She unexpectedly sees herself from behind. Her neck is as thin as a six-year-old’s. On the floor of the nursery with Ninne, who is wearing a red-checked dress. A ray of sunlight between the beds, Ninne refusing to put on her knee socks. Put on your seeknocks, Ninne! And Ninne rolls around laughing, wanting to hear seeknocks over and over again. Along with the other words they once shared.
Ia sleeps in the smallest room, which is no bigger than a closet. She has asked Mom if Ia can be her very own baby, and Mom has said yes.
Then she sees herself from behind in Granny’s rock garden, with a dragonfly on her finger. Everyone in the house is fast asleep, only she and the dragonfly are awake. It breathes with the rear end of its body. And then it is gone.
In Årsta, as Ricki unrolls her architectural drawings.
In the schoolyard, wearing that loathsome beret. Herself from behind, from a long distance away, or is it backward? Staying in Lund means fossilizing. Better to opt for a broken heart and occasional clarity of vision and the freedom to breathe. It will mean carrying an enormous burden of guilt.
But fossilizing into a bad-tempered sack of stones would be much worse.
She comes back to the present, and the other girl has disappeared. She gets to her feet and leaves the churchyard. They catch the morning boat to the house in the archipelago, she and Dad. And they remain silent almost all the way, because what is there to say?
Olle comes over with the boy. Ninne and Ia are there too. Olle wants to talk to Dad on his own, so the sisters take their little cousin down to the shore for a swim. As they begin to get undressed, he starts howling like a wild animal; he runs up the hill and takes cover behind a pine tree.
They can see him peering around the trunk.
He is a very strange child.
He approaches them slowly. When they turn around: piercing yells, earsplitting screams, and he runs and hides behind a birch. They see his blond head moving from tree to tree, and they can’t stop laughing at him. Until they realize it’s the sight of their breasts the boy can’t stand. They seem to remind him of something: a loss.
She pictures Ricki and the silent boy beneath her white breast: the image of the Pietà. They stop laughing and get dressed; the boy calms down. By now Olle is grateful that she wants to visit Ricki. He gives her a set of keys to the apartment.
But first of all she has to go and see Mom.
It is a farewell. Don’t go, Mom keeps repeating quietly. It’s only for a year, she replies, it’s a lie, but it makes the situation more bearable. Gothenburg isn’t all that far from Lund, I’ll be back to see you all the time.
Don’t go. Please, please don’t leave me. Not you as well. You don’t have to live at home, but stay in Lund.
Mom, I have to go.
Her mother falls silent, rubbing her fingers.
They are sitting on the balcony at her maternal grandparents’ new two-room apartment in Gärdet. The market garden is to be sold; Mom has been helping them to pack everything up and is about to go back to Lund. Down below the balcony the birch leaves are rustling gently, and the terns are screaming in the sky. In Mom’s eyes she sees the child with mixed blood who has always had to defend herself: enormous tension, enormous tenacity. But now abandoned. Utterly abandoned.
And she repeats that she has to get away, just for a while, gain some kind of perspective, have the chance to be herself. Her mouth is dry as she says it all again. Dead words. Like walking through a dead landscape, short steps, vigilance, silence.
Has her mother ever had the chance to be herself? Oh yes. Through her music. And in her language. Mom has been herself more than most people.
Eventually Mom gives up.
In that case I guess you have to go, she says.
In this life we live as if we were occupying a rented room. Language is also a room. Everything on loan. To be returned. We can’t share death, but we can dig out a hollow and lie in it, settle down to wait: that’s how it feels to say goodbye to Mom.
One step toward death. But one step closer to life.
Mom, I don’t know if I can do it, but I’m going to try to write. She hasn’t confided this to anyone else. And at that moment a little spark of interest is born in Mom’s eyes.
Talking to Mom has gone better than she could have hoped. She goes with Mom to the central station, and on the platform they hug each other tightly.
She waves until the train is out of sight.
She unlocks the front door of the apartment on Drottninghusgränd. The place smells summer-empty. She opens the kitchen window, fries the blood pudding she has brought with her. Pinches a glass of cognac out of Olle’s bottle.
What is she going to do with herself now she is all alone?
She is me. Or at least, I was once her.
I try to picture her in my mind’s eye. She is wearing a turquoise summer dress and sandals. She doesn’t know what to do. She crouches down in front of the bookcase in the dark hallway and reads the names on the spines.
She finds a book about Spinoza, but she doesn’t have the energy to read.
The apartment is dark and depressing. Opening all the windows doesn’t help; it is still stuffy. She pulls off her dress and drops it on a chair, walks around barefoot in her underwear. She has made a big decision, and now she is scared. She is planning to move to a city she knows very little about.
