* * *
After we finished dessert and I had fetched the cognac and drunk a glass of it, I went inside to piss. On the way, I poked my head around the door of the children’s room where they lay sighing like little animals in their own little worlds. The voices of the others drifted in from the balcony, I heard Linda’s voice, and her laughter too, and I thought about what it must be like to be a child and fall asleep to the sounds made by one’s parents. The sounds of life outside themselves. I pissed, and it felt good. I looked at myself in the mirror as I washed my hands. The deep furrows in my brow, the lines that ran down my cheeks, the wrinkles around my eyes, none had been there when Vanja was born. But I felt the way I had always felt, the same now as when I was twenty, and perhaps that was the reason that what I saw in the mirror was not a forty-year-old man, though my age was clear and conspicuous, but myself, Karl Ove.
I dried my hands on the towel, went into the bedroom, and opened my e-mails, as always with my heart pounding and gripped by an intense feeling of dread.
There was a message from Amazon, and one from Tonje.
I opened Tonje’s.
Dear Karl Ove,
I’m sorry I haven’t sent word before now. Your assumptions are quite right. I had a pounding headache and a nerve in my eyelid twitched for three days while I read your novel. Since then I’ve tried to figure out where that reaction came from. To begin with it was the fear of being held up in full view. Gradually, the reading itself became a burden. All the little stories I’d forgotten about suddenly came to life again, as you did too, the person you once were to me.
After having read it I found I could relax a bit more. Tore is right, I am a princess, if only in the book. But I’d like to try to see it in terms of principle, if I can. After all, I’ve no idea what you’re saying about me in Book 5. And I can’t just say everything’s fine as long as you stick to writing nicely about me. So I’ve decided not to intervene in any way. It’s your project. Use my full name by all means, all or nothing. I don’t feel I can give you any viewpoints on the book, I’m sure you understand that. But it touched my heart to read it. Dearest, dearest Karl Ove.
All my best,
Tonje
My relief as I read her message was so immense, and the last line so unexpectedly warm and loving, that tears welled in my eyes. I closed the message and sat for a moment in front of the computer. I wanted the emotions to subside a bit before going back out to the others. The mere fact that I’d received an e-mail from Tonje felt like I was deceiving Linda. As if I had a secret life outside the family. But I did too, I’d had a life before them, and though I wasn’t in the habit of thinking about it, I certainly had while I’d been writing the first book. I had resurrected the life I once led, I had resurrected all the people I knew and was connected to back then, resurrected them in my mind, and with the past come to life in that way, I had gone about among them, my family, without saying a word about it, without letting on in the slightest, and yet there it was in their midst.
After maybe ten minutes I got to my feet and went back. I would have to send Tonje’s e-mail to the publishers, partly because they needed to be sure of everyone’s response now that the fuss concerning the manuscript had spiraled the way it had, and partly because I wanted them to see that I wasn’t totally unreliable, because although Gunnar’s letters were out of control I couldn’t help but assume that the publishers were thinking there was never smoke without fire and that there was most likely at least a grain of truth in Gunnar’s accusations. I was a writer, I made a living out of making things up, and most likely, so I imagined them thinking, Gunnar’s reaction to my description of those real-life circumstances was tainted by my novelist’s temperament, which tended toward exaggeration, perhaps even strongly so. I especially suspected Geir Berdahl of such thoughts. The accountant’s veracity versus the writer’s unreliability. That Tonje had reacted the way she had, and had sufficient faith in me to give me free rein as to how she and our relationship would be described in the books that followed, was no proof of anything, but it was at least a different take.
Still, it would have to wait until tomorrow. Now I was going to sit out in the dark with Linda, Christina, and Geir, illuminated by the light of the lantern, drinking cognac and talking about whatever subject happened to crop up.
