Breathless

by Anne Sward

  The cold bites into my face and makes my eyes water. From a distance everything looks as usual, as I remember it, though I haven’t set foot anywhere near Lukas’s house since I left. See you in hell, Lo. Hell could be here, on the steps of the house where he grew up, or it could be where we used to sit with a bowl of rice and his hand-rolled cigarettes and nothing special to do. It required intelligence to love like that, quietly and with no props. We grew up so understimulated, filled each other’s field of vision so completely, breathed the same air, heavy with toads rotting in the rain.

  He isn’t there, hasn’t been for a long time, Mama said, but I have to see for myself. No trace left of the fire. The exterior looks as though it has been restored, but only from a distance. When I come closer I see that there are no details in place, the interior crude and unfinished, bare partitions, no furniture, a façade, that is all. The river rats must have their own empire here now with their own laws, move around as they please. If they stay here and keep each other in check, they’ll be left in peace. I look in all the windows and the toolshed and the garage, but everything seems to have been abandoned. I go down to the lake, imagine the boom of the bittern on a certain sort of evening, like the time Lukas had drunk too much and wanted to go home even though he was already at home. I haven’t been to the lake since then either. The last time I walked along this path was with Yoel, a stranger on a chance but momentous visit. I didn’t want to leave, but nothing held me back.

  The dead forest and our hiding place. Yet childhood is not a place to which you can return. Why Lukas? How many times have I asked myself this? Because he and I were the people we were? The dead forest has risen up again, but the tender green shoots are just brushwood growing healthily between the trunks. I continue along the shore without finding our hideout. Was it really so inaccessible and well concealed? There are no fixed points for my memory, everything indistinguishable, like the vegetation. I must have walked too far, gotten lost. Stop and look out over the lake, and there . . . with the lake water halfway up the broken windows, there it is. It is either floating or perhaps sinking, a little way out in the mirrorlike water, about to be dragged even deeper. From a distance it looks like a rotting, half-sunken barge. Wherever Lukas is, it can hardly be here.

  The sheltering trees around the house are gone. The beautiful little larch grove felled. Good timber, I remember Papa’s father used to say. After the war he had traveled through Finland, and when he came home he talked about the delightful larch forests and the impressively strong women, in that order. Grandmother laughed about that. Tall trees and hardy women, a longing for something that could compare with him.

  I stand at the water’s edge and see the light divide the lake, split it into the silvery surface and the dark depths. Giddiness, now or never. The water is deadly cold and muddy with sludge from the bottom, but I have to do it. Take off my clothes and wade out. When the water reaches my thighs I begin to sink. The bottom of the lake is so much marshier than I remember, or is it just my adult weight that pulls me down?

  I should have left the seal of time and silence intact, had respect for it. The letter wasn’t as unreadable as I had hoped it would be. After turning it over in my mind, in the end I could work it out, even though with every word it became harder to interpret, as if he took so long over each character that darkness descended while he battled with something that was impossible, too much, too awful. Forgive me.

  It was the last thing I had expected from him.

  An accusation or a declaration of love or both, that was what I’d imagined. Not this. Lo . . . Copenhagen . . . forgive me . . . answer . . .

  The letter had traveled a long way. Lukas must have been waiting for an answer—fearful to begin with, then impatient, in the end resigned—no, in the end nothing at all. My silence taken for a no, I don’t forgive you. It only takes one to let go.

  That explains why he never came up to Mama’s house when I was at home. When he saw his old car standing there under the white birch. Not because he couldn’t forgive me for going away—but because he thought that I couldn’t forgive him.

  —

  The lake water is halfway up the peeling door to the pearl fisher’s house. I’m forced to enter via the broken window, haul myself up and clamber into the cold hall. A dull stagnation fills the rooms. The moisture dampens both the light and the rustling in the winter reeds outside. The rooms aren’t submerged. The floors are damp, but the wood seems to have swollen with water from underneath and become watertight like boat timber. At first sight everything seems to be as usual. I find no food in the cool cupboard that might indicate someone’s recent presence. At first I think I can feel a faint warmth coming from the cast iron of the stove, but it must have been my imagination.

  It is impossible to go back. The place I pictured existed only as long as we were here. The rest is just dead coral trees, an impression of wandering around in an artificially lit display.

  —

  I had slept the sleep of an inebriated child—an overtired youngster who has eaten far too much—and Lukas couldn’t stop himself. Was that what he was trying to say in his letter? This is a man’s world . . . even in my sleep . . . but it wouldn’t be nothing, nothing without . . . intoxicated for the first time, teenage-drunk, sugar-scented, available, out of it, amid the dark brown sheets. Dark brown, I remember that, have always had a memory for useless details. The curtains at the window were also dark brown, the entire hotel dark brown, like a bat, cheap and yet, I suspect, a fortune for him.

  A memory for details. But I’ve forgotten what it is he’s asking me to forgive. That he might have done something against my will. Surely I would remember that forever? You couldn’t even drown the river rats, Lukas.

