The Locked Room

by Maj Sjowall

  For three years she had stayed at her job in a chemical factory in the southern suburbs of Stockholm. But when the divorce had gone through and she’d been left alone with her daughter, she was forced to take a shorter and worse-paid shift. She felt caught in a trap. Suddenly, in despair, she quit her job—without knowing what she was going to do next.

  Meanwhile unemployment had become steadily worse, and the lack of jobs was so severe that even academically educated and highly qualified professional people were fighting over ill-paid jobs that were far beneath their qualifications.

  For a while Monita had been out of work. She received a meager income from unemployment insurance but became steadily more depressed. All her thoughts went to the problem of how to make ends meet; rent, food, and clothes for Mona swallowed up everything she could scrape together. She couldn’t afford to buy any clothes for herself and had to give up smoking. The pile of unpaid bills just grew and grew. In the end she had swallowed her pride and asked Peter to help her; after all, the law obliged him to contribute to Mona’s support. Though he complained that he now had his own family to think of, he gave her five hundred kronor. She had used it immediately to pay off some of her debts.

  Except for three weeks when she worked as an office temporary and a couple of weeks picking out loaves in a big bakery, Monita had no steady job during the fall of 1970. She hadn’t found this lack of work disagreeable in itself. It was nice to be able to sleep late in the mornings and be with Mona in the daytime, and if she’d not been weighed down with all these money worries, lack of work wouldn’t have bothered her. As time went by, her desire to continue her education had waned. What was the sense of wasting time and energy accumulating debts, when all one got for one’s pains were worthless exams and the dubious satisfaction of having slightly enriched one’s store of knowledge? Furthermore, she’d begun to suspect that something more than higher wages and pleasanter working conditions would be needed before there would be much sense in participating in the industrial-capitalist system.

  Just before Christmas she went with Mona to visit her sister in Oslo. Their parents had died in a car crash five years ago, and this sister was the only close relative she had. After their parents’ death it had become a tradition with them to celebrate Christmas at her sister’s place. To get the money for her ticket she went to a pawnshop with her parents’ wedding rings and a few other pieces of jewelry she’d inherited from them. She stayed in Oslo for two weeks, and when she got back to Stockholm again after New Year’s she’d gained six pounds and felt more cheerful than she had for a long time.

  In February, 1971, Monita celebrated her twenty-fifth birthday. A year had now passed since Peter had left her, and Monita thought she’d changed more during that single year than during her entire marriage. She had matured, discovered new aspects of herself, and that was to the good. But she had also grown harder, more resigned, and a trifle bitter. And that was not so good. Above all, she had become very lonely.

  As the solitary mother of a six-year-old who demanded all her time, and with her home in a big housing project out in the suburbs where everyone seemed to be erecting barriers around his own privacy, she had no chance to break out of this isolation.

  Little by little her former friends and acquaintances had drawn away and ceased to show up. Not wishing to leave her daughter alone, she could only rarely go out, and for lack of money couldn’t afford entertainment. During the first period after her divorce some friend or other would come out and look her up; but it was a long way out to Hökarängen, and they soon got tired of the trip. She was often down in the dumps and very depressed, and presumably the impression she’d made on her friends had been so dismal that she’d scared them away.

  She took long walks with her daughter and brought home bundles of books from the library, reading them during the silent solitary hours after Mona had gone to sleep. It was rare for her phone to ring. She herself had no one she could call; and when the phone was finally cut off because she hadn’t paid her bill, she didn’t even notice the difference. She felt like a prisoner in her own home. But gradually her imprisonment began to feel like security, and existence outside the walls of her dreary suburban apartment seemed steadily more unreal and remote.

  Sometimes at night, as she wandered aimlessly between the living room and the kitchen, too tired to read and too nervous to sleep, it would seem to her that she was going out of her mind. It was as if she only had to let go a little, and the barriers would fall and madness would burst through.

  Often she contemplated suicide, and many times her feelings of hopelessness and anxiety were so acute that only the thought of her child prevented her from taking her own life.

  She worried deeply about the child. She would weep tears of helpless bitterness when she thought of her daughter’s future. She wanted her child to grow up in a warm, secure, humane environment—one where the rat race after power, money, and social status did not make everyone into an enemy, and where the words “buy” and “own” weren’t regarded as synonymous with happiness. She wanted to give her child a chance to develop her individuality and not be shaped to fit into one of the pigeonholes society had prepared for her. She wanted her child to feel the joy of working, of sharing life with others, of security; and she wanted her to have self-respect.

  Such elementary demands on existence for her daughter did not seem to her presumptuous; but she clearly saw that she’d never realize these hopes as long as they went on living in Sweden. What she couldn’t figure out was how to get the money to emigrate; and her despair and despondency threatened to turn into resignation and apathy.

  When she’d come home after her visit to Oslo, she had decided to pull herself together and do something about her situation. To enlarge her own freedom and also save Mona from becoming too isolated, she tried—for the tenth time—to get her a place in a day care center quite near the building they lived in. To her astonishment a place was available, and Mona was able to start at once.

