“Mommy, Mommy, we have some presents for you,” they shouted as we came in.
“Hang on,” I said. “First we have to fika.”
Fika, that was the Swedish word for drinking coffee, an old slang word deriving from kaffi, with the syllables swapped around.
I put the buns in a basket, took out five plates, three glasses, two cups, mixed the juices, put the coffee on, Heidi and Vanja set the table.
“Now you can go and get her,” I said.
Slowly she followed them through the hall. Perched on the edge of her chair by the wall. They stood in front of her, each holding a present. They handed them to her, one after the other. She slowly unwrapped them. The towel, the socks with “The Best Mommy in the World” on them. They watched her full of expectation.
“Thank you,” she said.
Her face was blank. Not a trace of emotion was visible.
Oh no, oh no.
Oh no, oh no.
“Heidi chose the towel, and Vanja the socks, and John wanted to buy you a plane, but I think it was because he wanted to play with it himself,” I said.
“And then we bought some buns and juice. Heidi and Vanja have set the table. Now let’s eat. Come on, everyone.”
I’d spoken in such a loud voice, and quickly so that there would be so much going on around them that they wouldn’t notice something was wrong and think about it.
Linda was crying when we were alone in the bedroom afterwards.
“I can’t do anything,” she said.
“Well,” I said. “That’s now. It’ll pass.”
“I have an appointment with the doctor tomorrow,” she said. “Can you come with me, do you think?”
“Of course I can,” I said.
“It’s awful,” she whispered.
“It’ll be all right,” I said. “Everything’ll be fine. You’ll soon be better. The kids are fine.”
She shook her head.
“Yes, they are. Their grandmothers are coming too.”
“You have to write,” she whispered.
“That’ll sort itself out,” I said.
* * *
After she made the radio program, Linda had been down for a long time. Then there had been a light patch, suddenly she didn’t have a care in the world. It had been good for me as it meant her energy increased and I could have more time for writing. She did a lot of shopping, and if she didn’t actually hide it from me, she wasn’t very open about it either. Out of the blue there were two horrible large porcelain dogs in the children’s room, for example, which she had bought for them, and the windowsill in our bedroom was full of similar ornaments. I knew her grandmother had been like that, presumably they gave her a sense of security. I didn’t object to her buying them for herself, but I didn’t much like her drawing the children into it. This wasn’t her, usually she had good taste, now something else was coming out in her. Once she had seen a young girl begging in front of Hemköp and decided to do something, she called social services and told them about her. This may have been an act of kindness, but it wasn’t something Linda would normally have done. If I said to her that she’d done a lot of shopping recently, she would snort, what she bought was so cheap, almost everything was from secondhand shops. One afternoon there was a ring at the door, and there stood an antique-shop owner, she had bought a lamp in the same mawkish, heavy, ancient-aunt style, and not because it was cheap, it wasn’t, but because it was so beautiful. She spoke a lot to strangers, people sitting at the next table in a café, shop assistants, and at the nursery school, she was good friends with everyone. She beamed, chatted, and kept everything on a very superficial level. There was nothing wrong with any of this aside from the fact that I never had any real contact with her, and she never had her feet on the ground. When I said that, she looked at me and said she understood what I meant. Of course, she understood everything and everything was fine. She was happy, that was all there was to it, and everything worked, she was creative with the children, and they liked the mood she brought, things happened around her. I put my dislike of this to one side, after all there was nothing wrong with it, and what could I say, that she shouldn’t buy such hideous things for the children? Oh, one afternoon the girls each had a used Barbie doll in their hands, and John had a soldier. Had Linda bought them?
I threw the dolls away after the children had gone to bed.
When the light period was over and she began to sink, she was full of shame for what she had done, even though there was nothing wrong with it, not in itself. It worried her a lot that her ups and downs had become worse. Once she attacked me, saying I should help her, every other man would. She wanted me to help her go back into therapy. Most of all she wanted us to go together. She had wanted that for many years. She knew I would rather die than go to couples therapy, and actually I meant it. If there were a choice between couples therapy and death, I would unhesitatingly choose death. I didn’t want to subject myself to individual therapy either. But something about her desperate state made me call for an appointment with a psychologist the following day anyway. We had been there earlier that spring. Linda had started crying when she explained how she felt. The psychologist listened to what she said and then he asked me what I thought and I told him. He wasn’t so much interested in Linda’s mood swings as her life situation, the fact that she didn’t have a job and wasn’t earning money, and he asked her how this problem could be solved. He was right in what he said, but I didn’t understand how him saying this would help her. Subsequently Linda went to see him on her own. Then she called a doctor for an appointment and had a session with her. At that time her mood was a great deal better. Now the situation was different, I had never seen her like this before, not even remotely. She had lost her grip and had fallen so far into her inner darkness that nothing around her had meaning any longer. That was how it seemed to me. She loved our children more than anything else, but not even for them could she come closer to the world.
