They seemed fond of Justine and sent her small presents, but whenever they met her, they overwhelmed her with questions without the patience to wait for her answers. In a way, they were from a previous era. Girls were cute to look at, but you shouldn’t invest in their future. For example, there was no talk about raising Justine to eventually take over the family firm. They would rather find someone else from outside. A man.
When they entered their seventies, they began to lose interest in the whole Sandy concern. They placed it in the hands of their only son. Now it was his business to nurture the company and make a profit. How he did so was no longer any of their business.
For all intents and purposes, they died at the same time. When it happened, she and Sven were somewhere in Italy. Ivar was still living when they returned home, but he died a few days later at Karolinska Hospital.
Flora remembered every detail-the telephone call, Sven answering, his sudden full attention. When he returned the receiver to its cradle, he turned to her and said with a neutral tone in his voice: “It’s almost his time. We have to go home right away.”
His mother was waiting for him before the entrance to the hospital, wearing an armless blue blouse which revealed her flabby underarms. She stood in front of the door and smoked. When she preceded them into the elevator, she almost fell. She had difficulty speaking; her voice had shrunk, almost cut off.
Flora had never seen a person die. Not even that summer when she worked at the mental hospital. The women there were vicious and mean; every once in a while, she wished they’d die. They made fun of her and called her a whore. They didn’t mean what they said; they were sick and they couldn’t think straight, but it didn’t help. No matter how much she reminded herself of this, she was filled with discomfort whenever she approached hospital buildings.
As soon as she stepped into her father-in-law’s room, she remembered that unusual smell, the one that announced that a human being was in the process of dying. She knew it at once. She would never be able to describe it; it was just there.
The old man was on his back, coupled to tubes and apparatus. His nose hooked up from the withered face. For a few seconds, he opened his eyes, but he did not register their presence, his glance wandering toward the ceiling. He fumbled and scratched with his hands as if he were searching for something to hold him back.
Her mother-in-law broke down.
“Ivar!” she screamed. “You can’t leave me like this, really, I forbid you…!”
His body shook; his jaw opened and shut. This made her cling to his sheets, hold on to the bed rail, howl.
Everyone was embarrassed. Two nurses led her out of the room and gave her an injection of a tranquilizer. Her husband lay there, dead and alone.
“We’ll put him to rights and light a few candles,” said a nurse. “Go out and take care of his wife for the time being.” Sven was obviously shaken.
He wanted to leave right away.
It only took a week and it was her mother-in-law’s turn. A serious wave of influenza swept over the country. It set its claws into her, and, broken down by sorrow and shock, her body was not able to mount a real defense.
The double funeral was an orgy of music and roses. The deceased had planned it that way. Everything had been written in their papers, as if they had known that they would die at the same time.
They left behind quite a bit of real estate, which Sven began to sell off as soon as he could. There was a six-room apartment on the fashionable Karlavägen; there was a villa on the Spanish coast and a hunting cabin up in the Åre mountains. And last but not least the yellow house with the veranda and the bay out on the island.
Flora and Sven had been to the house on the island a few times. She had always felt a kind of happiness out there, a contentedness. She asked Sven to keep it. She caught the desire to make it her own, to put her stamp on it. Sven felt the same way. For a few light and heady weeks, they worked together on this idea, plans and fantasies.
They shipped out a few loads of the things they would need: timber, spackle, scrapers, paint. One man on the island, one of the permanent residents, offered to help them; Sven was the way he was when it came to practical things.
The February twilight entered the room. The smell of frying fish. Rattling in the hallway, time for dinner again.
“What are they going to treat us to today, I wonder,” muttered Märta Bengtsson. The dinner hour was the highlight of the day for Flora’s roommate. She seemed to have an enormous, almost grotesque appetite, to the point of grotesque. Something about her reminded Flora of her mother-in-law.
Märta sat in her wheelchair with her napkin tied under her chin and tried to stuff the food into her mouth with trembling, shaking hands. She ate fairly noisily.
A white uniform had pulled a chair over to Flora’s bed and now began to feed her. She was in a bit of a hurry; one could tell because of her way of thrusting the spoon between Flora’s lips and practically scrape off the potato blend against her tongue. She was very young. Had Flora really been so young? She had a ring in her nose and a tattooed animal that crept along her underarm.
She talked the whole time, as if she had read in a practical handbook that this was the proper way to handle fellow human beings: one should speak to them, not about them.
Märta Bengtsson tried to answer, but she had difficulty coordinating both eating and talking. Time and again she would choke on her food, and the white uniform would have to get up and help her.
“Today is Saturday; surely it is,” she managed between bites. “Are you going out to have a good time, nurse?”
This white uniform was certainly not a nurse, just an assistant with barely any training.
The assistant giggled. “You could say that I’m going out for a good time tonight.”
“Do you already have a close little friend?”
“Huh? ‘Close little friend’?”
A new attack of coughing, Flora turned her head away, disgusted. She looked up at the shiny, empty ceiling.
