Drowned

by Therese Bohman

  “Sounds good. Like a real summer holiday.”

  The thoughtfulness in his voice doesn’t sound genuine to me, the fact that he’s trying to pretend just makes me feel uncomfortable, I don’t want to pretend any longer, and I don’t want to talk to him anymore, I clear my throat.

  “Listen, Stella’s just shouted to me, she wants some help with dinner. So … you take care.”

  “You too.”

  We hang up at exactly the same time, very quickly, both equally relieved, perhaps.

  Stella and I walk through the forest on our way down to the lake, over shiny tree roots and last year’s fallen leaves. The trees around us are tall, it’s like walking in a great hall of trunks, a cathedral with a ceiling made of treetops. I look up at the sky, blue flickering among the green, I see a bird way up high, sitting motionless on a branch and watching us. It is hot even in the shade beneath the trees, the air seems to be standing still.

  By the side of the path there are mats of glowing green sorrel, I break off a few leaves and push them in my mouth. The taste is sour, just as I remember from the forest where we played when we were little, but I find it difficult to swallow the leaves when they grow soft in my mouth, I spit them out. Stella looks at me, her expression amused.

  “You can use them in salads,” she says.

  I wrinkle my nose, she smiles.

  The water in the lake is still and dark. Stella doesn’t want to swim by the little sandy beach, but by some rocks a little farther on, it’s nicer getting in there, you avoid that feeling that the ground is giving way beneath your feet. She has wound up her hair in a shiny knot on top of her head, and in her strapless swimsuit she looks like a film star, timeless, elegant. I feel clumsy beside her but I forget that as soon as the water envelops me, it feels fresher today, it’s warm enough to be pleasant from the start, but yet it’s cooling, I lie on my back, close my eyes, the surface of the water is almost body temperature. I feel so drowsy I’m afraid of nodding off, I can feel my head sinking farther beneath the surface the more I relax, the sounds around me become muted, slow. The water is the same color as syrup, or resin, I run my finger across the surface, it looks almost viscous, as if it has thickened, is in the process of setting. If the temperature were to drop suddenly Stella and I would end up like insects caught in a piece of amber, I think, like the people in Pompeii, trapped inside the syrup-colored frozen water of the lake instead of ash. The archaeologists could hack us out of the yellow ice one day, study us, the thought makes me smile.

  A short distance away Stella’s head is bobbing up and down, she swims out to the middle of the lake, turns and swims back, repeats this several times, I lose count of her lengths. Her strokes look slightly awkward, as if she is not entirely comfortable with them, but her expression is determined. Suddenly she is beside me, treading water, breathing heavily.

  “This is fantastic exercise,” she says between breaths. “You really do use your entire body.”

  I nod. Her movements produce small eddies of cooler water around us, I feel the gooseflesh on my arms, then a few seconds later they are smooth again as the blazing sun quickly warms up this new water too. Stella gazes over toward the shore on the far side of the lake, screws up her eyes, and points.

  “Have you seen them?” she says. “I told you the water lilies would be flowering now.”

  I turn my head and there they are, a host of water lilies, like a floral cover on the surface of the water, it seems almost unbelievable that I didn’t see them when I was here on my own. They move gently, even though the water looks completely still, perhaps there are currents down below tugging at their stems, they look indolent, majestic, like torches that have been slowly brought to the surface, up toward the light, blooming quietly and with dignity among the green pattern of their leaves.

  “Can you pick them?” I say. “Take them home and put them in a vase?”

  “Not in a vase, maybe. But it ought to be possible to put them in a bowl of water. Shall I go and get one?”

  It’s a long way to swim to the other side, perhaps she’s overestimating her ability. I shake my head.

  “I find them slightly revolting.”

  Stella laughs, pushes back a strand of hair that has escaped from the knot and fallen down over one eyebrow. Then she turns and swims back toward the rocks. A short distance out there is a large rock hidden just beneath the surface, the water swirling around it as a kind of warning. Stella heaves herself up onto it, waves to me, it looks weird, as if she’s actually sitting on the water. I laugh, wave back, swim toward her.

