The Unit (19 page)

No, I had no desire whatsoever to get close to Petra, to ask personal questions or even to pretend to believe that her goodwill was genuine. I said:

“There is absolutely no need to switch off the surveillance cameras, from my point of view; it would give me no pleasure whatsoever. I have no intention of doing anything that would be better unseen or unheard. And in any case I have no way of checking whether the surveillance is switched off or not, so it makes no difference.”

But she didn’t give up:

“Irrespective of what you believe or think or feel might give you pleasure, I will personally ensure that the apartment is blocked to the cameras between …”

She looked at her watch, then glanced up at me:

“Is two hours enough?”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“Let’s say three,” she said. “Shall we say between one and four this afternoon?”

I nodded.

“Okay, so you have free access to room 3, section F2 between thirteen hundred hours and sixteen hundred hours today.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“During that time the surveillance will be switched off.”

“Whatever you say,” I said.

She got up and came around the table on her way to the door. As she was passing me, she stopped and pressed her hand lightly on my shoulder.

“And let me know,” she said, “if there’s anything else I can do for you.”

Then she removed her hand and left.

26

The only sound was a faint humming from the air-conditioning. No sounds penetrated from outside, the silence was compact—like in a padded cell, where any risk of an echo or other sound effects has been removed. I had never experienced this kind of silence in Johannes’s apartment before—or any other apartment in the unit, for that matter.

I had closed the door behind me, turned the bolt, and was now standing with my back to the door, looking at Johannes’s living room and the wall he had built around his kitchenette. If I had placed my hands on my back I would have touched the door, I was standing so close to it. You might have thought I was afraid of something in the room, you might have thought I was afraid to go in, that I was unsure whether I really wanted to be there, or whether I ought to be there. But it wasn’t that. I wasn’t afraid, or uncertain, just slow; perhaps it was the stillness in the room that was making me that way.

On the dining table stood two empty coffee mugs, a bread basket containing a forgotten slice of whole-grain bread, and two plates with crumbs; one of the plates had on it a half-eaten sandwich with a shiny slice of cheese, the edges turning upward. The remains of yesterday’s breakfast. The half-sandwich was mine; I had been hungry, much hungrier than I usually was in the mornings—perhaps it was the knowledge of the child in my stomach that made me suddenly think I needed to eat more than usual. But when I started my third sandwich I had realized I couldn’t finish it.

“Do you want half of this?” I’d asked.

Johannes had shaken his head and said:

“No thanks, darling, I’m full.”

Then he had sat there looking at me for a long time, his expression serious. In the end I had laughed out loud and asked:

“What’s the matter? Do I look funny?”

“Not in the least. You look more beautiful than I’ve ever seen you.”

When we left the table and I was leaving to go back to my room to work, we had hugged exactly as we always did, and I had said:

“See you tonight.”

And he had said:

“I love you, Dorrit. I love
both of you
,” and he had placed one hand on my stomach and I had replied that I loved him more than I had ever loved anyone, which was true.

And he had kissed me and stroked my hair and whispered:

“You have given my life a meaning, do you know that? The meaning of my life is you.”

All morning he had been a little more serious than usual, a little less flirtatious, slightly less playful and naughty. But then he had just found out he was going to be a parent, and it wasn’t unusual for him to say serious, loving things to me—for
us
to say serious and loving things to each other—when we went our separate ways after breakfast. So how was I to know that this talk of the meaning of life was his way of saying good-bye?

Was it cowardly of him not to say anything? Or was it thoughtful? I don’t know. I only know that whether he was cowardly or thoughtful or both, he did it out of love.

How long I stood there just inside the door I don’t know, but when I finally began to move I was stiff, and my legs felt numb and swollen, just like when I was really young and I was at high school and worked in the book department of a big store in my spare time, or later on when I wasn’t quite so young and I supported myself by posing as a life model for art classes, standing still for twenty minutes at a time with a five-minute break, day in and day out for several weeks sometimes; I would feel numb and swollen just as I did now, and in this state I moved through the room, over to Johannes’s desk, where I found a CD in a clear plastic case beside the computer.
Blue Whale
, Johannes had printed on the disk with a black marker pen. His collection of short stories. I left it where it was, I didn’t even touch it; partly because I had already read it, partly because I was quite sure that the work of dispensable authors was well looked after by the unit staff who, unlike us, had contact with the outside world. During the past year I had read a small number of new books written by “unusually driven authors making their debut,” who later turned out to be authors who were, or had been, here in the unit.

Between the computer and the printer lay all kinds of things that are typically found on a desk: pens, an eraser, a ruler, paper clips, and Post-it notes in different colors and sizes. Among these bits and pieces lay the pink fossil stone. I picked it up and weighed it in my hand, closing my fingers around it. It was cool and smooth and had a distinct weight, without actually being heavy.

