She nodded.
I put my hand on her shoulder. She didn’t react.
“It’ll pass,” I said. “It’s just right now, that’s all. And I won’t be able to cope without your help. I can’t fight on two fronts. It’ll do me in.”
“I’ll do my best,” she said, looking up at me and putting her hand on mine.
“I’m glad,” I said.
Njaal and Vanja came bombing in from the hall. Linda took her hand back.
“I’ll go out and get those prawns, then,” I said. “Is there anything else we need? Wine, bread, lemons, mayonnaise, prawns.”
“We’ve got mayonnaise, I think, don’t we? In the fridge?”
“It’ll be ancient if we have. I’ll buy some more. Is there anything you’d like?”
The children started bouncing on the bed.
“Maybe those yellow berries, that fruit or whatever it is they’ve got there, you know,” said Linda. “In those small baskets. I can’t remember what they’re called. Do you know what I mean?”
I nodded. Somewhere Heidi was on her own and sad, I thought to myself.
“OK,” I said. “I’ll get some ice cream and strawberries as well, I think.”
“Get some candy for the children, then.”
“Will do,” I said, and went through into the hall. I stopped in the doorway of the children’s room; John was fast asleep on his belly, spread-eagled, his head resting on one arm, saliva dribbling from his mouth. I stood looking at him for a moment, then went back into the living room, where Heidi was sitting on the toy box, Christina must have put the lid back on, with a doll in one hand and a small blue plastic comb in the other.
“Do you want to come shopping with me, Heidi?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“Yes, come on,” I said. “It’ll be nice.”
“No, I said.”
“OK,” I said, and smiled, then went into the other room, where Geir was sitting on the sofa reading, while Christina was sitting in the chair across the table, skimming through a photo book.
“Just popping out to get the prawns,” I said.
“I’ll come with you,” said Geir, getting to his feet.
“No need,” I said. “Just buying prawns, that’s all.”
I didn’t want him to come, it would be too much the two of us, seen from where Linda was. But I couldn’t say no to his face. He would have to grasp the intention.
“It’ll be nice to get out,” he said, looking at Christina. “Is there anything we need?”
“I don’t think so,” she said.
Linda came in from the hall. From the look on her face and her movements I could see she wasn’t upset any more.
Maybe she and Christina could have a chat for a bit if we went out.
“I’ll pop out for the shopping, then,” I said.
“Can you take Heidi or Vanja with you?” she said.
“Heidi didn’t want to go. I can ask her again, though.”
I poked my head around the door.
“Put your shoes on. We’re going shopping.”
She looked up at me.
“Do I have to?” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Why doesn’t Vanja have to?”
“Because I want you to come. Come on.”
She got to her feet and went past me, put her sandals on, and stood waiting by the door while I put my own shoes on, patted my back pocket to make sure I had my wallet with my cards in it, then my front pocket, feeling its lumpy nest of keys, grabbed my sunglasses off the hat shelf, and opened the door.
Heidi was shy with Geir being with us in the elevator, she looked down at the floor. She could be shy with me too; sometimes if I caught her eye and smiled, she could look away with a sheepish little grin on her face. She was hardly ever like that in social situations and had been confident right from the start, but often in what was almost the opposite situation, the more intimate context, when the attention of a single person was directed toward her. With Vanja the opposite was true, she liked attention from one person and would even go looking for it, whereas in new social situations she would be shy and withdraw.
Shyness is a protective mechanism, and the interesting thing was that they were protecting different aspects of themselves. Did those aspects need protecting because they were particularly fragile or because they were particularly precious?
It was interesting too that they should both protect themelves by lowering their gaze, bowing their heads, turning away. Shyness was directly linked with the eyes, it was always their eyes they hid from view. They could respond if someone asked them something, but with their eyes cast down. So what were they protecting themselves against, what was it about being seen by another person? It wasn’t being seen as such, since there they were, in plain sight, their physical selves present in the space, rather it was being seen to be who they were, and that was contained in the eyes. They were protecting themselves against someone looking into their eyes and seeing who they were, what was inside them, and the eyes were the entrance to that, for which reason they had to be concealed. Animal young behaved differently; if, for instance, a person suddenly came into a room full of kittens, the kittens would scurry away and hide, but what they hid would be their physical selves, since they were vulnerable to attack and could be killed and eaten. Perhaps the children’s instinctive reaction to such intrusion was the same, yet in some more cultivated version, translated from the physical to the social world, from the body to the soul, which trembled with the fear of being taken.
Down on the ground floor, Geir pressed the button to open the elevator doors and Heidi took my hand as we walked the few meters to the front door, which closed slowly behind us, the barely audible buzz it made before clicking shut gradually drowned out by the sounds from outside, cars rumbling through the traffic lights, the voices of the customers sitting outside the Chinese takeaway, each with their own little box of noodles or rice in front of them, the voices and footsteps of those passing by, on their way to and from the city center.