When I returned to them Linda was telling a story. It was about the first summer after we moved here. The apartment, the balcony, the city, all had been new to us. Nearly every evening we sat out here after the children had been put to bed. The summer had no end; well into September we were still sitting outside in the evenings. We’d bought a baby alarm, the transmitter was in the children’s room, the receiver on the table between us. Whenever they stirred, whenever they made a sound, the receiver came on and we could hear it. One evening it crackled with the sound of a child crying. I went into their room, but whoever it was, Vanja or Heidi, must have settled again right away, because when I came in they were fast asleep. I went back outside, only for it to start again. This time Linda went in. The same thing happened: they were asleep. It was creepy, the sound of a child crying, coming to us through the hiss and crackle of the receiver, a small, distant voice. I found myself thinking it was like a dead child crying from the afterlife, its sound waves picked up by the transmitter. I didn’t mention the thought, Linda was already beside herself, she bustled back to the children again, this time with receiver in hand so she could see with her own eyes that the crying she was hearing wasn’t from one of her own. While she was away I tried to figure out what was going on. We were in the middle of a city, with hundreds of people in our immediate vicinity, and somebody among them clearly had the same make of baby alarm as us.
I told Linda when she got back. It calmed her down. But then a moment later she looked at me and said, But there’s no one taking care of that child.
As she told the story, the creepiness we had both felt at the time was gone. It had become a story. But Linda had just written a short story about that very incident. In it the creepiness was intact, perhaps even more intensely. That was how she was, it was her talent, she could distill life down to points of extreme intensity and densely concentrated meaning. I often felt tears come to my eyes when I read the things she wrote, and this particular story was no exception because the person she was so immediately became apparent to me.
“We bought that baby alarm before we went to Gotland,” I said. “Do you remember? Our trip there?”
“Yes,” she said. “I remember you used to run to the shop with your backpack on to get breakfast in the mornings.”
“Run?” said Geir. “How far?”
“Ten kilometers,” I said. “For a few months there I was in superb shape. Only I didn’t realize. Everything’s relative. You manage one thing, but there’s always something else you can’t. So I focused on that.”
“Vacationing with kids and no car, it’s a genre on its own,” said Linda.
“A sonnet of life with small children,” I said. “It doesn’t get much harder than that.”
“It was lovely, though,” she said. “I was pregnant with Heidi. And Vanja was so little! To us she was a big girl. But she was just a tiny tot!”
“She was,” I said. “It’s horrendous how time flies! It feels like such a long time ago, back in my boyhood almost.”
We spent two weeks there in a rented house on the edge of the woods, and in the middle of those woods, which reminded me in every respect of the woods at Hove, pine trees that went all the way down to the shore, in the middle of those woods were these peculiar white rock formations they call raukar. Oh, what an exhilarating sight they were! Every afternoon, while Linda and Vanja were at the house, I would run there to look at them. Like statues they stood, tall as a man, white among the straight, upright pine trees. There was something totem-like about them, and the associations they had for me were of indigenous peoples and a world without cars, without asphalt, without concrete, without glass, without machines. A wo
rld consisting only of what grew and people living among it. I ran there and it filled me with emotions, and then I ran back to my little family.
Now it was no longer something that had just happened, but something that had happened a long time ago, the same way as this, this evening on the balcony, years from now will be something I looked back on, removed from the life I will be living then. A memory is a ledge on the mountainside of the mind; there we are, drinking and chatting, and on the ledge below us my dad sits in his chair, dead, his face smeared with blood. And on a ledge below him we are sitting in a rest stop somewhere in the Agder region, Mom, Dad, Yngve, and I, we’ve been picking berries all morning, now we’re eating our picnic, and next to us is a river, its waters green and white and icy cold, descended from the high fells to our rear, and on the other side, at the edge of the road, coated with dust, stands our red Opel Kadett.
But as yet it was not a memory, not some constituent of the past, but still simply the point to which we had come, an evening that was now drawing to an end.
“You must be tired,” said Linda to Christina, who nodded, yes, she was, and with those words it was over, for we were all tired and the children would be waking up at five o’clock in the worst case, half past five at best, so the time had come to clear the table, load the dishwasher, turn off the lights, brush our teeth, and go to bed.
