She thought of home, about the past and all the things she missed and had missed every single day since she came here.
She was not there, she had absented herself. Here she was just a face with no body. She had no neck, no breasts, no crotch, no legs.
So when he was rough, when he forced himself into her from behind, when her anus was bleeding, it wasn’t happening to her. She was elsewhere, having left only her head there, singing Lydia Grajauskas to a tune she had learnt long ago.
It was raining as he drove into the empty car park.
It was the kind of summer when people held their breath when they woke up and crept over to the bedroom window, hoping that today, today the sun would be beating against the slats of the venetian blinds. It was the kind of summer when instead the rain played freely outside. Every morning weary eyes would give up hope as they scanned the greyness, while the mind registered the tapping on the window pane.
Ewert Grens sighed. He parked the car, turned the engine off, but stayed in the driver’s seat until it was impossible to see out and the raindrops were a steady flow that obscured everything. He couldn’t be bothered to move. He didn’t want to. Unease crawled all over him; reluctance tugged at whatever there was to catch. Another week had passed and he had almost forgotten about her.
He was breathing heavily.
He would never truly forget.
He lived with her still, every day, practically every hour, twenty-five years on. Nothing helped, no fucking hope.
The rain eased off, allowing him a glimpse of the large red-brick villa from the seventies. The garden was lovely, almost too carefully tended. He liked the apple trees best, six of them, which had just shed their white flowers.
He hated that house.
He relaxed his grip on the wheel, opened the car door and climbed out. Large puddles had formed on the uneven tarmac and he zigzagged between them, but the wet still soaked through the soles of his shoes before he was halfway there. As he walked, he tried to shake off the feeling that life ended a little with every step he took towards the entrance.
The whole place smelt of old people. He came here every Monday morning, but had never got used to the smell. The people who lived here in their wheelchairs or behind their Zimmer frames were not all old. He had no idea what caused the smell.
‘She’s sitting in her room.’
‘Thanks.’
‘She knows you’re coming.’
She didn’t have the faintest idea that he was coming.
He nodded at the young care assistant, who had come to recognise him and was just trying to be friendly, but would never know how much it hurt.
He walked past the Smiler, a man of about his own age who usually sat in the lobby, waving cheerily as people came and went; then there was Margareta, who screamed if you didn’t pay attention to her and stop to ask how she was. Every Monday morning, there they were, part of a photograph that didn’t need to be taken. He wondered whether, if they were not lined up and waiting one morning, he would miss them, or whether he would be relieved at not having to deal with the predictability of it all.
He paused. A quiet moment outside her room.
Some nights he would wake, shaken and covered in sweat, because he had clearly heard her say Welcome when he came, she had taken his hand in hers, happy to hold on to someone who loved her. He thought about it, about his recurring dream and it gave him the courage to open the door, as he always did, and enter her space, a small room with a window overlooking the car park.
‘Hello, Anni.’
She was sitting in the middle of the room, the wheelchair facing the door. She looked at him, her eyes showing nothing remotely like recognition or even a response. He went to her, put his hand against her cold cheek, talked to her.
‘Hi, Anni. It’s me. Ewert.’
She laughed. Inappropriate and too loud as always, a child’s laughter.
‘Do you know who I am today?’
Another laugh, a sudden loud noise. He pulled over the chair that was standing by the desk she never used, and sat down next to her. He took her hand, held it.
They had made her look nice.
Her fair hair was combed, held back with a slide on each side. A blue dress that he hadn’t seen for a while, that smelt newly washed.
It always struck him how bafflingly unchanged she really was, how the twenty-five years, wheelchair-bound years in the land of the unaware, had left so few traces. He had gained twenty kilos, lost a lot of hair, knew how furrowed his face had become. She was unmarked, as if you were allowed a more carefree spirit that kept you young to make up for not being able to participate in real life.
She tried to say something as she looked at him, making her usual gurgling baby noises, which always made him feel that she was trying to reach him. He squeezed her hand and swallowed whatever it was that was hurting his throat.
‘He’s being released tomorrow,’ he told her.
She mumbled and drooled and he pulled out his hankie to wipe away the saliva dribbling down her chin.
‘Anni, do you understand? From tomorrow, he’ll be out. He’ll be free, littering the streets again.’
Her room looked just the same as when she had moved in. He had picked out which pieces of furniture she should have from home and positioned them; he was the only one who knew why it was important for her to sleep with her head to the window.
Already on the first night she had looked at peace.
He had carried her in, put her in the bed and tucked the covers round her slender body. Her sleep had been deep and he had left her in the morning when she woke up. Leaving the car there he had walked all the way to police headquarters in Kungsholmen. It was afternoon by the time he had arrived.
‘I’ll get him this time.’
Her eyes rested on him, as if she were listening. He knew this was an illusion, but because it looked right, he sometimes pretended they were having a talk the way they used to.
Her eyes, were they expectant or just empty?
If only I had managed to stop.
If only that bastard hadn’t pulled you out. And if only your head hadn’t been softer than the wheel.
Ewert Grens bent over her, his forehead touching hers. He kissed her cheek.
‘I miss you.’
The man in the dark suit with the gold tiepin, who usually spat on the floor in front of her feet, had just left. It hadn’t helped this time to think of Klaipeda and have no body, only a head. She had felt him inside her; it happened sometimes that she couldn’t shut out the pain when someone thrust themselves into her and ordered her to move at the same time.
Lydia wondered if it was his smell.
The smell she recognised reminded her of the men who sat with her dad in that dirty room full of weapons. She wondered if it was a good thing that she recognised it, if that meant that she was still somehow connected to what had been back then and which she longed for so much, or if it was just breaking down even more, that everything she could have had, and that was now so far away, was being forced deeper into her.
He didn’t speak afterwards. He had looked at her, pointed, one last time – that was all. He didn’t even turn round when he left.
Lydia laughed.
If there had been anything between her legs, she would have been aggrieved that his bodily fluids had filled it and she would have felt him inside her even more. But she hadn’t. She was just a face.
She laughed as she lathered one part of her body after another with the white bar of soap until her skin was red; she rubbed hard, pressing the soap against her neck, shoulders, over her breasts, her vagina, her thighs, feet.
The suffocating shame.
She washed it away. His hands, his breath, his smell. The water was almost painfully hot, but the shame was like some horrible membrane that would not come off.