* * *
Number Four. That I didn’t scream.
She’s really stupid, in fact, because she didn’t scream. Sometimes, her mother comes to her in her dreams. She hugs her with all her warmth, but sometimes she opens her jacket with the zipper and it’s black as night in there. She speaks the worst words: I’m so disappointed in you.
They were supposed to learn the names of the lakes and on Friday they were going to have a geography test. Maybe Friday is already over. She would have studied with Laura. Laura would cover Rāza on the map and she would have guessed right. She already knows a number of the names of the lakes. That’s why she was looking forward to the test. Mamma, Tētis, and Erki would often go fishing with her before the new baby came. After that, she’d fish with Pappa and Erki. She wonders if they are fishing right now. This very second. If she’d just done one little, little thing, maybe she’d be asking to go fishing with them. If only she’d just opened her mouth and yelled as loud as she could. She closes her eyes and pretends she’s far away from here.
* * *
Number Three. That that man did some really disgusting things.
She closes her eyes so hard it almost hurts, but it’s not enough not to see. Because his hands were on her skin and skin is like a huge eye that never forgets. He had a disgusting tongue, disgusting nails, and a smile like a normal man, which made it extra disgusting. But none of that was the worst.
* * *
Number Two. That George called this “the first time.”
The worst was George coming in long afterward, smiling and saying she’d done well for it being “the first time.” She understood what he meant: This had just begun. She was supposed to be happier next time, the man had told George to tell her. But for the most part it went well. It will be easier and easier each time, but she had to remember to smile and be happy. Think of something fun, he’d said. Think of candy.
* * *
Number One. That I’m in a foreign country and nobody knows.
Her legs feel like they could run the whole way home to Mamma and Pappa. But she knows it’s just a feeling, because the car driving her here took an eternity. The space she’d sat in had no windows, but she could feel the difference in the jolts and bumps on the roads. Sometimes it was quiet around them and at other times she could hear noises and voices. She could have screamed then, too.
Being in a foreign country is a loneliness as great as the darkness of the night. Laura, Mamma, Pappa, Erki, and the baby are in their normal world and she’s in a foreign one. All she has left is her own arms and legs. She hugs them and scratches them, because this disgusting man has covered them with his smell. Where her feet end is where the foreign country begins. Maybe it will swallow her up.
She’d realized she was in another country ever since she realized she’d spelled A-P-O-T-E-K. In her country, an apothecary is spelled A-P-T-I-E-K-A. There’s no “o” in it.
CHAPTER 40
Janus scoots between the living room and the hallway with a determined and ever increasing desperate look at Pernilla. She sighs. “He’ll pee on the rug soon,” she says. “Do you want to walk with me?”
A simple walk hasn’t been part of Kouplan’s world for the past two and a half years. It’s crazy to be outside when he doesn’t need to be. He’s thirsty for real air.
“Only if I can hold the leash,” he says.
A person with a dog on the leash is a real citizen.
* * *
She decides to take the long walk. The November air is starting to be real winter air with a chill that burns the cheeks and gives the day an aura of reality. Frost glitters in the trees.
He pulls on the leash, because Janus has stopped to smell some poop. Pernilla glances at him. The boy who has his own problems and still is able to understand her.
“Do you like dogs?”
He makes a face that could be a yes or a no.
“Right now, I love them,” he says. “Janus makes me look normal.”
She thinks they have a great deal in common. Of all the people in this city, perhaps she’s the one who understands him best.
“Sometimes I let Julia stay home so nobody could see her.”
“More and more often, I know,” he says. “But you said it was because she was getting tired of Janus.”
“It was a bit of both.”
Janus trots along with his short legs. Pernilla can watch him better now that someone else is holding his leash. He sniffs a gold spot in the frost, and then sniffs the air. He’s finding a tree interesting.
“I wonder if he feels what we feel,” she says. “Did you know that a third of a dog’s brain is connected to its sense of smell?”
Janus stops and turns his head. Then he’s pulled from his trance by a tug on the leash. Then he starts to sniff a leaf. Pernilla has to smile.
“I really like that dog,” she says.
* * *
Kouplan watches the busy bit of life attached to the end of a leash. A living being, totally dependent on Pernilla. How does it feel compared to the needs of an imaginary child? Did she start to notice the difference between having a real dog on her lap and having a child made up of empty air? Everything originates in the mind, even the sensation of heat and cold on the skin. And all the background programs running along in the subconscious; they keep our routines going as if our brains were a bunch of old computers.
“Patrick had a statue in the hallway,” he says. “Do you remember it?”
Pernilla wrinkles her forehead as she searches her memory.
“It was the one with two faces,” he says.
She nods at once.
“Yes, we had that at home,” she says. “It was this Greek god, as I remember. I’d almost forgotten it.”
“Roman mythology,” Kouplan says, and then hopes she forgets he was trying to correct her. “He represents beginnings and ends.”
“I know. One face looks to the past and one face looks to the future.”
