The Unit (14 page)

That night I dreamed of Jock and the beach and the stick I picked up and threw over and over again, and which he brought back to me over and over again. But the dream was different this time. Sometimes it wasn’t Jock who came back to me with the stick in his mouth, but Johannes running toward me with his arms outstretched and his hair standing on end in the wind. And sometimes it wasn’t me throwing the stick but Johannes, and when Jock brought it back we both praised him. And then suddenly we were in the car outside the house, my old car and my old house. We got out of the car and went into the house and all three of us lived there. Johannes was hanging pictures on the walls, framed photographs. I asked him:

“What are those photographs?”

“Can’t you see?” replied Johannes. “Those are our children, of course.”

“Our children?” I said, and then I woke up and the dawn light was in the room.

I didn’t tell Johannes about the dream, not then. It frightened me. It was beautiful and we were very happy in it. And yet—or perhaps that was exactly why—it felt threatening in some way. During the rest of the day I tried to forget the dream, shake it off, the way you try to shake off nightmares. But I couldn’t do it, it had fixed itself in my consciousness and it sat there all day, coloring everything I did and everything that happened and everything that was said. Everything was colored by the feeling that I had a man and children and a house and a car and a dog.

20

Another day at lunchtime when I was out walking, I caught sight of young Potter in the winter garden again. This time he was sitting on a bench on a patio reading a book. It had been several weeks, or maybe a month or so, since the day when we had chatted in the citrus grove, and of course I had worn several different pairs of pants during that time. Each time I had carefully smuggled the little piece of paper from the right-hand pocket in one pair to the same place in the other, so that I always knew where it was, and when I saw Potter in there among the palms, half hidden by the little fountain, I pushed my hands into my pockets, wandered onto the patio, stopped and said hi.

He looked up absentmindedly from the book.

“Well hi there,” he said when he recognized me. “How are things?”

“Absolutely fine,” I said. “How about you?”

“Yes. Good.” He adjusted his glasses with his index finger, his gaze flickering up and down slightly; he clearly wanted to get back to his book, but he was polite and made an effort to give me a friendly smile. I didn’t want to give the impression that I was the kind of person who would insensitively impose on people who wanted to be left in peace, so I made as if to continue my walk, but then stopped and asked, as if in passing:

“And how are you getting on with finding a new place to live?”

It worked; he brightened up and closed the book with one finger keeping his place as he decided to take a break.

“Good,” he said, “we actually went to look at a really nice apartment yesterday. Four rooms with a little garden. It’s really close to the neighbors, but the garden is pretty mature and you can’t see inside. And it’s on two floors with a view over a park from the top floor. A big playground just outside, a day nursery and school close by, and lots of families with children in the community.”

I shuddered involuntarily at the very idea of living in a place like that, hemmed in between families noisily spreading themselves out, practically spilling over like rising bread dough, around and on top of people who were on their own and who neither wanted to make themselves heard nor were able to do so, who didn’t want to spread themselves like that, and thus became invisible and annihilated—crushed to nothingness. But Potter was feeling chatty now and in full swing, so I steeled myself and tried not to let it bother me as he told me in detail about the lovely, child-friendly residential area, and I pulled my right hand out of my pocket with the piece of paper pressed between my palm and my little finger, ring finger, and middle finger. Potter carried on explaining: about the apartment, its practical design, how they were going to decorate the children’s room, about an ultrasound scan of the twins in his partner’s stomach.

“Would you like to see it?” he said. “I’ve got it here.” Without waiting for a reply he pulled a wallet out of his back pocket.

Normally I would have hesitated and perhaps even refused, made some excuse and said that I was in a terrible rush—I had already had my fill of blurred ultrasound images of the developing babies of those who were needed—but of course I realized I couldn’t let this opportunity slip through my fingers just because of that.

So I sat down on the bench next to Potter, who held out the unclear little picture to me. I feigned interest and took it between the thumb and index finger of my right hand, with the other fingers still holding the piece of paper. He pointed at two paler kidney-shaped areas among all the lines and shadows on the picture, and I nodded and said something about how fascinating it was and asked how old they were now, the twin fetuses, and whether he was looking forward to being a parent, and he replied and explained and chatted, and somewhere in the middle of all this pointing and asking and explaining, while we were still sitting there leaning over the little photograph, I managed to pass the little crumpled piece of paper from my hand into his. When I had done it I glanced quickly up at his face. He didn’t look surprised, but just nodded, briefly, almost imperceptibly and with a tiny wink—I got the impression that he realized my interested questions had been nothing more than a kind of camouflage—and then, when we had finished looking at the picture, he put it into his wallet along with the crumpled piece of paper, and put the wallet back in his pocket.

