Breathless Page 6

  I lurked on the windowsill, a wretched circus monkey in front of a miserable audience who wouldn’t even look at me. What about me! I wanted to shout. But the sight of Mama filled me with a knot of anxiety that only she could evoke. Instead of saying anything I leapt through the air and landed crouched on my heels in the middle of the table. It was intended as a pleasant surprise, but Mama didn’t even raise her eyes. I didn’t notice how the others reacted, because I only had eyes for her, all my attention directed to her half-closed eyelids and smoking mouth. She was the center of the distress, there was no mistake about it, and it reminded me of something I didn’t want to be reminded of on any account.

  Rikard shooed me off the table like one of the irritating flies in the September heat. Mama lit another cigarette as Marina in one deft movement drew me to her. She held me hard and in a practiced maneuver lifted me onto her lap, even though I’d shot up too that summer, all arms and legs, and could hardly fit on her knee any longer.

  “Is it something to do with Papa?” I whispered in Marina’s ear. She blew the smoke past my face and brought her lips close up:

  “No, for once it’s nothing to do with your papa. But you must leave your mama in peace today.”

  “What about the cake?” I pleaded, and she laid a finger on my lips. It stung like a nettle.

  “We’ll sort it out, hush, don’t be such a baby.”

  It began to feel like the garden of death, but I didn’t know who had died. No one answered my questions, as if I too were talking into a plastic bag and the questions stayed inside it. If you were invisible, you might as well disappear. I went inside and packed the essentials, the secrets in the dust: the hunting knife, the steel strings, the porn magazine, the aftershave, the cigarette, still unsmoked since the night of the fire. The bicycle that Papa had left behind was far too big—I had to ride at a slant under the crossbar, and although it was downhill all the way along the gravel track between the fields of stubble, it was very difficult to pedal.

  I used to imagine that the lake was an enormous eye, the only visible part of an even more enormous underground creature. This beautiful, terrifying giantess Hyrrokkin would one day rise up and surprise us all, distort our perspective, dislodge woods, factories, roe deer, houses, and fields of corn, which would collapse into the crater where her body had lain, and she would just walk away. She belonged to a different and a better world, like Lukas and me. She’d just rested here awhile and would leave devastation in her wake.

  It was Papa’s father who had told me the story about Hyrrokkin. He was interested in mythological women, particularly the demonic ones with extraordinary powers: Jezebel, Lilith, the sisters Fenja and Menja who made the sea salty. He liked to watch Mama when she was chopping wood too, her shirtsleeves rolled up and her hair Medusa-curly with sweat, a cigarette in the corner of her mouth when she thought no one could see her. Hyrrokkin meant smoke, Grandfather said, and I had seen smoke rising out of the earth at dawn, especially over her eye when it was turned to ice in winter. Now she was tucked up under the ground, invisible except for her mirrorlike eye. You could bathe in it if you dared. It was not for the fainthearted.

  Her eye was gazing right at me, with a beguiling look that enticed me even from afar. Almost no one ever bathed here. There were rumors about people who drowned themselves and people who were drowned. I was so young that I had only vaguely heard them, but I had been warned numerous times about the lake—like everything else Mama warned me about, I didn’t let it seriously affect me.

  —

  After a while Lukas entered the pearl fisher’s house, where I was stretched out on the bed waiting for him to think better of his underwater tactic. I was far more concerned about him diving right into Hyrrokkin’s eye than about his hard-on, which after all couldn’t last forever.

  He found my hastily packed canvas bag next to the bed.

  “Have you run away from home? Couldn’t you have brought something to eat?” he said as he rummaged through the contents, flicked through the porn magazine, and then fished out the holy cigarette from our first meeting. Before I had time to open my mouth, he picked up a lighter and lit it . . . it burned like tinder.

  “And what the hell are we going to do now?” he said and blew the smoke hard at the ceiling.

  I shrugged my shoulders. “Dunno. It’s my birthday, but why should we worry about that?”

