It had been in the papers. They had written about the woman’s background. The building complex had its own celebrity.
Would she open the door if Eva rang the bell? Or Pär, the single man who went by on his bike every morning with a pained expression on his face but who greeted Eva with a smile when they bumped into each other outside. Would he open his door?
Eva had talked to him before. He would often sit on the bench by the little play area and watch his five-year-old son build an endless series of sand castles. Sometimes the son was gone and Eva guessed he was with his mother. Pär was from the north. That was the only thing she knew about him.
The woman above her came from the south. She had mentioned Tuzla, but also a village that Eva could no longer remember the name of.
They had all gathered in a building with fifty-seven other families. Eva imagined them all walking from various directions, leaving behind them lives, relatives, and friends, in order to end up in a rental apartment building on the outskirts of Uppsala.
An area at the outskirts of the city where the cries of the tawny owl could be heard from the forest.
Earlier she had not thought about her surroundings so much. It was only after her divorce from Jörgen that she felt that she had the room to think. While they were still living together, it was as if he took all her time, used up all the oxygen around her, filling the space with his volubility and his thundering laugh. There were those who felt that he was sick, that his incessant talking was a manic fixation on the threat of silence, but Eva knew better. It was an inherited characteristic; his father and grandfather had been the same.
It was possible that he suffered from an overinflated self-confidence. The problem was that he seemed to nourish this self-confidence by turning to his surroundings, preying on Eva like a predatory digger wasp in order to strengthen himself.
Sometimes she pitied him, but only sometimes, and more rarely lately. As they sat in the lawyer’s office discussing the divorce, she felt only fatigue and great scorn. Jörgen was going on as usual, as if he did not understand that they were there to discuss the custody arrangements for the children.
The lawyer interrupted his stream of words by asking if he could really afford to stay in the highly mortgaged condominium. That halted his speech and he gave Eva a terrified look, as if seeking the answer to a question he had never posed. Eva understood that it was not the financial aspect that frightened him, but the sudden realization that he would have to live alone from now on.
Since then, this anxiety did not seem to want to leave him. It did not make him quiet, quite the opposite, but for Eva, Jörgen’s tentative questions about her well-being and tiptoeing into areas that they had not previously touched on were indications that he was not really mature, not conscious of what it meant to share one’s life with another person, that their marriage had simply been an extension of Jörgen’s life with his single mother. She, the bitch, as Eva called her in private, really had only one close friend, and that was her son.
Now the thoughtfulness and questions came too late. Eva was never tempted to grab one of the hooks he tossed out that they should perhaps try again. She maintained her distance and was mostly exaggeratedly formal. She knew that it hurt him, but in an obscure way it gave her a sense of satisfaction. It was a primitive revenge, but she could not be bothered with his sad monologues, where self-pity always lurked behind his account of how difficult life was.
Jörgen came and picked up Patrik and Hugo every other weekend and Eva put up a wall held together with indifference and suspicion toward his incessant drivel, glad to have escaped but careful not to become mean or ironic. He complained that he and the boys did not have a good relationship, but when Eva suggested that the boys should spend longer periods of time with him, he backed off.
Nowadays she had all the time in the world. The only schedule she had to observe were the appointments at the employment agency, and her only duty was to care for her two children, make sure that they got off to school, and went to bed at a somewhat reasonable hour.
Sometimes she was grateful for the fact that she had been laid off. It was as if the process of making herself free had started with her divorce, and that the freedom had now taken a new and higher form. It was a frustrating feeling, this remarkable mixture of anger at not being needed and the joy of being free to do as she pleased.
She formed the impression that it was more expensive to be unemployed. And yet she cut down on everything. She had stopped smoking about a month ago and calculated that she had already saved four hundred kronor. Where had they gone? she asked, but the answer was immediate. Fitting Hugo for instep supports had cost over a thousand kronor.
Her freedom may have increased, with all the hours alone with her thoughts, but her self-esteem was at rock bottom. She felt that she was different, or rather that everyone around her saw with different eyes. She was at the disposal of potential employers. The problem was that no one was disposed to employ her. Could they see it on her, did unemployment leave physical marks? Was there something in her posture that made the girls at the ICA supermarket only a little older than Patrik, or the bus driver when she climbed onto the bus in the middle of the day, regard her as a second-class citizen? She did not want to believe this, but the feeling of being worthless had eaten into her.
And now Helen, who appeared to be growing at Eva’s expense. It was as if she unconsciously saw the possibility of diminishing Eva as a way to take revenge for her own shortcomings and her submission to a man she should have left many years ago.
Eva had shrunk, been pressed back against the kitchen cabinets and the drain pipes under an increasingly shining countertop. Everything in the apartment was cleaned, picked up, dusted, everything was in its place, only that she was no longer needed. Wrong, she thought. I am needed. They had talked about that at work, how important they were, not least for the old people who patiently waited their turn in line, thumbing letters and forms. Someone decided that the post office should be reduced and that the number of customer chairs should be cut. One day there were carpenters there, putting up a wall. That was how it started. And the old people had to stand.
Then came the reduced hours. Everything became crowded, the tone cranky, complaints increased, and the clerks had to deal more often with the customers’ frustrations. One day lists appeared in the waiting area where the customers could sign protests of the worsening service and the closing of more post office locations. Many letters to the editor appeared in Upsala Nya Tidning, but nothing helped, and even Eva’s post office was eventually closed down. That was now nine months ago.
God, how she had looked for jobs! She had spent the first couple of weeks running around to stores, calling the county and the city, getting in touch with friends and even asking Jörgen if he couldn’t get her something at the sanitation company where he worked.
But there was nothing to get. During the summer she had worked for a few weeks in Eldercare Services, and thereafter at a supermarket, filling in for someone on disability, but the employee had miraculously arisen from his sickbed and returned to work.
Thereafter, nothing.
Five
This was how Manuel imagined a prison: a gray wall and barbed wire that ran the perimeter of a high fence. He had also imagined a manned guard post where he would have to present the reason for his visit, but there was only a gigantic door with a smaller door carved into it.