The Unit (7 page)

I found her in the sauna by the swimming pool along with Lena, a cheerful woman with white, short, unruly hair and eyes as bright as a squirrel’s, and Vanja, whose appearance was the exact opposite of Lena’s: a serious expression and iron gray hair caught up in a long braid.

“Hi Dorrit!” said Elsa when she spotted me in the doorway. “Come on in and sit down!”

I grabbed a towel, got undressed, took a shower, stepped into the dry heat and sat down on one of the top wooden benches.

We chatted for a while about this and that. Eventually Vanja left, then Lena, and Elsa and I were left on our own. I was sweating like mad, and kept wiping my forehead so that the sweat wouldn’t run into my eyes; I enjoyed the feeling of little rivulets of sweat trickling down my spine and between my breasts.

“How did things go for you today, Elsa?” I asked. “The chat with the nurse, I mean.”

“Oh, I think I got lucky,” she said. “I’m joining an experiment that’s already under way, where they want more so-called ordinary people, people who’ve been in employment and are used to colleagues and compromises and fixed working hours, that sort of thing. It’s to do with testing people’s ability to work together, and with mutual trust and loyalty. Working in a group to allocate and delegate tasks in order to solve a problem together. It sounds really interesting, actually.”

“That must be the one Johannes is involved in,” I said.

“Oh yes? How does he find it?”

“Too much time spent talking rubbish, according to him. But completely safe, of course. It’s just that he gets very tired.”

I told her about finding him lying on his stomach on the grass, fast asleep, and Elsa laughed.

“I’ve got nothing against getting tired,” she said.

“Me neither,” I said.

4

“Who’s Wilma?” I asked.

Johannes turned quickly to face me; his expression was surprised, but there was something else, something strained, like anger or suspicion, and I immediately regretted asking.

We were standing in front of one of Majken’s paintings, each of us with a sparkling fruit drink in our hand. The picture showed a skinny old woman in a hospital bed. She was lying on her side in the fetal position, her arms and legs locked in contractures—the picture was actually called
Contractures
. The woman was wearing green incontinence pants; apart from that she was naked. Above her, in the air, a shoal of white, long-tailed sperm was circulating.

“What do you know about Wilma?” asked Johannes.

“Nothing. When I woke you up on the lawn the other day, you said: ‘What is it, Wilma?’”

“Oh!” His expression softened, his eyes became calm again, less watchful.

“Wilma is my niece,” he said.

“Right,” I said. I wanted to ask questions—How old is she? Did you see her often? Did you get on well? Did you look after her sometimes? The questions stuck in my throat. I wanted to know what it was like to be close to a child, to be part of its social network, to look after a little relative, to be woken up by a niece or nephew who wanted to play with you or wanted help with something.

I had hardly ever seen my own nieces and nephews, let alone looked after them. After our parents died—with less than a year between them, first my father, then my mother—the gaps between telephone calls, letters, e-mails and visits grew longer and longer. It became clear that our parents had been the link that held us together, and when they were gone there was no longer anything for us to gather around or stick together for. Ole, Ida and Jens had been living in Brussels, London and Helsinki respectively with their families for a long time, and were very busy with their careers, which had vague titles like management consultant and marketing operator. I had never been to visit any of them, and couldn’t even imagine one of their children waking me up by gently shaking my shoulder and saying: “Dorrit? Auntie Dorrit?” The concept was just as unreal as the idea of a child shaking me and saying “Mom!”

At any rate, I just couldn’t bring myself to ask Johannes any more questions about Wilma.

After a little while we moved on to the next picture. It showed another woman, significantly younger; she was dressed in a long white dress and a tulle veil, and was swimming underwater with a net, chasing another shoal of sperm, but this time they were trying to escape from her. The sperm with their wriggling tails were swimming away from the woman and her net. This one was titled
Fertile
.

The next painting was small, around twelve inches square, and showed a bluish fetus in its fetal sac, against a warm, blood-red background with blue veins. The fetus was shown in profile, but was twisted in an unnatural shape: the narrow, still transparent arms and legs were bent into the fetal position, while the upper body and head were turned to the front, facing the observer. The head was also bent slightly backward, and the slanting, very dark oval eyes were squinting unseeing, it seemed to me, in different directions. The nose was a still-undeveloped bump without nostrils in the middle of the pale blue face, with its thin, downy skin. And the mouth was the most striking part—unnaturally wide with full red lips, locked in a twisted, gaping expression, perhaps a tortured grimace, perhaps a scornful grin, it was hard to decide. It was also difficult to decide whether the fetus was dead or dying, or capable of life but severely deformed. I leaned forward to read the title:
To be or not to be—that is the question.

