“Your mother drank,” said Agnes.
Birgitta’s peeling knife stopped in mid-motion.
“Your mother was unhappy.”
Birgitta stared at the housekeeper’s hunched back. Only the sound of the knife against the cutting board was heard.
“What do you mean?”
Agnes turned around with the knife in her hand. The smell of onion struck Birgitta.
“Exactly what I’m saying-your mother was unhappy and drank.”
“My mother was sick.”
“She got sick, yes.”
Birgitta stared at the older woman, tried to see something conciliatory in her facial features, some opening to a different conclusion, a different story. But in the housekeeper’s face there was only the determined look that Birgitta recognized so well. No compromise was possible. It was a stern implacability that Birgitta guessed had been impressed on Agnes during prayer and self-denial since she was a child.
She held an apple up to her nose to drive away the smell of onion.
“But there’s nothing to talk about now,” Agnes decided, and resumed her work.
Birgitta took a bite of the apple.
“I’m going to make two apple cakes,” Agnes stated with her back turned toward her. “If you want to eat the apples you can go out and pick for yourself.”
She went over to the refrigerator, took out a package of bones with some meat on them, perhaps pieces of oxtail, and Birgitta understood that Agnes was preparing a stock and that most likely there would be roast fillet with mushroom gravy and fried potatoes with herbs for dinner, a classic in the house.
Birgitta got up and pulled on the old, cutoff boots that Agnes always had standing by the door and went out. She realized that Agnes was watching her and when she turned her face toward the sky there was a fine drizzle that settled on her face like a cool, refreshing film. She knew that it would irritate Agnes.
“You’ll catch cold,” was also her immediate comment when Birgitta returned to the kitchen.
“I wish I could be at the dinner,” she said.
“I doubt if it will be much fun,” said Agnes.
“I was mostly thinking about the food.”
Agnes’s neck twitched.
“Can’t we eat in the kitchen, the two of us? Like before, when-”
“I’ll be serving,” said Agnes.
“You’ll have time for that too.”
Agnes did not answer but shook her head.
“I can help you,” said Birgitta, but realized at once that it was the wrong thing to say.
“Think how that would look.”
A sudden fury came over her and she caught herself cursing Agnes’s lack of imagination. “Think how that would look,” she silently imitated the ill-tempered comment, but the fury changed just as quickly into a kind of melancholy that affected her more and more often when she visited the house. It seemed as if the uncertainty of her childhood returned even stronger with increasing age, as if the smells in the house, the sight of the heavy furniture and the threadbare carpets brought her back to the unpredictable aspects of her early years, the feeling of constantly moving in a minefield, where a quarrel could detonate at any moment. Freedom had always been outside the house, in the garden or in the old playhouse that some distant relative had cobbled together in the early 1960s, places that neither Bertram nor Dagmar visited.
Liisa always joked with her, called the Ohler family “the headshrinkers” without ever explaining what she meant, but Birgitta herself had started to think of the family as a clan that wandered around with shrunken skulls, a ridiculous but also anxious image that sometimes came to her.
“Why did you think I would disappear every time I left the house?”
“What?”
The breadth of Agnes’s question, and perhaps the fact that she asked it at all, produced a landslide of emotions inside Birgitta.
“I guess I was afraid of being alone,” she answered with her eyes directed out the window. Between the branches of the trees and the black-soiled leaves some patches of blue sky were visible.
“No risk,” said Agnes. “I stayed here. Always.”
“Do you regret it?”
“Maybe I was scared too,” said Agnes at last.
She fetched a pan-it was her firm conviction that stock should always be cooked in an iron pan-dumped in the bones, the oxtail meat and vegetables, salt, whole pepper, bay leaves, poured in a little water and half a bottle of red wine, Portuguese Birgitta noticed, set the pan on the stove, and turned on the heat.
“There now,” she murmured.
Birgitta had peeled and cut up the last apple and let the segments disappear down into the tub of water. She wished there had been more fruit to peel.
“As luck would have it I brought black chanterelles with me,” said Agnes.
“From the island?”
Agnes nodded.
“I should have made the stock yesterday, but I didn’t find out until this morning that there would be a dinner this evening.”
“I’m sure it will be really good as always,” said Birgitta.
Agnes was standing by the stove and would do so until she could skim the stock a couple of times, and then leave it to simmer for several hours.
“Afraid of the life out there,” she said unprovoked, making a movement with the ladle toward the window. “Here I had an income and a place to live anyway.”
“But you’ve been happy, haven’t you?”
Agnes snorted.
“You all thought I couldn’t manage anything else,” she said. “Anything other than scrubbing, dusting, and cooking, cleaning up. And maybe that’s right.”
“Now you’re being unfair.”
Birgitta got up and went over to the housekeeper. “Look at me!” she said.
Agnes slowly turned her head. Her eyes looked uncommonly fish-like, perhaps it was the heat in the kitchen, perhaps the talk about happiness and all the thoughts that brought with it that made her eyes stick out even more.
“We have always appreciated you, you know that! The whole family, even if Daddy is the way he is. Even Mama wanted to have you stay.”
The ladle stopped in the pan.
“What do you mean ‘have me stay’?”
“It was nothing,” said Birgitta, her face turning bright red.
“Yes it was,” said Agnes, as she resumed the skimming.
Birgitta thought she could perceive something triumphant in her voice.
“I know that the professor wanted to fire me, but that Dagmar intervened.”
“That’s not at all true!”
“As true as I’m standing here. And what is really true? Is there more than one truth?”
“Sometimes,” said Birgitta, who was relieved that she got off so easy.
“I’ll stick to mine.”
Agnes turned down the heat on the stove.
“And one day perhaps you will find out why your father wanted to drive me out onto the street.”
“He wanted to save on the household,” said Birgitta.
“That’s the silliest thing I’ve heard.”
Agnes made a smacking sound with her tongue as if to underscore what she thought about Birgitta’s understanding.
“Now you’ll have to excuse me,” she said, “but I have to prepare the roast.”
“How should I find out the truth? Daddy’s not likely to say anything.”
“You’ll have to wait until I die,” said Agnes. “And that can be at any time.”
“Don’t say that!”
“What do I know?”
“Ridiculous!” Birgitta hissed.
“That may be, but you’ll have to wait.”
Birgitta left the kitchen without a word, pulled off her stockings on the stairs, and took a few easy, girlish barefoot steps out on the lawn, with a flightiness that in no way corresponded to what was going on inside her. She needed to get away from Agnes and her evasiveness. Bitterness was the worst thing she knew, when people dug down into old injustices, many times imagined, and dwelled on them over and over again.