But it’s the widower who quickly leaves and comes back. To punish him, she decides to keep the bag.
You can keep the bag, he says.
It’s her reward for not allowing her to look inside the closet. But he doesn’t give anything to the ugly sister for not opening the glass door of the bookcase for her. The bag is light, only two pairs of shoes and two dresses. Still, they ask Bengt to carry it down for them. Once they reach the street, the beautiful aunt asks him whether there wasn’t another pair. He says that they must be in the closet. Then she asks whether there wasn’t another dress, too, a new red one. He denies it and says that his father already returned it. Now the beautiful one regrets that she ever came and cleaned. The ugly one thinks the beautiful one is selfish. She herself feels quite content. Quite content and therefore quite good.
Alma was sweet, she says to her nephew as they cross the street. It’s a pity that she left so soon. A pity for you.
Once the streetcar leaves, he doesn’t really know why he lied. He walks past a little cinema and looks at the pictures behind the frosty glass for a little while. Then he sees a black dog in the entrance. He still doesn’t know why he lied. Then he goes home. But he runs into his father at a corner. They pass each other in the darkness and the snow. After a while, the son turns around and heads after the father. He realizes that he doesn’t have his key. Then he realizes that he does have it after all. But he continues walking to get some air. When the father notices that the son is following him, he walks through a door that had just opened at the corner. He walks briskly across the yard and out the other side. But on the next street the father runs.
Inside the building, the son skims through the list of tenants. Then someone comes up to him and asks him who he’s looking for. He replies that he must be in the wrong building. Then he runs out. He runs all the way home. But once he’s outside the front gate of his building, he turns around and goes back. There was a vending machine in the other building, and he wants to buy some throat lozenges from it. But when he gets there, there is no vending machine. And the door is locked. Then he remembers that there was once an accident in this building. Somebody who was smoking in bed had burnt to death. In the heavy snowfall, he is standing on the sidewalk and studying window after window, trying to remember where it happened. All the lights eventually go out before he can remember. Besides, it’s windy and snowing. Signposts are squeaking, and windows are creaking. So he takes cover in the doorway. No one is going in. No one is coming out. When he finally does come home, the father is already there. At once, he finds himself curiously happy and asks him to make some coffee. When he holds out his coffee cup, the father takes his other hand.
I had to give the dresses away, he says.
The son keeps his hand there. Then he lets it be stroked. In the middle of the night he remembers that the accident happened in a different building. A sound from the other room had woken him up when he suddenly remembered before falling back asleep. In the morning, the red dress is spread out over the armchair again.
In the evening the father comes home with a dog. A big black dog. Whenever he goes near it, it growls. So the father gives it a lump of sugar. As they eat their pea soup, the dog sits beside the firewood bin and watches them. Then while they drink coffee, the son chucks another lump of sugar at it. The dog doesn’t touch it. Then the son asks him why he bought a dog. The father says it’s so that they won’t be so lonely. Then he says he got it for a bargain.
Later that night, after the son has gone to bed – because the need to listen to what was happening in the other room had prevented him from studying – he hears the dog come pattering through the hallway. It treads slowly, almost like a frightened human being. It must be very late. He sits listening in silence for a long time because whatever is happening in the other room is lasting as long as usual, maybe even longer. Even though there is only one dress now. And maybe a pair of shoes.
At last, the dog stops. It stops in front of his door. And lingers there. At first, it’s almost completely silent. Then it starts to pant, and when it does, it pants like a frightened human being. Frightened people terrify him. And frightened animals terrify him almost just as much. So he gets up and pads through the darkness to lock his door. But then he finds that he has already locked it. As he slips back into bed, the dog starts whimpering some more. It almost sounds like a sleeping infant. Finally, it patters down the hallway again. Then the father drops something in his room. He doesn’t pick up whatever he dropped. It becomes absolutely silent in the room. Then, after a long period of silence, the son falls asleep.
