“Mommy, Mommy, I carried the strawberries,” Heidi called out.
I felt a brief tingle of happiness in my chest, at the same time registering that Vanja and Njaal were still in the bedroom as I pressed the bathroom door handle down. I dropped my pants and sat down on the toilet seat. Next to me was an issue of the Swedish football magazine Offside. Argentina was due to play in the Andes, where the air was so thin it was by no means unusual for players to pass out, they even had oxygen tanks ready to go!
I could hear Vanja’s voice next door, then Njaal’s. I guessed that Vanja was showing him her computer game, the one she got for her birthday. It was about dogs, and the idea was to get them to do various things. Most of the functions were still too difficult for her, but some she managed, like making the dog jump on and off a log to snatch different objects as they came flying through the air. Heidi had been given the matching version with cats, but she was still too little to get anything out of it and was happy enough watching her older sister play.
A small silverfish had paused on one of the floor tiles, perhaps twenty centimeters in front of my feet. It looked like a trilobite or some other small fossilized creature from prehistory. Such a simple creation. There was something crude and matter-like about it, as if it were a tiny blob of clay or a catfish that had been given feet.
I leaned forward to squash it under my finger, but the moment I moved it darted away toward the wall and vanished through a gap under the baseboard.
There were probably quite a few under the laundry baskets. And most likely in all the dust that had collected under the window in the corner, too. A little colony of silverfish.
Footsteps sounded in the hall, and since Vanja and Njaal were still in the bedroom it had to be Heidi. The children hardly ever used this bathroom, so even though the door was unlocked there was no reason to fear they would come in. It did happen on occasion, because they were by no means entirely predictable, though only rarely. With Linda it was different, if I heard her coming I would grip the door handle and press it upward in case she tried to press it down and come in. The first time Yngve had come to see us here he had asked for a key, finding it unthinkable to go to the toilet without being able to lock the door. It had been just as unthinkable for me too, or at least deeply alien, and for the first few weeks I had felt exposed and vulnerable, but then I got used to it. Somehow I always knew where everyone was and if anyone approached I would hear them. That we didn’t have a key was because of Vanja and Heidi, so they wouldn’t lock themselves in. It was about the only safety measure we had when it came to the children; all the sockets were open, all the shelves and cupboards unsecured, and the stove too, and the sharp knives and scissors lay within easy reach in one of the bottom drawers. Nothing had happened so far, and nothing would, because parents have a keen sense of what their children might conceivably get up to, and one thing I was certain I would never see was Vanja or Heidi with a big kitchen knife in their hands, or John crawling about on the stove like a little monkey. Moreover, I always knew exactly where they were, and almost always what they were doing. Of course, all these assumptions could be invalidated in the space of a few horrible seconds, but I didn’t believe that would ever happen, and I never felt less than comfortable about their safety at home.
Outside the door, Heidi passed by and went into the bedroom. I picked the magazine up again and carried on reading. Once, we caught a ling in the sea off Torungen, I suddenly remembered. It had been windy, but the air had been warm; it must have been sometime in the summer. We were in the boat Dad bought when I was eleven or twelve, a seventeen-foot Rana Fisk with a twenty-five-horsepower Yamaha outboard. Yngve was with us, his hair blown to the side, and of course Dad, that dark figure of which I was so watchful. Waves chopped and dashed against the yellow fiberglass hull. The line, running barely visible through the air, down into the blue water. The first glimpses of a fish, which instantly lent depth to all the blue, rather like the first stars in a sky still light in early evening. A dense green shape, now here, now there, whiter with Dad’s every pull.
What was it?
A long, regular body, yellow-gray and white, with a hideous face and wide, bulging eyes.
“It’s a deepwater fish,” Dad said. “A ling, I think.”
Inquisitive and filled with pity, I stared at it. Its stomach had burst, he said, and dropped it onto the floor of the boat, where it lay lifeless, before he cast his line out again, and then I remembered I was holding one too, and tugged it hard, gripping it tight between my fingers.
The feeling of floating on the surface of such enormous depths.
Dad.
What had I done to him?
A stab of distress and terror went through my chest. A moment later, when I turned on the tap and looked at myself in the mirror, I saw no sign of my inner turmoil. If I hadn’t seen that same face, those same eyes, so many times before, and associated them so closely with who I was, they could just as easily have belonged to someone else.
My eyes looked sad, my features stark and, with the deep furrows that lined my cheeks and brow, mask-like.
I twisted the thin pole with the little knob on the end and opened the blind, looked across at the hotel, above which the evening sun angled down, there were people sitting on the steps of the square and on the half-meter-high wall my children always wanted to balance on whenever we went to the park just along the road, and at the same time I took the towel from the peg and dried my hands. There was no getting away from the guilt I felt, it had transplanted itself from the abstract reality of the mind, where it could be countered by abstract means, to the physical reality of the body, where it could not be countered at all because the body had no means of defense but itself, and could only run, walk, sit, sleep, and a few other such things. It felt as if I were a room, and inside that room with me there was something horrifying. It was no use running, because if I ran, the whole room ran with me. There was no escape, for the simple reason that it was there. It didn’t matter if what I’d done was reasonable, if I was within my rights or not, because it was there, indisputable, inescapable, and all I could do was wait until it was something that was there no more.
