by Linn Ullmann
Tomas was sitting at a table on the other side of the bar, drinking beer. It was Molly who saw him first. Then Laura saw him. And finally Erika saw him, too. Later that evening, she threw up over him in the taxi.
“I’m not used to drinking this much,” she kept saying, as she tried to wipe the sick off his shirt. Tomas helped her upstairs, maneuvered her into the bathroom, sat her on the floor of the shower, and let the warm water flow. He washed her hair and dried the back of her long, slender neck with a towel. He said she had the palest neck he had ever seen. Like a ballet dancer, he said.
“My mother’s a ballet dancer,” she said, and began to cry.
He gave her clean clothes, a cotton shirt and a pair of sweatpants, and put her in a chair in the living room. He went out to the kitchen to make coffee. She did not want to lose him. She was tired and she ached all over, as if she had given birth without a moment to rest afterward. Everything just carried on. She sat in the chair in his living room and knew she must not lose him.
“Can you hear me, out there in the kitchen?” she called.
“I can hear you,” he called back.
Erika sang:
I wish, I wish, but it’s all in vain,
I wish I were a maid again;
But a maid again I never shall be
Till apples grow on an orange tree.
The idea had been for them to make love, and then for her to go home to Sundt and the children, slip under the covers beside Sundt, and wonder whether Sundt could smell Tomas on her body even though she had showered, sense the stinging red all over her skin, her lips swollen from the kisses of a man who was not her husband; but then she had been sick in the taxi and none of what was planned had happened, and now she was sitting in the chair knowing only that she must not lose him.
“You’ve got a nice voice,” he said.
He spoke quietly. There was no need to shout from the kitchen.
“I’ve had too much to drink,” she said.
“You’ve got a nice voice even when you’ve had too much to drink,” he said.
No, she must not lose him. She got up, crossed the living room—her legs would carry her now—and went into the kitchen. She didn’t really know what it meant, this knowledge that she must not lose him. She fell to her knees and wrapped her arms around him, resting her head at the back of his knee.
“Don’t go.”
He stood motionless.
“Erika, I can’t make coffee with you hanging on to me like that,” he said.
“I don’t want coffee.”
“What do you want, then?”
“I don’t know. I want to live here with you.”
“You can live here for a while,” he said.
Chapter 21
Ragnar ran through the long grass, past Erika and Laura as they lay dozing in the sun. He turned left and ran into the woods. If you turned right, you came to the sea; if you went straight on, as Ragnar had done the first time they saw him, you came to Isak’s door. Ragnar ran and ran and ran.
It was windy. The wind gave you goose pimples and you needed an anorak even though the sun was shining. Erika and Laura had found a sheltered patch in the grass. At breakfast that morning, Isak had told Erika and Laura they weren’t to go down to the beach; they would have to stay near the house. He said the way it was looking, a storm was likely to blow up and then both of them, small and thin as they were, could be carried right out to sea. Rosa agreed. Erika and Laura ate nothing; they ate like two little mice, and such nibblers couldn’t stand up to the sea the day it decided to come and get them. Nibblers would have to ride the waves all the way to the Soviet Union, or even farther, and there they would have to stand in a queue for the rest of their lives to buy a few wretched potatoes, and they would never be able to go back home, because everybody who tried was shot at the border. So Erika and Laura ate two more slices of bread with cheese, although they were too big to believe stories like that, and they each drank a glass of O’boy, which tasted best if you took it with a dessert spoon, as if the chocolate milk were an elegant soup, although Rosa never let them; nor were they allowed to put more than two teaspoons of O’boy powder in each glass, and that wasn’t enough: three teaspoons was the absolute minimum, and five tasted really nice, especially if the powder formed lumps in the milk—like syrupy chocolate bubbles that would melt on your tongue.
Isak was strict about a lot of things. Outdoors time, for example. And bedtime. And dinnertime.
Every so often, Erika and Laura would be ordered out to find Molly, who used to hide in the woods. For on the stroke of six, dinnertime, Isak would come clumping through the living room into the kitchen and yell, I’m as hungry as a bear, and Molly, who nearly always had a blue dress on, would shout back, Not bear! Not bear! Then they could all sit up at the table and be served by Rosa.
But he was not strict about the O’boy. He saw no reason why the girls shouldn’t be allowed to gulp down as much chocolate milk as they wanted, and he didn’t care if they drank it from a glass or laboriously with a spoon. When Rosa went to the mainland to shop, he said they were welcome to tip the whole packet of O’boy down their throats if they liked, provided they didn’t expect any sympathy when they were sick afterward.
When Ragnar ran past them through the grass on his way into the woods, Erika and Laura decided to run after him. He had the wind at his back and was running faster than usual; his feet barely touched the ground, and from a distance he looked like some woodland creature, an elf or an ogre. Laura could run faster than anybody Erika knew, but not as fast as Ragnar, and it was Laura who whispered to Erika that Ragnar looked a bit like an ogre. Erika didn’t like that. He wasn’t good-looking, with his matchstick legs and thin wrists, it was true. And the worst thing was the little lump or growth between his eyebrows that made him look like a boy with three eyes or two noses. But as time went by and Erika got to know him, she and Laura didn’t talk so much about his looking like an ogre. Erika told herself that if she squeezed her eyes almost shut and squinted at him, he was actually okay, even good-looking; but she didn’t say that to Laura, who was too young to know if a boy was good-looking or not, anyway.
