It turned out that Nahrin wanted to plant a vegetable garden, though mostly in the spring. Gabriel didn’t know all the names in Swedish and even some of the Chaldean names seemed strange to him, but he translated her descriptions. Witch hazel for insect bites, Nahrin ticked off, coltsfoot for coughs, angelica against colds and many others Dan could not identify. Finally he gave way. What does it matter? he told himself. Gabriel will take care of it. And who knows, maybe one day some of the plants will be useful? It was a weak argument, he knew, but he was flying to Paris tomorrow and Nahrin was clearly used to getting what she wanted.
‘I’ll be gone for a few days,’ he said to Gabriel, ‘but you know what to do.’
12
In Paris the days were sultry, carrying a shifting load of smells. There was the rotting stone around the Odeon, the smell of dank river water on the quays, and then, magically, sudden bursts of sunshine washing along the great boulevards.
They stayed in the same hotel, separate rooms. For the first three days, Monday to Wednesday, Lena was occupied until late in the evening. Her job was to help at a worldwide holiday congress for professionals, where WingClub had a stand. Thursday and Friday she was free from lunchtime on. They walked everywhere together on those afternoons, sought out small restaurants away from the tourist streets. Dan marvelled at what was happening to him. After over three years of solitude here he was, laughing happily as they strolled along beneath the trees, the air spiced and heavy. At dinner, the restaurant around them hummed with conversation.
On the weekend Lena was busy again but Dan collected her when she’d finished and together they walked back to the hotel through crowded night streets, talking endlessly about what they saw. On Monday, their last day, she had lunch with the WingClub CEO, Lennart Widström, at Le Meurice. He was passing through Paris and wanted to know how she’d got on. Dan met her that evening for dinner in a bistro near their hotel. She arrived late and said she didn’t want to eat. When he asked her if everything was all right she made no attempt to answer. Instead they talked about what time they should be out of the hotel next morning. Then she said she wished they didn’t have to go back. Ever.
At that moment some force rose up in her, some gathering of decision Dan could see in the set of her lips, but almost at once it was defeated. He did not know what had happened, only that something had.
‘We can stay on a while,’ he said, ‘another few days if you like.’
She shook her head. ‘That’s impossible.’
‘Why?’
She shrugged.
‘Why?’ he insisted.
Again she shrugged. She turned her face away as though she might be about to cry.
‘Should we talk?’ he asked her gently.
She said no. Talk was no fucking use whatsoever.
By now he suspected what it was. She’d learnt she didn’t get this job for nothing. Widström expected a thank-you in his hotel bedroom after lunch. Whether or not he succeeded Dan had no idea, but she deserved better. The thought of her being dependent for her livelihood on a man like Widström made him angry.
‘To hell with dinner,’ he told her. ‘Let’s have a bottle of champagne.’
By the time they were finishing the champagne she said, ‘There’s no use brooding, is there?’
‘No. Not a bit.’
She took the last drink from her glass and began to laugh. ‘You always know how to do it, DeeJay, don’t you?’
‘I only wish I did.’
‘Let’s get another bottle. This time it’s on me.’
The next day they took the plane home. Parting at Arlanda airport they told each other they’d be in touch.
‘Fuck that,’ she said. ‘We sound like strangers again.’
‘Come out to Blidö. Have dinner. Lunch. A swim in the sea. Anything.’
‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘what do you actually do out there? Alone at night?’
‘You’ll meet someone, Lena. You’ll marry and—’
‘Jesus, some of the loneliest people I know are married. Bricked up in their own little huts. What do you do, DeeJay? What do you do alone out there when you know you’re going mad?’
What did he do? He worked, walked, slept, saw Sune Isaksson almost every day now, Gabriel Rabban three times a week. Gabriel cut and weeded, fertilized with cow dung that came in a barrel on the pick-up driven by Nahrin. Sometimes Josef came and stayed to have coffee with Dan. French had become their language. Nahrin said that certain herbs could be planted now. The rest not until spring.