I started to laugh—involuntarily. Johannes looked at me and started laughing too, a low, rumbling, and slightly hesitant laugh; perhaps he was laughing out of politeness because I was laughing, or so that he wouldn’t seem stupid, or perhaps he was just as torn as I was; perhaps this was his way of laughing involuntarily.

Majken, who had been standing a little way off in the room talking to Alice and Vanja and some other visitors, was now on her way over to us with a half full glass in her hand.

“Do you find it funny?” asked Majken, gesturing toward the picture of the fetus.

“Yes,” I said. “Or no. Or both. It’s … unpleasant. And yet it’s funny.”

“Hm …” said Majken. “That’s actually how I felt when I was painting it. The other way around, though. My first feeling was a kind of angry humor. But as I worked the fetus became more and more distorted and frightening. In the end I was actually slightly afraid of it. And I still am, I think.”

I was watching her as she talked, her green eyes exuding a sense of calm and harmony. But at the outer corner of one eye a tiny nerve was vibrating, almost imperceptibly; it twitched and quivered beneath the skin. This quivering, together with just the tiniest hint of tension around her mouth, was the only thing that gave away the fact that this harmony was not complete, that there was something inside that was not calm, and I was seized by an almost irresistible urge to put my arms around her, to console and protect. To try to save her. But just as during our nighttime stroll in Monet’s garden a week ago, I was afraid I would ruin the atmosphere if I gave in to my emotions and impulses.

The gallery was, as galleries usually are, light and airy—polished wooden floor, white walls, high ceiling—and in this particular gallery there was daylight despite the fact that it was evening. Since Majken was principally a visual artist, the exhibition consisted mainly of paintings, colorful and figurative. But at the far end of the bright hall was a wall painted black. There was a doorway in the wall with a heavy black curtain in front of it. Above the doorway was a sign in big blue neon letters: HERE.

As you approached the doorway and the curtain, you could hear, very faintly, a whispering voice from inside. It was enticing, this voice, there was something meditative and magnetic about it, and I was drawn all the way to the door; I moved the curtain aside slightly and looked into compact darkness. I walked in and let the curtain fall behind me. I stood still in the darkness, waiting for my eyes to grow accustomed to it, and after a little while I could just make out a faint, bluish light farther in.

I started to walk cautiously toward the light and the whispering, and immediately I could hear not one but two whispering voices. Or perhaps three, or even more, it was hard to make out, they were speaking out of the darkness, but from different directions. They were different distances away from me, coming and going, sometimes continuing on from one another, sometimes talking over one another. The voices were eager, but in a good way, not angry or pushy. It was impossible to make out what they were saying, but I had the impression that they were calling to me—well, not just to me, of course, but to me in my capacity as a visitor. The floor beneath my feet felt soft and silent, like a fitted carpet, and I couldn’t hear my own footsteps. I couldn’t see anything either, apart from the distant, bluish light far ahead; there was only black darkness around me, and I had the feeling that I was moving in a tunnel of some kind. After a while I also got the impression that there were several people around me. I couldn’t see anyone, but sometimes I thought I could hear breathing that wasn’t my own, or I felt a faint movement of the air as someone passed me, but I wasn’t sure.

The voices, the whispering voices, grew in number as I moved farther in. They didn’t get any louder, I was the one approaching them. I passed individual voices, leaving them behind me, but only to approach several more. Suddenly I was surrounded by these gentle, enticing, whispering voices. There were both women’s and men’s voices at first, but after a while I could hear the occasional child’s voice, shriller and higher, among the rest.

The blue glow ahead of me grew brighter and expanded; I was getting closer and closer, and it was getting cooler now, not cold but cool, and the smell of damp earth crept toward me. It was as if I were going into a cave, and when I got even farther in I heard, in the distance, something dripping among all the whispering voices, then the echo of slow footsteps. The whole thing was very calming: the sounds, the darkness, the smell of earth and the coolness, and I could feel my heartbeat literally slowing down and finding a more measured rhythm. My arms, shoulders, and the back of my neck felt pleasantly relaxed. My steps also grew slower, lighter, almost as if I were moving in slow motion. I was completely calm; my brain was lying there with its full weight inside my skull—for the first time in my life I could feel the weight of my brain. It lay there, heavy and silent. It wasn’t thinking, it wasn’t having opinions, it wasn’t arguing, it wasn’t analyzing. It was only controlling my bodily functions and sensory organs, and I don’t think my senses had ever been so sharp before. And in this very clear, highly receptive and yet incredibly relaxed state I stepped into an oval room with high, small glass paintings along the black walls, my footsteps echoing on a marble floor. There were obviously people in here; it was their footsteps I had heard, accompanied by the whispering voices and the sound of dripping.

