She became mischevious.
“Nothing. I already know everything.”
“Really?”
“Nah… Just joking…”
Mark took out a book from his jacket pocket, thumbed through it, stopped at a page. The letters were tiny and practically jumbled together.
“Read this bit in English. Then I’ll quiz you on the vocabulary.”
She turned red, and couldn’t pronounce anything, neither in Swedish nor in English.
He smiled, with a little bit of scoffing.
“OK, the rumors about Swedish schools are true. They’re all shitty.”
“My foot hurts,” she whispered.
“I don’t believe you,” he said.
“It’s true!”
“Where’s it hurting, exactly?”
She pointed at the cast. Then he pushed her skirt up slightly, and held her leg right above the knee.
Once he left, she did the same thing as he had, placed her hand on the same place. Then she moved it slowly further upwards, and a hot and painful swelling appeared between her legs. A pain throbbing right to her brain.
Chapter SIXTEEN
That next Saturday, Berit returned to Hasselby. She bought a bottle of Gran Fuedo and a pot of tender crocus. She didn’t call first; she just went.
The day was foggy. She didn’t bother with the bus. Instead she walked from the last station of the subway and took the road along the beach. She felt a growing anxiety, which she couldn’t ignore, thinking that she was going to confront Justine again.
During the night, she had been dreaming. Tor had shaken her awake.
“Are you having a nightmare?” he said. “Or is the boss giving you a hard time?”
The dream had something to do with a company party. Everyone was there, and strangely, Justine was there, too. In the dream, Berit was wearing a dress that had been much too elegant for the situation, with decolletage and a deep back. Everything was wrong. She mingled and tried to talk with people, but they acted as if she were invisible.
Maybe it was the sleeping pills. She had continued to take them before bed. It was getting hard to go to sleep without them. Maybe it was all that old stuff from childhood.
Tor asked her to come with him to their summer house on Vat Island. He was planning to go there and stay overnight. It would be good for her, he thought, to get a little sea air.
“I can make blinies,” he said. “I think we still have some caviar in the freezer.”
“I don’t want to,” she said. “I just can’t. I don’t want to.”
There was a thin layer of water on the ice. Some ducks came flying. They landed on the ice and went sliding before they could stop themselves. An old-fashioned boat, a
Then a distant sound that kept increasing. The clattering noise of a helicopter. The fog was too thick for her to see it, but it got closer and closer.
She never could listen to the sound of helicopters without thinking of the time she saw “Miss Saigon” in London with some friends. They had gotten good seats, but were practically scared to death of the sudden high roar of the helicopter in the introductory scene. And she remembered the ending, the curtain, the strong light right in their faces. Many people were crying. It was sentimental, all right, but also so unbelievably tragic.
Afterwards they had gone to a pub where Berit started some small talk with a handsome, unemployed young man who insisted on calling her “Mum.” She enjoyed the pub’s party atmosphere. She was amazed at her own command of English, but the next morning, she just wanted to go back home.
Now, a few meters up in the air, she felt two lights and the sound was very close. She felt a fluttering panic- what if it didn’t see her, if it intended to land right there? She ran a few steps into the snow bank.
The helicopter glided past her so closely that raindrops shaken from the trees fell on her face. It belonged to the navy. It sniffed back and forth at the edge of the beach and she saw the pilot as a huddling silhouette. Did someone disappear under the ice? Someone who right now was fighting for life in chilly Lake Malar?
Maybe Justine was not even home. She thought of that as she climbed up the stairs and rang the bell. No one opened up. She waited for a minute and rang the bell again. Then she heard weak thumping inside the house, and stepped back a few steps.
It was Justine. She was home; her clothes were wrinkled as if she’d slept in them. On one foot she had a large woolen sock.
“Berit?” she asked.
“Yes… it’s me. May I come in for a minute? Or are you busy?”
Justine stepped aside.
“No, come on in.”
“I brought some flowers and also… this bottle of wine. I drank all your
“Don’t worry about it. Go ahead and hang up your coat.”
When Justine went into the kitchen, Berit noticed that she was limping. She stopped, her arms hanging at her sides.
“What have you done to yourself?”
“Naah… it’s nothing. I slipped when I was out running. It was a crazy thing to do, I know, go running in the middle of winter. But it’ll go away soon; it’s already feeling much better.”
“You didn’t break it, did you?”
“No. That foot’s a little weak, that’s all. It’s always been weak. I keep spraining it all the time.”
“You do?”
“Next time when you come by, it’ll be all better, and we can take a walk and look at old familiar places. The old school…”
“Maybe… what are you up to, by the way? Did I interrupt you with something important?”
“Not at all.”
“Would you mind if I stayed for a bit?”
“No, not one bit. We can open up this bottle of wine and have a taste. What time is it anyway?”
Justine giggled.
“Always having that old Luther looking over our shoulders!”
“Of course, I thought you’d drink the wine yourself. I didn’t intend to sit here and swig it down, too.”
“Open the bottle, please. The corkscrew is in the top drawer in the kitchen. Then let’s sit upstairs in the library, where we were sitting last time. It’s so pleasant there.”
They went up the stairs. Berit noticed the posters from Justine’s father’s candy factory. They were still hanging in the place they always had. The memories came back.
“Do you remember all those Sandy Candy boxes we used to get from you?” she asked hesitantly.
“Maybe you did get some.”
“You always had a whole bunch of those boxes.”
“Pappa brought them home. I got really sick of them after a while. Sometimes you want something else than that old Sandy taste in your mouth.”
“But the kids were jealous of you! Your father owned a candy factory!”
“No big deal.”
