A Blessed Child (15 page)

Molly hop-skips in and out between the trees in the woods. The bikini she has asked for as a birthday present will have polka dots, just like Erika’s, and the cake Rosa makes will be decorated with wild strawberries—and Erika and Laura will pick them. As for Molly, she will sit on a red cushion and eat chocolate pudding all day. Isak says so.

If Molly isn’t at home when Rosa starts cooking dinner, which she does at half past four—an hour and a half before the meal is served—her sisters have to go and look for her. Sometimes they can see her a long way off, hidden behind a tree, because Molly is very good at hiding but also not very good. Sometimes they can’t see her. Sometimes she doesn’t answer when they call. She’s usually wearing the blue dress, so that’s what they hope to catch a glimpse of. The dress is completely washed-out and only just covers her bottom. This summer, Molly is allowed to take part in the Hammarsö Pageant. You really have to be six to take part. But Isak says Molly can be in it even though she’s only four years and fifty-one weeks old. Rosa is going to make her a dress of purple velvet and she will stand in the middle of the stage and sing, and when she has finished singing she will do a low curtsey to the audience and say:

And now that night is falling

The full moon is bright as day

We are halfway between light and darkness

And halfway through our play.

Chapter 53

Erika can hear Laura calling her, but she pretends not to. She is sitting on her unmade bed, reading a letter from Ragnar. There’s something he wants to tell her face-to-face, he writes.
Meet me in the hut!
It is taking some time to read the letter, because he has written the whole thing in the secret language they used to speak when they were younger. There was music on the radio—the Jam, the Stranglers, the Boomtown Rats—but they have interrupted the music to bring news of the terrorist attacks at Spanish beach resorts. Erika looks up from her letter for a moment, listens, and turns back to the letter…
Three Finns and one Swede have been killed…Tourists are bathing in their own blood on the Costa del Sol.

“Erika!” Laura calls from the kitchen.

Erika doesn’t answer.

“Where are you?” calls Laura.

Erika burrows under the quilt and puts the pillow over her head.

Other voices.

“Erika! Erika!” calls Rosa.

And then her little sister’s high voice.

“Erika, you’ve got to come right now!” Molly calls.

Erika presses the pillow down harder over her head and waits for someone to open her door and find her. (Open her door without knocking! Nobody ever bothers to knock, in spite of the sign
DO NOT ENTER WITHOUT KNOCKING
! Isak is the only one who ever knocks.)

“Erika!” calls Laura.

“Erika! Erika!” shrieks Molly.

“Erika, can you come at once! We need you!” calls Rosa.

Erika throws aside the quilt. It’s too warm lying like that. Tonight she’s going to sleep naked with just the quilt cover and put the quilt under the bed. Rosa doesn’t like you taking your quilt out. She thinks you should keep it on even when it’s hot, for some unknown reason. But this is the hottest summer since
1874
, and even Rosa, admittedly against her better judgment, lets you open enough windows to create a draft in the house. Rosa usually can’t imagine anything more threatening to her family’s well-being than a draft in the house.

What the local paper claims about its being the hottest summer since
1874
, Isak says can’t possibly be true. Isak says there’s no need to go any further back than
1971
to find the same prolonged high summer temperatures.

“Erika, you’ve got to come!” calls Laura.

“Come on, Erika, you’ve got to come and help!” calls Rosa.

“ERIKA!” shrieks Molly.

Erika sits stock-still in bed, listening to the voices outside, voices from the living room, voices from somewhere out on the veranda. Then a quiet knock comes at the door.

“Erika,” says Isak, and she visualizes him bending his great head to the door so she can hear what he is saying.

“We need you now. You’ve got to sing. Can you open the door?”

Erika gets off the bed and drags herself across the floor. Over her bikini bottoms she’s wearing a fitted white shirt that she thinks looks good against her brown skin. Her hair is long and tangled; it comes down below her shoulders now. Laura’s hair is longer.

Erika opens the door, leans against the door frame, and looks at her father. He smiles when he sees her. She smiles back.

Erika remembers she has been chewing gum and quickly swallows it before opening her mouth to speak. Isak doesn’t like girls chewing gum. He says it’s unbecoming.

