advice.
The first year, he employed housekeepers, who took care of both the house and the child. Sometimes he thought about selling the house, but his wife was in the cemetery in Hasselby, and he went there a few times a week.
“Do you think that she would want me to sell it?” he would ask her. “She loved that house so much. I bought that house for her sake.”
He had trouble hanging on to housekeepers. Perhaps it was too lonely, down at the beach? Too isolated?
That the girl could be behind the problem with housekeepers was a thought that never once entered into his poor, thick skull.
Chapter FIVE
The trees began to appear out of the fog, becoming black, visible. It was morning. Justine had slept the whole night sitting in the armchair, she was thirsty and her shoulders were stiff.
The same feeling as over there. But not.
Over there:
She could still feel her relief which poured through her when she finally could make out the contours of things. The thick, tropical night had begun to move off, retreat; she lay with open eyes and took it all in. How everything reappeared, the tree trunks, the leaves, how they grew and took their forms as day came. And relief spread through her, made her limbs soft. She had been awake the whole night, and finally she fell into a light sleep, just as the others began to stretch and move around in their sleeping bags.
Justine went downstairs, holding onto the handrail like a tired old woman. Yep, just like Flora used to shuffle up and down between the floors before she had to move to the hospice. She would have never gone there voluntarily, but after her stroke, she no longer had any strength.
Down there, the kitchen was dark. She lit the stove and put on a pot of water. Her dress was all wrinkled; she must have been sweating while she was asleep. She hadn’t even noticed that night had come.
Was dying like that?
While leaning against the kitchen wall, she drank her tea in slow sips. Her ears strained for a sound. A sudden longing for words. Anything but silence. She called the bird. He was probably sitting on his branch and sleeping with his head turned backwards and his beak stuck under his gray feathers. He didn’t come and he didn’t answer. He was sitting in silence somewhere, remembering his wild origin.
The house was walled in: this chill and brooding silence like insulation. It was in the stones, the foundation, the basement, the walls. Even a sunny August day could not force in its light and life.
There. In the jungle. No silence existed there. Everywhere was living, creeping, crawling, peeping and trickling, as well as the rustling of leaves while it was all going on, an eating, chewing, steaming rot, millions of small masticating jaws that were never satisfied, the screams and the rush of rain, the howl of a saw.
She asked Nathan, “Can they really be working here with tools, isn’t that called the destruction of the rain forest?”
He did not answer her, forcing her to ask again. Then he turned and his eyes were just as changed as they had been since the day that Martina had joined the group in Kuala Lumpur.
The sound was an insect. Such an insect that could make that howl, going straight to the marrow of her bones, and she froze, even though she was too hot.
Martina… she wasn’t much bigger than an insect herself. Keep thinking like that. You grind insects under your heel until they are squished. Insects like Martina are not worth much more than that. That’s what she had to keep thinking.
She herself was like the house. Made of silence and enstoned.
As if her words took time to construct, they had to search for a pathway that led out of her.
People got tired of waiting.
Nobody likes to wait for words.
Some people thought it was a sign of shyness. Others of a sense of self-importance. Her teacher used that exact word,
Flora was standing on the rag rug, right in the beige square, or maybe it was the Isabella-colored square; anyway, there she stood with her heavy, brown-lined eyelids, opening like small shutters.
“Get up, Justine!”
No. She sank deeper, into the rug. Flora was wearing boots, fine leather boots with stiletto heels. She saw the heels clearly from her position on the floor, how a tiny leaf had gotten caught in one of the points.
Flora’s hand on her head, at first lightly, as if reassuring her. Then the fingers bent, the nails, her hair, like ice in their roots when she was lifted up, ooowwww.
“So, at least you can open your mouth!”
Like a pendulum, back and forth, the short, delicate strands, how they burst.
Flora put her down. It was cold, she had stayed in her bed, and heard how Flora returned through the front door. In just her nightgown, she then went down the stairs.
“Do you know what your teacher, Miss Messer, said to me this evening? She said that you were stubborn and had a sense of self-importance. Stubborn and proud. That’s what she called you. I was forced to say that I was sorry, but she was absolutely correct.”
“That’s not true, that’s not true! She hates me!”
“No strong words, Justine. No one hates. This is called raising a child and it is her duty according to the law to contribute to the raising of a child.”
“Forgive me then, but tell me what I am supposed to do to get her to like me…”
“If I hear a single complaint from your teacher again, I will do such things to you that even your father won’t recognize you.”
Justine covered her ears, her eyes turned inside out, ugly and cold in her whole body, ugly and burning. Turned her face to the floor. The same rug, that one again?
Flora’s little booted foot, yes, it was little; she had heard her father say so when she stood in the hallway one night when they thought she was sleeping. She glimpsed Flora, nude and thin, like a girl, wearing her boots on the clean sheets.
Now the rug pressed against her temples, every bump and uneven spot, the smell of stale food. Flora pressed lightly with the sole, ground her foot against Justine’s cheek.
“I want you to say it loud and clear. That you are a disgusting repulsive child that no one likes.”
She couldn’t do that.
“That you are a spoiled, nasty and lanky child that no one in the entire world could love. Say it!”
She fell unconscious and everything was gone.
The bird came, his wings whistling. She boiled a couple of eggs, gave one to the bird and ate the other one. He was a large, well-shaped creature. He peeled the egg with his beak and shook the shell and bits of egg all over the kitchen.
“Fritz?” she said, not paying attention. “Is that your name?”
The bird screeched, flapped his wings, and flew to her shoulder. She stuck her finger against his gray stomach, and felt that his body was like a warm, living broiler underneath his feathers.
“I should get you a friend,” she said. “We are too lonely, you and I.”
He nipped her finger, lightly, lifted it, pecked it away.
He arrived at the house the day that Flora left it. Justine saw an ad in the newspaper: “Bird for sale due to change in family circumstances. Friendly and tame.”
Change in family circumstances. That was her case, too.
Without thinking about it for long, she grabbed the phone. The bird was at the other end of town, Saltsjobaden, and at first the car wouldn’t start, but after a few sprays of 5-56 under the hood, she managed to get it going. It