  Very much at random, Monita had begun answering the want ads. And all the while she was brooding on her main problem: What was she to do to get some money? That she’d need a great deal of it if she was ever to radically alter her situation was something she clearly realized. She wanted at all costs to go abroad. She felt less and less content—and had begun to hate this society, which boasted of a prosperity actually reserved for a small privileged minority while the great majority’s only privilege was to keep moving on the treadmill that turned the machinery.

  Again and again in her thoughts she turned over the various ways of getting some capital. She found the problem insoluble. To earn it by honest work was out of the question. Even when she was working she had never managed to make her after-tax earnings suffice for much more than rent and food.

  Her chances of winning the soccer pools seemed improbable, but every week she went on handing in her thirty-two-line system, if only to be able to go on hoping.

  There was no one she could expect to leave her a fortune. Nor was it likely that some mortally ill millionaire would propose marriage and then give up the ghost on their wedding night.

  There were girls, of course, who earned a lot of money as prostitutes. She even knew one personally. Nowadays there was no need to walk the streets; you just called yourself a model and rented a studio or took work in some massage parlor or elegant sex club. But she found the mere thought of it repulsive.

  The only way left, then, was to steal it. But how, and where? Anyway, she was certainly too honest to carry it off. So for the time being she decided to try to get herself a decent job. This proved easier than she’d dared hope.

  She got a job as a waitress in a busy well-known downtown restaurant. Her hours were short and convenient, and there were excellent prospects of doing well out of tips. One of this restaurant’s many habitués was Filip Faithful Mauritzon.

  One day he was sitting, an insignificant but decent-looking little man, at one of Monita’s tables, where he ordered
pork and mashed turnips. He had said some friendly words to her and joked as she took his order; but there was nothing about him to merit Monita’s particular attention. Neither, on the other hand, was there anything about Monita to arouse Mauritzon’s special interest, at least not that time.

  Monita’s appearance, as she herself had gradually come to realize, was commonplace. People she’d met only once or twice rarely recognized her the next time. She had dark hair, gray-blue eyes, good teeth, and regular features. She was of medium height—five feet five inches—normal physique, and weighed about one hundred and twenty pounds. There were men who thought her beautiful, but that was only after they had come to know her well.

  When Mauritzon, for the third time in a week, sat down at one of her tables, Monita recognized him and guessed that he was going to order the plat du jour: sausages and boiled potatoes. Last time he’d taken pork pancakes.

  He did order the sausages, and a glass of milk to drink. When she brought him his food, he looked up at her and said: “You must be new here, miss?”

  She nodded. It wasn’t the first time he’d spoken to her, but she was used to anonymity, and her waitress’s uniform did nothing to facilitate recognition.

  When she brought him his bill he gave her a substantial tip and said: “I hope you’ll like it here, miss, because I do. And the food’s good, so watch your figure.” Before leaving he winked at her in an amiable manner.

  During the following weeks Monita noticed how the tidy little fellow who always ate the simplest of food and never drank anything but milk began to select one of her tables. Before sitting down, it became his habit to stand over by the door and look to see which tables she was serving. This astonished her, but she also felt faintly flattered.

  She did not regard herself as any great shakes as a waitress. She found it hard to maintain a mask of impassivity toward querulous or impatient customers, and whenever anyone annoyed her, she’d snap back. She also had the habit of getting lost in her own thoughts and was often distraught and forgetful. On the other hand she was strong and worked quickly, and to such customers as she thought deserved it she was friendly without being obsequious or silly like some of the other girls.

  Each time Mauritzon came in she’d exchange a few words with him. Gradually she came to regard him as an old acquaintance. His polite, slightly old-fashioned manners—which seemed in some way out of harmony with the pithy views on everything between heaven and earth that he often expressed—fascinated her.

  Though Monita was not happy in her new job, she did not find it altogether a bad one. She finished before the day care center closed, so she was able to pick Mona up on time. And she no longer felt so desperately isolated and lonely, though she still entertained the same wild hope that one day she’d be able to leave Sweden for some other more friendly climate. By now Mona had found several new playmates in the day care center and could hardly wait to get there every morning. Her best friend lived in the same building, and Monita had gotten to know the parents—who were young and friendly. With them she had made a mutual arrangement whereby they each looked after the other’s daughter at nights, when an evening out became imperative. Several times she had had Mona’s playmate as her overnight guest, and Mona had twice slept at her friend’s place—even though Monita had found nothing better to do on those occasions than to go into town to a movie. Even so, it was an arrangement that gave her a sense of freedom and that was later to prove a most practical one.

  One April day, when she’d been working at her new job for a little more than two months, she was standing there with her hands clasped under her apron, dreaming, when Mauritzon summoned her over to his table. She went up to him, nodded at his plate of pea soup, which he’d barely had time to taste, and asked: “Is there something wrong with it?”

