“Oh…”
He gave her a crooked smile.
“It’s been kind of crazy around here.”
She should say something, ask about the creature’s habits and what kind of food he ate. She couldn’t get the words out. There was something about the bird’s ruffled, black gray appearance that made her feel like crying. As if she were hunched inside that cage, left for others to take on.
The man cleared his throat and pulled out a cardboard box.
“We’re breaking up,” he said.
“Yes… I understand.”
“Yep, that’s it. After so many years together, one day comes where you’re no longer a family. You’ve taken it all for granted! Hey! Don’t take anything for granted, OK?”
“I don’t take things for granted.”
“Well, many people do. Like me, for example. I’ve done it… up to now.”
She didn’t know what to say. The man was silent for a while, and then he said.
“OK. Here’s the bird. He has lived with us for many years… he was part of our family. My wife found him out in the garden when he was young. He’d probably fallen from his nest. A cat had gotten him, a cat that wanted a toy. Know what I did with that cat? I shot him.”
“You shot him?”
“With an air gun. It died on the spot.”
“Is that allowed?”
“Fuck that. It’s my garden and I can do whatever I want in my own garden.”
“And the bird?”
“We took care of him and raised him. Well, like I said, now we’re heading off in different directions, my dear wife and me. And the bird needs a home.”
“He looks a little… scraggly. Is he healthy?”
“You know, he feels more than we think. He’s listened to our discussions for months. He’s sad; he knows it’s time to go. He’s always loved my wife. She couldn’t bear to be here when you came.”
“Do you think he’ll be all right living with me?”
“I think so. He wants to be with whoever will have him. He knows that by instinct, and he won’t be too distant from those people.”
They stood next to each other and watched the bird. The man swallowed, traced his finger on one of the bars.
“Some birds live as pairs. They are faithful to each other until death!” he burst out, and saliva drops shone on his chin. “The macaws in Brazil, they’re faithful to the death!”
She nodded carefully.
“All right, if you want him, take him. Take him at once. I can’t deal with this. And I have to… keep packing.”
“How much do you want for him?”
“Just take him, he’s yours.”
“But the ad…”
“Take him! Fuck the ad! I don’t want a thing, not even for the cage!”
“I don’t think I can take the cage.”
“No cage?”
“It won’t fit in my car.”
He took a step to the window, looked out. When he turned back to her, his eyes were red. He took a deep breath, got ready.
“Well, I’ll have to throw it out, then, or try and sell it. No, the hell with it, I’m not going to deal with any more damn ads. And we have to clip his wings, or he can be taken by impulse and fly away, and he won’t last a minute with those magpies out there; they’ll hack him to pieces.”
Justine cried out softly.
“No… we can’t.”
She took off her scarf. It was long and thin, and she had wrapped it a few times around her neck.
“Don’t cut his wings. Let me try this… instead.”
She twisted the cage door open, and slowly, stiffly, stuck in her arm. She was a bit afraid, the man was making her nervous; she’d rather be alone. The bird opened his beak, which was black and somewhat bent. He gave out a small sound. “Come,” she whispered. “Climb up on my arm and sit down.” The man moved behind her.
“You’re familiar with animals, right?”
“Yes,” she mumbled, which was more or less true.
The bird took a hesitant step toward her and then sat at once on her hand. He was heavy and warm. She drew her arm back to herself. The bird kept sitting.
She placed him on the kitchen table and slowly wrapped the scarf around him. He made no attempt to escape.
She took him into her arms like a child.
“Soooo,” the man whispered. “Sooooo…”
He was almost singing with a one-toned voice, he then turned his lips to the ceiling and gave a sound that was almost like a yoik. Justine burst out in sweat on her back.
She went to the door and tried to get her shoes on.
“I’ll help you!” The man fell to his knees in front of her, pressed her feet into her shoes and tied the shoelaces with strong, double knots. He was silent now. He opened the door and followed her out. While she was getting in the car, he bent over the bird and kissed him loudly on the beak. Then he turned toward her, with a feeling of dismay.
“He usually strikes back when I do that. It usually works.”
“Uh-huh.”
Justine laid the bird down on the front seat. He looked like he was sleeping.
“Look, it’s like a head of cabbage,” said the man, and she noticed that he stopped using “he” and said “it.”
While she started the engine, he left his hand on the open car window. It was a narrow and somewhat childlike hand.
“Well, gotta go,” she said, and shifted to first. The man’s knuckles turned white.
“OK then,” came from somewhere above her.
When the car started to move, he let go and made a gesture as if he were waving her back. It wasn’t until she got on the highway that she realized that she forgot to ask the bird’s name.
She let him live in her room. She brought in a tree from the garden and placed it in a Christmas tree stand. She anchored the tree with a hook in the wall. The tree became the bird’s sleeping perch. After a few hours, he had pecked off every single leaf on the branches.
He liked to be in the kitchen or come to her when she was sitting and looking out over the water. She began to find his droppings everywhere. At first she was careful to spread out newspapers and clean up after him. Now this happened more sporadically, when she realized that the house was hers and hers alone, and she must take care of it because her things were worth taking care of.
