More Bitter Than Death (31 page)

She seems to hesitate, scratches her scalp a little with a hand that is dirty. She is still wearing some of Susanne’s light-pink nail polish.

He wonders if he’s ever going to manage to learn to do those kinds of girly things with her: put nail polish on her tiny nails, put her hair up in pigtails, know which jeans are the right ones.

“There. Now you really do have to go to sleep.”

“Papa?”

“Yes?”

“Promise you’ll never kick me.”

He stiffens, in midstep. “What do you mean, sweetie? Of course I’ll never kick you. Now go to sleep.”

His heart drums hard inside his chest and his temples break out in sweat.

Cautiously he put her back down again in her bed, which is also a couch.

Which is actually a couch.

He sneaks out of the room on shaky legs and pulls the door shut. He goes back to his glass of amber-colored liquid, turns the TV on just in time to see Federer trounce Söderling, notes that Swedish tennis has gone to hell. He thinks once again about Phuket, the warm, salty seawater, about everything he had to give up.

He decides to pour himself another glass.

*   *   *

He wakes up shivering. The TV is still on, a woman and a man smiling and drinking some kind of diet cola. They’re skinny and tan and look happy and successful.

Cold air blows through the room and his limbs feel strangely unresponsive when he tries to sit up. His head is throbbing and a wave of nausea washes over him.

Is the door open?

He reaches for the remote control and turns off the TV. In the ensuing silence, he hears a banging sound, as if the door were banging in the wind.

Slowly he walks out into the hall.

What the hell?

Cold air sweeps around his legs and he looks down at his feet, confused, as if that were the source of the problem. He looks at the cold tile floor in front of him.

Bang, bang.

Then suddenly he has a thought, is filled with dread.

He walks over to Tilda’s door and opens it, and the instant he does, all the noises of the winter woods rush into the house, drowning out his thoughts, subsuming his consciousness.

Ice-cold air sends the curtains up along the walls, like tattered sails. Leaves tumble onto the floor, clinging to his ankles.

The window is banging against the wall.

He looks at the couch where his military-green sleeping bag is wadded up in one corner.

Tilda is gone.

It feels weird to prepare for a group meeting again. Aina is on time for once and we arrange the chairs and tables together. One fewer chair. Today we’re going to talk about what happened, give it words, understand it, explain it.

“Sometimes I get so tired of all this,” Aina says. “Of everything we do. Do you really think we’re doing any good, that we’re changing anything? It’s just words, words, words.”

I look at Aina, surprised, as she stands there bent over the little table, putting out a pitcher of water, glasses, and a coffee thermos. Aina doesn’t usually have doubts or feel helpless.

“Of course what we do means something. You know it does. You’ve met a ton of people you’ve helped. You’re good at what you do. Great, even.”

Aina looks at me, and I notice that her eyes are red and puffy. She’s been crying.

“All these words.” She shakes her head. “It’s as if we fill reality with words to explain what we can’t understand, to vanquish our demons, keep them below the surface . . . but actually we’re not changing anything, we’re just holding things at bay. We can’t change anything. We are who we are. The world is what it is. What’s done is done.”

She shakes her head, and tears start flowing down her cheeks. She stands perfectly still. Nothing changes in her facial expression, just these tears.

“Oh, Siri, I can’t bear the thought of Hillevi’s kids,” Aina says. “I can’t bear that they have to keep living with their father who beats them, that their mother is dead, and that the only person they have in this world is their abusive father. It’s crazy. It’s insane.”

She wipes her eyes with the backs of her hands, rubbing them like a little kid. Suddenly she looks like a girl, a hurt, lonely five-year-old girl. I walk over to her and put my arms around her, hold her tight, feel how her whole body shakes from the crying. We stand like that for a long time, me with my arms around Aina, until her sobs cease.

*   *   *

The group is gathered: Malin, Sofie, Kattis, and Sirkka. There is still an empty spot, an absence that is impossible to ignore. Hillevi was such a strong person, so forthright and bold. It’s impossible to grasp that she’s gone. It’s as if she might walk in the door any minute, laughing, apologize for being late, and then sit down in her old spot.

“Why did you take away her chair?” Sofie asks. She sounds mad, defiant.

“We thought that, well, Hillevi is really gone. There is no denying it.” Aina looks Sofie somberly in the eye. Sofie slowly nods and then backs down.

Aina starts discussing Hillevi’s death, our last meeting. At first she is hesitant, faltering, but then her words start coming faster. She paints the scene again: Henrik, crazy and infuriated, with the gun, Hillevi trying to talk him down.

Aina talks and the rest of us listen, captivated by her words.

Suddenly Sofie chimes in, agreeing with something Aina said, identifying with a feeling. And then the group is up and running. They transform from a quiet, passive audience into active participants who turn themselves inside out, exposing their fears, their pain. There’s such power in their words, in their experiences. Together Aina and I manage to steer them, manage to stay in control of the group, make sure everyone gets a chance to talk, to be seen and heard. We capture Kattis’s fear, Malin’s rage, Sofie’s sadness, and Sirkka’s silent melancholy, addressing their feelings until the group is ready to move on.

Malin says, “One thing I’ve noticed. I know a lot about all of you, except for you, Sirkka. It feels weird. I’d really like to know why you . . . why you ended up here, in our group.”

Malin runs her fingers through her bangs and tucks them behind her ear. A calm has spread through the group. It’s as if everyone has vented their emotions and now they need to talk about something else. I glance at Sirkka, who’s picking at her cuticles, inspecting her light nail polish with a critical eye, looking for flaws where there aren’t any flaws to be found.