It was several weeks before I bumped into Potter again, this time one evening in section E4. Alice lived there. She had borrowed a DVD from the library and invited me and Elsa and Lena and Vivi to watch the film and to have some homemade fruitcake and tea. The film was a romantic comedy, a frothy story full of mix-ups and misunderstandings that ended with a wedding. As soon as the titles rolled Elsa and Vivi left. They had begun to spend a lot of time together lately, just the two of them, and I was slowly starting to realize that there was something going on between them, that they were falling in love. I wanted to get back to Johannes, so shortly after Elsa and Vivi left I thanked Alice and went on my way. And that was when I caught sight of Potter in the laundry room as I was on my way out of the section. He was doing something to the drain in the floor.

“Is it blocked?” I said and stopped, hesitated in the doorway and then leaned on the door frame.

He looked up.

“Yes,” he sighed. “And it’s the third time in a week.”

And so we stood there for a little while—or rather I stood, while he was on his knees—and chatted about blockages and how to sort them out. As the former owner of a house with old drains and narrow pipes that often got blocked, I was able to give him some tips on how to solve the problem, and clever ways to help avoid it in the future.

When he had finished, at least for this time, as he said while replacing the grid over the drain, he got up and walked past me on the way out, and we said good-bye, and a neatly folded piece of paper was slipped into my hand, which I smuggled into my pocket.

Despite the fact that it wasn’t particularly late, Johannes was already asleep when I got back. He had left the light on above the sink in the kitchen. From the bedroom I could hear the sighing noises he made in his sleep; it wasn’t really snoring, but it wasn’t ordinary breathing either. He sounded like a dreaming child. He sounded like my brother Ole, when he was four and I was nine and he and Ida and I shared a room during a vacation in a cottage. He sounded like the wind whispering through a field of corn in late summer. It made me feel at peace. Safe.

I sat down at the dining table in the half darkness. From time to time Johannes would smack his lips in his sleep, half whimpering and muttering something in a thick voice (which didn’t sound like Ole at all). Then he would go back to the regular sighing, and that was the only sound apart from the faint, even hum of the air-conditioning. Apart from that the silence was complete. On the table lay the fossil Johannes had picked up on the beach. Beside the stone lay a magazine, I can’t remember what it was. I touched the stone, running my index finger over the contours of the cone-shaped fossil that had once been an animal, or at least part of an animal. I picked up the stone, weighed it in my hand, closed my fingers around it, turned it round and round in my cupped hand. It felt good; the stone was cool and smooth. Then I put it down again, pulled the magazine toward me, opened it, flicked through the pages and pretended to skim an article here and there while fiddling in my pocket with my hand—I was trying to make it look as if I were scratching my thigh—and fumbling for the piece of paper Potter had given me. I got hold of it and pulled it out as silently as I could, holding it between my index and middle finger, then carefully unfolded it under the table. Then I quickly slipped it in between two pages of the magazine, which I had positioned right by the edge of the table. Then all I had to do was leaf through until I got to the right place. When I got there I leaned forward slightly with one elbow on the table and my chin resting on the palm of my hand, so that I was hiding as much as possible.

I don’t see particularly well in the dark, and it took a while before I realized what the piece of paper was. It wasn’t a message, or a letter, not one single word was written or printed on it. It was two pictures. Two photographs, color photographs, printed next to one another in the middle of the piece of paper. I moved a fraction so that the light from the kitchen would shine down on the pictures.

