The Truth Behind the Lie

by Sara Lövestam

  CHAPTER 18

  There is one large and one enormous Dala horse at the center of Skansen. When we went to Skansen, Julia and I, she was not impressed by the bears or the moose, but always wanted to go to the Dala horses. We’d go there starting in March. I’d bring cheese sandwiches and we’d climb onto their broad wooden backs. They gave us a sense of security with the log cabins around us and then the whole fence surrounding all of Skansen itself. We were sitting on the enormous horse with Julia and me carrying on a conversation.

  “There’s a daddy,” Julia said.

  We looked at the daddy walking past pushing a baby carriage.

  “Yes, there’s one,” I said. “Look over there—there’s another one.”

  From our positions on the enormous horse, we watched daddies go past.

  “I don’t have a daddy,” Julia said.

  I remember the taste of cheese and bread crumbling in my saliva. With one hand, I held onto Julia and with the other I unscrewed the top of the Thermos.

  “Do you want some hot chocolate?”

  We shared the cup from the Thermos between us. I can still hear her voice as I’d asked her what she wanted to eat.

  “Same as you.”

  I believe it gave her the same sense of security as the small farmyards around us.

  “Do you want a daddy?”

  Julia watched another one walk by and then she looked at me. “No, they’re too much trouble.”

  She was barely three years old, but she knew how to express herself.

  She was also more correct than she realized.

  “It’s better the way it is now,” I agreed.

  I didn’t tell her about Patrick until several years later. I told her that he could have been her father, but he didn’t want to take the chance.

  That was last year.

  * * *

  Julia never wanted to go to the petting zoo. That was good, because I didn’t like going there myself.

  “Too many people,” I told her. “And we don’t want to run into difficult people.”

  She agreed with me. Especially when there were special activities, we kept our distance. We could live without the tiny theater, and the crowds of school groups scared her. But that day, when we’d been talking about daddies, we walked on the path through the petting zoo. Next to the goats, she spied a squirrel. I stopped as she walked closer. If I’d moved an inch, the squirrel would have run up a tree, but it wasn’t bothered by Julia. As she reached out a hand to pet the squirrel, I became nervous. It could have rabies or God knows what, I thought, and I must have moved slightly, because the squirrel jumped, ran over the gravel path and straight up a spruce. Julia looked at me reproachfully.

  “You mean I can’t even play with a squirrel?”

  She had a special way of expressing herself, ever since she learned to talk. She was a special child. She is a special child.

  I wonder if that is why they took her. Did they see how special she was by her eyes? I don’t know if I should hope that’s why or not, but something in me hopes that’s why.

  * * *

  You can go to Skansen for free if you are a child under six. Next summer, she’d need a ticket.

  CHAPTER 19

  He’s in police custody. He can smell dust and cleaning fluid, as well as coffee from their coffee machine, and he doesn’t dare open his eyes. The coffee machine sputters and steams; do they really have one so close to the cells?

  A stone scrapes against his cheek; it’s round and smooth and it seems to be fastened on the mattress, and it’s not a stone. And the cell is not a cell. Kouplan opens his eyes and stares at mocha upholstery.

  She’s put a blanket over him, with fringe that tickles his neck. He checks that he has all his clothes on, and he does. The wine has made his tongue thick like porridge. He turns onto his back and looks at Pernilla’s ceiling.

  “It was a bad idea to open that second bottle of wine,” Pernilla says. “How are you feeling?”

  How’s he feeling? First and foremost happy that he hasn’t really woken up in a jail cell. On the other hand, his mind and his body are not cooperating with each other.

  “Fine,” he says and raises himself on his elbow. “What time is it?”

  It’s nine thirty and Pernilla is making some sandwiches. His empty stomach growls at not receiving its usual oatmeal, or perhaps that’s the wine, but his taste buds rejoice. She has some very good cheese, too, cheddar, and she’s spreading butter on them as if she were making them for a child. The thought pinches his heart; it’s almost ten and Julia is still out there.

