The Truth Behind the Lie

by Sara Lövestam

  CHAPTER 12

  Pernilla doesn’t answer right away, but he lets the question hang in the air until she finally catches it. She looks at him searchingly.

  “I don’t know if you would understand.”

  Kouplan, for one of one hundred thousand reasons, in this country, in this apartment, in this body, also does not have an identification number.

  “I understand most things,” he says, and truthfully he does.

  “Well, then,” Pernilla says. “Let me pour myself another cup of coffee first.”

  * * *

  She heads into the kitchen, a being in jeans and a cardigan, full of sorrow and secrets. A body that once carried a child who is gone. An amputated life, like his.

  If she did carry the child herself. A suspicion comes to mind, and he wants to ignore it, but he must think about it now that he’s a real detective: Was Julia always her child from the beginning?

  Pernilla’s hand is shaking as she sets her second cup of coffee down on the table.

  “What do you know about Social Services?”

  Kouplan shrugs. If it’s the same bureaucracy he’s had to deal with, he knows he can’t get help from them without a residence permit.

  “Social Services evaluates whether or not you can keep your child. If you are competent. You see?”

  “And why would you not be competent?”

  Pernilla shivers and pulls her feet under her body. It makes her appear like a girl, even though she’s certainly over thirty.

  “I had some problems when I was young. When I met Patrick, I was feeling better for a while, but I had problems again when I was pregnant. Take a look.”

  She pulls up her sleeves and shows her pale lower arms to Kouplan. Pure white scars show a lifetime of despair and calming razor blades.

  “Patrick sent me to the psych ward and I was kept there … I was there a few times, and I can’t even remember how many. You must think I’m crazy, now, right?”

  She is staring at him worriedly. He thinks that all the scars on her arms are chalk white. None of them are new. He shakes his head.

  “I don’t think you’re crazy.”

  She releases her fear and breath in one long sigh. Pulls her legs even tighter under her body.

  “I knew that they wouldn’t let me keep Julia.”

  Silence told the rest of the story. Kouplan fills it in.

  “So you faked a miscarriage.”

  “I gave birth to Julia here in this room all by myself.”

  Kouplan is living in a country where the citizens have everything arranged for them. That’s how he thinks about the Swedes. Like an Excel spreadsheet where the grid pattern and the calculations keep them from falling and they call it cradle-to-grave welfare. Pernilla’s story is a deviation from the rules, a dizzying drop out of the system. As is Julia, the girl, who is hardly a citizen, just as he is not. He tries to take it in as Pernilla explains.

  “If she doesn’t exist, they can’t take her away from me.”

  She’s pulling down her sleeves and covering the white streaks with her kaftan. She’s drinking the coffee, that’s already getting cold, and breathes in air as if it were cocaine. Kouplan looks around the room where Julia was born. He tries to imagine a blond Swede giving birth to her child alone on a linoleum floor and, presumably, layers of towels. Pernilla turns back to him and her face is as naked as it had been outside the church.

  “And now someone has taken her.”

  * * *

  Kouplan can’t exactly get up and leave for lunch after hearing a story like that. Although the coffee is keeping the worst hunger pangs away, it also eats into his stomach.

  “I’m going to make a sandwich,” Pernilla says. “Want one?”

  He has four in all: cheese and green bell pepper. He wants more, but you can’t eat as many sandwiches as you want in someone else’s house.

  “Go ahead,” she says. “Take another one. Have you eaten yet today?”

  He contemplates her. Karin has always told him not to tell anyone, ever. He spreads butter onto a slice of bread with Pernilla’s green plastic butter knife and then he tells her:

  “I don’t exist, either.”

  Something about secrets weighs down a person’s soul. A human being’s secrets are walls and shrinking rooms—or waiting for seventy-five lashes of the whip. The feeling humans have when they keep secrets means they’re not made for telling lies.

  “I’m hiding from the border police,” Kouplan says, although he knows he shouldn’t.

