She swallowed.
‘Maybe things aren’t that good after all.’
‘No, that’s what we thought.’
There was silence again. Soon ‘Old Man Noah’ would be finished, and every second was precious.
Then with an enormous effort she forced out the words.
‘Henrik and I are getting a divorce.’
Her mother and father sat quite calmly, their faces expressionless. But she was having a hard time remaining in her chair. For the first time she had given voice to the words and felt them penetrate her from outside. She had sent them straight out into the universe like a fact that could not be called back. For the first time their import became real. She was one of those who had failed, who had made her son a child of divorce.
‘So, it’s that bad.’
Her father had a worried furrow in his brow.
His words confused her. Why weren’t they surprised? What had they seen that she couldn’t see?
Her mother interpreted her reaction, as usual, but it was with sorrow in her voice that she began to explain.
‘Well, we might as well be honest. It’s like this: from the beginning we thought that you and Henrik were a little too, what should I say, a little too different perhaps. But you were so sure and wanted him so much, so what could we say? And what right did we have to meddle in your choice of a husband? You’ve always done what you wanted, after all.’
She lovingly placed her hand on Eva’s and smiled.
‘We could see how you two were getting along, and we worried that you would tire of each other in the long run. We didn’t think he would be able to live up to all the expectations we knew you had. That’s not to say that I’m particularly glad that we were right.’
Eva pulled her hand away, afraid that her mother would feel it shaking. Everything in chaos. She looked around the kitchen, let her gaze rest on the old glass tray on the wall that came from her great-grandmother’s house. Generations of hard-working couples who through their struggles had given her opportunities and led her to this. One generation follows another. Until she came and broke the chain with her failure. The Great Loser who wasn’t good enough for her husband and who would mark her son and the rest of the generational chain and pass down new values for what love and marriage were. Something deceitful and unreliable. Not worth fighting for, or believing in at all.
Her father put down his coffee cup with a familiar clatter of home.
‘How’s Henrik taking it? He must be very upset.’
She looked at her mother, dumbfounded. And then at her father, still so proud of his daughter who took command of her own life, who wouldn’t settle for less than the best, who was worth so much more.
And an iron curtain dropped in front of the truth.
‘Well . . . he’s doing OK, I suppose.’
‘What have you decided to do about the house?’
Weak and powerless, the voice from inside the dark tried to make itself heard one last time.
Then she turned her head and looked at her father and the voice from the Eva who once existed gave up and fell silent, unable to warn her again.
And inside herself she prayed to be allowed to meet, for once in her life, someone who would stand by her side and love her, someone she could lean on when she no longer had the strength to fight.
‘I’m going to buy Henrik out and keep the house. I’m going to need to borrow some money.’
Horrid was the word he thought could best describe the remainder of their crossing, even if it was an understatement. The Baltic Sea was smooth as a mirror, but the calm outside was amply compensated for by the tornado that struck him, that tore loose every feeling he thought was firmly anchored in a decision taken. Everything he had known, wanted, dreamed. It was all one big mess.
The longest half-hour of his life she had spent locked in the bathroom before she burst out, packed her things in a rage and without saying a word slammed the door of their luxury cabin behind her.
He had remained sitting where he was, looking out the porthole as the archipelago thinned out and Stockholm and home vanished farther and farther out of reach. After a few hours he made his way down to the lobby and changed his return trip reservation to that same night. She had done the same, he learned. He had no idea where she was during the rest of the crossing.
In Abo he had changed ferries; as sheer punishment he was given a windowless cabin on a lower deck below the water level, and that’s where he had continued his isolation. Just after midnight there was an urgent knock on his door. She was drunk. Furiously she screamed at him, using all the obscene words he could remember ever hearing, and when he didn’t defend himself the air went out of her. In tears she collapsed on the floor inside the cabin door. But he was unable to console her. For the life of him he couldn’t come up with anything to say. And when she realised his total inability to handle all that had happened, her wrath was reawakened and with a new onslaught of vituperation she left the cabin, slamming the door, leaving him to the confined space with her words hanging in the air. And he realised that he deserved every one of them. He remained sitting among them and spent the next few hours in soul-searching until he could stand it no longer. Because he had been betrayed as well. A judge ought to come down on his side, weighing the punishment he deserved for what he had done to Linda against the sympathy to which he was entitled after Eva’s betrayal.
It would have been so much easier if everything were black or white. The tightrope he would have been forced to walk with a furious need to accuse her without any of his own guilt. Silence her with her guilty conscience and rob her of every possibility of defending herself. Force her to admit her wretchedness and thereby finally take the power from her. Gain superiority over her.
Instead he would obsequiously have to attempt to win back her love, persuade her in an ingratiating way, try to convince her to stay with him. Choose his words well and not give her the slightest opportunity of minimising her crime by dumping part of the guilt onto him, by saying that he had behaved no better himself.
It would have been so much easier if he had told her the truth from the beginning. If he had confessed his secret love or passion or whatever it was he felt or had felt. Then they could have continued from the point they were at now, with all their cards on the table. Now it was too late. Now his admission that he had lied cast him into the underworld and from there he could never become her equal. Even if she had done the same thing to him, her verbal prowess would quickly shift all right and truth to her side.
There was something about Eva that made him feel superfluous. She was so unbelievably strong. Adversity seemed to have the opposite effect on her that it did on other people. She didn’t react normally. For her adversity was a reason, and fuel to become even stronger. In some unfathomable way she always managed to convert a crisis into an opportunity. As he stood by and kept silent and realised that she didn’t need him, that she could solve everything on her own with no need for his help or support. Bit by bit she had stripped him of all responsibility until finally he hadn’t known whether he could handle anything at all. Good God, he wasn’t even allowed to open his own window envelopes!
With Linda everything had been different. She had openly admitted that she needed him; it was a fantastic feeling to be indispensable. She made him feel like a man. Straight off she admitted that there were things that she couldn’t do or hadn’t mastered, and unlike Eva there was nothing shameful in it for her. On the contrary, she used it to come closer to him, to make them dependent on each other, to help them create an essential togetherness. And he had enjoyed their solidarity. He had fantasised about their life together and how different everything would be. How different