  “You look like the little mermaid,” I say.

  She laughs too, slips back into the water, we swim back to the shore together.

  When we have dried ourselves with our faded towels we spread them on the rocks and sit down side by side. The stone is smooth and pleasant, like in the archipelago. I fiddle vaguely with some alder cones, Stella drinks water directly from an old juice bottle she has brought with her, swallowing great big gulps, then she takes a deep breath.

  “I think I’m going to start swimming in the fall,” she says. “In the mornings, before I go to work. The pool is right next door. I’d like to be a really good swimmer. And it makes you strong.”

  I steal a glance at her body. She is smaller and daintier than I am, I’ve always envied her that. She doesn’t look as if she needs to take up swimming to keep in shape, and there is no sign of a rounded tummy yet. I spot a mark on her inner thigh, just below the edge of her swimsuit. It’s a round mark, about the size of a shirt button or a small coin, dark against her smooth, pale skin, a livid dark red, almost purple. When she notices that I have seen it she quickly covers it with her hand, looks up at me, I think she looks as if she has been caught out, slightly embarrassed.

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  She shakes her head, smiles anxiously.

  “I’m so clumsy, I burned myself,” she says.

  “On what?”

  “I dropped a cigarette.”

  She’s nowhere near as good at lying as I am, and the thought that I am better than her at something is quite satisfying. There is something different about her tone of voice, something strained, besides which it’s a poor explanation. It could easily be a burn, but a dropped cigarette would never make such a perfect round mark. And she would have had to have been smoking dressed in only her underwear. I give a little smile, she looks at me with an unconvincingly relaxed expression.

  “But you don’t smoke, do you?” I say.

  She looks away.

  “Sometimes. At parties.”

  I drop the subject because it is obviously upsetting her. It amuses me slightly to have hit upon a sore point, even if I find it difficult to understand why. Perhaps there’s something she finds embarrassing behind it, but dropping a cigarette on your leg is hardly something to be so embarrassed about. But then it occurs to me that she might have done it on purpose, that she might have burned herself. I’ve only read about that kind of thing in magazines, and at first the idea seems alien, but the more I think about it, the more logical it seems. Stella, who is such a controlled person, always so conscientious—isn’t that the kind of woman who does those things, is she punishing herself for some reason? I swallow, afraid of where my thoughts are heading: Stella weeping in my arms in the palace park, her “What if it’s my fault,” perhaps it’s only a short step from there to punishing herself in a purely practical way.

  I suddenly feel ill, I glance at Stella, who seems perfectly calm now, perfectly happy in the sun on the warm rocks. She passes me the bottle of water, rolls over onto her stomach, closes her eyes.

  When Stella is at work and Gabriel has gone into town I go up the stairs, up to the first floor, into the bedroom. I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I haven’t been able to get the mark on Stella’s thigh out of my mind. I want proof, one way or the other. At the same time I am trying to persuade myself not to make too big a deal of it, to take it easy—even this kind of th
ing could be a one-off, I think, a really bad day, I don’t have any problems imagining that, even if I could never do something like that myself, but then Stella and I are different in that way too: her anger has always been more explosive, found more dramatic ways of expressing itself than mine. Perhaps she did it out of sheer defiance, a kind of regression to her teenage years, perhaps she regrets it with hindsight, thinks she overreacted and is embarrassed, perhaps that’s why she doesn’t want to talk about it.

  Stella has kept a diary for as long as I can remember. I used to envy her the discipline she had even as a child: she really did write something every single day, even if it was only a brief entry. When we were little I used to be allowed to see what she’d written sometimes, then it all got more and more secretive and she started to hide her diaries, even though I would never have tried to find them and read them. I think it’s unpleasant, knowing too much about other people, I’ve never understood that particular urge. I’ve always been surprised at the shameless curiosity of others: my friends rummaging in the drawers of my desk when they were left alone in my room when I was younger, or my first landlord in Stockholm who rented me a small, furnished one-room apartment full of stuff, and almost seemed to expect that I would go through drawers and photo albums, bundles of papers and videotapes.

