The Boy at the Door

by Alex Dahl

  I went into the bedroom and lay down on my back. I didn’t want to get up again because I already knew I was going to do what I shouldn’t do; that I’d walk out of that hard-earned apartment, that I’d never return, that all the help I’d received would be in vain, that I’d disappoint you and all the others who’d shown me kindness, that whichever road I chose, it would inevitably lead back to Krysz, back to smack, and then, to death. I tried, as a last resort, to summon you to my mind, studying your calm face in my memories. You never tired of trying to save me. So many memories. At the country house, you spent every morning weaving little baskets out of birch roots, and though you never asked me to join you, you must have known that eventually I would; there just wasn’t anything else to do. Sometimes you’d start a conversation, and sometimes you would not, but either way, it always felt like the air between us was clear. Back then, you always seemed like some kind of actual saint – I presumed you had to be, to take someone like me on. Now, I realize you were just an extraordinary woman who tried to show me how to be whole.

  The bed was hard, and I thought it had been made that way to force people to get up. I didn’t want to get up, because it would mean setting the next chain of destruction into motion. You stayed on in my mind awhile longer, and I tried to see you as you might have been long before I knew you; you told me you were born after the war, when Europe was still burning, when children played freely and learned to weave wicker baskets from their mothers. If you had been my mother, maybe my memories and my imaginings and my guilt would have been enough to keep me on that bed. But you weren’t; you were a stranger who’d tried everything to save me, and who I would now disappoint so bitterly. I wish that you were my mother.

  I got up, and by then, the corners of the room lay in purple shadows. It was still light outside, but gloomy now, with dispersing, wispy clouds stretching across the sky. In the park across the road, a child flew a wild red kite which ended up caught in the branches of a tree. The father was still standing there, trying to untangle it, when the moon appeared, yellow and full, behind the trees. He’s an ordinary father, I thought, and a good one. I got up and looked around the apartment. Even the photograph of you and me, laughing together by the lake, holding a fish with a swollen white belly, couldn’t stop me from picking up my handbag and softly closing the door behind me.

  I want you to know what happened afterwards.

  The summer after Magdalena died, Krysz was practically tearing at the walls. I decided he needed a change of scenery from the apartment we’d lived in during those last terrible months of Magdalena’s life; where he’d come home every day having watched her become less and less, and so I began looking for a summer job for us on one of the many farms requiring seasonal help. I’m not quite sure if it was intentional or coincidental, but one day as I read the advertised jobs in Göteborgs-Posten, I turned the page beyond the jobs nearby and glanced at the ads for Värmland. And there it was. My parents’ farm was looking for ten to fifteen people to help out with the strawberry fields. I remember my hands shook so hard I barely managed to dial the number.

  So I came home again. I didn’t tell Krysz that it was the farm where I’d grown up, because a part of me suspected that he’d then refuse to go, just out of spite, because sometimes he can be like that. Of course I knew how incredibly overwhelming and painful it would be to return to the farm, faced again with the loss of my father, my mother, Besta, and of course – my home itself, but I hadn’t considered how good it would feel, too. It felt mostly good. The man who’d bought the farm was fair and seemed kind, though he had a slightly shifty, sad look about him, as if he personally felt all the sorrows of everyone around him. And I suppose we were a rather sorrowful bunch – the people who take strawberry-picking jobs in Sweden today are generally either addicts of some kind, or illegal immigrants, and that was certainly true of those who’d arrived at my parents’ old farm for a summer’s hard work.

  I think the reason I came to develop more of a relationship with our employer that summer than any of the other workers was that he soon realized what was happening between Krysz and me, though we were staying in a tent behind the barn and not in the main house. Our employer noticed my many bruises, and did not approve. You’re not much of a man if you hit a woman, he said to Krysz one evening. Krysz just nodded and looked away, clearly concentrating hard not to reciprocate – we couldn’t afford to lose the job. When the older man had retreated and we’d gone back to the tent, Krysz pressed his hands together around my neck and whispered, I can’t fucking wait to kill you.

