The Truth Behind the Lie

by Sara Lövestam

  She’d done exactly what her mother always said not to do. It’s just that she’d thought those men weren’t real. In her mind, they were monsters, drooling alcoholics with staring eyes reaching slimy hands toward her. In reality, it was a man in a normal jacket who’d winked at her and asked her if she could help him.

  Reality was a world where her mother was there every day.

  Lots of other things, too, which flutter in her mind like photos from an album. Every day they seem less real. Sometimes she’s in the bathtub and asking her mother for more bubbles. Her mother says there aren’t any left, and she’s disappointed because she wants to make bubble animals. Then she wakes up and she’s in this room.

  She must be the dumbest kid on the planet. Can you help me, that’s all he had to say and she’d walked right into his rough hands. One went around her waist and the other over her mouth. She should have said: I’m not allowed to help strangers. She repeats this sentence, the one she should have said, in the dark. Practicing for the second chance she won’t have.

  * * *

  It’s now silent in the room next to hers. The men have finished groaning and have left. She can’t hear Iwona at all. Not even her breathing. She’s afraid. What if Iwona’s dead? In the dark, her thoughts become real. Iwona, white and stiff as a board, her heavily made-up eyes wide open with blood coming from them. Iwona dead on the other side of the wall and death crawling across the tiles, crawling to her room, crawling into her bed. Death wrapping around her like a blanket, no matter how hard she pulls it away. She feels her own throat is suffocating her; her own chest is exploding; death is whispering into her ear and through it: a cough. A dry cough on the other side of the wall. Probably not the cough of a ghost. As she listens carefully, she can tell that Iwona is breathing. They were just breathing at the same pace so it was hard to hear. She pulls her hand out from under the cocoon of a blanket she’d made for herself. Her knuckles knock on the wall. Three times. The room is so still as she waits as if time is standing still. Then there’s a reply. Three Polish knocks.

  Iwona is lying there, she thinks, as she turns over onto her stomach. She keeps thinking this over and over as Death slinks away into a corner of the room. You can do this with nightmares. You can drive them away by thinking of something else. Tomorrow she is supposed to get a visit. But maybe she will wake up and be in her own bed.

  CHAPTER 29

  In some dreams, you’re falling and falling. Everything you try to hold on to dissolves and each time the hope of survival disappears even more. Finally, you wake up, but today Pernilla does not. She’s sitting down as if paralyzed and she still feels as if she’s falling and falling. She feels her mind fall apart into pieces and disappear as if it were nothing at all. The sofa she’s sitting on feels as if it can’t support her, perhaps does not even exist, and the floor is just as much an illusion. So she reaches for the one thing that still seems real, her phone, and she taps out a message that doesn’t hold the slightest bit of her fear: Could you come over for a while?

  Kouplan replies ten long minutes later: Am leaving Maria Square right now.

  The fact that he will be visiting shortly makes her kitchen, her pantry, her stove, and her fridge become real. Even the inner chaos of her mind knows that the young man needs food, so she is needed and the fog in her mind must disappear. Behind her, the tapping nails and wagging tail remind her that another living being also needs her.

  * * *

  Kouplan thinks he’ll ask: Tell me about the man you meet when you’re out walking Janus. There’s something about that man, about her walking with Janus, or, at the very least, how Pernilla talks about it that seems important. He thinks he’ll say: Tell me about the man you meet when you don’t have Julia with you but when she opens the door, her eyes are glassy and red and they focus on him the way a drunken driver tries to focus on a policeman. When she hugs him, she doesn’t let go until he clears his throat in embarrassment. She doesn’t smell like alcohol.

  “Have you been taking something?” he asks.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m sorry I asked.”

  “I don’t do drugs!”

  Her voice turns angry and her face comes into focus. That’s good. He’d rather have her angry than lost. They stand in the hallway looking at each other until she says:

  “Would you like some cod?”

  * * *

  There’s the Swedish mother, Kouplan thinks as he watches her whip two eggs into something the Swedes call egg sauce. Then there’s that naked soul which now seems to be dissolving. Her straight blond hair might as well be dyed rose with black roots; her light blue sweater might as well be a careless décolletage; the apartment might as well be a basement hole-in-the-wall. He’d seen it before and he’s seen it today and he felt it against his chest until she let go. She’s like a person clutching at reality as if she needs it to survive. She’s clutching it as if only her fingernails have a hold.

  “Tell me about the man you meet when you’re out walking Janus,” he now asks.

  He thinks she reacts, but it could also be his imagination.

  “His name is Gustav,” she says. “He has a mixed breed dog, too, one a bit bigger than Janus. And a female.”

  Kouplan nods and pretends he’s watching her make the eggs. At least she knows the man’s name.

  “I believe there’s a film called The Dog Trick,” he says tentatively.

  In reality, he knows the film very well. His brother had said: When you’re learning a language, watch movies and read books. Kouplan remembers the line Alexander Skarsgård uses when he meets Josephine Bornebusch for the first time.

  Pernilla wrinkles her forehead.

  “You mean the one with Skarsgård in it?”

  “Yeah, that’s the one. Do you think Gustav is trying to get to know you better?”

