A Blessed Child

by Linn Ullmann

  Once, many years ago, before he got to know Erika, he and Marion had been best friends. Going out together, even. Eight years old and they were a couple. He’s almost forgotten it; it was so long ago.

  “I don’t believe you,” says Erika. “You and Marion?”

  Erika is often with him in the hut. She brings cinnamon buns and milk and O’boy and sometimes a drop of wine she’s managed to get her hands on without Rosa and Isak’s noticing.

  “It’s true. We walked along the beach, hand in hand, and said we were going out together.”

  Erika turns to him.

  “Why does she hate you now?”

  Ragnar doesn’t answer. Most of all he wants to lie still on the mattress with Erika and not say anything, or at least not talk about Marion and the others. It means nothing.

  “It means nothing,” he says.

  It’s awful, this: counting the days until he and his mother will have to leave Hammarsö and go back home to Stockholm, away from those bastards. It’s true, he prefers the bastards in Stockholm to the bastards on Hammarsö. Marion isn’t in Stockholm. That’s to say, she is in Stockholm, but not in his Stockholm. They live in two different cities. Just as they live on two different islands here. Nobody knows Ragnar’s Hammarsö, except perhaps Erika, a little. And nobody knows Ragnar’s Stockholm.

  Once, last winter, he ran into Marion in town, outside Rigoletto on Kungsgatan. They nodded to each other as if they were perfectly normal acquaintances. She had a cold and looked washed-out, and wore a stupid hat pulled down over her ears and a quilted jacket buttoned right up to her chin. He couldn’t see her long black hair. He would never admit, even under torture, that he thinks Marion is beautiful, and that day on Kungsgatan she wasn’t beautiful or even cute, just a very ordinary girl in a stupid hat. In his Stockholm there is Puggen, and Puggen is grown up. Puggen and Ragnar are friends. It’s awful! The problem with counting the days until he leaves Hammarsö is that he’ll also be counting the days until he leaves Erika. When he was little, he counted the days to Christmas and his birthday and even his name day (as if there were anything to celebrate if your name was Ragnar!) because his mother would always give him a present. But not even a lunatic counts the days until he’s going to be plunged into acid or leave the person he loves. Ragnar can’t be bothered counting the days to his birthday anymore.

  Ragnar and Erika have the same birthday.

  This year they’re going to be fourteen. And when that day comes, there will only be three days to go until the opening night of the Hammarsö Pageant and six days to go until he and his mother return to Stockholm. Six days. That’s not even a week. Six days, however you look at it, is an unbearably short time.

  Ragnar studies his face in the mirror. Then who the hell else are you talking to? One day he’s going to have an operation to remove the birthmark between his eyes, and then he’ll come to Hammarsö and everyone will gasp. SHIT, IS THAT RAGNAR? they’ll say. Because not only has he got rid of that goddamned mark, not only has he got a smooth, tanned forehead, but he’s also grown; he’s taller and stronger than Pär and all those total losers. And he’ll grab Marion’s black hair and drag her along the road after him. He winks at himself and shoots with his index fingers from his hips, a pistol in each hand.

  Chapter 52

  The dress is blue. Molly has got other dresses, too, but she likes wearing the blue one best. Molly’s mother has washed the dress in the washing machine many times, wearing the fabric very thin. Whenever Molly wakes up in the night, she heads for her mother, who is asleep in bed in the next room. She curls up in her mother’s big bed, beside her mother’s warm body, and folds herself deeper and deeper into her mother’s long arms.

  The reason Molly doesn’t want to sleep in her own bed at night is that there is a bear in her room, in the wall.

  In summer it’s Rosa who washes the blue dress in the washing machine. Sleeping in Rosa’s bed at night isn’t allowed, because Isak sleeps there. If Molly tries—creeps quietly into Rosa’s room and climbs into Rosa’s bed—Isak wakes up and starts bellowing.

  Laura’s the only one who doesn’t mind hearing about the bear in the wall.

  Laura says: “You can sleep with me, in my bed.”

  Molly nods and looks down at the floor. She has two sisters called Erika and Laura. They are sisters for the summer and only then.