  There is no problem finding Stella’s diary now, it’s in the drawer of her bedside table along with a few bits and pieces: lip salve, some pens, tissues, and a packet of condoms, which makes me feel uncomfortable about my snooping, but I take out the diary anyway. It’s covered in a shiny, Asian fabric with a pattern of blossoming fruit trees and birds against a pale-blue background, the same kind of notebook Stella used to have when she was little. I open the first page, it is dated just about twelve months ago, August last year, it must have been immediately after Stella and Gabriel came back from their holiday in Italy. All the entries are short, in Stella’s neat and clearly legible handwriting: Planning meeting with parks committee, decided to get rid of hyacinths outside town hall. Out for a meal with G after work is the first entry. Ordered bulbs, lots of yellow + broom for Slottsgatan and the square. Spoke to Sara, we might go there for the weekend in a few weeks. It goes on in the same way: mostly notes about work, and a few details about what has happened at home, but in the same matter-of-fact tone. G and I went to IKEA, bought shelves for the bedroom and storeroom. Sore throat, hope I don’t get a cold before the conference next week.

  I put the book back in the drawer, surprised at the impersonal tone. Perhaps she no longer feels the same need for a diary, I think, perhaps she makes those notes about her everyday life because of some inherent sense of obligation. I close the drawer, smooth down the bedspread.

  Gabriel barbecues in the evening, catfish, he shows it to me triumphantly before putting it on the grill. Ever since I arrived he has been saying that he ought to cook catfish because I’ve never had it, Stella makes potato salad with her own potatoes and radishes and red onions and herbs, she is proud of the fact that she grows so much herself. “If war breaks out we’ll be self-sufficient,” she often says, even if that isn’t strictly true. I can hear her through the living room as she clatters about in the kitchen, muttering about blackfly on the dill, I hear Gabriel speak to her as he comes in to fetch something and they laugh together, a muted laughter that sounds intimate.

  I am leafing through an old art book I found in one of the bookcases in the living room, its cardboard cover is yellowed and its color pictures of early Renaissance paintings are dull and faded, Italian frescoes with a somewhat tentative perspective. I wonder if the colors in the book were once sharper, if they were vivid red and blue when it was first printed, or if they have always looked like this, if it wasn’t possible to print brighter colors at that time.

  Gabriel makes a big thing of the fish when we’re eating, it does look beautiful, patterned with lines from the grill, and it tastes good, although I don’t think it’s anything special.

  “What do you think?” he says when I’ve taken the first bite.

  “Delicious,” I say.

  “Try it with a little squeeze of lemon.”

  He passes me a dish of lemon wedges, I squeeze a few drops of juice over my piece of fish, taste again, nod to him. Then I empty my wineglass, gulping it down. It’s good wine, easy to drink. I reach for the bottle and top up my glass, Stella is talking about some occasion when Gabriel made a complete mess of his catfish and they both laugh, I’m not listening. We have a secret, I think, a secret is a confidence and confidences mean something, they bind people together. This guilt is like a tie, I think. We have exchanged guilt as others exchange rings. We carry it together now, the knowledge of a betrayal.

  He is still not looking at me, he is looking at Stella, he seems particularly attentive to what she says, laughing when she tells him about something that was in the paper, they have so much fun with the local paper that makes news out of nothing, particularly during the summer when nothing happens; articles about people showing off their enormous record-breaking vegetables and amusingly shaped potatoes, a story with a happy ending about a hamster that disappeared then returned to its owner, they laugh together. The feeling in my stomach is new, it is jealousy and something more, it feels like nausea, like a distant childhood memory of having fallen and gotten the wind knocked out of me so that at first I can’t get any air, I am breathing but nothing happens, perhaps something inside me has locked in some kind of cramp, the nausea washes over me when he looks at Stella with his most loving expression, full of tenderness, he’s never looked at me that way. He has looked at me in other ways, dark, aroused, it’s not enough, when I see how he looks at Stella I know it’s not enough for me, not anymore. Look at me, I think, look at me with that loving expression, look at me and stop laughing. But he doesn’t stop.