The door behind me opened, and I spun round.
It was Heidi. There were tears in her eyes.
“What’s the matter, lilla tjejen?” I said, hanging the towel back on the peg.
She came up and wrapped her arms around my legs. I lifted her up and kissed her cheek.
“Won’t they play with you?” I asked.
She shook her head and stared stiffly into space.
“Come on, you can stay with me and we’ll make some dinner.”
“I don’t want to,” she said.
I went out with her on my arm.
“How about a film, then?” I said. “Or Bolibompa? It’ll be on in a minute.”
She nodded.
I went through the hall and into the living room, where I put her down on the sofa – I could hear Linda, Christina, and Geir talking in the other room – and looked around for the remote. Normally it was on the bookshelf where the children couldn’t reach it. But it wasn’t there.
Oh, for crying out loud.
John started wailing in the bedroom. I heard Linda get to her feet, and a second later I caught a fleeting glimpse of her as she passed the open doorway while I scanned the long windowsill that ran the length of the far wall. It wasn’t there either.
Heidi looked up at me.
“I can’t find the remote,” I said.
She stared toward the table in front of her. There it was, halfhidden under the newspaper Linda must have been reading while we were out.
“There it is,” I said. “Now, let’s see!”
Linda came in with John on her arm. He was curled up like a little monkey, pressing his cheek to her chest.
“Put Bolibompa on,” she said.
“That’s what I’m doing,” I said.
When the sound came on and the picture appeared, John
turned his head to see. Linda put him down next to Heidi, and he accepted this without protest. TV was like a drug to them.
“What time do you think we should eat?” said Linda.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Around seven, maybe?”
“What about the children? I can’t see them shelling prawns.”
“That’s a point,” I said. “I didn’t think of them when we were shopping. Do we have anything? I can have a look,” I said.
Njaal and Vanja came charging through the hall.
“Is Bolibompa on?” Vanja called out.
“In a minute,” I called back, went into the kitchen, and opened the fridge. There were some eggs. Carrots, potatoes, yellowing broccoli. Half a bag of fish cakes. The freezer next to it was mainly full of things Linda’s mother had made for us, and various cuts of meat she’d bought, besides some peas, a few half-empty bags of chicken drumsticks, a couple of loaves of bread we’d frozen and forgotten about. But oh, thank goodness, there on the bottom shelf was a pizza! I looked up at Linda, who was standing behind me.
“They’ll be more than happy with pizza, don’t you think?”
She nodded.
“I’ll make it for them now,” I said. “They can eat in front of the TV.”
I took the pizza box out and put it on the counter, switched the oven on, found the scissors in the drawer, tore off the long strip along the side of the box, tipped it so the pizza itself, round and surprisingly heavy, slid out into my hand, snipped open the see-through plastic it was wrapped in, which was stiff and had a kind of crinkly crispness about it, nothing like the see-through plastic of the bags we bought our fruit in, which were looser in some way, or the thin cling film for wrapping food up before putting it in the fridge. Nor was it anything like the slightly thicker, more durable plastic that covered the corn-on-the-cob we sometimes bought, or the six-packs of beer.
“In that case we might as well eat after they’ve gone to bed,” said Linda.
“Sounds good to me,” I said, taking the pizza out through the opening I had made in the wrapper and allowing it to rest in my palm, as if my hand were a serving plate, while with the other I pulled out the metal drawer underneath the stove and took out a mottled brown or, more accurately, blackened baking sheet on which I placed the pizza before sliding it into the oven, crumpling the wrapper and taking it to the bin under the sink, which was so full I had to press the garbage down with my fists in order to make room. Just as I had done so and was about to close the cupboard door, momentarily occupied by the thought of the garbage rising slowly up to the lid again, the phone rang.
I went warily into the hall. Someone had intruded into our home, he or she was here now, ringing their presence out into the room. I paused at the table under the mirror and picked up the phone. It was an 04 number, meaning it was from someone in Malmö.
“Yeah, hello?” I said.
“Hi, Stefan here.”
“Hi, Stefan!”
“How’s it going, all right?”
“Fine,” I said, noticing the two bags of groceries I’d dumped next to the shoes and forgotten all about. “How about you?”
“Fine, too. We were thinking of going to the beach tomorrow. Would you like to come with us? We can just take Vanja along, if that’s better for you.”
“Sounds great,” I said. “Only we’ve got visitors at the moment, so I think we’re going to be spending the day with them, I’m afraid.”
“Oh, I see. It’s short notice, I know. Still, not to worry.”
“Some other time.”
“Definitely. Speak to you soon, then.”
“Yeah. Take care.”
“Thanks, same to you. Hej då.”
“Hej då.”
I hung up, took the two bags with me into the kitchen and put them down on the table, put the paper bags of prawns in the fridge and the two loaves on the big cutting board, bent down to the oven and looked at the pizza that lay inside, illuminated in its little compartment as if it were on TV, but of course it was nowhere near ready yet, I had only put it in a few minutes ago.
