“You mean he owns the property?”
Pappa did own the forest together with four brothers, so that wouldn’t be a lie.
“Yes, he does.”
“And where did you meet Anita?”
The question was a sneak attack. Alvar immediately began to hiccup.
“We met at the riding … club.”
His face flushed immediately. Alvar Svensson af Björke was definitely a rotten liar.
On the other side of the table, Anita clenched her jaw, and he could see her thoughts churning furiously. “It was so embarrassing, for Alvar, Mamma,” she said quickly and laughed. “He can’t ride at all, but when he got there, he had to try, and they really were laughing at him.”
Her mother nodded mistrustfully and turned back to Alvar. “Why were you there, then, if you can’t ride?”
“It was one of the entertainment evenings—” Anita began but was cut off.
“I’m talking to Alvar.”
Alvar swallowed and hiccupped. He kept on sweating profusely. The hard way is always the easiest in the end, his mother had said. You should always tell the truth.
“I’m a musician. I play bass. So I play at those kinds of entertainment evenings and parties and … other places.”
Mrs. Bergner was looking at him as if he were telling lies, and he blushed because of that. She bored her gaze directly into his dishonest eyes, curled her lips, and nodded. This was not at all why he had come here. Why was he here?
“I saw the bomb,” he burst out.
Mrs. Bergner’s peering eyes opened wide. Anita’s became as round as plates.
“The Russian bomb?”
“Well, I couldn’t tell if it was Russian, but the entire Eriksdal Theater is gone.”
Nobody said a word. Mrs. Bergner’s expression of curiosity showed Alvar how much she resembled Anita. Anita took a deep breath.
“I biked over here,” Alvar continued when nobody said a word. “I thought maybe Anita might be frightened or … well, I came here just to see you, Anita. I wanted to make sure you were all right.”
Anita laughed and exchanged a look with her mother. She cocked her head. “That was incredibly sweet of you. Alvar is always so sweet, Mamma, just like a little brother.”
Mrs. Bergner seemed to be thinking hard and she looked them both over as she listened to Anita’s words. Especially the last three, Alvar suspected, as her gaze fell directly on him while Anita spoke. Anita was twenty-three now. Could a nineteen-year-old ever be mature enough for someone who was already twenty-three?
Anita’s mother spoke the words he didn’t really want to hear. A real man would never have been allowed to accompany Anita to her room.
* * *
He could not escape that feeling when he was alone with Anita. It was there, just like when you took a walk in the forest and the trees suddenly opened to a glade. Fighting for a place in a swing band, conversing with Aunt Hilda about the decay of today’s youth, and biking through the city with errands from Åkesson’s grocery: all that was real life and demanded effort. With Anita, he could close his eyes and feel his pulse slow. He sat down on a chair. She sat down at her desk and turned toward him.
“Do you think the war has come to Sweden?”
Alvar did not want to talk about the war, but this was the day when a bomb had fallen. He thought back to his emotions near the crater that had been Eriksdal Theater. Then he thought about his mother and father and the soldiers at the Norwegian border.
“The war has already been here a long time. Normal windows don’t look like that.”
He nodded toward Anita’s well-crafted blackout curtain. She got up and walked over to him and ran her hand through his hair. Their roots sent tingles down his entire body. What had he just thought about a lowered pulse?
“Come.” She sat down on her sofa and patted the empty seat beside her. “I don’t want Mamma to hear us.”
They sat next to each other. Any thought of bombs felt far away now. It was as if they no longer existed, even though they’d fallen just last night. Even though he could still feel them vibrating through the floor.
“You are like my little brother.”
“I am not your little brother.”
“Well, I know I have lived longer than you have. And I ought to know more about life, but all I feel is lost.”
Those words little brother were still ringing in Alvar’s ears, but he tried to ignore them and concentrate on what Anita was saying.
“I’m twenty-three years old and I should have already moved out and married. Mamma is always bringing over people like bank directors for me to meet. The kind of men she wants me to marry, you know.”
