The Prize (120 page)

‘How did it happen? You said it was planned.’

‘Two years ago, a well-known Swedish architect, rather handsome and impressive, came into Nordiska Kompaniet to buy a dress for his wife’s birthday. Lilly served him. They fell in love with each other. Young women like Lilly do not believe in promiscuity, but they do believe in love, not sublimating it but expressing it and enjoying it. They had an affair. As I said, this architect loved Lilly, but he also loved his wife and three children. Lilly is sensible, you can see. She knew that she could never possess him legally. But if marriage was denied her, she wanted the fruit of marriage. She wanted a child in her lover’s image. So they talked it over, exactly like married couples, and they went ahead. Soon enough, Lilly was pregnant.’

Craig tried to keep an open mind. Daranyi was making it too reasonable. ‘But the consequences—didn’t she think of that?’ Craig asked.

‘There are no consequences in Sweden,’ said Daranyi. The coffee had arrived, and he dropped two cubes of sugar in his cup and stirred them. ‘The word bastard is unknown here, and that is as it should be. After all, Mr. Craig, the newborn child has committed no sin.’

‘Right,’ said Craig, ‘but still—’

‘Sweden does not encourage illegitimacy. Women like Lilly do not prefer it. Marriage is still the ideal. But life goes on, and love happens, and Sweden faces these facts. Because every child’s birth, by either a married or unwed mother, is recorded here, and accepted, Sweden has the highest illegitimacy rate in the world. Sometimes, I wonder. I think that is only because they admit to what other countries hide and make ugly.’

‘You mean Arne actually won’t suffer?’

‘He won’t suffer at all. When Lilly was ready to give birth, I drove her to a state hospital, and the father, the architect, was already there. After Arne was born, Lilly was put in a room with two married mothers, and treated exactly as they were. The cost of the hospital and doctor was only one krona a day—maybe twenty cents American—a virtue of socialized medicine so detested by your American doctors. The government gave Lilly four hundred kronor as a gift, for her immediate needs. While she was still in the hospital, the appointed guardian appeared. You see, the Swedish welfare state thinks of everything. In 1917, around that time, they established what they call the Svenska Barnav
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mnnden or Child Welfare Committee, to supervise unwed mothers. This organization has female guardians, trained for two years in sociology, psychology, child care, and it assigns a guardian to each unwed mother. The guardian gives advice, sees that there is money, and so forth. Lilly’s guardian has been visiting her and the boy every month—today they are meeting in the government nursery building, where we were—and soon, the guardian will look in maybe only twice a year, until Arne is eighteen.’

‘How does Lilly manage?’

‘I was coming to that, Mr. Craig. The Swedes, as I have said, are sensible. Every child must have a father. Very well. If the father does not volunteer his responsibility, as Arne’s father did, the state finds the father with help of the mother. If he admits paternity, all is well. If he refuses to admit it, he is given a blood test. If the blood test is positive, he is automatically the father.’

‘But blood tests aren’t always accurate,’ said Craig.

‘No, they are not, but they are better than nothing. There are a few inequities, I am sure, but very few. If the blood test is negative, and the father cannot be found, or if the father is found but too poor to help, the state takes over financial support of the so-called illegitimate youngster. Lilly’s architect, of course, admitted paternity at once. He now gives Lilly ten per cent of his monthly income to take care of Arne.’

‘What does the architect’s wife say to this?’

‘He has never told her. If she outlives him, one day she will know, for Arne will receive part of the inheritance. More often, the men tell their wives. There are scenes, but I have never heard of a divorce over this.’

Craig stared at his coffee, but had no interest in it yet. ‘Mr. Daranyi, I don’t want to pry, but—does Lilly still see her son’s father?’

‘No. That was over with half a year ago. The decision, you must believe me, was Lilly’s own. She finally fell out of love with him. She saw that he was not really her type. She is happy now that he was not free to marry her, or there would be either an unhappy marriage held together by the child, or there would be a divorce. In case you wonder, she is still pleased to have the little boy. For the time, Arne is her life. She keeps him in the state nursery all the time now. But later, she will let him be there only in the day, while she works, and at night and Sundays she will have him in the apartment.’

‘And there is no disgrace whatsoever?’

‘Mr. Craig, when Arne was born, Lilly put a birth announcement in the newspapers, and she sent blue cards of happiness to all her friends. She has several friends in similar circumstances. One girl, in the nudist society, and with a good job—she was thirty-four and dying to have a baby, but because of the man shortage she was afraid she would never find a husband. At her job, she discussed this problem with her employer, whom she admired, and he co-operated, and now she has a daughter. Is that not better for a normal woman than living barren and sterile and withered? And is it not better for the child, at least when he comes by accident, to recognize him and make him like everyone else, not to do what is done in other countries, make him sinful or dead by abortion, or make the mother a fallen woman or a suicide or forced into a shotgun marriage? I think so.’

Craig nodded slowly. Understanding had come, and in an hour he had grown again. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I think so, too.’

