My Struggle: Book 2: A Man in Love (7 page)

He got up and went to the bathroom. The next moment he came out with Vanja and Achilles in front of him. Vanja had put on her broadest smile, Achilles looked rather more guilt-ridden. The sleeves of his small suit jacket were soaked. Vanja’s bare arms glistened with moisture.

‘They had their hands as far down the toilet as they could get them when I went in,’ Linus said. I met Vanja’s eyes and couldn’t help smiling.

‘We’ll have to take this off now, young man,’ Linus said, leading Achilles into the hall. ‘And you make sure you wash your hands properly.’

‘The same applies to you, Vanja,’ I said, getting up. ‘Into the bathroom with you.’

She stretched out her arms over the basin and looked up at me.

‘I’m playing with Achilles!’ she said.

‘I can see that,’ I said. ‘But you don’t have to stick your hands down the loo to do that, do you?’

‘No,’ she said, and laughed.

I wetted my hands under the tap, soaped them, and washed her arms from the tips of her fingers to her shoulders. Then I dried them before kissing her on the forehead and sending her out again. The apologetic smile I wore when I sat down was unnecessary, no one was interested in pursuing this little episode, not even Linus, who as soon as he returned continued the story about a man he had seen attacked by monkeys in Thailand. His face didn’t even break into a smile when the others laughed, but he seemed to inhale their laughter, as if to give the story renewed vigour, which it did, and only when the next wave of laughter broke did he smile, not much, and not at his own wit, it struck me; it was more like an expression of the satisfaction he felt when his face could bask in the merriment he had evoked. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ he said, jabbing his hand in the air. The stern woman, who thus far had been looking out of the window, pulled her chair up and leaned across the table again.

‘Isn’t it tough to have two children so close in age?’ she asked.

‘Yes and no,’ I answered. ‘It is a bit wearing. But it’s still better with two than one. The single-child scenario seems a bit sad, if you ask me . . . I’ve always thought I wanted to have three children. Then there are lots of permutations when they play. And the children are in the majority vis-à-vis the parents . . .’

I smiled. She said nothing. All of a sudden I realised she had an only child.

‘But just one can be brilliant too,’ I said.

She rested her head on her hand.

‘But I wish Gustav had a brother or a sister,’ she said. ‘It’s too much with just us two.’

‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘He’ll have loads of pals in the nursery, and that’s great.’

‘The problem is I haven’t got a husband,’ she said. ‘And so it’s not possible.’

What the
fuck
had that got to do with me?

I sent her a look of sympathy and concentrated on preventing my eyes from wandering, which can easily happen in such situations.

‘And I can’t imagine the men I meet as fathers to my children,’ she continued.

‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘These things sort themselves out.’

‘I don’t believe they do,’ she said. ‘But thank you anyway.’

From the corner of my eye I detected a movement. I turned and looked towards the door. Vanja was coming my way. She stopped right next to me.

‘I want to go home,’ she said. ‘Can’t we go now?’

‘We have to stay for a just a little longer,’ I said. ‘Soon there’ll be cake too. You want some of that, don’t you?’

She didn’t answer.

‘Do you want to sit on my lap?’ I asked.

She nodded, and I moved my wine glass and lifted her up.

‘You sit with me for a bit, and then we’ll go back in. I can stay with you. OK?’

‘OK.’

She sat watching the others round the table. I wondered what she was thinking. How did it seem to her?

I observed her. Her blonde hair was already over her shoulders. A small nose, a little mouth, two tiny ears, both with pointed elfin tips. Her blue eyes, which always betrayed her mood, had a slight squint, hence the glasses. At first she had been proud of them. Now they were the first thing she took off when she was angry. Perhaps because she knew it was important for us that she should wear them?

