What’s the point of this? I ought to just tell Robert and be pleased that—
The door opened and Erik walked in, leading a black mare. He took off her tack, humming something that Annika couldn’t make out. Nothing out of the ordinary. In the worst-case scenario she would have to remain hidden beneath the hay for several hours, ending up none the wiser.
Erik said something that sounded like “Schweitz” and the horse followed him toward the center of the indoor school. This was followed by a bizarre display.
Erik shouted, “Maisch!” and the horse began to turn around and around, rotating at such a speed that it was surprising that she didn’t fall down, overcome with dizziness. Erik clapped his hands and shouted, “Haitch!” whereupon the horse stopped spinning and started to gallop around as if it were being pursued by a pack of wolves.
Its eyes were rolling, and there was nothing graceful or beautiful about the experience; the horse was terrified, and its body was wracked with a series of shudders as it raced around and around. Erik stood in the middle of the school laughing.
Suddenly he yelled, “Densch!” and the horse stopped dead, sawdust spraying up around its hooves. Then it reared up on its back legs and slammed its front legs down with such force that Annika felt the impact all the way up in the hayloft. The terrified animal repeated this maneuver until Erik shouted, “Gamm!” whereupon it began kicking out with its back legs, over and over again.
The mare’s body was covered in a lather of sweat, and she was barely able to obey Erik as he ordered her into her loose box.
Annika’s nose was itching and she moved back a fraction so that she could pinch her nostrils. She was convinced that she had just witnessed something she wasn’t meant to see.
She curled up in the hay, bending her body inward to force back the sneeze, and she succeeded. When she looked out again, Erik had disappeared. She held her breath. He wasn’t on his way up the ladder to the loft, was he? No, there wasn’t a sound inside the barn. She still waited another five minutes before she climbed down, making sure no one saw her before she went back to the house.
That evening she almost told Robert everything. She began by chatting about the horses in general, which was fine, but as soon as she mentioned Erik’s name it was as if the atmosphere in the room changed, and Robert remembered that he had a number of calls to make.
Annika remained in the living room, gazing into the fire; a moment ago it had been crackling cozily, but now it made her think of things being consumed by the flames.
Perhaps Erik’s behavior toward animals explained why Annika acquired a new friend a couple of weeks later. The ginger cat that had been living in the barn had made herself a home under the steps leading up to the front door of the house. The December days were growing colder and Annika tried to tempt the cat indoors, but she obstinately remained where she was. Annika brought her a blanket, and every day she put down a saucer of milk, which the cat lapped up.
Annika agonized constantly about how and when she was going to tell Robert about her condition. She would soon begin to show, and she wanted to tell him before then. She remembered the occasion when she and Robert had talked about children: not only what he had said, but his immense relief when she told him that it was impossible for her to get pregnant.
Obviously the best thing would be to lay her cards on the table so that Robert could express his opinion. Perhaps that was why she hadn’t said anything so far. She didn’t want to know what that opinion might be.
What made her feel really bad was that she didn’t merely content herself with the sin of omission by not saying anything; instead, she actually pretended that she was having her periods as usual, wearing pads and refraining from sex due to her nonexistent condition.
And the weeks went by.
In January it became clear why the cat had withdrawn. Like Annika, she was in the family way. Her stomach expanded with each passing day, and by February it was huge. There must be a substantial litter in there, waiting to come out.
Annika had begun to see the first signs in her own body, and she grew increasingly concerned about the cat. She used an extension lead so that she could put a heater under the steps, and swapped the blanket for an old duvet.
Robert spotted her as she was making a new nest for the cat; he stroked her back as she crouched on all fours, trying to make the dark, chilly space as cozy as possible.
“You’ve grown really fond of that cat, haven’t you?” he said.
Before Annika had time to weigh up the pros and cons, it just slipped out: “We sisters in misfortune have to stick together.”
Robert tilted his head on one side. “What do you mean?”
Annika shuffled out from under the steps and glanced at Robert, who still looked amused. “I mean that we—the cat and I—that we’re both … Robert, I’m pregnant.”
Robert’s mouth opened and closed, opened again to say something, but Annika got there first. “I know what I said, and nobody can understand what’s happened. It ought to be impossible, but there you go—I’m pregnant.”
“And how long—”
“Fourteen weeks.”
“No,” Robert said. “No, I mean how long have you known about this?”
It would be so easy to lie, but she couldn’t cope with trying to assess the consequences of her imaginary periods, her silence, so she told him the truth. By this time Robert was kneeling on the frozen ground. His head was bowed as if he were waiting for the executioner’s ax to fall.
The cat was purring as she made herself comfortable in her new nest. Robert raised his head, looked Annika in the eye and said, “You have to get rid of it.”
“But why, Robert? It’s—”
“Listen to me. You have to get rid of it. Have you told anyone else?”
“No, I thought I’d wait until I’d spoken to you. But you—”
“Annika, get rid of it.” Robert got to his feet, brushing fragments of earth off his pants. “There’s nothing to discuss, nothing to say. Get rid of it.”
With those words he turned away from her and went back into the house. Annika stayed where she was, gazing at the cat, fat and contented in her comfortable haven. Nobody was telling her to get rid of her babies. But then, she didn’t have a husband.
