"Yes."
I fetched the other blanket from the wardrobe and spread it over you. When I had done that, I folded my arms and said, "I have no intention of becoming some kind of nursemaid, you know."
Your head moved slowly from side to side and you said, "I don"t need anything." Your voice was very weak. I had to strain to hear the words. There was something cheeky, eleven letters: impertinent about the way you said you didn"t need anything. A kind of smugness. I looked at you. Under the blankets you looked more like a normal sick person.
I removed the blankets.
"In that case you won"t be needing these either."
I carefully folded the blankets and put them back in the wardrobe. You didn"t object. When I turned back to face you again, everything was as it should be. Your naked, shaved body stretched out on the bed, just the way I wanted it. Perhaps by way of apology I said it again: "You can"t be cold. You"re dead."
"I understand."
"What do you understand?"
"Nothing."
"Come on, tell me. I"m curious about what you understand when you"re dead."
You didn"t reply. I gave your shoulder a push, just a little one.
"Tell me."
No reply. Your eyelids were closed once more. I sat beside you for a while longer. You were so beautiful to look at. It wasn"t the time for any more confessions. When I got up to leave, you said something I didn"t hear, so I bent down and put my ear close to your mouth.
"What did you say?"
The lips parted. I was aware of a faint aroma of something like frozen berries. You said, "I don"t want you to come here anymore."
I straightened up.
"I"m sorry," I said. "But that"s not actually your decision to make."
Your face was so rigid that it was impossible to pick up any kind of reaction. I waited a few seconds for a futile protest. When it didn"t come, I left the house for that day.
From now on I am going to omit all my reaction and speculation on the fact that a dead man was talking to me. Of course I turned the problem over in my head, many many times. You weren"t really dead (of course you were dead. You had spent at least six days lying in a room where the temperature was below freezing), I was mad (I wasn"t mad, there was nothing in my behaviour to suggest that I was mad), I was imagining the whole thing, and so on and so on.
But it was a fact. From now on we will take that as read.
When I got home, earlier than usual despite the hour I had spent searching the house, I was disappointed. Sad. In spite of my hard att.i.tude, your last remark had hurt me. I cried for a while. Then I tried to do some work on a crossword. I had a deadline to meet. It didn"t go well, so I sent an old one from Hemmets Journal to Allers, and vice versa. The one for Kamratposten wasn"t so urgent.
I knew it wasn"t a good thing to do. The crosswords I sent were no more than four years old. The editor wouldn"t notice a thing, but I could guarantee some old bag in Smland or somewhere like that would complain. People with photographic memories enjoy doing crosswords, or so I"ve heard.
Your body was all I could see during the hour I spent sitting at the computer, trying to come up with new combinations of words, witty little secondary meanings. Only your body, your perfect face. You no longer belonged to me. You had taken yourself away from me.
What right did you have to do that?
Yes, the disappointment slowly changed to anger. Anger because I wasn"t good enough for you. Because you preferred to lie dead and alone in that bare room rather than to have me by your side. My secrets and my musings on life weren"t good enough for you, Svensson.
My anger spilled out onto the family, I must admit. Not in the form of outbursts of rage, but rather a simmering discontent, a constant state of irritability. I could be forgiven to some extent because my period was due. That was what La.s.se thought, anyway.
I was perfectly clear about one thing: I would never, ever tell anyone about you. You might well have distanced yourself from me, but you were still my secret, and mine alone.
The following morning I put some make-up on. Oh, it makes my cheeks flame as I tell you this, but I don"t want to hide anything. I put some make-up on, made myself look good. The biggest problem with my face is that it"s so flat. My nose is small, with a slight downturn, my lips are thin. The s.p.a.ce between my eyes and eyebrows is shallow. My eyes are almost completely devoid of any oval shaping which, combined with the shallowness of the socket, means that they have no depth. And the colour is a watery blue, on top of everything else.
But the value of make-up cannot be overestimated, if it"s done properly. I brought out my cheekbones with blusher, deepened my eyes with shadow and kohl, made my lips look fuller with a lip pencil and lipstick. Covered the spots on my forehead with foundation. I"m not claiming to be some kind of expert but what I do, I do well.
If I were to make an objective a.s.sessment, I would say that the make-up made me look twice as good or half as ugly.
I set off.
Halfway to your house I took out my pocket mirror and checked one last time, touched up my lipstick. What was I trying to achieve? I don"t know. Not exactly. If I say it was an attempt to make the situation more sacred it sounds as though I"m dressing things up, nine letters: euphemism, but I think that"s the closest thing to the truth. Like wearing a white blouse to church, making sure the back of your neck is clean.
The first thing I noticed when I got inside was that the bedroom door was open. I had left it closed, but not locked. When I looked in you were lying on the bed with both blankets over you. I took a walk around the house, and you didn"t seem to have done anything.
Hang on a minute. Of course.
The saltcellar was upright.
I laughed out loud when I thought about how the dead rise from their graves to avenge an injustice, to put right something that was wrong when they died. So this was your motivation, the thing you needed to put right: a saltcellar. For the first time I thought you might just be the corpse of a pretty pathetic person.