  On the farm lived a small boy called Tobias. He was a serious, wild little thing who you could tell had spent a lot of time alone in nature. He spoke unselfconsciously to the rocks and the trees as though it was the most natural thing in the world, always trailed by a little white dog – it was like they were one being. He wasn’t half as interested in people. He reminded me of myself when I was little. Our employer told me once when I was helping him in the barn that the boy was his daughter’s son and that he was visiting for the summer. The old man was clearly very fond of his grandson – he always gave him a ride on his back, or chased him around the lawn, and smiled lovingly as the boy trundled off to play in the forest with the dog. The boy never spoke to us workers, but he did sometimes sit on the steps outside the main house, watching us with a serious expression as we came in from the fields. There was always something quite un-childlike about him.

  Towards the end of that summer, Krysz and I had a very big fight, and though we were taking care to keep our voices down, I guess Krysz had grown more reckless as we were leaving soon anyway. The old man interfered and pulled Krysz off me, and it took several of the other men to stop Krysz from killing him. The old man’s nose was broken and he suffered a nasty cut above his eye, but it was nothing compared to the words Krysz screamed at him, even in front of the child. He called him a fucking pedophile and said he’d call the police on him and have his fucking shithole of a farm repossessed. He tried to pull me into the car, but the old man said stay. I don’t know why I did, but like I said, I was tired. So tired. Though I wasn’t using as much at that time as I have in the past, mostly occasional cocaine and crack and very occasionally heroin, it took me several weeks to come clean. I spent those weeks in a pleasant yellow attic room, and the old man more or less took care of me. When I began to feel stronger, I started to sit in the kitchen with the old man in the evenings, watching the curling flames in the hearth he always kept going, even though it was still summer. He seemed lonely, though I think it was company he was after, rather than conversation.

  I’d stare right into the flames, blocking out anything else, and then I’d be back there, in that same kitchen, with my mother. I’d have given anything to stay at the farm, and for a while, I considered trying to interest the old man in a romantic relationship, because then, when he died, the farm would be mine again, and just the thought of that made my insides go weak. At the same time, I knew I couldn’t do it. Firstly, I just didn’t have the confidence to try something like that – though I’d only just turned thirty, I looked like I was over fifty. And though the old guy seemed to like me well enough and probably appreciated the company, I don’t think he ever considered me in that way. Who would? It was pretty obvious to anybody that I was a hard drug user. A few weeks after I was clean, I realized September had arrived. And that the boy was still there.

  *

  I’ve been mostly clean for a long while now, though there are some modifications to that truth – I smoke a fair bit of pot, and we’ve both been drinking a lot over the past few months. Today is a Friday, and Krysz has gone to Sweden for the weekend with Pawel to buy cigarettes and meat. Pawel is Krysz’s friend from his teens and basically the reason why Krysz got into bad stuff in the first place. He’s violent and dangerous and I’m always on edge when he’s around. We just got a new sum of money yesterday, and he likes to take off whenever that happens, to blow off some steam, as he puts it. He tends to c
ome back in a better mood, so perhaps that will happen this time also. It’s just the boy and me until Tuesday, and I am in part looking forward to that, and also dreading it. I wanted to take this opportunity to write to you, dear Ellen, though I can’t imagine ever posting it. But I want it off my chest, everything that has happened. I want you to know my story.