I lay on my back under the covers, waiting for Linda to come in from the bathroom. When she did, and lowered herself into the bed, as if into water it seemed to me, I put my arms around her and held her tight, feeling her body against mine, her warmth, sensing her smell.
“I love you,” I said. And for some strange reason I cried as I spoke the words. But I did so silently, my eyes simply filling with tears, and she knew nothing of it.
* * *
The next day we went to the beach. Linda made meatballs and buttered some bread, I made an omelette and filled a thermos with coffee and another with squash, we put it all in a cooler, packed a big blanket, towels, and bathing suits, and the girls’ inflatable armbands that were so very important, helped them into their summer dresses and sandals, gave them each a cap to put on, rubbed their sunscreen in, put John in the stroller, and set off. Until that summer Ribersborg had been synonymous with the beach for us, but there was no shade there anywhere, and Linda – who was sensitive to the sun and hid herself under wide-brimmed hats and behind sunglasses all summer, as well as always choosing the shady side of the street and always sitting under the parasols if we were out at a café, unlike me who couldn’t get enough of the sun – had taken us all to the beach at Sibbarp instead one day when the summer began, because although it was quite a bit farther there were trees there that grew right down to the beach, and pools of deepest shadow under their leafy crowns, and since then we’d always gone there whenever we wanted to swim. Sibbarp was too far to walk, we had to take the bus from Bergsgatan by the Konserthuset; it took just under half an hour to get there. Njaal, Heidi, and Vanja went first, then came Linda with the cooler bag slung over her shoulder, Christina with a backpack on her back, and Geir carrying a tote bag in his hand, while I brought up the rear, pushing John in his stroller with a big bag full of clutter. It was hot and there was no shade at the bus stop, so it was a relief when the bus came after ten minutes. It was almost full. Geir and Christina found seats at the front, Christina sat with Njaal on her knee, while Vanja and Heidi found two next to each other farther back after the open area in the middle of the bus, and Linda and I sat behind them, Linda with John on her lap. We passed through the city, skirting the hospital and the concourse area on the other side of the Pildammsparken, where the old and particularly striking sports stadium was, shaped like an elongated bowl or a flat-bottomed boat, built in the days of functionalism, unfortunately rather unsuited to football because of its running track and the insufficient incline of its stands, which was why a new stadium had been built next to it. In the same area was the Baltiska Hallen, as well as another big indoor arena with artificial turf. I’d been there a lot the first winter we lived in Malmö, there were some journalists who met a couple of afternoons a week to kick a ball around there and they’d let me join in.
I wiped the sweat from my forehead and realized we were crossing Bellevuevägen. I was so unfamiliar with the city I didn’t even know yet how the various districts were connected. We must be near the subdivision garden, I thought to myself. The very thought of the place plunged me into darkness. I looked at Linda and John. His face was sweaty, his eyes kept opening and shutting like the mouths of a pair of expiring fish. In a few seconds he would no longer be able to resist the compelling onslaught of sleep, so overpowering at that age.
