by Anne Sward
I had bought a few packs of Silk Cut for Mama on the way here. When I take two out and light them, she sniffs at the air. Is it . . . yes, you can’t mistake the smell of light, mild tobacco.
“I don’t smoke, haven’t smoked since before you were born.”
“Me neither,” I say, “but with you I’m prepared to make an exception.” She smiles.
“Well. That’s all right then,” she says and reaches forward with her hand ready for the cigarette. Still smiling, she cautiously inhales the smoke. But as it escapes through her frozen blue lips she becomes serious again. The trees in Grandfather’s arboretum have a snowy side and sunny side, a brittle cracking sound when the ice slips off the branches. It’s when something thaws from a frozen state that it breaks.
“Lo,” she says hesitantly.
“What?”
THE SLOPING CEILING
“Two weeks outside time and space and everything I was used to,” Mama tells me. Two weeks is nothing, two weeks is everything. Put up with it until it passes, Björn had said. But it didn’t.
She liked being alone with him in the new house as they waited for the others to follow with the vanload of furniture. As far as she was concerned, they could take their time. Perhaps she liked it too much; the new light made him look different, smell different, stronger. She looked different too, she could see it in his eyes.
Björn taught her how to cut wood. She had an energy that she had to channel into something sensible, he thought, and she learned quickly, as you do when you learn something that in fact you already know.
More than anything she liked doing nothing with him. They’d never done that before—at home you always did something. But the new house was perfect, needed no attention at all, required nothing of them. They picked up snails in the arboretum instead, fat and shiny silvery green. He’d heard that they were edible, at least in France, and here in the south they were already halfway there, pity to let them go to waste. Boil them, or what? Butter? Salt? Mama had no idea, but they had a try. It turned to glue. They laughed about it the whole evening. Seeing him laugh was an unusual sight and she liked it very much.
After she had taught him to laugh she wanted to teach him to swim, but he wasn’t interested in that.
“Only animals swim,” he protested.
“Aw, come on.” She went first to show him. Up to her waist in the water. Turned around.
“Watch me—it’s not dangerous.” But Björn looked as though he thought it was dangerous to watch her.
“Are you scared?”
When she said that, he was forced to go out into the dark water. The words were a trap that had already closed around him.
“Lean back, I’m holding you. You have to relax, otherwise you’ll sink.”
He sank. As heavy as a black oak. As taut as a gun with the safety off.
But she held him.
She was strong and the water made her stronger.
The whole of his weight rested in her arms. His white underpants filled with water so he looked like a drowning Ophelia, and she had to laugh at him—she’d seen him more or less naked so many times in the old house, where they lived in such a cramped space, but this sudden diffidence was something you had to laugh about.
Nothing could happen. The existence of a possibility didn’t mean that it was a real possibility. Not because Björn was like a father to her—the paternal type was the last thing he was—but Idun had always been like a mother to her, even more than her own. She had to put up with it, whether or not it passed.
After two weeks they were no longer alone, people in all the rooms. Karenina became Katarina again and Björn returned to his normal self, slower to laugh and other nonsense. He had to forget the swim he had taken with her and be content with viewing the lake from a distance. The lake that he thought with a little goodwill they could count as their own, like the barley fields and even the silver curve of the railway as it swept so assuredly through the countryside bearing its promise that the world carried on forever.
They were no longer alone, but the tension between them continued, soundless as a bird of prey. That someone might notice it, that it might suddenly strike with no chance of them stopping it, had been a nightmare. They had to avoid each other sufficiently to avert disaster—but not so openly that anyone had cause for suspicion.
With Idun leading the way, the new arrivals walked through the house, absolutely silent, struck dumb, until the children started to fight over the bedrooms on the upper floor. The upper floor for the children, the floor below for the adults, two pretty bedrooms with doors out onto the veranda. Veranda, it was like being in America. There was no limit to it all. Three toilets . . . Rikard, the youngest, ran around like an excited puppy and squirted into all three and flushed them so that it sounded as though an almighty torrent was running through the whole house. Björn shouted at his son, but Idun just laughed. Before they’d had to manage with a communal dry closet, so this was a luxury to laugh over every day.
The furniture was unloaded and carried in. It looked meager in the large bright rooms. That was the disadvantage of trading up so dramatically, Björn said—not without some pride, because the move had been his idea from start to finish and this was the house he had found, crowned by the universe of exotic trees that spread out right to the edge of the fields of barley.
The shared bank loan, which had been much bigger than they had anticipated, was what held the four of them together now. Forever. As well as the past, of course.
Children, memories, origins. And the fact that they were all now strangers in this new place. Björn, Idun, Anna, and Aron.
And the bird of prey. The one that never struck. Doomed to keep circling.
“Love is a folie à deux,” Mama says. What she has just told me is floating somewhere above my head, finding no point where it can sink in.
“Papa, then? Why Papa?” I whisper.