Erika and Laura got up from their sheltered spot in the grass and ran after him. They knew his name was Ragnar. They knew he lived alone with his mother in a summer cottage of brown-stained wood, ten minutes’ walk from Isak’s house. They knew he was in year five of a school in Stockholm. They knew his favorite shirt was the one that said MY DAD WENT TO NEW YORK CITY AND ALL HE GOT ME WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT. Or at any rate, that was the one he nearly always had on as he raced past them through the long grass behind Isak’s house, along the stony beach, along the gravel track and past the shop. That one or NIAGARA FALLS. They even knew he had a hut somewhere in the woods, a hut he had built himself. But they didn’t know where it was. It was secret.
Many summers later, when Erika and Ragnar were thirteen and were lying in the long grass eating wild strawberries and drinking Coca-Cola they’d stolen from the shop, she told him about when she was little, about the first years on Hammarsö, before she knew him, when she had only one new sister, Laura, before suddenly, one summer, there was a carriage outside Isak’s house with a baby in it who screamed and screamed and screamed; she told him how Isak and Rosa had teased her, saying she was so small and thin that she could get blown out to sea any minute and die a horrible death on the other side of the horizon. Ragnar listened, stroked her hair, and said: “It’s the big trees that fall over in the storm, not the little ones.”
He bent over her and kissed her on the mouth. His mouth felt rough, not like a girl’s—she had kissed a number of girls in her class, so she would know how to do it properly when it really mattered—and he tasted of salt and Coca-Cola.
“What do you mean?” asked Erika.
“It’s a well-known saying that your father, Isak, obviously never heard—I mean, when he said that about you being blown away in the storm.”
Erika looked up
at the sky: not a cloud anywhere, not the slightest mackerel streak. Your father, Isak, Ragnar had said, and he meant something by it, but she didn’t know what. At any rate, it was a strange way of putting it. Erika wouldn’t have said Your mother, Ann-Kristin.
On Hammarsö, the trees were small and crooked, so perhaps it was true that the big ones fell first.
“But we’re not trees,” said Erika out loud, nudging him in the side.
He looked at her and smiled.
“We’re not trees,” she repeated.
And she really didn’t know if she wanted to kiss him some more, or tip the rest of the Coca-Cola over him and run.
Chapter 22
One evening, Tomas took her hands and loosened her embrace, finger by finger, and left her. They had lived together in the flat by Sofienberg Park for nine years.
For nine years, Erika and the children ate food that Tomas had cooked. Hearty, fragrant meat stews, extravagantly spiced, with big chunks of beef or pork. And long after Erika and Ane had gone to bed, Tomas played computer games with Magnus. Erika said: He’s a child; he’s got to go to school. The pair of you can’t stay up all night playing computer games. You can’t do that, Tomas. Magnus has got to get some sleep. He’s a child.
She remembers that he said: I stayed with you longer than I really wanted, because of Magnus and Ane. But they’re not my children.
In the days after he left her, she went through all the things he had bought with money they didn’t have and that he had then left behind, like relics; among them an idiotic cordless doorbell you could carry around the flat with you, if you happened to be in the toilet or in bed and were afraid of not hearing a ring at the door. What was more, you could adjust the volume and choose how you wanted it to sound. Tomas chose church bells. They had spent some time contemplating that. They had discussed the pros and cons. Shall we have this ring tone or that one? They didn’t talk about what was happening in the world, the fact that one war was succeeding another. They didn’t talk about the icon Tomas had bought in Paris for almost a hundred thousand kroner. It was supposedly from the sixteenth century and reminded him of a Ukrainian actress, beautiful as an icon, whom he had met at Nice airport. He hung the icon over the bed. She took it down. He put it back up. Don’t you realize they’re going to kick us out, Tomas? We can’t afford to borrow a hundred thousand kroner from the bank. We can’t afford to borrow ten thousand kroner. We can’t afford to borrow one thousand.
Erika talked like Sundt.
She objected like Sundt.
She was Sundt.
The icon turned out (and it came as no surprise) to be a forgery, worth a couple of hundred at the most. Tomas stared at Erika wide-eyed when she told him. He wanted to sell the icon, he said. It’s worth two hundred kroner, she said. Don’t you understand? Then we’ll throw it out, said Tomas. After that, he forgot all about it. Erika left it hanging there over the bed.
Now and then she missed Sundt. He was cheap, but he wasn’t crazy. Sundt watched over the children in the night. Tomas didn’t watch over anybody but himself, and scarcely that. Tomas didn’t sleep in the double bed with her. He slept on a red sofa in a basement storage area he rented from the housing association. He’d actually been planning to use it as an office; it had a window, and he wanted somewhere to do his translation work without being disturbed by Erika and her children. But he’d gradually moved down there, where, in the end, he spent virtually all his time.