“In your writings, you said that Julia picked the name Janus because it reminded her of Jesus.”
Pernilla nods as she looks at him.
“Yes, she did.”
“But if Julia was in your mind…”
Her eyes narrow.
“I mean, the Greek god,” he chooses to use her terminology. “His name was Janus, right?”
Janus the god can handle being confused for a Greek.
“He’s given his name to January, the first month,” he continues. “The god of … doors and bridges … new beginnings … transitions.”
“Transformations,” Pernilla says.
She stops. “How weird that Julia chose that name.”
She doesn’t need to hear again that Julia was all in her mind.
“A good choice,” he says.
* * *
If his mother had been around, he’d ask her what she would think of his theory. That the dog had triggered Pernilla’s mind to start to find its way out of her psychosis. There are various schools concerning psychological illnesses. His mother is one who searches for triggers and reasons in the labyrinth of life. He watches the wriggling, tail-wagging mutt on the leash and wonders whether a dog would help him miss her less.
“Are you certain that they’re looking for you?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re so scared all the time. Are you sure it’s not your imagination?”
Kouplan no longer has the letter that told him to get ready for deportation. He did not want anyone to know who he really was, so he intended to burn the letter. He doesn’t really remember if he’s followed through. Still, he can’t get at the file they have on him at Immigration Services. In a way, Pernilla’s question is relevant: She couldn’t prove that Julia existed, and so Julia does not exist. He has no proof that he is allowed to exist.
“I wish,” he says. “If I woke up and everything was shown to be just paranoia…”
He tries to imagine this. First, that the police he’s a
lways trying to hide from are imaginary. Second, that he’d wake up from a psychosis. The relief that would feel like is something he can’t imagine.
“I’d cry,” he says.
* * *
Pernilla glances over at him. It would be a real coincidence if one mentally ill person trusted another mentally ill person to search for a child that was just imaginary. She knows crazy people attract other crazy people, so she’d brought up the question. But deep down she knows that Kouplan has something she lacks. Balance.
“I’m sorry I had you running around all over the city,” she says. “You shouldn’t even be out on a walk and I had you running back and forth between Globen, Akalla, Hökarängen…”
“And Maria Square,” he says. “No need to apologize. It was my job. I just wasn’t looking in the right place.”
“But I feel really bad about it now,” she says. “I should have … I even understood somehow … remember when I was crying and saying I thought Julia was dead? And if I’d been following my feelings, I might have…”
Kouplan is no longer listening, so she stops speaking. He’s picking up his phone and pulls out a photo, shows her, even though Pernilla’s already seen it.
“Do you think she looks kidnapped to you?”
The child looks like a normal girl. It’s what she thought the first time she looked at the photo. How could I tell if it were Julia if she looks so normal?
“I thought you said Julia didn’t exist,” she says. “So nobody could kidnap her if she’s not real, right?”
“I’m not so sure.”
* * *
Kouplan does not know. Julia may not exist, but Rashid exists. Rashid’s landlord exists. Some of his sympathetic friends know that a man named M.B. trades in women and at least one girl. Chavez exists and when he left the building in which the Sohrabi family lives, he said he’d been visiting the boss. Many people had been going up and down the staircase and the Sohrabi daughter says that there are bad people there. And in that apartment, there’s the face of a young girl. It’s a clue beyond Globen and a pink raincoat.
“I don’t know,” he says.
There’s a scale. On one side, there are people who throw themselves in front of cars to save the life of a kitten or give away everything they own to starving people so they have food. On the other side, there are psychopaths who kill for an earring or sell out their people for the sake of oil. Somewhere in the middle are most people, and Kouplan is one of them. He may be a good listener, but he’s just an average good person. He will definitely not risk his life calling the police for a child who may—emphasis on may—be held captive in an apartment on Maria Square. When he thinks this, he thinks that this doesn’t sound like an average good person, so he doesn’t want to think it again.
Janus has now sniffed several hundred leaves, pinecones, and piles of poop. He trots into the elevator ahead of Kouplan and Pernilla.
“Theoretically,” he says, because he can’t shake the echo of his thought about the girl, “if you want to call the police, but you don’t want them to trace the number…”
Pernilla thinks about this. The elevator goes from one to two.
“If I call a customer, all they see is the support number,” she says. “But the police can trace it, I’m sure. Why do you want to call the police?”
“Something I’m thinking about,” Kouplan says.
CHAPTER 41
The world has two sides: winners and losers. One side has people who are used up, consumed, thrown out. The other side contains those who see where the cards are going to fall and want to land on the winning side. George is in the middle of such a game and his advantage is that he can see this clearly. He sees the losers before they even know they’ve lost. He can’t see all of M.B.’s tentacles, but he knows they exist. He feels that he, himself, doesn’t have any, so he pretends they’re not there. He’s a decent guy who’s figured out how the world works.