“It’s that way,” I said, pointing across the square. The air felt warm, the sun angling down from above the Hilton hotel, a bit fuller in color now, a richer yellow than earlier in the day.
“I like Malmö,” said Geir. “I wouldn’t mind living here.”
“What’s stopping you?” I said.
Heidi took a little skip at my side. I gave her hand a little squeeze, and then another, and smiled when she looked up at me.
“Moving costs money. And money’s in short supply, as you know.”
“Everything’s a lot cheaper here,” I said.
“True,” he said. “But we’d have to do an apartment swap, rather than buying, so there’s not much chance, I’m afraid.”
“I can see that,” I said.
We went down the steps and crossed the square in front of the fountain, following the sidewalk along the street where the buses and taxis passed, then taking the first left toward the shop we were going to. It was called Delikatessen and apart from prawns they also sold lobsters, oysters, mussels, fish and crabs, as well as meat from selected suppliers, poultry, game, and well-hung beef, and cheeses too, and just about everything else one might associate with good eating, such as exclusive olive oils, red and white wine vinegars, olives, herbs and spices, salt flakes from France, freshly baked French bread and baguettes. On Saturday mornings the place was always full of people, Malmö’s upper echelons, or so I imagined, getting the shopping in for their social gatherings in the evening, but when we opened the door and stepped inside, the place was empty apart from two assistants in chef’s hats and white aprons, busy clearing away before closing time, so it seemed.
“I want to sit there,” said Heidi, pointing at the tall bar stools that surrounded two tables by the window.
I pulled one of them out and lifted her up onto it, nodding at the same time to one of the assistants who had stepped up behind the glass counter ready to serve us.
“Certainly,” he said. “How many were you thinking of?”
“We’re four adults and four children,” I said. “The children won’t eat much, so maybe two and a half, three kilos? Something like that?”
“I’d say two and a half ought to do it,” he said, snatching a white bag from a pile behind the counter with one hand, picking up his scoop with the other.
“Let’s make it just over two and a half, then,” I said.
“Right you are,” he said, and began scooping the prawns into the bag while I cast a glance at Heidi, who was sitting with both hands flat on the tabletop, watching the assistant. Geir stood with his hands behind his back at the counter, looking at the oysters.
I went over to Heidi, lifted her up, and carried her over to the counter just as the assistant put the bag down on the shiny scales. The pointer shot up to a kilo and a half and dithered there for a moment.
“Can you see the lobsters over there?” I said. “They live at the bottom of the sea.”
“I know,” she said.
“Aren’t they splendid?” I said.
She nodded.
Hauled up from the depths of the ocean and placed on display here, with their black peppercorn eyes and long, bright red tentacles.
“What’s that?” she said, indicating the red plastic nets full of mussels lying on their bed of crushed ice.
“Mussels,” I said.
“What?” she said.
“Musslor,” I said. “Blåmusslor.”
“Are they alive?”
“Yes.”
“But they don’t have eyes!” she said.
“No,” I said. “The shell is like their house. They live inside it.”
The assistant put a second bag on the scales. It weighed in at 1.3 kilos. His powers of assessment were impressive, I thought to myself, putting Heidi down and stepping up to the till on the counter at the other end of the narrow room.
“Anything else?” he asked.
“Some bread, perhaps. One of those baguettes over there. And maybe one of those,” I said, pointing at one of the large, stone-shaped loaves.
“Certainly,” he said, dropping each into separate bags. I took my card out of my back pocket.
“Can you think of anything else we need?” I said to Geir.
“No,” he said. “Unless you were thinking of a crème brûlée for dessert?”
I shook my head.
“Ice cream and fruit.”
“As ever,” he said.
“Are you getting tired of it?” I asked him, glancing at the assistant as he entered the amounts into the till.
“Tired, me? Not at all. I’m a traditionalist. As long as you’ve got those wafers you always buy to go with it, that’ll do me.”
“You can’t get them in Malmö. They’re a Stockholm thing.”
“I might have known,” he said.
The assistant told me the amount.
“OK,” I said, and put my card into the reader. I entered my PIN, which was no longer 0000, but nearly as easy to remember, since it consisted of the four figures in the top right corner of the key pad, 2536, took the two bags he handed me across the counter, waited for the message to appear on the display telling me the transaction was accepted, pulled out my card, put it in its little wallet, and slid it into my back pocket again as the assistant tore off the receipt and handed it to me.
“Thanks, have a nice day,” I said, and stuffed the piece of paper into my other back pocket, which was a kind of archive for all my receipts.
“Same to you,” he said.
“Come on, Heidi,” I said. She was still standing at the shellfish counter looking at the display, but turned and came running to put her hand in mine, and we went out onto the sidewalk, where the air between the four-story buildings was warm and still.
“Where to now?” said Geir.
“The liquor store. Then Hemköp after that,” I said.
“No need to break the bank for our sake,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Besides, I like spending money. The more the merrier.”
“Tell me about it,” he said.