They laughed a lot toward the end. Told stories and laughed. Tomas bought wine, music, books, and that weird doorbell, and they laughed! Erika stopped mentioning the money slipping through his fingers.
Erika was not Sundt.
But she threw the bags of music and books into the car and drove to the different stores. Can I have the money back? I don’t want a credit note. I want cash back. And please don’t let my husband buy any more books. Or any more CDs.
But they talked about the new bell.
All those ring tones.
And you can carry it around the house with you.
He left her a note before he disappeared.
“For good,” the note said. “This time I’m going for good.”
Chapter 23
“We’re nearly there now,” the woman beside her said. She was happy. She almost sang the words.
Erika turned to her and smiled.
Oh, so you’re talking now, she thought. Having sat beside me in the car, eating oranges without a word, without even loosening the belt of your coat.
Throughout their ride together, the woman had made Erika feel that she’d done something wrong, put her foot in it, rushed in where angels fear to tread, or worse: that she had soiled something pure and delicate simply by taking up space.
Now you listen here! I’ve met people like you before! My father, for example, when he was younger and I was still afraid of him. Or Tomas, my husband. He could read something out to me, something elegantly phrased he’d translated or written himself, and I’d make some comment, and it was always wrong, see? It was totally wrong, and Tomas would look away and say, Forget I ever asked you. Forget it!
When Erika found Tomas’s note (he had put it on the kitchen table under a hand-painted blue teapot, as if afraid it might blow away), she went down to the storage area in the cellar to check that he hadn’t hidden away there or hung himself. How long ago now? Four months? Four months, three weeks, and two days. The cellar window was open; it was just getting light outside. Afterward she had found herself thinking he must have escaped through the window, like the Indian in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Outside the cellar window it was snowing or raining and she stood there, staring. Not a wet, snowy mass but gray, virtually transparent flakes, light enough to be indifferent to gravity, like particles of dust, though wetter and colder. There was a scattering of dry brown leaves on the window ledge and the linoleum floor; they must have blown in and he hadn’t bothered to collect them or vacuum. Erika lay down on the red sofa that had been moved down to the cellar when she refused to have it in the living room; she hadn’t expected Tomas to move down with it. The sofa smelled of him and of other things, too. But mostly of him.
Chapter 24
The first time Erika saw her was in the summer of 1977. She was lying draped on the rock farthest out to sea, with long brown legs extending from her polka-dot bikini briefs.
Erika knew at once that she was the one called Marion.
She stopped and looked. She dropped the Russian tobacco packet she had found on the beach and stood quite still.
Ragnar grabbed her arm and said, “Come on, come on, Erika! Don’t gawk at her. She’s a moron. Come on!”
He picked up the Russian packet, which was still pretty much intact and bore the name PRIMA.
“Come on,” said Ragnar. “Come on, Erika.”
It was Marion who said that the perfect boob was the shape of a champagne glass. Her father, Niclas Bodström, had said so. But Niclas Bodström hadn’t used the word boob; he’d said breast. Niclas Bodström had a summer place on the west side of Hammarsö and wasn’t just anybody. Erika didn’t really know what he did or even what he looked like, but she knew he wasn’t just anybody.
To illustrate what Niclas Bodström meant by this statement, Marion produced a crystal champagne glass from her shocking-pink beach bag. Not a champagne flute that you might confuse with a white wine glass, but a wide, rounded champagne saucer.
Erika would be lying on the rock along with Emily and Frida. She had been invited. It was Marion’s rock. None of the girls would lie down on the rock without having been invited by Marion. Laura was too young; she wasn’t allowed to lie on the rock. The first summer Erika got to know Marion, she wasn’t allowed to lie on the rock, either.
“What was your name again?”
Marion stood face-to-face with Erika outside the shop. As usual, she had Emily and Frida with her; Eva was there as well.
“She’s that Norwegian girl,” said Emily.
“Th
e one whose little sister always tags along,” said Frida.
“And much worse than that! She’s the one who hangs out with Psycho Boy,” said Marion.
The champagne glass wasn’t clean; there was a huge lipstick mark clinging to the glass like a leech.
“My mum’s lips,” said Marion, pointing to the lipstick mark.
She got up and stood on the rock, letting the wind catch her long black hair. Erika could see she was posing; Erika could see that in fact she seemed a little bit ridiculous, standing there on the rock, pretending she was being photographed for Vogue or something. But so what? Just because Ragnar kept filling her head with shit about Marion. How vain she was. How stupid she was. What a slut she was. She was pretty fabulous, too. The most gorgeous girl Erika had ever seen. No wonder Ragnar talked shit.
Erika looked out across the sky and the sea.
“Absolutely perfect!” said Marion, lowering her breast into the glass.
Chapter 25
Now, more than twenty-five years later, she was on her way to Hammarsö again. But first she would spend the night in Sunne. Ragnar was gone. Only his breath in Erika’s lungs. His blood in Erika’s veins. A flood of pain and waves and breathing. Ragnar’s breathing in her lungs, in her mouth, Ragnar’s blood in her veins.