For fifteen years, Annika had lived with a constant feeling of inadequacy, a sense that she was defective in some way: a woman who was incapable of fulfilling her key function. That was no longer the case.
It couldn’t be helped. If she was forced to choose, then she would do so.
The next few days passed in mutual silence. Robert rang and made an appointment for her, and when he was standing there ready to give her a lift, she refused to go. He upbraided her, but gave no reason apart from his repeated assertion that she just had to get rid of it.
A few days before the date when it would be too late for a legal termination, she spelled it out. “Robert, you can stop all that. I’m not doing it. If you don’t want me, that’s fine. We’ll split up; I’ll move out. It would break my heart, but that’s the way it is.”
Robert gazed at her for a long time, and to her surprise she saw tears welling up in his eyes. He shook his head and whispered something that sounded like “That won’t help.” His voice was thick with emotion.
“What did you say?”
Robert wiped away the tears, got to his feet and said, “Nothing. Nothing.” He took her hand and raised it to his lips. Then he nodded calmly and said, “That’s that, then.”
He left the room and slipped upstairs to his office. It was almost time for his daily meeting with Erik.
Annika went out on to the front steps to get some fresh air. The thermometer was showing minus ten degrees, and a thin layer of snow covered the ground. Her lungs hurt when she took a deep breath. Had Robert finally accepted the situation? “Accepted” felt like the wrong word. Resigned himself, more like.
She had no more time to ponder because she heard a muted howl of pain from beneath
the steps. Annika thought she knew what was happening and hurried down to the cat’s little home.
The cat was indeed in the process of giving birth. She hissed at Annika and struck out feebly with one paw while her small body was wracked with contractions. Annika ignored her protests and crawled inside the narrow space, drawing her knees up under her chin. She wanted to watch.
The cat was panting rhythmically and her stomach was heaving with the lives that were determined to make their way out into the world. Annika sat with her fingers tightly interlaced, concentrating so hard on what was going on in front of her eyes that she let out a scream when a face appeared in the opening.
Erik glanced from Annika to the cat and back to Annika. “So,” he said. “It’s time.”
Annika swallowed with some difficulty, and managed to hiss, “Yes.”
Erik’s breath was polluting the small space and even the cat, who seemed to have accepted Annika’s presence, paused in her efforts in order to hiss and lash out at him. He smiled and said, “You two seem to be doing just fine,” whereupon he knocked three times on the wall and disappeared from view.
The cat relaxed for a moment, then resumed the task of giving birth to her kittens.
She produced a litter of six. Once the first one was out, it was all over in ten minutes. Annika sat looking at the heap of blind, helpless little creatures with a feeling of dread.
Ten minutes to bring six new lives into the world, and already the cat was lying there licking her kittens as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Which it was, of course, even if it seemed like a miracle to Annika at the moment.
She was particularly taken with the firstborn. He or she was smaller than the others, and while it was possible to detect nuances of color in the thin fur of the rest of the litter, the firstborn was completely white and looked almost as if it had no fur at all. Its body was covered with pale, soft down, and Annika wanted to wrap it up warmly, take care of it and protect it from all evil.
She was sitting there lost in thought, wondering how this could be achieved, when she heard noises from the house: raised voices and a dull thud as something fell to the floor. When she tried to crawl out to see what was going on, her body had grown numb from sitting in such a cramped position for so long and she had to spend some time straightening out her stiff limbs. Meanwhile, the voices fell silent.
Grimacing with pain, Annika slowly edged out from under the steps. Erik was standing there, and he held out his hand. Reluctantly she took it and allowed him to help her to her feet. His expression was one of complete calm, and there was nothing to indicate that he had just been quarreling. “You mustn’t get cold like that,” he said, glancing at her belly. “In your condition.”
Annika withdrew her hand and hurried indoors. Erik headed toward the barn, and Annika stroked her belly. There was no sign of a bump when she was dressed, so how could Erik—
Had Robert told him? Was that why they had quarreled?
She found him in his office, sitting at his desk with his back to the door. There was a bottle of whisky in front of him. Unlike many of his friends, Robert was careful when it came to alcohol, and rarely got drunk. She had never seen him drinking during the day.
“Robert?”
He spun slowly around on his chair as he took a gulp from a half-full glass. His face was pale and his mouth twisted into an unnatural smile as he said, “Yes, my darling?”
“What were you arguing about? You and Erik.”
Robert took another substantial gulp and shook his head. “Oh, nothing, nothing. Just the same old thing. Same old same old.” He spun his chair and turned his back on her.
The next few weeks were difficult to endure. The clear, cold winter moved into an ill-defined period of slush and gray skies which continued day in and day out. Robert went away on a number of business trips, and when he came home he drank whisky and remained unreachable, sitting by the fire in the living room and staring into the flames.
If Annika hadn’t had the cat and her kittens to keep her occupied, she might just have said thank you and good-bye, walked away from the house and tried to regard her marriage to Robert as a strange interlude that had at least led to her becoming pregnant.