  He’s afraid, but he’s breathing more freely.

  “I knew there was something about you,” Pernilla says.

  * * *

  He thinks she gives him a longer hug as they say goodbye. Longer than the one she gave him when they met at the church. She smells of perfumed soap and she’s warm and her cheek is soft. Her white scars are warming his neck.

  * * *

  Back in his room, he searches: Social Services take children. He needs to understand, to check it out. One mother gives tips to other mothers who have lost their children to Social Services. One discussion page has hundreds of leads on how to hide from them and one title reads: Soc threatens to wait at the maternity ward to take my child when I give birth. There are many of them; this is a part of Swedish society that has been hidden from him. He wonders for a while how likely it would be that someone from Social Services heard that Pernilla gave birth in secret and if they would come and take her right from the street. Unlikely, he concludes, but still writes up another line of inquiry. Now he has five.

  CHAPTER 13

  One minute on Kouplan’s phone costs fifty-nine öre. Ten minutes is six crowns and one hour is thirty-six. The charge applies the second a new minute starts, so it’s good to keep an eye on the seconds on Regina’s kitchen clock.

  He could call from Regina’s home phone, but that could be traced.

  As soon as the outer door dampens sound of yelling children and he can hear the elevator start going down, he walks into the kitchen. He takes a few deep breaths and then tests his phrases and his ultra-Swedish male voice. Then he punches in Patrick’s number.

  * * *

  “Yes, hello,” he says as soon as Patrick picks up. “My name is Robert Johansson. I have some questions about a certain Pernilla Svensson. Have I reached the right number?”

  “No.”

  The reply is immediate.

  Kouplan hums in that questioning way Swedes have.

  “That’s odd. Aren’t you Patrick Magnusson? Former live-in partner of Pernilla?”

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “She gave you as a reference,” Kouplan lies smoothly. “But you say you don’t know her?”

  “How the hell did you get my number? I don’t have anything to do with that psycho, nothing whatsoever.”

  “You do know who she is.”

  “Look here!”

  The way Patrick says look here in such an authoritative manner is something Kouplan will store in case he needs to sound authoritative himself later on.

  “If you meet Pernilla, tell her to leave me the hell alone. I’ve moved on.”

  “And Julia, who is your d…”

  “Who the hell are you?” Patrick interrupts with a voice barely under control. “You said you got me as a reference. A reference for what, if I may ask?”

  Kouplan is about to say that Julia is missing and involve Patrick in the search for his daughter, but he realizes this is definitely not a good idea. Perhaps Patrick is involved or might go to the police himself.

  “Pernilla said…”

  “Hey, know what? We’re done here. Tell her to stop trying to get in contact with me and you, don’t you ever call me again.”

  Click. Second fifty-eight. Say what you will about Patrick, he saved Kouplan fifty-nine öre. Does not like Pernilla one bit, he writes next to Patrick’s name in his notebook. Doesn’t give a damn about Julia. Doesn’t know Julia is his child? Is she even his child?

 
; How could he figure out whether or not Pernilla was telling the truth about Patrick being the father when Patrick doesn’t want to talk about her? It’s not like they sell DNA tests at the corner store. He notes: How many men were in Pernilla’s life seven years ago?

  * * *

  His second call goes to Sofia Church. A woman picks up the phone. She doesn’t recognize the name: Thor.

  With a laugh, she says, “I’ve only been here six months, though.”

  Her voice is warm like a blanket you’d want to curl up in.

  “Just a minute and let me check with someone who’s worked here longer,” she says and the voice disappears.

  Sixty-three seconds go by on the kitchen clock as the silence cuts though Kouplan’s phone, warm from his ear. He stares at his notes, tries to see if something has escaped his attention. Like Thor, the name the woman doesn’t recognize. The employee at Subway, the Greek restaurant, the kiosk, but nobody has mentioned a single strange man with a child. Like Patrick, the man who didn’t want to talk.

