“Yuck! What an ugly, disgusting nose!”
“Look at Justine’s French chin!”
“Yuck! What an ugly, disgusting chin!”
“Look at Justine’s French neck!”
“Yuck! What an ugly, disgusting neck!”
Hands pulling at her clothes, buttons, pulling down her zipper. Then she broke free and ran. They didn’t expect her unpredictable movement. She usually played the role of the victim so well.
But now she was in flight, fleeing them.
Uprooted trees and brushwood. She had been there once with the Hunter. When she ran away from school, she would often meet him there. He wore a leather coat and smelled like leaves and earth.
The Hunter squatted and contemplated her.
No one else did that.
He brought her over to his place. There was a cat with white whiskers and an iron woodstove. Out in the back, he chopped wood to feed the stove. The kitchen roared with heat.
He did not say that she should not pay any attention to them. He didn’t say anything at all.
But he stroked her lightly over the back.
They sat at his table and played solitaire. He had extremely small cards with Japanese flowers on the back. They competed to see who would first lay out all the cards. The cat walked on the table with delicate, soft steps. When the cat lay down, the Hunter scratched it under its paw pads with his fingernail. The whole cat body shook.
“Are you just as ticklish, Stina?”
He always called her Stina, not the French Justine. What had the Hunter’s name been?
She would never tell anyone about the Hunter. There was a witch woman in her house. The witch woman’s evil eye could fall on the Hunter and no one could save himself from that look, not even with prayer.
Sometimes Pappa wanted to speak with her about serious things. She could tell by his way of lifting his shoulders. She could tell already at the dinner table and then she would lose her appetite.
In the evening, he would come to her room.
She quickly asked:
“Are you going on a trip again?”
“No, why would you think that?”
“If you’re going on a trip, can I come, too?”
“I’m not leaving, Sweetie.”
“But IF.”
“Someday you can come with me.”
“Where will we go?”
“Maybe to France.”
She fingered the desk pad. She had drawn on it, flowers and sleeping animals. If only he would continue to talk, if he would add details, what we need to travel, passports and suitcases and we need to buy you some clothes to travel in.
But Pappa coughed as if he were catching a cold. “Have you finished your homework properly?” “Yes, I have.”
“And you’re doing fine in school, right, Justine?” “Yes.”
“You must tell me if something is going on. Promise me.” “Yes.”
“The school years are so short, but so important. Take advantage of them. If you understand what I mean.” She didn’t, but she nodded.
“You should also take advantage of your childhood. Unfortunately, you don’t realize this until childhood is over. Childhood problems… they’re small compared to the problems you will have once you are all grown up. Do you understand me, Justine?”
She nodded again.
Once he left the room, she would start to cry immediately. As long as he was in the room, she was filled with expectation, as if he would see right through her and with one movement rip her away from the chair and lift her straight to the light.
Everything was so heavy and soiled.
She lay on her stomach in the bed, and everything was warm and wet.
Justine ran to the forest to the uprooted tree. A swarm of shining threads. The snow had melted. Brown, damp grass. The sound of a woodpecker against a tree.
In the Hunter’s room, the Christmas tree was still up with its soft light-green needles.
He called her Stina.
He once had a wife, a woman named Dora. Something happened. He mentioned it sometimes, and his face turned old. Then he was no longer just the Hunter but someone else, and she was disturbed by it but still had to listen, over and over.
They had had a small firm which sold gardening supplies. He operated it together with his best friend Jack. Dora took care of the books; she was very good at numbers.
“You didn’t have any children?”
She had to ask, to draw out the story.
He made a wild grimace.
“No. We never had the chance.”
He was getting closer to the difficult part, the inevitable part.
“One day when I entered the shed…”
She saw it. He had told the story so many times that she now could see the scene in front of her, the details, the colors, even the scent of Dora’s lily-of-the-valley talcum powder which she put under her arms after washing up in the morning.
She saw the other man, the Hunter’s friend, how he leaned over the woman. She saw it as if it were on a book, a Harlequin cover. The woman’s hair in a page cut, black and slick; it fell down over the bench. The man’s shirt of deer leather, somewhat unlaced. She saw their lips come closer. Shaking with lust, her fingers got cold and she had an unusual feeling of breathlessness.
“What happened then?” she whispered and the cat jumped to the floor and went to the door on its straggling legs.
“I don’t know,” he said with a gravelly voice. “I have no idea what happened to them.”
Then she approached the Hunter and touched his cheek. And it was warm in the kitchen and the stove had begun to glow.
“When you’re big, you’re going to forget all about me,” he said, and the cards disappeared into his huge hands.
“Never till the day I die!” she exclaimed, and then she cried, because she was starting to grow now, starting to be a grown person.
“I usually stand on the top of the bluff and scream,” said the Hunter. “That usually helps. People think you’re crazy, and one of these days I’ll end up in the asylum. But it does help to stand on the top of the bluff and scream.”
