Invisible Love (18 page)

“Yes, you do!”

“No, and we'll never know.”

“I don't believe you.”

“It's the law, Alba. They asked me a standard question and I gave them a standard answer. What happened next is no concern of ours.”

“Oh, really? You mean I don't have a right to know if they cut my son up and what they did with him? This is a nightmare!”

Magnus hesitated, grunted, then resumed in a calm voice, “Where are you now, darling? I'll come and get you.”

 

*

 

Apart from Magnus and Katrin, nobody understood why Alba refused for several weeks to visit her nephew in the hospital. They were all surprised that a godmother who, until then, had never spent two days without seeing her godson could have broken off such an exceptional relationship. Some thought it was a kind of jealousy—one child dies, another recovers—but as soon as they put forward this hypothesis, her nearest and dearest defended her, saying that such pettiness wasn't in her character.

Alba had resumed her work. “I have a children's book to finish,” she would mutter to anyone who tried to engage her in conversation. Although it was true that she had to finish the illustrations for a story by Andersen, she was glad that painting served as a barrier against intruders and isolated her in her thoughts.

Over her pots and brushes, she brooded on her anger. Without respite, from morning to evening, she came back again and again to the thing that wounded her: her son's heart had been put in her nephew's body without her being asked. Her sister suspected it, but Magnus didn't give a damn. “A matter of principle,” he kept saying! They're such cowards, these men, when they forget their scruples and cling to their principles!

At night, she would search endlessly on the internet, reading the views and explanations of politicians, ethical committees, psychiatrists, and patients' associations. Was there a way of finding out what happened to the organs? In spite of the legal ban, had there ever been a court case that had allowed a parent to break that intolerable silence?

Magnus viewed all this agitation with a skeptical eye. “Why do you want to know what they did with our son's body?”

“First of all, my son's body is still my son. Secondly, when they removed his organs, he was alive.”

“You're confusing brain death and the heart stopping.”

“I'm not confusing anything. His heart was beating. They tore it out of him.”

At last, she reached the ultimate conclusion to all this hair-splitting: they had killed Thor so that Jonas could survive.

Losing his temper, Magnus brought her down to earth. “His skull had been smashed in, his other organs were surviving mechanically, they would have stopped soon.”

“Are you a doctor?”

“More than you are. You don't understand a thing.”

“I don't give a damn about understanding, I want to know!”

“All you'll do is poison your life.”

“It's already poisoned.”

To put an end to these scenes that could easily have continued until dawn, Magnus would slam the door and go to his sports club.

Their marriage was deteriorating under the pressure. Aware that she was responsible, she took pride in the fact. “At least I don't compromise, I search for the truth.”

Some evenings, though, she managed to assuage her grief, or rather Magnus's expert hands managed to do so, the intoxicating smell of his skin, his brown hair, his animal tenderness. Alas, as soon as they had climaxed and their bodies moved apart, she would think of Thor and feel guilty.

Guilty of what?

Of living for a few minutes as if her son wasn't dead.

In any case, that was what she thought she was guilty of . . .

 

*

 

Jonas had been moved from intensive care to the ward for convalescent cardiac patients. Ever since he had heard about his cousin's death, he had been writing daily e-mails to his aunt in which he related in a humorous manner his stay in the hospital, trying to amuse her with portraits of those around him—patients and medical staff—then venturing, in discreet words, to understand and share her grief. Touched by the first two messages, Alba now deleted them without even opening them. From those first e-mails, she had kept only one sentence: “Another heart is beating in my chest, but I'm still the same.” Those words haunted her. It seemed to her they were killing Thor for the second time, because they denied that the presence of his heart had made any substantial difference to Jonas. The little bastard! How could he be so selfish?

After all these weeks shut away, she delivered her illustrations for the Andersen story and saw, from the dismayed expressions of the publisher and her assistants, that the results didn't greatly appeal to them.

“Don't you like them?”

“A bit dark, aren't they? Not like your usual style.”

“That's how I see things. Before, I was only a silly woman who believed in happiness.”

“We . . . we loved the silly woman's drawings.”

“And I loved being silly. But that's over now.”

Having fulfilled her commission, Alba was able to devote her days to her investigation. Was Thor's heart in Jonas's chest? By collecting and collating all the information she could find, she didn't unearth the truth but did see two ways to get at it: a legal way, and an illegal way. The legal way meant making an appointment at the transplant center, the illegal meant joining a group of activists, Liberaria, who were planning to break the rules.

Her obsession hadn't completely obliterated her judgment, so she first went to the transplant center, where one of the administrators, Mr. Sturluson, greeted her from behind his chrome desk. Around him were a dozen posters boasting of health recovered, each bearing a photograph of a transplant patient in overly bright colors, the kind you see in travel agency posters.

As she sat down opposite Mr. Sturluson, his three-day growth of dark beard reminded her of Magnus—another Basque probably, all the dark-haired men in Iceland were descended from Basque sailors!—a thinner, less handsome version of Magnus, which set alarm bells ringing inside her:
Don't lose your temper, don't be as hysterical as Magnus says you are.

So she calmly explained her situation: as the mother of a child who had agreed—as had she and her husband, she made clear—to be an organ donor, she wanted to know what had happened.

“You made the right choice, madam, and I congratulate you. Society needs people like you.”

“What happened after that?”

“We made a wise use of your permission. I have no doubt a life was saved thanks to your generosity.”

“‘No doubt' . . . But why can't I be sure?”

“We aren't authorized to go into details, madam.”

“But you have the details in your possession?”

Mr. Sturluson indicated his computer. “We have that information, of course. For medical reasons, we have to be able to know where the organs went.”

“Then tell me.”

