Chapter Eighteen
IRENE WOKE UP WITH a start. She thought she heard quiet sobbing. Was Jenny awake and crying again? Cautiously she sneaked up and listened at her daughter’s door. All was quiet. When she cracked open the door, she could hear calm breathing and panting. The panting came from Sammie. He lay squirming on his back with his paws in the air. His “little mistress” lay dangerously close to the edge of the bed, but Irene felt no uneasiness, only tenderness. It was good for Jenny to have her dog close to her. It had been a difficult Friday for her.
IRENE HAD come home around ten. What she wanted most of all was to have a big cup of tea and a sandwich and then crawl into bed. But it wasn’t to be. Not right away at least.
Sammie stormed toward her, but he wasn’t himself. His tail hung anxiously straight down and he crouched down and whimpered instead of leaping and yelping. Was he sick or in pain? She bent down and started to babble to him as her hands slid over his body to see if he was sore anyplace. Then she heard sobs and Katarina’s voice from the living room. “She looks like a God damned skag!”
“Skag”! What in God’s name did that mean? And who looked like one? Irene got up, tossed her leather jacket on the hat rack as she passed by, and went to find her daughters in the living room. Katarina was hanging off the edge of the easy chair talking to Jenny, who lay prone on the sofa, shaking with sobs. She had hidden her bald head under a sofa pillow, which she was holding tight. Katarina hadn’t heard her mother arrive and didn’t notice when she came in the room. She was intensely involved in comforting her sister.
“There are thousands of other guys who are cooler and nicer! And thousands of other bands. With better music. And if you don’t want to play skinhead music, you can let your hair grow out. In two months your hair will be as long as Marie Fredriksson’s in Roxette! We can bleach it. Cool as shit! Pale stubble! Before it grows out we can say you had cancer. Your hair fell out because of all the chemo and all that radiation. . Hey! Are you crazy?”
With a wail Jenny jumped up and threw the pillow straight at Katarina. She was furious. Tears sprayed from her wide eyes. Her stamina was running out, because she didn’t pursue the attack. When she saw Irene she rushed over and flung herself with full force into her arms and sobbed. Sobbed inconsolably, wordlessly. Sobbed over her first betrayed love, her first betrayed hopes. Irene’s crushed rib hurt when Jenny came flying into her arms, but she didn’t show it; she started silently rocking her as she tenderly stroked her bald head.
A LITTLE later they were sitting around the kitchen table, drinking tea and eating open-faced egg sandwiches with Kalle’s caviar. Bit by bit the story came out. Jenny had told Markus that she didn’t want to go to the demonstrations on the anniversary of Karl XII’s death. She didn’t want to shout slogans that she didn’t agree with. But she did want to stay in the band. Markus got furious and said, “If you don’t believe in them, then you can’t stay with the band. You’ve shown where you stand!”
Then he turned on his heel and left. Jenny was devastated, because she was in love with him, or so she thought anyway. He was the first boy who had kissed her so her knees got weak. When Katarina mentioned this, Jenny flared up again but soon calmed down. That was exactly how it had felt.
It had been Katarina’s idea to rent
Katarina told her mother that after the movie Grandma had described in detail her own experiences as a seventeen-year-old at the end of the war. About the white Red Cross buses that emptied their cargoes of walking skeletons. At her school they had opened up the baths. Nurses had stripped the ragged clothes caked with filth off the human wrecks. They were treated with delousing powder and scrubbed with hot water and scrub brushes. A poor old Jewish man was so scared when they were about to delouse him that he had a heart attack and died! He thought it was poison. Like the poison the Nazis used when they wanted to kill lots of people at once. Although that was probably gas, Grandma said. Her job had been to hand out clean clothes and help those who couldn’t even dress themselves. Strangely enough, Grandma didn’t say a word about Jenny’s clean-shaven head. It was as if she didn’t even see it.
By then Jenny thought that her sister had been allowed to talk long enough. After all, this was mostly about her! Eagerly she broke into the conversation. “When Grandma finished telling her story, I asked her if she really had seen all those people who had been in concentration camps. She had. Then I asked if it was true that there were really extermination camps. And then she said ‘Yes.’ I asked why they let it happen! Why didn’t the Swedes protest that millions of people were being killed in these camps? But she didn’t know the answer. Then she said that in Sweden we didn’t know about it during the war. It wasn’t until the war was over and Hitler was dead that the camps were opened and people found out about it. I think that sounds incredible! I mean … it’s not so strange that someone might not believe that the camps existed. . since nobody reacted during the war. They just let it happen!”
She stopped and Irene sensed a slightly apologetic tone in those final remarks. Jenny sat running her fingernail along the edge of the table. That was a sign that she was holding back something that was difficult to say. Finally she took a deep breath and said, “Could you tell Tommy that I’m not a racist? We don’t have to be enemies. I don’t want that! Tell him. I’m not a racist, really. The lyrics are racist. I can hear that now. Totally. I gave my CDs back to Markus. He can give them to Marie!”
“Is she the one who’s a ‘God damned skag’?”
“Exactly! She
It wasn’t necessary to ask for an explanation of the word. Her tone of voice explained everything.
Cautiously Irene asked, “What happened to Markus?”
Jenny turned all crinkly around the eyes, but before Katarina could start to speak for her again, she said with a teary tremble in her voice, “Markus and Marie started going steady yesterday. She’s in the eighth grade.”
“Is she a skinhead too?”
“Naw, she has neon pink hair. Sometimes she makes lavender loops in it. And she got pierced too. She has a ring in her eyebrow, one in her upper lip, and one in her nose. Disgusting!”
Both daughters were agreed that it was “totally heinous,” and Irene was grateful for that.
WHEN KRISTER came home at one A.M. the girls were asleep, but Irene was still up. After telling him about Jenny’s troubles and about the impending end to her skinhead period, she tried to seduce her husband. But he was too tired and not at all in the mood. The Christmas rush at the city’s restaurants had begun. She lay awake for a long time, her whirling thoughts of skinheads, millionaires, bombs, murderers, biker gangs, sexual relations between people who shouldn’t be having any, and sexual relations between people who should.
From sheer exhaustion she fell asleep, until the sobbing woke her. But she must have been dreaming. Nobody in the house was crying.
THERE WASN’T a free parking place in the whole city. Finally Irene drove down to police headquarters and put her car in the lot. Both Jenny and Katarina were bursting with anticipation. They had a hard time maintaining their teenage dignity when the little kid inside them demanded to come out. Jenny had pulled a bright red chimney- sweep cap over her ears. Not just to hide her scalp, but also because it was very cold. Only a few degrees below freezing, but it was windy. That’s when Goteborg feels like the Antarctic. Irene and the twins ran toward the downtown shopping district to keep their circulation going.
Garlands with lights and stars were stretched across the pedestrian-only streets. The tall trees in Brunnparken and along Ostra Hamngatan glittered with hundreds of tiny lights woven into their leafless branches. But few people looked up at the crowns of the trees. Most of them burrowed their chins down into their collars and hunched their shoulders against the wind. They wanted to get into the lovely warmth, and the shopkeepers were rubbing their hands. That was exactly what they wanted too.
The girls popped in and out of clothing stores. Irene looked at a few jackets, but a glance at the price tags made her decide to wait until spring. She would only have to wear a winter jacket for a few more months. Spring and fall jackets could wait. But she missed her poplin one.