She brought Jamala with her. Josef explained that Jamala was one of Mary’s attributes. A Chaldean custom. In addition to Mary’s name (Miriam), other names referring to her were given to girls in baptism: Kamala (Miriam’s perfection), Jamala (her beauty), Afifa (her purity), Farida (her uniqueness). There were many such words.
‘You knew when she was born that Jamala would be beautiful?’
‘Yes,’ Josef answered gravely. ‘We all knew.’
Dan suspected that informing him of such things might be part of a pitch the family were making for his support, but a genuine bond was growing between them nonetheless. Josef’s background was clearly intellectual. His knowledge of his people’s past, of the great Mesopotamian cradle of human civilization, was vibrant. Before he married Nahrin, he said, he had been a teacher in Mosul. The furrows cut deeper into his cheeks when he smiled. Dan began to notice other things about him. His ears, set close to his head, gave his face a remarkably neat appearance. His nose was aquiline and, by European tradition, vaguely aristocratic. He admitted he knew little about agriculture. The land they had held in Iraq had belonged to Nahrin’s family. Her two brothers were killed within a year when called up by Saddam Hussein to fight against Iran.
‘Nahrin and I are cousins. We’d met a few times at family events like weddings, funerals. When her parents drew up a list of possible suitors she didn’t like them and she got in touch with me. I was a widower, at that time twice her age. Which could, of course, be the reason she chose me.’
The recklessness of what he had just said surprised him. He laughed again, throwing out his hands, a gesture which invited Dan to share the joke at his expense.
‘As you may have noticed, she is a strong-willed woman. It was in the months after our marriage that we began to fall in love. A common occurrence in our culture. You don’t do that in the West.’
Dan wanted to hear more about their family life in Iraq. Josef sighed, looking out over the garden where Gabriel worked. ‘A long story,’ he said. Meaning another time.
Already Dan had pieced together a rough mosaic. After the success over Iran in early 1983 internal fighting began in the north of Iraq. The Christians were heavily outnumbered.
‘The Baathists were fighting the Kurds,’ Josef said, ‘but they both wanted our land.’
Of their four children, two of the sons had fled with their families to Syria, the third to Lebanon. Their daughter, a girl as headstrong as her mother according to Josef, had married a man with land outside a town called Alqosh. When he spoke of his son-in-law Josef’s voice was carefully neutral. Dan got the impression of a macho type, a man who trained his three young sons, Josef’s grandsons, to shoot accurately, to shoot to kill. When their farm was attacked, Josef said, they hid Jamala in the big outdoor oven. Her father had made her practise lying there silently. She would have heard the screams, of course. She didn’t come out until everything was over. Her family lay in the yard, their throats cut. Since then she could neither hear nor speak. When they got to Sweden they had taken her to the district health clinic in Malmö. The doctor found no physical damage. Two years of psychiatric therapy made no difference. They said she would have to start in a school for the deaf and dumb, learn proper sign language. In the meantime they went to France and came back with Gabriel. Since he had always spoken Swedish with his mother, they asked him to teach Jamala to read and write in Swedish instead of Chaldean. That was to be her new language, her new life. I
t was slow painstaking work. Gabriel pointed to the word in her Swedish children’s book and formed its counterpart in Chaldean, then in Swedish, while she watched his lips. Line by line they advanced through the text.
They had been living on welfare until they got the job on the farm. At their ages, Josef said, their chances of getting any better work were small. A friend of his, an associate professor from the College of Agriculture and Forestry at Mosul University, was lucky to get work in a kebab restaurant. Such jobs were much sought after. Another, a forty-five-year-old eye surgeon, was delivering pizzas on a scooter.
‘Even the younger generation,’ Josef said, ‘the ones who’ve grown up here, they have problems getting work. With names like Selavas or Rabban who wants them?’
On the occasions when Nahrin came they reverted to Swedish though Josef had difficulty following.