  What has he really found out from yesterday? Something, anything, that can excuse the wine? He chews a sandwich as he flips through his notebook to find musings about Pernilla’s motives. At one spot, he’s written: Who is Julia? He has to muddle through his mind to figure out what he meant.

  “I’m making a few more; you can take them with you,” Pernilla says.

  Kouplan observes her. There’s nothing evil in her soul, he feels. Something evasive is there, something that’s hard to touch and it might be pain, but she can’t make sandwiches like that and still be evil. So he puts a parenthesis around that question in his notebook and focuses on the other one.

  “Yesterday I asked you about the year before you had Julia,” he says. “But I don’t believe you answered.”

  Pernilla doesn’t get angry this time. Perhaps her brain is as wooly as his.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “The people you met. How you felt. If you had any other relationships.”

  Pernilla looks at her coffee cup. She sighs.

  “I can’t think of anything. But…”

  “What is it?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Nothing. I can’t remember anything specific. And, of course, that was before Julia. I mean, she didn’t even exist then.”

  * * *

  Kouplan looks at her intently, she can sense it and she knows he’s paid attention to her but. But her thoughts stop there. She knows she’s missing something, but it’s like losing your vision right before getting a migraine. Something did happen before Julia was born, but she can’t figure out what it is without falling.

  Kouplan eats his fourth sandwich. She’s noticed his thin body is always hungry. Just as she has to do when she has a migraine, Pernilla focuses on things other than what her eyes are trying to see.

  “Didn’t you mention your mother was a psychologist?”

  Kouplan jerks, his hand holding the sandwich stops briefly in its tracks.

  “Did I?” he replies. “Yes, she has a degree in psychology.”

  “And your father?”

  “A professor.”

  He says this as if anyone can become a professor. Pernilla has never even met one. She studies the somewhat curved nose of the son of a professor and imagines she sees something well read in his black eyebrows.

  “Tell me about your life in…”

  She stops. She’s never asked him where he came from.

  “Iran,” Kouplan says.

  He drinks an entire cup of coffee without saying more. Then he puts the cup on its saucer and he swallows an extra time.

  “I didn’t have a life in Iran,” he says. “I had a childhood and a family. Then I had a time.”

  Pernilla listens and tries to understand the difference between a time and a life. It feels like the difference between what she knows and what she doesn’t know.

  “Then I came here,” Kouplan says and she wonders what he’s left out, but she doesn’t ask. “And then I almost had a life. Yes, I had a life, in order to … but now I have a time again.”

  She understands enough to fill in his thought.

  “And you’re longing for a life.”

  “… longing for a life.”

  Their eyes meet; she whose child is gone and he who needs a life. This thought makes her want to open another bottle of wine.

  Instead, she says, “What are you going to do
today?”

  Kouplan says he’s going to Hökarängen and to Globen and he’ll be making a few phone calls. Pernilla forces herself to think this sounds good. It seems he has some clues. Then he asks about Thor.

  “Don’t freak out now,” he says. “But is it possible that Thor is the father of your child?”

  She has to laugh—she almost laughs out loud.

  “No,” she replies, shaking her head emphatically.

  Thor is not Julia’s father. She is almost completely sure of that.

  * * *

  Before he goes, she asks him if there’s anything she can do right now. She’s washed windows and there’s not a single dirty dish in the house. She’s taken deep breaths with Janus’s paws resting on her stomach, she’s hiccoughed from crying, and she’s vomited in the toilet. Perhaps there’s something better for her to do? Perhaps come with Kouplan?

  “Just think,” he says. “See if there’s a photo anywhere or if you can remember anything that happened before Julia was born or when she was small. You can write down everything you’re thinking.”

  He looks at her with those professor eyes, those psychologist eyes.

  “And you can think back to that Monday.”

  He does not say the day Julia disappeared.

