A Blessed Child (3 page)

Chapter 9

Elisabet said it wasn’t easy to be mother and father at the same time. She said
more
is demanded of a woman than of a man. She said that as a
woman
she had been forced to do
everything
by herself. (Elisabet often spoke in italics.) She said women, simply because they are
women,
are not
heard
the same way men are. That’s why I speak
clearly,
she said. To be
heard.
To get your
attention.

In the spring of
1980
, almost a year after that summer when everything happened, everything changed, Erika spoke to Isak on the phone, and he said she would have to forget about coming to Hammarsö for the holidays. It would be the summer Erika turned fifteen. Why? she said. Why must I forget Hammarsö this year? Her father did not like to be questioned, so he snapped his fingers. Erika heard a little snap from far away in Stockholm or Lund or wherever he was, and the frost seeped through the receiver. Yes, the receiver Erika was clutching froze in her hands, and Erika’s hands, which her father would sometimes kiss, turned to ice, too. That’s the way he is, thought Erika, and so as not to cry, she thought of five reasons why she loved him.

She would have to forget about Hammarsö that year. And maybe next year, too. And the year after that. She wasn’t going there; none of them were. Because Isak didn’t want them to.

“But why
doesn’t
he?” asked Elisabet. “Why, Erika?”

Her mother was standing on her long legs in the living room on Oscarsgate, running a hand through her thick hair. On her feet she had a pair of high-heeled ferry-yellow pumps by Yves Saint Laurent.

Elisabet said: “There is simply no way I can be expected to think up all sorts of exciting activities for the holidays. You’ll have to entertain yourself.”

She continued: “I shall be
working.
My head’s
full
of things that need doing.
Full!
Your father can’t just
change
a system that’s worked perfectly well since
1972
.”

Erika knew all about Elisabet’s head. It had always been full. Erika was nearly fifteen now, but when she was little, her mother used to declare herself a bundle of nerves. Erika felt sorry for her then, having to drag around that overflowing, tired, and heavy head filled with a bundle of nerves. She hadn’t been sure what nerves were, but imagined them to be some kind of maggot. She had thought Elisabet’s lovely head might explode at any moment or open up and let out some huge, tangled horror, especially if clumsy little Erika, by her very presence, added to the bundle.

As Erika grew older, her mother ceased claiming to be a bundle of nerves. She just said: I’m just not very
happy
today, Erika.

Erika wasn’t going to Hammarsö (“Why? Why? Is the house just going to stand empty, Isak?”), but she had a plan.

“I shall keep out of your way, Mamma. I promise. You won’t know I’m here.”

“But why, Erika? Why aren’t you all going to Hammarsö? I mean, it’s so beautiful there. Green sea and everything.”

“Gray,” said Erika.

“What?” said Elisabet.

“The sea’s gray,” said Erika. “Not green. It’s different sorts of gray.”

“But why?” asked Elisabet. “Why aren’t you going there? Why isn’t anybody going to Hammarsö?”

“I don’t know, Mamma.”

“What will you do, then? Get a summer job of some kind?”

“Yes, maybe.”

Erika had known Isak would come to this decision, of course. All that long winter she had known. How could they stay in that house again as if nothing had happened? How could she possibly go there again? How could he? How could Laura and Molly? How could Rosa, who had sat in complete silence beneath the blue lamp in the kitchen in the white limestone house, go back there? To Hammarsö. To the heaths and beaches and poppies and the bluish-gray sea she had once heard a grown-up man call the Frog Sea. The man intended it in a derogatory way. But Erika liked the idea of her and Ragnar’s sea being a frog sea: silent and strange and alive and shallow until it was suddenly deep and ominous. A frog, Ragnar had said, can go slack and play dead for several minutes if he’s attacked.

The currents brought things from the Baltic states and Poland that washed up on the stony beach below Isak’s house: sodden detergent boxes and cigarette packets, shampoo bottles, driftwood; and bottles that might contain oxygen and be deadly dangerous
(Don’t touch anything you find washed up on the beach!),
or even a secret message from the sealed continent on the other side of the horizon, from the communist regimes in the east, from the countries where people were shot or thrown in prison if they tried to cross the border or escape. The cardboard boxes and shampoo bottles had strange words on them, written in strange letters:
PRIMA
and
STOLICHNAYA
, and Ragnar and Erika tried to decipher the words, adding them to their cryptic language. They gathered the things in plastic bags from the shop and took them to the secret hut deep in the woods.