  “The trick of using your dog to meet girls?”

  Pernilla smiles slightly, perhaps amused or perhaps pleased. The smile disappears immediately, but it had shown something about Pernilla and Gustav.

  “Did he ever come here?”

  Pernilla shakes her head, frightened.

  “No, oh God, no! We just…”

  “You just…?”

  He’s responded too quickly. Pernilla shuts off and turns away. What had they done and was it important?

  “I can understand why he likes you,” he says, as relaxed as if he were not giving her a compliment. “You’re pretty.”

  She glances at him with mistrust, so he opens his arms wide.

  “Objectively speaking, it’s true! I’m only saying it’s not so strange!”

  He sees her blush and thinks, she’s just lost a child. He’s only lost a brother, yet he knows that sometimes you need a break from all the sorrow and pain. Still he finds it odd that she’s blushing. A part of him—and he doesn’t want to know which part—also finds this interesting.

  “We only went out for coffee,” she says.

  * * *

  Fish with egg sauce turns out to taste like fish sticks: not much. Kouplan’s stomach is still full of that heavenly fesenjan but he pounds down the cod and potatoes as if he’s a chipmunk stuffing his cheeks.

  In front of him is practical housewife Pernilla, but he’d just felt her fragility when she’d hugged him. The question was how deep her fragility went. The question was how difficult it would be to keep a child a secret when someone named Gustav wants to have coffee.

  “Did you and Julia ever fight?”

  “No.” Her answer came quickly, followed by a sad smile.

  “She was … always so positive and just … nice. She was born that way. I often thought that all the empathy people have lost landed up in her.”

  Not quite an answer the police would accept. Kouplan wasn’t buying it, either.

  “You must have had to say no sometimes. Kids get angry when they hear no.”

  Pernilla shook her head emphatically.

  “Not Julia. She understood.”
<
br />   Kouplan thinks about certain regimes. Some of them say: This never happens here even as their prisons turn into cemeteries. He can’t help the thought.

  “Did you ever tell Gustav you had a child?”

  If she says yes, it could be that she’s throwing suspicion on him. If she says no, does she realize that she’s throwing suspicion on herself? She wrinkles her forehead, looks at him.

  “I don’t believe I did.”

  How can a person be a mother and not even mention her child? Kouplan has three ideas: One is fear of being dumped. One is the habit of not telling anyone. One is the pretense that the child does not exist.

  “So what did you talk about?”

  “Mostly his business.”

  Kouplan can’t make sense of this. Perhaps he should dig into why she didn’t tell Gustav about Julia. Ask a direct question. But direct questions haven’t worked yet. It’s as if they close her down and extinguish her eyes.

  So he doesn’t say anything and keeps on eating cod with egg sauce. Pernilla has put down her silverware. She’s sitting quietly but finally she finds something to say.

  “He wants to start a business making apple jelly.”

  * * *

  Kouplan’s notebook has dog-eared pages and a bent cover. Notes are randomly distributed with arrows pointing every which way. They’re in Persian, Swedish, and even some English. He knows where everything is and the patterns they’re making.

  “What have you written there?” Pernilla asks.

  “The description of the various people Chavez has met.”

  “And there?”

  “What you can see from the Maria Square apothecary.”

  It’s not what’s really written down, but he has no intention of letting Pernilla know she’s one of the suspects. That would just make her sad. She points to another word and he laughs.

  “That’s in Swedish,” he says.

  “But what’s it say?”

  “Bead mosaic kit,” he says. “Obviously.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  When she reads the word, he realizes that his spelling is not at all what the word had sounded like to him. But he really hadn’t had time to ask her how to spell it.

  “I don’t even know what it is,” he says.

  She gets up and goes to her bedroom. She comes back with some various bead mosaic pictures in happy colors.

  “You put beads on this backing and then when you have a finished pattern, you iron them and they melt together. This one Julia made.”

  Most of the bead mosaics are pink, violet, red, and blue.

  “Her favorite colors? They’re very pretty.”

  Often when you talk about a six-year-old’s creativity, you have to be diplomatic. But these bead mosaics are actually quite good. Symmetric and with excellent patterns.

  “Did you help her?”

  “I just taught her how. These she did all by herself.”

  “Wow.”

  He notices his wow fills her with pride and touches her heart. Tears appear in the corners of her eyes. It’s pretty crazy to suspect her, he thinks. She’s the one who hired me, after all.

  “I have more, but…”

  Her voice starts to tremble and he doesn’t need to see more.

  “So what have you written down?” he asks instead.

  * * *

  Pernilla has written eight and a half pages. Tight, handwritten, and with the years in the margins.

  “I tried using the computer,” she said. “It went better when I wrote by hand. I don’t know if you can read my writing.”

  Kouplan can read it. Pernilla’s hand is like that of a child. The letters lean in every direction, but her printing is the finest he’s seen. On the first page he reads: The rain was so strange the day they took Julia. When he flips to the second and third pages, he can see the dates skip around: earlier years, different months, back and forth to days where Julia learned how to walk, learned how to crawl. Anecdotes and soul-searching.

  “I’ll take this home and read it thoroughly,” he says.

