waist so that her legs could be like scissors around him.
“Stina,” he whispered, “you know that this is wrong.” “Who decides what is right and what is wrong?” And she sank over him and they did it again. He moved within her and she wriggled but let him remain there. Afterwards he was full of regret.
She stroked him and tried to find words. She had to cry to get him to open up.
“I’m coming back to you. I will never leave you.”
Day after day. The uprooted tree. The house. Sometimes he locked the door and wasn’t there. She waited in the yard. Then she learned how to break open the lock on his window. She lay in his sheets, his smell against her clothes.
A draft of chilly air. He stood in the light, a blanket in his hand. He turned his face from her.
His hand pounded the table.
“You can’t,” she said, and her mouth and jaws ached. “You can’t drive me away.”
Naked in his lap, the seams of his jeans.
“Don’t you hear the blackbird out there?” she whispered. “You’re thinking of the thrushes.”
“Do you hear their song?”
“Why are you doing this to me, making me weak…?” The cloth was swelling against her groin.
“You’re not that weak… see?”
Laughter, happiness. How he lifted her like a spread-out, fluttering butterfly. Opened her leaves.
Every time she was amazed. She was as thin as a reed and he…
“I believe that you’ll cleave me in half…”
But at that white moment he was unable to hear her; he was a flailing fish, glitter on her stomach.
Then he stood up and shrank.
One day she was forced to tell him about the island. “We’re going out to the islands tomorrow. We’re going to live there for a while in an old house that my grandparents owned. It’s on one of the islands. We have to go there by boat. There’s no other way there.”
If she thought he was not going to say anything, she was wrong.
He wanted to know everything.
“Pappa has taken vacation. We’re going to live there for a while. There’re not many houses on this island, just a few; food comes by boat. Still, there are some people who live there all year round. Do you think they go fishing, or else how do they live through the winter? I get to decorate my own room; it will be my very own. I’m going to help paint it. Pappa has brought home some wallpaper designs, and I’ve already picked one out.”
He looked at her sternly.
“Now I want you to listen to me. I will be gone when you return, and you’re the one forcing me to do this; but I’m not blaming you, not at all.”
She was too filled with her future plans to listen. She sat in his arms, stroked his soft eyes.
“When the apples ripen, we’ll pick them, and I am going to bake you into an apple pie and cut you all up into pieces. And then I’ll eat you up with vanilla sauce and ice cream. But now I have to go home.”
Chapter EIGHTEEN
Sven’s parents had always surprised Flora. They had a vulgar aspect to them which did not fit either their position or their class. Both of them were large and had loud voices, and her father-in-law had lost some of his hearing so that her mother-inlaw had to raise her voice even more so that he could hear her. They used coarse words and language in their speech and they seemed to enjoy shocking others by it. They approached their environment with childish expectation, waiting for reactions.
Sven had prepared her.
“They’re a little different. I just want to let you know so that you’re aware.”
During a few occasions, while she was still working as a secretary, Ivar Dalvik had come to the office and they had been introduced. He shook her hand hard and asked for her name two times.
“Oh, Flora is it… can I open you up?” he joked. “If one wants to know more about a flower’s innermost being?”
She always had trouble with that kind of humor.
She did not meet her future mother-in-law until she was Sven’s fiancee.
She never felt really accepted by them. She and Sven discussed this from time to time. He didn’t understand her. He thought she was taking things too seriously.
“They think that I am too lower class for their fine son; that’s what it is.”
“That’s not true, Flora. They really don’t care about what kind of person I’ve chosen to marry. I know it sounds strange, but that’s the way they are. Let them be, two egocentric old people. Why would you ever worry what they think? We’re living our lives and they’re living theirs.”
It didn’t help. She always felt that she wasn’t good enough for them. Maybe she should have been louder, used more gestures, like them.
When it came right down to it, she didn’t have much contact with them, but that was a two-edged sword. On the one side, she despised them. On the other, she wished they would see her, acknowledge her, as the active and hard-working woman that she was.
They seemed fond of Justine and sent her small presents, but whenever they met her, they overwhelmed her with questions without the patience to wait for her answers. In a way, they were from a previous era. Girls were cute to look at, but you shouldn’t invest in their future. For example, there was no talk about raising Justine to eventually take over the family firm. They would rather find someone else from outside. A man.
When they entered their seventies, they began to lose interest in the whole Sandy concern. They placed it in the hands of their only son. Now it was his business to nurture the company and make a profit. How he did so was no longer any of their business.
For all intents and purposes, they died at the same time. When it happened, she and Sven were somewhere in Italy. Ivar was still living when they returned home, but he died a few days later at Karolinska Hospital.
Flora remembered every detail-the telephone call, Sven answering, his sudden full attention. When he returned the receiver to its cradle, he turned to her and said with a neutral tone in his voice: “It’s almost his time. We have to go home right away.”
His mother was waiting for him before the entrance to the hospital, wearing an armless blue blouse which revealed her flabby underarms. She stood in front of the door and smoked. When she preceded them into the elevator, she almost fell. She had difficulty speaking; her voice had shrunk, almost cut off.
Flora had never seen a person die. Not even that summer when she worked at the mental hospital. The women there were vicious and mean; every once in a while, she wished they’d die. They made fun of her and called her a whore. They didn’t mean what they said; they were sick and they couldn’t think straight, but it didn’t help. No matter how much she reminded herself of this, she was filled with discomfort whenever she approached hospital buildings.
As soon as she stepped into her father-in-law’s room, she remembered that unusual smell, the one that announced that a human being was in the process of dying. She knew it at once. She would never be able to describe it; it was just there.
The old man was on his back, coupled to tubes and apparatus. His nose hooked up from the withered face. For a few seconds, he opened his eyes, but he did not register their presence, his glance wandering toward the ceiling. He fumbled and scratched with his hands as if he were searching for something to hold him back.
Her mother-in-law broke down.
“Ivar!” she screamed. “You can’t leave me like this, really, I forbid you…!”
His body shook; his jaw opened and shut. This made her cling to his sheets, hold on to the bed rail, howl.
Everyone was embarrassed. Two nurses led her out of the room and gave her an injection of a tranquilizer. Her husband lay there, dead and alone.
“We’ll put him to rights and light a few candles,” said a nurse. “Go out and take care of his wife for the time being.” Sven was obviously shaken.