So never again. Erika grew up and married Sundt and had a girl and a boy. Both forced their way out of her, took a breath, and found her breast, and now, this winter, her son was the same age that Ragnar had been in the summer of
1979
.

Erika and Ragnar. Born on the same day, in the same year. They were exactly the same age and were even born at more or less the same time of night, Erika at five past three in the morning and Ragnar at quarter past three. She remembered how delighted he was at realizing this. We’re twins, he said. And a few years later he said: We’re best friends. We love each other. Soul mates with the same blood.

Chapter 10

So far Erika hadn’t made a single mistake. The daylight was fading. It was nearly four and already getting dark. The snow was falling more heavily than ever. She wanted to get as far as Örebro; she had booked a room at the Grand Hotel, where Laura said she should stay, pronouncing it
frightfully nice;
she wanted at least to get farther than Karlstad before she stopped. Otherwise it would be too long a drive the next day. Erika said out loud:

I’m driving carefully through the snow.

I’m remembering to look in the rearview mirror every five seconds.

I’m the one in charge of this car.

I shall go on to Örebro.

Her children were fine. Magnus was on a school trip to Poland, visiting the concentration camps, Auschwitz and Birkenau of course, but also a couple more whose names Erika could not recall. Now he was in Kraków. He had sent a text and told her he had bought a jacket and a pair of trousers, because it was cheaper there than at home. He said nothing about the camps. Ane was managing by herself, staying with a friend. Ane sent a text saying:
Hi Mum. Have a gd trip :-) Drive safe. OK 4 me 2 stay with N not B? :-) Dad says OK.

Going to Hammarsö, where she hadn’t been for more than twenty-five years.

Going to see Isak, to whom she normally spoke only on the telephone.

His voice had sounded so reedy the last time.

“How are you, Isak?”

He replied: “It feels a bit like an epilogue, Erika.”

“I could come and see you, you know.”

She regretted it immediately.

“You never want to come here,” said Isak.

“Well, I do now,” said Erika.

“You haven’t been here since you were…What were you? Fifteen? Sixteen?”

“Fourteen. I haven’t been to Hammarsö since I was fourteen.”

“Fourteen years! Goddamn! You haven’t been here for…! How old are you now?” asked Isak.

“Thirty-nine,” said Erika.

Isak went quiet, then he said:

“You’re thirty-nine?”

“Yes.”

“So you’re not exactly a spring chicken anymore!”

“No, Isak. And neither are you!”

“And how old is Laura?”

“Laura’s thirty-seven.”

Isak said nothing, but Erika added: “And in case you’re wondering, Molly’s thirty.”

Isak said: “You haven’t been here for twenty-five years. I see no reason why you should come now.”

“Maybe it’s time.”

“But now? You’re coming now? The weather’s awful. They’re forecasting snowstorms. Nobody wants to be here in a storm.”

“We can think of something to do.”

“I don’t think anymore. I’m almost ninety.”

“You’re eighty-four,” said Erika. “I’ll bring some DVDs. Have you got a DVD player?”

“No.”

“All right. I’ll bring some videos.”

“Don’t come, Erika. We’ll just tiptoe around being polite to each other, and that’s an awful effort at my age.”

“I don’t care. I’m coming to see you,” said Erika.

She didn’t want this. She didn’t want to see him. She wouldn’t be able to cope with the physical proximity. The telephone was perfectly adequate. But she let herself be carried along by her proposal. The little girl let herself be carried along. A reedy, old man’s voice on the telephone. The idea of a life without Father.
It feels a bit like an epilogue, Erika.

Chapter 11

There is a photograph: two little sisters with long blond hair, shaking hands—formally, politely, gravely, like the heads of state of two Lilliputian nations.

