Breathless

by Anne Sward

  Björn opened the window onto the garden and flicked out the flies lying sluggish and well fed on the sill. He had never seen fatter flies. And there it was, the arboretum, the reason he had fallen for this particular house. The impressive collection of exotic trees—at least they were exotic to him, born beyond the tree line. They spread out coquettishly in front of him. A Garden of Eden. Paradise.

  Katarina following at his heels, just as dumbfounded, went to stand next to him at the open window. He wanted . . . to say something, but he was speechless. It wasn’t like him to be so weak and sentimental. Perhaps because he had taken off his shoes and was barefoot like a child. When he’d had the chance for the first time in his life to experience the feel of a fitted carpet between his toes, he’d unlaced his boots and let his big white feet sink into the unresisting softness. He really did want to say something, something that was worthy of the situation, but he couldn’t. And it didn’t help that she stood there so close to him, her sandals kicked off too, her hand raised. She held her slender brown hand before her like a delicate and exotic leaf, as if she were trying to touch the magnificent arboretum from a distance. He hoped she understood what a kingdom he’d lain at her feet.

  This was what all their children deserved. They hadn’t grown up in luxury and affluence—far from it—but the future was theirs, he promised her. As far as he knew, all the children had originated in the warm flour-smelling bakehouse, at the side of the house that the families had rented together for many years. So was it chance or delusions of grandeur that made them choose regal names for their firstborn? But who has a greater right to cherish dreams than those who possess nothing, and hadn’t he and Idun always dreamed of being able to give their eldest son, Erik, all this? And Anna and Aron had undoubtedly held the same hope for their Katarina.

  —

  There she was now, Katarina, like a vestige of the old in the midst of the new. It must have been to do with the change in the light. Something that rendered her a little like a queen, looking out over the new landscape as if in two minds whether it was worth conquering or not. An ice queen, coldly distant, or maybe just exhausted after twenty-four hours on the train. Her scent of birch and melting snow. Surrounded by the unfamiliar, she smelled of home.

  “Queen Katarina.” He laughed. She hadn’t been following his thoughts and gave a start at his laugh. Watchful, looked at him as if she thought . . . that he was flattering her? Or the opposite, that he had caught her red-handed committing the mortal sin of pride—standing there, hand raised to the mirage beyond the window as if imagining that all this was hers and hers alone. Did he want to bring her back down to earth with his sarcastic “queen”? She lowered her hand, but as he glanced at her, her distinct profile was no less majestic.

  “You know who you’re named after, don’t you?” he said. No, she didn’t know. Didn’t know who he was talking about, even though she had spent several years longer at school than him, serving no purpose at all.

  “Russia’s greatest ever ruler, Catherine the Great. A conqueror.” She mumbled something inaudible in reply, still suspecting that he was making fun of her, that he’d picked up on her weak point, her vulnerability, and he wanted to put her in her place so she didn’t get ideas. Conqueror? Why did he call her that?

  —

  It wasn’t time to go to bed, but she had unrolled the mats and the old military sleeping bags on the floor, to serve as their beds until the furniture arrived on the van. And she’d been out and bought something for them to eat and candles and a pack of beer at the grocer’s shop, which was almost closer to the house than the outside privy was back home. While they ate, Björn continued to talk about Catherine the Great, and she resisted the urge to ask him to listen to her instead. She had things to say too. She just hadn’t found the right words yet.

  This tsarina, who had clearly made a big impression upon him, had conquered vast territories on Russia’s account. She’d had three children by three different men, presumably none of whom was her husband—she’d simply had him assassinated after he’d been crowned regent and then took the throne herself and reigned for another thirty years over her huge empire, Björn related, opening another beer.

  —

  They’d come to a promised land, everything would be better here, he assured her, as they sat in their makeshift sleeping quarters with the military sleeping bags. It was just like during the war, only without the war. What did he mean, “everything,” she wondered? She didn’t think there was anything wrong with their life at home. What were they lacking?

  “Light, warmth, and hopes for the future, Katarina, for a start . . .” A winter in Skåne is as short and mild as a holiday—without the temperate winter there would be no arboretum.

  “What’s an arboretum?” she asked.

  “It’s a tree universe,” he said. “A universe of trees.” That evening they went in for the first time, among the tall trunks that made even Björn look small, despite his stature.

  They fell asleep and awoke in a different state of happiness, but with the same feeling of elation. He rose quickly to see if the arboretum was still outside the window. It hadn’t been a dream. The trees were where they should be, all the different species he’d never seen before and whose names he didn’t know.

  The house needed no work, so they could take some time off, relax, bask in the sun until the others came down from the north. The only thing they had to do was to buy a scythe to cut the grass and a good book on trees so that they could guide the others around the grounds, point out sugar maples, black poplars, empress trees, everything that was now theirs. Björn had thought they’d bought a house at great expense, but now it turned out they’d acquired a paradise for next to nothing.

  Jubilant, he lifted the newly awakened Katarina as if she were a slender birch pole and waltzed her around the room with long jerky steps.

