by Alex Dahl
It was very late by the time the flat quietened down. I could see the glow of the moon high on the sky, behind a thin cloud. I was lying next to Abdi on the bottom bunk, and at our feet lay another boy, a younger brother, curled into a ball. Fatma came in and turned off the lights and she gave me a really big smile and I could see in her eyes that she felt sorry for me, and that was nice but it also made me angry. I prayed in the night that I could stay there with them and I almost managed to convince myself that that was what Anni had arranged, because if you already have eleven children, you really might as well have twelve.
When I woke the next morning, Abdi and the two girls with purple headscarves and at least another couple of the children had gone. School, said Fatma and smiled that kind smile again. Soon you will go to school, too, she said, and put a steaming bowl of something down on the table in front of me. My heart shuddered. School. I wanted to ask her questions like: Can I live here? Where is Anni? Is Anni coming back? Have they found Krysz? Why did you say I will go to school? How can someone like me go to school? Instead I said nothing, because if you ask too many questions people will know that you know nothing. If you don’t say anything, they don’t know what you know. Will you help me here today? asked Fatma, and I nodded, because what else could I do? I ate the bowl of sweet, watery porridge with bits of chicken floating in it, and it was nicer than it sounds. After breakfast, I helped Fatma to iron some sheets and then some curtains, holding the edges up and off the apartment’s floor, which was covered in small bits of food, bits of children’s plastic toys and balls of dust, while she ironed.
We bathed three of the small boys and she sang to them in another language while running a sponge across their thin backs. Their ribs showed through their skin, and their fingernails were long. They stared at me and splashed in the shallow water and wailed when they had to come back up. This reminded me of how Moffa used to bathe me in a birch-wood tub outside on the lawn overlooking the lake every evening in summer, singing Kaptein Sabeltann’s pirate song in a funny voice while swatting at buzzing swarms of mosquitoes, tickling me with the coarse old sponge tied to a stick from the apple tree.
Fatma gave me a plate of pasta with ketchup and peas, and I sat on the bunk and played the football game alone while the small children napped. Then Abdi and the older children came back from school and we played the game together again.
For two or maybe three days it was like that. The other big kids went to school, but I stayed in the apartment with Fatma and helped her. I asked her how she knew Anni and she said, Anni and me used to live together in Karlstad. I never knew Anni had lived in Karlstad, but I guess I never knew anything about her before I knew her anyway. I asked her why she owed Anni big-time and she looked down at her own hands peeling carrots and said in a very soft voice, Because Anni and Krysz helped me and my children across the border to Norway.
Today is Tuesday, and after I heard the church bells from the church across the road ring five, Fatma came into the room and said, Yamal, you have to get ready for swim club. I told her I had to go, too, because I also have swimming club on Tuesday, even though it’s not the same group as Yamal. I know this because it’s the only time I have to be somewhere, and Anni says I’m really bloody lucky to go there. Fatma said I couldn’t go to swim club. It made me really sad and then she said, Okay, you can go, but I’m going to tell Anni she has to get you from there. I asked, Can’t I come back here? but Fatma shook her head and picked up one of the small boys, who screamed and cried. Outside on the street, walking through really hard rain with Yamal, I regretted saying I wanted to go to swim club. I wanted to stay in the warm flat with all the children. The rain is still coming down now; it’s washing down and across the big windows here at the swimming pool. I’m shivering. I don’t want to jump into the water from the green board. I look across the pool to where some parents are sitting, but of course there is nobody I know. A woman is staring at me, and I quickly look away, so used to trying to not be seen. If anyone sees you, they’ll shoot you or put you in a small, black hole... Before we left the apartment, Fatma handed me a plastic bag with a frayed old towel and some swimming shorts with Batman on them. Did Anni say she will pick me up? I asked and she smiled and put a hand on my shoulder. Don’t worry, she said, in her careful, strange Norwegian. I’ve sent her three messages. She’ll be there.
