Breathless Read online

  There’s a dead body in there. There must be. Otherwise how could the key be on the inside? Lukas can’t answer that. Instead he brings out a bag of cough drops, prepared for me to be awkward. Still no. Not so difficult—cough drops taste horrible. He takes a piece of bubble gum out of his other pocket. I shake my head firmly. He holds out a whole handful. Nope. Then he produces the entire bag. When it comes to bubble gum, I am weak, and why shouldn’t he take advantage of that? However much I go on about it, Mama never lets me have any because it always ends up getting stuck in my hair. I snatch the bag, and with my mouth full of bubbles I begin to wriggle in through the opening Lukas has lifted me up to. I scrape my back and whimper, but Lukas just pushes me forward. Too late to change your mind now, he says. I’ve already stuffed three pink pieces of gum into my mouth, so now I have to keep my side of the bargain. As soon as my feet hit the ground I hurry to unlock the door and let him in. The cobweb curtains sway. I stay close to the open door, chewing and blowing nervous bubbles, pretending to keep watch while Lukas checks around. Things we have never seen before and cannot fathom what they are. Things we do not know if we should be frightened of or not. It takes awhile before we realize that the odd-looking bits of trash hanging from the ceiling are dead bats that never woke up from their winter sleep.

  It smells like another country in there. Not that we have ever, apart from Lukas’s first dim recollections, been in another country. But we imagine it would be like this.

  The house is small and dark like the innards of a clam and has been empty for so long that the hinges have rusted up and creepy-crawlies have taken over. The amount of dust, like a thick layer of radioactive fallout, indicates that no one has set foot in here for a very long time. There are traces of scampering mice and outspread wings of owls in the dust on the floor, drifts of droppings, moths and dead wasps along the walls.

  Everywhere are these remarkable things on dusty cluttered shelves. Tiny skeletons of animals we don’t recognize, a lacquered box with razor-sharp knives, beautifully ornate chopsticks. Ancient crumbling herbal cigarettes that according to Lukas were some sort of drug. That doesn’t stop him smoking them, the sweet stench of the exotic sapped by lying forgotten for decades, but still powerful enough to intoxicate, at least enough to make him spew in the sink.

  There are so many strange things to smoke, so many foreign places to make your own. This is a place made for hiding away, a refuge from curious eyes. Despite the mummified bats on the ceiling, we go there. Despite the giant ghostlike trees of coral in the windows where the spiders have spun new webs on top of old. And under the floor, no, we can’t even begin to think about what lies under the floor. The pearl fisher’s forsaken loves, Lukas says.

  We’ve heard about the pearl fisher. No one seems to have known him, but everyone knows the stories. How he journeyed to Japan to try his luck in the pearl waters there, only to discover that the Japanese pearl fishers were all women. So much for his macho adventure.

  —

  We try to make the space our own in a cleanup operation. We sweep in a frenzy, haul out the heavy rugs and wash them in the lake, and then the Japanese quilts, which float like marbled paper in an oil bath before they fill with water and sink. Clean out the flues to the stove as well as we can and test it with a fire, unaware that we are sending smoke signals to the entire village from our secret den.

  This place unnerves Lukas, and yet he wants to come here. The derelict house has something going on in its walls, something crawling and breathing, but nevertheless this is where we head all the time.

  Every morning I wait for him at a different spot we have decided on the night before, according to an ingenious system no one would be able to discern a pattern in—just as the points in a constellation resemble nothing unless you already know what they’re supposed to represent. Sometimes I wait under the wrong tree or behind the wrong greenhouse, dovecote, garage, in the wrong out-of-the-way spot by the lake. But he always finds me in the end. The village is not very big.

  Below the pearl fisher’s house we can bathe without being seen, concealed by a dense thicket of waterside trees. The land around the lake is covered in a thick growth of bay willows, water plantains, and wild angelica shielding us from view on all sides. As long as no one comes up close we won’t be discovered. You have to be careful not to become entangled in the plants growing wild underwater. They seize hold of your legs and hold you down under the surface. The water snakes. The slow-swimming adders.

