Let’s go, she thought.
Nathan was speaking to a shop assistant; they were observing her. The assistant came up to her with a measuring tape around her neck.
“She’s wondering about your size.”
“Why? Nothing here I want.”
Nathan held a dress up to her. It looked made for a pygmy.
“I thought you might want something more elegant when we’re out and about among people. This is still civilization, you know.”
“Just look at that, Nathan, do you really think I can squeeze into that? Can you really believe that? It’s made for a child!”
“Well, maybe not this exact one, but a larger size.”
He turned toward the assistant; she had big, brown eyes.
“Bigger size?” he asked in English.
The assistant smiled crookedly, took the dress, and went away to search.
“Let’s go,” Justine whispered.
“Don’t be such a troublemaker.”
“But Nathan, you don’t get it.”
“The hell I don’t. I want to give you a nice dress, and you’re acting like a stubborn child.”
He began to walk to the counter. Justine followed him. The assistant came. She looked at Nathan expectantly.
“Well?” he asked.
“Sorry, sir, not bigger size.”
“As if I were an incompetent, stupid child!” Justine burst out once they returned to the street. “She ignored me completely!”
“Huh.”
“She turned to you; she talked to you.”
“She must have noticed how grumpy and unwilling you were.”
Justine put on her sunglasses. She was crying again, and she had a headache.
That evening, her period started. She thought that was the explanation. She told Nathan, forgive me that I was so whiny.”
“I pretty much thought that was the deal. I know women; they have their whiny phases.”
She did not want to be one of those women he knew like that. She crept into the narrow bed. Just wanted him to hug her, nothing more.
He said, “Tomorrow afternoon, I’m going to meet Ben. He’s coming with us on the expedition.”
She took his arm, drew it over her, placed it on her tummy.
“Does it hurt?” he asked.
“Yes,” she whispered.
He kissed her.
“Turn more to the side so I can hold you for a little while.”
During the night, she bled horribly. She stained not only the sheets, but the mattress underneath. She didn’t want the cleaning women to see it. She tried to clean the stains herself, but it didn’t work.
She and Nathan ate breakfast at a restaurant which was next door to the hotel. They ordered juice and coffee with milk and there was a sweet, creamy mess at the bottom, which appeared to be some kind of sweetener. She stirred it suspiciously. Nathan was eating roti, a dish that looked like pancakes with meat sauce. Men and women were sitting around eating, all using their fingers.
“You might have noticed that they’re using their right hands. Their left hands are unclean,” Nathan explained.
“What do they do with their left?”
“Figure that one out for yourself.”
Justine’s stomach hurt, it cramped like tiny, digging nails. That’s the way it always was, the first few days of her period. No pain medication in the world could help.
“Maybe you should just stay at the hotel,” suggested Nathan. “You look a little ill.”
She thought about the cleaning women.
“I’d rather die. Take me with you.”
They took a taxi through the city. Nathan pointed out a few sights for her: the National Mosque, with its sun feather column and its minaret, which was over seventy meters high. For fun, he used a tour guide’s voice.
“And here to the right, you will soon be able to see the famous twin towers…”
He was acting like an eager boy.
“I love you,” she said loudly. “Oh, Nathan, put me in your shirt pocket and take me with you wherever you go, and never ever take me out!”
The man called Ben was waiting for them in a room with air-conditioning. There was tea and juice on a table. Justine felt a spontaneous confidence in him. He was relaxed and had nothing of calculation or malevolence about him.
“So you’re going out in the jungle to frolic with tigers and elephants,” he joked, while handing her a glass of juice. He spoke excellent English.
“I hope I don’t exactly frolic,” she answered.
“You know that there are both tigers and wild elephants in the area we’re going to,” he said.
He observed her reaction; then he laughed.
“You don’t see them very often. They keep away from humans; they’re more afraid of us than we are of them.”
“But they have attacked humans?” asked Nathan.
“Of course, but that hasn’t happened in a while.”
“Elephants scare me more than tigers,” she mumbled. “Once a man let me ride an elephant. Pappa and I were at the circus. They didn’t ask me; they just lifted me up and plopped me down right on that wrinkly skin. A few weeks later, Pappa told me that an elephant had gone crazy, managed to escape its chain, and ran amok.”
Ben smiled at her. His brown chin was round, his nose wide and flat. He was born in the jungle, but he had received a decent education and even studied at the university in Kuala Lumpur.
“Elephants shouldn’t be in a circus,” he said. “No wonder they go crazy there.”
They sat with Ben for a long time, talking and looking at maps, making long lists of the things that they would do and the things they had to purchase. In the evening, they went out to a restaurant. There was just one dish: fried rice with chicken. Justine was hungry. There wasn’t much meat on the chicken; it was mostly bones. They each ordered a Coke.
Nathan said he longed for a cold beer.
“No beer here,” he said. “I know another place; we can go there next time.”
That night she slept soundly and didn’t even wake up when the muzzien called to prayer at six in the morning.