* * *
After I had dropped off the children at the school the following morning, I made some breakfast for Linda and took it to her in the bedroom on a tray. I had often done that the first year we were together, as nothing made her happier. But then I stopped, I didn’t want to put in any more effort to make her happy.
She sat up in bed. She ran her hands across the duvet, back and forth, it was uncanny, they were like the movements of an animal. Then with one hand she lifted the bowl of muesli, with the other she dipped in the spoon and transported it to her mouth. She was so slow that I turned, opened the blinds, and glanced over at the hotel.
Something had broken inside her, I reflected.
She ate half the muesli, then she put down the bowl.
“Are you full?” I said.
She nodded.
“Let’s go then, shall we?”
She nodded again.
“Do you want to have a shower first?”
“I can’t,” she said.
“OK,” I said. “You don’t have to.”
I took her arm and helped her up. She stood looking at the open closet, where her clothes were. The same desperation appeared in her eyes now as when she had looked at the children.
I took a pair of blue jeans and a gray sweater and laid them on the bed by her.
“Is that all right?” I said.
She nodded.
“I’ll be waiting in the hall,” I said, and left.
* * *
We took the elevator and walked arm-in-arm to the taxis outside the Hilton. Her movements were heavy and slow, as if gravity were greater for her than for anyone else. And perhaps that was indeed how it was.
Something had broken inside her, I reflected again.
We got into a taxi, I said the name of the street and the number, the driver signaled to move into Föreningsgatan, which we followed as far as the Concert House, where we turned right, crossed the bridge over the canal, and came into the lower part of town, where we seldom went, we lived our lives between ou
r apartment in Triangeln and the nursery school in Möllevangen.
Outside the door to the building I asked what the code was. She said it mechanically – she remembered all these things so much better than I did.
We took the elevator up, entered a large waiting room. Linda walked slowly to the reception window. I put a cup on the grill of the coffee machine, pressed the button for black, looked around while the cup filled.
Two people were sitting there, heads bowed, trying to occupy as little space as possible. One, a woman, perhaps fifty; the other, a man, perhaps thirty. The woman was pale, plump, dressed colorlessly. The man was also plump, had a sparse beard, greasy hair, and glasses. Beside them sat a woman talking loudly on her phone. A man came in, short hair, dressed formally, health sandals on his feet, presumably a doctor. He stopped in front of them as I took my cup for a sip, he said a name, the middle-aged woman got up, they shook hands, she followed him down the corridor.
“Would you like a cup of coffee?” I asked Linda, who had joined me.
She shook her head.
“Shall we sit down?”
She nodded. Slowly she took the few steps to the sofa, looked at me, I nodded, she sat down. I sat down beside her and held her hand in mine. The woman was still on her phone. There was a radio in the background, I looked up, a speaker under the ceiling. Someone was talking and laughed, it was one of those morning talk shows that were aired everywhere people worked: hairdressing salons, taxis, garages. I thought it inappropriate, it must cut straight into Linda’s heart, the life she was excluded from.
I gazed at her. She didn’t appear to notice.
I remembered once being in a taxi on our way to a hospital in Stockholm, Linda was terrified the child she would soon be giving birth to was dead, and the radio was on in the taxi. Although I knew the light mood was an agony for her, in the zone of the ultimate horror, on the border between life and death, I didn’t dare ask the driver to turn off the radio, I was afraid he would be offended.
I squeezed her hand. She was staring into the middle distance.
“Would you like some water?” I said.
She nodded.
I got up and filled a white plastic cup with water. The sides of the cup were so thin I could feel the water, cold and trembling.
She drank it in one swig.
Around the corner came a woman perhaps a few years younger than me. She stopped and looked at us, Linda got up, the woman smiled and held out a hand. Linda shook it.
“Hi,” I said.
We shook hands, and then we walked down the corridor. She stopped outside a door, extended a hand and we went in. A chair on one side of the table, two on the other. A desk beneath the window, a few unclear, neutral lithographs on the walls.
“Please, sit down,” she said.
We sat down.
“How are you, Linda?” she asked, sitting with her legs crossed, a notebook in one hand, a pen in the other. Her eyes were friendly, her impression a little impersonal, perhaps because of the pad and the pen.
Linda studied her.
“Not good,” she said at length, in an almost inaudible whisper.
The doctor asked several more questions, which I could see were meant to clarify the situation. Each time Linda answered with very few words after a long pause.
“Do you hear voices?” the doctor said.
Long pause.
Voices? I thought. She was way off target. Linda didn’t hear voices.
Perhaps there was a list she had to go through and cross off.
“No…,” Linda said. “Only thoughts … I don’t want to think them…”
“Do you think about suicide, Linda? About taking your own life?”
Linda stared at her. Then she burst into tears.
“But … but I … can’t … I … can’t do that,” she said. “The children … I … can’t do that.”
