Afterward, when they are sitting at the table in the kitchen, the beautiful one suddenly stretches out one of her arms. Then she stretches out the other one and yawns. The sleeve on the first arm has a torn seam in the armpit. Then she mentions that she doesn’t have a single decent dress to wear. The widower takes her arm and squeezes it above the elbow. Then he asks her to go in the other room with him.
When they come back, the son is suddenly terrified. She had come in swiftly and silently through the doorway. His mind knows that it’s his aunt, but his fear is quicker than his thoughts. His fear can only see his mother coming. And he imagines this because the beautiful aunt is wearing his mother’s green dress. She says that she has to take it in. And when she takes it off, her slip comes off with it. She is standing with glistening teeth between the table and the stove. She is blushing, but her body is as shiny as salmon. The father takes her gently by the hips. Then the ugly one tells him to leave her alone. The beautiful one grows solemn and folds up Alma’s green dress. He has kissed her before. She was sixteen then, and she was braiding her hair. Then he kissed her when she was eighteen, but then she immediately burst into tears. Now she is thirty-six. For eighteen years she hasn’t cried whenever someone has kissed her. But he has never done it again.
After she folds up the dress, she takes off her shoes. The ugly sister takes off hers, too. Then the brother goes to get the two pairs of shoes from the closet. And the black dress, too. As the sisters try on the shoes, the beautiful one saunters back and forth in the high heels. But the other one sticks her feet under the darkness of the table to see how the shoes fit. She doesn’t try on the dress at all. Nor does she thank him for it. But just as they are about to leave, looking at the widower, she says that Alma would have wanted her sisters-in-law to have them. She stressed the word sisters-in-law. The question is whether he noticed it.
Then the beautiful sister asks for a bag to carry the clothes in. There has to be one in the closet, she says. I can go and get it myself.
But it’s the widower who quickly leaves and comes back. To punish him, she decides to keep the bag.
You can keep the bag, he says.
It’s her reward for not allowing her to look inside the closet. But he doesn’t give anything to the ugly sister for not opening the glass door of the bookcase for her. The bag is light, only two pairs of shoes and two dresses. Still, they ask Bengt to carry it down for them. Once they reach the street, the beautiful aunt asks him whether there wasn’t another pair. He says that they must be in the closet. Then she asks whether there wasn’t another dress, too, a new red one. He denies it and says that his father already returned it. Now the beautiful one regrets that she ever came and cleaned. The ugly one thinks the beautiful one is selfish. She herself feels quite content. Quite content and therefore quite good.
Alma was sweet, she says to her nephew as they cross the street. It’s a pity that she left so soon. A pity for you.
Once the streetcar leaves, he doesn’t really know why he lied. He walks past a little cinema and looks at the pictures behind the frosty glass for a little while. Then he sees a black dog in the entrance. He still doesn’t know why he lied. Then he goes home. But he runs into his father at a corner. They pass each other in the darkness and the snow. After a while, the son turns around and heads after the father. He realizes that he doesn’t have his key. Then he realizes that he does have it after all. But he continues walking to get some air. When the father notices that the son is following him, he walks through a door that had just opened at the corner. He walks briskly across the yard and out the other side. But on the next street the father runs.
Inside the building, the son skims through the list of tenants. Then someone comes up to him and asks him who he’s looking for. He replies that he must be in the wrong building. Then he runs out. He runs all the way home. But once he’s outside the front gate of his building, he turns around and goes back. There was a vending machine in the other building, and he wants to buy some throat lozenges from it. But when he gets there, there is no vending machine. And the door is locked. Then he remembers that there was once an accident in this building. Somebody who was smoking in bed had burnt to death. In the heavy snowfall, he is standing on the sidewalk and studying window after window, trying to remember where it happened. All the lights eventually go out before he can remember. Besides, it’s windy and snowing. Signposts are squeaking, and windows are creaking. So he takes cover in the doorway. No one is going in. No one is coming out. When he finally does come home, the father is already there. At once, he finds himself curiously happy and asks him to make some coffee. When he holds out his coffee cup, the father takes his other hand.
I had to give the dresses away, he says.
The son keeps his hand there. Then he lets it be stroked. In the middle of the night he remembers that the accident happened in a different building. A sound from the other room had woken him up when he suddenly remembered before falling back asleep. In the morning, the red dress is spread out over the armchair again.
In the evening the father comes home with a dog. A big black dog. Whenever he goes near it, it growls. So the father gives it a lump of sugar. As they eat their pea soup, the dog sits beside the firewood bin and watches them. Then while they drink coffee, the son chucks another lump of sugar at it. The dog doesn’t touch it. Then the son asks him why he bought a dog. The father says it’s so that they won’t be so lonely. Then he says he got it for a bargain.
Later that night, after the son has gone to bed—because the need to listen to what was happening in the other room had prevented him from studying—he hears the dog come pattering through the hallway. It treads slowly, almost like a frightened human being. It must be very late. He sits listening in silence for a long time because whatever is happening in the other room is lasting as long as usual, maybe even longer. Even though there is only one dress now. And maybe a pair of shoes.
At last, the dog stops. It stops in front of his door. And lingers there. At first, it’s almost completely silent. Then it starts to pant, and when it does, it pants like a frightened human being. Frightened people terrify him. And frightened animals terrify him almost just as much. So he gets up and pads through the darkness to lock his door. But then he finds that he has already locked it. As he slips back into bed, the dog starts whimpering some more. It almost sounds like a sleeping infant. Finally, it patters down the hallway again. Then the father drops something in his room. He doesn’t pick up whatever he dropped. It becomes absolutely silent in the room. Then, after a long period of silence, the son falls asleep.
He has a dream as he sleeps. He dreams that someone is calling to him. He doesn’t recognize the voice. Nor does he recognize his own name. And he is standing in a strange room. It has no windows. No mirrors either. But there are black candles burning along the walls. They burn down very quickly but are constantly replenished as soon as they burn out. The candles make the room dreadfully hot, and he suddenly realizes that he has to take everything off to keep from bursting into flames. But when he looks down at his body, he doesn’t recognize it, just as he doesn’t recognize his own name, which is now being called much more loudly from beyond the room. A garment is clinging to his strange body, a cloak with a peculiar cut. When the heat becomes unbearable, he tries tearing it off his body. But he can’t get it off. The more he tears at it, the tighter it envelops him. Then he feels a sharp pain in his hands. When he looks down at them, they are red with blood. Astonished, he sees that the cloak is made of blood. The candles suddenly go out and it becomes very dark in the room. The room also turns cold. Through the darkness, the voice comes creeping up to him. The voice has paws. It pants like a frightened human being. Slowly, the room begins to brighten. His aunts come wandering through the darkness. They are holding burning candles in their hands. Their faces are ghostly, and their eyes are closed. But around their bodies, they are wearing cloaks of blood. Suddenly, they are gone. Only the candles remain. In the flickering light, a big black dog comes pattering toward him. The dog is the one calling out his unrecognizable name. Once it is terrifyingly close, he hears what the name is. The name is Gun, and the voice is his father’s. Even the dog’s eyes are his father’s. He tries to run away, but he is paralyzed. Gently, the dog lays its hot paws on his hips. Then he tries to shout out his real name. But his tongue is just a big, scorching lump. He bites and bites. When he finally bites hard enough so that it hurts, he wakes up.