“What can I do for you?” she says.

“A funeral,” says Isak.

“Who’s died?”

“A sparrow,” Isak says.

He smiles again.

“Molly’s been so sad ever since she found it; we really didn’t mean for her to find it.”

“Birds die, and five-year-olds find them and cry,” says Erika.

“She’s been looking forward to the funeral,” her father says. “I think it was Laura’s idea.”

Isak holds out a little wooden cross.

“I made this.”

“All right, all right,” says Erika with a shrug. “I’m coming.”

Chapter 54

Ragnar’s hut is equipped so he can survive almost anything except an atom bomb or a nuclear explosion in the east. When he was smaller, he was scared of all that stuff, plutonium and explosions and bombs, and to comfort him his mother said Sweden would never be hit by an atom bomb and wiped off the face of the Earth, because Sweden was neutral and campaigned for peace on Earth. Ragnar knew better: nobody escaped the atom bomb. Yet he still tried to imagine a completely ordinary Sweden in a world that was otherwise entirely blotted out. The thought was not particularly edifying. Ragnar doesn’t brood about the atom bomb so much anymore; he can’t do anything to defend himself against it, after all, and if there’s war that may be just as well. Total Annihilation! Global Death! Ragnar thinks about other dangers (because on Hammarsö, nobody’s neutral—it’s perpetual war), so the hut is conceived not just as a place to be, with Erika, for example, but also as a fortress not unlike the old ruined forts on the eastern side of the island. Except his fortress is built of wood, not stone. One day, maybe next summer, he’s going to build a fortress of stone. Work is already in progress. In the evenings he collects big stones on the beach, loads them into a supermarket cart he stole from the shop, hauls them through branches and brush to the hut in the woods, and stores them either under his camp bed or outside, all around the clearing.

The hut’s main advantage is its location. It stands in a little patch of open heath beyond a virtually impenetrable forest of pine trees, dense juniper bushes, briar roses, and dark green, overgrown deciduous trees. Nobody uses this path, nobody ventures to this part of the forest. And why should they, when there are so many other, prettier woodland paths to take, inland to the open, flowering heathlands, or down to the sea? They would only scratch themselves on the thorns, stumble and fall in the brushwood and get bitten by ticks and horse-flies and other disgusting creepy-crawlies. It’s the perfect hiding place, and he has everything he needs: a stock of tinned food that, as long as he doesn’t quite eat his fill every day (actually, the feeling of fullness only comes half an hour after you’ve eaten, he read somewhere), should last him three weeks. He has thirty liters of water, forty-seven bottles of Coca-Cola, and ten bottles of Pommac (which is the worst-tasting soda in the world, here intended for situations when everything else has been drunk and all hope is gone). He has five collectors’ ring binders of
The Phantom
and
Superman,
complete sets. He has two working flashlights, a good tape player he got from his mother on his birthday, and his favorite cassette tape of the band Television. He has a box full of new batteries and another of potato chips and cigarettes and matches. On one wall there’s a film poster of Robert de Niro as Travis Bickle, signed by Puggen—that’s a birthday present from last year, too. He has a sleeping bag, an extra blanket, and a threadbare brown teddy he hides behind the stones under the camp bed whenever Erika comes to see him. He has plates, cutlery, glasses, and cups for two, and a flower-patterned oilcloth for the camping table.

Ragnar has a part in this year’s Hammarsö Pageant. It wasn’t his idea; he thinks the whole thing is pointless. But his mother went to Isak and said this time he’d better make sure her boy had a part for once.

Ragnar initially had no idea what Isak meant when he rang one evening and said they were looking for an angel for this year’s production and hoped he might oblige.

“Why me?” asked Ragnar.

“Because it would be fun,” answered Isak. He was playing Wise Old Man, he added.

At that Ragnar started laughing.

Isak also said that his daughters were all playing wood sprites; even Molly had a part this year.

“And Erika?” asked Ragnar.

“What about Erika?” said Isak.

“Is Erika in it, too?”

