The Unit (8 page)

6

When my older sister Siv was about to turn fifty I called her to ask if she wanted me to come over, but all I got was an automated message: “There is no subscriber at this number.” When I tried to e-mail instead, the message bounced back; no one with that address existed. Then I got in touch with my other sister and my brothers, but they said they hadn’t heard from Siv for several years and knew nothing. In the end, after having written an ordinary letter to her and gotten it back with her name and address crossed out and RETURN TO SENDER written across it, I got in the car and drove to Malmö, to her apartment on Kornettsgatan. But there was a different name on the door, and when I rang the bell, a young man answered. He said:

“No, there’s no Siv Weger. My boyfriend and I have lived here for over two years.”

He was lying! Or … ? I was confused. As far as I could remember, I had seen Siv at home here in this very apartment as recently as a year ago, on her forty-ninth birthday. We would try to meet up at least twice a year, on each other’s birthdays, and sometimes over Christmas and New Year’s as well. It could happen that a birthday get-together might occasionally be postponed or canceled because we didn’t have time to travel to see each other, or because we couldn’t afford it. Therefore I now came to the conclusion, if somewhat reluctantly, that my memory was playing tricks on me, and that I was mixing up the last couple of years—as so often happens when we hit middle age. The order in which things had happened, and the length of time between events in my relatively recent past, tended to be a little unclear in my mind these days. Time, the past, had lost its linear structure to some extent, my memory had started to prioritize as it had never done before, breaking up time and rearranging my experiences and reference points, putting them in an arbitrary and changeable order. I therefore decided it must have been over two years since I was last in Siv’s apartment.

But of course I didn’t just leave it at that; the fact remained that she had gone off somewhere without getting in touch with me, and that wasn’t like her. I therefore reported her disappearance to the police, even though of course I suspected she had been taken to a unit. But I wasn’t sure; it was true that she had no children, but she could easily have become successful in her profession all of a sudden, or managed to find a steady partner who loved her. Or both. We weren’t in the habit of asking about each other’s love lives, and Siv wasn’t the kind to start talking about that sort of thing. So it could have happened without my hearing about it. She could, for example, have met someone from another part of the country and moved there with him or her, and simply forgotten to tell me. Or something terrible could have happened: she might have moved to another part of the country with her partner, intending to tell me, but hadn’t had time because she had been involved in an accident or a violent crime with a fatal outcome. Perhaps she was buried in some forest or bog, or had been dumped in the sea, or perhaps her dismembered body was in someone’s freezer. Or maybe she had decided to go mountain climbing and had fallen without anyone seeing and had landed somewhere where people hardly ever went. Anything could have happened. That was why I reported her disappearance.

However, the police investigation led nowhere. At least that’s what they said whenever I phoned to ask how it was going. “We are doing everything in our power to find out what happened to your sister. But so far our leads have unfortunately been unsuccessful.”

Sometimes when I had to visit Malmö I would bump into one of Siv’s old friends, and I always took the opportunity to ask if they’d heard from her or if they knew anything. I might get an answer like this:

“No, it’s ages since I had any contact with Siv. But you know what she’s like; she’s probably just given notice on the flat, sold everything and taken off on a long trip somewhere. You’ll see, she’ll be sitting in some ashram chanting a mantra, or sailing around Cape Horn on a raft or something like that. I’m sure she’ll pop up like a jack-in-the-box any day now.”

Or they’d say something along these lines:

“Oh, you know, contact between Sivan and me has always been pretty sporadic. I haven’t a clue what she’s up to these days.”

Later, after a year or so, when I had accepted the fact that Siv was gone and wasn’t coming back, I did think that one of her friends must have known what had actually happened to her, but hadn’t said anything. I thought she might have told someone in confidence that she was going to be dispensable, and that this person had promised to say nothing if I or anyone else should ask. I really wanted to believe that this was what had happened. I really wanted to believe that Siv had a friend like that, someone so close to her that she could confide in them. I really wanted to believe that she hadn’t only had “sporadic contacts.”

7

“What’s the meaning of life?” asked Arnold, my psychologist.

For the third time in the week after Majken’s final donation I was sitting in the armchair in his office. The first time had been an emergency. Henrietta had followed me to my apartment, where I had locked myself in and sunk down with my back against the door. She had stood outside listening to me—as if it weren’t enough that someone was sitting in a control tower (or wherever it was that they sat) both watching and listening. This person was evidently in contact with Henrietta via a mobile phone or some other kind of transmitter, because I could hear her talking quietly to someone.