She and Nathan took a shower together. She soaped up his big, light body; she could never get enough of touching him. Her hands could long for him, long to feel his skin, his warmth; he was so filled with life and strength. There in the shower, he had a strong erection, and she knelt and took him in her mouth.
Afterwards, he had tears in his eyes.
“Sometimes, I feel I need to rethink my idea of never getting married again,” he said, stroking her cheek.
“Do you think it would work out? Or do you think that I’ll also become hysterical?”
“You’ll just have to refrain from it.”
She had pulled up her underclothes, they were still a bit damp, but would dry on her body.
He said: “Today we’re going to meet the others who are coming with on our excursion.”
“Who are they?”
“Two Norwegians, I think; some Germans, a guy from Iceland and-believe it or not-a Swede. We’re going to meet them at Ben’s in about an hour.”
Chapter THREE
Her father was not buried in what had been seen as the family grave, the grave where the French wife was at rest. Rather, he was buried on the other side of the cemetery, where the newer and smaller graves were.
Justine heard Flora say to Viola: “Should I let the two of them be together in death, and have all three of us there later? No! Once I die it will just be him and me, just him and me!”
“And little Justine?”
Flora began to laugh. “Don’t you see that little Justine is not so little anymore? Soon, she’s going to be past her best years, overripe.”
Viola’s tone changed, as if she’d been insulted herself. One could see her as “overripe,” almost sixty. She had been bought out by NK and she had been recommended to start her own business. The truth was that the department store did not want old ladies at the perfume c
ounters. They didn’t have the same results in sales; in fact, they could have a frightening effect on the customers.
Viola had no choice but to take the money, and now she was renting an expensive little place near Hötorget. She started Viola’s Body Shop, where she sold soaps, perfumes, and expensive lingerie. She had offered to take Justine as an apprentice; maybe she could be trained to take over the business. A few days later, Justine had indeed gone there. She stood behind the counter in a rose nylon skirt Viola had picked out, and Viola had also made her up and had taken her to a hair salon.
It didn’t work.
“Quite frankly, she’s rude to the customers,” Viola reported later to her sister. “She pretended not to hear what they were asking her; just stood there drifting away in her own thoughts. Take her back.”
“I didn’t try to force her on you; it was completely your idea. I told you it wouldn’t work out. I’ve always said there was something wrong with her mentally, but you never believed me.”
After her father’s death, they lived as usual in the house. Nothing had changed; all the routines remained the same. Flora continued to speak to her husband after she had closed the bedroom door; Justine could hear her voice through the wall which separated them. Flora talked loudly. She rebuked him for leaving her; she threatened to sell the house and buy an apartment in the city.
She also said this to Justine.
“Don’t think that we are going to live here forever and ever. Anyway, it’s not normal for two grown woman to share a house like this. Normal would be that you would have moved away from here many, many years ago; you have just been growing like an abscess on Sven and me during our entire life together. Your father has protected you and overprotected you, but he’s not here anymore. Now I’m free to throw you out. He wouldn’t be offended; he should have thanked me. He knows that everything I’ve done for you has been for your own good. Women understand these things better than men.”
Justine would make herself scarce whenever Flora was in that mood. Sometimes she took the car and drove up to the cliffs near Lövista, wandered on old paths; never for long, though, anxiety drove her back home. What was Flora thinking of? Had she brought a real estate agent to the house, who was now wandering around figuring out how much it was worth?
All this remained unchanged for many years.
During the morning, they drank their coffee on their own side of the table, each fully dressed, neither wanting to appear in a robe in front of the other one. That would be a defeat. Flora was always made up, her eyelashes large and blue. These days they were a bit more uneven; her sight had started to weaken.
When the warm days came, she would move to the balcony or into the garden. She had always loved the sun. She asked Justine for help with the lounger and had her also bring out a carafe with white wine and water. Wearing her strong glasses, she would paint her nails, layer after layer.
Her stroke came on such a day, while she was sitting in her lounger on the balcony. It was a fine, clear spring day, one of the first really warm ones. She was wearing a bikini and she told Justine she had the same bikini since she was a young woman; her body was as cute and small as a girl’s. But now she had difficulty walking up and down the stairs.
Then she said that she had called a real estate agent. “There is an apartment on Norr Mälarstrand which I am thinking of buying. One floor with a large terrace. I can sit there and sunbathe. You know how I love the heat.”
“What about me?” asked Justine.
“You’ll just have to find something for yourself. The house is definitely going to be sold. The real estate agent said that there were a number of interested buyers.”
And she sank into the cushions and made herself comfortable. The sun shone on her knotty, hairless legs. She rubbed in lotion, stomach and arms; she raised her glass to her lips and drank.
Afterwards Justine told Nathan that she was extraordinarily angry at Flora that moment.
“So angry that I could have killed her. I thought I could put something into her drink, some poison or something. But where would you get that? Poison? Not like going to the drug store and asking to buy some strychnine. Don’t they use that in the mystery stories? I went to the garden, got in the boat and roared off; Pappa never liked it when I would take off like that: you ought to be calm and careful, he always said. But I was angry, furious; I think he would have understood me; he also wanted to keep the house. Because of Mamma. I made a few rounds out there, because it was a normal workday and people were at work and I thought about what it would be like if we had to move and whether I would have the chance to stop her.”