They were taken in Sten and Lisa’s garden. In the left-hand picture Jock is with their youngest child, a little girl with round cheeks and curly black hair, big brown eyes and a funny little turned-up nose. Jock has a blue ball in his mouth—at least it looks like a ball—and is running toward the girl with his head up, proud, fearless. She’s wearing jeans, Wellington boots, a blue knitted sweater with a big red car on the front, and a gray scarf, and she’s laughing and clapping her hands above her head. She had grown, she seemed taller and slimmer, more sturdy—the previous autumn her brother, two years older, had been wearing that sweater. On the lawn, where she and Jock are playing, lie red, brown, and yellow autumn leaves. A few yellowish white mushrooms are sticking up out of the ground. Windfalls: red and pale green apples, half eaten by the birds, rotting. In the background you can see the chicken coop and two of the speckled hens. Sten’s red bicycle with child seats at the front and back is just visible on the far side of the chicken coop.

In the right-hand picture Jock and Lisa are sitting on the bench in front of the house and the flowerbed, where a few roses and marigolds are still hanging on, glowing along with the deep red ivy scrambling up the wall. Jock and Lisa are facing each other, one of her hands is resting on his back, level with his shoulder blades. His ears are pointing forward, her eyebrows are raised just a fraction, both of them have their mouths slightly open. It almost looks as if they’re singing a duet. It’s an amusing picture—and I laughed out loud. Inside me was a different kind of laughter, a kind of huge relief mixed with grief, exploding and bumping at my chest, just inside my breastbone, trying to get out. But it was impossible. I didn’t dare let it out. It was too big, this relief, it hurt too much to be set free.

I folded up the piece of paper with the pictures on it, smuggled it back into my pocket, got up, went and turned off the light in the kitchen, then fumbled my way back to the bathroom in the darkness, had a wash and brushed my teeth, crept into the bedroom, got undressed, and slipped under the covers close, so close to Johannes, who was still sighing in his sleep.

I never did find out how it had come about, that business with the photographs—whether Potter had been there, met Lisa and the girl and Jock and taken the pictures himself, or whether Sten and Lisa, or someone else, had sent them to him. I would bump into Potter from time to time in the future, but never had the opportunity to ask him; all I could do was thank him with a nod and a smile for the trouble he had gone to on my behalf. However, judging by the season and by the girl, who had grown since I last saw her, the pictures had been taken recently. And that was all I needed to know.

21

Out in the community it was Christmastime. If you switched on the television or radio or opened a newspaper you were instantly aware of it. There was the sound of bells and there were Advent calendars and news reports of record sales and articles about the stress of it all and commercials for this year’s Christmas gifts and tips for Christmas dinner and Donald Duck and dancing around the tree and stories about the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus and the star shining above the stable.

But the unit itself was a blessedly Christmas-free zone. Everything carried on as normal, both before, during and after this holiday, which otherwise swallowed up everything in its path; no glitter, no Advent candles, no Christmas Muzak in the stores, no reduced opening hours at the sports center, no Santa hats on the instructors at Friskis & Svettis and no special gym classes with only Christmas music. The restaurant, art gallery, cinema, theater and stores were open exactly as usual and with no frills; no special Christmas menu, no film matinee for children on December 26, no sales between Christmas and New Year, no New Year celebrations and no Twelfth Night, which would loom up in front of you with a scornful grin just when you thought the whole thing was over for this year.

It was, however, a new year; it was impossible to avoid or ignore that fact; the number at the end of the year changed. Time was passing, inexorably. I would soon be fifty-one. Johannes had just turned sixty-four, which was old for a dispensable person. But he certainly didn’t feel old. And I actually felt younger than I had for many years. Presumably it was because I was desired, and because I loved and was loved in return.

My novel was more or less done; I was just putting the finishing touches on it. I read it and made small changes, read it again and made more small changes, didn’t really want to let go.

Johannes laughed at me, called me “a mother hen.” It was evening. We were lying in bed, naked.

“But don’t you get like that too?” I asked. “When you’ve almost finished something and you know you’ll soon have to part from it and start something new?”

“Yes.”

“Well then! Why are you laughing at me?” I pinched one of his nipples playfully.

“Because it’s fun,” he replied, pinching me in return.

“Ouch!” I said.

“That can’t have hurt,” he said.

“No.”

“So why did you say ouch, then?”

“Because it’s fun,” I replied, and the next second he was on top of me.

Afterward, when we’d fallen asleep, I dreamed the dream about Jock and the stick and the beach, the dream where Jock sometimes turns into Johannes, running toward me in the wind with his arms outstretched as the sea crashes and roars, the dream where Johannes sometimes throws the stick and Jock brings it back and we both praise him, the dream where we get back to my house and Johannes is hanging framed photographs on the walls and I ask him: “What are those photographs?” and he replies: “Can’t you see? Those are our children, of course.”