Isak did not mention to Ragnar that his mother had come to him, begging him to include her boy in the play. It was Erika who told him about it a few weeks later. Ragnar had said he couldn’t understand why he’d been offered a part all of a sudden. Isak calling him, being all nice and welcoming. He didn’t get it. And so Erika told him the truth, that Ann-Kristin had come to see Isak, begging on his behalf.

He could visualize the scene: his mother at Isak’s door—ugly and shabby and old. And Isak not even inviting her in for a cup of coffee. TO HELL WITH HIM.

Ragnar turns up for every single rehearsal in the garage. They are all there, dressed as wood sprites and angels and old peasant women. Marion, Frida, Emily, Pär, Fabian, and Olle. Erika makes faces at him when nobody’s looking, and sometimes takes his hand and gives it a squeeze. Erika smiles when he says his lines, a verse that starts with the words
I am an angel from the north.

Marion doesn’t say much. She chews gum and reads her lines. It’s just ten days to the opening night in the community center. Palle Quist shouts at the pianist, who has overslept for the fourth rehearsal in a row. Isak Lövenstad, in a fake white beard, can’t get through his second monologue. The leading lady, Ann-Marie Krok, is in the early stages of senile dementia (they say) and is confusing this year’s with last year’s lines. Palle Quist sits down on the floor, puts his head in his hands, and shouts, NO! NO! NO!

Marion runs one hand through her black hair and smiles at him.

“Hi, Ragnar.”

He looks at her and she doesn’t look away. She rolls her eyes and shrugs, to show how idiotically everyone’s behaving—Isak, Ann-Marie Krok, Palle Quist.

“See these people?”

He nods. They can see the same things. Ann-Marie Krok starts crying and runs offstage and out of the garage. Palle Quist rushes after her. Marion leans right up close to him and whispers: “That’s my grandmother. They all want to be young and beautiful.”

Ragnar nods. In a moment of jealous intimacy he thinks he will tell Marion what he is planning. She would understand. She’s the only one who would. Not even Erika would support him or understand (Erika has been chosen to sing and is taking the whole play much more seriously then she lets on), but Marion hates this spectacle as much as he does. Ragnar wants to tell her he’s thinking of upstaging this whole stupid pageant. Instead of saying his cringe-making angel lines, he’s going to read something quite different. He’s going to declaim a manifesto. On opening night he’s going to appear to them as a real angel! Not a fairy-tale angel in white, but a terrifying angel of death! An angel of truth and darkness!

I reckon that’ll make them shit all over themselves sitting there in the community center, he wants to say. But he keeps his mouth shut. He looks at Marion. She runs her hand through her hair again.

She says: “See you, okay?”

She is on her way out, but turns and gives him a smile. She has big, almost black eyes.

“Okay?”

“See you,” says Ragnar.

Chapter 55

The funeral procession moves slowly down to the sea: first Molly wearing a long black shift, quickly whipped up for her out of some old dress material that Rosa had right at the back of a cupboard; then Laura and Erika side by side, Erika with
Hymns Ancient and Modern
in her right hand; then Isak with the fake white beard, holding the wooden cross high; finally Rosa with a picnic basket of fruit cordial and buns. Laura is pulling a spade along behind her. The dead sparrow lies on a bed of white cotton wool in a shoebox from the Nordiska Kompaniet department store.

Erika has promised her father she will sing at the funeral—she can hardly refuse—but as soon as it’s over she’s going to run through the woods to Ragnar’s hut. She will lie on his bed and wait for him. She misses him. It’s all so difficult. She can’t tell anyone, can’t tell Marion, Frida, or Emily. At the very mention of Ragnar’s name, Marion sticks her finger down her throat and says, YUCK! Then Frida and Emily stick their fingers down their throats and say, YUCK! Marion would really like Erika to pair up with Fabian with the thick tongue.
You’d be good together, I just know it, so go on, kiss him!
and Erika does a bit of making out with Fabian, just to keep Marion happy.