*
The water in the shower is amazing – fast-flowing and properly hot. I stay under the stream for a long while, trying to make a plan for what to do next. I suppose I could just wander back down to the town with Yamal and go back to the flat with him as though that’s what Fatma told me to do. But she didn’t. The last thing she said to me before she shut the door behind us earlier was: Just wait. I know what’s going to happen next. Anni will come and get me. She has to, eventually. When I stayed at Fatma’s, maybe Anni went and found some money so she could get her hit, and maybe she made a good plan. Getting hits is what Anni and Krysz want. When they have money and can get their hits, they are as nice as anybody else. Anni sometimes tells me stories of when she was little and she lived on a farm and she knew how to speak to horses. For real, she’d always add, as though I didn’t believe her. Krysz sometimes tells me about when he was little, too, and how he and his friends used to hunt in deep forests and fish in wild rivers, but I’m not sure that this is true because I’ve been to the house where Krysz was a child, and I lived there, even, and it’s just a normal little house with lots of other houses around it in a city, and I never saw a forest or a river at all.
Yamal has gone when I come back out to the changing rooms. It’s horrible, having to put my rained-on clothes back on – my jeans are so wet I have to try three times before I manage to pull them over my knees, and so cold that they make me shake with it. I go out into the reception and sit down on a bench. The only sounds are the tap-tap from the reception lady’s keyboard and the falling rain outside. Is it your mummy or your daddy who’s picking you up? asks the reception lady. I shrug and glance around, as though Anni might be standing somewhere, quietly waiting for me. I’ve tried calling the number, she says. It’s so wet out there. After a while, a lady and a little girl appear. They stand waiting, and the woman seems annoyed, looking down the hall towards the changing rooms, out through the glass doors to the dark, wet parking lot, and back down the hall. I feel her eyes on me and I imagine looking up at her, just staring at her face, how she’d probably be shocked. Krysz once said I have the ability to look right through people.
Another little girl appears, with bouncy blonde hair and nice clothes, like she is on TV to sell something, and the mother sighs heavily and pulls her towards the door. When they’ve left, the reception lady looks up, sees me still sitting there and lets out a big sigh, too, and half runs over to the double doors. Cecilia, she shouts into the loud rainstorm. Cecilia! I hear the woman and her girls come back into the hall, whispering with the reception lady. I keep my eyes trained to the floor, to where my dripping hair has made a pool on the brown tiles, like the rainwater at the bottom of the skateboard ramp, and focus all I can on that name. Cecilia. I know this name.
4
If my life were a Hollywood movie, then Johan would be the one-dimensional, classic male lead of the high-school movie genre; the wealthy, good-looking, sporty guy who also loves puppies. He just can’t help it; he’s inherently decent. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that he was raised in this sweet and safe little town by wealthy, good-looking, sporty parents who love puppies and who donate substantial amounts to charity and are still happily married forty years later. He’s by no means perfect, but his imperfections are of the rather innocent type; toilet seat up, cycling shorts flung on the floor, an occasional belch in my presence, insisting on a couple of drunken weekends a year away with his buddies, too many evenings spent at the gym, not liking oysters and whistling in the car.
We’ve known each other since childhood, and I remember him as the older, floppy-haired boy up the road who was a
lways nice to us little rope-skipping girls. He used to play football on the street with his brother and friends and sometimes we little girls would be allowed to join in. Once, I tripped over and grazed my knee, and Johan scooped me up rather graciously and carried me all the way into my house, delivering me onto the sofa and into the care of my impressed mother. It can’t have been more than a minute, but I never forgot that episode; the feeling of complete security as he carried me, the taste of tears at the back of my throat, his face worried, sweaty at the hairline, my throbbing knee and the scent of freshly shorn grass on the evening air.
When he became a father, Johan continued in the same vein, not afraid to adopt all the Scandinavian stereotypes for modern fatherhood; he practically breastfed. He strolled around Sandefjord proudly with Nicoline, and then Hermine, in their pink strollers, expertly feeding and burping and changing them. He got up in the night and walked around the dark house in circles, holding a little girl carefully, his lower arm pressing gently against a sore tummy, while Mommy slept, night after night. He complimented me and made me feel loved when I hated myself and my crumbling, chubby, post-baby body. He came to prenatal couples’ yoga and sat there straight-faced and serious while the other dads-to-be stared awkwardly down at their meaty hands and hairy winter legs bared to the world.