  The living room is like a jewelry box, I think as I stand on the thick Oriental rug, it is dark red, its pattern like prisms, diamonds, and the crystal chandelier on the ceiling glitters like an old lady wearing row upon row of necklaces. And then there are the books, shelf upon shelf, the pictures, the squashed-down sofa, the tiled stove, a bank of pelargoniums, I would be envious of anybody who got to live in a house with a room like this, does she appreciate it? Maybe she thinks it’s too cluttered, that it attracts the dust. She hasn’t said much about the house apart from the odd comment about things that don’t work, and then that business of wanting to renovate the kitchen and bathroom, maybe she really wants to live somewhere else, preferably in Stockholm of course, or maybe in Malmö, just spending the summer here, and perhaps the odd weekend during the rest of the year.

  I run my fingers over a row of book spines, wondering whether I ought to read one of them. On a stool there is a pile of Stella’s books, books about flora and gardens, I pick one up, it is older than the rest. The Countryman’s Reference Book, compiled with the assistance of numerous specialists, it is heavy, bound in dark-brown leather with the title in gold on the front. I flick through it from the back: threshing, thistles, sowing, root vegetables, rhubarb, pears, parasites, I stop, glance at the illustrations. They are disgusting yet fascinating, making me think of the clumps of blackfly on the nasturtiums, I skim through the text: Parasite: refers to a plant or animal that acquires its nutrition from another living organism, which is then referred to as the host plant or host animal. Holoparasites occur in only a few cases among the higher plants in Sweden. As a rule they cause damage to the host by depriving it of nutrition, producing unhealthy growths, or destroying the tissues which have been attacked, thus leading to sickness and death, the room is stuffy, we ought to open the windows more, but perhaps it wouldn’t make any difference on days like this, or in summers like this, with its sticky, motionless air, we could have all the windows and doors wide open and it still wouldn’t be any cooler or fresher.

  Suddenly Gabriel is standing in the doorway, I close the book.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I thought I might try and find s
omething to read.”

  He nods, walks over to one of the bookcases and seems to be looking for a particular book, I am aware of his smell, I close my eyes briefly and think of the greenhouse, his kisses, his grip on my arms, I can feel my cheeks begin to burn immediately.

  “Here.”

  He passes me a small, thick book bound in blue leather. Selections from the Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne, it says on the cover. The pages are fragile and yellowed, their edges uneven. Someone must have used a blunt knife to slit them open.

  “I think you’d like it. And it fits in well with your assignment.”

  “Do you like it?”

  He clears his throat.

  “It’s hard to find anything more elegant than this,” he says. “And at the same time it’s also hard to find anything more pathetic. Do you understand?”

  His expression is different now, softer, his voice too, and at last he is looking at me in the way I want him to look at me. I nod, thinking that this is the way I want it to be, I want him to take out more books, hand them to me, look at me with that kind expression, wanting me to understand. I think that I really do want to understand.

  I hear him talking on the telephone in the kitchen. He is leaning over the draining board, doodling absentmindedly on the notepad he and Stella usually use for the shopping lists. He can’t see me, but I can gaze at him from behind, his shoulders, his arms where the sleeves of his T-shirt end. The fingers of one hand are drumming impatiently on the draining board, I realize he’s waiting for something on the phone. Then he clears his throat.

  “Yes, I called earlier,” he says. “It’s about the insurance.”

  He is silent for a moment, listening.

  “But I’ve already keyed in the fucking client number,” he says in a tone that is both irritated and weary. “Surely that’s why they’ve put me through to you?”

  He sighs, leafs through a bundle of papers in front of him and begins to read out a long sequence of numbers.