by Anne Sward
—
The world’s smallest film festival. Two women and a guide dog. The hitchhiker I picked up on the way here laughed when I said where I was going.
“So . . . you and your blind mother have a film festival together, and you two are the only audience?”
“Yes, but we don’t use that word.”
“Film festival?”
“Blind.” We behave as if nothing has happened. She wants everything to be as it was, the same routines, that’s all she wishes for now.
I can’t say no. Of course I should be able to say no, but I can’t. When Mama rings to announce that another film festival is coming up, I pack my bag and set off home, wherever I happen to be.
—
But this time she’s not here. I arrive at a dark house, all locked up. Go around looking for a message, the north room, south room, east room, west room, even the attic that she never uses. I can still smell the sickly sweet scent from before that I didn’t realize back then came from the grass Rikard used to smoke up here. After Mama’s little sister drowned he was the youngest in the family and everyone’s eyes were upon him. When I was born he was at last free from the nagging and scolding. Perhaps that’s why he loved me so unreservedly. Called me his favorite jewel. Mama called me her favorite worry.
In my memory this house is still full of people. Mama can’t fill all the rooms with life on her own and I can’t get used to the emptiness. The sound of my own breathing rebounds from the walls like faint sighs. I stiffen when I see the dog lying on the bat chair in the upper lounge. She can’t possibly know that I’m the daughter here—daughters and mothers don’t share an identical smell—and yet she doesn’t even open her eyes as I pass on my way to Mama’s bedroom. I lie down on the bed, numb because she should have been here and isn’t. Tired after the long journey, I fall asleep.
—
I fall asleep hungry and awaken famished. Two headlights sweep over the faded cloudberry wallpaper. I manage to reach the bottom of the stairs and see Mama close the car door, before the stranger, whose face I don’t catch, rolls away in a dilapidated old white Citroën.
Mama feels her way toward the house, up the outside steps, starts when she senses someone is standing in the doorway.
“It’s only me, Mama.”
“Lo! You frightened me!” A kiss on the cheek. An unusual greeting for her. In the hall she stumbles on my bags, pulls a face as she picks herself up, but waves away my offer of help. “Why have you got so much stuff with you? Everything’s here. Clothes as well, if you need to borrow anything.”
“I have to move on soon, Mama. I told you on the phone. Can’t stay long.”
She isn’t listening. Her thoughts are elsewhere. Goes in with her boots still on, right up to the stove she uses.
“You could have lit it, couldn’t you, it’s freezing in here.” The temperature must mean that she has been away for quite a while. An explanation would be in order, but no . . . she seems to be preoccupied. Who was he, the man in the white car? That she, after all these lonely years of “beware of men,” might have met someone is inconceivable.
Maybe I’ll be forced to get used to the inconceivable. Just have to let it sink in before I can ask her about it.
“That dog you’ve got,” I say instead. “Isn’t it the idea that you should take her with you when you go out?”
“She’s a guard dog,” Mama says. No, she’s not, actually. God knows how long the waiting list is for such a . . .
“. . . specially trained guide dog for the blind, Mama.” I risk saying it; she detests the word.
“I don’t want her. I’ve asked them to come and take her away. I’m not that blind.”
That’s what she wants everyone to believe, but she can’t fool me. I can tell that she doesn’t see me. She always used to have a special expression when she looked at me, like watching a favorite problem, with a sort of affection, however hopeless it might be.
Tales of blindness are just romantic stories about wisdom and a noble spiritual life. In reality it is bruises and spilled milk, burned flesh, windows not cleaned, a constant searching for missing items, and stumbling over everyday obstacles. Seeing her walk into chairs and doors hurts me. Especially when she doesn’t complain.
When I have made an effort to prepare some food, I receive a mild telling off for not putting everything back in the right place afterward.