  Laura says: “I’ve got nails as sharp as claws and I can gouge his eyes out, and I’ve got teeth as sharp as spears and I can bite his neck and make the blood spurt out.”

  Laura isn’t big and round and soft like Molly’s mother, but spindly and sharp-edged, just like her bed. Laura’s bed isn’t meant for two girls. The girls are meant to stay in their own beds and sleep all night. That’s what Rosa says. When Molly wakes up in the night and is afraid of the bear, Laura whispers in her ear that she will slaughter the bear with one of her knives and then skin it. She’ll sell the pelt in the shop and make lots of money that she won’t share with anybody, not even Molly. Laura wants to keep all the money for herself.

  “It’s my bear,” says Molly.

  “But I’m the one killing it,” says Laura.

  Lastly she’ll boil up the bear to make soup, and serve it to Isak, who eats that sort of thing.

  “He never does!” says Molly, unsure.

  It is dark; the night is long. The grandfather clock in the living room strikes three. Laura says Molly must sleep, but not rest her head on Laura’s arm, because that hurts. Laura sings Molly’s song:

  Dance to your daddy

  My little lassie

  Dance to your daddy

  My little one

  You shall have a fishie

  In a little dishie

  You shall have a fishie

  When the boat comes in

  When Rosa has washed the blue dress, she hangs it, still dripping, on white rails in a hot cupboard in the laundry room. Molly’s mother hasn’t got a laundry room. Only Rosa has a laundry room. In the laundry room Rosa washes Isak’s socks, shirts, and trousers, and then she hangs them up on white rails in the hot cupboard. Every day there are socks, shirts, and trousers in the hot cupboard, and sometimes the blue dress is hanging there, too, among Isak’s clothes, on white rails.

  You’re not allowed into the laundry room and you’re not allowed to open the door to the hot cupboard and you’re not allowed to sit in the hot cupboard to get warm after you’ve been swimming in the cold sea. You could die if you do that. If the door slams shut, say, and you can’t get it open again. But it’s nice and cozy, crawling in under Isak’s damp trouser legs, sitting there to get warm, with Laura. When Erika comes into the laundry room, it’s nearly always to rinse out her bikini in cold water, not because she wants to sit in the cupboard. Erika’s too big to sit in the cupboard.

  On the drying cupboard in the laundry room, Isak has put up a notice, and the notice says: THIS DRYING CUPBOARD IS NOT TO BE USED BY CHILDREN AFTER SWIMMING! ANYONE WHO BREAKS THIS RULE WILL BE PUNISHED WITHOUT MERCY! It is written in thick red felt-tip pen, and underneath Isak has drawn a bear with two crooked horns on its head.

  Laura reads the notice for Molly. She says the drawing isn’t a bear, it’s a devil.

  Erika is at the sink, rinsing out her bikini. She rolls her eyes. She can’t generally be bothered to play with Laura and Molly. Sometimes Rosa offers five kronor to whichever big sister will mind Molly while she goes to the mainland or gets on with housework. Erika hasn’t got time. Erika’s seeing Marion or Ragnar or going to the shop for an ice cream or something. Laura says she hasn’t really got time, either, but she needs the money.

  Molly studies her father’s drawing and says she doesn’t think it’s a devil. She says this although she has no idea what a devil is.

  “It’s a bear,” says Molly.

  “It’s a devil,” says Laura.

  “It’s a bear,” says Molly.

  “Bears don’t have horns on their heads,” says Laura, pointing to the horns.
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br />   “Those aren’t horns—they’re teeth,” says Molly.

  “Nobody has teeth on their head, silly.”

  “Oh yes they do!” says Molly.

  “Well, bears don’t. I’ve never seen a bear with teeth on its head.”

  Molly loses her temper. “But I have!”

  Erika takes Laura’s arm and tells her to stop it. Laura says Erika isn’t the babysitter. Erika can mind her own business while Laura does her babysitting job.

  Erika shrugs.

  Laura points at the picture again and says to Molly: “It’s a devil with horns.”

