When they reached the library, the bird was sitting in the window. He turned his head toward them and squawked. Berit jumped so that she almost dropped the bottle of wine.
“Oh, did he scare you?”
“When he screamed like that…”
“He’s just making his presence known.”
“Why would he do that?”
“So we don’t forget that he exists.”
“No risk of that! Does he ever attack you?”
“Attack me? Whatever for?”
“I don’t know. I’d never trust a wild thing like him.” Justine took the bottle from her and poured. They lifted their glasses, said
“Mmm,” said Berit. “Not bad at all, if I may say so. I really don’t drink wine often enough. But it’s so good, so good for the soul.”
The helicopter was there again; it seemed to be right out side the house. The bird flapped his wings, nodded his head. “Someone has fallen through the ice,” said Justine. “How do you know that?”
“Heard it on the local radio.”
“How awful.”
Justine nodded.
“Happens every year. I live so close that I always notice, too.”
“Isn’t the ice a little too weak to walk on?”
“It holds at some places, and then suddenly it gets weak.
People really ought to know better. But some people are just idiots.”
Justine laughed and raised her glass.
“
After a moment, she asked about Berit’s job.
“Have you been fired yet, or what’s up?”
“The business is moving to Lulea. My boss says we can all come, too. But no one wants to move to Lulea.”
“Do you have a choice?”
“I don’t know… I don’t know anything any more… I can’t sleep at night.”
And tears welled up in her eyes, made her weak and exposed.
“I seem to come here and burst out… bawling.” “You are carrying so much confusion inside yourself. Just like the rest of us…”
Justine stretched out one arm and made a clucking sound.
The bird tramped around for a moment in the window and then flew to her with clumsy wing beats.
“Even this bird,” she said. “He needs a female. He doesn’t really understand that, but something is bubbling up inside him, making him weak. It’s getting lighter; spring is coming. Then longing grows like a sorrow, just as it does in every living being.”
“Justine… when we were little…”
Justine said quickly, “Tell me about your boys.” “My… boys?”
“Yeah, how they’re living their lives, these young people with their whole lives ahead of them? Do they ever feel that sadness?”
Berit took some tissues from her bag, blew her nose; her head was throbbing.
“Sadness? No I really don’t think so.”
“Are they working?”
“They’re… still both studying. But they don’t know what they want to be yet. At any rate, they’re not going into the publishing business. I scared them away from that.” “Do they have girlfriends?”
She nodded.
“They belong to another world. Young, thin, beautiful.
Whenever I see them, I really understand more than ever that I am passe.”
Justine placed the bird between them. He turned his beak toward Berit, and made a hissing sound.
“Yuck. Justine… can’t you…”
“You’re afraid of him. He notices that right away. Try and be natural, relax.”
Berit drank some wine and then carefully reached out her hand. The bird opened his beak and it was red and large in there.
“He sees through me,” she whispered. “He doesn’t like me.”
“Don’t worry, just ignore him. Well, whatever, I can move him.”
She got up and limped toward the bookcase. The bird followed her, alighted on her hand. She lifted him to the topmost bookshelf and he took his spot there like a brooding animal from pagan times.
The cliffs, the round hill. Justine’s body. The jacket up over her head. She had started to get breasts; they were already fairly large. That foster child, she was sitting on Justine’s stomach and was starting to take off her pants. How suddenly everything changed, because Justine broke away and began to run, slipped and fell directly down on the stones below.
How they ran and ran.
“We’ve killed her!”
“Let’s go!”
“Are you crazy? We have to get someone, her mom.” “No, no, let’s run away!”
“No, we’ve got to get help!”
“Blame yourself then, if we get sent to jail!”
Gerd was her name, she suddenly remembered. Gerd was the one who forced them to run to the house.
“We’ll just say she stumbled; we were playing and she just fell.”
They rang the doorbell again and again. After a while, Flora stood there with her hair in curlers. She looked at them with mistrust and told them she was in a hurry.
They had to wait while she took care of her hair, stand in the hallway with the odor of shampoo and cigarette smoke.
The woman grabbed her coat, looked down at her calf. “Look at my stockings! Damn it!”
“Please hurry, ma’am.” Gerd pulled at her coat. That she would dare.
“Where did it happen?”
“Over there by the cliffs.”
“I have always said that you need to be careful. It appears that you are just as disobedient as she is.”
That very word. Disobedient. She kept up her grumbling as she walked, rubber boots and coat. Justine spread out on the stones. Her clothes were on, but her jacket was to the side with arms still tied together. She looked to them like a sacrificial victim.
“Look. We’ve finished off this bottle in record time,” said Berit. “I intended it for you; it was a gift for you.”
“Doesn’t it seem to you that they put less wine in the bottles nowadays?”
Berit rolled up the tissue and stuffed it in her bag.
“Yeah, I’ve noticed that.”
“There’s more wine in the basement.”
“There is…?”
“You’ll have to go get it… It’s in the same room with the old washtub. I know you’ll see it.”
She got up stiffly, afraid that the bird would notice and attack her. Justine laughed with a tone in her laugh that Berit had never heard before.
“You’re walking like a spastic! Don’t be such a bunny rabbit. It’s just a goddamn bird.”
It wasn’t just the bird. She was back in the old days, these very steps, she and Jill, their strength from ganging up together, the smell of submission, of degradation. And she remembered what the child Justine had said about that washtub. Flora. That was the name of that woman with the painted eyes, the doll woman who was playing the role of mother.
She found the wine bottles right away. They were arranged on a shelf, just as Justine described. It was dark down here; she hadn’t found the light switch. Shyly, she glanced at the washtub; saw it with the eyes of a little girl.