It was clearer this time, Johannes’s voice was very close, very real, as if we were dreaming the same dream at exactly the same time and the conversation were really taking place, as if we were talking about those photographs in our sleep.

The next day I stopped tinkering with my novel and decided that it was finished now; I burned it onto a CD and put it into a cardboard sleeve with the title of the novel and my name on it. Then I didn’t know what to do with it, so I just left it lying on the desk.

And straightaway I started sketching out some ideas for a new story. It was slow going, but that’s the way it often is when I start something new: slow, heavy and uncertain, like laboring up a steep hill on a bicycle with a rusty chain that’s threatening to break at any moment.

On top of that, I had started to get so tired recently; worn out and dizzy. At first I thought it was because I was involved in another physical training program—something I was very grateful for, of course, because it was far more healthy and pleasant than having to take pills, have injections, or undergo experiments involving different solutions or gases. This time they were measuring muscle volume and the capacity to take in oxygen. After the first preliminary tests on those of us who had been selected to participate, I was told I had the physical fitness of a twenty-year-old. But now, a few weeks into the project, I was feeling weak, sometimes really run down, and I was afraid I wasn’t getting enough vitamins and minerals, or that I was dehydrated. I made a real effort to eat better and drink more, but it didn’t help.

Then one morning I woke up feeling nauseous, and had to rush to the bathroom. I threw up. After a sandwich and a glass of milk, I felt a little better. I was tired and slightly woozy, but I didn’t feel really ill again until the evening. And as before I felt better when I’d eaten, but the next morning I threw up again.

It carried on like this day after day, and it was only after a couple of weeks that one afternoon, after I’d finished my training session, I got the idea of swinging by the hospital and going into the pharmacy to ask for a pregnancy test.

The assistant looked surprised.

“I’ll see if we’ve got any,” he said, and disappeared. He was gone for quite a while, but eventually returned with a little box containing a do-it-yourself pregnancy test, complete with instructions.

I went home. Spent the night alone, and in the morning tested my urine. And it was true. However unbelievable it sounds. I really was pregnant. Johannes and I were going to be parents.

I didn’t get much done that morning, just wandered around my apartment; into the bedroom, out again, around the dining table and easy chairs, over to the desk, fiddled around on the computer for a while, gave a start when I caught sight of Majken’s picture of the deformed fetus, turned my back on it, went into the kitchenette, opened the door of the refrigerator, closed it again, poured myself a glass of water, walked around the dining table again, put down the glass without having drunk any of the water, ambled back into the bedroom and out again. If there had been a window I would have stood by it, to gather my thoughts, to calm myself. But there was no window, so I didn’t manage to calm down.

In the afternoon I had physical training as usual, then went home and ate and tried to sleep for a while, which didn’t go all that well. I was too overexcited. I was too dizzy, I felt too sick. I was too happy.

As soon as I got through the door of Johannes’s apartment that evening I said:

“Now I know why I’ve been feeling so bad. Or am feeling bad.”

“Oh … ?” Johannes frowned anxiously, and I almost shouted as I said:

“I’m pregnant! You’re going to be a daddy!”

At first he thought I was joking, of course. When he finally realized that my seriousness and agitation were genuine, and that I was telling the truth, he took my hand between both of his and kissed it. Then he kissed me on the forehead and whispered:

“My love.”

He held me, my forehead against his collarbone, his cheek against my ear, and he whispered the same words over and over again: “My love. My love.”

When he let me go and I looked at his face, his eyes were shining. I interpreted it as a sign that he was moved.

Later, when we had made love and were lying in bed in the darkness, just about to go to sleep, I heard him crying, quiet and suppressed. I turned on my side, stroked his cheek and asked him what the matter was, didn’t he feel well? He replied that he was fine, it was just that he was happy.

“I’m crying because I’m so happy,” he said.

But he didn’t sound happy.

Then I told him about my dream, about him and Jock and me on the beach, and how we went into my house, which in my dream was our house, and how he was hanging pictures of our children on the walls.

“How wonderful,” he said. “Such a beautiful dream.”

“Now it can become a reality,” I said.

In response he put his arms around me and pressed me so tightly against his body that I could hardly breathe.