The Unit (23 page)

Authors: Ninni Holmqvist

Tags: #Psychological Fiction, #Dystopias, #Health facilities, #Middle aged women, #General, #Literary, #Fiction, #Middle-aged women, #Human experimentation in medicine, #Fiction - General, #Fantasy

BOOK: The Unit

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PART 4

I did get to see her. Only for a moment, but still. She had black hair. Her face was smooth and delicate, like a doll’s. She had Johannes’s nose, his upper lip and his mouth. And his chin too, I think. But there was also something of my mother in her face, perhaps something about the forehead, perhaps it was the actual shape of her face. She was a little bundle: arms and legs curled in the fetal position, those incomprehensibly tiny hands clenched, the fingers of one hand curled around the thumb. Eyes tightly closed, her toes alternately bending and flexing in time with her cries.

That was what I saw and heard when the midwife held her up in front of me: that she was real and that she was alive and healthy. Then she was taken away. And I was stitched up as I lay there on the operating table, anesthetized from my rib cage downward.

Petra Runhede had said: “Let me know if there’s anything I can do for you, Dorrit.”

She had said it that morning after Johannes’s final donation, and—amusingly enough—she said it again when I bumped into her in the crowd at the party just a few minutes after I returned from my nocturnal stroll beneath the stars. I had been gone for about an hour and had had time to think about a lot of things, so when she asked me I was perfectly clear about what she could do for me.

“Okay,” I replied. “Do you want to know right now?”

“Sure,” she said. “Let’s go and sit somewhere a bit quieter.”

We went out into the lobby. There were low tables, sofas with short backs and round padded stools; it looked like an airport lounge, impersonal and no more comfortable than necessary. I sat down on one of the sofas, with Petra on a stool opposite me. She took a notepad and pen out of the inside pocket of her jacket, then nodded to me in her everlastingly sincere way.

“Three things,” I said. “I want to be awake during the C-section. I want to see the child. And I want”—I stretched out my left leg so that I could get my hand in my pocket, took out the fossil stone and held it up in front of Petra in the palm of my hand—“the child to have this, I want the adoptive parents to promise to give it to the child, along with a letter from me, when it begins to ask about its biological parents—or at the latest when it comes of age. The letter will not contain anything that reveals the fact that the parents were dispensable. Can you arrange it?”

Petra scribbled feverishly, then she looked up:

“Yes. I think so. Of course I can’t guarantee that the parents will actually keep their promise, but I can certainly get them to sign an agreement.”

She promised to come back to me with further information, I thanked her, and we returned to the party, where we went our separate ways; I then went to look for Miranda. When I found her I explained my absence by saying I’d bumped into someone who was upset and needed to talk.

“The way you looked,” said Miranda, “I would have thought you were the one who needed someone to talk to.”

I laughed, assured her I was absolutely fine, and asked if she was up for that dance now. She was.

It’s February again. Eight months have passed since that party. And just about four months since I gave birth. There are two reasons why I’ve hung on for so long.

For one thing, I wanted to finish writing this—even if it will probably be one of the manuscripts that immediately ends up in some underground passage beneath the Royal Library in Stockholm. That’s if it ends up anywhere at all, and isn’t simply destroyed.

For another, Vivi was sent for her final donation just after I gave birth, and I wanted to be there for Elsa, because she was there for me after Johannes’s final donation.

But now Elsa is gone too, and no one here needs me anymore, not even myself. I only have a few lines left, then that’s it. This time tomorrow my heart and lungs will belong to someone else, to be exact a local politician, the mother of two children.

My daughter’s parent, by the way, is a single woman, aged forty-two, the director of a small recruitment company within the business and office sector. I’ve seen a picture of her. She looked nice, but also a bit sad. She’s had several miscarriages and has been on the adoption waiting list for a long time. I have also been offered the chance to see pictures of her together with my daughter, but I have declined the offer.

According to Petra Runhede, the adoptive parent was happy to sign an agreement promising to pass on the stone and the letter according to my instructions. Of course I can’t be sure that Petra is telling the truth, but I have chosen to assume that she is, just as I have chosen to believe that the adoptive mother will not break the agreement.

In the letter to my daughter I wrote some of the things I would have told her if I had chosen freedom along with her instead of giving her up to someone who can give her security and the chance of a dignified life. I wrote that when she was born she had her father’s nose and mouth and chin, and that if I look like my mother, then she had her own mother’s forehead and the shape of her face. I wrote that the stone with the cone-shaped fossil had belonged to her father, that he died before she was born, that the stone was the only thing I had left of him, and that I wanted her to have it as a memory of him from me. I wrote that he found it on the beach between Abbekås and Mossbystrand the day we met each other in the November twilight, when he was out collecting stones and I was walking my dog.

The translation of this work was supported by a grant from
the Swedish Arts Council.

Copyright © 2006 Ninni Holmqvist
Originally published in Swedish as
Enhet
by Norstedts,
Sweden, in 2006. Published in English by agreement with
Norstedts Agency.

Production Editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Holmqvist, Ninni, 1958–
[Enhet. English]
The unit / Ninni Holmqvist; translated by Marlaine
Delargy.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-59051-333-0
I. Title.
PT9876.18.03324E5413 2009
839.73′8—dc22 2008046294

PUBLISHER’S NOTE:
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and
incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination
or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual
persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely
coincidental.

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