“Don’t worry about it.”
“Well, I’m here now.”
She had two grocery bags full of food, wine, and champagne. OK, he thought, this is how she wants it.
There was something about her that made him excited, more than he felt with anyone else. Something in her way of putting her head to one side and looking a little bit guilty.
He was frightened of his own strength.
Afterwards, she got right out of bed.
He knew that she didn’t like it, that he had come too soon. He wanted to explain, but couldn’t find the words. We’ll just do it again, he thought. Later.
They set the table together, and she didn’t say much, but after she drank half a glass of wine, she began to cry.
“Sweetie, what is it?” he asked.
She didn’t answer and began to cry harder.
He threw his fork on the table.
“I’m a real asshole!” he exclaimed.
She turned to the side and didn’t look at him.
“Little sweetie,” he said. “Why did you want to come here, anyway?”
“I like you. I was longing for you the whole damn Christmas holidays.”
He got up and walked around the table, took her into his arms, lifted her out of her chair.
“Should we just finish the food, then?”
She took out a tissue and nodded.
After dinner, she fell asleep in the sofa, leaning on his arm. She breathed heavily and noisily. He was uncomfortable, but didn’t want to move, afraid that she would wake up and demand more from him.
A feeling of desolation crept over him.
Chapter THREE
Nathan had been wearing the green fatigues which were too tight for the jungle. He didn’t know that when he bought them; he just thought that they were practical and cheap. “Economical,” he said. Justine remembered his exact word.
No one saw him go to be by himself for a few moments. No one but Justine.
He probably screamed, more from surprise than anything else, although it probably stung a little. He tumbled outward immediately. The rapids and the waterfall drowned every sound, and they were so powerful that whatever became caught in them would be dashed to pieces.
Sometimes she thought she heard that scream. She was home now, at home in her house, but even so… And when she heard that scream, she also saw the body, how it turned once while falling. She saw his arms and his hands that she had loved.
Her house was narrow and tall in an almost Dutch kind of way. Originally it had been built with just two stories, but to get more room, her Pappa had had someone remodel the attic. But they were hardly ever there. In the summer it was too hot, and in the winter too cold.
Her father had never been an entirely practical person. He had hired carpenters, young men with suspenders. They had rushed up and down the stairs and formed their lips in silent suggestions whenever she came out in her nightgown. She had been confined to her bed. She lay in bed and listened to their steps and their hammering, and slowly she began to realize that she wasn’t a little girl any longer.
The oil heater was down in the basement. The driver of the oil tanker used to mutter about how difficult it was to reach it properly when it was time to refill it with oil, as the house was down so close to the beach that it was impossible to get the hoses stretched that far. Pappa used to bribe him with a bottle of whiskey, and this was something that Justine continued to do, once she was alone. Naturally, it was no longer the same driver. This one was bony and ill-tempered, and he spoke a dialect that made it almost impossible for her to understand his words. She felt herself shrink when she heard the sound of the oil truck. For a time, she thought about discontinuing oil delivery, but she didn’t know any other way to warm the house. There was a fireplace on the second floor, but it wasn’t big enough to heat the entire house. The raw chill of the lake seeped straight into the walls and floors.
In any case, she only had to deal with the trucker once a year. She always placed the whiskey bottle near the basement window, tied with a paper bow.
“Thanks for bringing the oil,” she would write on a slip of paper that she placed under the bottle. The piece of paper would still be there afterwards, the ink smeared.
The basement also held a large old-fashioned washing tub, which Flora had insisted on using. Twice a month Flora did laundry down there, and on those days both Justine and her father would feel ill at ease. She made herself look really ugly on those days, Flora, as if she enjoyed changing herself into a repulsive washerwoman. She knotted a handkerchief around her hair and wore her smelly patterned skirt which had missing buttons. It was a kind of reverse Cinderella transformation, and her fingers left stinging damp marks on Justine’s cheeks.
The hall was minimal, but they still had to store their outerwear there. Everywhere in the house there was a shortage of wardrobes. Once she became an adult, she had sometimes wondered why her pappa, with his wealth, had decided to continue living in that small house, even if it was adjacent to Lake Mälar. Something to do with her mother, something nostalgic.
Justine had stowed Flora’s capes and blue fox fur, packed them away in plastic garbage bags. Pappa’s loden coat, his caps and hats were stowed in another bag. She had decided to give them away to charity but she changed her mind at the last minute and carried them into the basement. Just the thought of meeting a strange woman wearing Flora’s fur gave her a feeling of distaste, as if her stepmother’s eyes would be staring at her from the strange woman’s face. Nail her to the pavement, force her back.
Just off the hall was the blue room, which they had used as a dining room. Everything there was either blue or white, from the wall-to-wall carpet, to the silk draperies, the flowerboxes in the window with its Saint Pauls and its Browallias. The flowers had not survived her sojourn to that hot country. She had soaked them with water prior to her departure, and placed layers of brown cardboard over the dirt, but it hadn’t helped.
The bird didn’t suffer. She let him live in the attic and set him up with bowls of seeds and water and a whole basket of peeled apples. He was having a grand old time.
Even the pictures on the wall continued the blue and white theme: a winter landscape, sailboats, and a weaving from silk rags that took up an entire wall. Justine’s mamma had woven it long before Justine was born. It had always hung there, an extension of her being.
She only had a few fragments of memory about her mother. A rumbling rain, a covering under which they sat close together, old sour socks sticking to her toes.
The smell of fluffy flowers, something hot with honey.
Against his will, her father told her.
Her mother had been standing, cleaning the windows. It was the window that faced the water on the second floor and the day had strong sunshine and the strong call of seagulls. The wind was still, and the ice was still lying thick over the water, but it was beginning to thin out, and perhaps she was happy about that, and perhaps she was humming to herself in the sunshine, perhaps she was even planning to go out on the balcony after she was finished in order to sit with her face turned toward the sky. She had quickly taken to this Nordic ritual. She had come from Annecy, a little town in France near the Swiss border, and he had taken her from there, against her parents’ wishes, to be his bride.
It was a Thursday. He came home from work at seven minutes after four. She was lying on the floor, with her arms outstretched as if she had been crucified. He could see right away that there was nothing that could be done.
“How could you tell?” Justine asked. She was in a period where she had to know as much as possible about her mother, obsessing about her.
He couldn’t answer.
“Perhaps she was still alive. If you had called a doctor right away, maybe he could have saved her.”