‘After a certain age it’s too late,’ he maintained. ‘The language-learning part of the brain gives up. The cells are switched to other functions.’
Dan tried to communicate with Jamala through gestures. As his hands chopped the air laughter, puzzlement, agreement appeared on her face and vanished as fleetingly as wind across water. With small teeth she bit her lower lip or tossed her head in a movement a young deer might make. At moments he saw her take him in with a fierce childish candour. Her alertness was constant, as though, despite her deafness, she was forever listening for a sound she could not hear.
Occasionally Nahrin would sit outside with her back to a tree in Dan’s garden, Jamala beside her. Dan heard the words through the open window, words he didn’t understand though he recognized by now that they were Chaldean, a language Josef said had grown from Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke. Jamala watched her grandmother’s lips, her gestures. Judging by the changes in her expression – delight, fear, astonishment – she was being told a story. Her eyes narrowed as Nahrin’s tone changed, the soft pupils glittering with excitement. Her grandmother’s arms tightened around her in protection. Age-old myths unravelled in the tranquil garden outside Dan’s window.
Each time they left, Dan went to the doorway. Three of them called goodbye. Jamala waved. Silence then, and dark invaded the garden. He gave the cat that came by each day her milk. Steadily she lapped until the bowl was empty. Afterwards, she jumped onto the side of the range where the iron surface was still warm from lunchtime, and washed her face. Far off came the voice of a woman calling a dog. The cat stopped and looked at Dan, her pupils spreading. On one such day he remembered that it was his twenty-ninth wedding anniversary, the fourth he had spent alone.
By now August was nearing its end and Dan thought of Madeleine Roos, wondering when her baby would be born.
Lena sent him a tiger lily. It came with the same taxi as before.
‘I hope I didn’t wake you,’ the driver said. ‘I waited out in the lane. She told me five to seven or not at all.’
As usual there was a note with the flower: Thank you for coming to Paris. And putting up with me when I was a bore. Exactly five thousand four hundred hours have passed since we first met. Only two thousand one hundred and twenty left to the ten-thousand mark. Plan now and avoid last-minute panic. No name. No envelope either. An open card, signed Lena. It must have cost her well over a hundred crowns to send the flower like this. Where did she get the money? The taxi driver looked at him with interest.
Dan telephoned later that morning to thank her. Her aunt said she was away.
13
The day Anders appeared on the island the early September sky was immense, a huge dome of cloudless blue. Gabriel was removing tired summer flowers under Nahrin’s direction. Dan let her have her way. It was nice to hear her speak Chaldean. It was nice to have someone he could share decisions with. When she came he always went out to say hello, especially if Jamala was with her. His acrobatic attempts at conversation made Jamala giggle and sometimes burst into laughter.
‘Is good,’ Nahrin said. ‘Good. She not laugh, for a child too little.’
Unwilling to return indoors when everything was looking so beautiful, Dan had decided to walk to the shop and get a few weekend groceries. On the way home he made a detour along the coast. The sea was almost flat. Only light ripples gave life to the reflection of the blue sky.
When he turned inland and approached the house, he saw the car, a black BMW, the same one Madeleine had driven when she came with his birthday present. Anders stood looking at the view across the wide meadow. Something is wrong, was Dan’s first thought. Why drive all the way out here without ringing first?
This thought was still in his head as Anders approached, arms wide open. He took Dan in a warm embrace and, as they drew apart, Anders’s face opened in a smile, his eyes shining with happiness.
‘Dan, she’s here!’
‘Here?’
‘Here in the world,’ Anders laughed. ‘They’re coming home from hospital tomorrow.’
‘Congratulations,’ Dan said. ‘I’m happy for you both.’
‘I was going to ring you but since I’d decided to come out anyway I thought I’d tell you in person.’
Instead of accepting Dan’s suggestion that they go into the house for a coffee Anders asked if they could take a walk. He wanted to get to know the island a little. But first he went to the car to fetch an envelope of photographs he said he had collected from the photography shop only that morning. In them Madeleine looked radiant. Her slender face was illuminated with an inner light that caught at Dan. Connie had looked like this when Carlos was born.
