Shame

by Karin Alvtegen

  Vanja might not think that Maj-Britt had any real problems, everything seemed perfectly normal, but Maj-Britt knew better. It was because of all those thoughts and the foul and loathsome things they led her to do that God didn’t want her. She was terrified of going blind, or of hair growing on her palms. That’s what happened to people who did what she’d been doing, but she’d never dared talk to Vanja about all that.

  She heard her mother working in the kitchen. Dinner would soon be ready; after they ate, Maj-Britt was supposed to head off for choir practice. It was no longer the children’s choir, which she had left when she turned fourteen. The past four years she had been singing in the church choir. Altos and sopranos and basses and tenors. She was a talented singer and had managed to convince her parents to let her sing in the parish choir, not just the one at her own Congregation. They’d agreed eventually on condition that she sing with the Congregation choir if there were ever a day when both choirs needed her.

  He sang first tenor, and he did it with bravura. The choirmaster always chose him if the piece contained difficult passages.

  ‘Göran, you take the high G. The rest of you can stay on the third if you can’t reach that high.’

  He had noticed her, she knew that, even though they had only exchanged a few words. She always sat with the other sopranos during the break, but sometimes their eyes found their way to each other amongst the altos and basses, just flicking over each other for a moment before shyly moving on. But this evening would be different. This evening there would be no choir to hide their glances, it would just be the two of them and the choirmaster, because they had been chosen as soloists for the Christmas concert. It was a tremendous feeling to have been selected. And especially with Göran.

  As she approached the church she saw him from a distance. He was standing on the church steps reading his sheet music. Unconsciously, she slowed down because she didn’t know if she could dare be alone with him. If the choirmaster was late they would be left standing there on the steps, and what would she say then? He raised his eyes and caught sight of her, and with her heart pounding she kept walking. He smiled as she approached.

  ‘Hi.’

  She greeted him quickly and then lowered her eyes. She felt as if she were burning when she looked directly at him, and her eyes kept flicking off in other directions.

  There was a long silence, a little too long to be comfortable. They both stood there, leafing through their sheet music as if they had never seen it before. Maj-Britt realised in amazement that Göran, who otherwise was always used to being noticed and listened to, didn’t seem to know what to say either.

  ‘Have you had time to practise at all?’

  She replied gratefully. ‘Yes, a little bit. But I think it’s quite hard without accompaniment.’

  Göran nodded, and the next moment he said the strangest thing, which in the days to come she would keep repeating to herself.

  ‘I’m almost more nervous about singing in front of just you than I am about the entire Christmas concert.’

  He smiled shyly. And with the sound of the choirmaster’s footsteps on the gravel path her eyes dared meet his for the first time.

  ‘So we’ll take it from the top without the introduction, and then you go directly to the second verse after the refrain.’

  Maj-Britt had sat down on the edge of one of the pews. Although Göran had admitted how nervous he was, she felt thankful that she didn’t have to go first. He wasn’t the only one who was nervous. In a daze she sat there, astonished at his words. She watched him in front of her, following his slightest movement; he was so talented and so handsome. With his eyes closed he began to sing. His sonorous voice was jubilant, and she felt a chill run down her spine. Göran had laid his jacket on the pew next to her, and she secretively stuck her hand in it and touched the lining at the very spot that usually pressed against his heart. No man had ever been allowed to come near her, but now a little stray desire fluttered inside her chest. She wanted to be close to him, assure herself that she held his interest, because when he wasn’t there he was still present inside her heart. It was inconceivable that a person who had never had anything to do with her life could suddenly fill her whole being.

  When he was finished singing he opened his eyes and looked at her. In a moment of silent understanding they both knew.

  Afterwards she told Vanja all about it. Again and again she told her what had happened and what he had said and in what tone of voice and how he had looked when he said it, and Vanja listened with patient interest and offered precisely the interpretations that Maj-Britt wanted to hear. In the evenings she lay in bed and counted the hours to the next choir practice when she would get to see him again. But nothing turned out the way she had hoped. Mixed in with the rest of the choir they were again like strangers to each other. Göran was the centre of attention as he always had been, and there was not a trace of the uncertainty he had revealed to her. The few times their eyes met they lost contact at once and drifted off amidst the choir.

  Vanja had given her some good advice.

  ‘But, Majsan, you have to talk to him, you know that, don’t you?’

  But what was she going to say?

  ‘Well, think up something you know will spark his interest. What else does he do besides sing in the choir? There must be something else he’s interested in. Or drop something right in front of him so you have a reason to start talking. You must have some sheet music or something that you could drop…’

  It was easy for Vanja; she was so brave. But Maj-Britt’s sheet music was almost glued to her hands, and to make it flutter all the way over to the tenors would take a miracle. But He who performed such things was very clearly not interested. And Vanja was not satisfied. After each choir practice she rang to hear all the details.