  Mama is looking out of the window. She has done this the whole time we have been sitting in the empty classroom that smells of glue, book dust, mother’s sweat.

  “There must be a mistake.”

  “I don’t think so,” the teacher says coldly.

  I say nothing. Through my effort to sit still I can see out of the corner of my eye that the door is ajar. There is a way out, at any rate.

  “A misunderstanding,” Mama tries again.

  “The only misunderstanding here,” the teacher says slowly, “is Lo’s.”

  Difficult to sit still on the sweat-slippery stool, but I try at least not to look provocative, because provocative is what the teacher calls me and is something she can’t stand. When I asked Papa what it meant, all I could grasp was that it was something you shouldn’t be.

  “Not at your age,” he said. “You can wait awhile for that.”

  “We’ve never had a first-year playing truant before. But this”—the teacher performs a peculiar wriggle of her upper body in an attempt to adjust her bra unobtrusively—“young lady does it like a fully fledged high school student.”

  Mama’s gaze rests somewhere out in space. I look at the teacher, who in turn looks at Mama. No one’s eyes meet, and it’s best if it stays that way.

  “I think Lo has totally misunderstood what compulsory school attendance means. Do you know what compulsory school attendance means in Sweden?” Without taking her eyes off Mama, she directs the question at me. I shake my head. “No. There you are. Just as I thought.”

  “But for goodness’ sake, she’s only seven,” Mama objects weakly.

  “That’s what I’m saying,” the teacher replies. “If you play truant like this at the age of seven . . . then it can only get worse. There are statistics to prove it.”

  Accusing blue eyes in the stale air of the classroom. I look at the teacher who looks at Mama who looks at a crow who is sitting high up on the frame of the swing.

  “You and your husband had better make clear to your daughter what’s important. Otherwise there’s no point in her making an appearance here for the rest of the term. In the autumn perhaps we’ll let her start the year again.”

  The crow lifts its tail, shits, screeches, and flies away.

  “Well,” says Mama, as if this were a sign, “in that case we’ll go. Come on, darling, I’ve got an appointment at the hairdresser’s in a minute.” But no one is going to escape so easily. The teacher wants to talk to Mama alone. “Lo stays here,” says Mama, not wanting to be left alone with the teacher.

  “No, she does not,” says the teacher.

  All that remains is for me to leave.

  That Mama has already lost is obvious by her humiliated silence. I slide off the sweaty plastic seat—another reason to escape from the classroom with its bad vibe and stagnant air. Lukas is probably prowling around outside like a criminal. He’s the one they are going to talk about now. He’s the one who has made me into a fully fledged truant at such a tender age. That’s the last thing I hear the teacher say before I race along the corridor and out to freedom.

  —

  Lukas is idling away the time on the fence between the playgrounds. The older children are not allowed to enter the area for primary children, so he’s sitting there without letting his feet touch the forbidden ground. The tractor tire smells of burned rubber. I spin around and around on it until the heavy chains creak.

/>   “Come on,” he says, but I’ve just finished spinning and can’t stand up. When I bend my head backward the clouds above me are sucked together in a swirl.

  I know that they can see us through the window. You’re going to get into so much trouble, I’m thinking, and maybe I say it aloud, because Lukas suddenly looks as though I’ve struck him across the mouth, although it was meant as a warning and not as a threat.

  “Who hit you?” I usually ask when I can see that it has happened again. One shouldn’t ask, but I’m just a child and so I do. Lukas, on the other hand, is old enough to know that it’s best not to answer. Anything you say can be used against you. At school no one seems to have the courage or the desire to touch him, so it’s not difficult to figure out where the bruises come from.

  —

  “Lukas is twice your age, why aren’t you with your classmates?” the teacher had asked while we sat waiting for Mama, who was late for the meeting.

  “But they’re children,” I exclaimed.