Alvar didn’t know, but he knew enough to keep quiet and listen.
“And Ingmar … yet you were the one who came here. The bombs fell and you came here. Why didn’t Ingmar come?”
“Maybe he was scared.”
“Scared of the bombs?”
“Scared of your mother. She scared me.”
Anita smiled briefly, as if he were joking. He took in her smile.
“I know Ingmar likes me. But he’s so difficult. It’s not easy to talk to him. I always feel like I have to be … that kind of woman.”
She said that kind of woman with such an intonation that he didn’t need to ask for further explanation.
She sighed. “He always seems evasive somehow. And all those strutting bank directors—they’re old. Not always in age, but in their minds.”
Alvar looked at her. One of her hands was scratching the other, as if picking off an imaginary scab. He took a deep breath. “I’m young.”
She was pulled out of her thoughts, looked at him and laughed. “You’re extremely young.”
Her eyes glittered as she said this. He believed that it was not just his imagination. Somewhere inside her, Anita liked the fact that he was young.
A step forward.
— CHAPTER 22 —
The teenage girl had left. Her brown eyes and deep thoughts were gone from Sunshine Home. Did he ever look that serious when he was fifteen? Hardly. But he remembers feeling just as lost inside his growing body. It took time to learn how to use it. He still remembers how growing pains had felt in his legs and how he kept getting taller and taller. Steffi is not as lanky, but she moves as if her body and her head existed in two different worlds, until she had started to listen to swing. If he were twenty years younger, he’d teach her the jitterbug and her entire self, body and soul, would then be united. All right, thirty years younger. All right, forty.
He tosses and turns. He prefers to lie on his back when he rests, but sometimes it’s hard to swallow that way, so he has to turn his head to the side until his neck stiffens. The last few days, he’d felt the tension even more. He had had no idea how badly Steffi was suffering under her tormentors until he’d seen the decapitated bass guitar. It was as if he’d been refusing to see it, as if it did not manifest itself until he’d seen it in reality, in the physical form of a broken instrument. He could be dense, sometimes, not at all like his mother had raised him. She’d told him to think about those who were weak, and she’d said it so long ago that by now he ought to have forgotten her exact words. His neck is aching. He shifts.
Right after the bombs hit Stockholm, he’d gotten a letter from his mother. She’d asked him to be a good boy and to be careful when it came to the war.
My dear boy,
I hope you are well and that Hilda is also well, of course. Don’t forget to be kind to her. She must have great difficulty with her legs.
I was so extremely frightened when I heard that bombs had fallen in Stockholm. You weren’t nearby, were you? You listen to what people tell you and stay away from dangerous places, won’t you? And you make sure that you have blackout curtains at home and don’t start fights with people in uniform.
I don’t know what to warn you about. I would like you to bury yourself somewhere safe with some food and water until this unpleasantness is over
, but you know that is my mother’s heart speaking. Go ahead and live your life. But don’t forget there’s a war on.
Here in Björke, Elsa has had a baby girl, Hjördis, and the baby was born with so much hair that people gathered at the hospital to take a look. Kalle Svensson was arrested for public drunkenness again. Young Karin Berntsson in Lysvik, if you remember her, they say she’s found a German in Fryksdalen on the other side of the border, but if you ask me, it’s just a rumor. And the boys in Torsby IF soccer have made it to division three and that’s all your brothers can think about right now.
He smiled as he read this last bit. The war, jazz music, bombs, and theaters that turned into gaping holes—and all his brothers could think about was soccer. He could see his mother in her clumsy handwriting. He could imagine his father, gruff but gentle, in the room beside her. He had been away from them for so long that he’d forgotten how their voices sounded, but he still knew exactly how they smelled. He’d have to go home. Soon. But first, he had to substitute again, for the second time, at Nalen. And make Anita understand that he was a man.
He’d started writing a song to win her heart. It grew from his guitar, even in the evenings as he sat in Aunt Hilda’s kitchen. He’d dampened his strings so it wouldn’t bother her. Sometimes she began to talk with him about it.