With us her eyes were lively and cheerful, that is if they didn’t lock and become unapproachable when she was having one of her grand bouts of fury. She was hugely dramatic and could rule the whole family with her temperament; she performed large-scale and complicated relational dramas with her toys, loved having stories read to her but watching films even more, and then preferably ones with characters and high drama which she puzzled over and discussed with us, bursting with questions but also the joy of retelling. For a period it was Astrid Lindgren’s character Madicken she was mad about, and this caused her to jump off the chairs and lie on the floor with her eyes closed; we had to lift her and think at first that she was dead, then realise she had fainted and had concussion, before carrying her, with eyes closed and arms hanging down, to her bed, where she was to lie for three days, preferably while we hummed the sad theme from this scene in the film. Then she leaped to her feet, ran to the chair and started all over again. At the nursery’s Christmas party she was the only one who bowed in response to the applause and who obviously enjoyed the attention. Often the idea of something meant more to her than the thing itself, such as with sweets; she could talk about them for an entire day and look forward to them, but when the sweets were in the bowl in front of her she barely tasted one before spitting it out. However, she didn’t learn from the experience: the next Saturday her expectations of the fantastic sweets were as high again. She wanted so much to go skating, but when we were there, at the rink, with the small skates Linda’s mother had bought for her on her feet and the little ice hockey helmet on her head, she shrieked with anger at the realisation that she couldn’t keep her balance and probably wouldn’t learn to do so any time soon. All the greater therefore was her joy at seeing that she could in fact ski, which happened once when we were on the small patch of snow in my mother’s garden trying out equipment she had come by. But then too the idea of skiing and the joy at being able to do it were greater than actually skiing; she could function quite happily without that. She loved to travel with us, loved to see new places and talked about all the things that had happened for several months afterwards. But most of all she loved to play with other children, of course. It was a great experience for her when other children at the nursery came back home with her. The first time Benjamin was due to come she went around the evening before, inspecting her toys, worried stiff that they were not good enough for him. She had just turned three. But when he arrived they got on like a house on fire and all prior concerns went up in a whirl of excitement and euphoria. Benjamin told his parents that Vanja was the nicest girl in the nursery, and when I told her that – she was sitting in bed playing with her Barbies – she reacted with a display of emotion she had never manifested before.

‘Do you know what Benjamin said?’ I said from the doorway.

‘No,’ she said, looking up at me with sudden interest.

‘He said you were the nicest girl in the nursery.’

I had never seen her filled with such light. She was glowing with happiness. I knew that neither Linda nor I would be able to say anything to make her react like that, and I understood with the immediate clarity of an insight that she was not ours. Her life was utterly her own.

‘What did he say?’ she answered, she wanted to hear it again.

‘He said you were the nicest in the nursery.’

Her smile was shy but happy, and that made me glad too, yet a shadow hung over my happiness, for was it not alarmingly early for others’ thoughts and opinions to mean so much to her? Wasn’t it best for everything to come from her, for it to be rooted in herself? Another time she surprised me like this was when I was in the nursery. I had gone to pick her up and she ran towards me in the corridor and asked if Stella could go with her to the stables afterwards. I said that things didn’t work like that, it had to be planned in advance, we had to speak to her parents first, and Vanja stood watching me say this, obviously disappointed, but when she went to pass on the news to Stella, she didn’t use my reasons. I heard her as I was rummaging in the hall for her rain gear.

‘It’ll be a bit boring for you at the stables,’ she said. ‘Just watching isn’t cool.’

This way of thinking, putting others’ reactions before your own, I recognised from myself, and as we walked towards Folkets Park in the rain I wondered about how she had picked that up. Was it just there, around her, invisible but present, like the air she breathed? Or was it genetic?

I never expressed any of these thoughts I had about the children, except to Linda of course, because these complex questions belonged only where they were, in me and between us. In reality, in the world Vanja inhabited everything was simple and found simple expression, and the complexity arose only in the sum of all the parts, of which naturally she knew nothing. And the fact that we talked a lot about them did not help at all in our daily lives, where everything was a mess and constantly on the verge of chaos. In the first of the Swedish ‘progress conversations’ we had with the nursery staff there was a lot of talk about her not making contact with the teachers, not wanting to sit on their laps or be patted, as well as her shyness. We should work on toughening her up, teaching her to play a more dominant role in games, taking the initiative and talking more, they said. Linda replied that she was tough enough at home, took the lead in all the games, always showed initiative and could talk the hind leg off a donkey. They told us the little she said in the nursery was unclear, her Swedish wasn’t correct, her vocabulary was not that large, so they were wondering if we had considered speech therapy. At this juncture in the conversation we were handed a brochure from one of the town’s speech therapists. They are crazy in this country, I thought. A speech therapist? Did everything have to be institutionalised? She’s only three!