All in all, Johan is a pretty okay man. That doesn’t mean I don’t get angry with him sometimes. Some people might even say I get disproportionately angry with him a disproportionate amount, but I genuinely believe men need to meet some resistance, or they get bored. They need to not entirely know where they’ve got you, even whether they’ve truly got you at all. Build them up and shower them with so much sex and affection that they become completely obsessed with you, and then tear them down. Boom. Hooked. Repeat. This strategy has certainly worked for me – I have been married to the most desirable man in Sandefjord for twelve years now, and he could have had anybody.
I’ve been angry with Johan so many times and for so many different reasons, but I haven’t ever been angry like this before; not with him nor with anybody else, ever. In the car on the way home, nobody speaks. We’ve left my car at the school and are returning home in Johan’s Tesla together, which Johan insisted on as a display of unity. Tobias is in the back seat. I clench and unclench my fists so hard I leave vivid red marks on my skin. This isn’t normal anger, I recognize that; it is true fury, the kind when you might actually murder someone. Images flit through my mind of clawing at eyes, ripping hair from skulls, sinking knives into soft bellies, kicking faces to a pulp. I want to kill Johan. I want to scream, but I know that if I open my mouth, not a sound will come. He stops at a red light, smiles reassuringly at Tobias in the rearview mirror, and I want to bolt from the car, running down the near-empty streets, shrieking and howling.
‘We believe the best thing to do would be to take Tobias home with you now,’ said Vera Jensrud in her pedagogical, soothing voice, after Johan had thanked them (thanked them!) for asking us to take this kid in. ‘And then this afternoon, Laila and a colleague will come to your house and you can work out a plan together. They will have a quick chat with Tobias as well, and then in the next few days we’ll schedule in some in-depth assessments.’
‘Should he be in school?’ asked Johan, his face still bright with the prospect of lending himself to such a good cause as a lost, poor little boy.
‘Yes, of course,’ said Laila Fucking Engebretsen. ‘But as he’ll be registered on your address in the short term, he will no longer be in the catchment area of this particular school, so he’ll attend your local school. I’m thinking that Monday would be a good day to start for him, that way he has a couple of days and a weekend to acclimatize to his new surroundings.’
‘Oh, good. Our daughters will be able to help him settle in, and they can all walk to school together. They’ll be delighted that we are going to host Tobias,’ said Johan, and I shot him an ice-cold glance, but modified it a little when I realized Vera and Laila were both looking at me carefully.
‘Of course, we can give you some time to discuss this between yourselves...’ Laila said. ‘It is a big decision, and it’s really important that you are both on board. It would be traumatizing for Tobias to have to move twice while we attempt to solve his long-term plan.’
‘Yes,’ I said, at the exact same time as Johan said, ‘No, I think we agree on this, Cecilia?’ In the end, Vera ushered us into a small office across the hall from the one we’d been sitting in, and as soon as the door shut, I turned to Johan, who, judging from his relaxed and open facial expression, had not expected my fury.
‘Are you out of your fucking mind?’
‘What?’
‘Are you completely fucking crazy, is what I’m asking.’
‘Cecilia... what... what are you talking about?’
‘You do understand that we will not, under any circumstances, host that kid in our house?’
‘Why ever not?’
‘Why not? Please tell me you’re joking? Why not?’ I wanted to shout, but was obviously aware of the social worker and police across the hall, so I made do with a loud hiss and grasped Johan’s arm, digging my nails painfully into his flesh. Then he did something that surprised me, for once in his life. He grabbed my hand off his arm and held it hard to my side, and forced me to meet his eyes.
‘Listen to me. You’re a bitch. You can be so much more than that, and you know I love you dearly, but sometimes you really are a bitch. Cecilia, this is the right thing to do. For God’s sake, imagine if it was your own kid. Stranded somewhere, for whatever reason, completely at the mercy of the kindness of strangers. Wouldn’t you want someone kind to take them in and help them until we could be found?’