For instance, he’d never have sex with the little girl. They asked him to, but he refused. Sex is between a man and a woman. That pervs exist who would pay huge amounts of money to do so brings up the question of their morality, not his. You hunt or are hunted—that’s how it is—but you can choose a few of your own rules.
For instance, he’s not making himself into a boyfriend; that’s an extremely effective method. He agrees with M.B. about this. Katarzyna, for example, she’s in the psychological gap between love and hate right now. Each time he says, how are you, baby, he confuses her even more. Women are weak like that, as fate would have it. It’s funny, they even call it the Stockholm syndrome. Don’t you love me? he asks and goes nuts every time she says no, even though he’s an average guy. He decides to have gentle sex with her when she says yes, and rough sex when she says no. He’s the strong one.
But a seven-year-old without tits? That’s my limit, he thinks. Sex with a fifteen-year-old, maybe even a fourteen-year-old. A thirteen-year-old only if she’s well developed with big tits and an ass that asks for it. He can feel an erection building up, but it’s at the thought of those big tits, not at the thought of a thirteen-year-old. He’s going to make a sandwich and then go in to Katarzyna and ask her if she loves him. Or Iwona, because her breasts are fuller and juicy. Even if she’s M.B.’s “girlfriend,” this is one of the perks of the job. Even better than a free pass for the gym, he thinks, smiling. Puts his teeth into his ham sandwich and that makes him think of hams, Katarzyna’s and Iwona’s and the fictional thirteen-year-old’s.
The point is, he’s an okay guy. When he got the call to find a child under the age of eight, it was obvious that he’d be the father and not the boyfriend. He wasn’t sure what M.B. was thinking there, but finally M.B. agreed. The concept of your real father is going to work. It’s a proven method.
It was ridiculously easy to lure her over to him. Almost as if it were her fate. As he usually thinks: The market feeds the demand and the world runs a strange system. He’s just a cog in the machine. He does what’s needed and doesn’t make mistakes. He even made sure he had a Y chromosome when he was born.
The eagerness in his pants has subsided a bit—he can think about making another sandwich before he goes in to Iwona. Katarzyna is going to get a customer soon, too, and he has to watch the door. He makes his second sandwich as a classic ham and cheese.
Y chromosome, he thinks, and is amused by his own train of thought. It was like winning the lottery. The world has two sides, and if you’re born a girl, it’s pretty much a given that you’re going to be consumed and go under. Perhaps they even like it, but he is still glad he was born a man. He wonders if this insight makes him a feminist.
They’re going to change apartments soon. M.B. is looking for a new place and then he’ll move the business. Either a suburb or in the city, but it has to be close to people’s jobs and preferably not so close to the police station. He wonders if he should tell Katarzyna about the move. It would bring her closer to him, if she felt he were telling her a secret. He’s got a crumb on his chin and he’s about to brush it off when all hell breaks loose.
* * *
Laima sees them come. They’re getting out of a van like the one they brought her in, but they’ve parked around the corner so she can see only the back of the van. They’re tumbling out like huge gorillas and they are lining up along the wall so that she has to press her nose to the window to see them all. Somehow she knows they’re after her and her heart is racing like a train—if a man could do something as bad as that disgusting man, how much would ten gorillas do? Her eyes fly around the room. There’s nowhere to hide, not even a closet. Just the file cabinet. But even if she could throw everything out—papers and boxes—there’s still not room for her legs in one empty drawer. She runs to the window again and the men in black are gone from view. She decides: If they come for me, I’ll jump.
The building thunders as they break in. It sounds like hundreds of men’s voices all yelling at the same time. The lock on her door seems as sturdy as paper. Al
l her courage disappears. She can’t jump, because then she’ll die. So she goes underneath the bed and presses against the wall. The door opens. Big, black shoes are thumping and stop right in front of her. She does not dare to look, but when she shuts her eyes, it gets even worse. Hundreds of black arms could be reaching for her and she wouldn’t know. She opens them again and sees the face of a man upside-down. He’s smiling but his eyes are wild and he’s calling in a foreign language to someone else. Her heart bangs against her chest.
* * *
But no black arms reach for her. The face goes away and now someone else is sitting on the other side of the room. He is talking to her in a foreign language, but she doesn’t say anything. His voice is kind, but so was George’s. After a while, he leaves. Laima shifts position, because she can’t just lie there for all eternity. There’s lots of dust and brownish gray dirt.
The next person to come into the room is a woman. She takes off her jacket and lies down on the floor by the other wall. She waves to Laima. “Russki?” she asks. Laima doesn’t reply. “Polski?” Laima keeps her mouth firmly shut.
You can’t trust women, either. There was a nice woman in the first apartment named Jessica. At first you could think she was nice, but then she went crazy and was threatening everyone with a kitchen scissors. Both men and women could seem nice and then turn into monsters. That’s what these past weeks have taught her about human beings.
But then Iwona comes in the room. She sits beside the other woman on the floor and she bends over so she can see Laima. Then she knocks, three times, on the floor, just like she does at night.
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