“I’ve decided-that you-leave-my daughter-alone!”
He had become so strange out on the island.
She just dropped all her plans at once and took the boat back to Stockholm.
She called her sister Viola who sold perfume at NK. She said that she and Sven had a serious disagreement, and that she had to get away for a while. She needed some time to think.
She was able to live in her sister’s apartment, a three-room apartment on Ostermalmgatan in the best part of town. She had the days all to herself, until that time in the evening when Viola came home; then they went out to eat at a restaurant.
It was as if she had a glass bell around her.
The days burned with sun, the asphalt hot and dusty. Nothing happened to her. She sat and listened to her sister’s tales from her life at the perfumery.
“I’m going to dye your hair,” said Viola and pulled out a heap of treatments. “You’ve always had great good looks. But just because you’re married doesn’t mean that you should let yourself go, you know. Do you think he’s found someone else? What’s his new secretary like? Have you checked up on her? You must be kind to him, tempt him a bit. Such a gold mine for a husband and always so nice!”
At the end of August, she returned to the island. Sven was waiting on the dock; he was suntanned and healthy. He didn’t mention what had happened. He took her around the waist, covered her lipsticked mouth with gentle kisses.
“You are beautiful, Flora, you are my little doll. I’ve missed you. May I look? You’ve bought a new fine dress. Oh, do you look fine in it!”
All the work on the house had stopped; the rooms were half-finished. The girl was sleeping in the hammock.
When she woke up, you could tell.
But still, he refused to talk about it.
In the middle of September, they returned to their home in the city.
“What about school?” she asked. “Have you thought about that?”
“I’ve contacted the school.”
“What did you say?”
“It doesn’t matter what I said. She’s gotten a leave of absence.”
Justine stopped getting dressed, roamed around throughout the house in her burled robe. Soon no clothes would cover her growing stomach. Buying her maternity clothes would be capitulating.
But it didn’t matter. She never left the house; she never showed herself to anyone.
It was expected around the time winter turned into spring.
Who was the father? Was it Mark?
But she kept silent the whole time.
Such a silence, a dejection. It filled the entire house from the basement to the newly finished attic.
When snow started falling, she began to knit. She pulled out the yarn from an old sweater and knitted from this frizzy, gray-white ball of yarn. Knitting without a pattern and with sulky uneven lips.
Right around the first day of Advent, Sven had to go on a business trip to Barcelona. Flora remembered it very well. He didn’t want to go, but he absolutely had to. He dithered about and let the taxi wait so long that he almost missed the plane.
When he left, Flora tried to resume some kind of contact.
“How are you? You can at least tell me how you’re feeling.”
Her light brown eyebrows came together.
“It’s snowing over the lake; it looks like feathers…”
“I didn’t ask you about that!”
“I had an animal once, you didn’t know about it.”
“What are you talking about, animals and feathers? All this has gone to your brain.”
“Brain? Flora, do you understand how roses can live within the brain?”
Flora took her by the shoulders, lifted her up. This smell of sweat and dirtiness. Hair like a mop, a bird’s nest on her neck. She took her by the wrist and led her to the shower.
She expected a reaction of anxiety and fear. But there was none of that. The shiny round belly, the bellybutton poking out. Breasts like two bulging and explosive balls. Flora took some soap in her hand and began to soap up that nervous, pale gray body. Rinsed and shampooed the girl’s hair.
Justine a pregnant statue. Now she clearly saw how the fetus moved around in there, his soft, round jumps. She laid her palm right against the girl’s belly. The girl shook. But the child was there; she felt it.
A new nightgown, how it got stuck over her stomach on the way down. Flora had to take a scissors and cut it open completely on one of the side seams. The girl sat with an abstract smile, her mouth haughty and calm.
Then the comb. It was impossible to sort out the knots; she had to use the scissors.
She cut the hair short, not out of revenge, but for practical reasons. The girl’s face round and swollen.
“What are you crying for now?”
The girl moved her head stiffly.
“Save your tears, you’ll have enough to cry about later.”
One night it was time. Why do births always start in the middle of the night?
The girl sat in her wrinkled nightgown. Her mouth was open; she had bit her tongue so that it was bleeding. She had cried out. We had woken up from her cries.
Sven said, no, he yelled to me: “Warm up some water and bring some towels, hurry up!”
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
It was already too late to leave for the hospital.
I said: “If we don’t make it through this…”
He lost his composure, hearing that.
I said again: “Such young girls… their pelvises.”
Then he pulled me into the kitchen and his face was a like a mask.
She fought all the way until dawn, screaming and throwing her body around.
Flora heard Sven pray to God.
She had stopped approaching him, but she observed the girl’s hips, so narrow and undeveloped.
If the baby becomes stuck, it will be our fault. If she dies while the child is still inside her, we are the ones who will be punished.
But she didn’t die, she came through it.
The baby lay on the sheets, and it was an extremely tiny boy.
Sven took the scissors, cut the cord in the middle of membranes and blood. Gave that clump, that newborn baby to her.
I felt the warm body, it jerked; he was trying to get air, and then he wailed, his nose wide and flat. I set him into the hand basin, and the water turned bloody. I washed his hands; he held them in fists, I had to uncurl them and saw deep lines and marks. His penis swollen and large, his limbs like tentacles. His hair was dark, his eyes muddy. I cleaned him from her blood and fluids; I wrapped him in a cloth. He had stopped crying; his face was formed like a heart. His little exquisitely carved upper lip, how it turned against the tip of my finger. I sat down and opened my blouse, the hard greedy gums.
Sven was in the doorway. He saw me. He turned and left.
She reached her arms out to me to take him. I said, you’re tired. You can fall asleep on him and he can suffocate. Look at him. Do you want to fall asleep on this beautiful little boy’s face?
She was thin and had lost a lot of blood.
I lay him to her breast, but he screamed and beat with his little delicate arms. He was hungry. That was a good sign. But she was so young; she had no milk to give him. Sven had to go and get a bottle and some formula. The boy was heavy. He had lain in my lap. I was the one who taught him to suck. Every time she took the boy, he screamed. She was too young; she wasn’t much more than a child herself.
They despaired because the boy stopped eating. What do you do with a child who doesn’t eat? She sat with a spoon, opened his little mouth. What went in ran out again and behind his ears. She gave him to the girl. Warm him