“Knives, for goodness’ sake, Lo, knives—go in the side drawer.” I have the urge to go up and put my arm around her and say, what’s the matter, Mama? She doesn’t normally go on like that . . . as if she’s trying to stem a much greater chaos. Knives. Spice jars. Shoes. Death. In the side drawer, Lo, the side drawer.
“I don’t understand how you can look after your own home.” She sighs and sorts through everything that has been done wrong. But I don’t, I have no home, or none that I feel at home in. It’s me and the dogs.
Dogs? Mama turns her empty gaze toward me. Yes, dogs. I can’t explain.
Immortal, despite a life of hunger, despite the dogcatchers’ nets and traps, zigzagging through the traffic. In all the unfamiliar towns I come to, the wild dogs are the least alien. They roam where they want, do as they wish, crap where they like, don’t care a jot about anything they dislike. A free and perilous life. If I’d been one of them, I would have died long ago, and yet it still attracts me. A dog’s only task is to be a dog, sleep in the sun, be four-legged. Just to be a human, however, is not sufficient. Life has to be lived inside the lines.
—
All those years I avoided my mother’s eyes:
“Where are you going?”
“Out.”
“When are you coming back?”
“Sometime.”
“You’re coming home for summer, aren’t you?”
“Maybe.”
All the long journeys and secret men, unanswered telephone calls, vague addresses, poste restante so-and-so. Those eyes that I avoided for so long, I miss them now. It is a desperately bleak feeling, being the only sighted person in the house. Now I’m the one who has to keep watch over her. If an atomic cloud started to grow on the horizon, she wouldn’t notice. But at least she would die without being afraid.
—
I sense a pattern. Of love. Want to see her eating and sleeping to make herself strong, enjoy the sun on the steps, comb her hair, keep her safe. When she goes out alone she gets lost and has to be driven home by strange people in strange cars. Can hardly see her way around now, but that doesn’t prevent her from chopping wood and cycling, and last summer she went down to bathe in the lake, lost all idea of where the shore was, swam around and around in circles until she almost couldn’t keep on. At the last moment she felt the bottom beneath her feet and managed to find her way onto land.
“Close to the eye.” She pulls a wry smile.
The feeling between us is changing. A new mixture of tenderness and irritation. I want to nourish and feed her, like a little child or a sensitive love. As she can’t see I pour extra oil into the coleslaw and cream into the egg sauce. In my nightmares I see myself slowly being transformed into Nurse Ratched in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the little white hat over the stiff hair, zealously conscientious, a witch in a starched collar who means well but does harm. Must be careful not to be like that.
I don’t like the thinness around her hips and neck. Her jeans are loose. Sad to eat alone . . . but Mama never complains about loneliness, even though she stopped eating for a time when she was first on her own in the house, when Papa’s father was no longer there. Later on she seemed to have made the decision that she had to survive that as well. To lose yourself is the most dangerous of all. She tried to teach me that when I was younger. If you lose something else you can always get it back—but if you lose yourself, who is going to search? While other mothers warned their daughters about rapists,
unwanted pregnancies, and venereal diseases, she was always warning me about losing myself to someone.
THE DEMON’S MOUTH
Don’t drink any more, Lukas had whispered in my ear, but I was already beyond that point. So sober that I fell asleep as soon as I felt his body against mine.
—
Afterward I just recall single moments, like flickering rays. Memories that can’t be pinned down because they’re too fuzzy, like the light in Copenhagen that day, swiftly changing September light over everything. Lukas and me. I remembered his body, his weight, the smell of bleach in the hotel pillow, but not the scent of him.
I had drunk as I had seen him drink on other occasions: quickly and with the deliberate intention of getting drunk. But that evening I don’t recall him drinking anything at all, at least not as long as I was awake. The memory . . . too much bleach, too little oxygen, too much weight, too much flickering. Remember only a feeling of being alone, greater than any I had experienced before, like trash blowing along deserted streets in the morning. My loneliness or his? I didn’t know—we were so close I couldn’t see him properly, couldn’t separate us.
