He wanted to leave right away.
It only took a week and it was her mother-in-law’s turn. A serious wave of influenza swept over the country. It set its claws into her, and, broken down by sorrow and shock, her body was not able to mount a real defense.
The double funeral was an orgy of music and roses. The deceased had planned it that way. Everything had been written in their papers, as if they had known that they would die at the same time.
They left behind quite a bit of real estate, which Sven began to sell off as soon as he could. There was a six- room apartment on the fashionable Karlavagen; there was a villa on the Spanish coast and a hunting cabin up in the Are mountains. And last but not least the yellow house with the veranda and the bay out on the island.
Flora and Sven had been to the house on the island a few times. She had always felt a kind of happiness out there, a contentedness. She asked Sven to keep it. She caught the desire to make it her own, to put her stamp on it. Sven felt the same way. For a few light and heady weeks, they worked together on this idea, plans and fantasies.
They shipped out a few loads of the things they would need: timber, spackle, scrapers, paint. One man on the island, one of the permanent residents, offered to help them; Sven was the way he was when it came to practical things.
The February twilight entered the room. The smell of frying fish. Rattling in the hallway, time for dinner again.
“What are they going to treat us to today, I wonder,” muttered Marta Bengtsson. The dinner hour was the highlight of the day for Flora’s roommate. She seemed to have an enormous, almost grotesque appetite, to the point of grotesque. Something about her reminded Flora of her mother-in-law.
Marta sat in her wheelchair with her napkin tied under her chin and tried to stuff the food into her mouth with trembling, shaking hands. She ate fairly noisily.
A white uniform had pulled a chair over to Flora’s bed and now began to feed her. She was in a bit of a hurry; one could tell because of her way of thrusting the spoon between Flora’s lips and practically scrape off the potato blend against her tongue. She was very young. Had Flora really been so young? She had a ring in her nose and a tattooed animal that crept along her underarm.
She talked the whole time, as if she had read in a practical handbook that this was the proper way to handle fellow human beings: one should speak to them, not about them.
Marta Bengtsson tried to answer, but she had difficulty coordinating both eating and talking. Time and again she would choke on her food, and the white uniform would have to get up and help her.
“Today is Saturday; surely it is,” she managed between bites. “Are you going out to have a good time, nurse?”
This white uniform was certainly not a nurse, just an assistant with barely any training.
The assistant giggled. “You could say that I’m going out for a good time tonight.”
“Do you already have a close little friend?”
“Huh? ‘Close little friend’?”
A new attack of coughing, Flora turned her head away, disgusted. She looked up at the shiny, empty ceiling.
It was there on the island that Flora realized that something was seriously going on with Justine. It began already on the trip out. She could not bear to be inside the cabin; she had to be outside with her head hanging over the railing, so that the spray made both her and her clothes wet. It was windy; white geese floated on the waves.
Flora looked at Sven.
“But she’s just a little seasick,” he said petulantly, as he went out to sit beside the girl. “She was never good at being at sea.”
The house was waiting for them. It was a cool and cloudy day with rain in the air. In the yard, the wood was stacked under tarps where rainwater had collected into small pools.
Sven took out the key.
“OK, girls,” he said, “now we’ve arrived at our own summer paradise.”
Justine was able to choose her own room. She had chosen one that faced east, a room that was narrow and high, but not too big. Her grandmother had called it her writing room. She had pen pals throughout the entire world, but when she was on the island, she never got around to writing them because she was too restless to stay very long.
Her white writing table was still in the room. Flora had been tense going through all the drawers, as if she was expecting to find a note or two about Sven and herself. But there was nothing there besides her mother-in-law’s rose stationery with her monogram in grey.
“Remember, Justine, that your grandmother wanted you to have that table,” said Sven, as if he had known, as if he had ever talked to his mother about such things.
After dinner, the television was always turned on. Marta Bengtsson’s two daughters had bought her a TV and set it up next to her bed. At this moment there was a program about winter sports, maybe some kind of competition; there was loud music. Young, strong people who flickered past from downhill ski jumps or on the ice. It hurt to look at them. She closed her eyes; they were aching as if she were becoming ill.
All of sudden it was silent. One of the white uniforms had come in and requested Marta Bengtsson to put on her headphones. Now there was just flickering light without sound.
Yes, it would be good if she became ill, had a fever. They would isolate her. That would keep Justine from visiting her. At any rate, it would prevent Justine from taking her on an outing. That terrorizing drive was still with her, a dizziness, a slowly growing premonition.
I want to die my own way.
But I don’t want to die… I want to live.
Justine grew even stranger while on the island. She would be sitting on a chair in the kitchen and she would suddenly fall asleep, her head thudding on the table. Snoring and sleeping.
“What’s wrong with you that you can fall asleep like that?” Flora said.
Then she stirred and her pupils floated around her eyes as if they were disconnected.
Flora thought about drugs. She went to the bent figure but did not smell anything unusual, just a distant strong electric field.
Justine was looking forward to putting up the wallpaper in her room, but suddenly she no longer had the energy. Right in the middle of a sunny afternoon, she would have to take a nap, snoring and sleeping just like an old person. Her skin became pale and doughy; she was getting blemishes on her shoulders and neck which itched. She scratched and ripped with her nails so that the skin came off.
“It’s not so strange that she’s tired,” said Sven, which surprised Flora, because he usually went to fetch the doctor at the slightest sneeze.
“Why on earth would she be more tired than we are?”
“Hormones, you know. She’s at a difficult stage.”
As far as Sven was concerned, it seemed Justine was always at a difficult stage.
One morning she heard sound in the bathroom. Flora was alone with the girl. Sven had gone with the boat. She stood in the hallway; the bathroom door was ajar. The girl was squatting there, bent over the toilet.
When she came out, her face was very doughy and white. She was on the way back to her room when Flora grabbed her by the arm.
“Let me look at you! Let me look right into your eyes!”
The girl turned toward her like a sleepwalker. And there, deep in the shining green of her irises, Flora saw the flagrant answer. Just as she had suspected, the teenage girl was pregnant.
Flora bombarded her with questions and didn’t leave Justine in peace for a minute. Who had done this to her? Who had raped her?
“No one,” she said, crying so the snot pooled on her upper lip. “No one raped me.”
“You stupid child. You’re not much more than a child, dammit!”
Sven stood there among the paint cans, round-shouldered but tall.
“Leave her alone now,” he said. “Leave her in peace.”
“But don’t you understand? She has to go to the hospital. They have to remove it!”
He had left off pleading long ago. He raised his voice to a rhythmic yell.