  “Do you remember seeing a man with a large nose?”

  Pernilla can only remember what she’s already told him. That it was raining, that she had an umbrella. But perhaps, if she thinks about it, she could have seen a man with a somewhat large nose. Perhaps to the left, by the ticket office. She can remember trees that had lost their leaves in the fall. She can almost remember a man behind them, and if she remembers rightly, he could have had a large nose.

  “But there was nothing remarkable about him,” she says. “Otherwise, I would have thought about it.”

  “It wasn’t anyone you would recognize,” Kouplan says.

  Of course it wouldn’t be.

  * * *

  Kouplan gets off the bus at Gullmarsplan subway station. He’s lost in thoughts about M.B., large noses, suspicious priests, and Pernilla’s uncertainty, as she says who definitely is not Julia’s father. Somehow, all of this must fit together. Let’s say, he says to his brother in his head. Let’s say that we’ve decided to kidnap a specific child. There’s some dark, hidden reason why we want to take her, but the mother would recognize us if we come too close, so what do we do? Well, we find someone who has experience in kidnapping people. Stockholm is a large city, but it’s probably not crawling with experienced kidnappers, so we’d do the same thing as Rashid—ask around, find our most shady friends and drop hints to get a name. I doubt that there are all that many names in this city. And then how many hard-boiled kidnappers are there who’ve taken a blond girl of about seven? What do you think?

  Kouplan’s brother does not answer, but then Kouplan’s phone vibrates and right when he is about to answer, he sees a policeman heading straight toward him. His legs almost collapse beneath him and the policeman raises a hand and says in a deep voice, almost as if in slow motion:

  “Hi, there, could you…”

  It doesn’t matter how much Kouplan trains his heart. It goes from zero to one hundred in a second, pumping blood to his legs that are the only things that can save him. Kouplan does the only—the most stupid thing that he can—rush into the crowd pouring out of the subway, slip through it like an eel heading upstream, run down the stairs to the subway trains. He can’t feel his feet as he jumps onto the tracks on the other side of the elevator, stumbles and says a quick prayer to the God he does not believe in, lands centimeters from the contact rail and flies over three tracks at the same time. The officer is behind him or perhaps in front of him; the sounds around him are trains and the echoes of shouting human beings; his heart keeps pumping power to his legs until they can’t take much more, until he finds himself back on the road. Nobody’s calling out to him any longer, but he keeps running toward Globen, past the kiosk with the Kurd. Stockholm in October is a washed out gray curtain, as he crosses the bridge to Skärmarbrink, turns onto a bike path, and then sinks, a pulsating wreck, huddling behind a bush.

  After ten minutes, nothing has moved. No uniforms appear in the distance between the houses and the street crossing, no police dogs or guards stuffed with adrenaline. Just rotting leaves beneath his hands, five cigarette butts, and an empty coffee cup before his eyes. It was just a warning. Kouplan releases the first deep breath he’s taken since he stepped off the bus, feels how his lungs quiver. He sits up on the rotting leaves and ducks his head away from a branch. Pulls out his telephone—didn’t it buzz a lifetime ago?

  * * *

  It’s Rashid. Kouplan calls the number on the screen as he gets up from behind the bush and brushes off his clothes. A black bird stares at him, confused.

  “Rashid? Hi, it’s Kouplan.”

  He doesn’t mention the police. That would just keep Rashid awake at night. Instead, he says he’s been running and that’s why he’s out of breath. Rashid asks if he’s been doing something stupid, but Kouplan replies he’s been doing something good.

  “I’m helping someone out.”

  “And I’m helping you. A guy’s coming to the grill this afternoon. He’s M.B.’s errand boy. He’s supposed to pick up something.”

  “For M.B.?”

  “Don’t know. Don’t want to know. He’ll be here at two.”

  Kouplan’s phone shows 11:45.