She went outside. There was a light in the window, but he didn’t look out at her. He sat at the table with the flowery wax tablecloth and played one game of solitaire after another. She climbed all the way to the edge. Wind in her eyes, wind in her mouth when she opened it wide, like at the dentist’s office.
But no scream came out.
“What do your parents say about you coming here?” he asked, and bent his head a little so that he could see her over his glasses.
She almost mentioned the witch woman. But she was older now, and the word was starting to fade.
“A single man has only one thing on his mind,” he muttered.
“I did it! Look! I won!”
“I’m not talking about that now.”
No, she knew that. He was having grown man thoughts which were filling his head and threatening to spill over.
She took her coat and left.
They hunted her down the cliff by the General Bathhouse, which was near her home. But she hadn’t reached home yet. The blonde archangel Berit with her flowing curls; after her, Evy and Gerd, a girl from Stockholm. She had come as a foster child. Her parents had split up and disappeared like smoke in the wind. At least that’s what Justine overheard Flora say to Pappa.
As smoke in the wind.
Gerd was tall, thin, and mouthy. She was drawn into Berit’s radius from the very first day. And she learned the rhymes.
They had not yet managed the worst, to undress her and show her secret to the world and make fun of it. She knew they might succeed one day, and that gave her the strength to flee.
Gerd, with her long, strong legs. She got closer, caught up, knocked her over. She screamed and defended herself, substances dragged under her fingernails.
“Look how she scratched you!” screamed Berit. “You’re bleeding all the way down your neck!”
/> Gerd sat on her stomach, keeping her arms under her back. She hit her face, one, two, one, two. Pulling her jacket over her head. They were doing something to her pants, roughly, and it was chilling.
It seemed like animal strength came over her and she threw herself to the side. When she tried to run and pull her clothes on at the same time, she sprained her ankle against the stones and fell off the cliff. As darkness came, she glimpsed their eyes, how they whitened and turned away.
Flora found her.
Two girls had gone to her house and had rung the doorbell. Justine has fallen off the cliff. Flora grabbed her coat and came.
“I grabbed my coat and came as soon as I could. Why were you girls running around near the cliff?”
Justine had come to. She was still lying on the ground and looked up in the mist; she couldn’t walk.
What could a person like Flora do in this situation?
“We have to work together, girls. You carry her legs and I’ll carry her shoulders.”
“We were playing here and then Justine slipped and fell, and we got really scared because she was so strange, she, like, didn’t answer us, and so we said, better run for her mom, and so we both ran and Evy was supposed to stay here.”
“I don’t know you,” said Flora looking at Gerd.
“No, I’m the new foster child at the Östman’s.”
“So you’re with them. What happened to your own parents?”
“They split up and no one wanted me.”
“They didn’t?” Flora sounded moved.
They carried her into the house, laid her on the blue rug. They didn’t look at her. They said that they had to run home now; it was dinner time.
“Go on, then,” said Flora.
When Pappa came home, he took Justine to the hospital in the car. She lay in the back seat, and Flora had turned to her, held her hand.
“They were playing like calves let loose in the meadow,” said Flora. “Aren’t they getting a bit big for that?”
Pappa kept quiet, driving like crazy over the Traneberg bridge. Once at the hospital, he lifted her up and carried her in.
The ankle was broken. Her leg was put in a cast that reached up to her knee. She felt heavy and happy.
“For six weeks, the girl needs to rest and not move around.”
Pappa said, “I’ll get a tutor for her. Summer vacation is almost here.”
Flora said, “I can teach her, if that doesn’t work out.”
Pappa said, “I’m sure you can. But I know a young man who is free right now. My cousin Percy’s son, Mark. I’ll give him some cash if he comes to our place for a few hours a day.”
Mark’s parents were diplomats. They had lived in Washington, D.C., for many years, but had just returned to Stockholm. They did not yet know where they would be going next.
Mark appeared the next day with a bouquet of yellow tulips.
“To the little sickie,” he said and stepped into the room carefully. He was slim and short; his hands were sweaty. His eyes were brown like nuts.
“What do you want to learn, cousin?” he asked with a grown man’s voice.
“Cousin?”
“Your dad and my dad are cousins and that makes us cousins. First cousins once removed, actually.”
She thought about that for a minute.
“All right,” he said. “What do you want to learn, cuz?”
She became mischevious.
“Nothing. I already know everything.”
“Really?”
“Nah… Just joking…”
Mark took out a book from his jacket pocket, thumbed through it, stopped at a page. The letters were tiny and practically jumbled together.
“Read this bit in English. Then I’ll quiz you on the vocabulary.”
She turned red, and couldn’t pronounce anything, neither in Swedish nor in English.
He smiled, with a little bit of scoffing.
“OK, the rumors about Swedish schools are true. They’re all shitty.”
“My foot hurts,” she whispered.
“I don’t believe you,” he said.
“It’s true!”
“Where’s it hurting, exactly?”
She pointed at the cast. Then he pushed her skirt up slightly, and held her leg right above the knee.
Once he left, she did the same thing as he had, placed her hand on the same place. Then she moved it slowly further upwards, and a hot and painful swelling appeared between her legs. A pain throbbing right to her brain.
