The Unit (20 page)

3

Alice went downhill quickly. It had begun with headaches, pains in her jaw, dizziness and anxiety. Just after she had told us about her tumor, she started to get confused from time to time. She would suddenly lose the thread while she was talking, would forget that we’d arranged to meet, would get lost and be unable to find her way home, or would get the day’s activities all mixed up. She was often upset, weeping in despair. The unit authorities let her carry on as long as she was no danger to herself or to others, for example as long as she didn’t do anything like leaving something on the stove. But we all knew it was only a matter of time before she was sent away to make her final donation.

We tried to spend time together as we used to do, Alice, Elsa, Vivi and I, but we didn’t have the same joy, the same healing humor between us. This was partly because Alice’s illness increasingly overshadowed everything, and partly because the relationship between Elsa and me was chilly to say the least, which naturally affected the atmosphere too.

I hadn’t gone through with my plan to tell Vivi and Alice about my condition as well. I presumed that Elsa had passed the information on to Vivi, and I wasn’t sure whether I ought to tell Alice at all. When I noticed how quickly she was deteriorating, getting lost in time and space more and more often, and staying that way for longer and longer periods, I decided there wasn’t any point in saying anything.

But even if we couldn’t quite manage to socialize like before, we still took care of Alice. When she became bedridden we took turns sitting with her every evening and night. During the day members of staff came and went, made sure that she ate something, washed herself and got dressed—things that at quite an early stage she forgot to do, or forgot that she’d done already. Sometimes she took a shower every hour or so, sometimes she didn’t wash for several days, sometimes she ate breakfast several times a day, while on other days she would forget to eat at all. She would go around wearing several layers of clothes because, strangely enough, she didn’t notice that she was already dressed when she decided it was time to put some clothes on.

One night when it was my turn to sit with her, I was woken by the sound of her crying as I lay on the sofa in the living room. She was crying like a child, that all-absorbing, abandoned sobbing that is so heartrending you’ll do anything in your power to make things right again, and I shot up from the sofa, felt dizzy and almost lost my balance in the darkness, leaned on the wall for support, and tottered off feeling slightly nauseous. In the bedroom I switched on the light and she was lying there in bed, flat on her back with her arms down by her sides, looking up at the ceiling and sobbing so hard that her whole body was shaking.

I sat down and got hold of her shoulders.

“There now, Alice, it’s okay,” I said. “What is it? What are you sad about?”

She didn’t reply, just kept on sobbing as if she could neither see, hear, nor feel my presence. I spoke to her in a calming voice, stroked her arms, her hair and her cheeks, dried her tears with the back of my hand. I tried to reach her, tried to make her understand that she wasn’t alone.

“I’m here, Alice,” I said. “I’m here. Maybe I can help you. Don’t be scared, there’s nothing to be scared of.”

I just kept talking, as reassuringly and calmly as I could, and after a long time the sobbing slowly subsided and she said:

“I know. I know you’re there, Mom, but I can’t see you.”

For a fraction of a second I considered whether I should tell her that I wasn’t her mother, but decided not to bother; when it came down to it, it didn’t really matter who I was at that particular moment, and instead I said:

“That’s because you’re looking up at the ceiling, darling. I’m sitting beside you.”

She lowered her gaze then, her eyes flickering around the room, turned her head in my direction and eventually managed, with some difficulty, to focus on my face. She sighed deeply, closed her eyes, rolled over onto her side facing me, curled up, made a few contented smacking noises with her lips, then fell asleep. I pulled the covers up over her shoulder, stroked her hair and went back to the sofa in the living room, and I fell asleep too.

In the morning she knew exactly who I was once again. She was just tired, bone weary somehow—the sort of tiredness, I assume, that sleep doesn’t really touch; you just have to work your way through it, and either it disappears of its own accord, or it stays put and becomes a part of you. In Alice’s case, of course, the tiredness was due to the tumor, and was definitely there to stay. I helped her to the bathroom then back to bed, an effort so taxing that she went back to sleep for a while as I got breakfast ready.

“Thank you, Dorrit,” she said, slurring her words slightly, when I carried in the breakfast tray. “You’re an angel.”

“So are you,” I said. “You’ve taken care of me plenty of times.”

She drew herself up into a sitting position and I plumped up the pillows so that she had some support for her back when she leaned against the headboard.

“Yes, but you weren’t ill,” she said. “It’s harder work with sick people, especially if they’re going to die soon.”

As I passed her a cup of coffee I said I wasn’t sure if I agreed with her. “A person who’s physically healthy but in despair can be just as difficult to deal with, surely. Looking after someone who’s ill is quite simple, really; at least you know what you have to do, in purely practical terms. But what do you do with someone you can’t do anything for?”

Alice smiled.

“You listen, I guess,” she said.

“Yes, and isn’t that the hardest thing of all?” I said.

“Is it? It doesn’t require any special knowledge or skills. Just the ability to hear. And a little calm in your body. The ability to sit still and listen. I don’t see why it should be so difficult.”

