Good Night, My Darling

“Yes, I do.”

“What’s her name?”

“Tam.”

“Tam.”

“Yes.”

“Do you love your wife Tam?”

“I love her and respect her.”

“Nathan!” she screamed, and then was quickly silent.

She got out of the shower; she was clean. She had showered for so long that the water finally ran cold.

Martina stood in the room, her thin back, her sarong like a skirt. She was holding something in her hand; it was the mascot. She had untied it from Justine’s backpack.

“What are you doing?” said Justine, her words coming like gravel and spikes.

“Nothing, just looking.”

Justine bent over her luggage, unhooked her parang.

The pain in her head returned.

She remembered the strength of the blood as it hit her arms; she remembered it burned.

They brought her in to talk, again and again. Her head cramped. Some policemen and a woman named Nancy Fors. She was light-skinned; she was a Swede. She had been sent from the embassy.

The windows in the room had bars.

She repeated.

“I came out of the shower, and there was someone there, a man. She lay on the floor. Martina lay on the floor and I screamed, and he turned toward me. No, I don’t remember his face, dark, thin. I ran into the bathroom. I slid and hit myself and the towel got wet. I heard him close the door. Then I went out. She was lying there, already dead.”

“Where did you hit yourself, Miss Dalvik?”

She drew up her skirt and showed them, here, here on my thigh. She was full of scratches and strange bites.

There was a doctor in the room. He touched her leg and made her scream.

She remembered a syringe and the smell of ether. Or was that later?

Maybe that was later.

“That man?”

“Yes.”

“How old do you think he was?”

“I don’t remember, I told you already.”

“Was he thirty? Or just twenty?”

“He was dark and thin.”

“Tell us everything again.”

“She lay on the floor, and the parang was in her back.” “Did he threaten you, Miss Dalvik?”

“He didn’t have time. I ran into the bathroom and locked the door. He had killed Martina.”

And it turned heavy and hard to breathe. The air didn’t make its way to her lungs. She tried to find oxygen and finally screamed right out loud.

Then there was a hospital, because everything was white: the sheets, the walls. Nancy Fors had a pleasant, long face. She sat next to the bed every time Justine opened her eyes.

“Ben, the man who was in the jungle with you, asked me to say hi.”

She cried when she heard his name.

But mostly she slept.

Nancy Fors said:

“They’ve caught a man who specialized in hotel burglary.” “They have?”

“Yes, they wonder if you can come by and identify him,” She had been sleeping for many days. Now she put on the clothes that Nancy Fors chose for her, wide long trousers and a patterned tunic with long arms.

“They’re my clothes. I think we wear the same size. You can keep them.”

She looked through a peephole. A man was sitting there; he was thin with a hollow-cheeked face.

“They’re wondering if he is the one,” Nancy Fors said.

She said she didn’t know.

She would have liked to say goodbye to Ben, but she wasn’t going to get the chance.

She would never see him again.

Nancy Fors went with her on the plane, to be either her support or her guard. They went together all the way back to Stockholm.

part three

Chapter ONE

There were a number of interrogations back in Stockholm, too. Two Swedish citizens had lost their lives in Southeast Asia. Justine had been in contact with both of them.

The first day, the telephone rang so much that she pulled the jack out of the socket. The police lent her a cell phone. We have to be able to reach you, they said. Make sure that the batteries don’t run down.

But every time they mentioned Nathan Gendser’s name something happened to her breathing; she had to loosen the clothes around her neck and she began to hyperventilate. She cried and ripped wounds into her arms.

She had been exposed to trauma. They gave her the name of a psychologist, but she didn’t bother to contact her.

She did not dare refuse to answer the cell phone. One of the first days, Nathan’s son Micke called. She let him come by the house.

There was a certain similarity between them, and as soon as she saw it, she had to start crying again. She rushed up from her chair in the blue room and left him by himself. Sitting on the bed in her room, she heard him wander about the house calling for her. Finally, she stepped back into the hall.

He was standing on the stairs, gripping the railing tightly. The bird was flying around the ceiling; he had been alone for so long now that unfamiliar voices made him excited. Justine called to him, but it took a while until he flew to her.

“Don’t be afraid,” she called down the stairs. “The bird is more afraid than you are.”

Then she thought of the tigers and how Ben used the exact words: “He’s far away from here; he’s much more afraid of you.”

She sat down on the top step, sit down, she told the boy, did you know that we saw a tiger’s spoor?

“Do you think a tiger could have killed him?” he said thickly.

“More likely it was an elephant.”

“An elephant…”

“Yes, there were elephants near the camp.”

“Jesus Christ!… Did you see them?”

“Not me. One of the guys with us in the jungle, Ben, said that he had never had experienced an animal attacking.”

“Maybe he annoyed them?”

“Your father?”