Some Kind of Peace: A Novel

by Camilla Grebe

  I moved on to the desk. It was still in the same state as the day Stefan died. No one had touched the worn desktop or blown the dust from the pile of papers stacked neatly in the far right corner. I ran my fingers over the rough surface, creating deep tracks in the dust. Resolutely, I went out to the kitchen and got a damp cloth, carefully moved the stack of papers to the floor, and started wiping the desk with long, sweeping motions.

  The drawers were full of neatly organized stacks of paper. Carefully, I removed the contents of the top drawer and set it on the now clean, damp surface of the desk. Balance statements from the student financial aid office, bills, and tax documents were sorted in the pile. On each piece of paper there was a note: TO BE PAID or FOR TAX RETURN. I shook my head. It was not like Stefan to be so pedantic and tidy. The next stack, labeled IMPORTANT PAPERS, was also inexplicably well organized. Insurance policies, the contract of sale for the house, account statements from the bank—all of our life and household together recorded in a stack of papers.

  I fiddled aimlessly with the documents, looked at the numbers that showed what we owned without seeing or understanding their significance. It was so good that everything was here, it would make things much easier for Dad, who was going to take care of all these financial matters, I mused, before my train of thought was interrupted by something else: a sinking concern, a fleeting feeling. Like a wrong note in a well-composed piece of music, barely audible but still perceptible. There was something that didn’t add up here. Stefan was never this neat. I had devoted a considerable portion of our years together to keeping track of his papers and things.

  I opened the bottom drawer. It contained only one piece of paper. A thin, crinkled, handwritten note with grease stains on it—it almost looked like wax paper—carefully folded down the middle and addressed “To Siri.” The dim room suddenly felt stuffy, and I got up to open one of the French doors. The cold, raw air filled my lungs and I heard the screeching of the gulls, intrusive and sharp as I supported myself against the doorframe.

  With fumbling, shaking fingers I unfolded the paper. It was a poem.

  Don’t be afraid of darkness,

  for in darkness rests the light.

  We see no stars or planets

  without the dark of night.

  The darkness of the pupil

  is in the iris round,

  for all light’s fearful longing

  has darkness at its ground.

  Don’t be afraid of darkness,

  for in it rests the light.

  Don’t be afraid of darkness;

  it holds the heart of light.

  Date: May 15

  Time: 3:00 p.m.

  Place: Karlaplan Psychology Clinic

  Therapist for treatment: Maryvonne von Arndtstadt

  Patient: Siri Bergman—assessment interview

  “Welcome, Siri. I know you’re a psychologist, so I assume you are already familiar with how an assessment interview works. So I suggest we skip the formalities and that you tell me why you are here.”

  “I’m here because I have an unprocessed trauma that I would benefit from talking about.”

  “In your past?”

  “My husband took his life a couple of years ago, or at least I think he took his life. I have always preferred to think of it as an accident. And there is no real evidence that has confirmed that it was suicide.”

  “That’s not completely unheard of where suicide is concerned.”

  “I know. But recently events… outside my control have forced me to reassess what happened, forced me to realize that it probably was a suicide.”

  “Tell me.”

  About the Authors

  Camilla Grebe (b. 1968) is a graduate of the Stockholm School of Economics and has had several entrepreneurial successes. She was a cofounder of Storyside, a Swedish audiobook publisher, where she was both CEO and publisher during the early 2000s. She lives in Stockholm, Sweden.

  Åsa Träff (b. 1970) is a psychologist specializing in cognitive behavioral therapy. She runs a private practice with her husband, also a psychologist. She primarily diagnoses and treats neuropsychiatric disorders and anxiety disorders. She lives in Älvsjö, Sweden.

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  COPYRIGHT © 2012 SIMON & SCHUSTER

  Turn the page to read the first chapters from the next novel in the

  bestselling series by Camilla Grebe and Åsa Träff.

  MORE BITTER

  THAN DEATH

  A Novel

  Camilla Grebe and Åsa Träff

  Translated by Tara Chace

  Available from Free Press in May 2013

  I find something more bitter than death:

  the woman who is a net,

  whose heart is like a snare,

  and whose hands are fetters.

  He who pleases God will escape her,

  but the sinner she will ensnare.

  —Ecclesiastes 7:26

  GUSTAVSBERG, A SUBURB OF STOCKHOLM,

  OCTOBER 22, AFTERNOON

  Everything looks different from below.

  The massive legs of the enormous dining table, the oak tabletop with the distinct grain and the chalk drawing underneath—the one Mama hasn’t discovered yet. The tablecloth draping down around her in heavy, creamy white folds.

  Mama also looks different from below.

  Cautiously she sticks her head out of her tent, glances over at her mother as she stands at the stove pushing down the spaghetti that’s poking out of the big, gray pot like pick-up sticks with one hand as she smokes with the other.

  There’s a snapping sound as the spaghetti breaks under the fork’s pressure.

  Mama’s worn jeans are hanging so far down over her rear end that she can see the tattoo on her backside and those pink panties.

