The Unit (11 page)

13

The exercise experiment was over. I had a few days off, then it was time for me to make my first organ donation: one of my kidneys was to go to a young medical student. I was very frightened.

The night before I was due to go in, Johannes stayed over with me. We made love, then I wept. He tried to calm and console me.

“I’ve only got one kidney,” he said. “It’s fine, I can’t tell the difference.”

“It’s not that,” I said. “I’m afraid I won’t wake up from the anesthesia. I’m afraid I’ll never see you again.”

He was quiet for a moment. He looked at me, his expression serious. Then he said:

“That day will come, you know. We both know that, and we have to live with it. But it won’t be now. It won’t be tomorrow.”

Not now. Not tomorrow.
That thought calmed me, and I fell asleep straightaway.

When the morning came I walked on relatively steady legs to department 4 in the hospital, which was part of section K. On the lower ground floor were the nursing center, the pharmacy, massage therapists, the podiatry and physical therapy clinics, a hairdresser, restrooms, and the elevators to different departments. Department 4 was on the fourth floor. My room—to my surprise I had a single room—had a window looking out over the Atrium Walkway, and through the glass walls I could look down over Monet’s garden.

This was the first window I had seen in the unit, and I stood there entranced, gazing down at the people moving about in the Atrium Walkway, some walking, some jogging. And I looked up and gazed out through the glass wall and across the pond, at the bridges with their rose arbors and at the wisteria, the copper beech, the weeping willow, the bamboo grove and the narrow paths where people were walking. I recognized Lena by her short, tousled white hair. She was moving quickly, loose-limbed, she looked like a little troll in a hurry. She stopped and exchanged a few words with someone I didn’t recognize who was sitting on a bench by the pond reading a newspaper.

“Dorrit Weger?” I turned around; a nurse in white pants and a light blue shirt was standing in the doorway.

“I’m Nurse Ann,” she said, coming into the room and shaking my hand. “I’m the head of department here on 4.”

Nurse Ann started to tell me about what was going to happen and what I had to do over the next few hours: take a shower using Hibiscrub, put on a hospital gown, have a sedative injection, be taken down to the operating room on level K1 on a gurney, be anesthetized.

The operation went well. I came to, felt sick, and threw up via a tube in my nose. It was disgusting, but at least I was alive. The young medical student had received my kidney, and things seemed to be going well there too, I heard. After just a few days I was discharged. Johannes came to pick me up with flowers and a box of chocolates; he took me home and looked after me, cooked for me and served up my meals, made coffee and tea and fed me chocolates. He even read aloud to me: Somerset Maugham’s short story “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” among other things.

I needed a little while to recuperate, but I was strong and was soon more or less back to normal: working on my novel, going for walks, swimming and going to the sauna—the last often with Elsa and Alice, who had both recently had surgery as well. Elsa had donated part of her liver, Alice had donated a kidney, just like me.

“If I’d known what a relatively simple procedure it was,” said Alice one afternoon when all three of us were sitting in the sauna, she and Elsa in opposite corners of the top bench and me on the middle level below Elsa, “I might well have considered donating a kidney voluntarily, just like that, out in the community.”

“Would you?” said Elsa, sounding really surprised. “To some needed stuck-up bitch with five splendid kids and a job that supports economic growth? Voluntarily? Are you serious?”

“Yes, but of course it wouldn’t have gone to somebody like that! Then again, why not? Everyone has the right to live. Even stuck-up bitches.”

“Oh yes?” said Elsa. “That’s what you think, is it? How noble!”

“Absolutely. Just call me Saint Alice.” She pressed her palms together as if she were praying, while at the same time crossing her eyes, her expression deeply serious and saintly, and from the depths of her lungs she intoned in her baritone voice:

“Aaamen … !”

It was impossible not to laugh, and that wasn’t such a good thing because it hurt to laugh, and Elsa and I clutched our scars from the operation.

Then we started comparing our scars. There was no one else in the sauna just then, except the surveillance cameras and the invisible microphones, of course. Alice’s scar was bigger than mine, but mine was uglier, bumpier, and in shades of blue, green and pink. Elsa’s was the biggest and extremely bumpy, almost like a lump, and the area all around it was inflamed and purple, but then it was also the most recent. When we’d finished discussing our scars, Elsa said:

“Dorrit, I have something to tell you. I’ve been trying to find the right time, but … Anyway, this is as good a moment as any. It’s about your sister.”

