The hotel was built like a patio, with an inner courtyard covered by a ceiling. When she came out of her room, she could see all of the floors. Down on the stone floor, she could see heaps of laundry. A woman was standing on the stairs with a mop. When Justine walked past, she looked away.
She walked down the flights of stairs carefully. On one landing, she saw a little house altar with incense and candles. She drew in the sour aroma.
This is as far away from home as a person can get, she thought. She felt wiped out from exhaustion.
A large man, wearing a patterned short-sleeve shirt, sat in the hotel foyer. The shirt clung to his back. A fleck on the counter, a fleck on his shining forehead. Justine gave him the keys to her room and asked if he would be able to exchange some money for her.
“No, no,” he answered in English. He pointed down the street.
She stepped into a burning wall of heat. She had to go through it. She had to get money and get something to eat, some water and food. The boy on the street was gone, and she felt relieved. She started to walk in the direction that the doorkeeper had indicated. The traffic was lively, the air heavy. The direct light made her eyes hurt. It was one great dizziness, a whirling, smoking inferno with pieces of street all around, like a labyrinth. She followed what she believed was the main street, thought she saw a sign with the word “bank.” She turned to the right, trying to imprint on her mind the look of the houses and the signs.
It wasn’t a bank, but some kind of office. She saw how people milled about in there behind the shiny window panes. She grasped the door handle, but the door was locked.
She stood in the way of two women with colorful dresses and head scarves.
“Excuse me… but where can I exchange my money?”
They both stuck out their chins, the same confused gesture.
She had to turn back, but then realized that she didn’t know where she was. Everything looked the same-same signs, same cars, same buildings. She felt faint; everything was going round and round, smells and sounds and thirst.
She heard someone call her name. She didn’t know where she was. She looked around, but didn’t see anything, blinded by the light and the sun. A taxi had stopped, the door opened.
“Justine, what are you up to?”
Nathan.
She grabbed the pocket of his shirt, heard a ripping sound from the seam loosening.
“Hey, relax!”
He led her to the taxi, helped her in.
Up in the room, he gave her water from a large plastic bottle.
“You better make damn sure that you don’t go out there without having a lot of water in you,” he admonished her.
“I didn’t have any local currency,” she said.
“You could have asked the guy at the desk. You could have gotten something in the room.”
“And you, you could have stayed here with me and not taken off like that.”
“I didn’t want to wake you up. You said you hadn’t slept a wink on the plane. It was out of consideration to you that I went out by myself.”
She curled up in the bed and began to wail.
“But Justine… you should know that I would have to explore the area.”
“You didn’t have to start immediately.”
“Yes, I did. I already had made some appointments. I’m here to work, you know. This is not a vacation if that’s what you thought.”
She lay there in her wrinkled dress and the elastic cut her waist. Her fingers were swollen from the heat.
She thought, maybe if we made love.
But when she touched him, he broke free.
She had met him at the dentist’s. It was during a period of time when she was there fairly often; she had problems with a bridge. Every time she entered the waiting room, he was sitting there, and finally, they both broke into laughter.
“It seems our dentist is also a matchmaker,” he said.
He was a few years older than she was. He had gray, tufty hair that would normally look ridiculous on a man of his age, but strangely did not on him. She heard someone call his name, Nathan Gendser.
Finally, they managed to come out into the waiting room at the same time. She was numb in her jaw from the Novocain. He was paying at the cashier.
“I’m finally done,” he said. “Feels great.”
She felt a twinge of disappointment.
“Lucky you!”
“Do you have much left?”
“Once or twice more. It wasn’t just the bridge; there were some cavities, too.”
“I have my car outside. Can I drive you somewhere?” Her own car was around the corner. She thought a moment, then said, “Thanks.”
It was summer. His plump, tanned hands; no ring. “Dalvik…,” he said. “I was wondering about that. Are you related to the Sandy Candy business?”
She nodded.
“Oh, I get it. That’s why you have to go to the dentist’s so often nowadays. Too much candy when you were a child!” “I didn’t eat too much of that candy. I didn’t like it much.
But I ate a lot of other kinds of candy.”
“I’m not surprised.”
He sat quietly for a minute. Then he asked her where she was going.
“Where are you going yourself?”
“Well, I can let you off at the subway station next to Odenplan? I live in the vicinity.”
“That’d be perfect.”
“Are you on vacation now?”
“No, I don’t work.”
“What! You don’t work! Are you unemployed?” “Not exactly.”
She felt his look; she stared stubbornly straight ahead.
People often were bothered when they found out that she didn’t work. She had never really started a career. She had been sick most of her teenage life. Then she thought it was too late for anything. But you just couldn’t say this to strangers. In order to avoid questions, she sometimes said that she’d worked for the family concern but was now thinking of trying something else. And then she would change the subject.