It was there on the island that Flora realized that something was seriously going on with Justine. It began already on the trip out. She could not bear to be inside the cabin; she had to be outside with her head hanging over the railing, so that the spray made both her and her clothes wet. It was windy; white geese floated on the waves.
Flora looked at Sven.
“But she’s just a little seasick,” he said petulantly, as he went out to sit beside the girl. “She was never good at being at sea.”
The house was waiting for them. It was a cool and cloudy day with rain in the air. In the yard, the wood was stacked under tarps where rainwater had collected into small pools.
Sven took out the key.
“OK, girls,” he said, “now we’ve arrived at our own summer paradise.”
Justine was able to choose her own room. She had chosen one that faced east, a room that was narrow and high, but not too big. Her grandmother had called it her writing room. She had pen pals throughout the entire world, but when she was on the island, she never got around to writing them because she was too restless to stay very long.
Her white writing table was still in the room. Flora had been tense going through all the drawers, as if she was expecting to find a note or two about Sven and herself. But there was nothing there besides her mother-in-law’s rose stationery with her monogram in grey.
“Remember, Justine, that your grandmother wanted you to have that table,” said Sven, as if he had known, as if he had ever talked to his mother about such things.
After dinner, the television was always turned on. Märta Bengtsson’s two daughters had bought her a TV and set it up next to her bed. At this moment there was a program about winter sports, maybe some kind of competition; there was loud music. Young, strong people who flickered past from downhill ski jumps or on the ice. It hurt to look at them. She closed her eyes; they were aching as if she were becoming ill.
All of sudden it was silent. One of the whit
e uniforms had come in and requested Märta Bengtsson to put on her headphones. Now there was just flickering light without sound.
Yes, it would be good if she became ill, had a fever. They would isolate her. That would keep Justine from visiting her. At any rate, it would prevent Justine from taking her on an outing. That terrorizing drive was still with her, a dizziness, a slowly growing premonition.
I want to die my own way.
But I don’t want to die… I want to live.
Justine grew even stranger while on the island. She would be sitting on a chair in the kitchen and she would suddenly fall asleep, her head thudding on the table. Snoring and sleeping.
“What’s wrong with you that you can fall asleep like that?” Flora said.
Then she stirred and her pupils floated around her eyes as if they were disconnected.
Flora thought about drugs. She went to the bent figure but did not smell anything unusual, just a distant strong electric field.
Justine was looking forward to putting up the wallpaper in her room, but suddenly she no longer had the energy. Right in the middle of a sunny afternoon, she would have to take a nap, snoring and sleeping just like an old person. Her skin became pale and doughy; she was getting blemishes on her shoulders and neck which itched. She scratched and ripped with her nails so that the skin came off.
“It’s not so strange that she’s tired,” said Sven, which surprised Flora, because he usually went to fetch the doctor at the slightest sneeze.
“Why on earth would she be more tired than we are?”
“Hormones, you know. She’s at a difficult stage.”
As far as Sven was concerned, it seemed Justine was always at a difficult stage.
One morning she heard sound in the bathroom. Flora was alone with the girl. Sven had gone with the boat. She stood in the hallway; the bathroom door was ajar. The girl was squatting there, bent over the toilet.
When she came out, her face was very doughy and white. She was on the way back to her room when Flora grabbed her by the arm.
“Let me look at you! Let me look right into your eyes!”
The girl turned toward her like a sleepwalker. And there, deep in the shining green of her irises, Flora saw the flagrant answer. Just as she had suspected, the teenage girl was pregnant.
Flora bombarded her with questions and didn’t leave Justine in peace for a minute. Who had done this to her? Who had raped her?
“No one,” she said, crying so the snot pooled on her upper lip. “No one raped me.”
“You stupid child. You’re not much more than a child, dammit!”
Sven stood there among the paint cans, round-shouldered but tall.
“Leave her alone now,” he said. “Leave her in peace.”
“But don’t you understand? She has to go to the hospital. They have to remove it!”
He had left off pleading long ago. He raised his voice to a rhythmic yell.
“I’ve decided-that you-leave-my daughter-alone!”
He had become so strange out on the island.
She just dropped all her plans at once and took the boat back to Stockholm.
She called her sister Viola who sold perfume at NK. She said that she and Sven had a serious disagreement, and that she had to get away for a while. She needed some time to think.
She was able to live in her sister’s apartment, a three-room apartment on Östermalmgatan in the best part of town. She had the days all to herself, until that time in the evening when Viola came home; then they went out to eat at a restaurant.
It was as if she had a glass bell around her.
The days burned with sun, the asphalt hot and dusty. Nothing happened to her. She sat and listened to her sister’s tales from her life at the perfumery.
“I’m going to dye your hair,” said Viola and pulled out a heap of treatments. “You’ve always had great good looks. But just because you’re married doesn’t mean that you should let yourself go, you know. Do you think he’s found someone else? What’s his new secretary like? Have you checked up on her? You must be kind to him, tempt him a bit. Such a gold mine for a husband and always so nice!”
At the end of August, she returned to the island. Sven was waiting on the dock; he was suntanned and healthy. He didn’t mention what had happened. He took her around the waist, covered her lipsticked mouth with gentle kisses.