  “They’re teeth! They’re teeth!” screeches Molly.

  She sits down on the floor and beats the drying cupboard with her fists.

  Erika wrings out her bikini and leaves.

  Laura says: “I know Daddy a bit better than you do, so I know the sort of pictures he draws.”

  She jabs her index finger at the drawing.

  “And that is not a bear.”

  “I couldn’t care less about you. It’s a bear, and all bears have teeth on their head!”

  Day after day of sunshine. Hot in the air, hot in the sea, hot in the grass. It’s almost too hot to have her blue dress on. It’s best to be virtually bare. Just panties and undershirt. Or a bikini. It’s Molly’s birthday soon. She’s going to be five. She wants a bikini for her birthday.

  Molly knows it’s possible to swim yet at the same time not to be able to swim. It’s hard to explain to Rosa and Isak. They say either you can swim or you can’t. They say when it comes to swimming, there are no two ways about it. They say on no account are you allowed into the sea when you’re only four years and fifty-one weeks old and not sure whether you can swim. Isak grips her in his arms and lifts her high in the air and spins her around.

  “You do as I say! Otherwise I’ll never put you back down again.”

  Isak calls her a blue flower. It’s not because she is a flower, but because she has a favorite dress that is blue.

  Molly’s tummy and head feel all light and wobbly, and Molly laughs out loud and Isak spins her even faster.

  Molly knows Isak doesn’t understand what she means. He hardly ever does. He’s a giant and she’s a blue flower. The most important thing is that she knows she can swim and yet not be able to swim. That’s why Molly goes into the water only when nobody’s looking. She goes down to the beach. She takes off her dress, folds it up neatly, and puts it on a rock. She lies down in the water, on the stony bottom, and lets the waves wash over her.

  It’s the summer of 1979, the hottest summer since 1874. It said so in the newspaper. It’s July. Molly can count to ten. She can count to a hundred and yet she can’t. In Molly’s room hangs a calendar with pictures of kittens. Every evening, Molly crosses a day off the calendar. She draws a big red X over the day that’s just gone and will never come back, maybe only in Heaven, where everything happens over and over again. That’s what Isak says, at least.

  Putting X’s on the calendar is one way to be sure time is going by. The other way is to sit under the grandfather clock in the living room and watch every time the big hand moves, which it does once a minute.

  When the big children go swimming, Molly stands on the beach looking on, shouting HOY HOY HOY. Erika and Laura and Ragnar and Marion and the others splash and play and have fun and wave to her.

  Whenever one of the children vanishes underwater—it happens sometimes; a wave comes and the child vanishes into the wave—Molly stretches her hands up to the sky and shouts HOY HOY HOY so loud that the child pops up again, every bit as alive as before.

  In four weeks, which is time that goes by, Molly’s mother will wash her dress and hang it on a string outside the bedroom window in the flat on the third floor. Molly’s mother has no laundry room, and she has no drying cupboard, either. Molly lives with her mother in a flat in Oslo. Molly doesn’t live on Hammarsö.

  Laura has told her that one day a long time ago, when Molly was a baby, she sat in her carriage outside Isak’s door and screamed and screamed until Rosa and Isak had no choice but to open the door and bring her inside with them. Molly’s mother tells her on the telephone that that is not what happened.

  “You’re as welcome on Hammarsö as your half sisters,” her mother says. “Next time Laura says anything like that, you tell her to stop talking rubbish.”

  One day, Molly sits by herself on the floor in front of Isak’s grandfather clock, determined to sit there until it’s time for her to go back home to Oslo. Or at least until it’s her birthday. She sits on the floor for ages. Time goes slowly when you watch it. As she is sitting there, a bird flies into the living room. There are three windows in Isak’s living room and only one of them is open, and the bird flies in through the open window. The bird is small and gray and buzzes around the room like a wasp, only worse because it’s bigger than a wasp. And suddenly it bashes its head against one of the closed windows. THUMP! Molly gets up from the floor and runs toward the bird, cupping her hand.

  “Come here, little bird! Come here!”