Your eyes were closed, as before. I sat down at the side of your bed.
"So you"ve been up and about," I said.
After a minute with no response, I got up and removed the blankets. You made a movement with your arm as if to stop me, but it was slow and weak. I bundled up the blankets and chucked them in the wardrobe.
Then you opened your eyes. A little more than the previous day. I could see a glimpse of something not unlike a jellyfish that had been washed ash.o.r.e beneath your eyelids. Dried slime.
"You"ve got make-up on," you said.
"Yes," I said. "I"ve got make-up on."
"Why?"
"Because I felt like it, that"s all."
A twitch of the mouth. I didn"t like that twitch; it made your face change.
"Share the joke," I said.
"s.h.i.t is s.h.i.t and snuff is snuff, in golden tins as well."
I waited. The long sentence had clearly taken it out of you, because it was quite a while before you finished off with, "An eastern European wh.o.r.e. That"s what you look like."
"What do you know about wh.o.r.es?"
"I know a great deal about wh.o.r.es."
Call me prudish, call me prim, call me any synonym you like, but I don"t like people talking that way. I really didn"t like it when you talked that way. I didn"t mind you being pathetic, but this wasn"t acceptable.
I took out my make-up bag and as I painted your lips I said, "Even. It"s "even in golden tins". It destroys the rhythm if you say "as well". Can"t you hear it? There are few things I detest more than people misquoting poetry."
You had closed your eyes again, and I put a thick layer of pale blue eye shadow on your slightly blue, shimmering eyelids. As I drew my kohl pencil along the edges, if could feel that the eyes beneath really were dried up, hard.
"Froding must be turning in his grave. That"s what annoys me so much, you see. Poetry is hard work. A poet can struggle for days, weeks to find the right word. To misquote is to completely discredit his work. It shows a lack of respect towards the writer, a lack of respect towards the language itself. You have no respect. That"s your problem."
I finished off by slapping far too much orange-tinted blusher on your cheeks. The whole thing was way over the top. You looked like a clown. I took a step back, folded my arms and contemplated my handiwork. You really did look funny. Like a man in a dress, twelve letters: transvest.i.te, only without the dress. I laughed.
"You have no respect," I said. "I don"t want to know, but I"m convinced your death has something to do with that fact, in one way or another."
You didn"t reply. You just lay there like an unsuccessful shop-window dummy.
"Think about it," I said, and turned on my heel.
When I got home I took out the biggest pitcher we had and positioned myself in the middle of the kitchen. I hurled the jug on the floor with all my strength. Then I spent the rest of the afternoon removing fragments of gla.s.s from the kitchen. Tiny splinters had ended up in the most unlikely places: in the fruit bowl, behind the radiator, in the little gap between the oven and the cooktop. I had to squint and twist my head at different angles to catch their reflections in the cold sunshine. I tracked down every single one, and removed them. I didn"t cry. I didn"t even have a lump in my throat.
Then I made a really special meal for my family. Coq au vin, but with chicken. You can"t get hold of c.o.c.kerel. We had a nice evening.
Very nice, actually.
I slept badly that night. Our bedroom is upstairs, and when the wind takes hold of the tin sheets on the roof and bangs them against each other, the vibrations run right through the entire bed frame. It sounded as if someone was trying to get in. I sat up in the armchair with the little reading lamp switched on and tried to concentrate on a biography of Frida Kahlo. The wind didn"t begin to drop until about three o"clock in the morning, and I managed to get a few hours" sleep.
La.s.se and the children had already flown the nest when I got up. I sat in the kitchen with my coffee, feeling a great sense of loss. La.s.se had written me a note, as he sometimes did when we didn"t see one another in the morning. "See you this afternoon. Thinking of you. x.x.x L." I sat there turning the note over and over in my fingers. I could see his fingers laboriously printing the letters with the thick point of the pencil. He"s dyslexic. That"s funny, isn"t it? Married to me, and he"s dyslexic. He"ll never be able to solve my crosswords.
But the note was spelled correctly.
I went into Emil"s room. Bamse the Bear comics strewn all over the floor, drawings of dinosaurs on the desk, and that smell of a small child that still surrounded his body, permeating his sheets and the air.
Johanna"s room: pictures of Darin cut out of Frida and pinned up on the wall. Maria Gripe"s Tordyveln flyger i skymningen neatly placed on the bedside table, a bookmark with a heart on it sticking out somewhere around the middle.
I sat down on the bed.
A couple of days earlier over dinner Emil had talked about some major project they were going to be doing in school. I couldn"t remember what it was. I hadn"t been listening.
I wished they were with me now. All of them. That they were telling me something, holding me tight, shaking me. That I could look into their eyes and recognise them, that they knew I was their mum, wife.
I got dressed and went down to the sea.
