by Maja Lunde
The damn drawings!
Suddenly I slammed my fist into the glass. It cracked; the pain radiated from my hand and through my entire body. The picture shook a bit, but hung there as before.
They had to come down. All three frames had to come down.
I lifted them off the hooks and took them with me out into the hallway. There I found my biggest shoes, heavy winter shoes with thick soles.
Shoes on, out into the yard.
I was about to put an end to them, land my boot on them, trample them hard, but at that moment I suddenly thought of Emma, of the noise it would make. I turned towards the bedroom window. The light wasn’t on up there. She was still asleep.
I carried the frames outside, opened the door to the barn and put them down on the floor.
Of course I could have just opened the frames from the back and teased out the pictures, but it was the sound of glass I wanted to hear. The crunching under my boot.
I stomped away, again and again, jumped on them. The glass broke, the frames shattered. Exactly as I had imagined.
Then I plucked out the drawings. I had hoped the broken glass would destroy them, but they were as good as new. The paper was surprisingly stiff and resilient. I laid them one on top of the other, six in all, in a pile. Stood there with them. I could burn them, put a match to them and let the lifework of my ancestors go up in flames. No.
I put the pile down on the worktable, studied it for a while. Terrible drawings. They hadn’t contributed to anything. Deserved a miserable fate. Not a fire, that was too dramatic, too dignified. Something else.
And then I knew.
I summoned my strength, took hold of the pile, my hands resisted, but I forced them. Then I started tearing. Long strips, I tried to make them as even as possible. But it was too thick trying to tear six all at once. I’d have to divide the pile in two. Three pages at a time. But that didn’t take long enough. I wanted to carry on for a long while. So I did one page at a time.
I liked the sound. It was as if the paper were screaming. Mercy. Mercy!
It felt better than good. It felt sensational, doing something—accomplishing something substantial. I could keep this up all night.
But finally I had to stop. There was no point tearing them up into too-small pieces, then they wouldn’t serve the purpose I had in mind.
I gathered up the strips and took them with me. Couldn’t be bothered to clean up the frames and the glass, I’d take care of it tomorrow. I just walked out into the night, across the yard and opened the back door.
Onto the porch and from there into the back hallway. There I opened the first door on the right and took two steps into the darkness. A gurgling sound informed me that as usual the flush valve was stuck. Probably needed to be replaced. I didn’t bother to turn on the light and check now. I just put the drawings, the paper, down on the floor. Ready to be used. Where they belonged. In the john.
TAO
We were sitting in an old electric car. Many cars like this were built in the 2020s, when solar electricity really took off. The time I visited the city with my parents, the streets were full of them, most of them old and decrepit. This car was better taken care of than most, built for fastidious customers, large, black and shiny. I had never seen this type of vehicle owned by a private person, nor used by people below a certain rank. The cars we had at home always belonged to the police or health care personnel, like the one that had come to pick up Wei-Wen. They were simple boxes of lightweight material, created to consume the least possible amount of electricity. This car was larger, more grand. Only rarely did a car like this visit our little city; it glided through the streets with tinted windows and we always wondered what they were doing in our little corner of the world.
It was the first time in my life I set foot inside such a beautiful vehicle. I put my hand on the imitation leather seat. It had once been smooth, but was now full of cracks. Because the car was old. The seats gave it away, the smell gave it away, the cleaning products were merely camouflage for the stench of old age that had settled into the fittings and the car body.
The woman had directed me to a seat in the middle, while she sat in the front and read off an address to the autopilot, a place name that meant nothing to me. Then the trip started. I saw only her neck. She said nothing. For a moment I considered asking her to stop, so I could jump out, but I knew there was no point. She gave me no choice. And there was something in her eyes that told me that there would be consequences if I didn’t do as she said.
Besides . . . perhaps she could lead me to Wei-Wen. That was all that mattered.
We drove for almost an hour, met a few cars while we were still in the city center, but after a while we were alone on the road. None of the traffic lights we passed was working, and we sailed through the streets without having to show consideration for anyone else. The sign on the highway indicated that we were on our way towards Shunyi. I didn’t know anything about the area, but the buildings told me that it must once have been inhabited by people who were well-off. Spacious, secluded houses, with just three or four floors, and enormous gardens. Now the houses were run-down and the gardens overgrown. We passed something that had once been a golf course. Now it was flatlands covered with weeds, where attempts at cultivation were being made on a few patches of earth in one corner. A lot of fertile land still lay fallow. It astonished me that nobody tried to make something grow there. But perhaps everyone had moved out.
Finally we stopped. The woman opened the door and got out, asked me to follow her.
We stood in a square, in the middle of which a once-handsome fountain was now rusting away. A statue of a bird, a crane, lay at the bottom of the pool, perhaps it had been knocked over by natural forces, or perhaps it had been vandalism. Not a single car could be heard, only the wind pounding against the buildings where roofing tiles and windows were loose, the sound of the earth’s own muscles, which slowly and inevitably were in the process of getting the upper hand, which would wipe out civilization.