She said “Yes” and “Yes, Dick’s here” and “Ready, yes” and “Just say the word” and shortly afterward she had unlocked the door and opened it carefully. The door opened outward and I fell slowly backward, apathetically. Then Dick had come to help and they had more or less carried me to Arnold, whom I hardly knew. At that point I had seen him only twice, and we hadn’t touched on anything particularly difficult, but had mostly kept to the surface of my emotional life. But now I was deposited in his armchair in a state where I was completely powerless and defenseless. All my suppressed fear, rage and grief had floated up to the surface and was lying there waiting; all he had to do was help himself, or at least that’s how it seemed to me—as if he were lapping up my feelings with his big, rough, psychologist’s tongue. And he had succeeded in getting me to talk about death, about when someone dies or disappears, like Majken, like Siv, like my parents and other people I had known who no longer existed.

Afterward I had actually felt better, it didn’t feel as if he had taken something away from me at all; on the contrary, it felt as if he was there for me. I wasn’t completely sure that this was actually true, for real, but the main thing was that it felt that way.

And so this time, a week to the day after Majken’s final donation, he thought we should talk about life.

“The meaning of life?” I said. “That’s a difficult question. I don’t think I can answer it.”

“Try,” said Arnold.

“Do you mean my life, what’s the meaning of my life? Or do you mean life in general?”

“You’re free to interpret the question as you wish.”

Normally, if I’d been out in the community, that would have put me on the defensive. Experience told me that whenever a doctor or a psychologist or a boss or a teacher or a policeman or a journalist says you are free to interpret a question as you wish, that usually means you are being tested in some way. If you interpret the question like this and respond like that, then you are seen as belonging to a particular category, and if instead you interpret it like that and respond like this, then you belong to a different category.

But here in the unit, I thought, it didn’t really matter how you interpreted questions. There was only one category here after all, and however I might choose to respond, that was the category I belonged to. I didn’t need to try to work out how I ought to respond, but could relax and answer however I wanted. I could allow myself to babble and ramble and feel my way, roughly the way I did when I wrote.

“I suppose I used to believe that my life belonged to me,” I rambled. “Something that was entirely at my disposal, something no one else had any claim on, or the right to have an opinion on. But I’ve changed my mind. I don’t own my life at all, it’s other people who own it.”

“Who?” asked Arnold.

I shrugged my shoulders. “Those who have the power, I suppose.”

“And who are they?”

“Our rulers, of course.”

“And who are our rulers?”

“Well,” I said. “We don’t really know. The state or industry or capitalism. Or the mass media. Or all four. Or are industry and capitalism the same thing? Anyway: those who safeguard growth and democracy and welfare, they’re the ones who own my life. They own everyone’s life. And life is capital. A capital that is to be divided fairly among the people in a way that promotes reproduction and growth, welfare and democracy. I am only a steward, taking care of my vital organs.”

“But is that your own opinion, Dorrit?”

“Certainly. Or—maybe not entirely. But I’m working on it.”

“Why?”

“To get through this, of course. I live for the capital, that’s a fact, isn’t it? And the best I can do with this fact is to like the situation. To believe it’s meaningful. Otherwise I can’t believe it’s meaningful to die for it.”

“Is it important to you to feel it’s meaningful to die for what you call ‘the capital’?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because otherwise I would feel powerless, which essentially I am, but I can cope with that as long as it doesn’t feel that way too. I’m here now, aren’t I? I live here and I’m going to die here. I live and die so that the gross national product will increase, and if I didn’t regard that as meaningful, then my existence here would be unbearable.”

“And you want to have a bearable existence?”

“Doesn’t everyone?” I asked.

Arnold didn’t reply. His lack of response provoked me, and I said acrimoniously:

“Perhaps that’s the meaning of life. Perhaps that’s the answer to your question: the meaning of life is that it should be bearable. Are you satisfied with that answer?”

“You’re angry,” he said—I couldn’t work out whether it was a question or a statement.

“Of course I’m bloody angry!” I said. “Wouldn’t you be?”

“Yes,” he said, “I probably would be.”

He didn’t say any more about it. And he didn’t ask any more questions about the meaning of life, so I didn’t say anything either, and we sat there without speaking for quite a long time, almost a whole minute I think, and all the time I was very angry, so angry that tears came to my eyes. But I didn’t cry, even if there was something in my throat that had tied itself in a knot and was stuck there throbbing and burning. I was what I used to call “politically angry,” and above all I was feeling boundlessly sorry for myself.

In the end Arnold said:

“Do you know who received Majken’s pancreas?”

I had to clear my throat before I was able to reply: “No. Or rather yes: a nurse with four children.”