“What kind of noise is that?” she’d scream at him, as if he were the one who was deaf.
“It’s Beethoven,” he’d say. Then he’d have to repeat it, louder: “BEETHOVEN!”
Aunt Hilda had frowned skeptically.
“I can tell it’s not Beethoven. I hope it’s not that jitterbug music.”
“Of course not,” he said honestly, because it wasn’t a swing tune.
“I absolutely forbid you to play Negro music in this house. You must understand this and take it to heart.” Her voice trembled with emotion.
“I will take it to heart,” he replied as he kept working on his composition.
He’d called his tune “A Girl and the Air,” and it was a jazzy fox-trot. He called the music style Alvar-jazz. The lyrics were about how a girl could change the air just by coming into the room. Even if his English wasn’t the best, he thought it sounded professional. He’d even found a rhyme: air and near.
* * *
He laughs to himself in his room at the Sunshine Home. Never, he tells himself, his forefinger in the air, never tell Steffi that you once tried to rhyme air and near. She’s a girl who knows a good rhyme, that one. He turns his head to the other side, points his nose up, and starts to doze.
* * *
Hepcat never logs in to the computer at school. That would be insane. It’s hard to keep to schoolwork when the assignment is Information Searching and Source Review and she’s been able to answer all the questions in five minutes. For a while, she searches for electric bass guitars and tries to figure out how long she has to save until she can buy a Fender. Much too long. Depressingly long. Then her fingers turn to The Place.
Stephanie Herrera’s page doesn’t look anything like Hepcat’s. They even have different colors. In the in-box there’s no sign of any messages, but three are shown on her guest page. Karro never writes a message to Steffi. That would be too intimate. The whole point is writing something on the guest page so everyone can see. Clicking on the guest page would mean accepting the shit thrown at her. Still, she can’t just let it go.
In addition, she feels hard as stone.
In addition, she’s a hepcat nobody can reach.
Even if they break her bass and call her a lesbian slut.
She is hard.
Like.
Stone.
Karro has written the first contribution. I forgot how ugly you are until you got to school today. I get why no guy wants you so you have to meet dykes on the net!!!! Steffi clicks delete. Feels nothing at all. Reads the second contribution. Slut. Creative. As she deletes it, she thinks she really ought to ignore the whole thing. Every time Steffi deletes something, Karro probably believes she’s been touched, as if she were soft and easily influenced, as if she went along with Karro’s game. She looks absentmindedly at the acknowledgment: Message deleted. She’s breathing quickly, exhaling Steffi’s vomit-green web page and inhaling something, anything, even Information Searching and Source Review. She never should have logged in.
The third guest page comment is not from Karro. It’s not from anyone else she knows, either. It’s from somebody named Simon Kjellman, and at first she doesn’t get it.
Really nice friends you have there. Hope it’s just some net trolls; otherwise they’re seriously mental. Anyway, did you get a chance to listen to Avishai Cohen yet?;)
Avishai Cohen. At first she has a vague recollection of the name and then warmth spreads through her. She’s back in the hallway at the music school. There are other boys and girls all around her and they’re looking at her without seeing someone disgusting. The boy with the beret has looked her up on the net, and that means that he even remembered her name, and not only that, he’s called Karro seriously mental.
To Steffi’s surprise, she feels the warmth turning into a lump in her throat. She feels it pressing against her windpipe and there’s hot tears welling up behind her nose. They’re now starting to stream down her face so quickly she can’t stop them. It’s like a volcanic explosion and she has to run to the bathroom.
She’s cried in the bathroom many times before, so that the feeling of the toilet under her thighs is the same as tears falling and dripping on her knees. She’s an expert on crying silently and letting her nose run freely into toilet paper until she knows she can stop and flush to hide the sound of sniffling and until she’s able to push the last bit of weeping deep into her stomach. But this bout of crying is something entirely different. It’s like opening a door. It’s someone holding up her heart so she can let the rest go. It would be a stupid lyric, she thinks in the middle of blowing her nose, but that’s exactly how it feels. She’s humming in her head as she walks home:
This is how it feels when your tears run and your heart burns
You may think it’s foolish, but that’s how my world turns.