The funeral procession draws close to the sea. Molly is holding the shoebox in her hands, carefully. She is not crying now; she is preoccupied with keeping her balance and not tripping over the black shift, which is a little too long. She has insisted on wearing her best shoes, new black patent-leather ones, bought on the mainland. The idea was for her to wear them for the first time on her fifth birthday, and again in the Hammarsö Pageant. After that they were to be packed in tissue paper and put in her suitcase and taken to Oslo. There, Molly’s mother would unpack them and put them at the back of the wardrobe in Molly’s room to await the next big occasion.

“Best shoes,” said Rosa, “are only supposed to be worn on special occasions; they are supposed to hurt and to give you blisters.”

Rosa said, too, that the shoes would get scratched and wrecked if Molly wore them on the beach. But Molly cried and said she wanted her new shoes for the funeral, they were black and went with the black shift, and although Rosa said no, and no again, Isak said it would be fine. And it is Isak who makes all final decisions.

Molly has told her sisters to dress up as well. Laura said there was no way she could be bothered to dress up for a rotten dead bird, and that made Molly start screaming.

“Can’t you just be nice for once,” Erika hissed at her sister. “Can’t you? Is that so hard for you?”

Laura shrugged.

Erika put on the costume she was going to wear for the Hammarsö Pageant, which Rosa had just finished making on the sewing machine. It was a thin white cotton dress with lace on the sleeves and a white ribbon belt. Erika wasn’t exactly sure what a wood sprite looked like, but you couldn’t go wrong with white lace and ribbon, Rosa said.

Anyway, the most important thing is that she’s going to sing. Not just now, during the funeral, but in the Hammarsö Pageant. Palle Quist had asked Erika, Marion, and Frida to audition for the big closing number, and he had chosen Erika.

“You sing like a little angel,” Palle Quist said, and Erika looked across at Marion and Frida and knew they would make her pay for those words, for Palle’s admiration; she could see it in their eyes, in their sneers. She didn’t know exactly how, but they were bound to make her pay. They would make her look stupid or ban her from the rock or force her to walk alone to the shop every day for a week to buy ice creams and Cokes for everybody. Something! Marion couldn’t care less about the Hammarsö Pageant; that was what she said: I couldn’t care fucking less about the goddamned play; but she had auditioned to sing even so, had made eyes at Palle Quist and tossed back her long black hair. And then he gave the part to Erika.

The beach below Isak’s house is long and bleak: nothing but stones and thistles and the occasional defiant yellow beach flower. The stones are four hundred million years old; many of them are entirely flat, as pale and silky smooth as the palms of Molly’s hands. It is the hottest of all the hot days, but down on the shoreline the wind is touching everything that can be touched and set in motion—Molly’s black shift, Erika’s white dress, Isak’s fake beard, Rosa’s long hair. It must appear a strange procession to anyone happening to see it from a distance. They step or dance or balance across the stones and the sun burns in the sky. Suddenly Isak halts, raises his head, and cries: “Stop! This is it. This is where we shall bury the dead bird!”

Molly hands out felt-tip pens to everyone from the pen set in Rosa’s basket. She asks them to write on the shoebox.

“To the bird,” says Molly. “And maybe to God.”

“Why?” asks Laura, and rolls up her eyes.

“
Because,
silly!” whispers Erika.

“I’ll write mine first,” says Isak.

Sometimes Erika tells Ragnar she’s coming to see him and then gets on her bike and goes to Marion’s instead. Sometimes she goes on her bike to see Emily, who is really Marion’s best friend, or to see Fabian with the thick tongue. She knows it drives Ragnar crazy when he waits for her in the hut and she doesn’t come. He wrote her a letter saying she mustn’t tell him she’s coming if she’s not.

Erika misses him when they haven’t seen each other for a while, but when they’re together, she just wants to get away.

It’s as if Ragnar is always with her. She’ll find herself imagining him standing just a few steps away, watching her. Like now, here on the beach. Everything she does, everything she says. After the funeral she’s going to run and find him. Then he’ll kiss her and undress her. She’s often embarrassed by what they do together.

