For the time being, however, she doesn’t burn herself. Probably thanks to the father. Because he takes the candlestick by the base and slowly moves it to the center of the table. Bengt watches his hand as he moves it. It isn’t burned but it’s afraid, because it grips it harder than a candle needs to be gripped. The father’s hand grips it so tightly that Bengt can see that it knows what candle it’s really moving. So that she will know, too, Bengt moves the candle back with one hand and offers her a cookie with the other. As she takes it, she says with an air of surprise:
What happened to your hand, Bengt?
Suddenly, he lets go of the candle and nearly drops the plate. Then he puts both of his hands on his lap.
I burnt myself, he answers without looking at anyone. I burnt myself on a candle.
It must have been quite recent, Gun says.
She looks at him when she says it. Then the father looks at her and wants to say something, wants to tell her what’s really going on, partly to correct a mistake, partly to say anything, because he knows that silence is dangerous. Just as he’s about to tell her, he realizes that he can’t. Because then he would have to talk about a time that burnt, so he talks about something else. He talks about the weather.
But Gun was right. Bengt has burnt himself quite recently. At three o’clock he burnt himself on the candle. On a whim, he put it on the table to see how it would look. For fun, he lit it. But just for a little while so that it wouldn’t be too short at nine o’clock. When he decided to put it out, he tried doing it with his hands by squeezing the flame, as people sometimes do to flames. Then he burnt his hands. He had forgotten to spit in them first.
Candles can be dangerous, Gun says after the father stopped talking.
Yes, Bengt responds. Just yes.
It isn’t much. He had wanted to say more, and he even knew what he should have said. Especially some candles—he should have said—the ones that burn at funeral meals. But it’s hard to say something like that. Much harder than he imagined. In fact, it’s difficult to do anything at all, except for looking down at his hands and grabbing a cookie now and then. After all, there is little we can do when we’re sitting at the same table and drinking tea with someone we hate. Judas himself could be sitting at our table, and we wouldn’t ask him about Jesus. We would talk to him about the weather.
Although, there’s actually a lot you can say about the weather. And only a moment after the father stops talking about it, he begins talking about it all over again. He says the weather is good, damn good, you could even say. Gun says it’s wonderful walking weather, but terrible for the cinema. Berit has nothing to say about the weather because she hasn’t noticed it. She has had a lot more to notice. Besides, she usually only notices it when it rains, because she likes the rain a lot. But Bengt says:
Yes, it’s nice now, but it wasn’t so great in January. There was a lot of snow. And it was so windy that you always had watery eyes.
Then the father notices that it’s burning up in the room. Bengt notices, too. What he also notices is that he hasn’t noticed it from the beginning, and this bewilders him. As for Berit, she drops a spoon, and it’s good to drop spoons when you sense it heating up. Maybe even Gun senses it. Then all of a sudden, she looks at Bengt, silently and for a long time. The father notices before the son does. The father thinks she looks at him beautifully, beautifully like a beautiful mother. But when Bengt notices, he is quite mystified again. He doesn’t like that she is looking at him, but he does notice that she has rather lovely eyes. Then he likes it even less. Because the one you despise cannot have beautiful eyes. Not because you really think they’re ugly, but because you don’t want them looking at you. So he lowers his eyes.
Don’t you come to the theater sometimes, Bengt? Gun asks. No, pretty rarely, he answers rather sullenly. I haven’t been there for quite a while. I don’t like going to the cinema.
But I think I’ve seen you at the Lantern, Gun says.
Then Bengt replies that he almost never goes to the Lantern. It’s silly to say this and stupid to lie because he knows she must recognize him. Still, he can’t keep from lying. Then it’s even stupider to have lied, because Berit says:
But Bengt! We’ve been to the Lantern several times lately. Of course, you remember.
It’s absurd for her to say this. Quite meaningless, too. Strictly speaking, it doesn’t matter whether Bengt goes to the cinema or not. Or to which theater he goes, either. But she says it all the same. Because the one you love isn’t supposed to lie. At least not so that anyone will notice it. This is why she thinks she says it. But after she said it, it occurs to her that maybe no one noticed that Bengt lied. This frightens her and to distract them from what she had said, she sweeps it under a haze of words.
But she also rambles because she knows that silence is bad. For she has suddenly become terrified of the silence, just as much as the father was. And whenever she speaks quickly and frantically, her accent comes out without her noticing it. Only the others notice it. And suddenly the son realizes that her dialect is vulgar. Sitting there, listening, he is surprised that he hasn’t noticed it before. The father thinks her accent is ugly. He usually likes accents—but beautiful accents, the accents of beautiful women. Gun smiles.
Berit talks about a sofa, the sofa in her room, the kind of back it has, and how it falls off whenever you sit on it. This makes Gun smile. The father does not smile. Nor does Bengt smile. Soon they are just uncomfortable. They think it’s so embarrassing that Berit is so odd right off the bat that they can’t bring themselves to smile. A person should never show herself to be stranger than she’s presumed to be. Otherwise, the audience, which everyone has at her performance, becomes disappointed. Not because the new show is bad, but because it’s new. Someone who has just appealed to our compassion, to our melancholy, or to our fear cannot suddenly start experimenting with our joy as she has just experimented with our earnestness! Too much cannot be contained in one and the same person. Otherwise we become skeptical, and we don’t like anyone we’re unsure of. And the person who seems to boast everything— we hate her, because it’s against the rules of the performance to have it all. The truly popular people are actually the monotonous ones, the ones who are always themselves, that is, the ones we believe them to be.
Therefore, it’s a relief for both of them when Berit finally stops talking. The father wipes his brow, which is now sweaty. Maybe it’s the candle that’s too warm. Bengt takes the cake from his mother’s plate and holds it in front of Gun. Then his hands start to tremble, because if Judas were to sit at our table, we would talk to him about the weather, of course, but if we were to offer him a pastry, our hands would tremble. He thinks they are shaking with hatred, so the son is pleased with his hands. But as soon as he is pleased, they no longer shake.
As Gun slices the cake, he studies her face. He looks at it through his mother’s candle. Gun is looking at the cake, which is why he dares to look at her. The candle is burning very brightly, and through the flame he sees her face as it is when it’s alone; how it looks when it thinks no one is watching it; how it looks when it sleeps. Now it has dark shadows under the eyes and lines around the mouth, fine, like needle marks. Now her face is forty years old and he wants the father to see it, too. So he says to the father: