by Alex Dahl
One night Krysz came to my house unannounced around eleven. He asked me to come with him to the club and help him out because there was some kind of problem. When we got there, it seemed all closed, and we walked down several dark, hushed corridors, towards the muffled sound of dance music playing in the distance. We walked into a softly lit space with an empty stage. I’d imagined girls twirling to the music, up and down a pole, zlotys sticking out of their tiny lace underpants, but there was no one there. Krysz turned to me.
‘Four of the girls are off. Vomit bug. I need you to help me out.’
‘Help you... with what?’
‘Private clients,’ he said, pointing to a black door faintly visible against the dark red wallpaper. ‘Through there.’
‘No,’ I said, my voice strong and calm, but there wasn’t even enough time to turn towards the exit before his fist slammed into the side of my head, filling my ears with the sound of bone crushing. Again, and again. When I came to, one man was pushing his way hard into me while another held my legs up against my chin. I began to struggle, and noticed yet another figure standing in the shadows next to the sofa bed I was on. It was Krysz, and he smiled at me and held a finger to his lips, the way you’d hush a baby. On either side of the man holding my legs stood other men, laughing and smoking, some of them stroking their penises, waiting their turn. After a long time, they left me alone with Krysz and he told me to go to sleep on the sofa. I didn’t want to, but I fell asleep with exhaustion and shock, and the intense pain in my head. When I woke up, Krysz half carried, half dragged me to a toilet with a wheelchair sign on the door, and brusquely cleaned me from head to toe with a dirty towel. Then, there were more men.
On the third day, Krysz helped me place a shot in the crook of my elbow, where some of my veins had become visible again after so many years of being completely destroyed. It was fine then. All of it. I didn’t mind. That’s how smack works, that’s what it does to your mind; it makes everything okay, as long as you’ve got it.
*
Sometimes Krysz stays away for many days – three days, four, and on a few occasions, a full week. When he’s away, I have played with the idea of just driving off in the campervan and going somewhere new. If I could get clean once, perhaps I could get clean again. Even while I think those kinds of thoughts, I know it isn’t true or possible. I know why Krysz stays away – because by the time he returns, I’ve finished all the drugs he left me, and miss him so badly I will do anything, absolutely anything he says, without kicking up too much of a fuss. We’re a team, he’s always said. What the fuck did you think – that I’d just support you and look after you without you bringing anything to the table?
About a week ago, I passed Oliver on the street. I pressed myself against a building and tried to make myself merge with its limestone walls, but his eyes met mine and widened in horror. I wish I’d had sunglasses to disguise my watery, red eyes, or a hat to hide my lank, greasy hair tied back in a tight bun every day. I don’t know what I’d expected, but I suppose I would have thought he might have said hello. Instead, he swiftly crossed the road, pointing out something in the distance to Åsa, whose hand he was holding, to distract her. She laughed at something he said, and her glossy ponytail swished back and forth as she walked. Over her shoulder was a nice leather handbag, and she wore cropped navy jeans and a pink Ralph Lauren top, the kind old ladies wear to golf.
After I had the misfortune of seeing Oliver and Åsa, I went back to the campervan and got out some crack I’d been saving. I walked to a wasteland behind a warehouse where I sometimes meet some other people like me, but that day, I was alone. I lit the pipe and drew the acrid smoke deep in my lungs, waiting for the first rush. I looked around me – at the gray, abandoned warehouses, the factories across the river spewing smoke, at a ripped billboard advertising some kind of amazing station wagon, and it all felt so wrong and foreign. For a very brief moment, I let myself think about Ellen, and Josef and Sofia. Did they know by now? I wondered. Up until I met Krysz, I spoke with Ellen two evenings a week. When I became so engrossed in Krysz I could barely sleep or eat or think straight, so our calls became more irregular, and I could tell that Ellen was becoming increasingly worried about me. She kept asking if something was wrong. Come home if you need to, she said several times, but I coolly reassured her that everything was just fine.
That day, after seeing Oliver and his preppy perfect girl, I took a shard of glass I found on the ground and sliced it along the inside of my left arm, making blood rush from me. I began hallucinating, seeing grotesque shapes grow forth from the upturned bodies of wrecked cars, and the sky went from a dull gray to a plethora of shimmering colors. I must have passed out, and when I woke again, my mother stood in front of me. She was crying, and I would have done anything to make her stop. No more, she mouthed.
*
I’m better now. I had to go to the emergency room even if they look at you like you’re vermin there, and make you wait much longer than anybody else even if you’re sicker than they are. I had miraculously missed my arteries, mostly because my arm was black and blue in the first place and I didn’t know how to cut it right. I don’t want to die. But I’m tired. The doctor who stitched me up – forty-four stitches in total – was kind and insisted on me sitting with him and talking for a while before I was allowed to leave.
‘There’s a whole world out there,’ he said. ‘So much more than this town, and your problems and your history.’ I nodded. ‘You could be anybody. You don’t have to be like this forever.’ I nodded again, and felt a sorrow so deep and ugly because I’ve lost Ellen and Josef and Sofia. I would have given anything to be back there, at the torp, making birch-root baskets and pulling fat, squirming lake fish from the clean, dark water.