The people were dark shadows, moving as if they were in a trance. The dripping sound was louder now, closer, the whispering voices as before, some close, some farther away, children’s voices and adult voices, women and men, and the words were still impossible to make out. It was dark in here too, but the glass paintings, with abstract motifs in shades of blue and turquoise, were illuminated and in their faint glow I could see, apart from the figures moving slowly around the room, a large rounded stone, a natural rock, about the same height as the withers of a small pony or a large dog, in the center of the room. And from somewhere above a drop of water fell at regular intervals, perhaps every five or six seconds, straight down into a hollow in the top of the stone. The hollow was full of water and the water was overflowing, running down the curve of the stone into a round black vat in which the stone was standing.

I stood there watching the falling droplets and the running water, covering the stone like a clear veil, until I became conscious of the warmth of another body at my side, and looked up. It was Majken herself, and she nodded silently at me. I nodded back. The whites of her eyes were luminous in the bluish glow of the glass paintings; her hair had its nocturnal golden gray sheen and looked very soft and silky, like angora, and without thinking about what I was doing I raised my hand and stroked her hair gently and slowly with the tips of my fingers—it really was very soft—and let them glide down over the nape of her neck and along her spine. When I reached the base of her spine I stopped, and slowly withdrew my hand.

And now I felt someone doing the same thing to me—exactly that:
someone
, because it wasn’t Majken, it was someone standing directly behind me, moving their fingertips lightly down from the top of my head over my hair, down the nape of my neck and my spine, stopping at the base of my spine and disappearing. Afterward I turned around, but too slowly, I didn’t see who it was, I just heard the echo of measured footsteps moving away and dissolving into the darkness.

5

I was woken by a shot, sat up in bed with a start and gazed around, half awake. It was still almost dark, not quite morning yet. It was Monday. A couple of weeks had passed since the exhibition.

A shot? Was that possible? Perhaps it was a dream. Or someone, one of my closest neighbors, slamming a door. But why should anyone be slamming doors in the middle of the night? Could the noise have come from outside? When it came down to it, I didn’t really know exactly where I was. I didn’t know what was outside the walls of the unit. Was it a village or a city? Was it just a forest? Or an industrial neighborhood? Nor did I know whether any of the walls of my apartment faced outward, if any were outside walls. The noise I had heard—the shot, the crash, the bang—could have been a bomb, an explosion, a truck carrying flammable goods crashing into another vehicle, springing a gas leak and blowing up. Perhaps there was a fire out there like the fires of hell, with thick black smoke. Poisonous. Was I in danger? Were
we
in danger? Probably not. In the end I decided it must have been a dream; I lay down and tried to get back to sleep. But it was impossible; I was wide-awake. So I got up, made some coffee and took a cup back to bed. Then I sat there under the duvet as the day slowly dawned, the light that was so very much like the real thing filtering in through the slats in the walls, and drank my morning coffee.

It almost felt like home. That’s the way my days used to begin. Well, they actually used to begin with me pulling on a pair of thermal pants and a padded jacket over my pajamas, ramming a hat with ear flaps firmly on my head, and going for a sleepy walk with Jock. But after that I would drink my coffee in bed as the day dawned. With my notepad close by.

I turned on the light, pulled out the drawer in the bedside table and lifted up the envelope containing the pictures of Nils, Jock, my house and my family, and took out my pad and my favorite pen. Then I put back the envelope, pushing away the thought of the photographs—I hadn’t looked at them since I arrived, and doubted that I ever would—and closed the drawer.

Then I began to write, but not my novel. I started a short story about a single woman around age forty-five who gives birth to a deformed child, not unlike the fetus in Majken’s painting, although the child in my story was not a fetus, but a fully developed child. Fully developed and born, but seriously deformed. Large parts of the brain were missing, as if they had been erased; it was only the centers for hunger and thirst and for certain other bodily functions such as swallowing and emptying the bladder and bowels that worked. It was uncertain whether the child would survive for weeks, days, hours. And if, against all the odds, it survived the first highly critical period, it would in all probability be completely helpless, unable to see, hear, smell, taste or feel, without the ability to recognize or make a connection with other people. An exhausting burden that would need looking after twenty-four hours a day throughout its entire life; the mother would never be able to manage its care without an enormous amount of support from society. The question was: Is this mother to be regarded as a parent in the practical, concrete meaning of the word? Is she to be regarded as needed? The question was: Is a person needed if she gives birth to a child that will never be able to bond with her, and will never be able to make any kind of contribution?