“What’s a sausage at slaughtering time,” I said. “That’s what Mom used to say when we did the Christmas shopping and there was something I was pestering her for. She never had much money, but if there was ever anything I needed, clothes for instance when I was at the gymnas, or later, when I was in college, she always gave me the money for it. I never understood that. If she didn’t have any money, how come she could suddenly afford to give me some? Now I’ve figured it out. Money’s relative. It’s an incredibly vague entity. Whenever I buy clothes for the kids I always buy a great big pile, because they can’t go without. Then I’ll grab a couple of CDs while I’m at it, because I need music when I’m working, and that’s where the money comes from. Or I might blow a couple of thousand on a fantastic pair of shoes. What happens then is there’s no more money left in the account, or very little. So I go through all our pockets, all the cupboards and drawers, and scrape together what I can find, maybe pick up the deposit on all our bottles or something, and then I buy some milk, bread, and spaghetti, and ignore all the bills. After a while, the reminders start coming in, and if I’ve got the money I pay them off, if I haven’t I’ll ignore them until the next step. It’s not that long ago that someone came around with a statement of claim or whatever it’s called, which I had to sign. Eventually, it’ll come to enforcement and they can seize your property. But long before that happens I’ll have money coming in again and be able to pay. I never connect the clothes for the kids or the CDs with suddenly having no money left, or someone coming to the door with a claim, that’s something else entirely.”
“We could never live like that,” said Geir. “In our house everything’s planned and by the book.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” I said. “But it does make things a whole lot easier. It takes it out of you, not being able to manage things properly.”
We came onto the square and Heidi let go of my hand and ran up to the fountain. Geir and I followed her.
“I’m not sure you’re right about that,” he said. “I’d love to just let things go sometimes. But I can’t.”
Heidi had put an ice-cream wrapper in the water, it bobbed gently up and down on the ripples made by the fountain. I recognized the wrapper, it belonged to an ice cream called Strawberry something. Strawberry Delight? Strawberry Dream? Pink ice cream with a white chocolate coating.
“To will is to have to will, as Ibsen put it,” said Geir.
“Now is the time to shut up! was something else he said. But there’s a saying I believe in. Or not a saying, exactly, more a popular belief, to the effect that losing money is a good sign, meaning more will be coming your way. I totally believe that. The more you tighten your finances, the narrower the channels become that the money goes through. If everything’s wide open, there’s always going to be room for more.”
“If you ever get the Nobel Prize, it won’t be for economics,” he said.
“It’s not a bad theory, is it? I could actually be on to something! I could write about the emotions of economics, instead of the mathematics of economics.”
“You’re the most optimistic person I know,” he said. “A depressed optimist. That’s what you are.”
“It’s got nothing to do with optimism. It’s all about accepting the way of things. This is how it is. Either you’ve got money, in which case you buy stuff, or else you haven’t, in which case you don’t.”
“But you’ve just been talking about all the stuff you buy when you haven’t got any money.”
“But I have got money! If I’d saved it to pay the bills next week, I wouldn’t have had any.”
Heidi floated her ice-cream wrapper all the way around the fountain. When she appeared again she waved at us.
“Come on,” I said. “We’ve got to get going.”
“I’m all wet,” she said.
“You’ll dry in the sun,” I said, taking her hand in mine and walking on just as a double-decker bus stopped outside the entrance to the Hilton.
“I still remember what a fantastic feeling it was to find an ATM in Bergen that wasn’t connected to my own bank, so I could take out money I didn’t have. It was like Christmas. Or when someone unexpectedly agreed to lend me a couple of hundred kroner.”
“Or twenty thousand.”
“You’ll get it back as soon as my advance comes in. Don’t worry.”
I had borrowed twenty thousand Swedish kronor from him, which he had taken from a savings account of his that he never touched, money set aside for harder times. Linda had borrowed a similar amount from her friends, who also had money put away for the future. When Linda and I started a joint account together, we arranged for an amount to be transferred automatically into a savings account once a month, but either there wasn’t enough money in the account for the transaction to go through, or else we spent the savings as soon as they went in.
Linda wanted so badly for us to have a savings account with money in it to support our future and our children’s future. It had enormous symbolic value to her. It was what proper families did, and she wanted more than anything else that our family should be a proper family. Her romantic dreams were about ordinary life.
We stopped at the crossing. Over by the Hilton, retirees from the bus were shuffling off along the sidewalk. A classic American convertible with the top down came cruising along Södra Förstadsgatan, its engine purring. In Arendal in the seventies American cars were as cool as you could get. Here it just looked out of place, some clueless idiot out showing off.
“Linda’s right too,” I said. “Even if you don’t think so. But if it’s going to be hell for me, it’s going to be hell for everyone else too.”
“Why wouldn’t I think so?”
I gave a shrug.
The light changed to green and we ambled over the road in a little throng of pedestrians.
“I saw the look you gave me when she started talking about how awful it’s going to be for her,” I said. “I suppose that’s what I meant.”
“What sort of look was that?”
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 38