‘Do you have a family?’ asked the doctor. I shook my head. ‘Anybody?’
‘Boyfriend.’
‘Would he be helpful if you wanted another kind of life?’
A small puff of disbelief escaped my mouth at the thought of Krysz helping me. ‘No.’
The doctor stood up and rummaged through his desk, which seemed to be full of papers. He pulled out a card and handed it to me. ‘Nowa Kobieta – it means “new woman”. It’s an organization that helps women in desperate life situations. They can help with methadone, shelter, education, legal aid and so forth. I think you need to get in touch with them.’ I took the card, knowing I’d throw it away as soon as I left the medical center – if Krysz found it among my things, he’d beat me to death. That night, I called Ellen, clutching the phone to my ear, and sat sobbing silently at the sound of her voice.
‘Annika,’ she said. ‘Annika, darling, I know it’s you. Please, please talk to me. It doesn’t matter where you are or what you’ve done, honey. Just talk to me.’ I put the phone down and it was a very long time before I was able to get back up off the mattress in the back of the van, I was crying that much. At the beginning, Krysz always called me Annika, but even then, when loving him was easy, I didn’t want him to. Only my mother and Ellen have ever been allowed to call me Annika. I don’t know why – maybe I’ve always sensed that there was some part of me that should only be for those who have really cared about me without an agenda.
Tomorrow morning I am going to Nowa Kobieta. I didn’t throw the card away, after all, and I managed to hide it in the inside pocket of the wash bag where I keep things like tampons and tweezers. I called them two days ago and a woman who spoke American said that they will help me even if I’m a junkie and a whore and pursued by a man who will want to kill me, as long as I’m willing to get clean. I am, though I know how awful it is. Sitting here tonight, with my last smack and a little lump of weed, it feels like I’m going to war tomorrow and having to say goodbye to those I love most. Krysz has been away two days and nights already, and I hope to God he will stay away another – I doubt I’ll make it to Nowa Kobieta if he comes back with drugs and more tasks I have to do for him.
Annika L., Karlstad, March 2015
I got clean for him, and it wasn’t as hard as the first time. I spent my days walking in circles in Nowa Kobieta’s walled garden with Debra, drawing in this journal because I wasn’t ready to write, taking my vitamins, learning to cook with the nuns who volunteered at the shelter and just trying to heal my broken heart and body.
After five months at Nowa Kobieta, I was encouraged to return to Sweden, and a residential place was arranged for me in Karlstad at a foundation that supports vulnerable mothers and their children. Before I went home, I wrote a long letter to Ellen, explaining what had happened to me in Krakow. I wrote that I understood that she wouldn’t be able to see me again if I relapsed, in spite of the extraordinary things she and her family had done for me. I tried to explain that it had been difficult for me in Poland, away from home and the routines I’d built in Karlstad with Ellen and her family, and that it had been like being untethered again. I left before she could have responded, even though I didn’t think she would, but when I arrived at Karlstad’s red-and-white-brick train station, blinking at the impossibility that everything here was exactly the same when I was so very different, I heard someone call my name.
‘Annika,’ the voice shouted, ‘over here!’ It was Ellen, whose hair was shorter and grayer than before, and the next thing I knew, she was hugging me close, my protruding stomach strangely wedged in between us. She realized this and pulled back, staring down at my tummy – I’d just reached thirty weeks then and was unmistakably pregnant.
‘Oh, Annika,’ she whispered. ‘Dear, dear girl.’
At the new women’s shelter, the Marieholmhemmet, I continued much the same as at Nowa Kobieta – eating green things, exercising in the garden, reading books in bed, stroking my belly and feeling the baby nudge me from within in response. A team of social workers and doctors looked after me, praising me for my commitment to stay clean for my baby, and every few days, Ellen came to visit me. We’d sit out on the terrace in the cold winter sun, or walk to the bakery down the street for a kanelbullar for old times’ sake. Everyone said to me that I might be able to keep the baby and that they would help me. Ellen even said that after the baby was born, I could come back to the red house in Sternvegen and live with her and Josef and Sofia, and they would help me with him.
The new life was beyond anything I could have imagined, in those difficult days in Krakow, when I was just waiting for Krysz or another overdose to kill me. All the kindness I received, it was astonishing. My baby would be welcomed into this world, even though he came from me. It all made me thankful that I didn’t die that day I cut myself with the glass shard, high on crack. I knew the reason I’d made it was because my mother appeared. For so many years, I’d prayed that she would come back, just one time, that I could see her face one more time, because in my memories she’d become blurred, and that was almost worse than her not being there, but I’d lost hope that she ever would. That day in Krakow at the wasteland, smoking crack and cutting my arm open, was hardly the first time I was close to death, and yet, that was the time she chose to come back to me. She was the same, and the greatest gift I am left with after seeing her apparition is that my memories of her have been replenished, so now when I think of her, her face is clear in my mind again, as clear as though I was still a child.