  “I mean, what are we going to do about this?” In a forced manner he indicated toward his stubbornly swollen prick—there were many words for it, but “prick” was the ugliest and most ridiculous and Lukas said it all the time, which gave me the impression that he didn’t like it.

  After searching among the books under the bed I found an old medical book that I had looked in many times before. I blew off the dust and opened it at a page with pictures that looked as though we could be on the right track. Lying on my back, I read it silently to myself first and then out loud for him:

  “Erectile dysfunction.” I raised my eyebrows questioningly, but Lukas was stamping up and down on the spot and appeared not to have heard of it.

  “Priapism?” I carried on.

  “Uh, I don’t understand a single word of this stupid language. Get to the explanation.”

  “Urological emergency,” I continued. I had always been a good reader, even when I had no notion what it was about.

  “But skip that bit, get to the point—farther down, farther down . . .”

  I let my eyes skim over the text. Lukas’s mouth was twisted in torture, as if his condition from one moment to the next had become untenable.

  “Prolonged and painful erection not caused by sexual arousal. The causes for this condition may include: leukemia, psychoactive drugs, anabolic steroids, recreational drugs such as alcohol and cocaine, protracted sexual activity, a burst artery in the scrotum . . . scrotum?”

  “Yes. Don’t know. Haven’t a clue.” He looked pale and signaled to me to continue.

  “Bite from a black widow spider, tumor, carbon monoxide poisoning, spinal cord injury, or lacking diagnosable cause. The problems are due to blood trapped in the erectile tissue. An erection lasting more than four hours is deemed to be a medical emergency.”

  Lukas was no longer complaining; he nodded at me to read on.

  “Four hours, it says. How long did you say it’s been like this?”

  “Days, on and off.”

  “Days?”

  “Yes, for a while it seemed to be getting better, but then it got worse again.”

  “But listen: the condition requires immediate medical attention, to prevent scar formation that could result in permanent inability to maintain an erection.” I looked at him as he stood in front of me, legs wide apart, with the face of a maniac.

  “Immediate medical attention, it says here. Doesn’t that mean . . . today?” I traced down the page with my finger, searching for the answer:

  “Treatment involves draining the blood by inserting a needle into the penis.”

  “Aagh!” Lukas looked as though he were trying to cast off something that had scalded him, but his hands were empty and it was a pitiful, disembodied gesture.

  “The area is numbed with local anesthetic and the blood is drawn off from—”

  “No thanks!”

  “—from the erectile tissue until the swelling goes down.”

  “Can you stop!”

  “Wait. There’s an alternative: ice can be put on the perineum to reduce the swelling. Perineum? What’s that? Well, you can put ice on it anyway. Climbing stairs is sometimes effective, as the exercise can send the blood flow to other parts of the body.”

  “Shut up now.” He groaned and sank to the floor, but I kept on reading:

  “In serious cases prolonged accumulation of the blood can lead to necrosis, spontaneous tissue death, gangrene. Fully developed gangrene cannot be cured. In cases of dry g
angrene the affected tissue falls off of its own accord. In cases of wet gangrene the affected area must be amputated, i.e., a surgical removal of the penis, known as penectomy.”

  Lukas’s face turned pale green, and with his hands at his crotch he stood up and backed out of the room, moaning.

  Stairs and ice—he had no choice.

  Lukas was not welcome in our home, preferably not to be seen at all in my vicinity. But there were no stairs at his house and no freezer with ice either, so we had to get into my house unseen. While I made sure it was safe, he started to race up and down the steep stairs between the cellar and the floor above.

  “This feels like”—he looked as though he would be prepared to have it amputated after all—“a sadistic joke,” I caught him saying on the way down.

  “But is it working?” I asked impatiently.