In the bedroom the bed was unmade. I had always slept on the inside, next to the wall, when I spent the night with Johannes. Now I lay down on the outside, in his place, and drew the duvet up to my chin. The scent of him was here, acrid and subtle at the same time, like nutmeg or cumin, and on the pillow where his head had rested lay odd white hairs that had been his.

I lay on my side, inhaled the scent and clutched the fossil stone in my hand.

If he had driven to the south coast on a different afternoon, I thought. If he had driven there on one of those afternoons when I was there with Jock during the autumn and winter, instead of one of the days when I wasn’t there. And if we had walked toward each other and caught sight of each other, and I had thought, Oh look, there’s Johannes Alby, and he’d thought, Oh look, there’s Dorrit Weger with her little dog. And if we had stopped and chatted, and if I had invited him back to my house for a cup of coffee or a bowl of soup or some pasta. If it had started like that. If it had started then.

PART 3

1

The aroma of chervil and freshly baked bread hit me as Vivi opened the door. I was late. I had hesitated for quite some time before I had actually walked out of my apartment and taken the few steps down the hall to Vivi’s door and knocked.

I had been feeling so tired. I had been so tired for so long, I just hadn’t had the strength to socialize, to turn up at parties or dinners or other gatherings where you were expected to have fun, to be interested in other people and to talk to more than one person at a time. I had withdrawn, been passive, at times even apathetic, and I would probably have cut myself off completely if it hadn’t been for Elsa, Alice, Vivi and Lena. They had been there the whole time. During the first weeks after Johannes’s final donation they had even taken turns to stay the night with me. Every time I woke up because I was upset or angry or felt sick or whatever, there was someone there to support and console and fetch water and make tea and listen and hold my hand until I went back to sleep.

But they were there afterward as well, after those first few days when I was presumably in shock. Quiet. In the background. On standby. And they were here whenever I needed them—or needed anyone at all—to talk to, or just to have around. And they did it without asking anything of me, without expecting me to be grateful or even pleasant. This had gone on for over two months.

When Vivi finally said one day that she was thinking of inviting some friends to dinner, and then, very cautiously, added: “It would be really lovely if you came too, Dorrit,” I felt that yes, perhaps I ought to try. And after a lot of dillydallying, here I was.

“You came!” said Vivi, taking my hand and pulling me in—as if she was afraid my courage would fail at the last minute, and I would run away if she didn’t grab hold of me and give me a helping hand.

She led me over to the table where the other guests were already seated and were just helping themselves to newly baked whole-grain bread and a steaming carrot soup with fresh chervil, because they had just given up on the idea that I might turn up. There was Elsa, Alice and Lena, and two people I’d never seen before. Vivi introduced them to me and we shook hands. They were called Görel and Mats.

Mats had arrived last month, Görel just a week ago, and she still had that expression newcomers always wear: horror and grief and rage—or whatever it might be. The fear of death, perhaps.

I sat down between Alice and Elsa, who hugged me from their respective sides. Alice took the opportunity to plant a noisy kiss on my cheek, and everyone laughed. When I turned and looked at her up close for the first time in ages, I noticed that she had changed. The coarseness of her facial features had been replaced by a kind of fragility, to a certain extent. She looked soft in a way I had never seen her look before. I thought perhaps the male hormones were finally beginning to leave her body. But she looked so tired as well, slightly hollow-eyed, slightly haggard. But then who isn’t haggard? I said to myself, pushing aside the stirrings of a sense of unease, and helped myself to the carrot soup.

During dinner the conversation moved through a range of topics. I didn’t take much part in it, I just sat there listening most of the time. Eventually they started talking about the outside world. The community. Things were changing out there. The number of childless fifty-year-old women and sixty-year-old men was dwindling significantly, and dispensable individuals were now being taken from professions that had previously been completely protected. It no longer mattered if you were a schoolteacher or a day care teacher or a welfare officer or a nurse or any other profession that involved caring for people; not even midwives were given a dispensation now; if you were childless, you were childless, end of story.

“And as if that weren’t enough,” said Mats, “there’s talk of reducing the age limit. People are really stressed out. Kids are getting pregnant at seventeen or eighteen, just to be on the safe side. The queues at the fertility and IVF clinics are getting longer and longer. The same with the adoption centers. Some people don’t make it to the front of the queue before it’s too late. And cases of HIV and chlamydia are increasing rapidly, because women are just going out and picking up one stranger after another and having unprotected sex.”

“And the number of small children being kidnapped has increased as well,” added Görel. “People are desperate.”

“There don’t seem to be any guarantees about anything any longer,” said Vivi. “Not for anyone. It makes everyone feel so insecure.”

