Breathless (27 page)

Paralyzed, I lay under a synthetic double quilt in a cheap hotel room in New York and thought about my own death. There are those people who can transform the most difficult experiences into something that strengthens them and helps them achieve maturity. Myself, I just wanted to be free of the pain. The quickest possible way out. Not to cling to sorrow—but now it was clinging to me.

I lay in my hotel bed and listened to Nina Simone singing in almost unidentifiable French,
ne me quitte pas,
don't leave me, her voice searing and pure. It hurt and then soothed—like a harsh big sister, like a winter bath, like a wound that is opened, emptied, disinfected, and sewn back together.

I took out an advance on death, and when I had done that, there was nothing else to be afraid of. The worst had already happened, so I had no reason to be worried about anything now. Safe and ravenous, hungry as a wolf, I climbed out of bed and went out.

I bought a pair of boots I had seen in a shop window opposite the hotel. They awakened a yearning in me. To walk. Just walk. Over the Brooklyn Bridge, the Manhattan Bridge, the Williamsburg Bridge, all the glittering bridges, cold and tempting, in the city that never sleeps. They were actually not my style at all, too sharp and too expensive—they made the rest of my clothing look cheap—but I was struck by such an inexplicable urge. A need to have them, like with some men, but with boots the craving is more compelling. All I have to do is throw enough money at them and they're mine. A pair of boots is a promise of movement—like a man is a promise, but of what you never really know. Make no demands of life, just go your own way, intoxicated with your own fragrance, however stale it may be.

Never stop: that seemed to be what this city was all about, perpetual motion, staying awake. Keep moving, it whispered, and I did. Until my money ran out.

—

When I reached home, Lukas's letter was still by the car windshield, unopened. Winter had passed as if it had never existed.

I
have been on the road for a long time now. Looking for European deserts—there are supposed to be seven of them, but I haven't even seen one. I travel cheaply and slowly, preferably at night, on trains that convey so much sleep back and forth between cities and countries. But Mama never asks me about things like this—where I've been or where I'm going to—she quite simply never asks. Instead: if I have cut my hair, if the car is working as it should, if I have enough money to manage on, if I'm eating properly. Always the same questions, the same answers. Yes, Mama, I am eating properly, large quantities and infrequently. You save time that way. I have enough money to manage on, and if I haven't, I sort it out: casual jobs, bread-and-butter jobs, tricks. You don't need to worry. I live cheaply, most of all when I travel.

Sometimes I tell her even though she doesn't ask. About the girl in Berlin going up and down the platform on just one roller skate. She only had one leg, it must be a physical impossibility, but she did it anyway, gliding to and fro like the bubble in a spirit level. About the marionette museum in Nuremberg. A security man watched me, followed me through the rooms, showed me the storeroom in the basement where we could be alone, warm and dusty with headless dolls hanging everywhere. Afterward I thought—never again . . . was forced to go out into the town to buy new tights, black with red seams. That night I dreamed about the one-legged girl again. How she defied gravity and all the other laws of nature about the hellishness of everything.

—

Work hard, live cheap, travel light. Bohemian, Mama calls it. It sounds better in French, the simple life. However light I travel, I always have the letter with me in my luggage, but the opportunity to open it never presents itself.

I saw a butterfly whirling around like a shiny black chewing gum wrapper in the hot air above the rush-hour traffic in Warsaw. Then I stood on a train by an open window and smelled the same mixture of odors as in my childhood, caraway plants and wild cabbage, factory smoke, rotting toads, bonfires on the fields. At the station in Copenhagen a dog barked at me—not like dogs routinely bark at strangers, this one barked as if it really had something personal against just me. In Malmö I met a tourist, a young Frenchwoman who was laughing at the town. She kept repeating the word
mégalomanie
and I was uncertain what she meant. Delusions of grandeur? Yes, Malmö is a little town with a craving for status. A railway line that ends there like in the really big stations in the world. On the other hand: on vacation in Malmö in January? She must be slightly delusional herself.

Where do butterflies go when you don't see them, at night, in the winter, when the exhaust fumes and the sleet drape like a hangover above everything? They can't always be twirling over city streets, childhood fields, the hot railway line out of the village. Life is not a string of pearls made up of lofty moments. It is only like that afterward when you have kept the best pictures and deleted the reality between.