Mama is quiet in the brightness, hesitates so long I think she has changed her mind and doesn’t want to tell me any more. Then she gathers herself—the first one to look at me . . . she had thought.
The first time Mama saw the pearl fisher’s house it reminded her of a room decorated for a party that never took place. The feeling of an extravagant life. It was in such an inaccessible spot, it must have belonged to a person who wanted to avoid contact with others at any price. Even though it was cluttered from floor to ceiling with things from distant journeys, the house was echoing and desolate, as if everything had been hollowed out by time and vermin, like a walk in a dead forest. The way Mama describes the place reveals that she doesn’t know I spent my entire childhood there. As if I didn’t know every joint in the damp wooden floor, every flyspeck on the wall in the alcove with the bed, exactly how the light filtered through the branches of the coral tree, the sour scent of the larch trees outside and the humid smell of incense and secret sleep.
In the alcove, in the middle of winter, bitterly cold. They must have kept their jackets on. Mama was sure it was that particular winter afternoon that I was conceived, because she had only been in there once and not returned.
That my life had been created in there, in the iron bed where Lukas and I often slept our secret sleep, is an unreal thought.
No one knew the pearl fisher, but everyone knew who he was, and Mama had decided that she would find the deserted house she had heard about. When she finally did, her first thought was that she would share the discovery with Björn. If anyone would understand, he would. They shared something that the other family members didn’t, whatever it was, perhaps only a determination—for something more, something else, new, a striving, a dream, or several. And this was a house built by a dreamer, possibly a little mad, but he may not have been. Whether you are mad or not is measured by how successful you are, Björn had said, so when in the end, after much searching, she found the place, she went to fetch him.
It was a cold and beautiful day. She took a shortcut over the winter fields and met him in the arboretum. He was standing there in his blue work trousers, no coat, but wearing a leather cap so ugly that you had to look like Björn to get away with it. Standing there doing something, as usual she didn’t know what, she supposed mostly standing and enjoying being between the trees. That was what he liked most about the arboretum, she’d realized—not the trees themselves, but the space between them. The silence and the tranquillity that she could long for too.
Now he was watchful as he saw her approaching in the distance. Even more watchful when she came up close to stand in front of him, twisting and turning her mittens and her request. He shook his leather cap when she had finally managed to formulate the question that was so difficult to ask. No, Karenina. Don’t call me Karenina . . . It is still no, he said. He didn’t want to. Without further explanation. Just no. Even though she could see he was not busy with anything. A sheath knife in one hand, that was all, a pretext in case he was caught red-handed doing nothing.
He didn’t want to. Not interested. Or perhaps terrified, she wasn’t sure. Terrified? Yes . . . or whatever it might be called.
Her hopes were turned to disappointment. Sudden, strong, crushing disappointment. Without a word she turned and walked away.
The first one to look at me, she said to herself, without really understanding where the idea came from. The thought just appeared in her head, unexpected and powerful, obvious and quite defiant, not to say insane, but nevertheless . . . appealing, yes, liberating, at any rate less impossible than other thoughts she’d been having lately.
The first one, she thought as she walked up toward the house, her hands throbbing with blood and cold.
They were all there, Björn’s four sons, busy with various things in the yard, the first sunny day for a long time. As it happened it was Rikard who looked at her first, from the open kitchen window where he was changing the weather stripping. Not Rikard . . . he was too young, the youngest of all the sons, no, not Rikard, she thought, slightly embarrassed. The next one to see her was Jon, but he was taken; he and his girlfriend were sitting on the step enjoying the winter sun. And then Isak, on the way to the compost with the day’s slop buckets. But he didn’t count, he was her brother. She went up to Erik, who was bending over the engine of the broken-down Volvo, the eldest of Björn’s sons and the one who resembled him most. But Erik was irritated and said, “Can you not see that I have my hands full? Where have you been anyway? You need to cycle down to do the shopping . . . milk, minced meat, soap, cigarettes . . .”
She pretended not to hear. She had already turned to David.
There was only David left, the son who resembled Björn least. David with steam coming out of his mouth in the cold, on his way out to the winter fields to shoot small game, standing by the garage cleaning his gun.
“Come on,” she said.
“What for?”
“Don’t ask so many questions.”
“Okay, okay, stop nagging, I’m coming.”
Everyone was used to her waywardness, and perhaps David should have had his suspicions when she told him to come without any why or wherefore. But he had no objection to accompanying her. Help her with whatever it was she needed help with. He liked her, she was easy to like, and he was the only one who did, but that just made him more convinced. When they passed the arboretum, Björn watched them go. All the way down across the frost-covered fields, the same way she had just come and wanted him, Björn, to go with her . . . she was now walking with David.
“I don’t know what he thought. I really don’t know what he thought when he saw me go off with his son. And I’ve never asked.”