“My sister?”

“Yes. Her name was Siv, wasn’t it?”

I nodded.

“She was here,” said Elsa. “She lived in B4.”

I remembered the wall hanging down in lab 2; I’d been right, then—it was Siv who had made it. I wasn’t surprised. I felt completely calm.

“How did you find out?” I asked Elsa.

“When I was in for my operation, I met a nurse. Clara Gransjö.”

“Gransjö? Is she related to Göran Gransjö?”

“She’s his daughter. Göran Gransjö was the principal of our school,” she explained to Alice before she went on. “Clara recognized my name, and I recognized hers, so we got talking about people at home in the village and checked to see whether we had any mutual acquaintances, and I was just about to mention you when she exclaimed: ‘Siv Weger! Did you know her?’ ‘No, but I know her sister,’ I said. ‘She’s in H3. We see each other every day.’ You don’t mind my saying that?”

She looked down at me anxiously.

“Of course not,” I said, climbing up to the top bench in between her and Alice, so that we were on the same level. “But tell me what you know about Siv.”

“Well,” Elsa began, “she came here when she was fifty, like most of us, and she was evidently involved in lots of medical and other experiments; she also went through three organ donations and a number of egg and bone marrow donations. The quality of her eggs was apparently as good as those of a twenty-five-year-old, and she was regarded as a real superwoman. And then she found love here, just like you. She met a woman called Elin or Ellen, Clara couldn’t remember which, and they were together until it was Elin or Ellen’s turn to donate her heart.”

I felt a stab of pain in the region around my own heart, and had to gasp for breath in the humid air of the sauna. I was thinking about Johannes, who was so much older than me and who had been in the unit for so much longer. I closed my eyes, thought “not today, not tomorrow,” and at the same time felt Elsa’s hand clutching mine.

“Are you okay?” she said. “Do you need to go out for some air? To cool down? Water?”

“No, no, I’m fine.” I said. I opened my eyes, met her gaze and nodded to her to carry on.

She pulled her hand away and leaned back cautiously against the hot wooden wall. Her whole body was shiny with sweat, mine too, and Alice’s. Alice was sitting in silence with her knees drawn up and her arms around her legs, listening earnestly to Elsa’s story.

“After she had lost her Ellen-Elin, she applied to make her final donation.”

“Can you do that?” said Alice.

“Didn’t you know?” Elsa replied. “Well, anyway, now you do. Her application was approved—I think they always are—and just a week or so later there was someone with Siv’s blood type who needed both a heart and lungs. And … That was four years ago.”

By this time I was no longer calm, by this time I was seething, and it had nothing to do with the heat of the sauna. As I said, I wasn’t surprised. As I’ve already mentioned I hadn’t thought it very likely that Siv would still be alive. I would have been surprised if she had been, if I had bumped into her here, for example during a walk in the winter garden, large as life, just older than when I last saw her. Nor was I upset, not primarily at least. I was angry. The fact is that I had worked up a real rage, little by little, while Elsa was telling us what she had found out. And the knowledge that Siv’s heart and lungs lived on inside someone who needed them more than she did—someone who perhaps had five splendid kids to provide for—didn’t make me less angry in the slightest.

“But what about me?” I burst out, slamming my hand against the wall. “Perhaps I needed my sister, why doesn’t anybody care about things like that? That brothers and sisters might need each other? I needed my big sister, I still need her, she was my family, my closest relative, why doesn’t anybody care about that?”

I punched the wall, over and over again, the sweat pouring, almost gushing out of me, splashing as I banged and punched, until Alice and Elsa moved in close to me from their respective corners, grabbed my arms and held me, stopping me from punching and flailing. They enveloped me, they rocked and soothed me as if I were a little child, and our warm, damp bodies slipped and stuck together.

“You know that relationships between siblings don’t count,” said Alice after a while. “It’s only new constellations they approve of. People who make a new home and produce new people. You know that, Dorrit; you know that everything has to move forward.”