Then she turned her attention to her coffee for a while, taking tiny, tiny sips, closing her eyes for a second after each sip, looking as if she was really enjoying it. Then she suddenly stopped, looked at me and said:

“Try not to be angry with Elsa.”

“What?” I said. “So you know we …”

I didn’t know how to finish the sentence, so I let it hang there, gaping, incomplete.

“I’ve noticed,” replied Alice in that slow, tired tone of voice that had become hers. She added:

“You have told her, haven’t you?”

“Told her what?”

“That you’re having a baby, of course.”

I frowned and glanced down at my stomach.

“Oh, it’s been obvious from the start,” said Alice. “Ever since … let’s see, it must have been just before Johannes died, I think. A week or so before that.”

I must have looked as if I’d seen a ghost, because she laughed and said:

“Don’t look at me like that, there’s nothing strange about it, I’m not psychic or anything. I’ve known so many women who’ve gotten pregnant and had children that I’ve learned to recognize the signs straightaway. Something happens to a woman’s face when she becomes pregnant; it becomes a fraction broader, somehow, and so does the mouth. And there’s something subtle about the posture and the look in the eyes that changes too, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.”

She put the cup down on the bedside table, her hand shaking; it was as if she didn’t have enough strength to talk and hold a coffee cup at the same time.

“What are you going to do?” she asked. “Are you going to give birth to it?”

“Yes.”

“And then?”

I snorted. “What do you think?” I said.

“I don’t think anything,” she said. “You tell me.”

“They’re going to take it away,” I said. “They’re going to take it from me and give it to someone else.”

Alice looked at me, with absolute clarity, as if she were looking straight through me, but she didn’t say anything else; it was as if she knew, or at least suspected, that I had a choice, a possibility, a way out.

There’s something strange about people who know they’re going to die soon. It’s as if their senses are expanded to superhuman dimensions, as if they acquire X-ray vision and become mind readers and can see into the future and suddenly understand everything that’s going on inside and between other people. And either that really is the case, or else we just want to believe it is, because it makes dying more attractive and easier to reconcile ourselves with, somehow.

In the end Alice said:

“Anyway, try not to be angry with Elsa.”

“I’m not angry with Elsa,” I said. “She’s the one who’s angry with me.”

“Try to understand her,” said Alice. “I might have reacted like her as well, if it weren’t … if it hadn’t been for this.”

She tapped herself on the head.

“Try to understand her,” she repeated, and I was afraid she was on her way into a new episode of short-term memory loss. But she went on: “You haven’t forgotten how it feels to lose a friend because of a child, I hope?”

“But she isn’t losing me,” I said. “I’m here, I’m not about to disappear. And if anyone is losing anything it’s me, losing my child.”

Alice looked at me in that same way again, clear and omniscient. I didn’t say any more, and we sat there quietly for a while. She reached for her coffee cup again. I offered her a plate with two cheese sandwiches that I’d made, but she shook her head. She looked even more tired now, and I had the impression that I was literally watching her disappear, little by little, before my eyes. I put the plate back on the bedside table, and all of a sudden I felt inexpressibly sad; it was as if a trapdoor had opened inside me, and I couldn’t stop myself from crying. In a vain attempt to hide the fact that I was crying, I turned my head away.

“Dorrit, my dear …,” said Alice, putting her cup back down on the bedside table.

“I’m sorry!” I sniveled. “I ought to be strong. Strong for you. But it’s just that I can’t stand—I hate—the thought of losing you!”

“I know that, Dorrit,” she replied calmly. “It comforts me to know that. And that’s enough for me. You don’t need to be strong.”

That was the first time in my life someone had told me I didn’t need to be strong.

“Hey,” she said next. “How about climbing in here with me for a while? I think it would do both of us good.”

I nodded, blew my nose on one of the napkins on the tray, then went around to the other side of the double bed, lifted up the covers and crawled in beside Alice. She was warm, red hot, like a stove.

That was the last real conversation I had with the Alice I had gotten to know. That was the last time she knew it was me she was talking to for more than a couple of minutes at a time. Within a week she had made her final donation. A boy with diabetes received islet cells from her pancreas, and one of the country’s most popular television personalities, a mother with two children, received her remaining kidney.

4

My new writing project had remained more or less untouched over the past few months. The only thing I had done was to read through what I had already written: thirty pages or so, a good start—though I say so myself. But a good start doesn’t go far, not if you no longer have any idea how you want the narrative to proceed, and particularly if you can no longer remember what you wanted to achieve with the story. It was as if the train had left, the train carrying the theme and my motivation.