  No one trusted him before, and now he was running up and down our stairs half naked and could be discovered at any moment. Still, it was this or a needle in his penis—that was the choice. I saw his lean suntanned back disappear up the stairs. A back I knew so well, and yet it often seemed so unfamiliar, as changeable as his face. When his height increased, out of control, last spring, his body had not managed to adjust its proportions. He was in disharmony with everything, as if there were no longer enough room in his body, as if he had stretched out rather than grown. Become a tall thin shadow of himself, almost worse than Papa the summer before he left.

  —

  “How does it feel?”

  “Sore.”

  “But has it gotten softer?” I asked next time he passed me as I stood on guard on the landing. He thrust his hand down to see.

  “Has it hell.”

  Ice was now his only hope. If the stairs were hard work, the ice was humiliating. Lukas was doubtful, but in the absence of ice cubes I had already fetched two bags of frozen mushrooms and stood in the food cellar with them dangling from my hands. He took off his trousers, but I told him to put them on again, that it would be cold enough without putting them directly on his skin. It would be no consolation if he brought it down and it suffered frostbite in the process.

  “Okay, but I’m doing it myself,” he said dismissively. He jumped onto the freezer, frowning with pain, and accepted the packets of mushrooms.

  It was probably the thought of amputation that helped him to endure—that and shame and ignominy, as well as pain. The cold appeared to aggravate his suffering instead of relieve it. Like cures like, was Rikard’s standard response when something had to be remedied. He had for a long time wanted to be a boxer, but he had such thin skin, his eyebrows couldn’t take it. The boxer knows nothing of the dancer’s pain and the dancer knows nothing of the boxer’s discipline, he claimed; you should respect what you don’t understand. Like now, how it was feeling for Lukas. I could see that it was hurting, diabolically, but perhaps that was a good sign, if Rikard’s cure logic was correct. We didn’t have time to think it over, we just had to try and see.

  Time passed and still nothing happened, and then, to speed up the proceedings, Lukas pulled down his shorts and put the deep-frozen bags of mushrooms right on his crotch.

  With that, Marina arrived.

  She was suddenly standing there in the cellar doorway, carrying an armful of hammock cushions rescued from the unexpected cloudburst, staring at us. The rain had made her mimosa-yellow cotton top see-through—one of her breasts was larger than the other—and I was struck by how remarkably like Papa she was, apart from the breasts. I’d never noticed it before, but with her medium-length hair now wet and pushed back off her face she was so like him that I gasped.

  Mama was upset when Papa left, but his sister Marina was the one who was angry. How she shrieked at him in the kitchen. Marina’s screaming was the most terrifying of all the things that happened at that time.

  Now with a violent push she threw the cushions aside and snatched for a weapon. That turned out to be a vacuum cleaner wand, an old-fashioned chrome model, lethal. Without a word she raised it up toward Lukas, in attack or in defense, it was impossible to say. The bags of frozen mushrooms slipped from Lukas’s hands onto the stone floor with a muffled sound. His shorts were still hanging around his ankles as he sat and tried to take in what was happening: the chrome wand, the expression on Marina’s face . . . If I could have moved, I would have pulled them up, but I was just as transfixed.

  All the evil energy in the room was directed toward Lukas. She didn’t even look at me, just made a vague gesture that I should move away from him. But I couldn’t.

  “I haven’t done anything,” he said. You only put soap on hands that are dirty, as the saying goes in my family. Marina . . . I saw the chrome pipe gleam in the light from the fluorescent strip when she swung it around in the air to build up speed. She was going off the rails, she must be. Hyrrokkin had drawn herself up to her full height.

  Instead of covering his penis, which was still standing straight up, Lukas raised his arms to cover his face. As if he seriously did think that she would hit him. She would never do that. Even if she was losing control. Not Marina . . . The thought ran through my head the second before she did it. Hard. Right at Lukas’s face with an awful thud. A shrill sound like the call of a bird of prey escaped from my lips. He groaned softly. If he hadn’t been so used to protecting himself at home, the blow would have knocked him to the floor. The sound of the metal against his forearms was excruciating.

