Sacrifice

by Karin Alvtegen

  Impure.

  The nature of the flesh is enmity towards God.

  It was hard to wash herself clean enough at the kitchen sink, but buses passed by on the main road twice a day, and from the bus station in town it was only a few hundred metres to the bathhouse. She began going there daily but never said anything about it to Göran. She was always back by the time he came home. They would eat dinner and exchange a few words, but the conversations became more and more trivial and her thoughts more and more suffocating. She thought that surely everything would improve when the baby arrived and he left school so that it would just be them again. Then maybe they could start working on another baby. Then they could be together again without it being wrong.

  She had found the phone number of the College’s office and had memorised it. The appointed day was approaching, and if she went into labour while Göran was at school she was supposed to call. He had already arranged to borrow a car so she didn’t have to worry. That’s what he said.

  She was standing in the shower at the bathhouse when her waters broke. Utterly without warning she felt that something was happening, and when she turned off the shower the water kept running down her legs. There was an older woman in the stall facing hers and Maj-Britt had turned her back – it was unpleasant to expose her nakedness to other women in the shower-room as well. She grabbed her towel and went out and sat down on the bench in the changing room. The first pains came just as she got her underwear on. She managed to put on the rest of her clothes, and when she was dressed she asked the woman from the shower-room to find out where there was a telephone.

  They grew closer to each other again during the delivery. He held her hand and wiped her brow and was so eager to do all he could to help her through the labour pains. Everything would be good again, she knew that now. She would talk to him about all the things she’d been thinking that were slowly but surely breaking her apart, try to get him to understand. She did her utmost to endure the pains that were tearing her body to bits and wondered why God was so cruel that He punished women so much for the sin that Eve had committed. The words from Scripture echoed in her head: Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin my mother conceived me.

  Time passed. The pains lashed her for hours but her body refused to open and release what it had created. It greedily kept its grip on the child that was struggling inside to emerge into life, and the midwife seemed more and more concerned. Twenty hours had passed when they were forced to give up. The decision was made and Maj-Britt was led away to the operating room to deliver the child by Caesarean section.

  Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin my mother conceived me.

  ‘Majsan.’

  She heard the voice but it was coming from far away. She was someplace other than where the voice originated. A faint shimmer of light penetrated at intervals through the mists of her vision, and the voice she heard echoed as if down a long tunnel.

  ‘Majsan, can you hear me?’

  She managed to open her eyes. Vague contours of what was close by took shape, and her eyes reluctantly adjusted their focus and then lost it again.

  ‘It’s a little girl.’

  And then she suddenly saw. The anaesthesia was slowly releasing its grip and she could see that he was standing there with a newborn baby in his arms. Göran was still there, he hadn’t abandoned her. And the baby in his arms must be their baby, the one her body had been unable to give birth to on its own. The child in his arms was wearing white clothes, she could see that too. It was perfect and clear and washed and pure and was wearing white clothes.

  ‘Darling, it’s a little girl.’

  He placed the little creature on her arm and her eyes desperately tried to adjust their focus to the new distance. A little girl.

  The door opened and a nurse rolled in a pay phone.

  ‘You probably want to call and tell everyone the happy news.’

  And Göran called his parents. And Vanja. Maj-Britt only managed to say a few words, but Vanja shrieked with delight on the other end.

  But they never called anyone else.

  Things didn’t turn out quite the way Göran had said. Instead of taking a job he asked his parents for financial help so he could finish his second year at the school. And the flat that he had promised they would move to would also have to wait for a while. But he had talked with the Council and it shouldn’t be any problem when they were ready. Or so they said.

  Maj-Britt continued to keep her thoughts to herself but at least now she had something to distract her. They decided to name the girl Susanna; they would have her christened in the church back home, by the same pastor who had married them. She wrote a letter to her parents and told them that they now had a grandchild and about the date of the christening, but she never received a reply.

  There was something wrong with the girl, Maj-Britt could feel it. It wasn’t that she didn’t like her, but she felt it was necessary to maintain a certain distance. The baby needed so much, and it was important for her to learn from the start to control her needs. Raising a child was also about setting limits, and no responsible parent would let her child’s will subvert the authority of an adult. That would be doing them a disservice. She breast-fed every four hours as she had been advised to do, and let the child cry herself to sleep if she was hungry in between. At seven o’clock every evening she had to go to sleep; that was the proper time, as they had told her at the child care centre. It could take a few hours for the baby to fall asleep; eventually she couldn’t hear her shrieks any longer. But Göran had a hard time accepting this. The nights he came home before the baby went to sleep he would pace up and down, questioning more and more strongly the child-rearing methods that allowed a small girl to lie in bed alone and cry herself to sleep.

  She was four months old when it was confirmed. Maj-Britt had known that something wasn’t right but she had refused to let her suspicions become fact. By means of various excuses she had succeeded in avoiding the latest check-ups at the child care centre, but finally they had called and threatened to pay a home visit if Maj-Britt didn’t bring the child in. Göran hadn’t been privy to her suspicions; she had borne them alone. Nor did he know that she was skipping the required check-ups. She didn’t want to go, didn’t want to sit there and get the news and pretend that she didn’t already know what was going on. Or the reason why it had turned out this way.