Vanja twisted around and found my gaze and asked when we’d be there. A few minutes yet, I said. How long is a minute, she wanted to know. Sixty seconds, I said. How long is a second, she wanted to know. From now until now, I said. That wasn’t long, she said. Don’t start counting, I said. She looked at me. Why not? she asked. I shrugged. You can if you want, I said. She began to count. When she got to thirty-eleven I corrected her. We came through the center of Limhamn, the main street was full of cars, the sidewalks on both sides filled with milling people. What comes after thirty-nine, Daddy? said Vanja. Forty, I said, turning my head to Linda. Is he asleep? I asked. She nodded. We carried on along the shoreline and soon wide-open areas of green appeared, dotted here and there with clusters of darker deciduous trees, and a moment later the bus swung into its terminus. Linda carried John to his stroller, he woke up and started wailing, I lifted the stroller out, she tried to get him into it, he kicked and struggled, I took over, and he calmed down after twenty seconds or so and I managed to get his legs into the stroller and was able to pick up the bag and follow the others while he laid his head back and immediately fell asleep again. I broke into a trot and caught up with Linda. Vanja, Heidi, and Njaal walked in front of us, scurrying along like three little dogs. The harbor was packed with small boats, and there were lots of people on and around the jetty. The grass we crossed was popular too, people were strolling, some were playing games, I heard the buzz of a radio-controlled plane, others were sitting around on blankets. The air was teeming with ladybugs, a couple landed on my white T-shirt and I flicked them away. We crossed the open lawns, passed the kiosk, and followed the gravel path that led off along the inside of the beach to the northern end where the trees were. We went past a woman in a bathing suit, she walked in that cautious way you do when you’re not used to having bare legs, and three young men, perhaps twenty years old, visibly wearing underpants under their low-slung bathing shorts. Linda was walking beside Christina now, the children were already way up ahead, running to see who would get there first. Geir stopped and I came up to him.
“Did you see her?” he said.
“Who?” I said.
“That woman in the bathing suit. It was all wet around her breasts. Soaking wet. But dry everywhere else. So she hadn’t been swimming. It was milk. Breast milk.”
“I didn’t notice,” I said.
Something kept crunching under my feet and I stopped to see what it was. Ladybugs. They were all over the ground. Dead ladybugs on the path and on the grass. The air was alive with them. I walked over to the trees, spread the blanket out in the shade, and started helping Heidi with her bathing suit and her water wings while Linda got Vanja changed. John was fast asleep in the stroller, chin against his chest and hat over his eyes. Three ladybugs had settled on his T-shirt, one on the brim of his hat. I felt them crawling in my hair and shook my head.
“Do you want to go out and swim with them while I get things organized?” I said to Linda. She nodded and got changed while I turned to the picnic. The blanket was already covered in ladybugs. I looked up. Great swarms filled the air. I looked down at my chest, four more had landed there. I flicked them away, picked up the blanket and gave it a shake before spreading it out again and setting out the containers with the sandwiches, meatballs, salad, omelette, and olives.
Geir batted at the air. Christina walked to the shore holding Njaal’s hand. Now that I knew, I could see she was pregnant. She flapped her free hand. Njaal copied her. Linda shook her hair. Heidi and Vanja stood hand in hand at the water’s edge and stared out at the sea. The blanket was crawling with ladybugs again.
“We can’t eat here,” I said. “They’re everywhere. Look at them,” I said, indicating the swarms that seemed to be swirling all around.
“Maybe it’s better over there,” Geir said. “It’s more exposed, so there’ll be more wind.”
We went over to where the grass came to an end, only to find the air just as thick and the ground covered with them.
“We might as well stay put,” I said. “They’re harmless enough.”
Back in the shade I tried to ignore them as best I could. I lit a cigarette and poured myself a cup of coffee. Seconds later, a ladybug was floating in it. I picked it out, inhaled and blew a cloud of smoke out in front of me, wondering if ladybugs like mosquitoes would be repelled by cigarette smoke. Geir had gone down to the shore, now all five of them were there. Linda stepped cautiously out into the water with Heidi and Vanja on each side of her. They reached up to her hips. Her skin was white as marble. The air was alive with flitting black dots. They were settling on the containers, and on the blanket again. They crawled on my shoes, shorts, and T-shirt. It was creepy. Ladybugs were among the most appealing of insects. So delicate and flowerlike in their beauty, they were the very antithesis of the monstrous. Mosquitoes could occur in huge swarms and be everywhere, there was nothing unnatural about that, but with ladybugs there was something ominous about it, as if something had gone wrong, as if something that ought to have been closed had been opened, and as I looked out over the sound, where the gigantic structure of the Öresund Bridge rose up disconcertingly near us to the south and the contours of the Barsebäck nuclear power plant were visible to the north, the blue sky above the glittering blue sea teeming with tiny black dots I knew to be ladybugs, I thought to myself: this is how the world ends.
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 45