anyone else, and then drunkenly stumbling down, finding their way home.
Sometimes she took the car to the new riding stables in Grimsta. There were plenty of parking spots during weekdays. She seldom saw any horses in the muddy field. Well, once she saw some long-legged animals with their muzzles to the ground like vacuum cleaners, but she could not see a single blade of grass.
Justine was overcome with the impulse to clap loudly so that one of them, the leader perhaps, would roll his eyes wildly and run off as fast as he could without realizing that he was enclosed on all sides by the fence; panic would make him forget everything but the attempt to flee, and all the others would follow him, out of their minds with fear, and they would thunder back and forth in the mud, completely losing all sense of direction.
Of course she didn’t do it.
Left of the ice rink, a path of electric lights began. She followed it just part way. She cut through the waterlogged fields below the apartment houses, passed the parking lot at the Maltesholm baths, and noticed that one of the windows on a trailer still hadn’t been fixed. She kept going toward the water and then ran for a while along the edge.
Four ducks waddled silently away. Although it was January, the temperatures were above freezing and it had been raining without a break for over a week, but this afternoon, the sky was bleak and white.
She drew in air through her nostrils.
Heaps of leaves lay along the slope, and the decay process appeared to have stopped. They were brown and slimy, not at all like leather.
Just like over there.
No sound, no birds, no raindrops, just the muffled thudding of her rhythmic steps as she forced her way up the slope, then echoing as she came to the boardwalk, where she almost fell. The water’s dampness had made a treacherous cover that made the Avia soles slip.
No, don’t stop, no weakness now; her lungs burned, a caustic, silent wheeze. She drove herself now, as if she were him. Nathan.
Safely inside her house, she stopped, leaning against the wall just inside the door to undo her shoelaces. She threw off the rest of her clothes, the red, windbreaker suit, the long johns, the sports bra, the panties. She stood with her legs wide apart, her arms out and let the sweat drip off.
The bird flew in from somewhere up inside the house. The sound of his rustling wings. He screeched and muttered, going on and on. He settled in her hair, holding tight with his coarse, shiny claws. She turned her head, felt him as a warm heaviness on the top of her head.
“Have you been waiting for me?” she said. “You know I always show up.”
She petted his back and took him down. With an angry little chatter, he disappeared into the kitchen.
She stretched on the thick, dining room rug, as she had learned from an exercise class on TV. She never cared for group activities. Shy, Nathan called her. In the beginning, that was what had attracted him the most.
She was still tall, but the time over there had sculpted her; she looked thinner, even though the scale still read 171 pounds. She stood for a long time in the shower, rubbing her stomach, limbs, the backs of her knees with a sponge.
Over there, not a single day went by where she did not long for clean European showers, long for a floor to stand on and tiles on the wall.
She and Martina had cleaned themselves in the yellow river water, but the smell of decay and mud seeped into their pores and could not be scrubbed away. In the beginning, she had a hard time getting in it, she thought about what may have been swimming about underneath the surface-snakes, piranhas, leeches. One morning they were forced to go through the rapids with all their clothes on since there was no other path. After that day, she was no longer afraid.
She dried off carefully and smeared on some body lotion. The Roma bottle was almost empty now, the one that looked like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. She cut it open with scissors and scraped out the rest with her finger. She looked at herself for a while in the mirror, flushed from the heat, no longer young. She painted lines around the eyes just as she had done since the sixties. Not a single person could make her stop.
Not even Flora.
Dressed in her green housedress, she went into the kitchen and poured herself a bowl of soured milk. The bird had settled on the window sill; he stared with one eye and muttered as if he were displeased. A blackbird strutted on the path outside, fat for winter and ruffled. Its call changed during the winter and became one shrill tone, as if someone were trying to pluck a too tightly wound guitar string. The other song, the one that was both melancholy and jubilant, usually stopped near the end of summer and did not return to life until late February, from the top of a very high tree.
For her entire life, Justine had lived in this house, by the water next to Hasselby Villastad. It was a narrow, tall little stone house, just right for two or three people. There had never been more than three, except for the short time with the baby.
Now Justine lived by herself. She could change the furniture just as she liked, but for now, she left everything just as it was. She slept in her childhood room with its faded wallpaper since she could not imagine moving into Flora’s and her pappa’s master bedroom. The bed was made, as if they would return at any time, and a few times a year, Justine would shake out the bedcover and change the sheets.
Their clothes were still hanging in the closet, Pappa’s suits and shirts on the left side of the bar and all of Flora’s little dresses on the other side. There was a thick layer of dust on the shoes. At times she thought about dusting them, but she never got around to bending down and picking them up.
She wiped down the dresser when she was in the mood to take care of things. She cleaned the mirror with window cleaner and she moved the hairbrush and the tiny perfume bottles around. Once she picked up Flora’s hair brush and held it to the window, staring at the gray strands of hair. She bit herself hard inside one cheek and quickly ripped away one of the strands. Then she went to the balcony and set it on fire. It burned with a pungent odor, rolled itself up, and disappeared.
It was already getting dark. She was in the upper hallway now, and she pulled a chair to the window, poured herself a glass of wine. The water of Lake Malar shimmered out there, waves bobbing up and down, gleaming from the neighbor’s outdoor light, which was on a timer that began at dusk. There was seldom anyone at home, and she did not know the people who lived there now.
Just as well.
She was alone. She was free to do anything she decided to do. Everything she had to do to become whole, strong, a living person, just like everyone else.
She had that right.
Chapter TWO
He had spent Christmas with his parents. Quiet, uneventful days. Christmas Eve had been beautiful with all the trees covered in frost. His mother had hung a light in the old birch tree, just as she had done when they were small, and he remembered his and Margareta’s giggling eagerness, which began the minute they woke up on the morning of Christmas Eve.
His mother usually asked that he return for Christmas. And what else would he be doing? Even so, he played hard to get, let her ask and plead, as if he constantly needed to hear how much he meant to her.
He had no idea what his father thought. Kjell Bergman was a man who seldom revealed his emotions. Only once had Hans Peter seen him lose his cool, seen shades of pain glide over his large, bulging face. That was the night the police came when Margareta had driven off the road. That was eighteen years ago, and Hans Peter was still living at home.
His sister’s death meant that he had to postpone his plans to move out. He was the only child now, and his parents needed him.
He was twenty-five when it happened, and right in the middle of trying to plan his future. He had studied theology and psychology at the university. Something within him longed for something higher; he saw himself in austere black vestments and experienced something resembling peace.