“I'm not authorized.”

“Please.”

He shook his head, the result of which was to project dandruff onto his charcoal gray jacket.

Her hand brushed the computer. “Look, it's here, in this box. Just press the right key and you'll set my mind at rest.”

“Why are you so determined to know, madam?”

She was taken aback. Why? It was necessary to her. Essential. At that moment, her whole being boiled down to that one thing.

“Do I ask you why you're alive, sir?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“What I mean is that people usually fail to answer the important questions. And yet you can answer this question for me. I'm listening.”

“I took an oath, madam.”

She sat back on her chair, brows knitted, nostrils quivering. “Do you think it's normal that a bureaucrat whose only concern is his monthly salary can hold on to vital information about my son, while his mother, who gave birth to him, raised him, loved him, and is now mourning him, can't access it?”

“Normal or not, madam, it's the law.”

She felt she was going to kill him.

He sensed it too.

For a brief lapse of time, Alba's eyes shone with a murderous flame. Everything seemed simple to her: she would strangle him, then open his computer. Not complicated, was it?

Sweat broke out on Sturluson's forehead.

A homicidal joy was boiling up in Alba. Ten more seconds and she would put her hand around this awful man's throat.

A security guard entered without warning.

“Did you call me? Is there a problem?”

He was more than six feet tall and his forearms were thicker than Alba's thighs. She realized that Sturluson had pressed an alarm button.

“No, Ghemar, it's all right,” Sturluson sighed. “Please see the lady out. She's upset because she's just suffered a terrible bereavement. Thank you for coming to see me, madam, and, once again, I congratulate you.”

She felt a strong desire to spit in his face as she left the room, but then she realized that she would only be lowering herself if she paid any more attention to a mere cog in the bureaucratic machine.

“You could at least shave,” she said as she went out. “Given how ugly you already are . . . ”

 

*

 

She'd had enough of playing with the pawns. It was the whole chessboard she had to attack now.

That afternoon, she contacted the people on the Liberaria website. This revolutionary association had the same aims as she did: to denounce the state, to fight excessive rules, to allow individuals to take possession of their own lives, to combat all forms of secrecy.

After several phone conversations with the leader of the group, known as Erik the Red, who, like her, wished to subvert the principles of the world, she was invited to an informal meeting at the Mermaid Café one Monday evening. According to Erik the Red, there would be some twenty people at the meeting.

When she opened the grimy door of the café, she saw only four people: an unusually short man, a pretty redhead who was biting her nails, a fair-haired man thinner than a matchstick, and a punk girl with green hair. She was just checking her watch to make sure she hadn't gotten the wrong time when the short man stood up, dry as a smoked herring, and signaled to her with his childlike hand.

“Erda?” he asked.

“Yes,” Alba said—that was the name she had adopted for her research on the internet.

“I'm Erik the Red,” he said, motioning for her to sit down.

She slipped onto the bench and they started talking over a beer. Cautiously, they exchanged a few general remarks on the dictatorship of the state, just to make sure they were on the same wavelength, then the debate warmed up. As he spoke—passionately, lyrically—Erik the Red lived up to his pseudonym; if, on entering, Alba hadn't seen any resemblance between this puny fellow and the tenth-century Viking hero, banished from Norway then from Iceland, who had discovered the virgin coasts of Greenland, she could now glimpse the shade of that ambitious soul in him.

The members' individual experiences explained their commitment: Erik the Red had seen his father blow his brains out after a drastic tax adjustment, the punk girl had wandered from orphanage to reform school, the thin, fair-haired man had been arrested several times for stealing documents while investigating corruption among members of parliament. But it was Vilma, the redhead with the creamy complexion, who moved Alba the most, since both shared an identical history—the fragile Vilma had lost her daughter not long before and couldn't find out what had become of her organs.

This unexpected similarity moved Alba deeply. At any other time, she wouldn't have paid any attention to this young woman. She would have been repelled by trifling things—her chewed nails, her yellow teeth—but now she rose above this aesthetic approach to the world and concentrated on Vilma's personality. It was obvious the woman was suffering as much as she was. Whenever Vilma mentioned her daughter, her fruity voice shook, threatening to break, and brought her audience to the verge of tears. Alba sobbed shamelessly . . . It was as if Vilma were speaking for her.

Urged to tell her story, Alba told them about her encounter with Sturluson. They sympathized, they took offense, and all regretted that she hadn't had time to kill the man. Vilma was staring at her. This response gratified Alba—she hadn't dared tell Magnus what had happened at the transplant center.

“I'll help you,” the fair-haired man, who was known as Whistle, suggested. “I'll try to hack into the website.”

“Can you do that?”

Vilma and Alba were taken aback. Flattered, Whistle nodded.

Alba went home galvanized: she had finally found support, she had finally met people shocked by injustice. Especially Vilma . . .

Before going to bed, she sent her a text.
Pleased to have met you. Shall we stay friends?
A few seconds later, she had a reply:
I can't do without your friendship. See you tomorrow. Love.

 

*

 

Alba began a life in parallel to her official life. Without saying anything to Magnus or Katrin, she saw Vilma every day. The two women understood each other, listened to each other, supported each other, wept together.

At the hospital, Jonas was making good progress: his body was tolerating the transplanted organ. Puzzled not to see his godmother, he sent ever more urgent e-mails, then sent Katrin and Magnus as ambassadors.

“What has he done to you?” her sister and husband asked her.

Alba found it harder and harder to justify her refusal, especially as she couldn't tell them openly that her nephew's fate depended on her investigation: either he had stolen Thor's heart and she would hate him until the day she died, or he was alive thanks to a stranger's heart and she would once again be able to embrace him.