Bolibompa’s signature tune came from the living room. I went and stood in the doorway. Christina was sitting in a chair with Njaal in her lap, Linda on the sofa with John in hers, and Heidi snuggled up to her, Vanja on a chair in the middle of the floor. All the blinds were down, but there was still so much sunlight in the room it was hard to see the picture on the screen.
I ought to have sat down with Vanja in my lap. But I couldn’t let Geir sit on his own in the other room. I could see what it would look like from his point of view, each of us sitting there with a child in our lap, watching children’s TV. It didn’t look good.
I went up to the back of Vanja’s chair, put one hand on her belly and kissed the top of her head. She didn’t so much as look up at me, concentrating all her attention on the television, and so I stepped past the table and went into the other room, where Geir was standing at the bookshelf.
“Going out for a smoke?” he said as he turned around.
“Good guess,” I said. “Are you coming with me?”
He nodded, poured himself a cup of coffee, and stepped outside. I filled my own cup with what was left and followed him out. He had taken my chair again, and again my inner being protested at the way everything was wrong with the angle at which I now had to sit. Maybe it was the fact I had my back to the door that made me so uncomfortable. I put my feet up on the railing and lit a smoke.
“Njaal and Vanja are getting along all right,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “They’re doing great together. Christina’s happy too.”
“Is she?”
“Yes, she likes being here. Plus it’s a joy for her to see Njaal having such a good time.”
“I don’t understand that,” I said. “About being here, I mean.”
“I like it here too.”
“It must be the mess of the place.”
“Yeah, it’s that as well. There’s a nice, relaxed feel about things. It feels free.”
“I’m glad you think so,” I said. “Personally, I’m anything but relaxed.”
“You’re not stressed by us being here, are you?”
“No, not at all. It’s all this business about Gunnar.”
“There’s nothing you can do about it. Just let it go. What happens happens.”
“Yes,” I said.
Our top-floor neighbors in the building farther along were sitting out on their balcony eating. They were perhaps twenty meters away, but up here among the rooftops it was close enough to be encroaching, and when I was on my own and they were sitting out I could hear everything they said if I concentrated and they didn’t lower their voices the way they might if they knew I was there. On the other side, at the end of our own building, I could stare right into the kitchen of an elderly couple, they often sat there smoking, and after three years their habits were nearly as familiar to me as my own. I assumed they looked at me in the same way; at any rate, our eyes occasionally met and we always looked away. Such visual encounters were strange, our entering fleetingly into each other’s minds in that way, they into mine, certainly, they meant we somehow knew each other, balancing continually between seeing and knowing on the one hand, and looking away and not wanting to know on the other. Opposite, in the apartments belonging to the same building as the balcony couple, I could likewise gaze in on the private lives of families, couples, and singles, usually without interest, merely noting what I saw, but every now and then something happened that insisted on occupying me for a moment, for instance the time one couple, the corner of whose kitchen was as much as I could see, suddenly were a family with a little baby. When the child was visible, half seated, half lying in its baby bouncer, it was as if it were presiding over them, because everything they did was in some way related to its wants and needs, which was a completely new thing.
“You’ve done nothing wrong,” said Geir.
“But I have, obviously,” I said. “I’m
trying to live with it.”
“Your dad’s dead. Your grandma’s dead.”
“And your empathy’s dead.”
“Look who’s talking.”
“Imagine there’s a life after this,” I said. “If we take that thought seriously. Only the body dies. The soul lives on in the world to come, in whatever form. What if it’s true? I mean, really true. It struck me the other day. What if there is life after death? It’d mean my dad’s out there somewhere waiting for me. And he’s going to be angry as hell.”
Geir laughed.
“You can relax. He’s dead as a dodo.”
“Gunnar isn’t, though.”
“But what can he do? OK, he can sue you. But for what? Defaming your father’s name? He wasn’t exactly Jesus, was he?”
“Gunnar says I’m a Judas. In which case he must have been Jesus, since he’s the one I’m betraying.”
“If he was Jesus, that makes your grandmother the Virgin Mary. And your grandfather was Joseph, the carpenter. Besides, Jesus didn’t have a son to betray him.”
“I wonder if it was actually Brutus he meant. He was a kind of son. Brutus Juliussen. Et tu, Brute? No, I only ate one.”
“You don’t have to say everything that comes into your mind, you know. Kids do that. Adults can put their utterances through quality control first.”
“I remember crying when I read about Julius Caesar. His death. I always did whenever I read biographies. Because of course they all die. Thomas Alva Edison. Henry Ford. Benjamin Franklin. Marie Curie. Florence Nightingale. Winston Churchill. Louis Armstrong. Theodore Roosevelt.”
“You read Theodore Roosevelt’s biography when you were a kid?”
“I did, yes. There was a series. About twenty of them, I suppose. One on each. Most were about Americans. A lot of presidents. Walt Disney, I remember him. Robert Oppenheimer. No, I’m joking. But Abraham Lincoln, at any rate. And when they died, no matter how, I always cried. But in a good way.”
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 40