‘This would never happen to my children. They’re from a good family,’ I said, but heard my voice falter as I spoke. Bad things can happen in good families, I know all too well. Truth is, I’m afraid. I’m terrified of what this could do to us as a family. And especially now, when I’ve finally arrived at a point where a harmonious family life seemed within reach.
‘There are no such things as good or bad families, Cecilia, and least of all good or bad children. He’s a little kid, honey. Think about how he must feel. Do you really think it will cost us so much to take him in for a short while?’
‘I’m extremely stressed at the moment. You clearly don’t understand how much pressure I’m under! It’s more work for me. We don’t even have an au pair now!’
‘Honey, what kind of pressure? I mean, I know you’re busy with the kids, but you only work part-time...’
‘Only? Are you fucking kidding me?’
‘I didn’t mean it like that, baby, you know that...’
‘I need help, Johan! I work around the clock trying to keep things together for the girls at home, as well as working. You’re always on a plane or at the office.’
‘If that’s what you are worried about, let’s just get a new au pair?’
‘It’s not enough to just get a new au pair. I’m not in a position to give an abandoned child what he needs.’
‘You’re an incredible mother. Give yourself some credit. You’re always talking yourself down; it’s like you don’t think you’re good enough. I wish you could see what everyone else sees.’
‘Johan—’
‘Cecilia. Think about him. In there, alone. We can help him, we really can. Stop obsessing over details, and just... let your heart do the rest.’
I glared at my husband and walked out of the room and back into Vera Jensrud’s office, giving the three people waiting a cool smile. ‘Very well,’ I said, trying and failing to keep the slight tremble out of my voice. ‘We will have Tobias until you find his parents or long-term foster care. How long do you imagine it would take to find foster parents, if that’s what it comes to?’
‘As we mentioned, due to the migration crisis, we are terribly short of foster families at the moment, but in a case as grave as this, we’d hope to have him placed in a couple of month
s at the longest.’
*
‘Johan, can you please drop me here?’ I say as we approach Kilen. I can see my modern office building at the water’s edge from here.
‘What? We’re heading home.’
‘I realized that I need to get some papers from the office. It won’t take that long – maybe half an hour. Then I’ll walk back up to the school and pick up my car.’
‘Cecilia,’ says Johan, a thin vein pulsing on the side of his head. He gently indicates to the back seat with his eyes. ‘Don’t you think you should...’
‘Here would be great,’ I say as we reach the roundabout where we go right for my office or straight across for home. I reach over fast and flick Johan’s indicator to the right. He looks angry, but pulls over.
It begins raining again as I walk away from the car, and I stop for a moment and look up at dark, swirling clouds, letting fat drops slap my face. What’s really shocking is that Johan seems to be angry with me for not wanting to let some kid into our family home. I mean, I empathize as much as the next person, but my consideration is obviously more for my own family and its harmony. I won’t let anything threaten it; I never have.
When I reach the door to my office, I change my mind and turn back around. I don’t really need anything from here; what I need is some time alone. Rain is falling heavily now, and my mind goes to those last few moments last night, when I walked Hermine and Nicoline out into the wet parking lot, when I still didn’t know of the little boy’s plight, when he was still someone else’s problem. I let the rain slick my hair to my scalp and run down my face, and I head towards the town center. What I really want is a drink; a huge glass of white wine, then another, and another. Obviously that isn’t an option as I’ll be entertaining a couple of fucking social workers for hours on end in my house this afternoon, and it would hardly be advantageous if I stank of alcohol. My thoughts go to those years when Johan and I were students in Paris, how we used to make weekends extra fun with a line or two of coke. Right now, I would give anything for that clear-headed, in-control feeling, but how on earth would I go about finding someone to sell me cocaine in little old Sandefjord? I glance around the square outside the shopping center, but there’s no one here; even the couple of old drunks who seemed to be permanent fixtures have given up in this rain. The one person I can possibly think of who might be able to get some is the one person I can’t ask – typical. I decide on retail therapy instead and head towards Sandefjord’s best ladies’ boutique.