More Bitter Than Death

by Camilla Grebe

  There’s no one at the check-in desk, so I sit down on one of the big couches and start flipping through a magazine as I check the place out. A woman with an enormous belly is sitting on another couch, talking on her cell phone. I hear her discussing her blood pressure, admission, and preeclampsia, all as she strokes that gigantic belly again and again, apparently not even aware that she’s doing it.

  There is a distant clink of porcelain and muffled laughter. The walls are decorated with art from Ikea, posters about the women’s helpline, and an invitation to participate in a clinical trial about women’s experience of pain during delivery.

  Magazines about pregnancy and parenting are everywhere.

  Suddenly a door opens and a woman in her fifties peeks out and notices me. She has frizzy hair and is wearing a tunic with flowers embroidered on it. A big bronze pendant is dangling between her breasts. She spots me and cocks her head to the side.

  “Are you Siri Bergman?”

  I nod dumbly and feel a wave of nausea come over me. Suddenly I’m afraid I’m going to throw up in this tidy waiting room, but then it occurs to me that if you’re going to have an embarrassing morning sickness episode anywhere, this probably isn’t the worst place.

  “Hi, Siri. I’m Monica Wall. I’m one of the midwives here. Welcome, welcome.”

  She takes my damp hand in her warm, dry one and then leads me into her office, pointing to a chair right in front of a big desk. Hanging on the wall above the desk are a bunch of pictures of babies and thank-you cards from parents and children. I wonder if a picture of the baby in my belly will end up on this wall, but the thought is so absurd that I let it go.

  Monica starts telling me about today’s appointment and what it will include. She mentions something about height and weight, blood pressure, and information pamphlets.

  “And where’s the father?”

  “The father?” My answer is a hollow echo. Monica looks up and our eyes meet. She has unusually clear blue eyes.

  “Or maybe you’re on your own. That’s not at all uncommon. We have groups for mothers who are single parents. Well, we usually call them ‘super’ parents. Super, not single. Just because there’s no partner in the picture doesn’t necessarily make a person lonely or deprived,” Monica says, and smiles encouragingly, and I have to swallow several times to get rid of the sour taste in my mouth.

  “There is a father, but he couldn’t come today . . . We’re not living together but we are in a relationship, so—”

  “I understand,” Monica says, and then smiles again. “Of course he’s welcome to come along if he wants. After all, he’s going to be having a baby too, and we encourage the fathers to participate. And is this your first child?” She smiles again and I realize that she’s really starting to bug me, this calm, safe, smiling woman who seems to have an answer for everything.

  “I had a late abortion before. My baby, the baby . . . the fetus . . . had a defect, so it wasn’t going to be able to survive outside the womb. They determined that during a routine ultrasound exam. But that was five years ago now.”

  Monica holds out a box of Kleenex and I realize that I’m crying, which I hadn’t noticed. The hormones, I think. It’s these crazy hormones.

  Monica looks unfazed, as if crying mothers were something she encountered every day, and I realize that that must be the case. She keeps asking questions: first day of last period, illnesses, birth control pills. I answer as best I can and she says that an ultrasound is the only way to determine how far along I am since I’ve had menstruation-like spotting despite being pregnant.

  “Do you smoke?” She looks up from the computer, where she has now begun filling out a questionnaire about my health.

  I hesitate.

  “Because if you smoke, you can get help quitting. We cooperate with the health center to offer smoking cessation therapy through hypnosis.”

  “I smoke extremely rarely,” I respond instead. “I’m not a regular smoker.”

  Monica appears satisfied and writes something down on the questionnaire, and once again I feel a wave of nausea come over me. I know which question is coming next. I just don’t know how I should answer it. The question I dread. The question that puts a name to my anxiety, that brings up thoughts of fetal deformities, defects, tiny fragile nerve cells.

  “And how much alcohol do you drink?”

