wine and currant sauce, do you remember?”
“That was a long time ago,” I said, struggling not to sound on the verge of tears.
“Don’t be pissed off with me.”
“I’m not, Simone.” I tried to smile at her.
Later, when I was standing in the hall with my shoes on, just about to leave, she emerged from the bathroom. She had something in her hand.
“Erik,” she said.
“Yes?”
“What’s this?”
They were Maja’s miniature anatomical binoculars.
“Oh, that. A present,” I said, hearing the elusiveness in my voice.
“It’s a beautiful object. It looks antique. Who gave it to you?”
I turned away to avoid looking her in the eye. “Just a patient,” I said, trying to sound absent-minded as I pretended to search for my keys. “God knows how he found out it was my birthday.”
She laughed in amazement. “I thought doctors weren’t allowed to accept gifts from their patients. Isn’t that unethical?”
“Maybe I shouldn’t have taken it,” I said, opening the door.
Simone’s gaze was burning into my back. I should have talked to her, but I was frightened of losing her. I didn’t dare. I didn’t know how to begin.
As I was about to go into the therapy room, Marek stopped me. He was barring the door and smiling an empty, odd smile at me.
“We’re having a bit of fun in here,” he said.
“What’s going on?”
“It’s a private party.”
I looked at him carefully. Suddenly, I heard screaming through the door.
“Let me in, Marek,” I said.
He grinned. “Doctor, that’s not possible at the moment.”
I pushed past him. The door opened, Marek lost his balance, grabbed for the doorknob, but ended up on the floor anyway.
“I was just joking,” he said. “It was only a joke, for God’s sake.”
All the patients were staring at us, frozen.
Marek stood up and dusted himself off.
I noted that Eva Blau had not arrived yet, and then I went over to the tripod and started adjusting the camera. I checked the wide-angle view and zoomed in; I saw Sibel wipe away tears, or so I thought. I tested the microphone through my headphones. I heard Lydia cheerfully exclaim, “Exactly! That’s always the way with children! Kasper doesn’t talk about anything else anymore; it’s just Spider-Man, Spider-Man, all the time!”
And I heard Charlotte respond, “I’ve gathered they’re all crazy about him at the moment.”
“Kasper doesn’t have a daddy. Perhaps Spider-Man acts as his male role model,” said Lydia, laughing so loudly that my headphones reverberated. “But we’re fine,” she went on. “We laugh a lot, even if we’ve had a few problems lately.” She dropped her voice confidentially. “It’s as if he’s jealous of everything I do, he wants to destroy my things, he doesn’t want me to talk on the phone, he throws my favourite book down the toilet, he yells at me… I think something must have happened, but he just won’t tell me.”
Jussi began to talk about his haunted house: his parents’ home up in Dorotea, in southern Lapland. They owned a lot of land close to an area where the Sami people lived in their traditional huts, even as late as the 1970s. “I live very close to a lake, Djuptjarnen,” he explained. “The last part of the route is old wooden tracks. In the summer, kids come there to swim. They love the myths about Nachen, the water sprite.”
“The water sprite?” I asked.
“People have seen him sitting and playing his fiddle by Djuptjarnen for over three hundred years.”
“But not you?”
“No,” he said, with a grin.
“But what do you do up there in the forest all year?” asked Pierre, half smiling.
“I buy old cars and buses, fix them up, and sell them; the place looks like a scrapyard.”
“Is it a big house?” Lydia asked.
“No, but it’s green. My dad painted the place one summer, a kind of peculiar pale green. I don’t know what he was thinking; someone must have given him the paint.” He laughed, then fell silent. It was time for a break.
Lydia produced a tin of saffron-scented biscuits that she offered around. “They’re totally organic,” she said, urging Marek to take some.
Charlotte smiled and nibbled a tiny bit from one edge.
“Did you make them yourself?” asked Jussi with an unexpected grin, which brought a gentle light to his heavy face.
“I almost didn’t have time,” said Lydia, shaking her head and smiling. “I almost got into a quarrel at the playground.”
Sibel sniggered and ate her biscuit in a couple of fierce bites.
“It was Kasper.” Lydia sighed. “We’d gone to the playground as usual this morning, and one of the mothers came over and said Kasper had hit her little girl on the back with a shovel.”
“Shit,” whispered Marek.
“I went completely cold when she said that,” said Lydia.
“What do you do in a situation like that?” Charlotte asked politely.
Marek took another biscuit and listened to Lydia with an unusually focused expression on his face, as if he were studying her as much as listening to her. For the first time, I wondered if he had a crush on her.
“I don’t know. I told the mother that I took it very seriously. I think I was quite upset, actually. Even though she said it was nothing to worry about, and she thought it had been an accident.”
“Of course,” said Charlotte. “Children play with such wild enthu siasm.”
“But I promised to speak to Kasper. I told her I would deal with it,” Lydia went on.
“Good.” Jussi nodded.
“She said Kasper seemed to be a really sweet boy,” Lydia added with a smile.
I sat down on my chair and flicked through my notes; I was anxious to get the second session under way as quickly as possible. It was Lydia’s turn again.
She met my eyes and smiled tentatively. Everyone was silent, expectant, as I began. The room was quiet with our breathing. A dark silence, growing more and more dense, followed our heartbeats. With each exhalation, we sank more deeply. After the induction my words led them downward, and after a while I turned to Lydia.
“You are moving deeper, sinking gently; you are very relaxed. Your arms are heavy, your legs are heavy, your eyelids are heavy. You are breathing slowly and listening to my words without question; you are surrounded by my words, you feel safe and compliant. Lydia, right now you are very close to the thing you do not want to think about, the thing you never talk about, the thing you turn away from, the thing that always lies hidden to the side of the warm light.”
“Yes,” she answered, with a sigh.
“You are there now,” I said.
“I am very close.”
“Where are you at this moment?”
“At home.”
“How old are you?”
“Thirty-seven.”
I looked at her. Reflections and flashes of light passed across her high, smooth forehead, her neat little mouth, and her skin, so pale it was almost sickly. I knew she had turned thirty-seven two weeks ago. She hadn’t gone far back in time like the others, but just a few days instead.
“What’s happening? What’s wrong?” I asked.
“The telephone…”
“What about the telephone?”