“There’s really not that much to tell,” Sirkka says. “I had a mean husband who beat me when he was dissatisfied, which he always was.” She sighs heavily, resigned.

“How did you guys meet?” Sofie interrupts with a glance at Sirkka. Sofie wants to understand who Sirkka is, what she’s been through.

“Well, there’s nothing special about that story.” Sirkka glances around at the various group members. For some reason her eyes pause on me. She smiles faintly, almost imperceptibly. “I met Timo back in the early seventies, 1971. We were young then. We’d both moved from Finland to Sweden to work. That’s what people did back then, come to Sweden to work. This is where the jobs were. We met on the boat, actually. Silja Line.”

She smiles sarcastically and Sofie lets out a faint giggle.

“Seriously? You guys met on the boat?” Sofie says. “And stayed together for, what, like almost forty years? That must be, you know, kind of unique. I thought those boats were all about one-night stands and people getting drunk on tax-free booze.” Sofie looks surprised. Surprised and a little tickled, as if she’s just realized that Sirkka wasn’t always the woman sitting before her now.

“Well, I suppose there was a little partying on the boats. And dancing, well, heavens . . .” Sirkka smiles again, happier this time, lost in her memories of a time long past.

“And?” Malin asks, peering at Sirkka with curiosity. “Then what happened?”

“Well, yes. We met and became a couple. Timo was handsome and fun. It was wonderful in the beginning. We were happy, actually, for a while, back when it was all fun and games. We lived in a little studio apartment in Solna, by Råsunda Stadium. We bought everything secondhand and it was really important to us that no one should know that, so we always snuck everything up the stairs. The apartment was tiny. We didn’t have a kitchen, just a kitchenette. And you had to shower down in the basement. But to us it was a palace. I was working as an assistant nurse at Karolinska and just needed to cut across Norra Cemetery to get to work. Timo was working for Scania in Södertälje. He took the train into town and back. Then I got pregnant. It wasn’t anything we planned, but it happened. Neither of us was particularly happy about it, actually, but what could we do? So we had our oldest daughter in April of ’seventy-two.”

“But why didn’t you have an abortion, if you didn’t want the baby?” Sofie asks Sirkka, genuinely puzzled.

“You couldn’t just get an abortion back then,” Sirkka explained. “We heard about people going off and getting abortions in other countries, like Poland. And you could apply to get one here in Sweden, if you had some particular reason, but we didn’t really have any particular reason. We did what most of
our friends were doing. We got married. Maybe people were liberated in the seventies in some ways, but there were still a lot of people who thought it was shameful to have a child out of wedlock. You were supposed to be married, settled. Otherwise what would people think?”

Sirkka throws up her hands in a gesture of resignation, and it’s clear that she has thought about this, the course of her life, how things could have gone differently, countless times before.

“Well, anyway, we were happy when our little girl arrived. She was so cute. We got a bigger apartment too, in Södertälje. Timo was closer to his job and I stayed home with Helena. And then Mikael was born the year after.”

“And then what happened?” Sofie’s eyes are wide. She looks almost reverent, a child listening raptly to a fairy tale.

“Ah, well.” Sirkka sighs. “It’s hard to explain. Timo got dissatisfied, and jealous. He started keeping tabs on me, guarding me. I understand now that that’s usually how it begins, but at the time . . . I thought I’d done something wrong. I tried to change, be happier, clean better, make better food, make sure the kids behaved when their dad was home. I wasn’t as nice to strangers and withdrew from my friends. But none of that helped, at all. Nothing I did helped. He would get mad. He got crazy mad—mad if the children yelled or made noise, mad if I looked grumpy, mad if I was happy, mad if the food didn’t taste good. I remember the first time he hit me. It was Christmastime and I’d made a potato casserole from his mother’s recipe. He said it was too salty. He said I made him feel ashamed of his family, that he was married to an ugly old hag who couldn’t cook. And then he hit me in the face.”

Sirkka closes her eyes, her wrinkled face wincing slightly. The memory is painful; after all these years that blow still hurts.

“It was like he enjoyed it. I don’t remember him ever saying he was sorry or apologizing. It was as if he had just done something he thought he was entitled to do. He became someone else, another person, and I couldn’t understand it. Suddenly I was in hell and I didn’t know how I’d gotten there. He was a devil, a real devil.”

Her face contorts again in pain.

“And you couldn’t leave him?” Aina’s question is gentle, more of a confirmation.

“No, I didn’t have anywhere to go—no job, no money of my own, no friends. My family was in Finland, but my parents were getting old and then
my mom got cancer. It took six months and then she was gone. All I had was my husband and the kids. So I lived for my kids.”

Again a glimpse of that almost imperceptible smile, as if Sirkka has learned not to broadcast her feelings. She sits still, narrating dispassionately, as if the story weren’t about her. Only the faint twitches of her wrinkled face betray her emotions.

“At first he only hit me occasionally. Mostly he yelled, berated me when something was wrong, maybe a slap to the side of my head with his open hand. Then it changed. The threats began. He would say he was going to kill me if I didn’t shape up, if I didn’t do what he said. I think he enjoyed degrading me, seeing me scared. He had me trapped, and he knew it. He owned me. I’ve often wondered why he didn’t leave me—I mean, since he thought I was so worthless, so ugly, so . . . repulsive. He owned me, and that made him feel powerful. That’s how I explain it to myself anyway.”