Her boyfriend lives there. The relationship will end.
It mustn’t end. But she doesn’t love him, and it has to end.
She takes off her bra and panties and stands in the bathtub under the shower. She is crying, her tears mingled with the running water. She hasn’t cried for a very long time. She hardly ever cries. And never uncontrollably, like this. It doesn’t matter, it’s okay to cry. No one can hear her. Her hair, which is usually caught up in a ponytail in a rubber band, is hanging loose; it is soon lank and sodden.
She sits on the edge of the bath and towels it dry. Calm.
She must calm down. There are things to do. She finds the linen cupboard and makes up the bed where she is to sleep, the boy’s narrow bed with his Donald Duck comics in neat piles beside it. She gets into the bed. The ceiling is white and blind. She draws up her knees, the bead is swollen and hard. She masturbates. Enterprisingly, systematically.
For them, she thinks. The depressing apartment is the home of love. This is where she has met them. And only here. Her vagina, she pushes her finger deep inside, but it brings no relief.
The loneliness is too great. Loneliness is the song of the earth. Das Lied von der Erde by Gustav Mahler. Kathleen Ferrier. It washes over her, the grief: fierce and harsh. She fetches the bottle of cognac from the kitchen. She doesn’t drink. She sits on the edge of the bed with her thighs spread apart and waters her pussy. Not waters. She rubs the golden, gleaming liquid over her labia with her finger.
Quietly. As a form of solace. Like a ritual. To calm herself.
She cannot calm herself. The grief overwhelms her, unmanageable and raging. Dad isn’t coming back. They were a pentagram, it was blown apart and the pieces flew in all directions. She throws herself facedown on the bed.
Her shoulders are shaking, the tears pouring down her cheeks. She doesn’t notice, but I can see her. It hurts. It hurts so much. She has held back for a long time. She misses us. And those five are gone, and will never exist again. They were not a pentagram.
How long does this go on?
Quite a long time, I think. I am the only one who can see her.
It goes on until she becomes aware of herself. Outside the August darkness has fallen. The pigeons are silent now; she closes the kitchen window and replaces the bottle of cognac in Olle’s cupboard.
She contemplates her reflection in the bathroom mirror. Her face is swollen, and she doesn’t recognize herself. The only time her grief was given free rein, and it was so tumultuous. A catharsis. She falls asleep at last.
In the morning she folds up the used sheets. She makes herself a coffee and rinses the
cup under the faucet. Olle told her to catch the red bus; she gets off at Ringvägen.
She stands there looking up at the hospital.
Did it really remind her of a palace? Did I really scramble up through the undergrowth and the bushes in my sandals, unable to find the asphalt path? Am I remembering incorrectly, was it such a hot day? Everything was exactly like that.
It was an unusually hot August day.
She stops several times on her way to the hospital. Perhaps Ricki will be haggard and ugly. She doesn’t want to remember her like that. The last meeting, if this is the last one, can obliterate all others. She sits down on the ground.
A bumblebee is buzzing in a clump of nettles nearby. She can see a plane up above, on its way to Bromma. The sky is blue and slightly curved, like a metal dish in a hot oven. She thinks about the prediction that promised Ricki two sons. Grandpa also believes in miracles, although he calls it the progress of medical science. Like Olle, he is convinced that Ricki will get better.
Maybe she won’t recognize her.
That’s possible.
But she will still be Ricki. People come and go through the main doors. An ambulance pulls up, a patient is wheeled in on a gurney. An old man is sitting on a bench by the wall, hunched over his stick. She sits down beside him and gropes in her pocket for a cigarette.
She smokes it, then stubs it out with her heel.
In the reception area she is directed to an elevator. She changes to a different elevator. An auxiliary is mopping the floor, and there is a smell of detergent. She follows a nurse along a corridor with lots of doors, some half-open. The nurse taps on Ricki’s door. She is in a private room in a bed by the window, and doesn’t notice that she has a visitor. The nurse touches her shoulder.
And Ricki turns her head and recognizes her. Immediately. With no hesitation whatsoever! Her face lights up; she is glowing.
Neta, how lovely, now we can have coffee!
I am telling the story as I remember it. Ricki was wearing a white hospital gown that barely met across her chest. She had put on a huge amount of weight. Otherwise she hadn’t really changed, or so I thought at first.
Coffee with something to dip in it, she insisted.
It’s not coffee time, the nurse objected.
Oh, come on, Ricki persisted. Coffee with something sweet, now my lovely niece has come to see me.