14

Sometimes at night I dreamed of Jock. We were usually on the beach or on our way home from there, tired and hungry, me with cold red cheeks, Jock with his breath steaming, and we went into the house, I put some wood in the stove and lit it, gave Jock some food and cooked something for myself. The seasons in the dream varied, but mostly it was autumn or winter. We were on the beach, I would throw a stick, and Jock would dash off barking with joy to fetch it, place it at my feet whereupon I would praise him, pick up the stick and throw it again. It was like a film, a loop, and I was very contented in those dreams, it was as if everything important was contained in that everlasting loop, as if everything else was unimportant, small, worthless. Sometimes I would wake up with the word “cycle” going around in my head, and I would stretch, then creep close to the still-sleeping Johannes and caress him or simply press myself against him until, half asleep and grunting slightly, he would begin to feel for my body with his hands, and before he was even fully awake he would part my legs and push inside me.

The night after Elsa told me about what happened to Siv, I dreamed the beach dream. This time it was unusually intense, the colors and contrasts unusually clear and sharp, almost like a film in Technicolor, and the sound of the waves, the wind, the gulls, the terns, the herons and Jock were clearly distinguishable. I could even smell the sea and the seaweed.

I was happy in the dream, but when I woke up it was with a feeling that I was falling apart, that I was cracking up from the inside and slowly falling to pieces. My heart was jumping and grating like a cold engine that doesn’t want to start, my skin was crawling and I couldn’t manage a single clear thought, it was as if all my thoughts were crushed to bits just as they began to take shape.

I didn’t get much done that day. After Johannes had gone home to write—reluctantly, because of course he noticed that I wasn’t feeling too good, but I told him I had to work—I sat for a long time, first in bed with my notepad on my knee, then in front of the computer, but I was incapable of writing one single syllable.

Around eleven o’clock in the morning I gave up, took a shower, got dressed and went out. Restlessly I meandered along the paths and tracks in the winter garden, did a circuit of the Atrium Walkway, then went back into the garden, the Monet part this time, but I felt kind of suffocated, shut in, almost as if I was about to have an attack of claustrophobia in there. So I turned and left via the nearest air lock, and did another half circuit of the Walkway until I reached the galleria and took the elevator up to the Terrace restaurant. Up there, closer to the glass roof, closer to the sky, it was lighter, and it made me feel slightly better to be looking out over the tops of the trees rather than being beneath them. I sat there for a long time in the middle of the lunchtime rush with my back to those who were eating, looking out over the garden without doing anything, just sitting and trying to breathe normally, until I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned my head. Alice.

“How are you, my friend?” she asked.

“I don’t actually know,” I replied, and I really didn’t know. I couldn’t understand myself: I had Johannes, after all; I loved him and everything pointed to the fact that he loved me in return. And I had friends who I cared about and respected, and who cared about me, and with whom I felt secure. And the information that Siv was dead had come as no surprise. I had assumed as much long ago and accepted it.

But there is a difference between assuming something and having it confirmed. There’s a big difference. They’re two completely different things.

And then there was Jock.

Alice went and got a chair, sat down beside me and put her arm around my shoulders.

“I miss my dog,” I said.

“Your dog? I didn’t know you had a dog.”

“But I did.”

“Poor you,” said Alice. “Poor, dear Dorrit.”

I leaned against her. I don’t remember if I cried, but I think so.

That same afternoon and evening I attended an information meeting about a medical experiment in which I was to participate. The experiment was to do with a new kind of psychiatric drug, a kind of antidepressant that was intended to work immediately, not like earlier versions that were fully effective only after several weeks of increased depression and fatigue. There were thirty of us at the meeting, including Erik, Lena and Kjell. Kjell was in a bad mood, claiming he had been misled; for some reason it seemed he had believed that his role of librarian within the unit exempted him from medical experiments. I didn’t really follow his argument, but it had something to do with the service at the library.

“It’s only for now, Kjell,” said one of the orderlies involved with the experiment, a heavily pregnant woman with greasy hair and a double chin, “it’s only during this particular meeting,” she clarified, “that you can’t be in the library. But Vivi Ljungberg is standing in for you, and she’s supposed to be an excellent librarian, so …”

Kjell snorted. “Vivi Ljungberg is
not
a librarian. Vivi Ljungberg is a
library assistant
. And what’s more she’s not familiar with this particular library. And besides …”

And he went on and on and on in his monotonous, whining voice. I got really irritated with him, and felt not a little uncomfortable. I thought he was making himself look ridiculous.