When the gods want to punish you, they answer your prayers. If you knew how many times I have wished him dead, she says.

Now he has been dead for three weeks, I find out when I call home. His weak point was his heart. I sit on the edge of the bed and wait while Mama weeps.

He hasn't lived with her in the house for a long time, not since the heart attack he had when a storm passed through the arboretum and he tried to save the sequoia. Gale warning. There wasn't even anything special about that tree, other than that he liked it, but he liked all the trees. He remained in a hospital bed after that, didn't get up again, didn't come back, not as himself. Then he had one more attack, Björn's weak point . . . Mama's tears subside and finally cease. The funeral? Have I missed it? No, not yet. The day after tomorrow, Lo—are you coming? No one can be so far away on this earth that they don't have a chance to get home by the day after tomorrow, not if they really try. Is Papa coming? I ask. Of course he is coming. Everyone is coming.

“Not me,” I say.

“Do as you wish.”

“Yes.” She is silent.

“I love you, Mama.”

“I know.”

We sit in silence for a while. She is the only person I can do this with. The morning air is cold in the room. I pull on my white skirt, the receiver tucked between my shoulder and my ear, rinse my face with the strongly chlorinated water. I have never been good at funerals, and this is one funeral I would definitely not have been good at.

I can't find my underwear, or my wallet with the pain relievers either. The room is very small—only you could lose something in such a small room, Mama would say if she could see me now. For a second, when she asks where I am, I don't know. I have to take half a step from the washbasin to the window and draw back the net curtain. Don't remember the name of the street, but it is spring here, the silver birches in the rear courtyard of the hotel are coming out. Grandfather would have liked this town, full of trees, the air smelling of Russian cigarettes after the war.

“Lublin.”

“Dublin?”

“No,
L
ublin, between Poland and Ukraine. Lublin,
L
as in—”

“Lo,” Mama says, “come home.”

I will come. But not until after the funeral. When you wake up, I will be there, Mama.

“Then I can't wait to wake up,” she says, as if it has been a long time since she felt like that.

She won't be alone. People will be coming from all points of the compass, mostly from the north. And Papa. A long time has passed since they last saw each other. He moved back north to the others a long time ago. I've really never been good at funerals and they will have to do without me—Mama and Papa on either side of the aisle, who would I sit beside? He has lost his father, she has lost . . . well, who understood any of that, in fact? I'm afraid that Mama will start to weep during the service, not like the others, no, she will cry like a dog, between her teeth. Like she cried just now on the telephone when she told me he was dead.

—

Not wanting to reach home too early, I make an unnecessary detour via Stockholm to get the car and drive all the way down. It's so late when I eventually arrive that it's already light. I fetch the door key from the garden shed and go in through the cellar, creep up the long cold steps. My old bedroom is cold too. Mama has forgotten to turn on the heater, or else she didn't believe I would come.

Freezing, I go up to the attic for a couple of blankets that are always on top of the water tank. The scent of summer games and birchwood smoke reminds me of how we used to sneak up here and play the princess and the pea, a game that Lukas never seemed to properly understand the point of, but his was only a supporting role: the footman who had to stuff the pea between the thick layers of blankets. I was made of genuine princess material, writhing on the wretched pea, more hollow-eyed with every night I was forced to sleep on the miserable bed. Lukas helped me put a streak of soot from the flues under my eyes to show how I grew more and more worn out by the discomfort.

Once he pretended to be the budding prince who crept into the chamber to seek the princess's warmth—things had been shaping up for that, he had been forced to sit in the dark bored to death for far too long, waiting while I tossed around in a theatrical lamentation over insomnia. But a princess who can't tolerate a golden pea underneath her can hardly put up with a 125-pound prince on top of her. I panicked, tried to knee him as he had taught me in self-defense, but didn't succeed and grabbed hold of a sharp, rusty implement instead, hit him right on the forehead with all my strength. He dropped onto me like a stone. If the blood hadn't looked so realistic, I would have thought he was joking. But it was pouring in a very lifelike way out of a bottomless gash and I had to wriggle free, tear off my dress, and wrap it around the fountain of blood before running down to the adults wearing only my underwear.