  *

  It took a while for the old man to begin to really talk to me. When he did, I think it might have been because I didn’t say much back, so he felt there was more space to speak freely. He told me that he’d left his first wife and their teenage daughter in Norway many years ago, and come to the farm because he needed to learn to breathe again. That’s what he said, and I know what he meant by that, because it is how I have felt so often over the years – that I just can’t breathe. That, and that I’d like to sleep until I’m dead. He said his daughter was so angry with him for leaving that she swore she’d never speak to him again, though he had tried everything to remain in contact with her. His letters were returned unopened, and he’d even driven to see her on many occasions, but the girl had refused to come to the door and his ex-wife had shut it in his face. He’d married a woman he loved madly, he said; a Swedish veterinary assistant who was much younger than him. His new wife loved the outdoors, and dreamed of a place where she could keep horses and dogs, and that was why they bought my family’s farm. They loved it there, and I was glad to hear that at least it wasn’t sold to someone who didn’t much appreciate it. As the old man told me of his life, night after night in the kitchen, I found that I couldn’t hate him for owning my farm. I became fond of him, and I enjoyed the new roles we began to take as I grew stronger – I cooked for him and the boy, cleaned the house, running the cloth tenderly along the floorboards put in place by my ancestors.

  Less than a year after they bought the farm, the man’s young wife drowned in the lake. She’d gone out onto the ice to help an injured bird and fell through the ice. It was at that point in winter, late November, when the temperatures had suddenly risen, and then plummeted almost overnight, so though the ice had appeared strong, it had cracks underneath. By the time the old man realized she was missing, the hole she’d fallen through had frozen almost all the way back over, and though they hacked holes all over the lake, her body didn’t reappear until March, floating one morning in the brown shallows. It must be the worst way to die, drowning. Or perhaps it isn’t; I’m used to feeling like I can’t breathe. Perhaps falling from a great height is worse.

  The old man stayed on at the farm – he said he felt close to his wife there. When I’d grown stronger, we sometimes walked around the lake together, and I almost told him, then, that his farm was once my farm. I didn’t because I was afraid he’d think I had some ulterior motives in coming there, other than just being there and feeling at home again. I don’t think Tobias liked it when his grandfather and I walked together, or when we stayed up in the evenings, talking. I can understand that; he was used to having his grandfather all to himself, just like I’d had my mother all to myself for so many years, and I hadn’t liked sharing her either. Though I was curious about how the little boy had come to live with his grandfather at the farm, I didn’t ask because I figured he’d tell me himself when and if he wanted to. And he did.

  The daughter had shown up after many years, pregnant and desperate for help. She told him she had to keep the pregnancy from her husband no matter what, or he’d leave her, and her life would be over. It was agreed that she’d give birth to the child and that it would be given up for adoption. When he spoke of this, I felt a sudden, stinging sensation in my gut at the thought of my own baby, whose name I never even knew. Though the plan had always been to give the child up for adoption, the man said he felt with every part of him that it was the wrong thing to do, that his daughter would come back for the child; he’d watched them together those first few days of the child’s life, and felt that the bond between his daughter and her baby was unbreakable. He had only intended to keep the baby for a few months, but the daughter didn’t return, and he grew increasingly fond of the boy, and found he just couldn’t give him away. He’d pleaded with his daughter relentlessly over the years, but she refused to discuss the matter and told him she wanted nothing further to do with him or the boy. Those were the problems the old man found himself dealing with that summer when I’d arrived on the farm. It seemed to me like a lot to carry, I said, and wasn’t there someone who could help? The old man said that it had gone too far, that by not reporting the boy’s existence to the authorities he’d committed a bad crime and Tobias would surely be taken away from him if anyone found out, and the old man couldn’t bear that. But you can’t hide him forever, I said, and the old man just looked at me as though that thought had never before occurred to him.

  Krysz came back one early morning in December, a few days after the boy’s birthday. Tobias and his grandfather were still asleep upstairs, and I was lighting the fire and brewing coffee the way I did every morning. I heard the purr of the engine and saw a flash of the red car between the bare trees as he approached, and felt my heart drop to the pit of my stomach. He didn’t drive all the way up to the house, but parked in between two huge oak trees at the top of the long driveway and just waited. It was a strange moment; to realize that I was choosing between the farm and the little life I’d begun to establish there, and Krysz. I walked upstairs as if in a daze, and picked up the old valise on the chair. I stood and listened, but the house was still. In the end, I walked out of the house with nothing. I wanted to leave all my things behind to make the old man understand that I hadn’t entirely wanted to go.