The sound of voices caused me to tilt my face upwards. There were two people standing on the roof of a tall building, I couldn’t see anything but their silhouettes against the sky, and heard talking but not words. They had something in their hands, something they now dropped. Round shadows slipped through the air, away from us, in the direction of the city center. I had read about remote-controlled, flying computers before. Drones. Was this the same thing? Who were they following?
Suddenly it struck me that perhaps they had also followed me, and for longer than I had suspected. That they already knew a great deal.
“We’re going in here,” the woman said.
The building had no name, no sign informing me of what it concealed. The woman put her hand against a glass plate on the wall, each of her fingers against five points on the plate. Suddenly two large, sooty doors slid to the side. They ran on electricity, in spite of the fact that it seemed as if the surrounding area had long since been without power.
She led me into the large building. I jumped when we almost collided with a young man standing guard on the inside. I turned around and discovered more guards. They were wearing uniforms like hers and greeted her quickly. She nodded back and continued on hurriedly.
I followed her through a large hall and further on into an open office landscape. We passed people everywhere. It was unreal, after all of these weeks in the deserted city. Everyone was like the guard, soft, clean, not marked by manual labor or sun. They worked busily, many people sat in front of large screens, others in soft-spoken meetings on plush sofa suites or around conference tables. A transparent landscape. The walls were of glass, the rooms were open, but the sound did not travel far. It was muffled by thick carpets and heavy furniture. In several places I almost stumbled over flat, round vacuum cleaners whirring around the floor by themselves, and sucking up dirt that I couldn’t see.
The deterioration had not made it here; it was as if I’d come to a world that belonged in the past.
> Finally she stopped. We were at the end of a hallway, in front of us was a wall, the first one I saw that wasn’t made of glass. This was of dark, shiny, polished wood. A tall, wide door that looked as if it were carved out of the woodwork. The woman knocked hard on the door. A few seconds passed; then it emitted a buzzing sound and a click, before it opened.
Wei-Wen. Was he here? Suddenly I was shaking.
“Please.” She nodded towards the open door.
I hesitated for a moment, then walked inside.
The door closed behind me. I heard the sound of the door again—the buzzing sound and a click. She locked me in.
The room was large and bright, but had no windows. The floor was carpeted here, too. The walls were covered with fabrics, heavy draperies, from floor to ceiling. Were there walls behind them? Or did they hide something else? People, openings to other rooms? Was that a tiny movement I saw there to the right? I spun around. But no, the curtain hung just as motionless as before. The discreet soundscape on the outside was an ear-shattering racket compared to the silence in here. Perhaps it was a room where no sounds were supposed to enter. Or get out. The thought caused my pulse to start racing.
There was a rustling in the fabric to my right and all of a sudden they were pulled to one side. An older woman liberated herself from the curtains. She smiled kindly. There was something familiar, the way she held her head, the tight-fitting collar. The web of wrinkles around her eyes. I’d seen her before, many times, but never in real life, and I knew the cadence of her voice before she spoke.
Because she was Li Xiara. The voice on the radio, the leader of the Committee, our nation’s executive body.
I took a step backwards in shock, but she kept smiling.
“I’m sorry we had to meet in this way,” she said softly. Her voice was more familiar than my own mother’s. “But we could no longer avoid having to speak with you.”
She put her hand on the back of a soft armchair.
“Please take a seat.”
She didn’t wait, but sat down in an identical chair opposite me.
“I know you have many questions. I’m sorry I couldn’t pick you up myself. I hope we’ll get everything cleared up.” She spoke with utter composure, as if reading from a script.
We sat facing each other with our heads at the same level.
I couldn’t help staring at her. Without the filter of media images her face was so naked. It was the unfamiliarity of having her so close, seeing her in real life.
My heart sunk. This woman . . . What choices had she made? What was she responsible for? The death of the cities? The situation of the young boy in the restaurant? The elderly people, left behind to die? The adolescents, no more than ghosts, so desperate that fellow human beings had become prey?
My own mother?
No. I mustn’t think about it, mustn’t let my questions, my criticism lash out, because she knew more than I did. I needed to breathe—and think carefully before I spoke.
“I would appreciate it if you could tell me why I’m here.” I imitated her manner of speaking, spoke the words as softly and gently as I could.
Her eyes came to rest on me.
“In the beginning we found you to be bothersome.”
“What?”
“Especially when you came to Beijing.” She paused. “But subsequently . . . We had really planned on contacting you, we didn’t want you, the two of you, to live with so much uncertainty for so long. But we just had to be completely certain first. We didn’t want any rumors circulating. At all.”
“Certain of what?”
She leaned forward in her chair, as if to get closer to me. “Now we are.”
I didn’t answer. The singsongy, calm voice awakened rage inside of me, but I got nowhere with my questions.
“And it was perhaps for the best,” she continued, “that you had to find your own way to the answers.”
I struggled to breathe, tried to stay calm. “I don’t understand what you mean.”
