He has flung his blanket on the floor. Naked, he is lying in his bed with his hands pressed against his burning hips. He is drenched in cool sweat. And he has a chewed-up handkerchief in his mouth. When he pulls it out, he remembers it. It tastes like tears and perfume. Still weighed down by the heaviness of the dream, he staggers out of bed. In the dark, he unlocks his door to the other room, and as he walks through it, he steps on something soft. When he turns on the light, he sees his mother’s hat lying on the floor in front of his door. There is also a hanger on the floor. And the door to the bookcase is ajar.
But the red dress is gone. The father is gone, too. And so is the dog.
A Letter in March from Himself to Himself
Dear Bengt!
It’s been a while since I last wrote to you. Some important things have happened since then. The most important thing is that I have seriously decided to stop attending lectures and seminars, though I’ll still take the exam in April. I plan to study at home. That way I’ll save time, and I can be home in the evenings. It’s nice being at home, and in the end I think Papa will come to think so, too.
I haven’t told him about my decision, and since I’m still going to take the exam, I won’t have to. And whenever he asks, How was your day today? I usually always say, Fine, thanks; it went really well. There’s no use saying that it wasn’t good or that I missed a question since I was never there in the first place. Besides, if I were to say something like that, it wouldn’t make it any less of a lie. It would just upset him, and I don’t want to do that. In fact, it’s the same reason why I don’t tell him that I’m home all day when he thinks I’m in class. In the evenings, I sometimes tell him little details about tests or lectures.
I intentionally talk about things I know he’ll appreciate. For example, that a professor came to class in a top hat and business suit because he had been at a funeral the day before and still thought he was wearing his tailcoat. He finds such stories amusing, and he still thinks professors have to be old and absentminded.
When he’s in a good mood he gives me money. Of course, it annoyed me at first, but then I realized I have to take it. Otherwise, he might start to suspect something, and I don’t want that to happen. And since I’m going to take the exam in April anyway, it doesn’t matter whether or not I accept these little rewards. After all, it’s just as much work, if not more, to study at home as it is to sit around in a lecture hall.
Besides, I like putting Papa in a good mood. It makes us both happy. On Thursday, I sat around for half a day coming up with a great story about a professor, and I told him all about it when he came home. He hasn’t laughed like that in a long time. And why shouldn’t I make someone happy if I can?
Yes, you might be right when you say that it’s not particularly nice to lie, but I think a lie should be judged by what a person hopes to gain from it. For example, if you lie to gain any kind of personal advantage, then I consider that an immoral way to use a lie. But if you lie to make someone happy, then I can see no reason why the lie can’t be justified. I also think a lot depends on the person who is lying. Isn’t it a different matter altogether when a corrupt person lies from when a good person lies? An honorable person can do things that other people cannot do. If a sluggard wastes his time roaming the streets and looking for girls while his parents think he’s really busy studying diligently, then it’s a completely different situation when a responsible person hides a temporary postponement from his father (which, all things considered, isn’t even a postponement).
And I have always been responsible. You can’t deny that, Bengt! I was raised to be responsible, you know that. You also know how Mama was and that she had a bad childhood. Since her mother was gravely ill and her father was dead, she was shuffled from one poor relative to the next throughout her youth. She used to say that her childhood was a carousel, not a nice one like we have here in the cities, but a poor, run-down carousel, one that is sent out to the most impoverished and distant places. So revolved her childhood. This also explained why she didn’t have a typical education. She had to learn almost everything on her own while working hard on the side. When I was little, I was always surprised by how much she knew. But when I got older, I noticed that her knowledge did have gaps. Yet I still have to admit what an achievement it was that she accomplished everything on her own. And because she had had it so hard, she wanted me to have it easier. Yet she also wanted me to learn something. Against father’s wishes, she insisted that I go to high school. Throughout my schooling, she never let me forget, and rightly so, the tremendous advantage I had of being able to pick up my knowledge so effortlessly. She also constantly ingrained in me the obligations it entailed. I didn’t miss a single day of school, and because of my sheer sense of duty, I even went to school with a fever at times. I, and I suppose all poor children who have been able to choose a different and more superior path than their parents, have been raised to be, above all else, responsible. Although, Bengt, you know very well that that isn’t so difficult for me.
That’s just it. Parents can have a different understanding from their children of what the word responsibility means. Unfortunately, all concepts can easily become limited for people who, whether in their work or their own curiosity, don’t concern themselves with the value of words. For an uneducated person, the word motherland, for example, has a much simpler and more finite meaning than it does for the educated individual, who from such an ostensibly simple term immediately discerns all the components the concept comprises. Naturally, this applies to the concept of responsibility in the same way. This means that for someone like Mama, who was in some sense an uncomplicated person, to be responsible is to simply wake up early in the morning, work hard no matter what the conditions, even if that means working ad absurdum, or in other words, in circumstances that don’t involve work at all. That kind of responsibility is simply identical to the word work.
In the same way, many complicated terms seemed to be the epitome of simplicity and unambiguity for Mama. This could often make you irritated with her, but you had to be understanding and remember the circumstances behind her education. A concept like “truth,” for example, was absolutely clear-cut to her. She couldn’t even accept the smallest white lie no matter how justifiable it was. Once, when I was in the fourth grade, I got a demerit, and in a moment of weakness she tried to spare me from Papa’s anger and signed his signature on the form. But on the day I was to submit it to my homeroom teacher, she called during the break and explained to him that she was guilty of a treacherous forgery. In the afternoon, the teacher comically related to the class what had happened, and I was terribly ashamed of what she had done. That evening when Papa came home, I told him what had happened, and he reproached Mama for her ridiculous behavior.