It almost sounds like rap and she gets lost in the feeling of how rap and jazz would sound when played together. She thinks the right walking bass line would make it work, and she’d try it if she had a bass. She tries not to think about her decapitated bass guitar as she puts the key in the lock. She tries to focus on something else, like the guy who wrote her, Simon Kjellman with the beret.
Pappa is in Karlstad with Edvin to find a pair of glasses and Mamma is at work. Steffi was hoping to have the apartment to herself and maybe practice the clarinet for a while. But she sees shoes in the hallway, Julia’s and Fanny’s, thrown down like last season’s style. Julia’s door is ajar and they’re talking about guys again. Steffi rolls her eyes—maybe Karro has a point and she really is a lesbian, because she finds all this boy talk ridiculous.
“What about David? He kisses like an electric mixer!”
“Like a mixer! But how?” Julia exclaims with excitement.
Silence. Steffi walks closer to Julia’s door and wants to tell them that she’s home and needs to study, but the silence makes her forget what she wants to say. Through the gap in the doorway, she sees how Julia’s and Fanny’s heads are close together, as if their lips were … but it’s gone so quickly she could have misunderstood what she’d seen. Julia is giggling again.
“OK. I get it! Like an electric mixer!”
Fanny laughs.
“Yes, that’s it! Some guys kiss like that.”
“Actually,” Julia says, leaning back against the wall. “Actually … girls are more attractive. We’re better at, like…”
“We wax!” Fanny says with emphasis. “Such lucky guys who get us! Right?”
Julia glances at Fanny. Steffi can’t stop looking. It’s like she’s watching an R-rated film and she’s the child who’d sneaked into the movie theater. Julia looks like she wants to say something
. She doesn’t speak, but for a while she still looks like she’s about to.
“Too bad we have to fall in love with them!” Fanny giggles.
Julia nods, but a part of her smile disappears. “Exactly. But … like, take Lukas for example. He kisses really well, like … wait, I’ll demonstrate.”
In the R-rated film in front of Steffi’s eyes, Julia leans toward Fanny. Softly she puts her hand on Fanny’s neck and then tucks a strand of Fanny’s hair behind her ear. She leans forward and kisses Fanny. Steffi is well aware that she knows nothing about the mysteries of love, but she can tell, just by Julia’s posture, exactly what Julia is feeling. The kiss goes on for so long that Steffi forces herself to look down and look at the door hinge for a moment. Then she hears Fanny laugh out loud.
“God! Now I know why you broke up with Lukas … not!”
Julia laughs, too, blushes. She says she’d rather have a guy with a car and then she starts to talk about kissing again, but Fanny changes the subject to a fan of fifties cars she’d met at a festival and who had a tree-shaped air freshener hanging in his tent.
Steffi backs away. She tiptoes to the kitchen and puts a slice of bread in the toaster and waits. When the toast pops out with its too-loud sound, it takes just three seconds for Julia to fly into the kitchen. Her question comes like the crack of a whip.
“How long have you been home?”
“A long time.”
“How long?”
Steffi looks at her nervous older sister. The one who let everyone believe Steffi was a lesbian.
“Twenty-two minutes and five seconds,” Steffi replies. “No, six seconds. No, seven seconds. No, eight … nine … ten…”
Julia shakes her head. “I forgot how crazy you are.”
“Why do you care how long I’ve been home?”
Julia shrugs. “I don’t.”
“If you’re wondering if I saw … what you were doing … in your room with Fanny.”
Julia’s usual tanned face turns bright red.
Fanny has come and is leaning in the doorway and now she laughs. “Were you spying on us?”
Julia is red, red, red.
Wonderful Feels Like This Page 16