“I usually call myself an odd-job man,” he said. “But the last few years, I’ve been working as a tour guide.” He let her out in front of the medical building on
Odenplan. When he drove off, she went into the subway and rode back to the dentist’s to get her car. Once she got home, she looked up his name in the telephone book. He lived on Norrtullsgatan. She got out the city map and found the exact place where he lived.
The next day, she did something unusual. She went there. This was unlike her. She talked to herself: what are you doing here, what are you expecting?
It was as if she were tipsy.
His car was parked next to the building. She glanced up at the façade, wondered which window was his. So that he wouldn’t discover her, she went into a nearby bookstore and thumbed through some books, finally buying a paperback just for appearances. Then she walked along the sidewalk, up and down, in front of his building. As if she knew he was coming any minute, an intuition.
Her sixth sense was correct. He came out of the apartment building a half hour later. He was alone. She sped up, as if she were just walking along that minute, she said, “Hey, it’s you… I didn’t expect to see someone I knew!”
His face: a look of surprised happiness!
“I was just going out to grab a bite to eat. Do you want to come, too?”
They took a boat out to the royal palace island of Drottningholm. He invited her to lunch at the exclusive restaurant. She felt she was waking up from a period of paralysis.
She had been silent for so many years. With him, the language began to return, one word at a time.
He stroked life into her body; he awakened her. “You are so beautiful, I love women who are not anorexic.
Like you, you’re so alive.”
She became violently jealous of all the women he had made love to.
“How do you know that I’m so alive?”
“I feel it, even though you’re in your sh
ell. I’m going to peel it from you, pluck your shell off, and show you to the world.”
She thought it was just something that a man would say, but she gave herself to him, totally.
She had never made love as a grown woman. After her child, her life came to an end.
Fragments of discussions between her father and Flora. Flora like an attack terrier: “It’s not just protecting her, you have to let her get well. We can’t do this here at home. You can’t, I can’t. She has to go to a clinic.”
She listened to her father’s footsteps, how doors slammed, how it thundered and shook through the entire house.
Finally he allowed a psychiatrist come to the house to examine her. He spoke of what happened and called it a miscarriage.
“You have to go on,” said the psychiatrist. “You have your whole life in front of you.”
He did not realize that for her, the reverse was true.
Yes, all the experts came to see her. He bought the best ones there were. Talk, talk, talk. He let her come with him on his trips, put her in the firm. Numbers and calculations, but nothing stayed in her mind. He brought home an electric typewriter, and Flora covered the keys so that she couldn’t see them. She learned a and ä.
When Flora traveled to Maderia with her, her father set her up in his bedroom.
“Sleep in my room, so you can see when I fall asleep and when I wake up. If I have done you wrong in life, know that I didn’t mean it, I’ve only wanted the best for you, Justine; you are all I have left of what was once my whole world. You are all I have left.”
“What about Flora?” she whispered.
“Flora? Oh yes, of course, Flora, too.”
She lay in Flora’s bed, on Flora’s pillow. She saw her father with new eyes. She saw that he had long ago passed his youth. His hair was no longer brown, but thinner and drab; his eyebrows shot out like bushes. He was sitting on the chair by Flora’s vanity. He was looking in the mirror.
“What do you wish for in life, Justine?” he asked, and he had resignation in his bearing.
She had no answer.
He leaned forward over the table.
“That man who… came so close to you? You don’t have to tell me who he was. But… was he important to you?”
She ran away from him wearing her nightgown. Stood behind the door and refused to talk.
Her father had to coax and cajole. He handed her the horn, as if that would help, as if she still were a little girl that could be comforted with a musical instrument.
The horn’s mouthpiece against her lips, the song of the horn.
She turned around, reflected in his eyes; his eyes were filled with pain. She wanted to cling to him and disappear into nothing. She was his only daughter, with great sorrow.
After some time, she began to stabilize. Flora had great patience. Whenever her sister came to visit, that was all they talked about, Flora’s great, endless patience.
“You’re certainly giving her just as good care as she would have gotten in a mental hospital,” said Viola, smelling like perfume and flowers. “It must give her a sense of security to have you around her. And it gives him some peace of mind, too.”
“It wouldn’t make any difference whether she were here or in a hospital; she hardly makes a fuss these days. And Sven feels better, having her here at home. His little girl.”
She said the last words with a bit of sarcasm.
Viola crossed her nylon-covered legs, and called Justine over.
“If I took you into the city, Justine, bought you a dress.”
“Believe me,” said Flora. “We’ve bought her so many clothes! I can’t stop you, but it’s a wasted effort. She never wears new things. At the very most, she will put it on for one day, and then she’ll never wear it again. She says that it feels uncomfortable and affected. But it doesn’t really matter. I mean, she hardly ever leaves the house.”
“Don’t give up, Flora. Clothes create grace and bearing. It could be a way to help return her to normal.”
Flora lowered her voice.
