Breathless Read online

  Translated from the Swedish by

  Deborah Bragan-Turner

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Copyright © Anne Swärd, 2010

  Translation copyright © Deborah Bragan-Turner, 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Originally published in Swedish as Till sista andetaget by Svante Weyler Bokforlag, Stockholm

  English-language edition first published in Great Britain by MacLehose Press, an imprint of Quercus

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Swärd, Anne.

  [Till sista andetaget. English]

  Breathless / Anne Swärd ; Translated from the Swedish by Deborah Bragan-Turner.

  pages cm

  Originally published in Swedish as Till sista andetaget in Stockholm by Weyler in 2009.

  ISBN 978-1-101-62283-4

  I. Title.

  PT9876.29.W38T5513 2013

  839.73'8—dc23

  2013007099

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  To Nadja

  To Samuel

  In memory of L.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  SUNSHINE HOURS

  BRUSHFIRE

  BOY’S EYES

  KARENINA

  BREATHLESS

  INNOCENCE

  UNFAMILIAR FORESTS

  AX

  THE RED ZONE

  NEITHER NEITHER NOR NOR

  IF EVER

  ILLUSION

  VERTIGO

  ADOLESCENCE

  THE DAY’S WARNING

  THE DEMON’S MOUTH

  PERIOD OF RAIN

  A STRANGER IN THE VILLAGE

  SCARS

  MORTE

  PLAYED, LAID, BETRAYED

  INCOGNITO

  TIME WEIGHS LIGHT

  RIVER OF OBLIVION

  DESIRE AND FEAR

  THE FIRST ONE TO LOOK AT ME

  THE SLOPING CEILING

  TOMORROW NEVER COMES

  SUNSHINE HOURS

  Every day she sat in a deck chair on the veranda, counting the hours of sunshine, drinking ice water, dozing. Trying not to think about cigarettes. The sweet smell of fresh tobacco, the smooth taste of smoke, the delicious rustle of a newly opened packet of Silk Cut, and the sensual warmth that filled the mouth. Pregnant with a giant apricot, that was how she looked. Her taut, rounded stomach was covered with down and had a springy resistance when the father-to-be and his brothers poked their filthy fingers at it. It smelled of sun-warmed, harvest-ripe fruit. How they wanted to take a bite, but she stopped them: No! Not quite ripe yet. Three more weeks in the sun. Three weeks? They had been patient an eternity, how could they stand more of this waiting? But she pushed him and his brothers away. They would have to be content to watch and wait. For a little while longer the magic fruit belonged to her alone.

  She sat there and saw her stomach darken, swell, stretch in a high dome toward the light. Rejoiced in the last luxuriant warmth of summer, tried not to think about cigarettes and the future and him. The other one. For love is a folie à deux, she had read somewhere. And now she knew it to be true from her own experience, and the worst thing was that all it took was for both of them to be slightly crazy—together, the whole thing became utter madness.

  Her infatuation had grown until it lost its softness, and her stomach likewise. She looked on them both as if they belonged to someone else: the lunar mountain that rose up above her hips, and the ravine of ill-starred love, so deep she couldn’t see the bottom. Pull yourself together, she said to herself. Get a grip, get a grip . . . don’t think about him. But whenever she tried not to think about him, there he was in her thoughts.

  Love is something one is stricken with, like a fever or bankruptcy. No, it was a fever that laid waste to her body, however hard she tried to cool it down on the outside. Love has no laws, veers between lovers as it pleases. She hated him. Loved him. Loved him so much that she hated him. His mere existence was bad enough—so close that some nights she thought she would go mad. Indeed she was not sure—perhaps she had already.

  —

  The stone walls of the house had the warmth of the entire summer stored up in them, and it was impossible to breathe inside. Instead David had made a bed for them in the corner of the veranda that was shaded in the morning. They slept close together on a mattress to the sound of the sparse night traffic on the highway in the distance, the rasping calls of the tree frogs from the overgrown dam behind the house, now and then a freight train and a solitary nightjar over the field. Even in her dreams she tried not to think about the other one. It didn’t work, however hard David held her to him. She had exercised willpower before—when she went down into the cellar to fetch beer, even though she was terrified of bats and knew that they were hanging from the low ceiling—but this was so much more difficult, her will not strong enough to resist the thought of him.

  At night David’s arm around her stopped her floating away, out into the cold dark universe, her stomach like an inflated helium balloon. But during the day she sat alone, proud and dignified, and wanted to be left in peace. Shooed him and his brothers away when they sniffed around her like dogs, as if they believed she was the bearer of a secret, when in fact anyone could tell what was on its way: an apricot, king size. She was becoming incredibly big.

  —

  The due date passed by days and weeks. The bulging fruit grew more and more overripe. Her navel, which once had been a little white bud, spread into a rose of gossamer skin and turned brown in its innermost folds. Her legs, which she could no longer see, filled with water, and a river delta of veins branched out, distended, snaking down her inner thighs.