And so was she.
The roots of the fallen tree. A child could crawl underneath, even if the roots could fall, it never did happen, and she sat there and let earth fall onto the back of her neck.
The animals: small animals, with snouts, shimmering fur tufts. Or the deer, standing still right where the forest met the meadow, wet nostrils, the whites of its eyes. On the other side of the shading roots, they surrounded her, circled in, and she was Snow White, left behind by the Hunter. She thought of him and a light swelling arose between her legs; she had already had her first blood, but she was still a child, and yet.
And he led her into the forest and lifted his rifle. Aimed right at her left breast.
She sat next to the dead deer once he left, she looked at its wound. He had dug around in there, taking its heart with him. What was a deer? She did not know, but the body was mangled and now the Hunter was carrying its heart to the woman who lived in Snow White’s home.
I did what you asked me with the girl.
Sudden fragility, then the mirror, looking at her reflection.
Satisfaction.
The foxes came, and the mice. And like snowflakes, the feathers of the owls fell upon the place where Snow White was sitting, warm and covering snow.
Animals made Flora ill, made her shudder and feel nauseous. A cat sneaked into the front hall, and she chased it out with a broom, its fur and tail straight up.
When Pappa said good night, Justine told him about it.
His face melted and he stroked her hand weakly, for a long time, but weakly.
Every evening for evenings on end, she asked Pappa for a pet. A cat or a
dog or a bird. Maybe he would have liked to give her one, but Flora’s moods controlled him completely.
“They are flea-covered, filthy things,” she would say and her painted, porcelain eyes would stare without mercy. “Bacteria. Smells. Animals are animals and should not be in human homes.”
The blue fox fur was another matter. It was dead. She received it one day in the middle of winter, a conciliatory gesture. Flora often needed to be appeased.
Chapter SIX
Berit Assarsson was late getting out for lunch. She didn’t know where she wanted to eat, her hunger had dissipated, but she still needed to stuff something into herself if she was going to make it through the rest of the day.
She was editing a book on sailing. She really didn’t know all that much about sailing, but since the book was going to be published and she had been given the job of making sure that it was ready to go, she didn’t want to reveal her weaknesses to all and sundry.
Tor had had a boat when they met, and of course it was nice to glide out among the islands and seek night harbor in a protected cove. But all the rest of it. He lost his temper easily and expected her to keep track of all the ropes and their ends, and in a crisis he always forgot that she just couldn’t do it. So there were always arguments and hard feelings.
They sold the boat and bought a summer place instead. For a summer place, it was fairly large, a house built at the end of the nineteenth century situated on Vät Island. It had been winterized, so they were able to celebrate Christmas there, which they often did. This past Christmas, both of their sons brought their girlfriends with them.
Berit went into the food halls at Hötorget. It was just past one o’clock in the afternoon, and the worst lunch crush was over. She ordered an avocado salad with shrimp and a large café au lait and sat down at one of the tables near the flower department. Such wonderful tulips you can get nowadays, what wonderful colors! If only the weather would change to be just a bit colder so that snow would come and lighten things up a bit.
The avocado was somewhat hard. She thought about going back to the counter and complaining, but she didn’t. How many times had she sat here in the food hall and eaten lunch? At least once a week during all the years she had been employed at the publisher’s. She tried figuring it out in her head: 46 weeks a year times fourteen years would be, would be, would be…
As a matter of fact, she had been traveling when she turned forty-five last year. Tor had surprised her with a roundthe-world ticket.
“Couldn’t you have waited until I turned fifty!” she exclaimed, practically alarmed over his sudden generosity.
He had hugged her quickly and clumsily.
“Who knows whether we’ll still be around then.”
So they went and were gone for almost two entire months. So that was eight weeks and therefore eight times when she didn’t eat in the food halls. She dug around in her purse for her mini-calculator, but didn’t find it. She had to take out a ballpoint pen and work it out just as Miss Messer had taught them during their schooldays so long ago.
Six hundred times or more she had had lunch here in this little restaurant near the bottom of the escalator. Over six hundred times!
Well, Berit, this is your life!
More and more often she felt sad over her condition. She felt that her life had passed its peak, and quite a while ago at that, and now everything was too late.
Everything, what everything?
She sometimes talked about this with Annie, who had the office next to hers. They had both begun at the publishing house at the same time, both had been home with the kids for a while before then, both had sons.
Everything… you’ve been waiting for, everything that was supposed to happen.
Annie agreed. Even though she was four years younger, she was thinking the same thing.
I wonder when it ended, she thought. I wonder when that change came, the change from a young, hopeful human being to a robotic machine.
She was far from being old. Sometimes men still looked at her with that special look in their eyes, but usually only after they had been introduced. Otherwise, she was hardly ever visible. Of course she took care of her body, took care of her face, never left her house without her make-up on, not even in the countryside. Every fifth week she went to her hairdresser, a handsome black man, who knew exactly how best to cut her hair.