  “Yes, but little one, so are you.” Perhaps. But I’ve never seen it that way. The first thing I felt when I came to school was shock—thrown in among my peers, in the midst of a pack of wild dogs, all snapping at each other’s legs.

  Lukas was old enough for seventh grade that year, but he had been moved back two years, a hard nut to crack. They couldn’t put him in the special class for maladjusted children because he wasn’t a troublemaker—it would have been easier if he had been a troublemaker. Fighting at recess, cheeky to the teachers, if he had had any obvious problems, difficulty sitting still, for example. But no, he has no trouble whatsoever with that. Sits absolutely still on the bench, doesn’t move a muscle, regrettably he doesn’t move his pen either and never puts up his hand. Can’t learn a thing. At home, perhaps, but what he learns at home is of no use when he comes to school.

  —

  When Mama eventually comes out, her curry-colored toweling tank top is sweaty under the arms and her eyes are dull with migraine. She takes an unopened pack of cigarettes from her shoulder bag although she stopped smoking long ago. A single glance summons me to her. Lukas has slipped into the shadows and cannot be seen. Not a word from Mama as we pedal home, she in front, slipping slightly from side to side on the seat of her jeans, as the bicycle is adjusted for Papa’s mother. Mama is tall, but Grandmother is taller. And I am small and at the moment I’m trying to make myself smaller. From now on I have to toe the line, do as I am told, no more no less, not cause more awkward meetings. Next time it will be the headmistress, the teacher has warned.

  Crisis meeting in the kitchen. Everyone has to be there except for me. Unaccustomed to closed doors, I wail and kick at it until Papa’s brother Rikard, who as a rule is always on my side, comes out and picks me up in both arms, carries me away, and flings me onto the television sofa.

  “Stay!” he hisses, as if I’ve been transformed into a dog. If that’s how he wants it, I think, and try to bite his hand, but Rikard pushes me over as if I were weightless.

  “Don’t move an inch,” he warns, “and I never want to hear that Lukas’s name again.” I’ve never seen him like this before. Sitting still out of sheer surprise, I feel the blood pounding in my ears.

  Mama is also changed. A different tone. The difference between blank shots and live ones.

  “I love you, Lo, but not when you lie.”

  “I don’t lie!”

  “Not when you lie, I said.” She punishes me in the worst possible way—by withdrawing her love. Doesn’t comfort me when I begin to cry.

  “You should beware of lies, they are dangerous. Little caterpillars that lie never get any wings.”

  “I’m not a caterpillar!”

  “No wings, Lo, just think about it.”

  Lukas had arrived in the village the year before I was born. He could remember almost nothing about his life before this, and what I had done with my time before I met him—that part of my life had already faded from my memory too.

  “Why are you so dark? When all the others are so fair?” he asked. “Where do you really come from?” He thinks it’s unfair that he is the one called darkie, when I’m the dark one of the two of us. In summer his hair is bleached until it is nearly blond, so it’s just his eyes and his name and the fact that everybody knows. My origins are just as distant as his, but only on a map. It’s not completely true that all the others are fair—in every class there are children belonging to the Greek workers, with names as long as the night freight train. But those children have each other. They’re obvious, belong together, keep together.

  Our home is not here, but a conviction we help one another to sustain. Because neither of us knows what it looks like where we really belong, we can imagine those places however we want. For Lukas, born on the outskirts of Budapest, a few hazy details emerge out of context. A blue glove, warm bread, a fox in a trap, blood in the snow, one or two words from a nursery rhyme or a swear word, he is not sure. Unsorted, unusable moments, a sensation in the stomach, mouth, nose, not really a smell or a taste, just a vague feeling.

  At his house they never speak about what they’ve left behind. The two have no language in common. His papa has mastered only rudimentary Swedish and Lukas even less Hungarian, just the very simplest of phrases. Amid such silence between them at the dinner table, they hardly know each other, father and son, two wastelands.

  —

  Lukas doesn’t go near my house, knows that he’s not welcome. Instead every day is filled with lies for his sake.