“You will have an opportunity to play a part in the time ahead. And we hope that you will cooperate.”
“What do you mean?!”
“I’ll get to that. First, why don’t you tell me about what you think has happened to your son? What have you found out?”
I forced myself to stay calm. She’d set the agenda, so I had no choice but to comply with it, to cooperate. What would happen if I failed?
“I believe that something has happened to Wei-Wen that has significance for many more people than myself,” I said slowly. “Or him.”
She nodded.
“And what else?”
“I believe that is why you have taken him. And that what has happened will potentially change everything.”
She waited.
“Can’t you just tell me where he is?” I was begging now. “That’s all I know.”
She was silent. Her gaze remained suspended in the air.
Suddenly it was as if everything inside me stopped, I could no longer take her calm, singsongy voice, the guessing games, the indifferent gaze and the little half-smile which was impossible to read.
“I don’t know anything!” In one jump I was right in front of her.
She flinched in her chair.
I grabbed hold of her shoulders. For the first time her expression changed. A tiny glimmer of fear pressed its way through the wall of equanimity.
“Where is Wei-Wen?” I shouted. “Where is he? What has happened to him?”
I hauled her up out of the chair.
“I can’t take any more! Don’t you understand? He’s my child!”
I held her up, shaking her. I was stronger, tougher after a life of manual labor. She didn’t have a chance. I pushed her towards the door and slammed her against the woodwork. Her face twisted, finally I had shaken something inside of her. But I didn’t let go; I held her tight and screamed.
“Where is Wei-Wen?! Where is he?!”
All of a sudden the guards were there, they came from behind, tore me loose, forced me down on the floor. Held me down. Deep sobs pushed their way up from my diaphragm.
“Wei-Wen . . . Wei-Wen . . . Wei-Wen . . .”
She stood over me. Once again she was calm, adjusting her clothes a bit, catching her breath.
“Let her go.”
Hesitating, the guards let me go. I sat there leaning forward, no longer putting up a fight. There was no fight left in me. Slowly Li Xiara walked over to me, and put her hand on the back of my head. She let it rest there for a moment, then she stroked my cheek and took hold under my chin. She gently forced my face upwards, so that my gaze met hers.
Then she nodded.
They took me to him. He lay on a white sheet in a sharply illuminated room. He was sleeping. His body was hidden by a blanket. Only his head was visible. His face was soft, but thinner than before. His eye sockets stood out like clear shadows. I drew closer and then I discovered it—they’d shaved off all his hair on the one side of his head. I took another step, and understood why. A section behind his ear, by his hairline, was red. The sting. I resisted the urge to rush forward. I was alone, but knew they were watching. They were always watching me. But that wasn’t why I remained standing there.
As long as I was here, two meters away, I could still believe he was sleeping.
I could believe he was sleeping and avoid noticing the ice crystals that were growing like vines from the floor and up along the legs of the bed.
I could believe he was sleeping and avoid noticing how my breath hung in the air in front of me, every time I let warmth escape from my lungs.
I could believe he was sleeping and avoid noticing that he emitted no corresponding white cloud, that above his bed, over the white sheet, the air was still, clear and cold.
GEORGE
Gareth’s farm smelled of something burning. The sweet aroma of warm honey and gasoline. The smoke hit me the minute I opened the car door.
He was standing with his back to me and his face to
wards the bonfire. It was many feet tall. The beehives weren’t stacked, but rather tossed in a pile. The bonfire roared, creaking and crackling. Merrily, was how it struck me. As if it had a life of its own, as if it were taking pleasure in destroying somebody’s life’s work. He held a gasoline can in his hand, his arm hung limply. Maybe he’d forgotten it was there.
He turned around and noticed me. He didn’t look surprised.
“How many?” I asked and nodded towards the fire.
“Ninety percent.”
Not the number of hives, not the number of bee colonies, but the percentage. As if it were all just math. But his eyes told a different story.
He walked a few steps, put the can down. But then he picked it up again, probably realized he couldn’t leave it there, in the middle of the yard.
He was red, his skin was so dry that it was about to crack, a rash had spread upwards from his tanned throat.
“What about you?” He raised his head.
“Most of them.”
He nodded. “Did you burn them?”
“Don’t know if there’s any point, but yeah.”
“Isn’t worth using the hives again. It’s gotten into them.”
He was right, they stank of death.
“I didn’t think it was going to happen here,” he said.
“I thought it was negligence,” I said.
Gareth pulled up the corners of his mouth into something that was supposed to resemble a smile. “Me, too.”
He wasn’t so different from the little boy he had once been, the one who stood alone in the schoolyard, with his backpack emptied out on the ground in front of him, the books trampled to pieces, the pencils thrown away, everything full of mud. But he didn’t give up then, never ran away, just crouched down, picked up the books, wiped the mud off with the sleeve of his sweater, gathered up the pencils, picked up his things, just as he had hundreds of times before.
I don’t know why, but suddenly I reached out my hand, squeezed his upper arm.
Then he bowed his head, his face crumpled, dissolved in front of me.