We’re on a diet, the nurse warned. Ricki wasn’t listening; she simply reeled off her list of requests. Danish pastries, cinnamon buns, cookies, sponge cakes. Anything sweet—crisprolls with jelly, if there’s nothing else.
Surely you must have Danish?
You know perfectly well that you’re on a diet, the nurse repeated as she left the room. I told Ricki that Olle sent his love, and her face lit up again: my darling husband! She was indescribably fat, shapeless, billowing, overflowing. Her hair had been hacked off just above shoulder level. But that wasn’t what made her different; it was her brain.
She could recall things from long ago. Me. And Olle, of course. She hadn’t a clue that she had given birth to a much longed-for son.
Ricki no longer remembered her five-year-old!
She lay in sunlight, but she was on her way into the shadows. Her room was at the top of the main building of the Southern District Hospital, almost touching the sky, and overlooking Årstaviken. Way down below the water sparkled and the sailboats sped along. Ricki rested in the sunlight as if it were a cradle. The visit was more important for me than for her; she would soon forget it.
She hasn’t changed, I tried to convince myself.
The kindness, that bright clarity, the optimism.
The essential nature of her personality, I tried to tell myself.
But that wasn’t quite true. I would never be able to ask her about the things I had wanted to discuss. Love. Dad. And Mom. Or Spinoza—I knew a little more about him by that stage.
I pulled a chair close to the bed. Ricki was interested only in Danish pastries. She kept anxiously asking about them. After about an hour an auxiliary actually appeared with a tray of coffee, pastries, and cookies, balancing it adeptly on Ricki’s enormous belly.
Ricki devoted her full attention to the goodies and ate up every scrap, until only crumbs remained. She sighed and licked her fingers so that she could finish every last one.
Delicious, she said, beaming from ear to ear. Absolutely delicious.
By the time she had finished polishing the plate, she was feeling sleepy. I hugged that big body and left. I trudged along the endless corridors, went down in one elevator after another, and left the hospital via the main entrance.
I went and sat on a rock up above Årstaviken. The air was still warm. Across the water I thought I could just make out the apartment block on Sijansvägen.
The white sails of the yachts billowed in the wind.
A green subway train passed over the railway bridge heading south, as silent as an illusion, high above the running water. Ricki would die by running water, according to an unknown fortune-teller at the beginning of time.
It suddenly seemed to me that I could see many dead people hovering above the water: their eager faces, their insistent voices, their strange lives.
Is it possible to hang out with the dead? Talk to them?
Yes. Maybe it’s better with them.
What was most important, the tumor or the love? I was filled with conviction: the love. It passes through those of us who are alive; it is then gathered in something greater and returns. What that is we will never know, but one of the many names of that unknown quantity is solace.
That was what our meeting was like; it was the last time I saw Ricki.
Then I stood on Ringvägen waiting for the bus. I was on my way to the future. It was very uncertain. The bus would take me there.
The last of the afternoon sunlight reached me. Before it disappeared the red bus arrived, and I got on. It rattled across Västerbron. Dad had driven Mom and me home across that bridge when my existence had only just begun. I knew that I loved them.
That I had to leave them.
The bus continued along by the water. People were walking on the shore in the dying summer light. Babies in strollers. Dogs. Everything was as it was, and nothing could be changed. I had been locked inside a prison. Not entirely, but to a certain extent, I had built it myself. Therefore, I was also able to leave it.
I was filled with gratitude, toward Ricki most of all. She was going to die, but she had opened her life to joy. And everything was opening up around me, the city and the people. Life is born precisely where the darkness meets the light, and I think we can call that God.
I would collect every little seed of joy in my hands.
I think it was something along those lines that went through my mind on the red bus.
And it was a revelation. An epiphany. I have had to use many words to find my way to this memory. The sun was gone, but the light remained for a long time, over the waters of the city and within me.
The quotations at the beginning of the four sections are taken from Marguerite Duras, Écrire (1993), translated into Swedish by Kennet Klemets (2014).
Stockholm and Yxlan
2013–2015
AGNETA PLEIJEL was born in Stockholm in 1940. One of Sweden’s foremost novelists, she is also a playwright and poet. Her books have been translated into more than twenty languages. She has worked as a critic and cultural editor for various Swedish newspapers and magazines. Pleijel served as president of the Swedish chapter of PEN International between 1987 and 1990, and has been a member of the academy Samfundet de Nio (the Nine Society) since 1988. From 1992 to 1996 she was a professor at the Institute of Drama in Stockholm.
MARLAINE DELARGY has translated novels by John Ajvide Lindqvist, Kristina Ohlsson, and Helene Tursten, as well as The Unit by Ninni Holmqvist and Therese Bohman’s Drowned and The Other Woman. She lives in England.
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