The wind during the night had blown the pack ice into jagged mounds, irregular patterns in the inlet. The tender from Domaro was on its way in, making for the steamboat jetty and pa.s.sing a flock of tufted ducks paddling by the edge of the ice. There was no more than a faint breeze now, but it was still so cold that it pinched at my nose and cheeks. Perhaps the ice would stay this year. Perhaps we would be able to buy cross-country skis and head off beyond Domaro and Gvasten. Light a camp fire on some distant island and grill sausages, far away from everything and everyone else.
I walked up towards your house. This would have to be the last time. I really just wanted to explain to you that you were a nasty piece of work who didn"t deserve my care and attention. Then I would leave you to rot until the spring.
I had a premonition. It turned out to be correct.
Before I even turned off the road I could see there were footprints on the drive leading up to your house. I kept on walking. Sweat broke out along my hairline. Itching beneath my woolly hat.
Did I leave anything inside? The make-up...
But there was no way anyone could link the make-up to me. They would realise someone had been in the house, but was there any way they could know it was me? Had anyone seen me?
No. I didn"t think so.
I carried on around the bend in the road so that I could see the back of the house. The footprints led up to the patio door. Only now did it occur to me that it was strange that there were no tyre tracks. If they had come to pick you up, surely they would have had some kind of vehicle?
Besides which, it had been very windy during the night, and yet the tracks were perfectly clear. That meant they must have come at some point between three o"clock in the morning and now. It was just after ten.
I turned and went back, constantly on the lookout for some movement, some glimpse of activity inside the house. But there was nothing. When I reached the tracks I slowed down. And stopped.
The tracks had been made by bare feet. The soles were clearly visible in the snow, which was about three centimetres deep. They were your footprints. I took a few steps along the drive, following them with my eyes. They went in both directions, but the ones leading to the road were much less clear. You had been out, then gone back home.
I stood staring at the tracks for a long time, glancing frantically over towards the road, until a thought struck me. I ran back to my house. Our house. La.s.se"s and my house. La.s.se"s and Emil"s and Johanna"s and my house. My family"s house.
They began halfway up the path leading to the front door. They ran along the side of the house. I crouched down. These were tracks made when you were leaving, the heels were facing the house. But next to them was a series of faint indentations in the snow. The footprints you left on the way in, which had been filled in by the wind.
I followed the tracks, flattening them down and rubbing them out with my boots. They stopped below my bedroom window, ending with two feet side by side, clearer than the rest. You stood here. For a long time. Stood in the cold wind during the night below my window, as I sat in the chair unable to sleep.
It could have been romantic.
I fetched the straw broom and swept the entire area. I really had to scrub and bang to obliterate the last two impressions. The ones where you had stood.
"How did you know where I live?"
Few things are as unpleasant as getting hot and sweaty, then standing in the cold as the sweat dries on your skin, with your clothes still wet. My breath was coming out of my mouth in dense clouds, saturated with moisture.
You were lying on the bed as usual. The make-up was smeared across your face, the blanket stained where you had used it to scrub at your skin. I ripped the blanket off your body.
"Answer me!"
I no longer thought you were beautiful. You were nothing more than a lump of frozen meat, lying there weighing down a bed. That ridiculous sausage between your legs, your messy face. And that knife in your chest. I yanked it out. I threw it at the wall. You didn"t move a muscle. A viscous, brownish bubble rose from the wound and stopped. Your lips parted and you whispered, "You are dead."
My stomach contracted in painful cramps, and I could feel the menstrual blood seeping out to compensate for the blood you were not bleeding. Everything went red before my eyes and I screamed, "I am not dead, you"re the one who"s dead you disgusting b.a.s.t.a.r.d and you can lie here and rot as far as I"m concerned, I don"t care about you anymore, so what have you got to say about that?"
My face was burning, and I didn"t hear your answer. I leaned closer. Every word you said, every breath carried with it the stench of jam that has been left in the freezer for too long. "Everything you told me. Indicates. That you are not. Alive."
At first I didn"t understand what was happening. It was as if the light had changed, as if the room had begun to tilt and my body was being twisted into a position where it did not want to be. A great weight fell through the air. My eyes p.r.i.c.ked and the tears welled up.
"It"s possible. But I...I..."
I cracked. An abscess of tears burst in my throat, and although I didn"t want it to happen, although I didn"t want to humiliate myself like that, my anger turned to sobs and my voice trembled as if in prayer when I spoke.
"I"ll be better. I promise I"ll be better. Leave me in peace. Don"t come to me. Leave me alone."
The fury ebbed away. The room was silent. There was only the sound of my sobs, the warm tickling feeling down my inner thigh as the blood overflowed. You opened your eyes, wider than you had ever done before, and looked at me. Two lumps of grey slime. You were smiling. This time you really were smiling. You said, "I"m sorry. But that"s not actually your decision to make."
I don"t remember how I got home, how I found the tools in the shed, how I got back. The images all flow into one. Suddenly I"m standing there again, in your bedroom. But this time I"ve got a hammer, nails and staples.
I forced your hand down towards the frame of the bed. I hammered two nails through the hand itself, then a staple around each finger. The sharp ends peeled away the skin, but the hoops clamped the skeleton firmly. The hand was securely fastened. You couldn"t go anywhere.