  She weighed nothing. A tiny waist like Idun’s before the five children. He could have danced with her until darkness settled over the fertile fields of early summer, if she hadn’t been so dizzy that she crumpled into a laughing heap on the floor. A princess on a pea in a punch-scented dream about a proper house. Her clearwater gaze. He felt young himself, was laughing too. It had been a long time, but he couldn’t help it when he looked at Katarina sitting with glowing cheeks, shy all of a sudden, even though she was the boldest of the four girls, more like Idun than her own mother. Her blue skirt had ridden up in the careless movements of the dance, and she tugged at it. Such recklessness. There must be something in this new world that was making them like this. Intoxication that went straight to the senses, bypassing reason. The air was already pulsing with cow dung and buttercups, while at home winter was barely over. If anyone could see them now, they would think that the buttercups, the cow dung, the change of air, idling about like this, sleeping like vagabonds until late in the morning, the shift from late winter to early summer, all of this had gone to their heads. Decompression sickness. The danger of stepping too quickly into the light. Giddiness. Blinding.

  He was unaccustomed to it. Perhaps that was all. He’d never been alone with any of the girls, and now they were almost adults, especially Katarina, at seventeen the eldest. A young Idun, tall, strong, lucently fair, her skin like birch. Powerful arms. Strong neck. Cold eyes. Like morning water, he thought. The sensation of waking up too quickly when you plunged into her gaze. He had always sobered up when he looked into Idun’s eyes. But Katarina’s eyes didn’t have the same effect on him, they made him confused, not clearheaded.

  Idun was the same as ever, only not quite so translucent, and her strength had passed into a kind of heaviness. He didn’t lie when he said that he loved her more with every child. But differently. Because Idun had changed, as if each child were a whole new experience. He didn’t share this feeling. For him it was just more of the same.

  There were days when he wished that he remembered. He’d asked her, “Do
you remember?” and Idun had smiled wryly and said, how could she ever forget? And then he’d been too ashamed to ask her to share her memory with him. However hard he tried, he couldn’t recall their first meeting—the crucial moment. Perhaps there was no crucial moment, but he imagined something, yes, against the light in a cloudberry meadow.

  He remembered her forever. She’d always been there, as natural as breathing. You didn’t think about it all the time, but you couldn’t survive without it. Sometimes he wished he could recollect how it had been when he first fell in love with her. There were days when he really needed that memory.

  —

  Why are you telling me all this? Katarina thought, but she allowed him to continue: buttercups, cow dung, change in the air, light. Something made him see her differently, she knew. Indeed, seeing her at all was different. Speaking to her. He’d never done that before. She had the feeling that he walked around the many rooms of the new house looking for her as soon as she was out of sight. And when he disappeared into the arboretum for a long time, it was she who searched for him, she who went through the trees calling his name, as if she really missed him.

  —

  In order not to feel completely useless waiting for the two families, they refined the dream before the others arrived, made a few small repairs that were in fact unnecessary, took care of the vanload of furniture that had been sent on ahead. Together they sat on the veranda in the evening and enjoyed the calm before the storm, the absence of mosquitoes and the presence of each other, the unfamiliar smells from the arboretum of balsam poplar and eucalyptus.

  “If your love is unrequited?” she said one evening when they had unrolled their sleeping bags and were just about to go to sleep. Her voice rose cautiously at the end, making the words a question. He looked at her in astonishment. What in heaven’s name did she think he knew about all that? She’d fallen silent and blown out the candles in the beer bottles, their only source of light here where, in contrast to home, nights in early summer were dark.

  “Well, then you take the name Karenina like in a Russian novel about impossible love . . . and then you put up with it . . . until it passes,” he said.

  Put up with it until it passes? Was that all he had to say?

  Put up with it until it passes . . .

  Didn’t he understand? Was that really the only thing he could advise her to do? He knew nothing about Russian novels. Had just happened to see the copy of Anna Karenina that she was reading in the evenings and picked up the name from the back of the book. He knew nothing about anything. Unrequited love included.

  BREATHLESS

  To your last breath, Lukas said. It was September, and all the most important things that have happened to me have always happened in September.

  Lukas’s eyes were black as river pearls. When it was cold they turned blue, the Japanese rice cooker dirty pink, the mosquito net gray from many summers’ insects.

  There was a strong smell of angelica in the late-summer air. The flies that had lapsed into a coma during the hottest weeks had come back to life and become annoyingly intrusive. And they buzzed around Lukas in particular.

  “To your last breath,” he said, but I wasn’t so sure.

  “It’s dangerous,” I said, a pointless objection, a lame protest.

  He just shrugged his shoulders at my warning.

  I didn’t intend to stop him, nor to go with him.

  “You’ll have to do it yourself,” I said.

  “Sure. You’ll never be a real man, you’re too cowardly.” Mild scorn in his voice.

  Maybe so, I thought, maybe he’s right. Or I simply didn’t have enough desperation within me. This water was too deep for me—even though anyone could see how much the lake had shrunk in the summer heat. Anyway, I didn’t want to be a man, I wanted to be a woman. This was what I thought but didn’t say.