Chapter SIXTEEN
That next Saturday, Berit returned to Hässelby. She bought a bottle of Gran Fuedo and a pot of tender crocus. She didn’t call first; she just went.
The day was foggy. She didn’t bother with the bus. Instead she walked from the last station of the subway and took the road along the beach. She felt a growing anxiety, which she couldn’t ignore, thinking that she was going to confront Justine again.
During the night, she had been dreaming. Tor had shaken her awake.
“Are you having a nightmare?” he said. “Or is the boss giving you a hard time?”
The dream had something to do with a company party. Everyone was there, and strangely, Justine was there, too. In the dream, Berit was wearing a dress that had been much too elegant for the situation, with décolletage and a deep back. Everything was wrong. She mingled and tried to talk with people, but they acted as if she were invisible.
Maybe it was the sleeping pills. She had continued to take them before bed. It was getting hard to go to sleep without them. Maybe it was all that old stuff from childhood.
Tor asked her to come with him to their summer house on Vät Island. He was planning to go there and stay overnight. It would be good for her, he thought, to get a little sea air.
“I can make blinies,” he said. “I think we still have some caviar in the freezer.”
“I don’t want to,” she said. “I just can’t. I don’t want to.”
There was a thin layer of water on the ice. Some ducks came flying. They landed on the ice and went sliding before they could stop themselves. An old-fashioned boat, a skuta, was tied to the pier. The water wasn’t frozen there because of the discharge from the thermal power station. Some men in dark clothes on the dock. She could barely make out the name of the boat, Sir William Archibald from Stockholm.
Then a distant sound that kept increasing. The clattering noise of a helicopter. The fog was too thick for her to see it, but it got closer and closer.
She never could listen to the sound of helicopters without thinking of the time she saw “Miss Saigon” in London with some friends. They had gotten good seats, but were practically scared to death of the sudden high roar of the helicopter in the introductory scene. And she remembered the ending, the curtain, the strong light right in their faces. Many people were crying. It was sentimental, all right, but also so unbelievably tragic.
Afterwards they had gone to a pub where Berit started some small talk with a handsome, unemployed young man who insisted on calling her “Mum.” She enjoyed the pub’s party atmosphere. She was amazed at her own command of English, but the next morning, she just wanted to go back home.
Now, a few meters up in the air, she felt two lights and the sound was very close. She felt a fluttering panic-what if it didn’t see her, if it intended to land right there? She ran a few steps into the snow bank.
The helicopter glided past her so closely that raindrops shaken from the trees fell on her face. It belonged to the navy. It sniffed back and forth at the edge of the beach and she saw the pilot as a huddling silhouette. Did someone disappear under the ice? Someone who right now was fighting for life in chilly Lake Mälar?
Maybe Justine was not even home. She thought of that as she climbed up the stairs and rang the bell. No one opened up. She waited for a minute and rang the bell again. Then she heard weak thumping inside the house, and stepped back a few steps.
It was Justine. She was home; her clothes were wrinkled as if she
’d slept in them. On one foot she had a large woolen sock.
“Berit?” she asked.
“Yes… it’s me. May I come in for a minute? Or are you busy?”
Justine stepped aside.
“No, come on in.”
“I brought some flowers and also… this bottle of wine. I drank all your glögg the other day and I want to make up for it… I thought… coming uninvited and all.”
“Don’t worry about it. Go ahead and hang up your coat.”
When Justine went into the kitchen, Berit noticed that she was limping. She stopped, her arms hanging at her sides.
“What have you done to yourself?”
“Naah… it’s nothing. I slipped when I was out running. It was a crazy thing to do, I know, go running in the middle of winter. But it’ll go away soon; it’s already feeling much better.”
“You didn’t break it, did you?”
“No. That foot’s a little weak, that’s all. It’s always been weak. I keep spraining it all the time.”
“You do?”
“Next time when you come by, it’ll be all better, and we can take a walk and look at old familiar places. The old school…”
“Maybe… what are you up to, by the way? Did I interrupt you with something important?”
“Not at all.”
“Would you mind if I stayed for a bit?”
“No, not one bit. We can open up this bottle of wine and have a taste. What time is it anyway?”
Justine giggled.
“Always having that old Luther looking over our shoulders!”
“Of course, I thought you’d drink the wine yourself. I didn’t intend to sit here and swig it down, too.”
“Open the bottle, please. The corkscrew is in the top drawer in the kitchen. Then let’s sit upstairs in the library, where we were sitting last time. It’s so pleasant there.”
They went up the stairs. Berit noticed the posters from Justine’s father’s candy factory. They were still hanging in the place they always had. The memories came back.
“Do you remember all those Sandy Candy boxes we used to get from you?” she asked hesitantly.
“Maybe you did get some.”
“You always had a whole bunch of those boxes.”
“Pappa brought them home. I got really sick of them after a while. Sometimes you want something else than that old Sandy taste in your mouth.”
Good Night, My Darling Page 13