  Beware, Mama says. Boy’s eyes, boy’s hands, boy’s smell. Love and the other lies. Especially love, whose poison is like a snake’s, goes straight to the heart with no time to cause pain, and suddenly you’re lost. I always wondered who she had cherished with that sort of love.

  KARENINA

  My mama with seashells in her ears, no makeup, her long body constantly moving, sweat glistening at her armpits, narrow waist, broad bottom, flared Lee jeans, strappy platform clogs. I loved her as a capricious wind that comes and goes to suit itself. It was Rikard who taught me to cycle, Marina who taught me to swear, Lukas who taught me to swim and roll cigarettes, Katja who taught me kissing and long-distance spitting, Grandmother Idun who taught me to paint my lips and click my fingers to “My Funny Valentine.” Mama taught me nothing. Not even to look out for all the things she was afraid of.

  She didn’t turn me away, but was merely out of reach the whole time, even when we were together. A perfectly normal mother except that she smoked Silk Cut that you could only buy on the ferries over to Denmark. Papa was also quite normal apart from the fact that he could walk on water, however thin the ice was.

  Together they made up a sacred circle of four: Idun and Björn, Anna and Aron. Grew up together, always lived together, before the children, with the children, with the tar-boiling, haymaking, forest, mine, railway. When my parents and their brothers and sisters were teenagers and Papa’s father had the idea for the long move south, the two families did even this together. Everything they owned was packed up in the same way they lived: mixed together and shared, secure and cramped.

  They bought the place unseen—the house by the undulating Skåne field, the largest they could find that was fairly reasonable. The houses were twice the price of those in the north, which Grandfather Björn took as a sign of what a promised land the south really was. Not cheap, but promised.

  And so it came about that all their savings were suddenly tied up in a place they had never even seen. In addition they had been obliged to take out a loan so big that Grandfather Aron couldn’t sleep at night. He had never been in debt to anyone before, had been brought up that way and thought of it almost as a sin. To buy a house unseen, that was madness . . . madness, according to Grandmother Idun. She was usually the one who made the decisions, but not this time, otherwise this wouldn’t have happened. The idea that they should move was Björn’s, the man
she loved for his ideas, but he didn’t usually carry them out. This time was different, he said, the children’s future.

  —

  Before they packed up their joint vanload of furniture and set off on the twelve-hundred-mile journey south, someone had to go on ahead and reconnoiter. The house had to be renovated, but they didn’t know how much needed to be done. None of the sons could take time off to accompany Björn, so instead it was my mama, Katarina, who volunteered. Björn was doubtful, but Grandmother Idun persuaded him. Katarina was as strong as their own boys, and besides she was the most practical of the youngsters. It was just a case of setting her to work; she was used to lending a hand.

  Idun had spoken. And so it was.

  The train across the country took a day and a night. Neither Grandfather nor Mama had traveled so far before. He had been involved in laying tracks, but had never actually made a train journey anywhere. And neither of them had the faintest notion that where they were going to move was so tremendously far away. He had wanted to travel alone. Why had Idun insisted? They sat in silence all the way down to the Västerbotten border, then Mama fell asleep, fortunately. With her head against his shoulder, which embarrassed him slightly, but at least he was relieved that the silence between them had a natural cause.

  —

  The house was far from what he had imagined. If this was what they called “in need of renovation,” then they had entirely different standards down here. A cellar of standing height rather than a crawl space. Extremely well insulated with proper synthetic material, not just air gaps and sawdust. Björn went from room to room and breathed in the feeling of newness. Modern materials and kinds of wood that smelled different. A dining room—that was a phrase to savor—redolent of punch. Big enough for them all to be able to eat together for the first time, as long as they bought a larger table. Wall-to-wall carpets in the bedrooms so numerous that they would not have to sleep more than two to a room. The ground floor the size of a small cathedral. Practical ceilings, high enough even for Björn, Idun, and their tall sons. Massive double-glazed windows that let in so much light, not what they were used to: temporary secondary windows that always fogged up in winter.