“But the kids were jealous of you! Your father owned a candy factory!”
“No big deal.”
When they reached the library, the bird was sitting in the window. He turned his head toward them and squawked. Berit jumped so that she almost dropped the bottle of wine.
“Oh, did he scare you?”
“When he screamed like that…”
“He’s just making his presence known.”
“Why would he do that?”
“So we don’t forget that he exists.”
“No risk of that! Does he ever attack you?”
“Attack me? Whatever for?”
“I don’t know. I’d never trust a wild thing like him.” Justine took the bottle from her and poured. They lifted their glasses, said skål. They sipped the wine.
“Mmm,” said Berit. “Not bad at all, if I may say so. I really don’t drink wine often enough. But it’s so good, so good for the soul.”
The helicopter was there again; it seemed to be right out side the house. The bird flapped his wings, nodded his head. “Someone has fallen through the ice,” said Justine. “How do you know that?”
“Heard it on the local radio.”
“How awful.”
Justine nodded.
“Happens every year. I live so close that I always notice, too.”
“Isn’t the ice a little too weak to walk on?”
“It holds at some places, and then suddenly it gets weak.
People really ought to know better. But some people are just idiots.”
Justine laughed and raised her glass.
“Skål!” she said. “Skål to those idiots!”
After a moment, she asked about Berit’s job.
“Have you been fired yet, or what’s up?”
“The business is moving to Luleå. My boss says we can all come, too. But no one wants to move to Luleå.”
“Do you have a choice?”
“I don’t know… I don’t know anything any more… I can’t sleep at night.”
And tears welled up in her eyes, made her weak and exposed.
“I seem to come here and burst out… bawling.” “You are carrying so much confusion inside yourself. Just like the rest of us…”
Justine stretched out one arm and made a clucking sound.
The bird tramped around for a moment in the window and then flew to her with clumsy wing beats.
“Even this bird,” she said. “He needs a female. He doesn’t really understand that, but something is bubbling up inside him, making him weak. It’s getting lighter; spring is coming. Then longing grows like a sorrow, just as it does in every living being.”
“Justine… when we were little…”
Justine said quickly, “Tell me about your boys.” “My… boys?”
“Yeah, how they’re living their lives, these young people with their whole lives ahead of them? Do they ever feel that sadness?”
Berit took some tissues from her bag, blew her nose; her head was throbbing.
“Sadness? No I really don’t think so.”
“Are they working?”
“They’re… still both studying. But they don’t know what they want to be yet. At any rate, they’re not going into the publishing business. I scared them away from that.” “Do they have girlfriends?”
She nodded.
“They belong to another world. Young, thin, beautiful.
Whenever I see them, I really understand more than ever that I am passé.”
Justine placed the bird between them. He turned his beak toward Berit, and made a hissing sound.
“Yuck. Justine… can’t you…”
“You’re afraid of him. He notices that right away. Try and be natural, relax.”
Berit drank some wine and then carefully reached out her hand. The bird opened his beak and it was red and large in there.
“He sees through me,” she whispered. “He doesn’t like me.”
“Don’t worry, just ignore him. Well, whatever, I can move him.”
She got up and limped toward the bookcase. The bird followed her, alighted on her hand. She lifted him to the topmost bookshelf and he took his spot there like a brooding animal from pagan times.
The cliffs, the round hill. Justine’s body. The jacket up over her head. She had started to get breasts; they were already fairly large. That foster child, she was sitting on Justine’s stomach and was starting to take off her pants. How suddenly everything changed, because Justine broke away and began to run, slipped and fell directly down on the stones below.
How they ran and ran.
“We’ve killed her!”
“Let’s go!”
“Are you crazy? We have to get someone, her mom.” “No, no, let’s run away!”
“No, we’ve got to get help!”
“Blame yourself then, if we get sent to jail!”
Gerd was her name, she suddenly remembered. Gerd was the one who forced them to run to the house.
“We’ll just say she stumbled; we were playing and she just fell.”
They rang the doorbell again and again. After a while, Flora stood there with her hair in curlers. She looked at them with mistrust and told them she was in a hurry.
They had to wait while she took care of her hair, stand in the hallway with the odor of shampoo and cigarette smoke.
The woman grabbed her coat, looked down at her calf. “Look at my stockings! Damn it!”
“Please hurry, ma’am.” Gerd pulled at her coat. That she would dare.
“Where did it happen?”
“Over there by the cliffs.”
“I have always said that you need to be careful. It appears that you are just as disobedient as she is.”
That very word. Disobedient. She kept up her grumbling as she walked, rubber boots and coat. Justine spread out on the stones. Her clothes were on, but her jacket was to the side with arms still tied together. She looked to them like a sacrificial victim.
“Look. We’ve finished off this bottle in record time,” said Berit. “I intended it for you; it was a gift for you.”