In spite of all the offers of help and rehabilitation and promises for the future for me and my baby, I made a decision the moment I learned I was pregnant, and that was that I’d give that baby every chance at a decent life. And that meant he couldn’t stay with me. Ellen tried to convince me that I may live to regret giving my baby up, but I always felt that it wouldn’t be giving him up, but giving him an actual chance. Adoptive parents were found; a lovely couple from Uppsala in their mid-thirties who’d tried to conceive for a decade. They came to visit me every fortnight at Marieholmhemmet and would stare in awe at the visible kicking of their baby, wiping at tears, laughing and holding hands. They had good jobs, a shiny new Volvo, a house with a big lawn, a cute little dog, and a sincere wish to raise a child. It was the right thing to do. I maintain that even now that I’ve known his tiny clasped fists, his fuzzy forehead and mop of black hair and his puckered little pink mouth, and looked into his ocean-blue eyes. I could never have given him what his new parents can, and I only want him to have everything.
‘We’ll send you a photograph every year on his birthday,’ they promised on the day they took him home with them, but I shook my head and said I’d rather they didn’t. Of course, there isn’t anything in the world I’d rather have, but sometimes it’s better to see someone in your mind and heart than in real life. The mother, Ulla, nodded solemnly, and drew me into a close hug, and I think she actually understood.
‘I will protect him with my life,’ she said, and Ellen and I watched them drive away from the orangery where we’d sat drinking tea every few days when the baby was still inside me. I think she was worried for me then, and that I would break down over giving the baby away, but all I could feel was overwhelming relief. I’d been upset and worried before because I wasn’t sure that my body, which had been abused so much and for so long, would be able to carry the baby safely into life.
It’s not like I don’t miss the baby, or that I wouldn’t give anything to hold him one more time, but I always knew that he was bigger than me, better, more important; and that if I could do right by him, then I’d have done at least one thing right. The strangest thing about right now is that my life is so very empty. There is no Krysz, no big belly, no baby, no drugs, no studies, no anything other than me. I’m almost thirty now, clean, lost. Ellen says I can be anything and go anywhere, like she’s always said, but I feel like I can’t see anything ahead, except an infinite whiteness that’s neither good nor bad. The truth is, and obviously I can never discuss this with anyone around me, I miss Krysz so much at times that I want to walk into the river or throw myself off a building. Of course, I don’t miss the bad things, the destructiveness and the abuse, but I miss him, or rather, the person I know he could be. That is why I still write to him.
It was me who wrote first. After all, he wouldn’t have been able to find me. I did it a few weeks after I’d arrived at Nowa Kobieta, and walked a couple of blocks to a post office and posted a letter addressed to him at the club. I also rented a postbox, and that was the return address I used. I didn’t tell him about the baby, but I told him that I would love him forever and that I felt sorry for him for having to live in such darkness. He wrote back after a couple of days, not angry like I’d thought he would be, but apologetic and seemingly sincere. He blamed his childhood, his shitty parents, the situation with his daughter, and his dreadful ex-wife. I should have left it there, considered it closure. But I responded, again and again, simply because I loved Krysz and still do. The reason I didn’t tell Krysz about the baby was that I didn’t believe it to be his, and also, even if he had been, I knew they’d never meet.
A new letter arrived from Krysz today, to the postbox I keep here in Karlstad. It was posted in Gothenburg. He wrote that Magdalena had taken a turn for the worse, and though she’d been treated in America last year, she might die from he
r blood sickness. He said he had moved to Sweden to be near her. He said he quit selling a long while ago, and that the combination of losing me and his daughter being so ill had given him a new perspective on life. He works on a large farm and believes the manual work helps him to stay sober and to be constructive. Like in every letter he’s written to me, he begged for my forgiveness, saying he’d give anything in the world to see me one last time and make his apologies to my face. Some ideas are good and some are bad, and the problem is, of course, to be able to distinguish between them, something which hasn’t come easily to me. But even as I wrote my reply, saying that perhaps we could meet sometime, I knew it was another wrong turn. I hesitated a long while by the postbox, and I could have just turned around and gone back home, dumping my letter into a bin along the way. I stared at my trembling hand holding the letter – the letter that could kill me – a long while as it hovered at the mouth of the postbox. Then I put it in. What’s wrong with me? There are easier ways to die. But... Krysz clean – I can’t even imagine it. Could it be that he’s just a different man now, like I’ve become a different woman? Is it that unreasonable to believe that people really can change?
Annika L., Karlstad, June 2015
He met me at the station, leaning against a nice black Volvo, the kind my baby’s parents have. A normal-person car, and Krysz looked like a normal person indeed. His hair, which used to be shaggy and matted, was cut short and neat. He wore discreet glasses, and was cleanly shaven. His T-shirt was black and nicely cut, and stitched above his heart was a little white cross and underneath, it read ‘Jesus’. At first I thought it must be meant ironically, but then I noticed he was also wearing a black leather bracelet with ‘I love Jesus’ spelled out with white beads, and a new tattoo of a cross on his wrist. He was the same and he wasn’t. I walked towards him slowly, feeling like my legs might buckle both from fear and longing. My skin, too, reacted to the sight of him, just like it had that first time I met him; it began to tingle all over, yearning for his touch, but fearing it also.