  CHAPTER 20

  Kouplan’s telephone shows 11:45, so he has time to go to Hökarängen. You have to think logically; you have to think that the errand boy can lead him to M.B. but perhaps neither of them will lead him to Julia. You have to also think that a kidnapper perhaps doesn’t tell the truth to all the ticket agents he meets, Kouplan thinks, as he gets off the subway.

  In Hökarängen, there are trees in one direction, apartment buildings in another, and in a third, there’s a small center. Kouplan chooses the apartment buildings. They’re located between cross streets and playgrounds with sandboxes. Empty, except for two children. The older brother is about five and the younger one is perhaps three. They’re building sandcastles and don’t notice Kouplan, but he stops. This is Sweden, with red rocking horses and scraggly city fir trees beside the corners of the buildings, but Kouplan sees himself and his brother. Someone opens a window on the fourth floor; a woman calls out in Arabic and the older brother looks up. Answers: “We’re coming!” Kouplan’s mother used to do the same thing; open the window and yell when food was ready. He walks to the door as if he lives there and greets the children. “Salaam aleikum.” The five-year-old looks at him, shy but courageous, just like Kouplan’s brother would have done. The three-year-old hides behind him, a tiny boy behind his big brother.

  “Are you the only children around here?” Kouplan asks.

  The five-year-old measures him with his stare, hesitates but then replies:

  “There’s a few more.”

  “Have any new kids shown up lately? The last few days?”

  “Like?”

  “Some new girl, for instance. A Swedish girl who’s new here?”

  The boy shakes his head. His little brother pulls him by the hand to the stairs.

  “Just the same kids as always,” the boy explains as he resists.

  * * *

  He’d always been the scared three-year-old. His brother had always been the brave one. Kouplan doesn’t want to think about his brother’s name, because at two o’clock, he’ll be spying on M.B.’s errand boy and there’s no room for feelings. But his brother had always been the brave one and if Kouplan had room for feelings right now, he’d be wondering if his brother was brave now, whether here on earth or in heaven.

  Instead, he thinks about how the world is full of people who have disappeared. He looks around without a plan, walks along Lingvägen and Russinvägen without seeing anyone with a large nose or a blond six-year-old. He walks back to the newsstand and the grocery store and wonders how many of the people
standing in line have had a person in their lives become lost. They all share a certain emptiness, all those people who have lost people. They all share a special emptiness.

  * * *

  Pernilla should never have taken out her old computer. It should have remained where it was, stuck in the back of the basement storage unit behind an exercise machine. That machine represents an alternative reality—defined stomach muscles that could have been; her computer signifies much the same.

  But now it’s in the living room and starts up slowly just like an old memory. She also has to haul up the screen, since she can’t connect the computer to her laptop. The background shines at her like a wronged ghost. Other mothers have pictures of their children, mouths sticky with jam, on their computer screens. Pernilla has a picture of someone’s hands. Once upon a time, she’d found the picture calming; today it made her nervous. She’d taken the picture herself. Was it Patrick’s hands or Thor’s? For a moment, it seemed as if they could reach out from the screen and she instinctively covers her breasts. She never should have taken out the computer, but she grabs the mouse and clicks on Pictures.

  The thing was, Julia didn’t like having her picture taken. Cameras made her panic. Or maybe it was Pernilla who was afraid of them? She remembers something all of a sudden. They were at Skansen and Julia was almost three. They were by themselves; they were walking past a friendly squirrel when a man approached them with a camera. Pernilla could still feel her panic and the fear that they’d discover Julia and take her away. She can still hear the anxiety in her voice as she asks Julia to turn away from the camera and run toward the old parish house. And Julia listened, as children always do when they realize that things are serious. And Julia ran.

  She opens her laptop and writes down this memory. Not because it might help Kouplan, however much he may believe it would, but because it could help her. If only the picture around that time she could not remember would become as clear, perhaps she would be able to see into the empty space, whether she wanted to or not.