“Yes, but why didn’t we think of that?” said Elsa. “Stealing a kid. The way these needed individuals spread themselves out with their strollers and carriages and little ones running around all over the place, they can’t possibly keep an eye on them all at the same time. I think it would be easy just to pick a sleeping baby out of its stroller in passing, while the parents are trying to watch the rest of the kids.”

I thought: So that’s the reason! That’s why Petra had so obstinately maintained that I was an unsuitable parent: because there was a shortage of dispensable individuals. The demand for organ donors and candidates for various experiments was no doubt as great as ever—perhaps even greater. I thought. But I didn’t say anything. Because I hadn’t yet told my friends I was pregnant. I hadn’t found the right opportunity yet.

Suddenly I realized that this was as good an opportunity as any, right here and now. So I opened my mouth to say: “Speaking of children, I’ve got something to tell you …”

But Alice beat me to it. Although she didn’t say “speaking of children,” she just came straight out and said, apropos of nothing at all:

“I’ve got something to tell you.” And she went on: “I’ve got something I
have
to tell you. And I have to do it as quickly as possible because I might not have much time left so I’ll do it now. I’ve got a brain tumor.”

There was silence. Not a cough, not a gasp, not even the slightest clink of glass, porcelain or cutlery. Just silence. Everyone froze, everyone turned to look at Alice as she sat there beside me, so small all of a sudden, it seemed to me, so old all at once. Just silence, just endless stillness, until she herself spoke again:

“They think it’s the radiation.” She turned to Görel, the new arrival, and explained: “You see, I’m involved in an experiment with some kind of radiation. Something radioactive.”

“But why?” asked Görel.

“Why? Because I’m a dispensable person and a lab bunny, of course!” said Alice, screwing her mouth up and chewing like a bunny rabbit.

Nobody laughed. Not even Alice.

“No, no,” said Görel. “I mean: what are they going to use the radiation for? What’s the point of the actual experiment?”

“The point?” said Alice, waving one hand dismissively. “My dear friend, I haven’t the faintest idea!”

2

The longer a person remains in the reserve bank unit, the more risky the experiments he or she is expected to participate in, while at the same time he or she moves closer to donating vital organs.

Now, knowing that there was a shortage of dispensable individuals, I could see that the situation in the unit had changed somewhat: fewer new arrivals came in each month—now it was usually two or three, whereas earlier it had been between five and ten. People were used up more quickly, and the generations grew shorter. Alice, for example, who had presumably been exposed to experiments involving chemical weapons, had only been in the unit for a year and a half. And during the time immediately following the dinner with Vivi, my closest friends had to undergo the following:

Elsa took part in a series of short but debilitating humane experiments, interspersed with donations. First it was a test involving some new super cleaning fluid, then an experiment with cigarettes and other tobacco- and nicotine-based products. Then her respiratory organs were exposed to vapor and gases from various chemical solvents. And between these experiments she donated part of her small intestine, the cornea from one eye, and the auditory bone from one ear. These operations just meant that she couldn’t see or hear as well, and that she got very tired, but the experiments gave her a horrible, itchy eczema on her hands and arms, bronchitis, and even asthma. Her general fitness and overall condition worsened. She was no longer the same athletic woman she had been just a year earlier; she got out of breath very easily and often had to rest. She stopped diving, and instead contented herself with quietly swimming the breaststroke in the shallow pool.

During the same period Vivi donated one kidney and a section of her liver; she also participated in all kinds of medical experiments, mostly involving psychiatric drugs that, as well as making her either listless and calm or euphorically high, also caused side effects including dizziness, palpitations, swollen limbs, rashes and hair loss. Within a very short time she and Elsa became old ladies, slowly hobbling along, arm in arm, as they went for their daily walk in the winter garden, stopping every few minutes to cough, catch their breath, or clutch their chest.

Lena, who by this time was one of the seniors, having spent three years in the unit, was taken in to donate her pancreas, liver, kidney and intestinal system. She did what Majken had done: told us that she was going to make her final donation, but not when, so that one day she simply wasn’t there anymore. The same thing happened to Elsa and Vivi as had happened to me: they went to Lena’s room to look for her just as the section orderlies were busy clearing everything out.

But in my opinion Alice was the one who had suffered most because of the increased demand for dispensable material.

Meanwhile I was safe, protected like a sea eagle, and was sent for regular checks, given tried and tested dietary supplements, and went to yoga and dance and Friskis & Svettis. And the humane experiments I took part in involved harmless things like sleep or dream studies, or comparing and charting a person’s ability to see in the dark or to distinguish different tastes, smells and sounds.