  A few short seconds, that was all it took. The moment when I felt your weight and the knowledge that I wouldn’t have had a chance—if—and for a moment you did too, enjoyed the advantage before you regretted it. Held me like a dog holds a piece of meat he is prepared to fight for. I remember the sense of being at the mercy of your desire not to hurt me. I didn’t want to hurt you, you said afterward. For me it meant that you could have if you had wanted to. I could have hurt you, but I didn’t want to—that was what I heard.

  After that I saw the vice inside you, inside all men. But it provoked me more than it scared me. You know it, I know it, therefore it doesn’t need to be said. And if we do say it, it changes nothing. I don’t hurt you because I’m not able to. But you don’t hurt me because you don’t want to.

  —

  What happened next?

  How could Mama have told me?

  Tell me what happened next, I asked, and didn’t know what I was asking for. If there had been such a thing as fairy tales, there would be just a few for adults only, like the one Lukas used to tell me about the nightingale that sang most beautifully in captivity after its eyes had been poked out.

  All Mama knew about him she had heard from the doctor in the village. How she managed it, patient confidentiality and all that . . . But for the doctor Mama was just a lonely blind middle-aged woman she could unburden herself to without risk. At any rate, after the fire Lukas had visited the village health center, with wounds that had become inflamed and needed to be dressed. He had eye problems caused by the smoke and the heat. He had a wear-and-tear injury from the factory. And some old injury that from time to time gave him headaches. After a while pain in his shoulders too with the toil of building the house and a chronic respiratory infection. The pearl fisher’s house that had become his temporary home was wet with damp and drafty and winter was approaching. He suffered such a serious loss of appetite that he was not eating any food at all. Insomnia. And then the fire negligence prosecution hanging over him and an inquiry into his mental state. The only thing Lukas could thank his lucky stars for, if he had any, was that the house was uninsured. At least he was not under suspicion of insurance fraud. And the fact that his papa
had neither life insurance nor a krona in the bank meant that Lukas escaped accusation of increasing the morphine dose too quickly.

  It was as if his body had suddenly seized up, all at once. Perhaps he just wanted to be looked after, the doctor thought. But not touched. Not that. No eye contact. He didn’t even want to take his shirt off in front of her when she needed to examine him. Difficult to talk to, unwilling to provide information about history of illness in his family, didn’t want to fill in any forms at all. He winced at any physical contact. A very reluctant patient, and yet he came and continued to come, with old injuries and new, his immune system destroyed, the degeneration of a human being—it happens sometimes. As a fellow human being, the doctor had followed it with horror; as a doctor, not without fascination.

  Then Lukas stopped showing up, suddenly and unexpectedly. Either he had been released from all his afflictions at once or, more probably, he had gone under. Possibly relocated, like so many others. At the leather factory where he worked there had been more layoffs. The doctor figured he was one of the many who left.

  A long time passed. When one day he was sitting in the waiting room again, it wasn’t because he was ill, but to ask for a certificate of health. He requested it for a job he was going to apply for elsewhere. Visibly changed—or just more his old self—that was something the doctor could not determine because she hadn’t met him before he became ill.

  Specimens taken and routine tests. Everything was as it should be. He had regained not only his health, but also his physique. The doctor didn’t believe in miracles, but maybe . . . everyday miracles. When Lukas came for his next appointment to get his test results, she signed the health certificate and handed it over with the feeling that she was delivering a present. He should have a good chance, she said, of getting the job he was hoping for, on an oil rig somewhere in the Atlantic.

  I looked at Mama imploringly, as if she could turn back the clock. But no, even she can’t do that.

  “On an oil rig? When you’ve been accused of arson?”

  “That investigation was dropped,” she reminds me.

  “But—fire negligence . . .”

  Well, if they did a check, Lukas managed to slip through regardless. He got the job. That was the last the doctor heard from him.

  Lukas on an oil rig sounds like an evil fairy story, but there are no fairy stories, he said.

  “Mama, I don’t know whether I want to hear the end.”

  “We can save it for tomorrow, Lo.”

  Tomorrow never comes. But I suspected anyway.

  They say that a factor leading to pyromania may be homelessness during childhood. You and your damn hand-rolled cigarettes, Lukas, only a lunatic would smoke on an oil rig, did your mistakes teach you nothing? Did you not sign a contract about fire safety when you got the job, had you not promised me to stop smoking, had I not promised you never to start? To whose lot does it fall to cast himself into the flame of guilt and put it out with his own body? An uncontrollable impulse. How often do you not think I have wanted to do it too? But it can’t be—you can only forget and carry on, forget and carry on. It’s a blessing to be able to forget, but for you the blessing was that everything could burn.

  I can still feel the tenderness around my midriff when I curl up in the alcove in the pearl fisher’s house and shut my eyes. It was sunny on the highway, the first light of day, as I was driving here at dawn at eighty miles an hour—too fast, too slippery, too bright—and suddenly: the oblique shaft entered through the windshield and transfixed me on the driver’s seat. I was veering across a no-man’s-land, straight into the light. Within its dazzling force was silence, the world was in slow motion, playing backward, moving away. Not a sound, no metallic smell of blood, only something that was closing, my lungs emptied of air. There was no pain, it was beyond good and bad. If I survive this, I thought, if I survive, I will give our story a happier ending.