  While she was reloading her chrome pipe he finally seemed to grasp the seriousness of his predicament, jumped down from the freezer, pulling up his shorts on the way, and, crouching, started to move toward the open door, to the garden and freedom. The torrential rain outside almost drowned his voice as he rattled off what sounded like a stream of accusations and apologies. Marina was standing in his way. Let him go, I was thinking, just let him go . . . afraid of what he might do otherwise. But she looked more furious than scared, blocked the doorway, raised the shining chrome pipe toward him again. Capable of anything at all, it seemed, as if she really were someone else.

  When he, with the speed of a fighting dog, grabbed hold of the vacuum cleaner tube, I saw the fear in her eyes. Marina had never been hit before; Lukas was used to it. When the shock of the surprise attack had subsided, she would soon lose the assailant’s advantage.

  Mama’s sister Katja had explained about the use of sound cannons—they were as effective as water cannons to disperse rioting crowds—and now I climbed up on the freezer and yelled as loudly as I could in an attempt to defuse the menacing situation. Lukas had just succeeded in wrenching the weapon out of Marina’s hands and lifted it up toward her to gain free access to the door when Papa’s brother Erik appeared in it with Katja immediately behind him. Without waiting to take in what had happened, they overpowered him. Suddenly it all unfolded like an unreal film: Lukas on his knees on the concrete floor with Erik on top of him, a hard kneecap in the small of his back. It looked horrible and quite unnecessary, as Lukas was completely still.

  “Are you okay?”

  Marina nodded in reply to Erik’s question. I wanted to say that it was she who had hit him, even though it was Lukas who happened to be holding the weapon when they came in, but I dared not open my mouth. When everything was quiet in the room, a musty odor of half-thawed mushrooms mixed with moldy winter apples and caustic soda from the adjoining laundry room filled the air.

  The chrome pipe was a side of Marina she had never revealed before.

  “Take him up to the kitchen,” she said, and without demanding a word of explanation Katja and Erik obeyed her command. Lukas offered no resistance when they yanked him away.

  Leaning against the freezer, Marina gasped for breath. She looked as though she was trying to find herself again, after she had been lost, or perhaps she had actually for a while been changed into somebody else. A stranger had possessed her body—that must have been what happened.

&
nbsp; “Lo . . .” she began, but broke off and started to pull at her top that was so yellow it almost smelled of mimosa. It was so hopelessly out of shape that she couldn’t straighten it. Lukas had pulled it to one side when he tried to disarm her. One of the seams was torn and it had the mark of his hand on the front between her breasts. “You’re coming with me. Now!” she ordered and dragged me up the stairs.

  —

  Mama was sleeping. We had to tiptoe around the house and there was no opportunity for a noisy interrogation in the kitchen.

  “What’s wrong with Mama? Who’s died?” I asked.

  “Jean Seberg,” Erik said. Who? Was it someone we knew? But he wasn’t listening. He stood by the sink holding Lukas in a harsh grip and said that we were going to take this matter to Lukas’s father. And that, he intimated, was just the beginning.

  No, not Lukas’s papa, not Gábriel. To drag him into it . . . my family had no idea.

  There was one other place where I belonged, a place I could disappear to whenever I wanted. A snow kingdom far away, vast, imposing, silent, desolate, wild. A landscape where there was only one season with a short interruption for a summer soon over. Completely different from here, where the past was overlaid and obliterated by the oppressive scent of growth, stagnant heat, flies, the lake’s jade-green eye staring unceasingly at us.

  —

  Escorted by Papa’s brother Erik and sister Marina, we walked in deathly silence down the gravel track to Lukas’s house. The late-summer sun was going down over the fields, on the day that never had been a birthday. I thought all along that Lukas would run off, because Erik was no longer holding on to him, but sooner or later he would have to come home, so what was the point?

  The person they said had died—the whole time I was thinking of her as the only one who could have saved us from this. If the others, like Mama, had been more concerned about her death and less about Lukas and me, we would have gotten away with it. They would not have had the energy to turn everything upside down as if disaster had befallen us in our food cellar.