  Björn, grandfather-to-be on the father’s side, gave her Tiger Balm to rub into her swollen ankles, but she couldn’t reach down. She allowed him to do it for her, as the act of tenderness it was. Like Farah Diba on her peacock throne, although her own feet hardly smelled of virgin milk; they were black and cracked after a whole summer barefoot. Idun, grandmother-to-be on the father’s side, had sent off for the latest firm molded bras from Swegmark mail order. She had never really bothered about bras before, but was informed by the future grandmother that from now on she had no choice. It wasn’t just her stomach that was growing, had she not noticed?

  “Will you stay like that afterwards?” David said and nodded toward her new and different charms.

  “I should hope not,” she said, having no desire to carry them around for the rest of her life and satisfied with the manageable size they had been hitherto.

  In her strange state she was above all trivialities. Heat, hunger, boredom, agitation, flies—none of the bothers that usually irritated her could trouble her now. She had never given birth before and so she wasn’t apprehensive. It was natural, she thought. Animals do it m
ore or less en passant, and she had always thought of herself as an animal, a fox, lithe and instinctive. She had decided that when it was time, if she could manage it, if it didn’t go too quickly, she would conjure up the picture of the vixen giving birth alone in the cool darkness of its lair.

  The longer an apricot hangs on a tree, the easier it falls. Björn had three apricot trees trained against the sunny side of the house, and at this particular time in late summer the fruits were so distended, so sweet, so ripe, so ready that just a look was enough for them to loosen and land in one’s hand. Things happen when the time is right. Even a skeptic could be convinced of that.

  While she waited she took pleasure in the last warmth of the year, gathering it up as one gathers one’s strength, without knowing how badly one is going to need it.

  —

  It was a protracted delivery.

  When the killer-whale baby finally rolled out of its mother after three days, she stared at the result with shock. The child looked nothing like a shiny rose-pink apricot covered with golden down. More like an Eskimo. The feeling that it had been worth it—the months of waiting, the body’s drastic transformation, the fear that took hold with the very first contractions, the reckless drive to the maternity clinic in thick fog, the unspeakable pain, the feeling that she was the last living soul on earth and lying there all by herself in a strange delivery room in a deserted hospital and giving birth as best she could although she had no idea how, and the lies afterward when everyone declared that she hadn’t been alone even though they had no notion how alone she had been—the feeling that it had been worth it didn’t emerge straightaway.

  It should have been a boy. Someone who looked like the father. Because he was the one who had made something start to grow inside her, uncontrolled, then at least what came out should have exhibited certain similarities to him, the originator. But no, first it was a girl, second . . . hair as dark as if it had been dipped into a bottomless lake.

  Later, when it was the new papa’s turn to inspect the harvest’s yield, he stared too. The girl resembled no one, least of all him, but not her mother either. He didn’t utter a word, overwhelmed by the seriousness of the moment or perhaps by disappointment. All the others on both sides of the family were various shades of Nordic blond. The nurses didn’t react until they saw the child in her father’s arms, but it had happened before, what with all the new foreign workers in the area. And sometimes babies were born with coal-black hair that discreetly fell out after a few weeks. After all, it was man’s ability to adapt that meant he survived.

  The obstetrician washed his hands somewhere in the background, and maybe he was thinking once again that his job really was grunt work rather than craftsmanship: women who screamed and kicked and calved as if there were nothing human left in them. Like this one.

  “It was a big stomach for such a little one,” he said, without turning around to reveal whether he meant the mother or the child, probably both.

  The mother recovered, but there was something frail about the child. It wasn’t really a perfect baby—rather pasty, rather weak, growing feebler as the days passed, the blood count too low, a clear case of anemia. Against her black hair and dark glistening eyes, her skin had a bluish pallor. The pediatrician thought they should give her a transfusion, but the mother didn’t want him to stick needles and tubes into the little mite, and so he reluctantly gave the child a few weeks to improve.

  —

  Jaundice at the clinic and a ban on visiting. The two families stood in the hospital grounds and waved when the mother lifted up her daughter on the balcony. A pale, dark-headed infant was all they could see at that distance. Everything in miniature apart from the eyes, unless it was just the color, dark sea green, giving the illusion that they were huge.

  Maybe it wasn’t a miracle, but it felt like it—the situation improved. Even though the birth certificate was just a piece of paper, it did verify that her daughter existed, this wan little thing lying under the hospital blanket and squinting out at the dazzling September light. It was to be Angela Rafaela. “Eh?” the new papa said doubtfully. But it had already been decided, and once the thought was formed it could not be withdrawn. It ought to have brought bad luck. Angela Rafaela after the archangel Raphael with his powers of healing, because here was a child who had healed herself, and there was reason to believe that some higher authority had had a hand in it. Or perhaps just the tip of a wing, but it had made all the difference.

