him pale and nauseous. So she had to lie there by herself and fight through the long painful hours and, once it was over, the midwife couldn’t reach him at home.
Afterwards he said that he had wandered about the whole night and thought of her. He had sent strong and intensive thoughts her way, in order to give her strength. She must have felt them, right?
And later, when the kids got chicken pox and all those other childhood illnesses- Jorgen kept getting ear infections-who had to take the blows? Of course, Berit was home those first few years, but she still could have used a bit of a break. But no. He hated illness of any kind and probably would have rather moved to a hotel for the duration, if it wasn’t for the fact that it would look bad.
“Those analytical types,” her mother used to say with a special look in her eyes.
Berit’s father raised cucumbers.
She got out of the bathtub and dried herself off carefully. It was nine at night. Might as well get into a nightgown right away and get to bed. She was a bit warmer now, and it was best to go straight under the covers before she chilled off again.
“Tor, I’m going to bed now,” she called. “You’re going to be up for a while, I take it?”
“Yes, the evening has just begun!”
He stood in the doorway; she pulled the towel up to her chin, shyly.
“Are you coming down with something?”
“No, not at all,” she said. “Just tired. Today was a hell of a day.”
He surprised her by going into the bathroom and slowly and carefully loosening the towel. He looked at her, took off his glasses.
“What’s up?” she asked peevishly.
“Well, after some thought, I decided that I should go to bed, too.”
Was he intending to make love? She couldn’t deal with that either. She realized that she didn’t remember the last time that they had made love.
She lay on her back in the bed while he went around the house turning off all the lights. The dishwasher started. Yes of course, it was totally full. She was wearing her knitted pajamas and thick gray socks. Then he came in and she closed her eyes and pretended that she was sleeping.
First he lay down in his own bed, but after a while, he lifted her blanket and got in.
“Tor… I don’t want to,” she said.
“Not that,” he said.
He appeared hurt. Was she supposed to make it up to him now, make everything all right?
“Sorry,” she said, and turned toward him.
A few seconds later, she said, “Tor?”
“Yes?”
“Can you imagine moving to Lulea?”
He chuckled dryly.
“I’m serious. Can you see yourself moving?”
“To Lulea of all places? No way.”
“Well, then I guess I have to move by myself. That is, if I want to keep working. Curt is going to move the whole publishing business there.”
His arm came out of the blanket. He scratched the wall searching for the light, found it. He sat up in the bed and looked at her, without really seeing her of course, because his glasses were on the dresser.
“To Lulea?” he asked and in that moment she was so tired of him that she had to hold herself in check to keep from screaming.
“Yes, Lulea! He’s getting a hell of a lot of subsidies, and he has his damned roots in that little corner of hell.”
“Berit…”
“That’s what’s happening! Shit!”
“When did you find this out?”
“He announced it on Monday. But you weren’t home, of course. I didn’t have a chance to tell you.”
“Are all of you going to be fired?”
“Oh no, not fired. And that is what is so devious about the whole thing, because only one or two of us are going to be able to move there. No one wants to go voluntarily.”
“But doesn’t he need you all?”
“Need, right. He is certainly going to downsize. And of course there’s lots of Norrlanders who’d want the job. If he wants to expand, that is.”
“You should get in touch with the union, Berit. He can’t do this, not without following all the proper procedures and rules.”
She snorted and put her feet on the floor.
“The union! We’re not unionized. It’s not customary in this field, you understand.”
He said, “Let’s go downstairs and talk for a while. Let’s go and have a cognac while we’re at it.”
He lit a fire in the fireplace and wrapped a blanket around her. Gave her the glass of cognac.
“Well, that’s a blow,” he said. “Lulea!”
“I’m going to be unemployed, Tor. At the age of forty-five, almost forty-six.”
“You can be a housewife again.”
“I’d rather die.”
“We wouldn’t have to eat take-out pizza.”
“Something wrong with the pizza?”
“Don’t ask me.”
“I really wasn’t hungry,” she said and sipped the cognac. “Maybe you can understand the reason now.”
“Berit,” he said softly. “Don’t throw in the towel! You’re still young. You should start looking for a new job now. It’ll work out.”
“With the high unemployment these days? Don’t you ever read the paper? Today there was an article about this twentyfive-year-old guy who hadn’t found a job since he finished his engineering degree at The Royal Technical College. A fine, well-educated kid, highly qualified, who was looking for any job at all. He had a folder filled with rejection letters. More than forty of them from the whole country. Even Lulea, by the way.”
“Hey, Sweetie, don’t make a mountain out of a molehill. At least not until you’ve looked around and seen whether the job situation really is all that bad.”
They emptied their glasses and went back to bed. They didn’t have much more to say.
He lay down in his bed, but reached to stroke her cheek.
“There’s one more thing,” she said. “And I am terrified about it.”
He mumbled a little; he was already falling asleep.
“In Hasselby, last Saturday, when I came home so late. That old classmate of mine… the one with the French name…”
Why was she the way she was? Why did things happen the way they did? What made a child into a victim?
And what was it about me? Where did that cruelty come from?
Children noticed differences, and what happened to her mother made her different from us. She didn’t have a real mother. Her mother died in that mysterious way in their house. When Justine was little. Then her father had married his secretary; there was a lot of gossip. We must have heard some of it when the adults were sitting down to coffee. It happened during grade school, first grade; we went to the stone building then… Justine had her place next to me, I wanted to sit next to Jill, but there was a misunderstanding. Our teacher said, that’s fine girls, sit there. Justine was ugly and spindly, like a fish. But weren’t we all…? She clung to me; just because we happened to be next to each other, we were supposed to be best friends. I believe I told her right away that we were not going to be friends, but she was somewhat slow on the uptake; she didn’t get it. All normal people would have understood, but not her. During recess, she would follow Jill and me: what should we play now, can I play, too. We were forced to hit her to get away from her. She had money; her dad was rich as Midas. She went to the store and bought candy during recesses, a huge pile of candy. She would hide it in different places for us to find, and we crept around and looked for it. It also made me mad, I remember that. Miss Messer discovered her, and then it was
