits down again, seems to have calmed down. He puts out his cigarette in the cake tin, where the ash mixes with crumbs from the lemon cookies from the bakery on Götgatan.

  His worn, rust-brown lamb’s wool sweater has ridden up a little around his midsection, exposing his pale, flabby body. Sven is getting old, I think. Does anyone want to get old alone? Am I going to get old alone, given that I have such a terribly hard time letting anyone get close to me?

  “But,” I say timidly, “I don’t think I understand. You said that she caught you?”

  He laughs sadly, slowly shakes his head, and then buries his face in his hands. His large body shakes as he sobs.

  “She caught me.”

  “But . . . ?”

  “She caught me drinking. She found me with the bottles, you know. That was the one thing I wasn’t allowed to do to her, the one thing I’d promised her I would never touch again, the goddamn booze. Do you remember last summer, at your crayfish party when I got so drunk? After that I had to promise her I would never drink again, otherwise she said she was going to leave me. She couldn’t have cared less about other women, but the booze . . . I can actually understand where she’s coming from. Twenty years ago I was well on the way to drinking myself out of house and home. I was drunk at work. My patients complained. I was close to getting fired. I suppose she thought . . . that that was going to happen again. You know?”

  I don’t respond. I hadn’t been expecting this. Everyone just assumed that Birgitta left Sven because he’d cheated on her. His womanizing was legendary. But I had no idea he drank. Although of course he had mentioned at some point that he used to drink way back when. But in some way I guess I just brushed that off as youthful impropriety. I never suspected that he still had a problem.

  Nothing is how it seems.

  Sven, who has always done his job so carefully, who’s so highly esteemed by his patients, and whom Aina and I turn to whenever we need guidance. An alcoholic? I have trouble believing it.

  “And now?” I ask hesitantly. I don’t want him to feel pressured into responding if he doesn’t want to. What he’s told me is profoundly personal.

  “Right now I’m really craving a drink,” he says, giving me a look that’s hard to read. “But I’m done with that now. And I’m done with love too. I’m done with all of it.”

  I smile at him, lean over the rickety table, and carefully stroke his knobby sweater sleeve, noticing his cigarette breath.

  “Don’t you think you’re exaggerating now? Maybe you’ll change your mind with time.”

  He takes my hand and turns to me.

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “I’m done with love. I don’t want any more. It’s not worth it. It’s too . . . painful.”

  I nod quietly, because what is there to say?

  We sit like that for a long time, my hand in his as darkness falls outside the window. Then he looks at me and says, “So, here we sit. Two alcoholics in the same office.”

  He squeezes my hand a little, a smile flits across his face, and I can’t be angry at him. Even though he has mentioned the unmentionable, touched that which must not be touched. Instead I smile back tiredly and shrug.

  He looks over at the door and there’s Aina, white bags from Söderhallerna in her hand. She’s still wearing her leather jacket, her striped cap, and way-too-big, hand-knit red mittens. She is looking right at me and I wonder how long she’s been standing there, listening to our conversation.

  “Falafel?” she tries softly.

  “So her old boyfriend killed his new girlfriend?” Vijay asks from his chair.

  His posture is marginally better than a heap of driftwood’s. A cigarette hangs from the corner of his mouth and his hairy arms jut out of his too-tight orange T-shirt. His sneakers are sitting just inside the door and he’s wearing a pair of sheepskin slippers. Fluffy tufts of wool peek out around the ankles. Again I think that he is actually turning into one of those eccentric professors whose lectures we used to sit through when we were in college, the ones who got away with being socially incompetent, slept with young students, or talked to themselves in the hallways.

  “Yes, he killed her.”

  Aina exhales the answer with alarming speed, as if she wanted to beat me to it or maybe didn’t think I could answer this simple but crucial question.

  We’ve gathered for a sort of crisis meeting at Vijay’s office. Aina and I are both shaken by what’s happened, by the way in which reality has forced its way into our little sisterhood group just as we were starting to get to know one another, reminding us once again of why we’re actually meeting. Our meetings are not gossip sessions, they’re counseling sessions for abused women.

  Outside the window it’s drizzling. Gray clouds are brooding over the city and an icy cold wind sweeps over the wet lawns that surround the Department of Psychology’s massive brick building. It’s just after three in the afternoon on a Friday and the university is already starting to look deserted.

  Our damp autumn clothes sit in a heap in the corner. Vijay was never overly concerned about tidiness, but ever since he and his boyfriend, Olle, moved in together, he has tried. Olle is the kind of person who hangs his T-shirts on matching hangers, who inserts cedar shoe trees into his sneakers, and who makes sure that cords to any electronics are wound around color-coded cable organizers so as not to clutter the apartment.

  “Fuck,” Vijay mumbles, lighting yet another cigarette.

  “What are we going to do?” Aina says.

  “Nothing, or I mean of course you should proceed as usual. The group is going to be even more important to the participants now. Not just for that patient, but for the others too. And if this . . . Kattis is in some danger, well then that’s for the police to deal with. And I’ll order one of those panic button alarms for your office too. I probably should have thought of that before.” Vijay is quiet for a second, studying us and slowly blowing out a curtain of smoke between us in a way that the uninitiated might interpret as trying to convey some message, but I know him, know that he’s thinking. Given what we’ve told him.

  “What?” I say.

  Vijay drums lightly on the desk with his fingernails, takes another deep drag, and seems troubled by something.

  “What I’m wondering is, how are you guys doing? Can you handle this?”

  The room is quiet for a moment before Aina attempts to respond.

  “We’re . . . okay. I think so, anyway. And before all this happened, I was actually starting to like our meetings. It’s unbelievably interesting to be confronted with all these women’s stories. They’re all so different. And yet they have this one thing in common, they’ve experienced violence. I think I’m starting to get a slightly clearer picture of what violence against women actually means.”

  Vijay laughs quietly and says, “T
his group isn’t actually all that representative.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Aina asks.

  “Your group is not representative of women who have been victims of violence. To begin with, your group isn’t particularly diverse, ethnically speaking. You have, what, one woman who’s not Swedish? And she’s from Finland, which is pretty similar to Sweden in terms of culture. All the others are Swedish. That’s not representative. In reality, other ethnicities are more prone to abuse, as are certain segments of the population like addicts and the homeless and women with disabilities. And then of course there are wars and conflicts. Girls and women are vulnerable in situations like that. Female soldiers are routinely subject to rape, and civilian women are raped and mutilated during times of war.”

  “But there hasn’t been any war in Sweden in decades . . .” That comment just slips out of me and I can tell right away that Vijay finds my naïveté tiresome.

  He puts out his cigarette in a bottle of Italian mineral water and leans toward me. Speaks slowly and enunciates clearly, as if I were a child. “No, but we have a lot of girls and women here who come from other parts of the world. Which is why it is also our problem, and not just on a moral level but also in a purely practical sense. We’re the ones who get to deal with that trauma.”

  I nod, ashamed of my ignorance, because I was just assuming that violence against women meant Swedish women who’d been hit by Swedish boyfriends in some suburb where expensive but blandly beige modernist buildings pop up like mushrooms from the fertile Scandinavian soil.

  As if he can hear what I am thinking, Vijay continues, “It’s not as simple as you might think. The definition of violence against women is not clear-cut. It’s not just about physical abuse in the home but about threats, psychological abuse, extreme control, underage marriage, conscious underfeeding of girls, checking their hymens. You know.”

  “So is there a common denominator?” Aina asks.

  Vijay nods, runs his hand over the black stubble on his chin, which is becoming increasingly speckled with gray as the years go by. “Power,” he says. “Power and control. That’s always what it comes down to in the end.”