“Well, then I guess I have to move by myself. That is, if I want to keep working. Curt is going to move the whole publishing business there.”
His arm came out of the blanket. He scratched the wall searching for the light, found it. He sat up in the bed and looked at her, without really seeing her of course, because his glasses were on the dresser.
“To Luleå?” he asked and in that moment she was so tired of him that she had to hold herself in check to keep from screaming.
“Yes, Luleå! He’s getting a hell of a lot of subsidies, and he has his damned roots in that little corner of hell.”
“Berit…”
“That’s what’s happening! Shit!”
“When did you find this out?”
“He announced it on Monday. But you weren’t home, of course. I didn’t have a chance to tell you.”
“Are all of you going to be fired?”
“Oh no, not fired. And that is what is so devious about the whole thing, because only one or two of us are going to be able to move there. No one wants to go voluntarily.”
“But doesn’t he need you all?”
“Need, right. He is certainly going to downsize. And of course there’s lots of Norrlanders who’d want the job. If he wants to expand, that is.”
“You should get in touch with the union, Berit. He can’t do this, not without following all the proper procedures and rules.”
She snorted and put her feet on the floor.
“The union! We’re not unionized. It’s not customary in this field, you understand.”
He said, “Let’s go downstairs and talk for a while. Let’s go and have a cognac while we’re at it.”
He lit a fire in the fireplace and wrapped a blanket around her. Gave her the glass of cognac.
“Well, that’s a blow,” he said. “Luleå!”
“I’m going to be unemployed, Tor. At the age of forty-five, almost forty-six.”
“You can be a housewife again.”
“I’d rather die.”
“We wouldn’t have to eat take-out pizza.”
“Something wrong with the pizza?”
“Don’t ask me.”
“I really wasn’t hungry,” she said and sipped the cognac. “Maybe you can understand the reason now.”
“Berit,” he said softly. “Don’t throw in the towel! You’re still young. You should start looking for a new job now. It’ll work out.”
“With the high unemployment these days? Don’t you ever read the paper? Today there was an article about this twentyfive-year-old guy who hadn’t found a job since he finished his engineering degree at The Royal Technical College. A fine, well-educated kid, highly qualified, who was looking for any job at all. He had a folder filled with rejection letters. More than forty of them from the whole country. Even Luleå, by the way.”
“Hey, Sweetie, don’t make a mountain out of a molehill. At least not until you’ve looked around and seen whether the job situation really is all that bad.”
They emptied their glasses and went back to bed. They didn’t have much more to say.
He lay down in his bed, but reached to stroke her cheek.
“There’s one more thing,” she said. “And I am terrified about it.”
He mumbled a little; he was already falling asleep.
“In Hässelby, last Saturday, when I came home so late. That old classmate of mine… the one with the French name…”
Why was she the way she was? Why did things happen the way they did? What made a child into a victim?
And what was it about me? Where did that cruelty come from?
Children noticed differences, and what happened to her mother made her different from us. She didn’t have a real mother. Her mother died in that mysterious way in their house. When Justine was little. Then her father had married his secretary; there was a lot of gossip. We must have heard some of it when the adults were sitting down to coffee. It happened during grade school, first grade; we went to the stone building then… Justine had her place next to me, I wanted to sit next to Jill, but there was a misunderstanding. Our teacher said, that’s fine girls, sit there. Justine was ugly and spindly, like a fish. But weren’t we all…? She clung to me; just because we happened to be next to each other, we were supposed to be best friends. I believe I told her right away that we were not going to be friends, but she was somewhat slow on the uptake; she didn’t get it. All normal people would have understood, but not her. During recess, she would follow Jill and me: what should we play now, can I play, too. We were forced to hit her to get away from her. She had money; her dad was rich as Midas. She went to the store and bought candy during recesses, a huge pile of candy. She would hide it in different places for us to find, and we crept around and looked for it. It also made me mad, I remember that. Miss Messer discovered her, and then it was forbidden to leave school grounds and forbidden to have candy at school. She had to stay after school, I believe; our teacher didn’t dare hit her, but made her sit and feel ashamed of herself.
She made us crazy. It was her fault. We were kids; we didn’t know better…
She tried to buy me. And the person who has to bribe is always lower down the ladder.
“Come home with me after school, Berit. I have a whole box full of Sandy Candy.”
“What about Jill?”
“Jill can come, too.”
It was that very house, the one down by the lake, and they had a dock that jutted straight out, and a large, fine boat. Her dad owned the whole Sandy concern.
“Flora’s not home,” she said.
“Flora… is she your mom?”
She shrugged.
“You’re mom’s dead, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Is she in the graveyard?”
“Yeah.”
“She was foreign, right?”
“She was from France. And when I am grown up, I’m moving there.”
“Could she speak Swedish, your mom?”
“Of course.”
“Can you speak French?”
“Pappa’s going to teach me. When he has time. But he has too much work nowadays. With the factory.”
When we got closer to the house, she told us to sneak in.
“In case Flora hasn’t left yet.”
She hadn’t left. We lay behind the big stone and saw her come down the stairs. She didn’t look like our mothers. My mom was old; I could tell when I saw Flora. She was nearly as thin as we were. She was made up like a film star. She had trouble walking on the gravel with her high heels; they sunk in. A car was waiting for her at the road. We saw her get into the back seat; the chauffeur held the door open for her and shut it again.
She didn’t notice us.
“She’s going shopping,” said Justine. “She loves going shopping.”
She had a key in a string around her neck. She had to stand on her toes in order to open the door. It seemed sort of disgusting to sneak into Justine’s house, as if we were doing something forbidden. As if she herself were doing something forbidden.
Her room was on the second floor. It looked like mine. Bed, desk, books. Some dolls and stuffed animals. She went down onto her knees and pulled a box from under the bed.
“Ta-da!” she said, and took off the lid.
The whole box was filled with small boxes of Sandy Candy.
“Go ahead. Help yourself,” she said.
We took four boxes apiece, Jill and me; that was all we could hold.
“OK. We’re going now,” said Jill.
Justine jumped up and blocked the door.
“Do you want to see the place my mom died?”
We looked at each other.
“OK,” I said.
“Follow me!”
It was next to the big window on the second floor.
“Here on the floor was where my mom died.”
“Why’d she do that?”
“Something broke in her brain.”
“Was your mom crazy?” Jill asked and giggled.
“No…”
“You’re crazy; maybe you got it from her,” said Jill.
“I’m not at all crazy!”
I glanced at the shining brown floor and tried to imagine how the woman who had been Justine’s real mother had lain there and breathed her last.