Anders showed him dozens of pictures of Madeleine and the baby, some with Madeleine sitting up, her head angled to watch Kajsa’s tiny face, some showing the two of them lying together, mother and baby asleep or awake, some showing Kajsa hungrily sucking Madeleine’s breast with Madeleine’s eyes heavy in acquiescence or raised to those of the person behind the camera, locking the three of them together in the hospital room.
Dan studied each of the photos carefully. Thank God! he thought. It’s all worked out. Meanwhile Anders was telling him that there were hundreds of other photos, starting on the day Madeleine went into the hospital and including her first visitors, her mother and then her father, followed by cousins and aunts and uncles.
‘I’d never been really conscious of us as a big family,’ he said happily, ‘until they all came pouring in to see Kajsa, the first of the new generation on Madde’s side as well as on mine.’
He went back to his car to fetch the camera he had used, the latest Hasselblad model, probably the most expensive camera then on the market, with a new feature he called a focal plane shutter. The phrase meant nothing to Dan and he couldn’t even begin to listen to the explanations with the bundle of photographs still in his hand, the images of the mother and child still fresh in his mind.
‘A gift from Madde’s father,’ Anders said. ‘He wants photos of Kajsa from day one. A historical record of her every move. But let’s set off. I want to see what it was that affected Madde so deeply, what it was that began to take her out of her prenatal depression.’
Dan made no answer but Anders was too full of good spirits to notice.
‘I mean everyone talks of postpartum depression, right? Prenatal depression is unnatural. What normal expectant mother could possibly feel down because of what’s happening in her body? That’s how the reasoning goes. But in fact I saw in a hospital magazine that one woman in ten goes through it. And Madde had it so bad that I began to worry about her and the effect it might have on the baby. But that day on the island turned out to be the beginning of her recovery. It didn’t come at once but little by little as her pregnancy neared its term her energy was back. It’s a different world in the archipelago, isn’t it? Have you read Strindberg? Yes, of course you have, you probably know his work better than I do. The magnificent plays he wrote out here. And the novels! By the Open Sea. Have you read it?’
‘Yes.’
They were walking over by the east coast now, where Madeleine and Dan had w
alked, but it wasn’t at all the same thing. Five months ago the spring light had scoured everything clean, the rocks and the trees and the sea. Now, in early autumn, they walked along a dry path while Anders spoke of his plans. The house outside Norrtälje had a prospective buyer, he said. He’d been to the agency in Norrtälje this morning with a power of attorney from Madeleine’s parents once the buyer confirmed. He’d also increased the bridging loan so that he could make an offer for a small house or a cottage here on the island. Their flat in Stockholm was everything they wanted but they felt it would be healthy for the baby to have an island place they could come to on fine weekends and during the summer.
‘While Madde is still in hospital I thought I’d sneak out here to have a look and I must say I agree with her. It really is beautiful. I’m hoping to surprise her if I can find something good.’
They were on their way back now, walking past the church landing stage with the old patinaed bench, where Dan had so impulsively asked Madeleine if she was looking forward to the birth, and she had flinched beside him as if from a blow.
‘Dan, I’m going to ask a favour of you,’ Anders said. ‘You know the people out here and you know what’s going on. I was wondering – if you happened to hear of anything coming up, just something small and simple, could you give me a ring? It doesn’t have to be by the water. I’ll keep the boat in the marina near the ferry berth at Furusund. It’ll be easy to drive out to there. Use my business number when you ring so that Madeleine won’t suspect what we’re up to. I could come out and see it and maybe meet the owners before it’s even on the market. It would mean avoiding a lot of hassle, to say nothing of saving the seller an agent’s 5 per cent. Then I’d bring Madde out to see it and we’d clinch the deal. Do you think you could do that?’
In the Name of Love Page 14