  “Excellent, as usual,” Mauritzon said. “But something has occurred to me. Here I sit stuffing myself day after day while you just run about working. I was going to ask whether I could invite you out to have a bite to eat with me, for a change. In the evening, of course, when you’re free. Tomorrow, for instance?”

  Monita didn’t hesitate long. She had long ago summed him up as honest, sober, and hard-working, a trifle eccentric but certainly not dangerous, even quite nice. Besides, this move of his had long been in the air, and she’d already made up her mind what she’d answer when he asked her. So she said: “Oh well, why not?”

  After passing that Friday evening in Mauritzon’s company Monita only needed to revise her opinion in two respects. He was not a teetotaler, and presumably he wasn’t very hard-working either; but neither of these facts made him any less nice. Indeed, she found him really interesting.

  Several times that spring they went out to restaurants together. Each time Monita, in a friendly but firm manner, turned down Mauritzon’s invitation to come home with him for a nightcap, nor did she allow him to see her home to Hökarängen.

  In the early summer she saw nothing at all of him and for two weeks in July was herself away on vacation with her sister in Norway.

  The first day after her return Mauritzon came in and sat down at his usual table. The same evening they met again. This time Monita went home with him to Armfeldtsgatan. It was the first time they went to bed together. Monita found he was as sociable in bed as elsewhere.

  Their relationship developed to their mutual satisfaction. Mauritzon was not too demanding and did not insist on meeting her more often than she herself wished, namely a couple of times a week. He was considerate toward her, and each found the other’s company agreeable.

  For her part she showed him the same delicacy. He was extremely taciturn, for instance, about his occupation, about how he earned his living; but though she wondered a good deal about this she was never inquisitive. Neither did she want him interfering too much in her own life, least of all where Mona was concerned. So she took care not to poke her nose into his affairs. He didn’t seem particularly jealous—no more than she was. Either he realized he was her only lover, or else he was indifferent to whether she went with other men. Nor did he ever ask her about her earlier affairs.

  When autumn came they went out on the town together less frequently, preferring to stay at his place, where they had something nice to eat and passed the greater part of their evenings and nights together in bed.

  Now and again Mauritzon vanished on some business trip, though he never said where or what sort of business it was. Monita was not stupid. She’d quite soon come to realize his activities must be criminal in some way, but having satisfied herself that he was basically decent and honest she assumed his criminality to be of an innocuous kind. She thought of him as a Robin Hood who stole from the rich to give to the poor. That he was a white slaver or that he sold narcotics to children was something that never occurred to her. As soon as the opportunity presented itself she tried in a veiled way to let him know that she was not disposed to moralize about crime aimed at the rich or against an exploitative society in general. She did this to get him, if possible, to reveal some of his secrets.

  And indeed, around Christmas, Mauritzon found himself obliged to initiate Monita to some small extent into his affairs. Christmas was always a busy time in Mauritzon’s line of work, and now, in his enthusiasm not to let slip any opportunity to make a dollar, he had taken on many more jobs than he could handle. Indeed, it was a physical impossibility. A highly complicated transaction required his presence in Hamburg the day after Christmas, though he had also promised that same day to make a delivery at Fornebu Airport outside Oslo. Since Monita was to spend Christmas in Oslo as usual, the temptation to ask her to act as his stand-in and courier was more than he could resist. No great risks were attached to the job, but the arrangements in connection with the delivery were so unusual and so involved that he could hardly fool her into thinking it was just an ordinary Christmas present. He gave her detailed instructions but, knowing she took a dim view of the drug business, told her that the package contained some forged forms to be u
sed in a post office job.

  Monita had nothing against acting as his assistant and carried out her task without complications. He paid for her journey and gave her a few hundred kronor by way of a fee.

  Though this extra income, so easily earned but so sorely needed, should have whetted her appetite, Monita, after she’d had time to think the matter over, was very much of two minds about undertaking anything similar in the future.

  She had nothing against the money. But if it entailed a risk of ending up in jail, she at least wanted to know what it was all about. She regretted not having taken a look at the contents of the package and began to suspect Mauritzon had fooled her. Next time he asked her to act as his emissary she’d made up her mind to refuse. To run about with mysterious parcels containing anything from opium to time bombs was quite simply not up her alley.

  Mauritzon must have understood this intuitively, for he asked no more services of her. Though his attitude remained the same, as time went by she began to become aware of aspects of his nature that she’d not perceived before. She discovered that he often told her lies—quite unnecessarily, since she never asked him what he was up to or tried to put him on the spot. She also began to suspect that he was not a gentleman thief—rather, a petty retailer in crime who would do virtually anything for money.

  During the first months of the year they met less frequently, not so much because Monita was resisting him but because Mauritzon was unusually busy and was often away.

  Monita did not think he’d grown tired of her; any evening he had to himself he was only too glad to spend with her. On one occasion when she was at his place he had some visitors. It was an evening in early March. His visitors, whose names were Malmström and Mohrén, were somewhat younger than Mauritzon and seemed to be business associates of his. She had taken a particular liking to one of them, but they’d not seen each other again.