His weight was enough; he didn’t need to move a muscle. Weighed down by flickering lights, cotton candy, and Lukas, I couldn’t move. Weighed down by loneliness. No kisses. I only saw the marks afterward. Long afterward. Like wounds on either side of the artery in my neck, still raw and tender. Perhaps it was the lifeblood he was lacking that he tried to suck from me. It had been going on so long, as if he had always needed what I had.
—
Under the swaying plastic chandelier we had moved toward the bed. Beer in every limb and hundreds of merry-go-rounds swirling and Lukas’s hips against my ribs, danse macabre, strength and weakness evenly matched, his hand on the curve of my back. A place it hadn’t been before, not like this, when it had no reason to be. His eyes turned away, but his hand remained.
I don’t know why I didn’t start to cry. He was crying, or something else was happening on his face. I don’t know if he had lifted me off the floor or if I had lost the feeling in my feet. The dance of the devil until you drop, until your feet go numb and you’ve danced a hole in the floor, all the way down into the underworld, the unknown.
The whole of my childhood I’d danced on his feet, believing that I was leading. Now I was fifteen and it was he who was leading and I didn’t know how to follow or how to resist.
Overcome by cotton candy and elephant beer, I disappeared into the mouth of the demon again and again. This is a man’s world, even in my sleep. When I awoke he was gone and the first thing I felt was relief.
—
I was allowed to leave the hotel despite not being able to pay for the room. It wasn’t my fault, the staff said. They seemed to assume the worst. They would trace him through the number on his driver’s license and make sure they got their money; these things had happened before. Clearly relieved to be rid of me, as if they were watching a problem walk out of the door. A problem that could have been difficult for the hotel, a failure of responsibility . . . I was nowhere near fifteen, they were agreed on that, and he was so much older.
If the whole thing hadn’t been about Lukas, I would have called Mama and asked her to come and fetch me. That was the last thing I could do now, but I had no other ideas as I stepped out onto the street, not even any notion of where I was in the city. No money, no map, no memory of the day before other than a vague feeling of soreness in my body. There seemed to be no solution, but none was needed—when I surveyed the street I saw the Ford in the spot where Lukas had parked it the day before. He was sitting in the front seat watching me, as if he had woken up at the very moment I came out onto the street, or maybe he had not slept at all that night. I slid into the passenger seat without a word. He said nothing either. First he had to wake up properly, pull on his shirt, and smoke a morning cigarette leaning against the car. Then he had to find a toilet and a cup of coffee and a piece of bread and some tobacco and go and pay for the room. I debated whether to warn him about going into the hotel, about the problem he might face with the staff. But I said nothing, and when it came to it they seemed to wash their hands of the whole thing, just wanted their money.
—
After that he had to drive around to find his way out of the center and north to the ferry. He had still said nothing. And I had said nothing. The silence became harder to break the longer it went on. We just drove.
“I didn’t want to hurt you,” he said finally, his eyes fixed on the line of cars as we drove up the ramp and into the gaping mouth of the ferry.
He stayed on the car deck for the entire crossing, while I went up and bought far too many candies, but I really just wanted to stand by the rail and watch the shoals of jellyfish under the oily black surface. Feel the force of the wind sweep everything away as I leaned far out over the water.
—
Only when the ferry had docked and I heard the irritated sound of horns from the car deck did I go down. Got into the Ford that was holding up the others behind. Lukas started the engine and moved off, saying nothing, but his last words hung in the air. And I replied that he hadn’t. Hurt me. He never would, would he? But he just looked at me oddly, as if it were not something I had the power to decide.