“You think about it though?”
Linda nodded.
“Often?”
Linda nodded.
“I … I … think … about it … all the time … If only … if only I had … a disease and could die. That would make it … easier. For everyone.”
Tears came into my eyes and I looked down. I took a slow, deep breath. I couldn’t go there. Looked at the carpet, looked at the chair leg, looked at the wastepaper basket in the corner, swallowed.
“Does it feel as if everything is going more slowly?” the doctor said.
Linda nodded.
“You don’t have the energy to do anything?”
“No!” Linda sobbed.
“Can you shower? Do you get out of bed at all?”
“No. Occasionally. The children … I can’t manage…”
The doctor wrote something in her notebook. Then she looked at me.
“What’s your perception of Linda now?” she said.
“I don’t quite know. But I’ve never seen her as low as this,” I said, looking at Linda. “This is completely new.”
“You’re obviously in a deep depression,” the doctor said. “We’ll have to try to turn that around. Naturally you’ll be given antidepressants. But we don’t want you too high when it lets go either, so we have to be careful. One possibility is going to the hospital, of course. Then you’ll have peace and quiet around you. At home you have the children and normal life. There might be demands on you it would be best you didn’t face. Have you thought about the possibility of going to the hospital?”
Linda stared at me, horror-stricken.
She shook her head.
“I think she’d be better off at home,” I said.
“Linda?” the doctor said.
“I don’t want to go to the hospital.”
“I understand,” the doctor said. “Of course you can be at home. It might be best for you. But then I want you to come here regularly. Is that all right?”
Linda nodded.
“It’s important you try to get up as much as possible. Try to do what you normally do as much as you can. It doesn’t have to be a lot. A little, so that you don’t spend the whole day in bed. Could you manage to read to the children, for example?”
“I don’t know,” Linda said.
“Then you can sit with them and watch children’s TV for half an hour. And it’s important you get out for some light and air. You have to try to go for a little walk every day.”
Linda nodded.
The doctor eyed her.
“I have such … terrible … fears,” Linda said.
“You can take something for that. A tablet for when the fear comes. It works instantly. It might make you a bit sleepy. And we’ll give you something for the depression. But I’d be a bit careful to begin with. We don’t want you to pick up too quickly.”
She got to her feet and sat down in front of the computer. I took Linda’s hand and squeezed it.
“You can pick up the medication at any pharmacy,” the doctor said, getting up. “And I’ve written down your next appointment. This Wednesday. Is that OK?”
Linda nodded and we stood up.
“I think it’s best if you’re not alone, Linda. Someone should always be with you.”
“Of course,” I said.
She accompanied us to the door, smiled, said goodbye, and gently closed the door.
“Do you think they can get a taxi for us at the reception?” I said.
Linda nodded.
“Then I’ll ask.”
Linda waited by the door while I spoke to the receptionist. Down on the street I smoked a cigarette.
“It’s going to be fine,” I said. “It’s good you don’t have to go to the hospital. So you’re there for the children at least, even if you don’t feel up to much.”
“Yes,” she said.
“We can go for a little walk every day. And you can watch TV with them.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Is that the taxi, I wonder?” I said, looking up the road, where a black Passat was coming. It stopped beside us, and
we got in.
“It’ll be fine,” I said. “You’ll soon be free of it.”
I knew the worst for Linda, the great nightmare, was going back to the hospital. The thought of the children exacerbated it, having a mother who had been admitted to a psychiatric institution, the stigma of it. I thought the same, hospitalization would define it and seal it as an illness, make it something institutional when it was actually only Linda, a darkness that filled her, and Linda, she was sitting beside me now, the mommy of Vanja, Heidi, and John. It was better for them that she was at home, that this didn’t become something alien and dangerous, but something they could see.
As we sat in the taxi, on our way home, I wasn’t sure. This was my responsibility. She wasn’t in a state to make any balanced decisions, nor did she want to. That was why she had looked at me. If I had nodded and said, you absolutely must go to the hospital, she would have gone.
The doctor had advised this course of action. We had said no, it is better we do it our way.
“When’s Ingrid supposed to be coming?” I said.
“I don’t know,” Linda said softly. “This afternoon sometime.”
“That’s good,” I said. “Then she’s here for the children, and they have something else to think about. They must have people around them now. I think that’s important.”
“Yes,” she said.
The taxi slid in by the front of the Hilton and came to a halt, I paid, we got out, I held her arm as we crossed the road and headed for the pharmacy.
* * *
Back at home, she went to bed, and was asleep in minutes. I walked from room to room for a while, had a cigarette on the balcony with the door open in case Ingrid called, sat down in my study and switched on my computer, when she was asleep she didn’t need me, but when I saw the essay I had been doing in Voss, about Turner and Claude Lorrain, I realized this wasn’t the right time and turned the computer off.
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 123