Every summer from
1972
to
1979
, Erika flew by herself from Norway to Sweden to let Elisabet rest her bundle of nerves, which had been gathered up all winter and spring. Erika agreed with her mother that it was
about time Isak Lövenstad took a bit of responsibility for once.

Elisabet said: “But I want you to know it’s a great,
great
joy being your mother, Erika!”

Every time Elisabet mentioned the great joy she felt at being Erika’s mother, which she did frequently and in that rather abrupt, random way, she would bend over Erika, gather her in her arms, and kiss her all over. Kiss! Kiss! Kiss! Gorgeous child! It was a mixture of kissing and tickling, and Erika didn’t like being tickled; it took her breath away and made her want to pull free and run. And yet she giggled. It was impossible not to when you were being tickled, and it was impossible to be cross with Elisabet.

Erika tried to explain to her mother that she liked the kisses but not the tickling, but it was hard to find the right words. She couldn’t do it. Elisabet misunderstood: she thought Erika was fishing for more tickle-kisses and put her arms around her daughter, held her tight, and tickled her even more, and they laughed until they both gasped for air.

Before Erika went to Hammarsö for the very first time—it was the summer she turned seven—Elisabet told her many things. She told Erika to remember to put on clean underwear every day and that she couldn’t assume Isak’s new wife would lay out clean clothes for her every morning. She told Erika to remember to say thank you for her meals and not to give the impression of being a spoiled brat. She told Erika not to forget to show Isak and Isak’s new wife the end-of-year report from her teacher that was full of praise for Erika’s achievements at school. Erika was a good reader, a good writer, good in math, good at keeping quiet until it was her turn to speak, good at working with others, and good at working on her own, but not particularly good at sports or making friends. Erika preferred the company of the teachers and seemed lost at recess. Her teacher wrote that Erika could make more of an effort with her drawing: she had—and this was just an example—handed in a drawing of a polar bear that did not look like a polar bear. The picture looked more like a sea monster with huge teeth, slavering jaws, and oozing eyes. The point, wrote the teacher, had been to draw a
lifelike
polar bear. But apart from a few such criticisms, the report was overwhelmingly positive, thought Elisabet after reading it several times, and therefore worth showing to the child’s father. Elisabet told Erika to remember to ring her at least every other day to let her know how she was; otherwise Elisabet would worry. Elisabet did not want to ring Hammarsö herself and get Isak’s new wife on the line. Elisabet told Erika she must bear in mind her father’s nasty, temperamental streak, but also that he didn’t mean anything by it, or rather, he meant
something,
but it wasn’t as bad as it might seem at the time; Erika shouldn’t get upset if he started bellowing. Or at least not terribly upset. Elisabet said Isak had a tongue that could dart out of his mouth like a serpent, spurting poison.

“But you can choose for yourself whether you want to die of it,” she said.

Elisabet did not tell her that Isak’s new wife had a name, and that the name was Rosa.
(How lovely! Like the flower!)
Neither did she tell her that Isak and Rosa had a daughter who was almost five, and that she was called Laura and that Laura was thus Erika’s sister.

Chapter 12

Erika and Laura wore shorts and washed-out pink T-shirts that strictly speaking they had grown out of. Both had long blond hair, long tanned Barbie-doll legs, and little handfuls of girlish bottom that wiggled from side to side as they trudged all that way from the shop to Isak’s house, each with a dripping ice-cream cone in hand. Men turned their heads and thought unmentionable things, but the sisters took no notice of the men; they were having enough trouble keeping their hands and T-shirts safe from ice-cream drips.

Or they lay in the tall grass in the meadow beyond the white limestone house that Isak had bought when Rosa was expecting Laura.

“We’re sisters, aren’t we?” asked Laura.

“Half sisters,” said Erika. “That’s different.”

“Yeah,” said Laura.

“We’ve got different mothers, and you have to have the same mother to be real sisters,” said Erika.

“And the same father,” said Laura.

Erika pondered.

“It’s a bit like false croup,” said Erika. “It’s not the real thing, being half sisters,” she added, and sang: “Half. Fake. Lie. Swindle.”

“What’s false croup?” asked Laura.