At least she was no longer nervous, not with David. Not at all as she would have been if Björn had been at her side. What she was feeling and doing and why, she couldn’t have explained, but she didn’t need to, because David asked no questions.
In the end she was the one who asked why he was taking his rifle with him. He didn’t need it where they were going. Surely he understood that they weren’t going hunting. He was already caught.
“You never know,” David replied, excessively vigilant. It also felt a little excessive when he suggested that they shoot off the lock when they reached the house and were unable to open the door. She took out a small pocketknife instead and worked it open. As if she had spent her life entering places that weren’t hers.
The chilled hideout was full of remarkable things, but instead of paying closer attention to them or perhaps lighting a fire in the stove, she guided him into the sleeping alcove and disarmed him.
The gun she propped against the old propane burner beside the bed.
“What’s gotten into you,” he breathed when, still wrapped in her woolen scarf and without even taking off her mittens, she started to unbutton her cardigan. She had nothing underneath. He’d seen her naked many times, but never like this, never for him, only him.
“Shhh . . .” she whispered, snuggling up to him in the creaking iron bed. She was quite calm and confident, sitting with her woolen hat and her white breasts. He was mortified and bewildered. How did she think they could keep this secret from the rest of the family?
“Shhh,” she hushed him again.
He’d always liked her, she knew that, maybe he looked up to her slightly. She was a few years older and had a way of making the age difference seem bigger. She was the one who always said what she thought, who even dared to stand up to Björn, something the others were wary of, with the exception of Idun.
When she tried to undress him she discovered a small home-tattooed star on one shoulder, newly done, not particularly attractive. She hadn’t realized that there were things about him she didn’t know. Here. Now. Him. That was all she wanted, she couldn’t explain it any better than that. David pulled his shirt back on, didn’t want to let her take his clothes off. No naked skin, perhaps it was too cold for that, and she had kept most of hers on too. His lips were dark with the cold, his pupils had contracted. She didn’t know what that meant—excitement, confusion, bedazzlement, all at the same time?
The quilts had a pattern of strange flowers she didn’t know the names of. And in David’s eyes something else she didn’t know . . . a mixture of disquiet and lust verging on terror? He was probably a virgin. She was not. But she wasn’t as experienced as she tried to appear.
David against Björn was like David’s fight with Goliath. David was a boy compared to Björn, but he made her feel like a woman. On the sloping ceiling in the alcove over David’s head hung the silhouettes of two Japanese dragons, cut out with edging scissors. She saw them only that one time, never forgot them. What sort of battle they were engaged in, whether they were mating or fighting, it wasn’t possible to see. But they could keep on indefinitely, they were so evenly matched.
—
If Mama could see me now she would ask me what the matter was, why my eyes . . . I wouldn’t be able to reply, but I wish she would ask. The love Mama used to warn me about, I always wondered who it was she had loved with that sort of passion. There was never the right opportunity to ask.
“Lo, I love your papa, but I can’t bear to think about him,” she answered whenever I tried. Her voice had a tone that didn’t invite further conversation. I pictured them as two animals equal in strength and wounds, who avoided each other so that they weren’
t forced to tear each other part.
When Mama hears the familiar sound of the lighter, she holds her hand out automatically. Fingers poised for a cigarette. Her unseeing eyes sharpen. She listens to the sound of paper. A shadow of anxiety passes over her face. The sound of paper being ripped.
“What is it?” she asks. “Is it for me?” I hand her the lighted cigarette. No, it is for me, Mama. I am opening it now.
Lukas’s letter is as short as it is illegible. I stare at it and can’t understand what I’m looking at. Unintelligible signs all mixed up together. It is obvious how hard he tried, how important it must have been, how impossible. His handwriting used to look as though he wrote up and down with his left hand and he never managed to get the letters in the right order.
The only feeling I have is of relief. Unbelievable relief.
No recriminations, at least none that I can interpret—there is no chance that I’ll be able to decipher this. I didn’t know that you could be so dyslexic, a whole page of illegible marks. Now at any rate I have done what I could, made the effort to look for the letter, found it, taken it with me everywhere, waiting for a place where I could open it, and in the end torn it open and read it, or at least tried. Only to find it impossible.
The muffled call of the bittern has been inside my head for so long, and the moment I skim through the letter it glides out over the lake. Deathly quiet and a little heavy at the front. And my head is empty, light, and calm.
TOMORROW NEVER COMES
When I have stared long enough at Lukas’s incomprehensible words, I see . . . at first only one word that stands out from the rest. Written with extra effort to make that at least legible. A simple word, and nevertheless I don’t understand it—why is he saying that to me? A feeling of disquiet spreads through me, just as when the bats in the attic unfold their dry wings after the winter and wake each other up, one after the other, until everything is fluttering. I rise out of the cane chair, tell Mama that I have to take a walk, give her my jacket so that she doesn’t freeze to death, and leave her there.