“But didn’t you both own the house?”
“We probably did, but I never paid attention to that stuff.”
“You never signed any papers?”
“Maybe I did. I don’t know, I was really depressed after Pappa died.”
He shook his head. “You need to remember those kinds of things, Justine.”
“Need, whatever. Now I pay more attention. At any rate, when I returned to the house, the sun had disappeared, and I thought that Flora had gone in. I started making dinner right away; it was probably five in the evening. I had been out for an unusually long time, landed somewhere that was completely still all around me, only the birds. I stood there on the beach and wished she would die, Nathan. I really did.”
“Did you ever give her a chance to be a mother to you?”
“Don’t you get it? Flora isn’t someone that you give something to. Flora is a taker.”
“Maybe I should come with you when you visit her in the nursing home?”
“No,” she said hastily, as if the old witch woman would arise from her sickbed, as if she would become strong again and begin to threaten them.
“Eventually I went upstairs. There was a draft from the upper level. I looked out and saw her sitting there in a somewhat distorted position. It looked so macabre, that dry old woman stomach and that bikini… She’d had a stroke. I tried to get her going, but she was slurring her speech and was strange. Later, they found that she was completely paralyzed and couldn’t even speak. Well, then I sent her off to the hospital and she never came back.”
He took both of her hands.
“You seem to be a bit grim to me, my darling.”
“She had me in her power for so many years.”
“Please pardon me in advance, but it sounds a bit exaggerated when you say that.”
“It’s not exaggerated.”
“It was surely not easy for her to become the step-mother of a spoiled child like you.”
“If you had met her, you wouldn’t think so.”
“Oh yes, you probably deserved a whipping or two!”
“Nathan!”
But the conversation had turned into play. He had that ability, to get her to forget that evil and hurtful past; he loved wrestling with her and taking off her clothes piece by piece, as if they were trophies. Then he placed himself between her legs. He kissed her and manipulated her until she was taken over by spasm upon spasm of orgasms. He enjoyed her amazement and her gratitude. A woman of her age so completely without experience.
But still she had carried a child.
When she explained more about that to him, he said that he had already surmised it. She was wider, not closed in the same way much younger women were. He was careful to say that it didn’t make her less attractive. It was one of the contrasts that made her so fascinating to him: so grown and wonderful but without any dissemblance.
He thought owning the bird was complete craziness. He came home with her once and the bird came flying, and he had to shout out in surprise. She had hoped that he would feel friendly. She had to close the door to the attic while Nathan was in the house. The bird did not like that. She heard him screech and fly around up there.
“I’m going to let him go into the wild,” said Nathan. “This is animal cruelty.”
“Do that and he’ll die. The others will attack him out there; t
hey’ll hack him to death.”
“Isn’t it better to die a quick, albeit cruel, death rather than be forced to live in a house that was made for human beings?”
“You don’t get it. He likes this house, and I am his friend.”
“It can’t be all that hygienic, either.”
“People are always going on about cleanliness. Do you think that my house looks messy?”
“No, but…”
“Let’s forget about the bird. Come on, I’ll show you something else.”
She showed him photos of herself when she was little, pictures of her mother and the wedding photo of her father and Flora.
“Ah… so this is the notorious Flora.”
“Yes.”
“Such a skeleton.”
“She has always been thin and beautiful.”
“She probably rattled when she walked. No, Justine, you’re the beautiful one; you’re round and plump, something for a guy to sink his teeth into.”
And he pressed his mouth against her underarm and gave her a large, dark-red hickey.
When he saw her post horn, he lifted it from its hook and tried to blow it. Not a single sound came from it. He blew until he turned red.
“It doesn’t work, does it?” he said.
She took it from him. She had composed a few melodies when she was a child, but they were simple and easy to remember. Now she played them for him.
He wanted to try again. He blew and snorted, and finally managed a hoarse, deep sound.
“I’ve always been able to play it,” she said quietly. “My Pappa gave it to me. He said it was made for me.” Even Nathan thought she should sell the house.
“Do it before the bird has destroyed it and left bird shit everywhere.”
“You don’t get it. I want to live here. My mother chose this house. I have lived here my entire life.”
“That’s why you should sell it. How many houses do you think I’ve lived in? I don’t even know myself. You have to move around a bit, get a new perspective. You get stunted by the same damn view each and every day. Don’t you get it? You have to keep growing, Justine. Try a little adventure.”
They all got together at Ben’s office. The two Norwegian men were already there when Justine and Nathan arrived. They were just under thirty; they were named Ole and Steinn. A little while later, the Icelander and the three Germans appeared: Heinrich, Stephan and Katrine. Heinrich was the oldest in the group, just over sixty. The Icelander’s name was Gudmundur.
Good Night, My Darling Page 19