  I disappeared into his shadow. He’d shot up that summer and I hadn’t kept up with him. He’d had an erection for several days, he said. It was as if something had locked, a mechanism that had gotten stuck, impossible to bring down. Now he had it in his head that it would help to swim across the whole lake underwater, hold his breath and count, focus on survival. He looked at me inquiringly, but to be honest I had no idea whether it would work. Perhaps it was good to give his blood something else to do instead of collecting in one place in his body, causing problems. But he had to do it himself. With my tiny leather pouches for lungs I’d sink like a stone halfway across. And his problem was hardly going to go away because I held my breath, was it? If we shared the same bloodstream, maybe. It was what he wished for, that we two should be one. We weren’t, just as our village wasn’t a proper village and the lake wasn’t a proper lake, only a place where the flow of water swelled and the river spread out, deep like a lake.

  I had a rough idea how it worked, even though I didn’t have one of my own. It wasn’t mechanical, as Lukas seemed to think. It was blood that made it stand straight out in his blue boxer shorts. Or possibly an evil spell as punishment for paying it too much attention. Some things don’t thrive on attention—that was what he used to say to me.

  I glanced at it, as if it were an overexcited puppy that someone had played with too much. “Don’t think about it, it’ll go.”

  “I can’t not think about it. I can only think about it.” He had flies around his mouth, and something in his eye made me feel uneasy, made me scratch away at old insect bites just to distract myself from the feeling of impotence—not my own, but his.

  He took his hands away from his crotch and pointed. “Will you feel it? It’s sick.”

  I shook my head.

  “To hell with it, then,” he muttered. “Maybe you don’t believe me . . .”

  I did believe him, perceived his desperation. I was ten years old and yet I knew more than he did about certain things, despite his sixteen years. Unlike Lukas, I had someone to ask. He had to discover everything by himself, and sometimes played up his incomprehension to diminish the age difference between us.

  “Can’t it be emptied?” I asked cautiously.

  Lukas pulled an exasperated face. “I’ve tried that.”

  “That’s not what I mean. I mean empty it of blood.”

  He shook his head in distaste and consternation. “Blood’s all connected up together in the body, just one system, like, one single lot of blood . . . You can’t empty one part of your body without emptying the rest. You’d bleed to death.”

  For all I knew he might be right, but his own tactic sounded just as dangerous: to swim the whole length of the lake underwater without coming up for breath once. You can breathe in your imagination, he maintained, right up to your very last breath, for there’s always a last breath, even in your mind.

  “It hurts, don’t you understand!”

  I lowered my gaze and stared at the problem. Hurts as in a sore that he has picked at?

  He gave a murderous look and reached out for me just as I turned my back to him, groped in the air a second too late.

  “The only sore I have is you,” I thought he said, but perhaps I just imagined it. He often said that I imagined things, and now I had reached the house and opened the door that was hanging askew on its single hinge. The pearl fisher’s house, our hiding place. A well-kept secret tucked away in the thick greenery by the lake.

  —

  The day had been doomed the moment I opened my eyes, and had only gotten worse. Chatter, laughter, squabbling, Grandmother Anna’s clatter in the kitchen, Mama’s chopping, Grandfather Björn’s voice penetrating everything, my aunts’ music, cars in the yard, all the familiar noises, and every now and again something unfamiliar that could make me prick up my ears and sneak closer—these were the normal sounds in our house that never slept. But this morning only quiet—a sound all its own—as when a prevailing wind suddenly abates and the silence is so palpable it can be heard. I h
ad fumbled for Mama and Aunt Marina on either side of the bed, although I was aware they couldn’t be there because I couldn’t hear them breathe.

  Hello, here I am all by myself in bed and it’s my birthday, I wanted to shout, but to whom? I waited for the morning light to travel over the cloudberry-patterned wallpaper. When it seemed that my humiliation was complete, I rose to look for them, confront them, demand congratulations, banana cake, restore order. From room to room in the large house I went, not finding a living soul. At last I heard faint sounds outside the open kitchen window, voices muted as if they were each talking into a plastic bag.

  There was a gloomy atmosphere around the garden table. I had never been to a funeral, but knew it must feel like this, the air heavy to breathe. I saw in Mama’s face that something was very wrong. She had never been good at hiding things, and now, red with weeping, her legs curled under her on the cane chair, she wasn’t even trying to. I hadn’t seen Mama’s face like this since Papa left us the year before. She was smoking, although she had stopped long ago—no one would forget the dramatic finale when, to prove that smoking was over forever, she’d thrown out every ashtray we had in the house, including the blood-red crystal one she’d been given by Papa’s father. An exaggerated gesture, and what was it worth now? Still, it is possible to smoke without ashtrays, and this she did. The saucer before her was piled high, despite the early hour. Papa’s sister Marina had also lit a cigarette without any protest from her mother, and Mama’s brother Isak was sitting on the back of the chair with his dirty boots on the seat, another offense no one objected to, murmuring:

  “It’s awful. Fucking awful, and that’s a fact . . .”