“You are beautiful, Flora, you are my little doll. I’ve missed you. May I look? You’ve bought a new fine dress. Oh, do you look fine in it!”
All the work on the house had stopped; the rooms were half-finished. The girl was sleeping in the hammock.
When she woke up, you could tell.
But still, he refused to talk about it.
In the middle of September, they returned to their home in the city.
“What about school?” she asked. “Have you thought about that?”
“I’ve contacted the school.”
“What did you say?”
“It doesn’t matter what I said. She’s gotten a leave of absence.”
Justine stopped getting dressed, roamed around throughout the house in her burled robe. Soon no clothes would cover her growing stomach. Buying her maternity clothes would be capitulating.
But it didn’t matter. She never left the house; she never showed herself to anyone.
It was expected around the time winter turned into spring.
Who was the father? Was it Mark?
But she kept silent the whole time.
Such a silence, a dejection. It filled the entire house from the basement to the newly finished attic.
When snow started falling, she began to knit. She pulled out the yarn from an old sweater and knitted from this frizzy, gray-white ball of yarn. Knitting without a pattern and with sulky uneven lips.
Right around the first day of Advent, Sven had to go on a business trip to Barcelona. Flora remembered it very well. He didn’t want to go, but he absolutely had to. He dithered about and let the taxi wait so long that he almost missed the plane.
When he left, Flora tried to resume some kind of contact.
“How are you? You can at least tell me how you’re feeling.”
Her light brown eyebrows came together.
“It’s snowing over the lake; it looks like feathers…”
“I didn’t ask you about that!”
“I had an animal once, you didn’t know about it.”
“What are you talking about, animals and feathers? All this has gone to your brain.”
“Brain? Flora, do you understand how roses can live within the brain?”
Flora took her by the shoulders, lifted her up. This smell of sweat and dirtiness. Hair like a mop, a bird’s nest on her neck. She took her by the wrist and led her to the shower.
She expected a reaction of anxiety and fear. But there was none of that. The shiny round belly, the bellybutton poking out. Breasts like two bulging and explosive balls. Flora took some soap in her hand and began to soap up that nervous, pale gray body. Rinsed and shampooed the girl’s hair.
Justine a pregnant statue. Now she clearly saw how the fetus moved around in there, his soft, round jumps. She laid her palm right against the girl’s belly. The girl shook. But the child was there; she felt it.
A new nightgown, how it got stuck over her stomach on the way down. Flora had to take a scissors and cut it open completely on one of the side seams. The girl sat with an abstract smile, her mouth haughty and calm.
Then the comb. It was impossible to sort out the knots; she had to use the scissors.
She cut the hair short, not out of revenge, but for practical reasons. The girl’s face round and swollen.
“What are you crying for now?”
The girl moved her head stiffly.
“Save your tears, you’ll have enough to cry about later.”
One night it was time. Why do births always start in the middle of the night?
I should have been the one. I crept next to him. I ope
ned myself in spasms.
The girl sat in her wrinkled nightgown. Her mouth was open; she had bit her tongue so that it was bleeding. She had cried out. We had woken up from her cries.
Sven said, no, he yelled to me: “Warm up some water and bring some towels, hurry up!”
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
It was already too late to leave for the hospital.
I said: “If we don’t make it through this…”
He lost his composure, hearing that.
I said again: “Such young girls… their pelvises.”
Then he pulled me into the kitchen and his face was a like a mask.
She fought all the way until dawn, screaming and throwing her body around.
Flora heard Sven pray to God.
She had stopped approaching him, but she observed the girl’s hips, so narrow and undeveloped.
If the baby becomes stuck, it will be our fault. If she dies while the child is still inside her, we are the ones who will be punished.
But she didn’t die, she came through it.
The baby lay on the sheets, and it was an extremely tiny boy.
Sven took the scissors, cut the cord in the middle of membranes and blood. Gave that clump, that newborn baby to her.
I felt the warm body, it jerked; he was trying to get air, and then he wailed, his nose wide and flat. I set him into the hand basin, and the water turned bloody. I washed his hands; he held them in fists, I had to uncurl them and saw deep lines and marks. His penis swollen and large, his limbs like tentacles. His hair was dark, his eyes muddy. I cleaned him from her blood and fluids; I wrapped him in a cloth. He had stopped crying; his face was formed like a heart. His little exquisitely carved upper lip, how it turned against the tip of my finger. I sat down and opened my blouse, the hard greedy gums.
Sven was in the doorway. He saw me. He turned and left.
She reached her arms out to me to take him. I said, you’re tired. You can fall asleep on him and he can suffocate. Look at him. Do you want to fall asleep on this beautiful little boy’s face?
She was thin and had lost a lot of blood.
I lay him to her breast, but he screamed and beat with his little delicate arms. He was hungry. That was a good sign. But she was so young; she had no milk to give him. Sven had to go and get a bottle and some formula. The boy was heavy. He had lain in my lap. I was the one who taught him to suck. Every time she took the boy, he screamed. She was too young; she wasn’t much more than a child herself.
Good Night, My Darling Page 15