At about half past eleven I had to stop so that I could get dressed and eat a proper lunch to be able to cope with my afternoon session in the physical exercise experiment. In five hours I had filled three and a half pages; not bad. I tore them off the pad and placed them upside down in a plastic folder on the desk next to the computer. My intention was to type them up and continue the story the next morning.

I went to the Terrace. They usually had tasty, substantial salads. I chose one with tuna, eggs, peas, rice, iceberg lettuce and tomatoes, got myself a large glass of freshly squeezed fruit juice, and sat down in my favorite spot where you could see all the way to the lily pond in Monet’s garden.

At this time of day there was hardly anyone here; it wasn’t until about half past twelve that it started to get noisy and crowded. I had thought I might see Majken, since she usually ate lunch early as well. But she wasn’t here, nor did she turn up.

When I had eaten I went down into the winter garden, lay down on the lawn and looked up at the sky through the glass dome, then when it was time for me to take the elevator down to my exercise session I stopped off at level 2 to see if Majken was in her studio. I wanted to tell her that her picture of the deformed fetus had inspired me to start writing again. I thought she ought to know that, I felt it was important. Her studio was between the room where they edited films and a studio that was shared by two animators, Erik and Peder.

Majken’s door was ajar. I knocked but got no answer, so I pushed it open, and a heavy aroma of linseed oil, turpentine and charcoal dust struck me.

“Majken?” I called, but still there was no reply. Half finished and completed sketches and paintings were stacked along the walls. On an easel in the center of the room stood a painting that had just been started, while tubes of paint, jars containing clean brushes, other jars with the lids screwed on (presumably containing oil or turpentine), two palettes, and multicolored pieces of rag were crowded together on a small table beside the easel. There was a side room with a little kitchen and a sink where you could clean brushes and palettes. I went in, but that was empty too. It felt a little bit as if I was snooping, as if I was invading Majken’s private domain, which I was in fact, so after I had established that she wasn’t there, I hurried out.

On the way to the elevators I passed the animators’ studio, and knocked on their door.

“Yes?” I heard from inside.

I opened the door and stepped in. On a threadbare sofa crammed in between a drawing board and a computer desk, and surrounded by a mess of sketchpads, pens and pieces of chalk thrown down anywhere on the furniture and the floor, sat Erik along with Vanja. They were drinking coffee. Erik had his arm around Vanja’s shoulders. There was no sign of Peder.

“Have you seen Majken?” I asked.

“Not for a while,” replied Erik. “Maybe she’s gone to give blood. Shall I give her a message if she turns up?”

I said there was no need, I was bound to bump into her in H3 tonight. Then I left them and carried on to the elevators, went down to my exercise session and didn’t give Majken another thought until the day’s work—four hours on a rowing machine—was over, and I went home to section H3, exhausted and with trembling upper arms, and saw that Majken’s door was ajar, just as her studio door had been. The only difference was that through this door I could hear voices, two of them, neither belonging to Majken.

My legs started trembling now as well, and on these trembling legs, which were threatening to give way, I went over to the door and pushed it wide open.

Dick and Henrietta were in there. They were chatting away quite normally as they wandered around among Majken’s things, Henrietta with a black garbage bag, Dick with a big metal box on wheels—it reminded me of the kind of gurneylike contraption they use in hospitals to transport patients who’ve died, although this box was shorter and deeper.

Dick was the first to notice me, as I stood in the doorway.

“Oh dear!” he said, looking at me but speaking to Henrietta. “Looks like we forgot to lock the door.”

“Oh dear!” echoed Henrietta; she put down the bag, came over to me and took hold of my arms, tilted her head to one side and was presumably about to say something sympathetic, something comforting. But I didn’t want to hear it, so I tore myself free, turned on my heel, rushed into my room, slammed the door—hard—and turned the key. (This was a symbolic gesture more than anything, since all staff members had their own master key that opened all the residents’ rooms.)

After that I stood just inside the door of my apartment, not knowing where to go next. For the first time I was seriously bothered by the surveillance cameras. Eating, sleeping, reading, writing, watching TV, talking on the telephone, cleaning your teeth, picking your nose or poking about in your ears, taking a shower, having a pee or a shit, changing your tampon: it was fine to do all that with someone watching. But, I asked myself, why should the bastards see this?

This—this was when my legs finally gave way and I sank helplessly to the floor and just sat there, not moving, with my back against the door, and, without being able to stop myself or even keep the noise down, howled like a mortally wounded animal.