But now she had the cat; after a few days of resistance she seemed to have accepted Annika as her assistant and nanny when it came to caring for the kittens. Annika set up a lamp under the steps, and the milder weather allowed her to spend a couple of hours each day in the company of the cat and her offspring.
She realized that her behavior was somewhat peculiar. She had a large, beautiful mansion, and yet she chose to spend the best hours of the day in a cold cubbyhole under the steps. She was waiting. Exactly what for, she didn’t know. A change.
Her cell phone showed countless unanswered calls from friends, and a couple from her gynecologist. Soon she would have to tackle things, but for the moment she was waiting. She convinced herself that it was because of the little one.
The white kitten, which she had decided was a male, needed additional care. He wasn’t growing as quickly as the others, and therefore he was often pushed out as they crowded around their mother’s teats. Annika started bottle-feeding him, so the cat ended up with five kittens while Annika had one.
Perhaps she was preparing herself for a maternal role which she had long ago expelled from her system, and which she must now reclaim? She told herself that once the white kitten could manage on its own, she would get to grips with her life.
One gray, slushy day at the beginning of March, when Robert had gone to work, Annika filled the small bottle with milk substitute and placed it in her basket, along with a bowl of cat food and a dry towel.
As usual she knocked before she went in to see the cat. It was a mark of respect, an indication that she knew she was entering the cat’s domain, where she was only a guest.
She put the basket down on the floor and took out the bottle. There was no sign of the white kitten. Its five siblings were tumbling around and making life difficult for their mother, nipping at her ears and head-butting her at every opportunity, until she hissed or gave them a swipe with her paw.
Annika looked behind and under the cat; she lifted the duvet. She picked up the lamp and illuminated each corner in turn, softly calling the kitten. After five minutes there was no longer any doubt. Her little white kitten had disappeared.
The door was always left open slightly so that the cat could come and go as she wished. With a growing feeling of dread that made her stomach churn, Annika crawled outside and began searching the garden in ever-widening circles. None of the other kittens had ever left their cozy home, but perhaps her poor little lost, helpless, wonderful boy …
She searched, she shouted, she sobbed and swore, but there was no trace of her protégé. She went back to the cubbyhole and looked again, even though she knew there was no point. Then she curled up in a ball and wept.
She felt a faint stirring in her belly. She stroked it and whispered, “It’s okay. Everything’s okay.” She pulled herself together. It wasn’t her own child that had gone missing. She was getting things all mixed up. The cat licked her hand.
“Where is he?” Annika asked her. “Do you know what’s happened to him?”
At the sound of her voice, the cat pricked up her ears and looked over toward the entrance. Annika crawled over and pushed open the door.
She gazed out across the half-frozen slush. Now that she wasn’t trying to spot the kitten, she immediately noticed the footprints. She went outside and bent over them. The tracks were partially thawed and the edges were ill-defined, but she could see the contours of a broad diamond pattern, like the soles of heavy boots.
Erik was busy mucking out. He was just heaving a pitchfork full of straw and dung into a wheelbarrow when Annika entered the barn. She walked quickly across the school, unable to take her eyes off his boots. When she stopped in front of him, he drove the spikes of the pitchfork into the ground and leaned on the handle, smiling at he
r with his head tilted to one side as if her visit came as a pleasant surprise.
Annika gestured angrily in the direction of the house. “Have you taken the white kitten?”
She didn’t know what she had expected him to say, but it certainly wasn’t the answer she got.
Erik shrugged and said, “What if I have?”
“In that case—in—” Annika’s cheeks were on fire, and the words stuck in her throat. “In that case you can damn well put him back! He doesn’t belong to you!”
Erik raised his eyebrows and picked up the pitchfork. He snorted and shook his head. Before returning to the loose box where he had been working, he said, “I think you’d better have a word with your husband. And by the way, it was a female.”
One word reverberated through Annika’s mind as she staggered back to the house: “was.” And by the way, it was a female. She didn’t understand what Erik was talking about, or what rights he thought he had, but there was one thing she assumed and another that she knew for sure: she assumed he had killed her kitten, and she knew the bastard had to go.
Without taking off her sodden shoes, she went into the kitchen, opened a drawer and took out a crowbar. She didn’t hesitate as she marched up the stairs and inserted the crowbar between the frame and the door of Erik’s room. The lock broke with the first wrench and the door swung open.
Annika had never seen a plan of the building, nor had she given the matter any thought, but she now realized that Erik’s room was the largest in the house. She clutched the crowbar to give her courage and stepped inside.
Bookshelves, cupboards and photographs covered the walls. Big windows overlooked the garden and the stables. In front of the window stood a desk and a chair. Several armchairs were grouped around the fireplace; no doubt that was where Robert and Erik held their meetings.
There was an unpleasant smell in the room, as if the Persian carpet covering the floor had been damp. Annika tiptoed gingerly over to one of the bookshelves. It contained no books, just files and more files.
AUDIT 2011, EXPENDITURE 2011. Her gaze traveled upward and she saw CONTRACTS OF EMPLOYMENT 1980–2010. On the next shelf along were different, more old-fashioned files and folders with labels such as: INVOICES 1945–1950 and BUILDING EXPENDITURE 1931–1932.
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