Arnold leaned over to one side, picked up a folder from the little table next to his armchair, opened the folder and took out a photograph. He was just about to pass it over to me when he stopped himself:

“Of course it isn’t only this person who’s got their life back thanks to Majken. Her heart has probably gone to someone, her lungs to someone else, her kidney—I assume she only had one left—to someone else again, and her liver too. And a great deal of other material will have been removed and stored in our organ and tissue banks. A single brain-dead body can save the lives of up to eight people. The removal and transplantation of these other organs and tissues is a bonus, you could say, when a specific organ, in this case the pancreas, from a specific donor with the right blood type and other criteria goes to a specific recipient in a planned and carefully prepared transplant. And this”—he leaned forward again and passed me the photograph—“is the specific recipient of Majken’s pancreas.”

He leaned back in his chair.

The photo in my hand showed a woman with four children of preschool age, two of whom were twins. The woman looked old and tired, her face unhealthily bloated and worn.

“She’s on her own with the children,” Arnold explained. “Her partner—the children’s father—died in an accident two years ago. She has no brothers or sisters, and her elderly mother has some kind of dementia and needs constant care. The picture is comparatively recent; the oldest child will soon be six, the twins have just turned four, and the little one wasn’t even born when the father was killed. The woman has type 1 diabetes, so it isn’t something self-inflicted, and—I don’t know all the medical details, but the pancreas has two functions. It produces normal insulin, as you perhaps know, and it also produces another fluid that helps to break down food. The production of insulin has never worked normally for this patient, and some time ago the secondary function of the pancreas also stopped working. Therefore the digestive process does not work properly either. She can neither eat nor drink normally, but lives on a nutritional drip. Since you don’t have children you perhaps can’t imagine what it must be like to look after four children on your own, while worrying about a senile parent and at the same time dragging round an IV stand, giving yourself injections and taking medication, under constant medical supervision.”

I could actually imagine all that very clearly, and I would have loved to be in her shoes. I would have gladly swapped places with this sick, worn down, fairly ugly woman, old before her time. I missed my mother; it wouldn’t have mattered how confused and helpless she got, just as long as she had been around to grow old, just as long as she’d lived. And I would have happily lived, sick and exhausted and constantly worried with four small children and an IV stand. Because that was at least a life, even if it was sure to be hell. I would have liked a hell, just as long as it was a life.

But then Arnold said:

“And the most important point: without the transplant she wouldn’t have had long to live. It would have been a matter of months, a year at best. Now, however, she has a very good chance of seeing her children grow up. She might not live long enough to have grandchildren, but she will probably have time to fulfill her role as a parent. And that is thanks to the pancreas from a person who had no one to live for.”

I said nothing. Just looked at the picture. The eldest child, the six-year-old, was wearing glasses and smiling at the camera. It was a big, innocent, open-mouthed smile; there were gaps where milk teeth had fallen out. The twins looked a little more serious; they were sitting on either side of the six-year-old, but were leaning their heads toward each other as if there were an invisible magnet between them. The smallest child was on its mother’s knee, waving a chubby hand in the air—perhaps he or she was waving at the camera—but was looking up at the mother’s face. Its expression was steady, secure. Full of trust. The woman was smiling wearily at the camera, her head tilted slightly to one side.

I looked at the photograph for a long time. There was something about the eldest child in particular that got me; something about her—I thought it was a girl—her open smile, something in her eyes behind the glasses, a kind of self-confidence, the sense that everything would be okay, the kind of spiritual strength that we only have at that time, when we are five, six, perhaps seven, or which is at its peak then at least; from then on it is destroyed, bit by bit, until it remains only in the form of shards and fragments.

Arnold cleared his throat. “What do you think about when you look at that picture?”

“Is it a girl, the eldest child?”

He looked at me, then picked up the folder, opened it, flicked through the papers, read, looked up:

“Yes,” he said. “It is.” Then he was silent for a moment; he seemed to hesitate, but added:

“Why do you ask?”

“I would have liked a girl,” I replied, and my voice was—involuntarily—so quiet that I wasn’t sure if Arnold had heard what I said.

He didn’t comment, nor did he ask me to repeat it.

My hour was over. I took a last look at the six-year-old, then handed the photograph back to Arnold, got up and went toward the door. With my hand resting on the handle, I turned back and asked:

“Did Majken get to see that picture?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Does she—the recipient, the woman—know anything about Majken?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Arnold spread his hands. “That’s the way things are done. It would be unethical.”

I nodded. “Of course,” I said. Then I said good-bye and thanked him, pressed down the door handle, opened the door and left.