  “Yes, hello, are you there? Yes, I talked to our treasurer and there was a certain Thor who used to work here. Do you have a pen and paper?”

  Kouplan just happens to have those very two things.

  * * *

  It’s 10:30 and Kouplan’s getting off the bus in Pernilla’s neighborhood. He hesitates; maybe he should let Pernilla come with him? But something in his gut tells him not to call her.

  Once his brother was supposed to go to a meeting at the newspaper. He asked Kouplan if he wanted to come with him, but his guts flipped in a way that made him decline. Thank God, his mother said later. Thank Allah that I didn’t lose both of my children.

  Kouplan listens to his gut and walks alone across the little central area up to the glass door with LIBRARY printed in standard official lettering. Around him, people are heading to work, kids with a free hour in their schedule are buying hot dogs, and frozen elderly men and women are coming out of the State Liquor Store with violet plastic bags in their hands. Inside the library’s door, it smells like a public building and literature. A brown-haired librarian is moving books from a shelf to a rolling cart. She looks at Kouplan as if she’s heard wrong.

  “You need the children’s department?”

  “Yes, where is it?”

  “Over there past that bookshelf.”

  He feels her eyes on his back as he turns to the right past the bookshelf. It wouldn’t seem so strange if he’d had a child? Or perhaps knew some?

  * * *

  There are red chairs and wooden tables in the children’s department and a three-foot-high figure of Emil of Lönneberga. Two dads with beards and their associated kids. Babies in carriages, twin girls around five and a three-year-old boy. The children’s librarian has short hair and glasses. Twenty-five at most. She smiles at Kouplan. She’s slightly plump and rather cute.

  “There’s a woman who usually comes here with her kid,” Kouplan says and shows her a picture of Pernilla on his phone.

  His phone is old, so the girl has to lean forward to get a good look. He can see the top of her breasts, but doesn’t have time to think about that.

  “Do you recognize her?”

  The shorthaired girl nods in concentration.

  “Yeah, I believe I do.”

  “And she also has a daughter she brings here?”

  “Okay. So?”

  “I found this,” Kouplan says and holds up his notebook. “I think it’s hers. It has meetings and telephone numbers and I think it’s important. But there’s no name on it. Do you know anything about them?”

  He can tell the girl wants to be helpful. She asks to look at the picture again. Kouplan wants to hear more about Julia.

  “Her daughter is six and kind of quiet. Is there anyone here who usually talks to them?”

  She takes his hand—softly puts her fingers around the back of his hand—as she turns the phone closer toward her view.

  “I think I know who you’re talking about. But I’ve never talked to them about anything more than the rules for checking out books and that kind of thing. She’s weird, right?”

  She looks up toward him while still holding her fingers around his hand. For some reason, this bothers him.

  “We’re all a bit weird, aren’t we?” he says and smiles his most charming smile to take the sting out of the fact he’d just defended Pernilla.

  A real detective wouldn’t have said this. A real detective would have said: Tell me more.

  * * *

  After he leaves the library and has a kebab for lunch, he takes the bus back to the Globe Arena. Not because it’s been helpful before. This time, as he exits the bus, he meets two large policemen, and his first instinct is to rush down into the subway. But they’re not looking at him. They’re keeping an eye open for signs of sports affiliation: yellow and black or red, yellow, and blue; scarves, beer swilling, and testosterone. About ten twenty-year-olds, wearing yellow and black, strutting with gym-trained legs and exercising their bass voices, joking around too loudly as clouds of testosterone waft past him. Kouplan slinks by thankfully.

  First he goes to Subway. It’s filled with yellow and black scarves and there’s someone else at the cashier’s spot than the girl he’s met before. At the Greek restaurant, it’s absolutely packed. They’re selling “hockey beer” for fifteen crowns and the waitress doesn’t even look at him when he asks her if he can ask a few questions. Outside, riot police are milling around while scruffy men with hand-written signs wander past: Tickets? They don’t look like they want to go to the match.