‘You heard Lilly speak of her sex education in school. That is universal here. No girl, no boy, graduates without complete knowledge about intercourse, birth, abortion, contraceptives. That would be impossible in your country, because the churches would not allow it. But here the Lutheran Church is the state church, and the state dominates it. Here the church is weak. Hardly anyone attends it. Education and realistic government supplant it. Is that so bad? Let us be honest. Swedish young people are no different in their sexual needs from American young people. At seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, the urges are the same everywhere. But in America, the love is illicit, all behind the barn and in a lovers’ lane and in motels, and spoiled by shame and guilts and secrecy. Here the love is not illicit. It is natural. If a girl loves a boy, she has intercourse with him because it is the normal thing to do. If the love continues, they marry. If it is not good, they do not marry. I have read the findings of your Dr. Chapman, who took the sex survey of your married women in America. What were his statistics? Four out of ten married women had premarital sex relations. Well, there was a similar survey in Sweden. Here, eight out of ten married women had intercourse before they were married, and the majority by the age of eighteen. You see, Mr. Craig, they are freer here, and no worse for it. In fact, better for it. Marriages here are more solid. A man does not marry a woman so that he can sleep with her. He sleeps with her, and then marries her because he does not want to be without her.’

Craig sipped his coffee absently. Lilly was on his mind. There was a question, and by now, it should not have troubled him, but he was a product of his past. ‘What will happen to Lilly?’ he asked.

Daranyi shrugged. ‘Who knows? She is still young. Swedish women marry relatively late. I believe the average marries at twenty-six or so. Lilly has found men she loves. Maybe one day, she will find one she loves enough to marry.’

‘Why did she—why did she submit to me?’

Daranyi smiled. ‘She did not submit to you, Mr. Craig. You submitted to her.’

‘I’m not so sure.’

‘I am. Lilly has love on her own terms.’

Craig set down his empty cup. ‘It all seems different now,’ he said. ‘Up to last night, it was just a—a side adventure—a tumble with a lovely girl. But now—’

‘Now what, Mr. Craig?’

‘I can’t say exactly. It seems she deserves more. And her son, despite what you’ve said—he deserves more.’

‘Mr. Craig, I detect in you the incurable disease you hold in common with all your countrymen.’

‘What is that?’

‘Guilt, Mr. Craig, guilt—from cradle to the grave.’

‘But the boy—’

‘Do not worry about the boy. He is Arne Hedqvist, secure and accepted. He does not have horns. Lilly knows—I have told her—that some of the greatest names of history were illegitimate children—Leonardo da Vinci, Erasmus, Pope Clement VII, the younger Dumas, your Alexander Hamilton, our Strindberg. They managed. Arne will manage better. And Lilly will manage, too. She has no guilts. Perhaps this is a good day for you. Perhaps after today you will have no guilts, either.’

Daranyi looked past Craig and waved.

‘Here she comes now,’ he said, turning his seat and rising. ‘We must go.’

Craig came to his feet slowly. He wished he could discuss all this with someone, someone close. He tried to think of Miller’s Dam and Harriet, but neither came alive. What came alive was the vision of Emily Stratman. If only he could speak to her, but he could not, because between them was an invisible barrier. Both had reached to surmount it, but they had not touched. Emily was, as yet, unreal. Only the girl with the golden hair, before him, was real, but here again was guilt, the smooth-rubbed Leah guilt.

What, he wondered, does one owe all others?

When does one belong to oneself alone, oneself alone?

Dr. Hans Eckart had left the taxi, and, in his unbending, goose-stepping stride, approached the goateed, diminutive figure who had answered his summons, and now waited on the street-corner.

‘Carl,’ said Eckart.

Carl Adolf Krantz whirled around, and without bothering to take Eckart’s formal gloved hand, he grabbed his arm and pushed him towards a doorway.

‘In there,’ said Krantz with urgency.

Annoyed, Eckart made the concession to the Swede’s foolish melodrama, and permitted himself to be pushed into the open recess of a
konditori
entrance.

‘What has got into you, Carl?’

But Krantz was peeking at three receding figures, a stout man, a tall man, and a young woman, across the street. ‘
Gott sei dank
,’ he muttered at last, ‘he did not see us together.’

‘Who?’ asked Eckart with exasperation. ‘
Um Himmels willen
—what is this idiocy?’

Krantz had recovered, and was immediately humble and apologetic. ‘Forgive me the bad moment, Hans. I did not wish to inconvenience you. But just as you came towards me, I saw across the street, coming out of the restaurant, the Hungarian.’

‘
Zum Teufel!
What Hungarian?’

‘Remember when I spoke to you of’—he paused discreetly, looked behind him, but the door of the tea shop was closed—‘the secret Stratman vote, how I manoeuvred it?’

‘Yes, yes—’

‘I told you of a Hungarian clown who passes for a spy—he is an investigator, actually, with good press connections—and how I hired him to inform me of Stratman’s rival candidates in physics. Do you recall? He was the one who learned the Spaniard was a Falangist and the two Australians homosexuals.’

‘Vaguely, I remember.’

‘He was across the street just now. There would have been nothing wrong in his seeing us, but he is curious—by nature of his calling—sometimes gossipy, and I thought it wiser—’