“Normal! That child has never been normal! It’s genetic, an inheritance from her mother. She has also been, let’s just say, a little unusual, to put it mildly. Now I’m attempting to give her basic knowledge about running a house. That won’t be wasted. And once Sven and I are old, she can care for herself and for us. Then she’ll be of some use, both to her and to us. A human being has to have some value; that’s among the most important things in life, to be useful.”
Viola could not understand why Flora didn’t hire help for the house or the garden. Married into wealth and still no additional household help.
“You could sit here like a member of the nobility and just be waited on. And you would still be valuable as the wife of the well-known Sven Dalvik, just that alone.”
Flora had her unusual reasons.
“I don’t want strangers in my home. This is my territory.”
The territory became Justine’s as well. Slowly, she greased herself into it, although Flora didn’t realize that. Wearing her father’s cast-off overalls, she scrubbed the walls and the floors in the house. Spring and fall, year after year.
In the water were a few drops of blood from a cut on her finger.
Chapter TWO
The day her father died, she was working her hardest up in the attic. She usually began at the top and slowly worked her way down. She was on her knees, scrubbing and scrubbing. The floor boards cut into her knees and the pain felt good to her. The raw wood, the smell of well-scrubbed pine.
Then from far below a draft of cold air. She heard Flora call. Her father had collapsed on the outer stairs. He had lost a shoe. Mechanically, she took off his other shoe. Her hands were still damp from the cleaning water.
Together they managed to pull him into the blue room. Flora ran up and down the stairs, changing clothes, smoking.
“You should change clothes, too, if you’re coming with us. You can’t wear those overalls.”
She sat with her father’s head in her lap. It felt hard and little.
Only one of them could ride in the ambulance. Justine took the Opel. She had gotten the Opel as a present for her thirty-fifth birthday. She followed closely behind the ambulance with its shrieking sirens.
As she already realized, there was nothing that could be done. A worn-out doctor took them aside to a room. She remembered a bandage over a cut on her father’s throat. She sat and wondered what he’d done. Did he cut himself? Or was it a hickey? She thought of anything and everything in that room, just not her father.
“So here’s what’s going on. At the most, he’ll manage to live through the night. I want you to be aware of this.”
“We’re aware,” she said.
Flora became angry. She scratched her hands like paws. “How much do you want… to do your utmost?”
“My dear Mrs. Dalvik, there are some things that can’t be bought. We have done our utmost.”
They sat, one on each side.
“Poor Justine,” said Flora. “I don’t think you realize how serious this is.”
Her cheeks were spotty with mascara. Justine had never seen her cry before. The sniffling bothered her; she wanted to be left alone with her father. She thought of death as a woman, maybe her mother, who had been sent to bring her husband home. She could imagine her coming through the window, big and tall, taking off his blanket, taking his hand, and leading him away from them. She would look at Flora with a spiteful little smile: “I’m taking him now, because he is mine.”
Nathan took her to the biggest shopping center in Kuala Lumpur. It looked just like a large department store in Sweden, and she was amazed at the assortment of goods. She must have forgotten her sunglasses at home, or lost them on the plane. Finally, she would be able to buy a new pair.
Nathan made clear that she could not hold his hand or show any affection because that would be offensive. People just did not show public affection in this country.
“We’ll
resume all of this in the hotel room,” he said. He was in a good mood again.
He also thought she should look at some clothes.
“It’ll cheer you up. Women love to shop; just ask an expert like me!”
He had been married twice and had a live-in girlfriend once. There were photos of all his children in graduation outfits or wedding dresses on the living room shelf. He had six children. She asked about their mothers, punished herself with details.
“Ann-Marie is the mother of these two. They look like her, same blue eyes, but thank God not the same mental status, if I may say so. Nettan is the mother of the twin girls and Mikke, the boy. I was legally married to both Ann-Marie and Nettan, for five and seven years respectively. After that, I’ve been careful not to get married. When I met Barbro, we agreed to just live together. She also didn’t want to get married. She had just gotten divorced from some crazy guy who used to beat her up. I lived with her for four or five years. Little Jenny is ours.”
He was very proud of Jenny, who was a model. A thin girlish young woman with doe-eyes, a copy of her mother.
“And then, did you live by yourself?”
He waved his hand.
“In a matter of speaking.”
“Why did it never work out? Are you so difficult to live with?”
“All three had one thing in common: they were a bit hysterical.”
“What do you mean hysterical?”
“I don’t want to go into that now.”
“Am I also hysterical?”
“Not what I’ve seen so far. But if I notice it, I’ll be sure to let you know.”
“And which one was the best in bed?”
He pushed her into his bed, lay over her, put a hand over her mouth.
“The first one is you, the second one is you, the third one is you, Darling.”
She looked through the clothes, but everything was too small. Malaysian women barely reached her shoulders. They appeared stamped from the same mold, and their waists were as narrow as one of her legs.
Good Night, My Darling Page 18