  Line of Inquiry 1: Someone who needs a child. Who goes to the Globe Arena to kidnap a child? Someone disreputable, someone who already knows the arena area well. Kouplan takes a few deep breaths and ignores the police, even though they are supposedly here to protect decent citizens like himself, and walks right up to one of the men with a sign declaring: Need tickets?

  “Tickets?” the man greets him.

  Kouplan shakes his head.

  “Just wondering about something.”

  “I’m working here.”

  “A single question.”

  They’ve talked for perhaps ten seconds and another ticket man is walking toward them. Kouplan realizes immediately that these ticket men are organized. Perhaps he shouldn’t ask, but he does anyway.

  “You guys working together?”

  “There a problem here?” the new ticket man says. “They go for six hundred.”

  “Looking for someone,” Kouplan says quickly. “Rough dude, often here. Goes by M.B.”

  The men look at each other.

  “So you don’t want to buy a ticket,” the one says.

  “Wait, what’s the deal with this M.D.?” asks the other.

  “M.B.,” Kouplan repeats.

  “He sell tickets?”

  “All I know is he has a big nose and goes by M.B. and he hangs around here.”

  The larger of the two studies him, pouting.

  “You don’t know much, I see.”

  He can hear what they’re doing. They’re playing with him, amused by him, tickled by the mystery of a young, middle-class Iranian looking for a criminal with a big nose. They’re guessing it must be about drugs. Or money.

  “Here last Monday. With a girl, six years old,” Kouplan says.

  The two men talk to each other in their own language.

  “So you don’t want to buy tickets,” the older one says again.

  “Was he tall?” asked the younger one. “I saw a big guy here last week. I was at Mickey D’s.”

  He nods toward McDonald’s.

  “He had the girl with him?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m saying.”

  The older man turns to his colleague.

  “What were you doing here on a Monday?” he asks and the younger one opens his arms.

  Behind them, two policemen are walking up.

  “Was she wearing a pink raincoat?” Kouplan asks quickly and the young man wr
inkles his forehead.

  “Yeah, she could’ve been.”

  Kouplan keeps his heart in check as the two policemen keep coming closer, since one of them had seen Julia.

  “So he had a big nose?”

  The older man draws back and disappears in the crowd, waving his sign. The policemen sweep past them toward three tipsy men in colorful scarves. Kouplan thinks about lions and zebras. Full lions don’t seek prey.

  “Not so big,” the younger ticket seller says. “Not so big he’d be tripping over it. I remember it wasn’t small, though. And that the little girl was crying … I think … and he was carrying her.”

  “Which way?”

  The older man yells something that Kouplan doesn’t understand. An order. The younger looks around, holds up the sign. Time for Kouplan to let the ticket sellers sell their tickets. Still, as he’s lifting his sign, the younger one points.

  “That way. Toward Skärmarbrink.”

  CHAPTER 14

  In its way, it’s a fairly normal room. It has a dresser, two chairs, and a small table. A bed. The first strange thing is that it’s not hers. The man who calls himself her “real father” tells her it’s her room, but it isn’t. Her real room has stuffed animals and Legos. She will never call it her room. She will never call him her real dad.

  * * *

  The second strange thing is that the door is locked. She’d never known a locked room before, except a bathroom. If the room with the chairs and table hadn’t been locked, she’d open it the minute the man went to the bathroom. She’d run all the way home to her mother. When she closes her eyes, she can sense the direction she’d run. She can tell her legs would carry her through a hundred uphill runs, and she knows very well that the room is locked to prevent her running.

  * * *

  She is fairly sure he’s not her real dad. Maybe she’d thought so at first, because he looked her directly in the eyes as he spoke, and he was a grown-up. Is there anything more truthful, for a moment, than when a grown-up looks you in the eye as he speaks?