  Finally, Vanja herself solved the problem. Through shrewd detective work amongst her friends, she ascertained that Göran was interested too. So, when pressuring Maj-Britt didn’t work, she took the matter into her own hands. One evening she rang Maj-Britt and asked her to come down to the kiosk. Maj-Britt didn’t want to, and for the first time Vanja got angry and called her a bore. Maj-Britt didn’t want to be a bore, especially not in Vanja’s eyes, so in spite of her parents’ surprise she put on her jacket and headed off. She wasn’t allowed to use make-up, but she usually borrowed some from Vanja, carefully wiping it off before she got home. She hadn’t even brushed her hair before she set off, and she fretted about it as she neared the kiosk. Because there he stood. Right next to the ice-cream sign by the bicycle stand. He smiled and said hi and she did too and then they just stood there, shy and embarrassed, and it felt just like it did the time they had stood on the church steps. Vanja never showed up. Or Bosse, the boy that Göran was waiting for. Maj-Britt kept glancing at her watch to assure him that she really was waiting for someone, and Göran did his best to keep the conversation going. They talked exclusively about the two people who hadn’t shown up yet. And why they hadn’t. It took them twenty minutes before they clicked. Bosse was Vanja’s cousin, and as the seconds ticked by Maj-Britt realised that Vanja probably had no intention of appearing at the kiosk that evening either. She had decided to give fate a little push. Göran was the first to figure it out.

  ‘If Bosse doesn’t come and Vanja doesn’t either, what do you think we should do?’

  Maj-Britt had no idea. What do you do on a Tuesday evening when you’re eighteen and have just realised that your secret love is no longer secret, and that he is standing on the other side of the bicycle stand and has also just been revealed? At that precise moment it began to rain, and neither of them really wanted to leave. It wasn’t a little drizzle, it was a cloudburst that came out of nowhere. The kiosk owner had started to close and was winding in the awning that would have protected them.

  It was Göran who first started to laugh. He tried to hold it back, but then the rain came down so hard that there was no resisting it any longer. Maj-Britt began to laugh too. Liberated
, she let him take her hand and they ran off together under the cover of his jacket.

  ‘We could go over to my house for a while if you want.’

  ‘Can we do that?’

  They had stopped on the other side of the road where they normally would have parted. He seemed surprised by the question.

  ‘Why not?’

  She didn’t answer, only smiled uncertainly. Some things were so simple for other people.

  ‘I have my own entrance so you don’t even have to meet my mother and father if you don’t want to.’

  She hesitated a tiny, tiny bit, but then nodded and let herself be drawn into all the wondrous things that were about to happen.

  As he had described, he had his own entrance. A door at the end of the house and behind it a stairway to the second floor. He even had a little cooker with two burners and an oven, almost like his own flat. And why shouldn’t he? He was twenty years old, after all, and could have moved away if he’d wanted to. She could have moved out too, for that matter. Yet, the idea was inconceivable.

  He opened a cupboard in the hallway and gave her a fluffy towel to dry off the worst of the rain. He hung her soaked jacket on the back of a chair and moved it in front of the heater. He had only a small hallway and one room with a dark-brown bookcase, an unmade bed and a desk with a chair. The sound of a TV in his parents’ part of the house revealed that you could hear every sound in the house.

  ‘I wasn’t sure if you would come.’

  He went over to the unmade bed and tossed the spread over it.

  ‘Would you like some tea?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  He picked up a saucepan from the cooker, which stood on the low bookshelf.

  ‘Sit down if you like.’

  He disappeared into the hall, going to what she assumed was a bathroom, as she heard water running and the clink of china. She looked around to find somewhere to sit. It was either the chair with the wet jacket on it by the heater, or the unmade bed. She stood where she was. But after he had made tea and she held one of the mismatched cups in her hands and he asked whether she wouldn’t like to sit next to him, she complied. They drank their tea and he did most of the talking. He told her about his future plans. He wanted to move away and maybe apply to the music college in Stockholm or Gothenburg. He was tired of this provincial town. Hadn’t she, who sang so well, ever thought about doing something with her voice? She let herself be swept along by his dreams, amazed at all the possibilities he suddenly conjured up. Even though she was eighteen and an adult, the thought had never entered her mind that there were alternatives to those the Congregation regarded as acceptable. She had never realised that being an adult meant that she was a grown-up with the right to make her own decisions about her life. There was only one thing she knew for sure at that moment: she didn’t want to be anywhere else than where she was right now. In Göran’s room with an empty teacup in her hand. Everything else was unimportant.

  And after that evening everything was as it should be. Months went by and outwardly everything looked the same. But inside a change was stirring. A reckless curiosity was emerging which began to question all limitations.

  No God in the world could have anything against what she finally was able to experience. Not even her parents’ God.

  But for safety’s sake it was best that her parents didn’t find out a thing.

  17

  Seven days after the accident Åse called. The only time Monika had left her flat was when she drove her mother to the cemetery and then stopped by the book-shop to buy more books. She was almost up to the nineteenth century, and no detail of Swedish history had been too insignificant to memorise. Learning facts had never been a problem for Monika.