He has a dream as he sleeps. He dreams that someone is calling to him. He doesn’t recognize the voice. Nor does he recognize his own name. And he is standing in a strange room. It has no windows. No mirrors either. But there are black candles burning along the walls. They burn down very quickly but are constantly replenished as soon as they burn out. The candles make the room dreadfully hot, and he suddenly realizes that he has to take everything off to keep from bursting into flames. But when he looks down at his body, he doesn’t recognize it, just as he doesn’t recognize his own name, which is now being called much more loudly from beyond the room. A garment is clinging to his strange body, a cloak with a peculiar cut. When the heat becomes unbearable, he tries tearing it off his body. But he can’t get it off. The more he tears at it, the tighter it envelops him. Then he feels a sharp pain in his hands. When he looks down at them, they are red with blood. Astonished, he sees that the cloak is made of blood. The candles suddenly go out and it becomes very dark in the room. The room also turns cold. Through the darkness, the voice comes creeping up to him. The voice has paws. It pants like a frightened human being. Slowly, the room begins to brighten. His aunts come wandering through the darkness. They are holding burning candles in their hands. Their faces are ghostly, and their eyes are closed. But around their bodies, they are wearing cloaks of blood. Suddenly, they are gone. Only the candles remain. In the flickering light, a big black dog comes pattering toward him. The dog is the one calling out his unrecognizable name. Once it is terrifyingly close, he hears what the name is. The name is Gun, and the voice is his father’s. Even the dog’s eyes are his father’s. He tries to run away, but he is paralyzed. Gently, the dog lays its hot paws on his hips. Then he tries to shout out his real name. But his tongue is just a big, scorching lump. He bites and bites. When he finally bites hard enough so that it hurts, he wakes up.
He has flung his blanket on the floor. Naked, he is lying in his bed with his hands pressed against his burning hips. He is drenched in cool sweat. And he has a chewed-up handkerchief in his mouth. When he pulls it out, he remembers it. It tastes like tears and perfume. Still weighed down by the heaviness of the dream, he staggers out of bed. In the dark, he unlocks his door to the other room, and as he walks through it, he steps on something soft. When he turns on the light, he sees his mother’s hat lying on the floor in front of his door. There is also a hanger on the floor. And the door to the bookcase is ajar.
But the red dress is gone. The father is gone, too. And so is the dog.
A Letter in March from Himself to Himself
Dear Bengt!
It’s been a while since I last wrote to you. Some important things have happened since then. The most important thing is that I have seriously decided to stop attending lectures and seminars, though I’ll still take the exam in April. I plan to study at home. That way I’ll save time, and I can be home in the evenings. It’s nice being at home, and in the end I think Papa will come to think so, too.
I haven’t told him about my decision, and since I’m still going to take the exam, I won’t have to. And whenever he asks, How was your day today? I usually always say, Fine, thanks; it went really well. There’s no use saying that it wasn’t good or that I missed a question since I was never there in the first place. Besides, if I were to say something like that, it wouldn’t make it any less of a lie. It would just upset him, and I don’t want to d
o that. In fact, it’s the same reason why I don’t tell him that I’m home all day when he thinks I’m in class. In the evenings, I sometimes tell him little details about tests or lectures.
I intentionally talk about things I know he’ll appreciate. For example, that a professor came to class in a top hat and business suit because he had been at a funeral the day before and still thought he was wearing his tailcoat. He finds such stories amusing, and he still thinks professors have to be old and absentminded.
When he’s in a good mood he gives me money. Of course, it annoyed me at first, but then I realized I have to take it. Otherwise, he might start to suspect something, and I don’t want that to happen. And since I’m going to take the exam in April anyway, it doesn’t matter whether or not I accept these little rewards. After all, it’s just as much work, if not more, to study at home as it is to sit around in a lecture hall.
Besides, I like putting Papa in a good mood. It makes us both happy. On Thursday, I sat around for half a day coming up with a great story about a professor, and I told him all about it when he came home. He hasn’t laughed like that in a long time. And why shouldn’t I make someone happy if I can?