On the road here I’d thought about him. My eye was caught by the hitchhiker’s hands, the lad I had picked up by the ramp onto the highway. I had glimpsed his hands and couldn’t stop staring at them. How they rested on the thigh of his jeans with the fingers spread out, in a way that reminded me of a game we used to play at school. A knife plunged faster and faster between someone’s fingers, the bravest one or someone who couldn’t say no, while the others watched, egging them on. I still had a scar on my left ring finger. It was Lukas who was holding the knife that time. Since then I’ve had a habit of looking at people’s hands. My memory is full of them: first a quick look at the face, then the hands to find out what the face is holding back, because hands never lie. A woman I met on a train to Berlin claimed to remember every penis she had ever touched, and one could well imagine that was quite a few. I can only remember fingers, nails, knuckles, palms, backs of hands. A unique ability to remember hands and forget the rest. The hands of sleeping men with the smell of seawater, garlic, hash, perfume, lubricant, dog’s fur, chlorine. I cup them over my face, watch the blood flowing, twisting in the blue veins just beneath the skin. Remember all the hands that ever touched me. Remember the ones I wished would touch me. The hands, the men, the towns.
The woman kept me awake the whole night talking about herself. It was that kind of night, caught in a trap, confined to a sleeping compartment on a slow train with a stranger who had taken life to heart. She was no longer afraid. Everything she had feared had already happened. Now she lived in a fait accompli. There was no point to her fear. Fear of what might happen is always the worst; that must be what it was the time Lukas stabbed me in the finger. It happened not because he was trembling, but because I was. Fear provokes danger.
Nothing happened the night in the hotel room in Copenhagen, and nothing was ever really the same again. I have never believed the myth about the butterfly beating its wings on one side of the earth and causing a hurricane on the other. But perhaps after all there is such a moment in everyone’s life, a moment that spreads and grows until it changes reality. And for me it was a few seconds of that evening.
—
I wake up late to a day of unexpected warmth and the day’s first warning from Mama: don’t forget to hold your breath when you fetch wood, and wash your hands thoroughly afterward, vole fever is spread through fresh and old droppings.
She starts to prepare the meal, no surprises, the national food: sausages and potatoes, a beer, doesn’t want any help, just sit there at the table, Lo . . . sit in your usual place, as normal. Everything has to be as normal, though nothing is. It looks dangerous when she handles the knife as if she co
uld see it, cuts the potatoes rapidly in her hand like her mother used to do, fumbles when she lights the gas stove. What if the flame gets hold of her sleeve . . . I want to help set the table, but she waves me back to my place. Instead I look through a pile of books gathering dust on the windowsill, long ago forgotten. I pull out the one at the bottom, a well-thumbed Anna Karenina, the abridged version with stills from the film with Greta Garbo. I can’t imagine the loneliness in store when you can no longer see to read. I started to read because I saw her doing it, because I wanted some of whatever it was that made her disappear into herself. Whenever we crawled into bed and I was warming my feet between her thighs, I would shut my eyes and listen half asleep to her turning the pages.
—
The sound of white birch being cut is like glasses clinking. Mama doesn’t chop wood as effectively as she did, but she’s just as obstinate. Then she puts the heavy ax on the chopping block and helps me to stack. The trimming ax swings from a strap on her work trousers with every movement she makes—the daughter ax I always used to think I would inherit. We have soon finished piling the wood, as long as she doesn’t take it into her head to chop some more. This is the best time. To sit chatting after a job well done.
She takes off her gloves and the padded lumberjack shirt—not much left of her when she sheds the unattractive protective layer. She’s a walking pair of collarbones, Papa’s father used to say. Her hair has become thinner too, but still has its color, fair like the fields in the days before the crops are gathered. Clumsily she strokes the guide dog’s head. Not used to patting dogs. Not used to patting anyone anymore.
“Do you remember the day of the fire, Mama?”
“In the field? Of course I do.” She dries the perspiration on her neck, still looks good, just older. She has the sort of face whose lines aren’t rubbed out by age and fatty tissue. If anything, the features become sharper. If only she would stop going around in Grandfather’s old castoffs, his various sizes of large work trousers with the belt tied around her waist twice, the lumber jacket that is her second home. A waste of beauty. When I point it out she looks at me, amused.