  ‘I’m sorry I haven’t called before now, but I haven’t really felt like doing anything. I just wanted to thank you for coming, Monika. I didn’t dare call Börje at home because he’s already had a minor heart attack and I didn’t know whether he could handle a phone call like that.’

  Åse’s voice sounded tired and flat. It was hard to believe it was the same person.

  ‘I was happy to do it.’

  There was a pause. Monika kept reading about the crop failures of 1771.

  ‘I drove out there yesterday.’

  ‘To the scene of the accident?’

  She turned a page.

  ‘No, to see her. Pernilla.’

  Monika stopped reading and sat up on the sofa.

  ‘You drove out there?’

  ‘I just had to, I never could have lived with myself otherwise. I had to look her in the eye and tell her how sorry I am.’

  Monika put down her book.

  ‘So how was she?’

  There was a long sigh.

  ‘It’s all so ghastly.’

  Monika wanted to know more. Get every detail out of Åse that might be useful.

  ‘But how was she?’

  ‘Well, what can I say? Sad. But composed, more or less. I think she’s been taking sedatives to get through the first few days. But that little girl…’

  Her voice broke.

  ‘She was crawling around on the floor and laughing and it was so… it’s so awful what I’ve done.’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault, Åse. When an elk appears like that you don’t have a chance.’

  ‘But I shouldn’t have been driving so fast. I knew that there weren’t any wildlife fences on that part of the road.’

  Monika hesitated. None of it was Åse’s fault. It had all been fate. Except that the wrong person was sitting in the passenger seat.

  There was a silence and Åse collected herself. She sniffled a few times but stopped crying.

  ‘Mattias’s parents were there for a couple of days, but they live in Spain so now they’ve gone back. Pernilla’s father is alive but apparently suffers from dementia and is in some home somewhere, and her mother died ten years ago, but she was getting help from the Council. Some volunteer crisis group that comes over and takes care of her daughter so she can get some sleep.’

  Monika listened with interest. A volunteer crisis group?

  ‘Which crisis group was it, do you know?’

  ‘No.’

  She wrote down crisis group???? under her notes about Jacob Magnus Sprengporten and underlined the words several times.

  ‘I was so afraid that she’d be angry or something but she wasn’t. She even thanked me for being brave enough to come over. Börje and Ellinor came along, I didn’t dare go alone. She was so grateful to find out all the details about how it happened; she said it helped to know.’

  Monika could feel her body stiffen.

  ‘What sort of details?’

  ‘About the accident itself. How it was at the accident site. And how he had been during the course. I said that he had talked a lot about her and Daniella.’

  Monika needed to know more about those details that Pernilla had been told, but it was a hard question to ask. Åse left her no choice. She did her best to try to make the question sound natural.

  ‘Not that it makes any difference, but… did you say anything about me?’

  There was a brief pause. Monika was on tenterhooks. What if Åse had managed to ruin everything?

  ‘No…’

  She was staring into space. Then she got up and walked towards the computer in her office; she was halfway there when Åse asked the question.

  ‘But how are you feeling now?’

  She stopped. Her eyes fixed on the wall above the computer screen. Åse had broached the question so cautiously, almost timidly, as if she scarcely dared utter it.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  She sounded sharper than she intended.

  ‘Well, I just mean that I thought you might have known that… or maybe you had thought that… but there really isn’t any reason for…’

  For about half a minute Åse did her best to try and erase her question in a long ramble about unrelated trivia. Monika stood quite still. Her guilt belonged to her; it was n
obody else’s business. But the question made her see that Åse had also recognised it and that it was absolutely essential to keep Åse away from Pernilla. She couldn’t risk having Åse running over there and sooner or later revealing that everything was actually Monika’s fault.

  ‘Are you still there?’

  Monika replied at once.

  ‘Yes, I’m here. I was just thinking.’

  ‘I don’t know quite what to do. I’d like so much to help her in some way.’

  Monika sat down at the computer and logged on to the Internet, going to the Council’s home page. She typed ‘crisis group’ in the search box and got a hit at once. She scanned the screen quickly. The hibiscus on the windowsill needed water. She went over and pressed her finger into the dry soil.

  ‘The fact is, Åse, that I think the best thing you can do for her is leave her alone. There’s nothing you can do. I’m telling you this as a doctor because I have experience with these matters. You have to try to distinguish between what’s good for her and what’s really only for your own sake.’

  Åse was silent and Monika waited. She wanted to have Pernilla to herself. She was her responsibility and no one else’s.

  Åse sounded almost bewildered when she continued.

  ‘Do you really think so?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve been through this before in similar cases.’

  Silence again. She pinched off a dry leaf and headed for the kitchen.

  ‘Try to get hold of yourself, Åse, your family needs you. What happened can’t be undone, and the best thing you can do is to try and get on with your own life and realise that nothing was your fault.’

  She went over to the worktop and opened the cupboard concealing the rubbish bag. She crumbled the dry leaf in her hand and let the pieces fall amongst the rest of the rubbish.

  ‘I’ll call you in a few days and see how you’re doing.’