Yes, you might be right when you say that it’s not particularly nice to lie, but I think a lie should be judged by what a person hopes to gain from it. For example, if you lie to gain any kind of personal advantage, then I consider that an immoral way to use a lie. But if you lie to make someone happy, then I can see no reason why the lie can’t be justified. I also think a lot depends on the person who is lying. Isn’t it a different matter altogether when a corrupt person lies from when a good person lies? An honorable person can do things that other people cannot do. If a sluggard wastes his time roaming the streets and looking for girls while his parents think he’s really busy studying diligently, then it’s a completely different situation when a responsible person hides a temporary postponement from his father (which, all things considered, isn’t even a postponement).
And I have always been responsible. You can’t deny that, Bengt! I was raised to be responsible, you know that. You also know how Mama was and that she had a bad childhood. Since her mother was gravely ill and her father was dead, she was shuffled from one poor relative to the next throughout her youth. She used to say that her childhood was a carousel, not a nice one like we have here in the cities, but a poor, run-down carousel, one that is sent out to the most impoverished and distant places. So revolved her childhood. This also explained why she didn’t have a typical education. She had to learn almost everything on her own while working hard on the side. When I was little, I was always surprised by how much she knew. But when I got older, I noticed that her knowledge did have gaps. Yet I still have to admit what an achievement it was that she accomplished everything on her own. And because she had had it so hard, she wanted me to have it easier. Yet she also wanted me to learn something. Against Father’s wishes, she insisted that I go to high school. Throughout my schooling, she never let me forget, and rightly so, the tremendous advantage I had of being able to pick up my knowledge so effortlessly. She also constantly ingrained in me the obligations it entailed. I didn’t miss a single day of school, and because of my sheer sense of duty, I even went to school with a fever at times. I, and I suppose all poor children who have been able to choose a different and more superior path than their parents, have been raised to be, above all else, responsible. Although, Bengt, you know very well that that isn’t so difficult for me.
That’s just it. Parents can have a different understanding from their children of what the word responsibility means. Unfortunately, all concepts can easily become limited for people who, whether in their work or their own curiosity, don’t concern themselves with the value of words. For an uneducated person, the word motherland, for example, has a much simpler and more finite meaning than it does for the educated individual, who from such an ostensibly simple term immediately discerns all the components the concept comprises. Naturally, this applies to the concept of responsibility in the same way. This means that for someone like Mama, who was in some sense an uncomplicated person, to be responsible is to simply wake up early in the morning, work hard no matter what the conditions, even if that means working ad absurdum, or in other words, in circumstances that don’t involve work at all. That kind of responsibility is simply identical to the word work.
In the same way, many complicated terms seemed to be the epitome of simplicity and unambiguity for Mama. This could often make you irritated with her, but you had to be understanding and remember the circumstances behind her education. A concept like “truth,” for example, was absolutely clear-cut to her. She couldn’t even accept the smallest white lie, no matter how justifiable it was. Once, when I was in the fourth grade, I got a demerit, and in a moment of weakness she tried to spare me from Papa’s anger and signed his signature on the form. But on the day I was to submit it to my homeroom teacher, she called during the break and explained to him that she was guilty of a treacherous forgery. In the afternoon, the teacher comically related to the class what had happened, and I was terribly ashamed of what she had done. That evening when Papa came home, I told him what had happened, and he reproached Mama for her ridiculous behavior.
I think that the more theoretical knowledge you obtain, the more multifarious and kaleidoscopic your view becomes of the reality that lurks behind concepts. This reality is so insatiably rich that a fixed determinant of a concept’s position must simply be an absurdity. For me, the concept truth isn’t summed up by a simple formula like it was for Mama. We sometimes discussed the matter, but it was impossible to get her to see how wrong we really are when we draw a fixed border around the meaning of a word. Moreover, the concept responsibility, for me, is so far from being identical to the concept work that at certain times it can even mean that we limit our performance for a time, especially when it proves necessary to do so with respect to our future goal. For weaker persons, it might be considered necessary to have an absolutely fixed value for a concept, but for a person who knows where he is going, which some say is the only important thing, a fixed definition like that can even seem obstructive at times.