  From below Mama’s bottom looks enormous, and she wonders if she should say so. Mama is always wondering if her bottom looks big or small. And she often forces Henrik to answer that question even though he doesn’t want to. He’d rather watch the horses that are running around and around on TV while he drinks his beer.

  It’s called a hobby.

  Mama puts her cigarette out in her coffee cup, picks up a little spaghetti that wound up next to the pot with those long fingernails, and stuffs it in her mouth as if it was candy. It crunches as she chews.

  She picks up a piece of blue chalk and starts carefully coloring in what’s going to be the sky. The drawing already has a house, their house, with a red car out front, the one they’re going to buy when Mama gets another job. Through the window, the weak gray light of the fall afternoon filters into the kitchen, painting the room in a depressing, dark palette, but in her tent it’s dark in a cozy way. Only a dim light seeps in, enough for her to see the paper resting on the floor in front of her and make out a hint of the colors of the chalk.

  A steady stream of music from the radio, interspersed with ad breaks. Ads are when they talk, that much she has understood. Ads are when Henrik goes and pees out all the beer he’s been drinking. Ads are also when Mama goes out and smokes on the balcony, but when Henrik’s not home she smokes everywhere. Even when there isn’t an ad.

  The knocking is gentle and considerate, as if maybe it wasn’t someone knocking but just absentmindedly drumming lightly on the wood as he or she passed the door to the apartment.

  She sees her mother light another cigarette, leaning over the sink, seeming to hesitate.

  Then the knocking becomes pounding.

  Thump, thump, thump.

  And there’s no longer any doubt that someone is standing outside the door, someone who wants in. Someone who’s in a hurry.

  “I’m coming,” Mama yells and slowly walks over to the door with her cigarette in her hand. As if she had all the time in th
e world. And Tilde knows that’s so, because Henrik has to learn to wait. Everything can’t always happen at once, can’t always be on his terms. Mama’s told him as much.

  She finds a light yellow piece of chalk she thinks will make a good sun and starts drawing a circle with sweeping, round motions. The paper crumples a little and when she holds it down with her other hand a small tear starts up in the right–hand corner. A crack in the perfect world she is so carefully creating. She hesitates: Start over again or keep going?

  Thump, thump, thump.

  Henrik seems angrier than usual. Then there’s the sound of the safety chain sliding off and Mama opens the door.

  She looks through her pieces of chalk, which resemble grayish brown sticks in the darkness under the kitchen table. As if she were sitting in the woods under a spruce tree playing with real sticks. She wonders what that would feel like; she’s never been to the woods. Just to the playground downtown and there aren’t any trees there, just thorny bushes with small, small orange-red berries that the other kids say are poisonous.

  She finds the gray chalk. She will draw a big, dark cloud. One swollen with rain and hail in its belly, one that scares the grownups.

  From out in the hallway she hears indignant voices and more pounding. Muffled thuds on the floor, as if something was falling over and over again. And she thinks that she wishes sometime they would quit fighting. Or that Mama could throw out those yellow beer cans, the ones that make Henrik grumpy and irritated and tired.

  She leans down to the floor so she can peek out from under the tablecloth. They’re screaming now and something is wrong. The voices don’t sound familiar. Henrik doesn’t sound the way he usually does.

  The hallway is cloaked in darkness.

  She can sense bodies moving there, but can’t see what’s happening.

  Then: a roar.

  Someone, she now sees it’s her mother, falls forward headlong onto the kitchen floor. She lands flat on her stomach with her face down, and she can see a red pool growing where her mother’s head is resting. Mama’s hands grab hold of the rug as if she wants to cling to it and she tries to crawl back into the main room at the same time as something small, shiny, and glimmering gold rolls into the kitchen from the hallway.

  Someone, the man, is swearing out in the hallway. His voice is gloomy and sort of rough. Then footsteps enter the kitchen. A figure bends over, catches the little object.

  She doesn’t dare stick her head out to see who it is, but she sees the black boots and dark trouser legs that stop next to her mother’s head, hesitate for a second and then kick her, over and over again in the face. Until her whole face seems to come loose, like a mask from a doll and red and pink goo gushes out in a puddle on the rug in front of her. The black boots are also covered with the goo that slowly drips down onto the floor, like melting ice cream.

  It gets quiet, except for the music still coming from the radio and she wonders how it can be possible for the music to just keep going and going, as if nothing had happened, even though Mama is lying there on the kitchen floor like a pile of dirty laundry in a sea of blood that’s growing by the second.

  Mama’s breaths are drawn out and wheezing. As if she had just inhaled water by mistake.

  Then she watches how her mother is dragged out into the hallway, inch by inch. She’s still clutching tightly to the little kitchen rug and it goes along with her, out into the dark hallway.

  The only thing left on the cream-colored linoleum floor is the sea of blood and the pink goo.

  She hesitates for a second, but then continues coloring in the gray storm cloud.

  STOCKHOLM, TWO MONTHS EARLIER

  Vijay’s office. An infinitely large desk, and yet every last corner of the desktop is covered with paper. I wonder how he can ever find what he needs among all these thousands of papers, folders, and journals.

  His laptop is perched on top of a stack of what looks like essays. A super-thin Mac. Vijay has always been a Mac person. Next to that, a cup of coffee and a banana peel. A tin of chewing tobacco is half hidden under a memo from the department chair.