  “Thanks.”

  “Not to worry.”

  “No, I mean it.” Pernilla looks right at him and nothing in her face is hidden. “Thank you so much for…”

  When she takes his hand, it warms everything in his blood, rushing through his body with the message of touch. He wonders if she realizes this. When she looks into his eyes, he has to remind himself to look at her and they haven’t even been drinking any wine.

  “I’m not sure that you’re really twenty-eight,” she says. “You look like you’re twelve. And yet you’re wise like a hundred-year-old.”

  It’s gotten dark, so maybe she doesn’t see that his blood has finally reached his face. He laughs to dismiss his blush.

  “There’s a Persian saying,” he tells her. “Don’t be fooled by the size of a peppercorn. It may be small, but it is strong.”

  “Say it in Persian.”

  This embarrasses him, too, in spite of the fact that he’s supposed to be as wise as someone who’s one hundred years old.

  “Felfel nabin ce rize, beškan besin ce tize.”

  She smiles and her eyes look like they must have been when she was having coffee with Gustav.

  “Falafel bise rise, beska nissekisse.”

  Compared to her pronunciation of Persian, his spelling of bead mosaic kit is nothing at all.

  CHAPTER 30

  The house with its wooden fence and iron gate is dark as coal inside, except for a corner of the reading room, where a floor lamp shines down on an armchair, a round table, and Thor. On the table are collections of photographs in green envelopes. On Thor’s lap is a photo album that he’d labeled Sofia, from his time as a priest at that church. He has group photographs of Sankta Lucia parties, weddings, and baptisms and now he’s peering through his reading glasses at a photo in his hand. He could have already been sitting there for ten minutes. It’s hard to feel time passing when it’s dark outside. The photo is one of a church coffee hour and the reason for the picture was the violinist, who is elegantly dressed and in the middle of playing, his bow raised. It must have been a special occasion. Thor doesn’t remember what it was, although he does remember the blond woman sitting on the right. She’s at the very edge of the picture, so it appears as if her cheek is elongated, but still it’s impossible not to recognize her: Pernilla.

  Very strange that a boy named … Cupcake?… that this young man would come here to his home and ask questions about Pernilla. Thor rarely has a bad conscience about his profession’s need for confidentiality—like life itself, he cannot choose—but just this once it might have been helpful to be more forthcoming. Just three words would have sent the boy away with the answer he was looking for, but there’s a reason for the practice. He cares for souls; if Cupcake had wanted his soul cared for, he’d have done so, too. But it’s not right to reveal one soul’s secret to another. He sends a wordless prayer to God, but, as usual, God is a bit too distantly divine to give him an immediate answer.

  He looks at Pernilla’s elongated cheek for another moment and strokes it with his thumb. He wishes he could have done more for her. Perhaps she didn’t really need a priest, but still she’d come to him. There are some lambs that the shepherds remember very well. Even shepherds who are retired.

  He slides the photo back into its slot in the album, where it resembles all the others. No one else would see the complicated life behind an elongated cheek on the right; just himself and the few people Pernilla feels she can trust. He hopes that Cupcake can do something with the words he’d sent him away with. Unfortunately, Thor feels he didn’t choose them very well.

  * * *

  It’s dark in the small room for rent on Hallonbergen. Or just “the room” if one would ask the Swedish Welfare Services—the ones who decide who gets housing subsidies. This room, as dark as it is, has been rented in secret. Just one lamp shines at the head of Kouplan’s bed. It’s shining on eight and a half hand-written pages a
nd Kouplan blinks so he can focus his sleepy eyes. He’s decided to write ten relevant questions about this material before he goes to sleep. So far, he’s only come up with three.

  He decides to order things chronologically and then reads Julia’s life story from being a one-year-old to becoming a big girl, almost school age. At the end of the episode where Pernilla and Julia had gone to Skansen, Pernilla had written: If you’re a six-year-old child, you get into Skansen for free. Next summer, she’d have needed a ticket. His eyes ache, but he keeps them open as he focuses on the sentence: Next summer she’d have needed a ticket. Are those just words, or did Pernilla not want Julia to grow older?

  He presses his eyes shut and then opens them again. Writes a rather odd question, because he still has quite a few to go to reach ten.

  * * *

  4. Was P afraid of J growing up?

  When he reads the question again, he realizes it’s not so odd after all. If Julia was not registered, what was she going to do when all the other kids started school?

  Julia learns to walk over the kitchen floor. Julia stops using a pacifier. Julia meets a swan and Pernilla is scared to death—the first thing she thinks is that someone has taken Julia. Who?

  * * *

  5. Who was P protecting J from, and why was P afraid?

  A relevant question.

  Julia and Pernilla go to Skansen and sit on the large Dala horses. They’re talking about fathers and Julia almost manages to pet a squirrel. Julia says her first words. Pernilla and Julia paint watercolors. Julia shows a natural talent for color. At least, according to her mother. They borrow books from the library. Julia wants a dog and on her sixth birthday, they get Janus. Julia gives Janus his name.

  * * *

  6. Did Julia only meet animals and never any other people?

  7. How tall are the Dala horses?