One bit of news is that Papa got a dog. It’s black and doesn’t like me, but it likes Papa. I don’t know why. When I asked him what the dog’s name was, he answered, Hector. When I asked him why, he didn’t know, and when I asked him if he knew who Hector was, he didn’t know that either. But instead of explaining how he came up with the name, he got angry and said that he was just a simple carpenter. Anytime someone shows himself to be wiser than Papa, he always says that he’s just a simple carpenter. It’s his best defense, and he used it against Mama a lot. The next day, however, he told me who Hector was. So I suspected that he had looked up the name in the encyclopedia. When I checked, I rightly discovered that volume H was dusted off. But now I wonder where he got the name. I also wonder where he got the dog. He says he bought it at a pet shop on Södermannagatan, but the other day when I walked from one end of the street to the other, I couldn’t find a single pet store. I think it’s disgusting when he lies and when he lies so sloppily. I also think it’s disgusting that he’s started spying on me.
I don’t know if I hate him anymore. I just think that what he has done is disgusting, sordid, and filthy. I can’t stand the thought of him betraying Mama for an entire year while pretending to be so innocent the whole time. When Aunt Agnes called today, she said she knew that it was going on for a long time. I think it’s despicable how they go around gossiping about it. They should at least have some consideration for my feelings.
Well, Bengt, this has become a long letter, but since Mama’s death, I’ve had time to think things out. I miss her terribly, but I just can’t express exactly how much in a letter. It’s March now, and the nights are long. The other night I went out for a walk along the pier with Berit. She said she thought that spring was the most beautiful season of all. I told her I thought it was the ugliest, with all the slush and cats in
heat. I shouldn’t have been so harsh, because I hurt her feelings. She isn’t sleeping well, she said. I know she can’t help it, but she’s very ugly without sleep. Mother was, too.
Good night, Bengt, and send everyone my regards.
Your friend,
Bengt
P.S. I forgot something: the other night I had a very horrible dream. I dreamt that I was standing in a large room surrounded by black candles. I was dressed very strangely, and I was sweating profusely. Suddenly, Papa came into the room and called me by the other woman’s name. Then I noticed I was wearing Mama’s red dress. Afterward, I realized that my dream was about my loyalty to Mama. Since then, I’ve been afraid, Bengt. I’m afraid that one day I’ll have to meet her – the other woman. I’m afraid because I know I won’t be able to control myself. I’m afraid I’m going to do something terrible.
P.P.S. Mama’s red dress has disappeared. When I asked Papa about it, he told me that he sold it. To prove he was telling the truth, he offered to share the money with me. I told him I didn’t want anything to do with that kind of money. I could tell he was glad to keep the money but hurt that I didn’t believe him. And I don’t believe him. I don’t know why, but I don’t.
Evening Promenades
At the end of March, the son often goes out for walks in the evenings. The father is also out on these evenings, but he doesn’t take walks. Well, he does, but they are very short. Even so, it’s a long time before he comes home again. He takes the dog out for walks because dogs need exercise. And every evening when he steps out the front door, he goes in a different direction. But every evening he ends up in the same place, which makes the dog very happy.
But before he ever gets there, it just so happens that he abruptly steps off the sidewalk and steps into a pub or a café, where he immediately looks for a newspaper, the biggest one he can find. Then he sits by the window with the paper covering his face as if he were reading. But he is not reading. Every time someone passes by on the street, he is peeking over the edge of the paper. Sometimes the son walks by. He strolls by slowly, and his eyes rove around as if they are looking for something. And they probably are. To a certain degree, the father is surprised to see his son out walking about, because they were just talking about it ten minutes ago. You should go outside and get some exercise, Son, the father had said. You shouldn’t be indoors on such a beautiful evening. But the son told him that it would be better for him to finish the eighty pages he had to read before his lecture the next morning. Snapped at him almost.
A Moth to a Flame Page 6