  “She has to have a name that people can pronounce as well,” the new papa’s mother said.

  “Okay. . . . Lo,” Mama said, irritated. Was that simple enough? She was clutching at anything and the name Lo—Swedish for lynx—had just popped into her head.

  “Angela Rafaela Lo Mård? That sounds crazy,” Papa said.

  That people would just call her Lo Mård hardly made things any better.

  How could anyone think he had the right to interfere? She had no intention of taking back the name she had just given—that would be tempting fate, like sucking the life out of the tiny nostrils.

  “David, it’s already decided,” she said. “Next time you can give birth and choose the name.” While she had been sitting in the deck chair, nurturing the baby inside her all summer, she had been reading the erotic diaries of Anaïs Nin, whose full name, Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell, was unabashedly long.

  But at least Grandmother was satisfied that the name they would use would be Lo. It was easy to remember, and that was the most important thing about a name, after all.

  I was baptized on the Feast of the Guardian Angels in October 1969, a year of hope with a slight hubris in the air. The moon wasn’t quite so far away. It shone with the same desolate light, but now that it had been touched by men it seemed less remote in the planetary darkness. The year of the moon landing was, according to my father’s mother, the last year that man could still surpass himself in anything other than stupidity.

  My first memory is of a bright light shining straight at me. I always thought it was the sun, but it must have been the lamp in the ceiling seen from below as I was passed from arm to arm in a kitchen full of people. So many arms and yet I didn’t feel trapped. Such a strong light and it shone just on me. The adults warmed their hands on me, sniffed at my neck to drink in the aroma of new life, kissed me one after the other as if I were a holy relic in a shrine.

  —

  No one could understand how I had come to be, in what dark corner of the large house it could have happened, the house where my parents and their brothers and sisters lived like one family. They just had to get used to the idea. My young uncles and aunts pulled me from all sides. I wasn’t supposed to have been there, but now that I was, dreams and hopes were spun around my dark head, something of which I was fortunately unaware. I wasn’t to trouble myself with anything other than existing. A ship so overloaded with expectations was to be a vessel too oppressive for a small child.

  Tender roots in the new earth, in the rich black soil, so unlike the barren ground they had moved away from. My small roots would bind them to the place where they still didn’t feel at home in their own right. Someone had to be born here so that the others could hang on to the birth certificate’s clear proof of their belonging. The adults must watch closely over me so that no harm should come. Protect, nourish, raise, make me housetrained, set one or two extendable boundaries and look the other way when I overstepped them. As soon as I was big enough I would slip away to escape the affection. I needed it to be there, just as long as I could stand still long enough to accept it.

  Born under a lucky star, according to the story they told me. Someone pointed out the Lynx constellation in the Northern Hemisphere. I loved standing out in the yard with Papa’s brothers when they were in that mood, magnanimous, when they would look at shooting stars and dream of getting away—back home—where they really belonged. Sometimes they could
be depressed and lighthearted at the same time, and then the starry sky was the only thing that helped. Every now and again they were in high spirits and acted as if they were from the Ministry of Silly Walks. On those evenings the stars didn’t matter to us.

  —

  If I wasn’t happy as a child, I didn’t realize. The short-term happiness that darts between trees is perhaps the only kind there is. I was happy as long as I could run free, happy in my puppy fat, happy when I was lying under the bed eavesdropping on my young aunts who spent a whole summer talking about nothing but sex, happy when Papa’s youngest brother, Rikard, chased me through the arboretum, even though I knew it wasn’t as much fun when he caught me. I never saw that happiness was so brief, because it came at such short intervals that I hardly noticed the gaps.

  About the time on the veranda, about the art of not thinking about the forbidden, I still knew nothing.

  “Beware of love,” Mama said as she sucked the poison out of my swelling foot, spat a long yellowish jet into the grass, and rinsed her mouth with milk.

  Love and snakes.

  Love, snakes, and the highway.

  Love, snakes, the highway, the lake.

  Bats.

  High-voltage power lines.

  Horror films.

  —

  “What about dogs?” I asked.

  “Them too.”

  “Nothing else?”

  She raised the ax. “More?”

  “Yes.”

  “Undercooked chicken. Bacteria,” she said and swung the ax with all her strength so that the pieces of birchwood shattered. The strength in her arm muscles was not to be trifled with.

  “And vole fever,” she added.

  “Vole fever doesn’t exist down here, Mama. It’s only farther north.”

  “And the rest. Watch out for the rest,” she said.

  —

  I wrote it all down in the green Chinese silk book with the ferrous smell of melting snow and blood between its pages. The book for beautiful things and dangerous things—I just didn’t yet know which was which. Fear is something you have to learn, if you aren’t born with it, Mama said. I had to be protected from myself because I didn’t have an ounce of fear in my body.