  “I just found out I was pregnant, so, well, I did drink alcohol before I knew that I . . . But I don’t drink very much now. Really.” I look into her clear, blue eyes and smile. “As a rule I never drink alcohol, just the occasional glass of wine on festive occasions and things like that.”

  Monica beams back at me.

  “Well great, then it’s time to weigh you,” she says, pointing to a digital scale in one corner of the room.

  Case Notes, Pediatric Health Care Center

  Initial appointment

  An 11-year-old boy comes in with his parents. The boy is having trouble with aggression at school. His parents explain that the boy is big and strong and often ends up getting in fights since he has a hard time keeping his aggression in check when he gets teased. The boy complains a lot about the other children being naughty and says he would prefer to stay home from school. The parents have a lot of trouble getting him to school.

  The parents describe the boy as a basically calm and secure child but one who’s always been a little different. When asked to describe how he’s different, they have a hard time providing details. They describe some learning difficulties at school and also say that the boy has always been a loner who prefers to hang out with his parents instead of other children. He likes to tinker with engines with his dad, who has an auto repair shop. The parents feel like they have a good relationship even though the difficulties with their son have taken a certain toll. The father says that sometimes he thinks the mother is a little lenient and that the boy needs a firm hand and clear boundaries. The mother agrees with him on this but at the same time she has a hard time being too strict with the boy when she can tell he’s suffering.

  The boy seems shy. He avoids eye contact with the undersigned, staring at his hands instead. He speaks in monosyllables and does not express any strong emotions. It appears that he keeps a lot of his aggression bottled up inside him as a defense against his own destructive energies. He says that he thinks his schoolmates are dumb and that they don’t usually let him join in. A little while ago two classmates played a “nasty joke” on him when they pulled down his pants and exposed his penis, which they called “fat dick,” to a girl the boy likes. The boy says that his whole body felt “very hot” and that he just “wanted to pulverize” the other boys. Because he’s big and strong, he was able to overpower them, and he did hit one boy in the face so many times that the kid needed eight stitches. The boy does not show any remorse for this, but rather thinks the kid got “what he deserved.” He also says that the other children are always mean to him and that he doesn’t want to go to school anymore. When asked what he wanted to do instead, he says that he would rather work in the auto repair shop with his dad.

  Summary assessment

  Boy, 11 years old, is occasionally aggressive and acts out, sometimes passive and withdrawn. He is the only child of parents who live together but are not married. The father works as an auto mechanic at his own company. The mother is a florist. The parents are overprotective and controlling and it is likely that the boy’s pattern of acting out can be seen as a reaction to this. The problems at school probably have something to do with the parents’ initial reluctance to let the boy go to school. His high absence rate more or less confirms this hypothesis.

  The boy’s difficulties can thus be seen a symptom of a pathological family dynamic, and therefore the best treatment would probably be family therapy interventions. The parents will meet with the undersigned again in two weeks.

  Anders Krepp, licensed psychologist, certified family therapist

  Markus sets the plates out on the worn drop-leaf table,
lines the glasses up, and arranges the utensils in two neat stacks.

  “How’s this?” he asks.

  “That’s fine,” I reply. “That way everyone can help themselves. It’s just Vijay and Aina after all. We don’t need to serve a formal sit-down meal.”

  Markus smiles and stretches out his long, muscular arm, capturing me and pulling me in to him with obvious authority. He smells fresh out of the shower and I bury my nose into the crook of the elbow of his gray sweater.

  The feeling that’s growing in me is hard to define. A hope is incubating somewhere inside me, a sort of confidence that I haven’t felt for years, and something else as well: a soft, warm, happy feeling that radiates through my body. As if the sun were shining on me in the middle of Stockholm’s November darkness.

  Just about the same time as Markus opens the bottles of Amarone, there’s a knock at the door. I pad into the drafty little front hall, lean forward, and peek out the peephole in the door that Markus had installed after I was attacked here.