“An illness,” answered Erika.

“What sort of illness?” asked Laura.

“Children can’t breathe,” said Erika. “Children go all blue in the face and blue round the mouth and they croak like this…”

Erika produced a croaking, coughing, rasping sound in her throat, grabbed her neck with both hands, and shivered all over.

Laura giggled and lay down beside her. Erika felt an urge to take her sister’s hand; it was so small and slim and delicate. Instead she said: “I had false croup when I was little. My mummy was all alone in the world.
Alone and abandoned.
And I nearly died. My mummy was all alone, standing outside with me in the winter night, crying.”

Laura went quiet; she very much wanted to tell a similar story about her own mother, Rosa, but could not think of one. Rosa was never
alone and abandoned.
Rosa would never
stand outside in the winter night, crying;
she would never contemplate anything so wild. One winter, on her way home from school, Laura had taken her woolly hat off and put it in her schoolbag, and Rosa had been so angry that she couldn’t speak for ten minutes, at least. This—being speechless for more than ten minutes—was the craziest thing she could think of with regard to her mother, who was always utterly sensible and calm. Rosa had been convinced that Laura would get pneumonia, and though Rosa was rarely wrong, on that occasion she was. Laura didn’t even catch cold.

Erika went on: “But of course, there’s something even worse than false croup.”

“What’s that?” asked Laura.

“REAL CROUP!” said Erika, not entirely sure what real croup might be, but obviously it had to be worse than false croup.

“With croup, you don’t stand a chance,” Erika said. “You just die. And that’s that.”

“But—” objected Laura. She wanted more details.

Erika stopped her with a scream. If she screamed, she wouldn’t have to give details. She got to her feet and staggered over the meadow, screaming HELP HELP I CAN’T BREATHE, I’VE GOT CROUP, I’VE GOT CROUP, before finally collapsing beside Laura.

Erika lay in the middle of a flower meadow. The backs of her knees and the insides of her wrists and her neck and scalp were itching: it was the insects climbing over her; it was the ticks latching on to her to suck. If you had a tick attached to you, there was a great commotion in Isak’s house. In Norwegian it was called a
flått.
In Swedish it was a
fästing.
She liked the Swedish word better. If you had a
fästing,
you would have both Isak and Rosa staring at your armpit, or bent over your bottom or leg, or pushing your hair off your neck so they could study it. It was a bit like going to school in new shoes: everyone said
Aren’t you smart,
pointing at your shoes; it was nice and embarrassing at the same time. And then there was the whole business of removing the tick with butter and tweezers, especially when it was big and fat and ready to pop and all bluey-mauve because it was full of blood. If you pressed the tick, blood would squirt out of it. The most important thing was not to leave the head behind. That could lead to blood poisoning, Rosa said. Splinters in your fingers or toes could also lead to blood poisoning if they stayed there too long, or if you didn’t manage to get the
whole
splinter out. And blood poisoning could lead to fever and convulsions, which could lead to gangrene, which could lead to amputation, sometimes without anaesthetic because it had to be done in such a rush. So you could end up having your arm or leg cut off, wide awake and conscious while they did it—and all because you hadn’t removed the tick or the splinter properly.

Beyond the trees, a hundred meters from the gray, uneven, stony beach and silver-gray sea, lay Isak’s white limestone house. Erika said to herself: I am Erika Lövenstad. Isak Lövenstad is my father. We live here on this island and my sister is called Laura and I’m the eldest.

She opened her eyes and stared straight up into the blue sky.

And so, the summer days were indistinguishable, as were the summers themselves. Erika and Laura spent most of their time lying in the long grass in front of that house, reading Donald Duck comics and later
Starlet,
which was really too advanced for them. They ate wild strawberries, staining their hands and mouths red. The sun shone every day, and it was outdoors time, which meant they weren’t allowed to go into the house and be a nuisance. Outdoors time was decreed. It was never discussed, had never been explained. Everyone knew what it was. It was unchangeable, like the sun and the moon and the seasons. Outdoors time meant you stayed outside. You didn’t go in to get a glass of water or use the toilet, because the pipes would gurgle and Isak would hear. You didn’t go to your room to fetch things you’d forgotten to take out with you (like maybe a tennis ball for a game of sevens), because the floorboards would creak. Erika learned all this during her first week on Hammarsö. If Isak was disturbed, it broke his concentration and sabotaged his working day. He would storm out of his room, stand in the middle of the kitchen, and bellow. Laura had stories to tell about Isak bellowing, about how scared she’d been, alone with him in the kitchen, about how his face blanched with all that bellowing. First white, then red, then mauve, like a tick ready to pop. Isak would get so angry that saliva dribbled from his mouth.

