I manage neither to sit down nor to leave the table.
She continues, “My husband is still the man I’ve always loved, the same laughter and interests. He just has some problems now. Your situation is much more difficult. It’s totally natural that you think it’s hard!”
“More difficult? Yes, but when I hear about you … the wheelchair, the two small children!”
“Your husband’s injury makes it so you no longer know who you’re sacrificing yourself for. That’s hard!”
My body got up without my deciding to, and now it’s on its way to the door, about to burst into tears without me having control over anything at all.
“I think you’re right, Mia,” I hear Bernard say behind me. “You aren’t like us. It’s obvious that your husband isn’t nearly as sick as our spouses.”
Such a weird thing to say. You aren’t like us. No one’s told me anything like that since I was a schoolgirl. But now I suppose I should understand the words as something positive. I turn toward him.
“No I’m not. He’s not so very sick.”
He gives me a reassuring smile, almost like Frederik or my father-in-law. “But that’s why you might find it interesting to hear about our very different experiences.”
“Yes,” I say, “I might. And Frederik’s going to get better, of course.”
“Exactly. He might make a lot of progress in the coming months.”
I’m trembling, yet when I look at my hand, it isn’t shaking. And I feel something gnaw at me deep inside, far down in my abdomen, just like the cramps that used to plague me as a teenager. I never figured out if it was due to the mechanics of puberty, or to everything from my mother that I had to put up with — or being terribly infatuated with a boy two grades above me.
At last my body begins to return to my chair. The group waits, considerate and curious, while I seat myself.
“The first meeting can sometimes be a little overwhelming,” says a woman whose husband used to be a department head in the Ministry of Justice. Earlier she was explaining how he’s been stealing trash and odd items from the neighborhood and putting them into big piles in their yard.
And several members repeat what Bernard said, which they now understand is what I really want to hear. Your husband isn’t like our husbands.
“Thank you. I’d really like to stay. You have a fantastic group here. I don’t know what happened …”
We grow quiet. We drink from our coffee cups and look at one another.
“Thanks for urging me to stay,” I say — not to Bernard, but to Gerda. “You should just keep going.”
A short while later, Gerda receives a call from Kirsten in the hospital.
We try to listen in, and soon we understand that something’s gone well. Gerda takes the handset from her ear and tells us that Kirsten’s husband is now in stable condition; it was a much smaller stroke than the last one. It’s a terrible setback for his rehabilitation, but he survived.
“Congratulations!” we all shout in chorus to Kirsten on the phone.
After Gerda’s hung up, she slumps in her chair. “Kirsten’s greatly relieved,” she says. “Both of them are.” She tells us in detail what Kirsten said, and then she goes out to the kitchen to put on some more coffee.
We talk among ourselves. Through the even murmur of voices, I distinctly hear Ulla say, in a subdued voice to the woman who feels guilty toward her adult children, “It would have been better if Kirsten’s husband had died this time.”
Can you say that? Am I the only one who heard it?
A quick ripple of unease passes around the table. Andrea raises her voice, so that even Gerda out in the kitchen will be able to hear her. “Ulla, how’d you feel if someone said that about your husband?”
Ulla gazes at her with vague, tranquil eyes. She shrugs her shoulders and says nothing.
Glancing back and forth, everyone’s eyes meet, and now I see a warmth in their faces that I’ve had a hard time seeing in anyone’s for a long time. There it is: warmth. I can feel it. We smile controlled, crooked smiles that are anything but merry.
Figure 8.3. A common test for neglect, in which the subject is asked to place numerals and hands on a clockface. The test shown here reveals pronounced neglect.
7
The three years before Frederik collapsed in Majorca are the ones that Niklas and I need to remember and find strength in. In those years he was a dream of a man. The time we had with the real Frederik was brief, but for those few years he deserves my willingness to sacrifice the rest of my life in caring for him.
We spent extended weekends in Budapest, Prague, and Vienna, sometimes with Niklas, other times just the two of us. We repaired the roof on the house by ourselves, sitting up there with our safety lines tied to the chimney, him so funny and happy while the house and the yard and the other fine homes of Farum lay spread out beneath us. Together we chose new plants for the yard, so that the blooms would be better distributed over the course of the summer. And we redecorated the bathroom, building a large shower stall that we inaugurated twice in one evening while Niklas was sleeping at a friend’s. It felt strange to fall so wildly in love with my husband again, after so many years of feeling cheated.
Even after spending one entire summer Saturday alone together, we found ourselves slipping away from a garden party at a neighbor’s because the other guests bored us and we would rather spend a few more hours by ourselves. We ran back to our yard and sat in the hanging sofa that had become our special place. We opened our own bottle of wine, and there we sat and watched the pale blue summer sky turn slowly to night. Beneath us, the gentle swing of the sofa. I took off my shoes and sat with my legs tucked up. We looked up at the outermost twigs of the apple tree. Gazed at each other and our small yard.
We had created everything here. It was good. Niklas and the house and yard and each other, our whole life together. Because we had stuck it out, because our love was strong enough.
And when it became full dark that night, we went up to our room and made love, still taken with each other and how lovely life could be.
Yet even more important than the marvelous days I enjoyed with Frederik, again and again, was the fact that Frederik began to cultivate a relationship with Niklas. During the bad years, we’d had a recurring quarrel about him not spending enough time with our son. It was one thing that he’d quit being with me, but he’d damn well better not quit on Niklas.
That all stopped. Occasionally the two of them would sit in the living room until late at night, listening to Frederik’s large collection of old classical LPs. Perhaps they had deep discussions those nights, though probably not — that’s no doubt just my own fantasy of how it must be to hang out with a dad you’ve seen all too little of. For them I suppose it sufficed merely to be in the living room together, listening to music.
At times I even felt that Frederik went over the top in his enthusiasm for Niklas — like the time a consultant from the Ministry of Education visited Saxtorph and happened to mention that down in his car he had a professional-quality camera with extra lenses, and that he was going to sell it all on the web.
The present that Frederik brought ecstatically home for Niklas was worth more than several years of Christmas and birthday gifts put together. We argued about it. Yet now I can see that, as usual, Frederik was right. Niklas had started to become interested in photography, it was a gift that might change his life, and it was a good deal from a seller whom Frederik could trust.