5
Vivi carried herself just as beautifully as before, just as fine-limbed and lovely. But she was moving more slowly and more stiffly as she walked around the library pushing a little cart, replacing the books on the shelves. I saw her through the big window facing out onto the square as I came around with two films and a book to return.
For the past two weeks or so I hadn’t gone out any more than necessary; I had just spent time with my own thoughts and my steadily expanding belly. It was showing now, my belly, I could no longer hide it, even under the loosest, bulkiest clothes, even if it wasn’t yet quite so large that an observer could be 100 percent certain I was pregnant just by looking at me when I was fully dressed. At least that’s what I thought. When I walked into the library and Vivi caught sight of me, she stopped short and said:
“Wow! I mean: hi! I haven’t seen you for a long time, Dorrit.”
She left the cart of books between two shelves and hobbled over to me at the circulation desk.
She had lost great clumps of her thick, shiny hair and nowadays always wore a handkerchief knotted around her head. It made her face look smaller, and her eyes and mouth bigger, and the whole thing gave her a naked, vulnerable appearance.
“How are things?” I asked tentatively.
“Okay,” she said.
“And… Elsa?”
“Not bad. A little better than she was a while ago, actually.”
I placed the book and the films on the counter, and was just about to ask her to give Elsa my best wishes, when she said:
“What’s going on with you two these days? You never see each other. She never talks about you. And if I ask her about something to do with you, she changes the subject. What’s happened?”
“Hasn’t she said anything?”
“No, that’s what I’m telling you: she doesn’t say a thing.”
And that’s the way it was: Elsa hadn’t told Vivi about our conversation, our quarrel. She hadn’t told her I was expecting a child.
“You’re joking!” she exclaimed when I told her.
And then she laughed. “And there I was thinking… I was thinking you’d started comfort eating or something. Or maybe you were taking part in some experiment that made you swell up, or where you had to eat a load of candy and cookies all day and weren’t allowed to exercise or something, these researchers come up with so many dumb ideas. And in fact you’re…”
She broke off, and said: “But how did it happen? I mean, how is it possible? Have you had hormone treatment? Or fertilized eggs implanted?”
“Why would I have done that?”
“I don’t mean on your own initiative, of course,” she said. “But it could have been done to you, couldn’t it? While you were anesthetized.”
“But I haven’t been anesthetized,” I said. “Not since I donated my kidney, and that’s ages ago; only an elephant could be pregnant that long.”
“I see,” she said. “Well, maybe you were impregnated naturally.”
“I think so,” I said.
I was about to leave; I was tired and Vivi seemed kind of strained, somehow. But now she said in her usual warm, serious tone:
“Was it Johannes who…?”
I nodded.
“Did he… Did he find out before…?”
“Just about,” I replied.
She looked at me. It was too much for me, that sympathetic look. I glanced away, swallowed. Then she held out her long arms, pulled me close to her, wrapped me in her embrace and stroked my back. She was almost as tall as Johannes; the top of my head reached her chin, and I closed my eyes, allowed myself to be enveloped by her, leaning my cheek against her breast. The scent of her reminded me of honey and fields of oilseed rape in bloom. I thought about Jock, and my dilapidated house and the farms and meadows around it, I thought about early summer in Skåne, about the wind and the sound of tractors and blackbirds and nightingales and young crows and the neighbors’ children playing and the wood stacked up to dry and washing hanging on the line between the apple trees, flapping in the breeze, and I could see my blue-painted garden furniture and there, on one of the chairs, I saw Johannes sitting, scratching Jock behind the ears as I walked toward them with a tray of coffee and cookies. I could see it as if it were a memory, and I didn’t cry, but it was as if my throat had been ripped apart, as if I had been crying, and my legs were about to give way.
Vivi led me over to her chair behind the circulation desk. I sat down. She fetched me a glass of water and pulled out a chair for herself, then sat down beside me with her arm around me. I drank a little of the water. Then we just sat there, behind the desk, until some borrowers came along needing Vivi’s help.
6
Elsa was lying on the lawn in the winter garden. She was lying on her side in the sun on a blanket. She was resting her head on her arm; an open book lay beside her. But she wasn’t reading, she was sleeping. Her rib cage was heaving, long deep breaths, even, almost completely free of that rattle now, but she coughed in her sleep from time to time. I stood in the shade on the gravel path just a few yards away from her. Stood there missing her. Dare I go over? Dare I go over and sit down next to her, be there when she woke up?
I did it, I walked from the crunching gravel onto the silent grass, sat down cross-legged an arm’s length away from her, in front of her, so that I wasn’t casting a shadow over her.
I had thought a great deal about what Alice had said. “You haven’t forgotten what it feels like to lose a friend because of a child, I hope?” Of course I hadn’t forgotten that feeling of being abruptly pushed out of a close circle to some distant periphery. Coming second, third, fourth, last. Being treated like someone less knowledgeable, someone inferior. Being shut out-and yet, paradoxically enough, being taken for granted. The old friends out in the community who had become parents had continued wanting to see me, but when we did meet up they were distant, sometimes condescending and always inaccessible, as if they were wrapped in invisible padding, at least when the children were small. The strange thing was that this only applied to my female friends; the men were certainly very much preoccupied with the child and with the upheaval involved in becoming a parent, and later with the chaos that ensued when they had their second child, which intensified when they had the third, fourth, fifth and so on. The men were absorbed, yes, but it was as if the women were on Valium: they talked and laughed and nodded and smiled, but they weren’t really there. It was as if they focused all their energy and all their interest in others on one single entity: the child.
I had always thought this was a deliberate stance, that they actually chose to close themselves off to more or less everyone except the child, who of course was dependent on them for its existence. I had always been convinced that this was a conscious decision to prioritize. But now I wasn’t so sure anymore. Now, while I was carrying something that would be a child, I noticed that I was changing; I was becoming self-absorbed in a new way that was hard to define, and I was beginning to sense that the self-sufficiency of those parents I had known was perhaps not a matter of choice. It wasn’t that I didn’t care about my friends anymore. My senses were heightened as never before, particularly my sense of smell and my hearing, and I was sensitive and easily moved, but at the same time I was becoming less and less receptive to the sorrows and troubles of those around me, and to their joy and happiness as well, when it came down to it. My friends meant a great deal to me-the few who were left. I didn’t think any less of them than before, quite the opposite, in fact. I rejoiced in the new ones, Görel and Mats and a couple of others, was immensely grateful that Vivi was such a good friend, and I grieved for Alice and Lena and Erik and Vanja and Majken and all the others I had lost. And Elsa, lying here in front of me on the grass, her head resting on her arm-I missed Elsa so much it felt as if my heart were being ripped out of my body. I enjoyed meeting and spending time with my friends, and when I did see them I registered everything they said and reacted to it, but a second later it slid off me like rain off a newly polished car: rapidly and without friction and without a single drop penetrating the surface. It was strange: in one way I was more sensitive than ever, in another I was more or less closed off.