  But the bird doesn’t hear her; it launches itself at the closed window again. THUMP! And another THUMP! Then it does a poo. White bird poo runs down the closed window. The bird whirls past her and Molly falls to her knees.

  She shuts her eyes tightly, covers her ears and whispers: “Help! Help! Help!”

  The bird flies up toward the ceiling and perches on top of Isak’s writing desk. It isn’t moving now. Molly is still on her knees on the floor, peeking at it through splayed fingers. It’s all gone quiet now; all she can hear is the tick of the grandfather clock. She decides that if she squeezes her eyes shut and counts to ten, it will fly away without crashing into anything. She squeezes her eyes shut.

  “One—two—three—four—five—six—seven—eight—nine—ten.”

  She opens her eyes.

  The bird is still there.

  A living gray blob on top of the writing desk.

  She wishes everything could be back to normal so she could sit down and watch time passing and be bored again. But nothing can be normal while the bird is inside.

  Molly gets up slowly, goes cautiously over to the windows, and opens first one, then the other.

  “Look over here, little bird! Look over here! Out you go!”

  The bird looks at her. She’s not sure it can see her, but it seems to be looking at her. She doesn’t want it to start flying again, buzzing wildly from wall to wall and bashing its head against the closed window and pooing. But she doesn’t want it just perched up there on the writing desk, quietly looking at her, either. She doesn’t want it to be so scared, at least not while she’s the only one who knows it’s so scared. Surely it could fly off and be scared somewhere else, where she wouldn’t have to look after it. No one expects Molly to look after all the birds in the whole world. It could be birds that have gotten their wings covered in oil and can’t fly and lie dying on the beach; that happens all the time. It’s sad, but not so terribly sad. It could be birds that get eaten by other birds or fly into other people’s living rooms or get stuck in the branch of a tree. They are not Molly’s problem. If Isak or Rosa or Erika or Laura had come into the living room, she would have been able to run away and then this bird wouldn’t have been her problem, either. But as things stand, it is. Molly and the bird are alone together. Suddenly it takes off and flies straight at her, hurtling toward her. She raises her arms to shield her face and screams, shutting her eyes tightly.

  It’s that noise again. THUMP!

  “Please! Fly away! Fly away!”

  Molly is crying now.

  And then suddenly: nothing. Complete quiet. She looks up at the writing desk. It’s not there. She looks around. The bird has gone. It isn’t here any longer. It has flown out one of the open windows, and it was Molly who opened them.

  Molly saved the bird and now it has gone.

  It no longer exists.

  Molly hop-skips through the woods, in and out among the trees
. She’s got new red sandals. When it’s as hot as it is now, it’s better to have sandals. The problem is, your toes stick out, and if someone’s got scissors that are sharp enough, they can chop off the whole lot. Every single toe. That’s what Laura says. Not that Laura (who’s got some sharp scissors like that) would chop off her little sister’s toes, when she was asleep, say, and not even wearing sandals, but there are certainly other people who might do it. Ragnar, for example, and Ragnar also has a horned head. Not two horns like in Isak’s drawing. But one.

  One night when Molly was lying in Laura’s narrow bed, Laura switched on the bedside light and whispered: “If you look carefully at Ragnar, you can see he’s got a brown lump on his forehead. Once, that was a big horn, but Isak did an operation and cut most of it off.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “It’s true,” said Laura.

  “And then what?”

  “When Ragnar’s mum was having him, it nearly went horribly wrong. They couldn’t get him out of her because of the horn.”

  Laura clasped her throat and made a dreadful noise, then the blue in her eyes vanished upward and her eyeballs were totally white.

  “And then?” said Molly.

  “And then,” said Laura, “when Ragnar was a year old and had learned to walk, his mum took his hand and went with him to Isak and asked him to do the operation. But although Isak’s a doctor, he couldn’t get rid of it all.”

  Molly hop-skips in and out between the trees in the woods. The bikini she has asked for as a birthday present will have polka dots, just like Erika’s, and the cake Rosa makes will be decorated with wild strawberries—and Erika and Laura will pick them. As for Molly, she will sit on a red cushion and eat chocolate pudding all day. Isak says so.