Too bad he’s gay, she thought. I’ve never done it with a black man. She turned red from shame at the mere thought.
She let her eyes wander around the food stalls, as she almost always saw someone she knew while she was here, and sure enough, here comes Elizabeth, gliding across the room. Elizabeth had an unusual way of sashaying so that everything that was in her way was swept aside.
She saw Berit, and turned her mouth to a smile.
“Darling Berit, here you are all alone; can I join you for a minute? What are you having… café latte? I’ll take one as well.”
“I have to go soon, but go ahead and sit down. I don’t have to rush.”
Elizabeth also worked in the publishing business, at Bonniers, in the big white building on Sveavägen.
“How are you, darling, you seem a bit pale?”
“I do?”
“Oh, that’s probably just the light here, nothing to worry about.”
“As a matter of fact, I am a little tired.”
“You are? We’ve had a few weeks off, but maybe you had to work through Christmas?”
“No, no. I’m not that kind of tired.”
“Oh, I know exactly what you mean. It’s this eternal gray weather. If only we had a bit more chill, so that the ice would come; I am so longing for the ice this year. We have not yet been skating one single time. And in the middle of January! Do you think it could be this El Niño thing affecting us all the way here in Scandinavia?”
“I haven’t the vaguest idea.”
“Well, it’s dull, dull, dull, that I know. Tell me, anything new?”
“Not really. How about you?”
“Lots of work, as always.”
“Same here. Same old same old… I’m thinking that it could be last year, or the year before, or the year before that, even. Everything the same. I think I’m getting burned out.”
“Oh my dear, dear friend. Isn’t it fun any more?”
“Fun is as fun does.”
Elizabeth leaned closer over the round, white iron table.
“I’ve heard them say… Curt Lüding is thinking of selling?”
Curt Lüding was Berit’s boss. He had started the business in the middle of the seventies, and he belonged to the young opposition, the kids who fought at the barricades. In those days, he published underground literature and socially critical novels. He was done with that now. Times had changed.
“The same old rumor,” even as she said it, she felt her stomach lurch.
“You haven’t heard anything specific?”
“No. You?”
“Nah. Nothing worth noticing.”
“Bonniers wants to take over?”
“Well, yes.”
Berit poked at a piece of corn with her fork, put it in her mouth.
“It’s not at all pleasant with these rumors going around,” she said. “Maybe that’s why people are feeling down. That uncertainty. I’m really going to ignore work all weekend long. I’m not going to think about it for one minute! I’m going to try and get out instead, maybe take a long walk this Saturday. Maybe I’ll go out to Hässelby and see to my parents’ graves there, and then take a long walk through nature out there and feel some nostalgia. I haven’t been there for who knows how long.”
On the way back to work, she sneaked into a shop for luxury lingerie on Drottninggatan. She tried on some bras and decided on a red shiny one with underwire and a pair of matching panties. The sharp lighting made her thighs and stomach look like dough.
My body, she thought. Just like an autopsy report. Six hundred and ninety crowns.
What you do for a minu
te of happiness!
She longed for some chocolate and walked hurriedly past the Belgian chocolate shop. She had bought some hand-made chocolate snails there for the boys’ girlfriends last Christmas. Those girls were thin as sticks; they could use a little more weight on their bones.
She felt strange around them. They resembled each other: awkward, blonde, flat-chested. They hung on the boys the whole time, pawing them and whimpering like spoiled children whenever they thought no one heard them. She never would have acted like that with Tor’s parents! His mother would have driven her from the door.
Helle and Marika. Helle was Danish, how she ended up in Stockholm was anybody’s guess. Berit had tried to chat with them, find out a bit about their backgrounds. They were sullen and silent. Or maybe just shy. She kept up her humor for the sake of her boys.
Now it had really started to rain; she opened her umbrella and used it as a shield against the wind. When she was passing the Russian restaurant, she was forced to cross the street. The locale was being scraped bare, an excavator was in the middle of the sidewalk. She wondered what was coming next. She had eaten there a few times. Full-bodied stews and piroges. It had been cozy and warm and, whenever she was really depressed, she had eaten there and gathered her strength.
The elevator to their floor was out of order. She walked up four flights of stairs, trailing a wet line after her umbrella. She hung up her things and went to her office. It was unusually quiet everywhere. Was there a meeting that she had forgotten? No, Annie was sitting at her desk, her arms were hanging down and she wasn’t working. Just sitting there with a lifeless look on her face.
“What’s going on, Annie? Something happen?” Annie motioned her over.
“Come on in.”
Then she got up and closed the door.
“Now things are going to change!”
A shudder went down Berit’s spine.
“What do you mean?”
“Curt’s up to something.”
“Up to what?”
“He’s calling an employee meeting. Not today, not tomorrow, but on Monday of all the damn days of the week.” “Employee meeting?”
“Yep. Apparently something he wants to tell us all together.” “Is he going to fire us?”
Good Night, My Darling Page 4