The unconscious prince was hauled down from the attic, driven to the hospital, and stitched back together. Afterward he was dumped back at Gábriel's and threatened with the police. I don't know what Gábriel did with him next, but by the time I was allowed out again, he had started to gather moss.

And for me: lengthy interrogation until I nearly fell asleep from exhaustion standing up. Only if I admitted something would I be allowed to go to bed. Was I sure that
nothing
had actually happened? If I thought about it. Really thought about it. Papa's mother was making hot chocolate and warming up meatballs, and it made me feel sick. Did he touch you, did he touch you . . . He must have—why would you have hit him otherwise, that's not like you. My aunts fixed their blue eyes on me until I told them the truth, that Lukas lay down on top of me when I was not expecting it, that I couldn't get any air, that I got hold of this thing . . .

“Thing? What thing?” Mama asked, alarmed.

“The what-do-you-call it? That hard thing . . .” They all stared at me. “The rusty thing. That I hit him with. I didn't mean to.”

It wasn't your fault, Lo, he's the one responsible, they assured me.

The scar on his forehead afterward. L-shaped with stitches that first reddened and then paled in the sun. Each time he looked at himself in the mirror he would see the initial of both our names.

—

A few hours later a panting noise wakens me, fully clothed under double blankets. When I wake up I never know where I am. I'm tossed out of sleep with the sensation of colliding against something hard—another new day? It is always like this. Wide awake, with no idea where.

It's the guide dog Mama has unintentionally acquired as her final companion in life. It sniffs at the dust on the trousers I was traveling in. I must smell of wild dog—they always rub against my legs, as if they want something. To belong, perhaps. Domesticated dogs unnerve me, and I push this one aside and climb out of bed. The house is silent. Everyone hurried away as soon as Grandfather was lowered into the earth. I had hoped that at least Rikard would still be here—it's been such a long time since we last saw each other. But his room is empty and Mama's too.

Mama, bitten by frost, is sleeping on the veranda in one of the dilapidated summer chairs that ought to fall apart but holds together at the seams just for her, so that she has somewhere to sit and nurse her urine infections, her bronchitis, freeze her fingers, dream deep-frozen dreams. She looks as though she is no longer part of this world. It's only when she opens her eyes that I know she's not dead. No emotion in her face—she doesn't even seem to be able to distinguish my silhouette. Snow-blind. It's a hideously bright day.

“Were you sitting there asleep? In this cold? There are quicker ways to die, Mama.”

She gives a start. “Lo?” It's nothing, she says, and pulls her hand through her hair, brittle with frost and static—nothing at all—she was born in much worse. Outdoors, where the cold belongs, she can enjoy it. Indoors she can't endure it.

“Don't tell me you've been sitting here sleeping all night . . .”

Mama makes a dismissive gesture, but it looks as though she has. There are no footprints up to her chair. The snow must not have been forecast, often the case here in the remarkable south. You can go to bed on a warm spring evening and when you wake up the world has turned white during the night. I'm cold in my flimsy dress under the thin jacket. It was spring in Lublin, spring all the way to Warsaw, and it was spring all the way to Berlin too. In Copenhagen spring was beginning. Here it's winter, but starting to warm up with a smell of fresh green timber and newly fallen snow that is already melting. I sweep the snow off the cane chair beside Mama and sit next to her without touching. She looks as though she could fall to pieces, not from frailty, but from cold.

The summer before I was born they slept out here on the veranda, she has told me many times before. Because it was so hot, because Mama was so big she could scarcely move from one chair to another, couldn't spend the night indoors, couldn't tolerate Papa's brothers constantly pointing at her stomach and asking when she was going to produce this . . .

“How was it? The funeral?”

Mama squints into the light. Doesn't know, she says. Yes, she was
there,
but not quite with it. But it was nice. Rikard said it was nice. So it was.

I nod. So it was.

Even if she just sat and waited for the service to end, right at the back of the church—right at the back even though she ought to have been sitting right at the front.

There's no obligation, I say. And Papa?

He had aged. That's what the priest whispered to Mama, who obviously couldn't see for herself how he looked. The priest was the same one who buried Grandmother Idun, the last time Papa was here. Mama didn't remember the priest, but the priest clearly remembered Papa. She had thought he was handsome when she saw him at the last funeral, and now he had aged even though he wasn't so old, but what does age have to do with old at all?