There was no reason not to believe this. Her mother had warned Erika before she came to Hammarsö that Isak could be moody; but her mother didn’t call it moody, she called it
temperamental.
Elisabet said several times that Erika must not disturb him when he was working, otherwise she risked a flash of his
temperamental
side—and that wasn’t good. Erika would sometimes imagine Isak’s temperamental side as a ton of plutonium inside his head. You wouldn’t even have to disturb him
a lot:
annoying him just a little was enough to make the barrel tip over and the plutonium, pale lilac, run out over the floor.

Day after day Erika and Laura would lie in the high grass in the meadow beyond the house by the sea. It might be two o’clock. They couldn’t hear it, but in the living room next to Isak’s workroom ticked the grandfather clock that chimed every whole and half hour. They couldn’t see him, but they knew Isak would be inside assembling some mysterious invention; it was never really clear what he was up to, but it was his work, and their father’s work was of the utmost importance (Laura would tell Erika) and had something to do with women and birth and swelling tummies and dead fetuses.

It was Laura who saw the boy with the matchstick legs first. He was running. Laura nudged Erika in the side and pointed, but neither of the girls said anything. Erika could see what Laura was pointing at, but the figure was running so fast that at first she couldn’t see that it was a boy her own age in a T-shirt and shorts; it could as easily have been an animal or some supernatural creature. It was as if he came from nowhere—he just materialized in the landscape around Isak’s house—but Erika thought he must have come from the beach, where he probably had slipped and fallen on the rocks. His knees were scraped. The boy didn’t notice Erika and Laura lying quite still in the grass, following him with their eyes. He ran across the meadow, so close that they could hear his sneakers pounding on the ground, his breathing louder than their own. He ran right past them and crossed the boundary between the meadow and the private dirt road that swung down to Isak’s house, past the gate a little way from the house, past the clump of stunted pines, past the wild strawberry patch, now picked bare, past Isak’s green Volvo. Erika looked at Laura and Laura looked at Erika, and both of them looked over at the boy again. He had short brown hair and his T-shirt said
I’VE BEEN TO NIAGARA FALLS.
And running down the road toward Isak’s house, he suddenly fell over on the gravel. Laura got to her feet, but Erika pulled her down into the grass again. The boy lay flat on his stomach. He lay there for a long time, or at any rate it felt like a long time. In the end he sat up and examined his knees. Erika felt a shooting pain in her own knees. The boy had already bashed his knees on the rocks on the beach and now he had fallen on the gravel and would have to pick all the grit out of the open wounds. It would sting. Perhaps she ought to help him. Perhaps she and Laura should get up from the tall grass and go over to him, but they stayed where they were. It was Erika who had to decide. She was the elder of the two. Erika lay there, pressing one hand on Laura’s back to keep her there, too. It was the boy who got up. He stood there for a bit, not moving, his body tensed, and he looked about him; then he set off at a run again. He ran all the way down to the house, all the way down to Isak’s house, and there he stopped. The boy stopped outside Isak’s door and rang the bell. The boy didn’t know it was outdoors time. He didn’t know outdoors time had been decreed. He didn’t even know what
a temperamental streak
was. He rang several times. Erika could see him ringing the bell again and again—even more than thirty years later she could see him at Isak’s front door—and when nobody opened he started hammering on it; he clenched his fists and launched himself at the door. Erika turned to Laura, who, though she could hear neither the ringing nor the hammering, had put her hands over her ears and screwed up her eyes. Erika knew that it would not be long before Isak opened the door, but that it was too late to get up and run after the boy to save him.