It was only a matter of time before Elsa, Vivi and Alice would notice that I was being treated completely differently from them, despite the fact that the four of us had been in the unit for roughly the same length of time. It was of course also only a question of time before they would be able to see that I was pregnant. I had already filled out: my hips were broader, my breasts were bigger, and my stomach was protruding under the loose clothes I had started to wear to hide the changes for as long as possible. So far I could just about get away with looking like someone who had just put on weight—at least as long as I kept my clothes on. But at around this time I started to avoid changing or showering in the sports center, I stopped taking a sauna, stopped swimming because the shape of my stomach under my swimsuit was unmistakable.

In other words, it was high time I told the others about my condition. Since I still regarded Elsa as my best friend and confidante, I decided to start with her, and took the opportunity one evening when the two of us were alone together in her room. Vivi was busy with library inventory and wouldn’t be there until late—they always slept together nowadays, just as Johannes and I had done.

Elsa was lying on the sofa, breathing heavily and gasping for air from time to time. I was sitting in the armchair across from her.

“Elsa,” I said. “There’s something I have to tell you, something I’ve been … carrying for a while.”

She looked at me, closing her cloudy eye—the one from which the cornea had been donated—and squinting anxiously with the other.

“Don’t tell me you’re sick too, Dorrit?”

“No, I’m not sick. I’m pregnant.”

“What?” Elsa’s arms and legs flailed as she struggled into a sitting position, turned her good ear toward me, coughed, cleared her throat noisily, then said hoarsely, almost hissing: “What did you say?”

“I’m pregnant,” I repeated.

“Are you joking, have you gone mad?”

“I’m not joking,” I said.

Her expression—she had never looked at me that way, I didn’t recognize the way she was looking at me, didn’t know how to interpret it—disbelief or envy or disgust or what?

“How the fuck did that happen?” she spat out eventually.

I felt as if I’d been stabbed, she’d never sworn at me before. I didn’t reply.

“How long have you known?” she asked.

“Since the day before Johannes’s final donation,” I answered.

“But that was several months ago. Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I’m saying it now,” I said. “It’s …” I was stumbling now, a lump in my throat, “it’s not unusual to wait for a while before you tell friends and acquaintances; the risk of miscarriage is highest in the early weeks.”

“I know that, for fuck’s sake! Do you think I was born yesterday, do you think you’re the first person I know who’s ended up pregnant and started handing out a whole lot of completely superfluous information?”

Once again I didn’t reply.

“How far along are you?” she asked, then gasped for air.

“Seventeen or eighteen weeks,” I managed to say before her chest started rattling, and it was as if her windpipe was somehow blocked, as if something had gone down the wrong way, but then came a thin, whistling sound. I imagined a very, very narrow, flattened tube through which a minute amount of air managed to filter, down into her lungs. She grabbed her inhaler, which was next to her on the sofa, held it to her mouth, and pressed the button; there was a faint click and she breathed in. After a little while she began to breathe more evenly, more calmly, but the whistling sound was still there as a faint accompaniment when she spoke:

“So you’re going to have a child?” she said. “A baby? Here?”

I shook my head.

“No. Not here. Are you going to go out there and live a needed, worthwhile life, showing off with your offspring and spreading yourself out all over the streets and squares and public transportation, pushing everybody else out of the way with your stroller and all the rest of the stuff you’ll find it necessary to carry around with you?”

I shook my head again, then told her as briefly and matter-of-factly as I could about the two choices Petra had given me: have the fetus transplanted or have the child adopted. Of course I didn’t say anything about the third alternative, the one connected to the key card that was still in the right pocket of my pants; I put my hand in my pocket and touched it from time to time, undecided. So far I hadn’t been in any state to make my mind up on that particular question, or even to look for doors that might lead out of the unit.

After my short explanation I expected Elsa to be sympathetic, or at least to politely express regret at the fact that I wouldn’t be allowed to be a parent to my child. But she didn’t. Instead she said:

“I don’t know, Dorrit, but this feels really bad. It feels like shit, to be honest.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“Well, you’re not one of us anymore. I mean, how are we going to be able to … How are we going to be able to trust you? Now that you’ve gone and become like them?”

I didn’t know how to respond to this. I was completely unprepared for her reaction. I didn’t understand it. I understood that she probably, in common with most dispensable individuals, lived with the sorrow encapsulated within her of never having had a child, and that this sorrow had now been activated. But I didn’t understand why she was so angry with me; after all, I hadn’t gotten pregnant in order to upset her or to hurt anyone.

When I didn’t speak, she went on:

“So you’re going to be waddling around here, with a big belly like a Buddha, looking smug and important and on a higher plane, just like all those needed stuck-up bitches out there in the community?”

I didn’t say anything now either. I just got up and left. Behind me I could hear her having another attack, gasping and panting for air. The faint click of the inhaler was the last thing I heard before I closed the door behind me.