After the meeting, as I was standing in elevator F on my way up to Johannes, I became aware of how anxious I was about these happy pills I was due to start popping the next morning. There was a risk of certain side effects, and we had been asked to be on the lookout for symptoms such as dizziness, nausea, vomiting, disturbed vision, numbness in the hands and feet and loss of feeling in the face. This would be the second experiment with the drug, after an adjustment to its composition. The side effects I mentioned had, in the first experiment, affected 90 percent of those taking part, and in certain circumstances they had been extremely serious, developing into bleeding stomach ulcers, strokes, and a dementialike state. There were rumors that a couple of people had actually died. Because of these risks and rumors the team leaders had decided it was necessary for us to take our pills under their supervision. They were afraid that otherwise we would wreck the whole project by not taking them.

When I knocked on Johannes’s door I was very tired. I felt heavy and old. But when I heard his footsteps approaching the door I felt lighter, it was as if I were being filled with helium or laughing gas; I felt happy and giddy.

“Here you are at last!” he said when he opened the door.

And he more or less pulled me into the apartment, into his arms, closed the door behind me, kissing my forehead, the tip of my nose, my cheeks, my mouth. My hands fumbled and grabbed and tore at his back, his upper arms, his back again and his buttocks, and he ran his hands through my hair, over my face, my neck, my breasts, forced one thumb into my mouth and made me suck it while he ordered me to look into his eyes. And with the other hand he found his way under my shirt and unbuttoned my pants, pulled them down, then my panties—not far down, just enough so that he could get at me. Then he slowly took his thumb out of my mouth and got hold of the hair at the back of my neck instead and held my head so that it was impossible for me to take my eyes off his face, while at the same time alternately rubbing my clitoris with his middle finger and pushing one, two, three, four fingers inside me. At the moment of orgasm my knees gave way, and if he hadn’t held me firmly I would have fallen forward onto my knees; instead I stayed there in his grasp, supported by his upper body and the hand massaging my pussy, and I heard myself uttering gurgling, whimpering noises of pain and pleasure mixed together.

Afterward he allowed me to slide slowly to my knees, and I stayed there, panting, sobbing, and watching his coarse yet at the same time soft hands with the raised lilac-blue veins floating in a sparse forest of white hairs, as they unbuttoned his pants and his cock emerged in front of my face, and I opened my mouth, closed my lips around it, hard, like a sphincter. He breathed out with a slow “aaah …”

Later we lay in bed naked. I still hadn’t told Johannes what Elsa had found out about Siv—I hadn’t actually mentioned Siv or the rest of my family at all—so I told him now.

“Superwoman Siv!” he exclaimed before I’d even finished telling him. “Was Superwoman Siv your sister? I didn’t know her name was Weger.”

“Did you know her?” I sat up in bed.

“No. But when I arrived here three—or what is it now, three and a half years ago—people were always talking about her and Ellen, her partner. Majken had time to get to know her, though. Just about. I think Superwoman Siv might have been to Majken something of what Majken was to you.”

“Do you really think so?” I said. “You’re not just saying that to make me feel better?”

“Now you’re being stupid, Dorrit! Why on earth would I do such a thing? I’m saying it because that’s the impression I got about the contact between Siv and Majken: a short friendship that made a deep impression and helped Majken to achieve a kind of balance pretty quickly, to get on an even keel and be able to cope with the circumstances of life in here.”

“She seemed to cope very well.”

“Presumably thanks to your sister, to a certain extent.”

“I wonder who was a friend like that to Siv,” I said.

Johannes didn’t reply, he just looked at me, and it seemed to me that his expression was suddenly sorrowful and slightly distant.

“Are you sad, or just serious?” I asked.

“I don’t really know,” he said.

I lay down again, took hold of his hand. We lay there on our backs, hand in hand, gazing up at the ceiling.

“The generations are very short in this place,” I said.

“Yes,” said Johannes. “They are.”

After a while I could tell from his breathing that he was struggling with tears. I turned over onto my side facing him, and placed my hand on his slightly rough cheek. He turned off the light—perhaps he didn’t want me to see his face when he was crying, or maybe he just thought it was time to go to sleep now—then he turned to me in the darkness, pulled me close, one arm around my shoulders, the other holding my head against his chest, and I pressed myself against him with my arm around his waist, my forehead against his breastbone and one leg wrapped around his thighs, almost as if I were climbing him.

In the morning when we woke up we were in the same position: like two drowning souls who have clung to each other in a final fruitless attempt to save themselves—or simply to avoid dying alone.