‘No, speech therapy’s out of the question,’ I said. Until that point Linda had been the one to do all the talking. ‘It will sort itself out. I only
started
talking when I was three. Before that I said nothing, apart from single words which were incomprehensible to anyone except my brother.’

They smiled.

‘And when I started speaking it came in long, fluent sentences. It all depends on the individual. We are not sending her to a speech therapist.’

‘Well, that’s up to you,’ said Olaf, the head of the nursery. ‘But you’re welcome to hang on to the brochures and give it some thought.’

‘OK then,’ I said.

I collected her hair in one hand and stroked her neck and the top of her back with one finger. Usually she loved this, especially before going to sleep, until she settled for the night, but this time she squirmed away.

On the other side of the table the stern woman had struck up a conversation with Mia, who gave her her undivided attention while Frida and Erik had begun to clear away the plates and cutlery. The white layer cake, which was the next item on the agenda, stood proudly on the worktop, decorated with raspberries and five small candles, beside a column of square cartons containing Bravo, a sugar-free apple drink.

Gustav, who until now had been sitting beside me with his back half-turned, swivelled round to face us.

‘Hi, Vanja,’ he said. ‘Are you having fun?’

As he didn’t get a response, nor any eye contact, he looked at me.

‘You’ll have to come and play with Jocke one day,’ he said, winking at me. ‘Fancy doing that?’

‘Yes,’ Vanja said, regarding him with eyes that suddenly dilated. Jocke was the biggest boy in the nursery. Going to his house was more than she dared hope for.

‘We’ll fix something up,’ Gustav said. Raised his glass, took a swig of red wine and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

‘Are you writing anything new then?’ he asked.

I shrugged.

‘Yes, I’m keeping busy,’ I said.

‘Do you work at home?’

‘Yes.’

‘How do you go about it? Do you sit waiting for inspiration?’

‘No, that’s no good. I have to work every day like you.’

‘Interesting. Interesting. There are not many distractions at home then?’

‘I manage fine.’

‘Ah, you do, do you? Well . . .’

‘Let’s all go into the living room then,’ Frida said. ‘And we can sing for Stella.’

She took a lighter from her pocket and lit the five candles.

‘What a wonderful cake,’ Mia said.

‘Yes, isn’t it?’ Frida said. ‘And it’s healthy too. There’s hardly any sugar in the cream.’

She lifted it up.

‘Will you go in and switch off the light, Erik?’ she said as people began to move from their seats and leave the room. I followed holding Vanja’s hand, and just managed to find a position against the wall furthest away when Frida entered the darkened hall with the illuminated cake in her hands. As she came into view from the table she began to sing
Ja må hon leva
, whereupon the other adults immediately joined in, and the birthday song rang around the small room as she placed the cake on the table in front of Stella, who was watching with gleaming eyes.

‘Shall I blow now?’ she asked.

Frida nodded as she sang.

Everyone clapped afterwards, me too. Then the lights came back on, and for a few minutes slices of the cake were distributed among the children. Vanja didn’t want to sit at the table, but on the floor by the wall, where we settled down, her with a plate of cake on her lap. It was only then I noticed she wasn’t wearing her shoes.

‘Where are your golden shoes?’ I asked.

‘They’re stupid,’ she said.

‘No, they’re not, they’re lovely,’ I said. ‘They’re a proper princess’s shoes!’

‘They’re stupid,’ she repeated.

‘But where are they?’

She didn’t answer.

‘Vanja,’ I said.

She looked up at me. Her mouth was white with cream.

‘Over there,’ she said, motioning towards the other room. I got up and went in, looked around, no shoes. I went back.