  Aina’s and Vijay’s faces smile at me, grotesquely warped by the lens.

  There’s a bottle of wine in Vijay’s hand.

  I open the door, let in the cold, raw autumn air, and give them both hugs.

  A while later we’re sitting at the kitchen table and eating Markus’s home-cooked beef bourguignon. From the living room I can hear the fire crackling in the woodstove. A faint scent of smoke lingers in the house. Aina is wearing a knit wool sweater and thick wool socks. I suppose she’s still cold, because she’s pulled her knees up under her sweater and is sitting on the kitchen chair like a frog. Her cheeks blaze in the faint light of the candles on the table.

  It’s pitch-black outside the windows. The darkness is so complete that I can’t even make out the contours of the trees lining the bay, can’t see the sky reflecting in the restless sea. But I can hear the waves through the thin, single-pane windows.

  Vijay approaches the topic cautiously, looking hesitantly at both Aina and me before asking the question, “How are things going for you guys . . . now? After everything that happened?”

  Aina takes a big sip of her wine and peers out into the blackness and shrugs. She says, “Don’t know. It feels weird. There are so many emotions, I think about it all the time. I’m not exaggerating when I say it’s the first thing I think of when I wake up and the last thing before I go to sleep.”

  “I dream about it,” I interject, and the moment I’ve said it I regret it, because I see the concern in their eyes.

  “What do you mean, you ‘dream about it’?” Vijay asks in a deceptively quiet voice, but I know what he’s thinking. I know what they’re all thinking, that I’m still fragile, that maybe I can’t handle a situation like this, that in the best-case scenario, my career will suffer, and in the worst-case scenario, my mental health will be in jeopardy.

  Vijay brushes a few grains of rice off his sweatshirt, which bears the name of a hard-rock band from the seventies that I recognize. I think about how you can never really tell with Vijay; he might really love the music, or it might be some new trend, one that I’m completely out of touch with, the kind that never makes it to the unhip stores I shop in.

  “Oh, forget about it,” I say, waving my hand to stave off any further concern, but when they still look troubled, I decide to try to explain. “Yeah, okay, I did actually dream about it, but in my dream I was the one who tried to save Hillevi by plugging the wound with my hand, not Sirkka.”

  Suddenly I remember the dream as clearly as if it were a real memory: the blood is gushing out of Hillevi’s slender body, my hands drowning in her warm, pulsing insides; the life slips out of her as the pool on the floor of the clinic meeting room grows, and the scattered cinnamon rolls become gigantic roses.

  Blood roses.

  “So, what happened?” Markus asks. “Did you save her?”

  “You don’t need to ask that,” I say. Maybe a little too curtly.

  “Maybe you’re feeling guilty about her dying,” Markus continues, and my irritation grows.

  “I think you’re reading things into my dream that might not be there,” I mumble, trying to keep my voice calm and controlled. Because I don’t want to ruin the evening, which began so promisingly.

  Aina seems to have picked up on the tension between Markus and me, because she comes to my rescue. “What do you think, Vijay? Do you also think Henrik killed Susanne?”

  “My dear, you know I can’t just answer that,” Vijay says. “It would be totally irresponsible of me to say that without knowing more about the crime.”

  “Well, but you could say something. Who would actually do something like that?”

  Vijay sighs deeply and squirms. “Okay,” he begins slowly. “She was at home with her daughter when the murderer arrived. As far as we know she opened the door for him or her. After that she was kicked to death and the murderer left the scene. The daughter, who was sitting under the dining table, witnessed the deed but hasn’t been able to identify the culprit. Is that right?”

  “That’s right,” Markus mumbles. “The daughter says it was a man, that she saw him, that she didn’t recognize him, but she couldn’t describe the killer.”

  Vijay runs his hand over the stubble on his chin, seems to ponder something for a while, and then nods at Markus.

  “What else did she say?” Vijay asks.