“Doesn’t it seem to you that they put less wine in the bottles nowadays?”
Berit rolled up the tissue and stuffed it in her bag.
“Yeah, I’ve noticed that.”
“There’s more wine in the basement.”
“There is…?”
“You’ll have to go get it… It’s in the same room with the old washtub. I know you’ll see it.”
She got up stiffly, afraid that the bird would notice and attack her. Justine laughed with a tone in her laugh that Berit had never heard before.
“You’re walking like a spastic! Don’t be such a bunny rabbit. It’s just a goddamn bird.”
It wasn’t just the bird. She was back in the old days, these very steps, she and Jill, their strength from ganging up together, the smell of submission, of degradation. And she remembered what the child Justine had said about that washtub. Flora. That was the name of that woman with the painted eyes, the doll woman who was playing the role of mother.
She found the wine bottles right away. They were arranged on a shelf, just as Justine described. It was dark down here; she hadn’t found the light switch. Shyly, she glanced at the washtub; saw it with the eyes of a little girl. The partition for the wood, did she really put a little girl in that and light a fire? To think she just sat there, waiting for the heat. The scalding heat.
She pressed the bottle to her chest and rushed upstairs. “Justine… there’s a lot that we need to work out.” Justine shook her head.
“Yes, we do! We really do! You have to listen to me, I can’t get any peace.”
There was an unusual expression that arose in Justine’s eyes.
“You want me to cross out the past as if it never happened.” “Yes…”
“Learn the great secret of life: love, forgive, and forget?”
“Well, something like that. Some kind of forgiveness… or… reconciliatio
n…”
Justine regarded her without saying anything. She drew her fingers through her hair, which then stood straight up. She broke out into a violent and jangling laugh.
“Just open the goddamn cork, why don’t you!”
Chapter SEVENTEEN
Mark came during the day and they read together. He would touch her sometimes, but not much. To him, she was just a child.
This provoked her. Her breasts were changing and the skin over them was painful and tender. She took off her headband, and she never put it back on again.
“Tell me about America,” she asked.
Then he began to speak in English so fast that she didn’t have a chance to keep up with him at all. She threw her pillow at him, right into his sneering face.
He lay down over her, pressing down her arms. “You’re just a little piece of shit, aren’t you.”
Enraged, she kicked him right in the crotch with her good leg. He turned white and fell off the bed.
He had a girlfriend in Washington.
“What looks she like?”
“What does she look like?” he corrected her.
“Yes, but what does she look like?”
“Brown eyes, big tits.”
It sounded nasty.
“Her name’s Cindy. She writes me every other week.” “Are you in love with her?”
He grinned.
“Tell me! Are you?”
He stood in front of the window and jerked his hand around his zipper.
“Start reading your book now. I’m not paid to answer your stupid questions.”
“It’s much too difficult. I can’t.”
“Read!”
“Da nyoo man shtands…”
“The not da! New not nyoo.”
“The nyoo man…”
“This is a fantastic book, Justine. Maybe you’re just too little. Too bad. You miss a lot, being so little.”
That put her off balance.
“What am I supposed to do then?”
“Nothing you can do. That’s just the way it is.”
“You’re an idiot!”
“How’s your foot doing? Getting any better?”
“Eventually.”
“What really happened?”
“I fell off a cliff.”
“You’ll just have to learn to walk properly.”
“I do walk properly. I just slipped, that’s all!”
No, she wasn’t too little. During the evenings, she lay turned to the wall and imagined how it would be. She and Mark in a whole different way. She felt her breasts, if they had grown, and her hand went down to that sinful place that was so wonderful to touch. A kind of restlessness came over her. She wanted to get away. But the cast was a ball and chain, it protected her from what was out there, but also transformed her into a prisoner.
Then the day came when winter had completely gone, when they took off her cast, sawing and cutting it away. A frail and shrunken leg appeared together with a sour smell.
But she was back to normal. And now school was over and the schoolyard had been filled with students in colorful clothes. All the teachers had been to the hairdresser; the flag had been taken out and raised.
She had been able to avoid all of that.
She imagined that it would be difficult to use that sticklike, narrow leg, but noticed that it was, deep inside, just as strong as before. In the evening it might swell and ache a bit, but she could walk and run, just like before.
She stood in the lee of the uprooted tree. There were candy wrappers on the ground.
She was alone.
She followed the forest path.
The Hunter was sitting on his front porch, whittling.
Shyly, she stepped into the garden.
He saw her. He didn’t say anything.
She sat right next to him, his back was tense. His hands kept whittling.
She sat right next to him, and put her hand on his arm. His skin was brown and old.
No.
Not old.
She stepped into his sparkling clean kitchen. The wax tablecloth had been wiped; the dish rack was empty. The floor was white and swept.
He got up and followed her.
“What do you want here?”
“Sorry,” she said. “It wasn’t my fault.”