  Self-abuse is what it’s called.

  And it was as she had suspected. She received the news the same way she would have listened to road directions. She merely asked a few supplementary questions for clarification. In the evening she passed on the news to Göran in the same way.

  ‘She’s blind. They confirmed it at the check-up today. We have to go back in two weeks.’

  From that day everything began to crumble. The last desperate remnants of their attempt to break away finally disappeared, and all that remained were shame, remorse and dread. The regret and the guilt ate through her body like acid, the body she hated more than anything on earth, and that never did her anything but harm. The same body on which the palpable proof of her sin was now dependent every four hours. An evil tree bears evil fruit. For the sake of sin each human being stands with real guilt before God and is threatened by His wrath and punishing justice. The overwhelming, dark desire for evil is propagated and is passed down from generation to generation, and this inherited sin is the cause of all other sins in thought, word and deed.

  In her pride she had rebelled against God, and the punishment was more loathsome than she ever could have imagined. He had kept silent and ignored her, and He had turned His wrath on her offspring instead. He would let the next generation bear the punishment that she herself should have borne.

  And then came the letter from her parents. They had heard it through the grapevine. They had not forgiven her, but the whole Congregation would offer prayers for her child who had been struck by God’s righteous retribution.

  A few months passed.
Göran grew more and more taciturn during the hours he was home. He didn’t even talk about the new flat anymore, the one they were supposed to move to in early summer. Two rooms and a kitchen on the ground floor, 68 square metres with a balcony. And a bathroom. Finally, they would get a bathroom so she could wash herself properly.

  She had already started to pack because she needed something to do; it had become harder and harder to sit still. She had just opened the linen cupboard in the hall above the stairs and was reaching for a stack of sheets. They had got them from Göran’s parents, his initials were primly embroidered on them in blue. She saw that the girl was crawling across the threshold from the bedroom, that she bumped her head on the doorjamb and just sat there. There was no gate to protect her from the stairs. Maj-Britt walked past her and went over to the packing carton that was set up on the bed and placed the sheets inside. When she turned round she hit her shin on the bedstead. The pain was brief and explosive and only lasted a second, but it was as if the physical sensation swept away a barrier inside her. Everything turned white. The scream came first. She screamed until her throat hurt, but it didn’t help. The girl was scared by her wailing, and Maj-Britt saw out of the corner of her eye that she was sobbing and crawling farther out in the hall. Closer to the stairs. But her rage could not be quelled; it grew ever stronger, and she grabbed hold of the carton in front of her with both hands and hurled it with all her might at the wall.

  ‘I hate You! Hate You, do You hear that? You know that I was ready to sacrifice everything but it was never enough!’

  She clenched her fists and shook them at the ceiling.

  ‘Do You hear me? Do You? Can’t You answer just once when someone speaks to You?’

  All her pent-up fury exploded and gushed out like a tidal wave. She felt it throbbing in her temples and she tore the sheets off the bed and heaved them across the room. A picture on the wall was caught in their sweep and there was no gate on the stairs out in the hall, and now her blind daughter could no longer be seen, she had disappeared beyond the door frame. But something could no longer be stopped, something had once and for all shattered inside her, and now it had to get out or she would explode.

  ‘You think You can win, don’t You? That I’m going to pray and beg Your forgiveness now that it’s all too late, now that You’ve made her take the punishment I was supposed to have. Is that what You think, is it?’

  There was nothing left to throw, so she picked up the carton and threw it one more time. She stood in the bedroom and threw a carton even though there was no gate in front of the stairs out there in the hall.

  ‘I can get along without You from now on, do You hear me?’

  And afterwards she remembered that just at that moment she had to go out in the hall because there was no gate in front of the stairs and her blind daughter was alone out there on the floor, but she never made it that far.

  She didn’t scream when she fell.

  There were only a couple of thuds and then everything was quiet.

  21

  There was something special about the nights. To be awake while others were sleeping. When everything had quieted down, when the thoughts of all people were gathered up and sorted into various dream states, leaving the air free. It was as if it became easier to think then, as if her musings had an easier time emerging when they didn’t have to make way for all the rushing traffic. During her student days she had often turned night into day, and whenever possible she preferred to study for her exams at night. When the air was free.

  Now the night had become associated with danger, for precisely the same reason. The fewer distractions and disturbing elements there were, the more often the field was clear. Something in there was protesting and seeking contact with her, and the quieter the night got, the harder it was to avoid hearing. Something in there blamed her, despite her brave attempts to bring about order and justice, and she had to watch out that she was not dragged down into the depths. She could only imagine what it would feel like to end up there; the slightest intimation of such a state was enough to scare her out of her wits. For twenty-three years she had managed to keep a distance from the darkness that was growing ever denser, but now it had grown so vast that it had almost reached the surface. The only way to maintain the slight distance that was still left was to stay in motion at all times. Because there was an urgency, a real urgency. She could feel in her whole body how much urgency there was. If only she made a decent effort, it would be possible to make everything right.