  Krysz was sober and somber. We made love in the car, right there, in the driveway. Nobody else has ever made me feel anything much, at least not since I was twelve years old. Taking Tobias was all Krysz’s idea. People always say that, don’t they? There is a part of me that is aware of you reading this and passing it on to the police or whatever to be used as some kind of evidence if I die, and I remain conscious of that, and so this isn’t entirely a matter of writing a letter to a dearly loved friend. I shouldn’t have told Krysz the things the old man told me – I find it difficult to live with, sometimes, that I did. If I hadn’t, Tobias and his grandfather would probably still be there at the farm, going about their lives. Krysz stared at me for a long time after I’d told him everything that had happened in the months he’d been gone; about the wife under the ice, the daughter who didn’t want her baby, what the boy was like, how kind the old man had been to me. His eyes went from deliberately sympathetic to ice cold. We’ll take the boy, he said, and get the old man to pay for his return. Then, we’ll make the mother pay to make us go away.

  You’ll be horrified to read these words, Ellen. I know that. I’m sorry I’ve done these things and that you’ll now know about them.

  At first, I don’t think I quite believed that we’d really taken him. I still don’t, sometimes, and now it has been seven months. The other day, I woke in the night, and he was standing there, at the end of the mattress, looking down at us. I catch myself forgetting we have him, then I suddenly jump when he walks into a room, in that quiet, catlike way of his. I think he must have learned it from those years he spent out in the forests at the farm; he really does move in the cautious, studied way of a wild animal. He doesn’t say much, but he cries in his sleep. He’s smart enough to mostly stay out of our way, and it’s a bit easier here in Sandefjord where he spends most days in the forest behind the house. The good thing about having the kid is that there’s less pressure on me to bring in money. Apart from on a few occasions, Krysz hasn’t asked me to pull tricks since we took him.

  On the night we took Tobias, we drove fast through the night to Trelleborg, and then on to the ferry to Świnoujście. The kid was out cold because Krysz had given him Rohypnol, and on the ferry we left him in the back seat of the car under a huge old tarpaulin. When we arrived in Świnoujście, Krysz bought a new phone off a man in the harbor, and took a picture of Tobias,
his face only just visible under the tarpaulin, and sent it to the old man with instructions on how to keep the kid alive. No contact by SMS from this point forward, email only, one million Swedish kronor cash left in a postbox in Trelleborg. When he’d sent the message, Krysz dropped the phone into the gray water.

  Tobias didn’t wake up until late afternoon the next day. At that point, Krysz had been getting stressed and kept saying things like, We’ve gone to all this trouble, why won’t the little fucker wake up? and Fuck, I’ve given him too much. When he finally did come to, Krysz stuck his face very close to the boy’s, who seemed groggy and kept blinking comically, as though he couldn’t believe his eyes, and said: If you’re not a good boy, I’ll fucking break every bone in your body. The boy cried, Moffa, Moffa, and Krysz told him the farm had burnt to the ground and that we’d saved him. Can’t you remember the fire? he asked. I turned away, I didn’t want to see the boy’s eyes, then. I thought of Magdalena, and how it seemed impossible that Krysz had once been a father.

  After three days, an email arrived from the old man. Krysz read it at an Internet café in town, and brought it back to show me. He said he couldn’t get a million kronor together that fast and begged for more time. Please don’t hurt Tobias, he said, I’ll do anything. Krysz responded that if he wanted to stop us from killing the kid and burying him in a forest somewhere he’ll never be found, he’d have to pay twenty thousand a month until he could remortgage the farm or find the million elsewhere. You’ve got a week, Krysz wrote. The following week, Krysz returned to Trelleborg with Pawel, and sure enough, there was twenty thousand in the postbox. And that’s how it has continued – the old guy never did manage to find the million, and Krysz thinks he’s probably in some kind of debt or something, but at least he’s coughing up monthly, and now the daughter pays, too.