  “Did you start chewing tobacco?”

  Aina gives Vijay an incredulous look and contorts her face in disgust.

  “Hm… I was forced to. Olle objected to the cigarettes, but he puts up with the chewing tobacco.”

  Vijay smiles and Aina shakes her head in sympathy.

  “Too bad. And here I was thinking we ought to grab a cup of coffee and take a smoke break in that biting wind out there, relive old memories and that sort of thing.”

  All three of us laugh, remembering for a second how we used to stand together in the pouring rain, snow, or broiling sun, season in and season out. Sharing cigarettes and coffee. Back then when life was less complicated. Or maybe it just seemed that way, back in those days.

  I observe Vijay. The black hair, now with gray at the temples. The bushy mustache, a wrinkled blue-and-white-striped cotton shirt. He doesn’t look like a professor, but maybe that’s how you’d describe the Professor Look: the lack of any common style denominator. What do I know anyway? I don’t know that many professors. But however little Vijay looks like a professor, I can’t deny the fact that he’s aged, just like Aina and me. We’re older, maybe wiser, maybe just more tired and mildly surprised that life didn’t turn out like we had thought, back then.

  “It’s not like I’d be hard to convince. Maybe we can go out and have a smoke anyway. Olle’s at a conference in Reykjavik so it’s not like he’ll know.” Vijay picks up his tobacco tin and starts absentmindedly picking at the label. “But,” he continues, “that’s not why I asked you to come… to discuss my nicotine habit, I mean.”

  Aina and I nod. We know that Vijay asked us here to discuss an assignment and we’re grateful for it. Psychotherapists suffer just like everyone else from economic downturns and the offer of a long-term contract from a publicly funded institution is most welcome.

  “So, it has to do with a research project in which we’re going to study how effective self-help groups are for women who have been victims of abuse. The target group is women who are at risk of developing posttraumatic stress disorder, but who for whatever reason don’t want to receive traditional treatment. The project is a collaboration between the municipality of Värmdö and Stockholm University.”

  Vijay has stepped into his professional persona. His eyes gleam and his cheeks are flushed pink. He is passionate about his work, doesn’t view it as a job, a source of income, but rather as a lifestyle and perhaps also something that gives his life meaning. Plus, he can’t deny that it does wonders for his ego, being the most knowledgeable, the expert. He often appears in the press, where he comments on various crimes and their presumed causes. It would be easy to psychoanalyze him, to believe that his satisfaction depends on his need for revenge. The put-upon immigrant, marginalized both because of his ethnic origin and his sexual orientation. Although that is far from the truth. Vijay’s parents are well-to-do academics who came to Sweden on research grants and then stayed. Being gay was never an issue for his family. There were three other brothers who were providing his parents with all the grandchildren their hearts desired. Vijay may have been seen as eccentric, but he was also quite successful.

  “Where do we come in, if this has to do with self-help therapy?” Aina interrupts Vijay’s pontificating and he’s forced to pause, something he isn’t that fond of doing.

  “I’m getting to that, if you’ll just bear with me.”

  He stops talking, opens his tobacco tin, stuffs a snuff pouch under his lip, and then proceeds.

  “The idea is for you guys to run the pilot study. Test the manual, take a peek at the psychoeducational portions, see if anything needs to be added or removed.”

  “Psychoeducation and self-help, that doesn’t sound like CBT,” I say, lost in thought. Aina is looking doubtful and Vijay is smiling placidly.

  “It isn’t CBT, not strictly speaking. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be eff
ective. You guys know that there is far more demand for trained psychotherapists with a CBT approach than there are psychotherapists. This is one way of allowing more people to participate in different interventions that we know are effective for posttraumatic stress disorder and trauma, we simply want to make this type of approach available at a lower cost. Besides, there’s a point to self-help groups, especially for people who have been victims. It gives them a sense of… of being in control, maybe. Empowerment. Well… you know.”

  “Empowerment?”

  Aina still looks skeptical and glances over at me, looking for a sign, a signal of how I feel about this whole thing.

  “How is it structured?”

  I’m curious and want to hear more about how they expect the treatment to work.

  “Eight sessions, two hours each. Every session will start with an instructional portion, reactions to trauma, men’s violence against women, information about common symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder, topics like that. After that there will be a less structured portion, the women can talk about their own experiences and listen to the others’ stories. The group leader’s role is to lead the conversation. Make sure that everyone gets a chance to talk and that no one becomes too dominant. After that, the leader will give a homework assignment, maybe asking the women to think about how their life changed after the traumatic event or come up with new goals for how they want things to be in the future. What they lost and what they think they could re-create, re-conquer perhaps. And then how they’re going to do it. You’ll receive a detailed manual, but you’re free to depart from it. You evaluate the sessions together afterwards and offer opinions on the contents. Everything will be documented. It’s important to remember that this is a self-help group, so the level has to be just right—it should have substance and be able to help them but it can’t be too complicated. It’s not psychotherapy, and the program won’t be run by psychotherapists; the group facilitators will be women who suffered violence at the hands of men themselves.…”