I did, however, make one last attempt just after Alice’s final donation. I thought perhaps I might find some solace in the project, I thought I might be able to rediscover my motivation through that solace. So I sat down on my fantastic desk chair with support for the base of my spine, my neck and my arms, switched on the computer, opened the file. Then I sat there for a good while, three or four hours or more. Wrote a few lines. Deleted them. Wrote a few more lines. Deleted them again. Took out a notepad and wrote by hand instead. Crossed out what I’d written, turned over the page and tried again, wrote, crossed out, turned the page and tried over and over again, but no, I just got angry and tired. In the end I decisively selected the document on the screen and moved it to the recycle bin, then emptied the recycle bin and shut down the computer. Leaned back in the chair against the headrest. My gaze happened to fall on Majken’s picture of the deformed fetus, either grimacing with pain or smiling scornfully. And it was then, at that very moment, that I first felt a movement in my belly. A brief, fleeting movement a bit like an air bubble, somehow, that was definitely not gas or anything else connected with the digestive process.

I looked down at my belly and it happened again: a kick or a push, perhaps even a movement of the head, how should I know, but it was the first tangible sign that something was not only growing but also living—and living it up—in there.

“Hello there,” I whispered, and pressed my hand gently against my stomach over my shirt. “Hello, little one.”

I did nothing more that day. I just called down to lab 4, where I was currently participating in a safe but irritating psychological experiment to do with living space and territory and so on, and said I needed to rest today. The team leading the experiment was very understanding about that kind of thing. It was partly because they knew I was expecting a child and was tired and slightly nauseous almost all the time, and partly because they were psychologists, so I guess it was their job to be understanding. Afterward I went and lay down on the bed, took the fossil stone out of my left pocket and lay there holding it, turning it round and round in one hand while the other hand rested on my stomach beneath my shirt.

After an hour and a half I felt another bubbling movement in my belly, and at the same time a very, very slight, almost imperceptible pressure against the palm of my hand. I pressed back, carefully. Another movement, almost like a reply. I gasped, then I laughed, then I cried, then I got up and went to the bathroom and had a pee and washed my face. Then I went and lay down again and fell asleep.

If anyone had asked me whether these early kicks or pushes made me happy or unhappy, I wouldn’t have known how to answer them. I didn’t know whether what I felt was longing or loss, togetherness or loneliness.

A few days later I went for an ultrasound. Amanda Jonstorp herself was doing it. She squeezed out a blob of clear gel; it was cold and it tickled and I giggled a little. She smiled at me, then picked up the wide probe and began to slide it over my stomach, alternating between small movements and broad sweeps. At the same time she stared with concentration at a computer screen that was turned away from me.

“Does everything look okay?” I asked.

“Yes, everything looks great,” said Amanda. “Better than expected, to be honest.”

“So can I have a look now?” I said.

“What?” she said, stopping abruptly in mid-sweep through the slippery gel on my stomach, and I realized I wasn’t meant to see my child on that screen, wasn’t meant to carry around a blurred picture of my scan to show everybody I bumped into who wasn’t quick enough to come up with an excuse to get out of it.

Amanda had red blotches on her cheeks and something of Petra Runhede about her as she stumbled over her words:

“I … I’m … really sorry, Dorrit. I thought … I thought you … realized. I thought … You do understand it would be wrong for us to encourage you to … to … bond with the fetus.”

As I was walking toward the elevators in the clinic reception area, I pushed my hand into my pocket and felt the key card. Just as when I had been carrying that little crumpled note with the message to Potter, I had changed pants several times since that day in February when I had been given the card, and by this time I had become very adept at moving it from the dirty pair on their way to the laundry to the clean pair I took out of the closet. I would hold it against my palm with my thumb and make sure I kept the back of my hand angled upward until I had slipped the card into the right front pocket of the clean pants. At the same time I would do my best to distract attention from that hand by doing something with the other: scratching my head, coughing into it, lifting the lid of the laundry basket and putting in the dirty pants, smoothing out a crease or picking off a loose thread. I was silent, quick and discreet, just as Birthmark had advised me to be.

The key card had been constantly on my mind over the past months. I had often slipped my hand into my pocket to feel it as I was doing now, and every time I had done so I had repeated the code to myself: 98 44, 98 44—which I also did now. But I hadn’t done any more, not yet; I still hadn’t come to a decision as to whether I would use the card or not. I didn’t make a decision now either, but this time it was as if everything associated with the key card—the possibilities, the risks and the uncertainty —had moved up into the part of the brain that actually thinks. And I realized I had reached a point where I had to make a decision.

I don’t know if it was because of this shift or if I would have seen what I saw in any case, but just as I came out of the hospital lobby with my hand in my pocket and started to walk toward elevator H, I saw, in an alcove next to the row of elevator doors, a staff member fiddling with something, her face turned to the wall. The wall was the color of linden flowers just there, exactly like the uniform shirt she was wearing, and it was quite dark in the alcove. But not so dark that I couldn’t see her, and after a moment I also saw that she was actually standing in front of a door, a very narrow one, with no handle; it was the same color as the wall, surrounded by a door frame, again exactly the same shade of green, and she was fiddling with something next to this door frame, but not for long; it only took two or three seconds for her to do what was necessary to open the door, and a second or two more for her to push it open a little way, slip through it and disappear, whereupon the door quickly and soundlessly closed behind her.