“I want you to leave now.”
“No…”
“I want you to leave this very minute.”
He stood against the wall. She went right up to him, her hips to his jeans.
“Stina!”
“Hold me. I’ve been so lonely.”
She closed his door and locked it. She lay on his blanket. It was gray and warm from the cat. She drew her legs under her, round.
His body a template against the window.
“I broke my leg,” she whispered, even though she hadn’t intended to tell him.
“Stina…”
“Come lie down next to me. Warm me up.”
He did so while saying, “I told you to leave.”
Her chin on his chest, the small curly strands. The smell of air and salt.
Her hands were so strong now. She was young; he was old. Oh, his tummy, so vulnerable and weak. She dipped her tongue, her lips, there.
Then.
The man.
She made him cry, and that made her afraid. When he saw her fear, he became strong again, and held her waist so that her legs could be like scissors around him.
“Stina,” he whispered, “you know that this is wrong.” “Who decides what is right and what is wrong?” And she sank over him and they did it again. He moved within her and she wriggled but let him remain there. Afterwards he was full of regret.
She stroked him and tried to find words. She had to cry to get him to open up.
“I’m coming back to you. I will never leave you.”
Day after day. The uprooted tree. The house. Sometimes he locked the door and wasn’t there. She waited in the yard. Then she learned how to break open the lock on his window. She lay in his sheets, his smell against her clothes.
A draft of chilly air. He stood in the light, a blanket in his hand. He turned his face from her.
His hand pounded the table.
“You can’t,” she said, and her mouth and jaws ached. “You can’t drive me away.”
Naked in his lap, the seams of his jeans.
“Don’t you hear the blackbird out there?” she whispered. “You’re thinking of the thrushes.”
“Do you hear their song?”
“Why are you doing this to me, making me weak…?” The cloth was swelling against her groin.
“You’re not that weak… see?”
Laughter, happiness. How he lifted her like a spread-out, fluttering butterfly. Opened her leaves.
Every time she was amazed. She was as thin as a reed and he…
“I believe that you’ll cleave me in half…”
But at that white moment he was unable to hear her; he was a flailing fish, glitter on her stomach.
Then he stood up and shrank.
One day she was forced to tell him about the island. “We’re going out to the islands tomorrow. We’re going to live there for a while in an old house that my grandparents owned. It’s on one of the islands. We have to go there by boat. There’s no other way there.”
If she thought he was not going to say anything, she was wrong.
He wanted to know everything.
“Pappa has taken vacation. We’re going to live there for a while. There’re not many houses on this island, just a few; food comes by boat. Still, there are some people who live there all year round. Do you think they go fishing, or else how do they live through the winter? I get to decorate my own room; it will be my very own. I’m going to help paint it. Pappa has brought home some wallpaper designs, and I’ve already picked one out.”
He looked at her sternly.
“Now I want you to listen to me. I will be gone when you return, and you’re the one forcing me
to do this; but I’m not blaming you, not at all.”
She was too filled with her future plans to listen. She sat in his arms, stroked his soft eyes.
“When the apples ripen, we’ll pick them, and I am going to bake you into an apple pie and cut you all up into pieces. And then I’ll eat you up with vanilla sauce and ice cream. But now I have to go home.”
Chapter EIGHTEEN
Sven’s parents had always surprised Flora. They had a vulgar aspect to them which did not fit either their position or their class. Both of them were large and had loud voices, and her father-in-law had lost some of his hearing so that her mother-inlaw had to raise her voice even more so that he could hear her. They used coarse words and language in their speech and they seemed to enjoy shocking others by it. They approached their environment with childish expectation, waiting for reactions.
Sven had prepared her.
“They’re a little different. I just want to let you know so that you’re aware.”
During a few occasions, while she was still working as a secretary, Ivar Dalvik had come to the office and they had been introduced. He shook her hand hard and asked for her name two times.
“Oh, Flora is it… can I open you up?” he joked. “If one wants to know more about a flower’s innermost being?”
She always had trouble with that kind of humor.
She did not meet her future mother-in-law until she was Sven’s fiancée.
She never felt really accepted by them. She and Sven discussed this from time to time. He didn’t understand her. He thought she was taking things too seriously.
“They think that I am too lower class for their fine son; that’s what it is.”
“That’s not true, Flora. They really don’t care about what kind of person I’ve chosen to marry. I know it sounds strange, but that’s the way they are. Let them be, two egocentric old people. Why would you ever worry what they think? We’re living our lives and they’re living theirs.”
It didn’t help. She always felt that she wasn’t good enough for them. Maybe she should have been louder, used more gestures, like them.
When it came right down to it, she didn’t have much contact with them, but that was a two-edged sword. On the one side, she despised them. On the other, she wished they would see her, acknowledge her, as the active and hard-working woman that she was.
Good Night, My Darling Page 14
