We continued to meet regularly even after my depression had died down and dispersed. The meetings covered getting on for two-and-a-half years, reducing eventually to just once or twice a month towards the end; and I know that nobody has contributed more to my understanding of myself than this Gudrun Ewerts.
‘You have been living all your life on other people’s terms,’ she said. ‘Since your little sister’s death, at least. You have been living a mirror image of yourself — do you understand what I’m saying? If you bury your own free will in a desert, you can’t expect it to survive.’
I know that she came into my mind as I was walking along the windy beach at Miȩdzyzdroje, that dear old therapist of mine; when I was walking in a sort of dream after having closed that heavy door. Maybe it’s not all that surprising, and I have the impression that I smiled at her. Or at least, at her memory: she has been dead for more than ten years, and it must have been a strange sort of smile.
*
But the relationship between me and my daughter never improved. She became an introverted child, learned to occupy herself far too soon, and the contact between us was always inadequate. It was as if we were playing the roles of mother and daughter, and without a doubt we were skilful actresses, both of us. Unfortunately the same sort of relationship applied to father and daughter — perhaps even more so. Throughout the whole of her childhood Synn was in charge of her own life: she looked after her school work and her relationships with her friends in exemplary fashion — or at least without any interference from us — and she kept her secrets to herself. I have no idea when she started her periods, nor when she lost her virginity. Two weeks after taking her school-leaving exam she moved to France, and I remember thinking that I had been a sort of hotel-keeper rather than a mother. I’d had a guest in the same room for nineteen years, and now she had moved on.
I never discussed this with Martin — there wouldn’t have been any point. The other hotel guest, Gunvald, had moved out only six months before his sister.
When I write about this it feels as if it isn’t true. It can’t have been as bad as that, I’m sitting here and making it all up. I lay awake night after night, worrying about it — surely that was the case? I thought about them and was convinced that I loved them.
Ah well, there are some people who believe that telling lies is the only way of getting close to a sort of truth.
*
We arrived at the hotel in Kristianstad at about seven o’clock. It was a grey morning, foggy. I had slept in the car for a few hours, but Martin was so tired that he couldn’t see straight. He drank three cups of coffee, and after our substantial breakfast and a shortish walk with Castor we continued to Ystad, where we drove onto a ferry to Świnoujście shortly before lunch.
The crossing took six hours. Martin slept more or less all the time; I sat in a deckchair beside him and tried to solve the crossword puzzle in the Svenska Dagbladet, as it was a Friday and I had managed to buy the newspaper in a kiosk on the way to the harbour. Castor lay stretched out at our feet. I recall that there were not many passengers, and I was soon overcome by a strong feeling of being abandoned. Almost a loss of identity. Who was I? Where was I going? Why?
Those are not useful questions for a fifty-five-year-old woman to ask herself, especially in circumstances in which there is no chance of finding an answer. After a while I realized that the best way of imposing a check on my increasing angst would be to ring Christa and exchange a few words with her: but by the time this insight dawned on me we were already so far out to sea that there was no mobile signal.
Instead I started thinking about a speech Martin had once given, in which he declared that there was no great difference between the concepts of ‘potato’ and ‘angst’. There were characteristics that could be ascribed to angst, and characteristics that could be ascribed to potato: some were the same, others were different. And that was that. It was in connection with a dinner to celebrate the awarding of a doctorate to one of his colleagues, a dry-as-dust lecturer in semantics. I recall that the comparison gave rise to much amusement around the table, and that Martin was immensely proud of his ingenuity. Without acknowledging it with so much as a smile, of course. Personally, I had no idea what he was talking about.
We met at the Monkeyhouse a hundred years ago, Christa and I. We worked under the same roof — and as often as not within the same cramped walls — for several years before we got to know each other. Our friendship began at the end of the nineties when she divorced her husband, a not exactly unknown actor with an enormous ego. Christa was far from well, and indeed felt so bad that some days when she came to work she needed to take two sleeping tablets and then go and hide away in order to avoid a complete breakdown.
She used to say: ‘Maria, I’m on the edge of complete breakdown — please sit by me and hold my hand until I fall asleep.’
And I would sit there, in one of the Monkeyhouse’s small rest rooms, holding one of her hands in both of mine while she wept, spoke, started slurring her words and eventually fell asleep. That would happen several times a week for at least three months, and how on earth we managed to conceal the situation from our bosses is still a mystery.
But you get to know one another in such circumstances, and we have continued to be close. Christa is the person I would like to scatter my ashes when I finally die: I’ve already chosen her in fact — and she me, but I don’t know if she’ll remember. About a year after her difficult divorce we went on a trip to Venice together, just the two of us, and one night after a long and wine-soaked evening in a restaurant we stood on one of the bridges over a deserted canal and exchanged promises to that effect. Whichever of us survived longest would look after the other’s ashes and make sure they ended up in the right place. I assume that what we had in mind was the black waters in the city where we were at the time, and that by scattering our ashes there we would be assured of eternal life — but we never talked about it afterwards. Obviously, we were a little drunk at the time. .
Unfortunately I didn’t have Christa by my side after that incident in Gothenburg. She was on a reporting mission in South America with her new husband, a photographer, and they didn’t get back to Stockholm until August. We had exchanged a few e-mails and spoken on the phone once or twice, but we didn’t meet face to face to discuss the matter until a few days after I had been in Gothenburg and interviewed the woman who may or may not have been raped. We had lunch at the Ulla Winbladh restaurant, and sat there talking for three hours. But to be honest, I felt somewhat disappointed when I left.
And to be even more honest I don’t really know what I had expected; but we hadn’t met for over six months, and if truth be told. . well, if it were told, our friendship had cooled off a little over the last few years. We had not been colleagues since the autumn of 2008. We had met increasingly infrequently, and kept in touch by e-mail, a few times a month and occasionally more often. Short factual reports, no more than that — ironical and rather playful, which is the simplest way of writing when it doesn’t concern real life. Or rather, when it does.
Right now, of course, it concerned rather a lot of important things — or so I tried to convince myself, and if I didn’t get in touch for several weeks after leaving Stockholm Christa would suspect there was something fishy going on. Despite everything. Or at least would think it was odd — surely there are internet cafes in Morocco just as there are everywhere else in the world? We had spoken on the phone three days before Martin and I left.