  She had turned on the radio to drown out the worst of the silence. Pernilla’s papers were spread out on the big oak kitchen table that was specially built to stand right where it stood. With room for ten people. There was no tiredness in her body, it was almost 3:30 in the morning and she was into her third glass of a 1979 Glen Mhor. She had bought the whisky during a trip abroad to supplement the exclusive contents of her bar cabinet, and it had made a good impression on some well-chosen guests. But it functioned equally well as an anaesthetic.

  She punched in Pernilla’s income on her calculator and totalled it up again, but it didn’t help. The situation was really as bad as Pernilla had said. Daniella would get a child’s stipend, but it was based on Mattias’s general supplementary pension and wouldn’t be very much. She had searched online and found out how to calculate it. Before the diving accident they had lived hand to mouth, working a bit here and there, saving enough to take a trip once in a while. After the accident Mattias had worked a little, but the jobs hadn’t been particularly well-paid. Pernilla had been right. They would be forced to move if they didn’t get some help.

  Not until she heard the morning paper land on the hall floor did she get up and go into the bedroom. The box of sleeping pills lay on her nightstand and she pressed a pill out of the foil pack and swallowed it with the dregs from a glass of water that had stood there since the night before. She wasn’t tired in the least, but she had to start work again and she had to get a few hours’ sleep. If she took the pill now and stayed up for half an hour she would fall asleep as soon as she lay down.

  Not one thought would manage to take shape.

  Dinner.

  She followed the unfamiliar chanterelle recipe meticulously and the whole thing turned out quite well, even though she would have preferred a piece of meat on the plate next to all those vegetables. Pernilla sat in silence. Monika filled her wine glass when needed but refrained from drinking any herself. She wanted to stay sharp, and, besides, she had to drive. She sat enjoying the thought that she would get to take Pernilla’s papers with her when she drove home. She was looking forward to familiarising herself fully with the situation. The papers were not merely an information source, they were also a guarantee, a temporary breathing space where she didn’t have to worry. With them in her hands she was certain to be allowed to return, at least one more time. She looked at the stack of papers lying on the kitchen worktop and noticed how soothing it felt.

  She wiped up the last food on her plate with a piece of bread and got ready for what she had to say. That they would be forced to make a slight change in what they might almost call ‘their routines’. She liked that expression, their routines. But now they would have to be altered a bit. She couldn’t jeopardise her job. Then they would both lose. So she sat and prepared for what had to be said.

  ‘My leave of absence is up tomorrow, so I’ll have to go back to work.’

  There was no reaction from across the table.

  ‘But I’d like to continue to drop by in the evenings if that would be any help.’

  Pernilla said nothing, only nodded a little, but she didn’t really seem to be listening. Her lack of interest made Monika uneasy. She hadn’t been able to make herself indispensable, and each time she was reminded of any lack of control the darkness pressed in closer and closer.

  ‘I thought I might be able to come by tomorrow evening and tell you about that programme and how my talk with them has gone; I’m planning to ring them first thing i
n the morning.’

  Pernilla sat jabbing her fork at a chanterelle that was left on her plate. She hadn’t eaten much, even though she had said the food was good.

  ‘Sure, if you feel like it, otherwise we can do it on the phone.’

  She didn’t take her eyes off the chanterelle, and with the help of the fork it made its way through the sauce, drawing an irregular trail between a lettuce leaf and a leftover wedge of potato.

  ‘It’s better if I come by, it’s no problem, and I have to give you your papers back anyway.’

  Pernilla nodded, put down her fork and took a gulp of wine. There was a very long pause. Monika glanced at Sofia Magdalena, wondering how she could bring the conversation round to some historical topic that might lighten the mood a little and make Pernilla realise how much they had in common, when Pernilla beat her to it. Except that the part of the story she wanted to talk about was the part that Monika wanted to avoid at all costs. The words hit her like a punch in the stomach.

  ‘It’s his birthday tomorrow.’

  Monika swallowed. She looked at Pernilla and realised her mistake. Until now Pernilla had almost never mentioned his name, and Monika had begun to relax, believing that it would continue that way as she hurried past his gaze in the living room whenever she had to walk by. But now Pernilla was starting to be affected by the wine. Monika in her foolishness had bought the wine and kept refilling her glass. The effect could be seen in Pernilla’s listless movements, and when she blinked it took longer than usual for her eyelids to close and then open again. Monika saw the tears streaming down Pernilla’s cheeks; they were running in a different way than they had the other times she had wept. On those occasions Pernilla had retreated with her grief, trying to hide. Now she sat there exposed on her chair, making no attempt to conceal her despair. The alcohol had dissolved all her barriers and Monika cursed her stupidity. She should have known better. But now she would have to atone for her mistake, as she was forced to endure every word.