  Markus suddenly looks dejected, shrugs his shoulders slightly. “They didn’t get that much out of her, actually,” he says. “They brought in a child interview specialist, and from what I hear she actually did a good job—”

  Vijay raises his hand to interrupt Markus. Vijay reassures him, “It’s not your fault; your colleagues seem to have done everything just right. The child was too young, pure and simple. You won’t get anything helpful out of a five-year-old. What else do we know? It was a very grisly assault and the kicks were mostly aimed at the woman’s face. No other weapons or implements were used. Correct?” Markus nods again. “Did they find any technical evidence at the scene?”

  “Not much. The techs think the crime was committed by a man, based on the strength required and the hand and footprints that were found at the scene. They also suspect that the murderer might have worn gloves. The marks suggested that. They also found traces of some sort of talcum powder, the kind you’d find on some surgical gloves. Otherwise nothing noteworthy. There were lots of different fibers at the scene, dog fur, cat fur, rabbit fur, hamster fur—all of Noah’s ark seem to have lived there. And then they found some food residue and some sort of small metal shavings that the tech guys think might be soldering residue.”

  “Hm, that’s interesting, very interesting.” Vijay leans back and studies the ceiling.

  “What’s interesting?” Aina asks.

  “That stuff about the gloves,” Vijay says. “That suggests some sort of advanced planning, which in turn indicates a different kind of crime than the one you first described.”

  “You’re going to have to explain what you mean,” Markus says.

  “Well, obviously there are lots of models for classifying murderers and other violent criminals, but the one that’s both simplest and the most useful divides aggression into just two types: reactive and instrumental. With reactive violence, the perpetrator kills in reaction to something: a provocation, a person, or maybe a behavior that brings up an old trauma. It’s not planned. If they use a weapon, they often grab something that’s available at the site, a rock or a kitchen knife, for example. The weapon or implement is usually left behind at the scene afterward. The violence can be very brutal and the crime scenes are messy and often full of technical evidence, since the deed wasn’t planned. Most murders fall into this category. Domestic violence and barroom brawls are examples of typical reactive violence. The victim and the perpetrator often know each other too. So, on the surface this would look just like that kind of a crime. But . . .”

  Vijay pauses for dramatic effect, looking at everyone around the table, and I have the se
nse that he’s enjoying being the center of attention and sharing his expertise; this is his specialty. He smiles and slowly brings the palms of his hands together the way he always does when he’s about to say something important.

  “What?” Aina urges impatiently.

  “There’s something that isn’t right, that business about the gloves, that the murderer might have worn gloves, I mean. That doesn’t tally with the behavior pattern of a reactive perpetrator. He or she wouldn’t plan the act in advance. Although, of course,” Vijay mumbles almost to himself, “instrumental violence could turn into reactive violence. And then we have the fact that the violence was unjustifiably brutal. The nature of the assault might suggest that the culprit has a personal history of repeated traumatization. When he then winds up in a situation where he is perpetrating the violence, the old traumas he suffered get stirred up and cause him to behave even more brutally. That might have been what happened. The initial instrumental violence could have become reactive violence.”

  Markus looks at me and discreetly raises his eyebrow. I smile, knowing he’s thinking that Vijay is pontificating, fixating on theoretical models that aren’t applicable in reality. But Aina is the one who actually asks the question.

  “Yeah, but how does all that really apply in this case? Do you think it was Henrik or not?”

  Vijay hesitates for a bit, as if he’s trying to think of the right way to put something.

  “I think the crime was planned. The use of gloves, for example. And I think that in some way it was personal, that the kicks aimed just at the face suggest that. So, yeah, based on my very limited knowledge of the case, I guess I think it could be Henrik.”

  “But Henrik has an alibi,” Markus says.

  “Yes . . .” Vijay pauses again. “But what was it again? It was his employees who gave him the alibi, right?”

  “Yes, they work for his construction company. What about that?”