Making out with Fabian now and then doesn’t count for anything. His tongue fills her whole mouth, and once it made her feel sick, but she blamed it on something she’d eaten, so then they played Yahtzee and shared a packet of chips instead of kissing. That would never have happened with Ragnar. For a start, being kissed by him doesn’t make her feel sick; she moves closer to him and takes his hands and puts them on her breasts, between her legs. She pulls him onto her and feels him lying there on top of her and wants it never to end. But she doesn’t want him to take it so seriously. They lie on the camp bed and touch each other’s faces, each other’s eyes, noses, mouths, cheeks, and Ragnar sometimes says, We’re alike, Erika, you and me.

Last time he got out a pocket mirror. They were lying together on the camp bed; she had pulled the blanket up to her chin, suddenly not wanting him to see her breasts. He angled the mirror so both their faces were reflected in it and said:

“You can see it, can’t you? We look like brother and sister.”

Erika took the mirror from him and threw it under the bed. It didn’t break. She said she’d like a Coca-Cola. Or some chewing gum. Or something nice to eat.

Ragnar sometimes says: Don’t leave me! And that just makes Erika want to get up and run away from the hut and never go back. She almost hates him then, hates him because she was missing him just before.

Molly wants everybody to write something on the shoebox. She has written her name in big, sloping letters, like this:
MOLLY.
And now she wants the others to write other things.

“Can’t I just write my name, too?” asks Laura when Molly gives her the shoebox.

“No!” says Molly. “You have to write more.”

“But you’ve only written your name,” says Laura.

“Yes, but
you
have to write more,” declares Molly.

Laura rolls her eyes. “But why? Why must I write more when it’s
your
funeral?”

Rosa tugs Laura’s plait and tells her to buck up and do as Molly says. A cool wind is blowing across the water; they all lift their heads and shut their eyes, letting the wind stroke their faces. It lasts only a second or two. Molly stands up on tiptoe and stares straight at Laura. The wind rustles the black shift. She says: “You have to write more! Writing your name isn’t enough.”

Laura takes the shoebox and writes swiftly:

Thank you for the world so sweet

Thank you for the food we eat

Thank you for the bird you killed

Let it spurt out blood and gore

Rest in peace, AMEN

Rosa looks over her daughter’s shoulder and says: “Oh, Laura, no!”

Isak bends over the shoebox and reads. His earlobes flush red and he raises his hand to his fake beard as if he wants to tear it off.

“You little brat,” he whispers to Laura. “Shall I cut off your fingers now or later?”

Laura eyes her father defiantly.

“But it’s true!”

“What is?” he hisses.

Laura shrugs.

“About the bird.”

“What does it say?” shouts Molly. “What did Laura write? What did Laura write?”

“Nothing,” says Rosa tersely. “Laura hasn’t written anything.”

“But she’s GOT TO!” shouts Molly. “She’s GOT TO write something.”

Isak pulls himself together, raises a hand, and says:

“Hush, the lot of you. Hush! Quiet! I must ask you all to be quiet now. It’s time for us to bury this bird.”

“Finally,” mutters Erika.

“Come on, Molly,” says Isak.

He takes his youngest daughter’s hand in his.

“HOY! HOY! HOY!” screams Molly.

“Come on, Molly,” he repeats. “We must all be quiet now.”

Without meeting Laura’s eye, Isak carefully takes the shoebox from her and passes it to Rosa.

“Now you write something,” he says to his wife.

“I’ll try,” says Rosa. “And then we’ll have a picnic. I’ve got lots of nice things in the basket.”

Rosa writes: “Little bird, now you are flying to Baby Jesus in Heaven.”

Rosa passes the box on to Erika.

Erika writes: “Dear God, bless all the people and birds here on Earth, best wishes, Erika.”

Erika passes the box to Isak.

Isak writes: “We went not namelessly away / Our life was to give name.”

When Erika catches sight of Ragnar, half hidden behind a tree, she doesn’t know how long he has been standing watching them. He is a fair way off, there in the clearing in the trees, where the woods stop being woods and start being beach instead. She doesn’t know how long, but she has sensed it, sensed that Ragnar is watching her. Every time she raises a hand or takes a step, it’s as if she is doing it for him.

What do you think of the way I raise my hand? What do you think of the way I move along the beach? Am I beautiful in this white dress with this ribbon belt? Am I, Ragnar?

She raises her hand, partly to wave to him, partly to shade her eyes from the sun. It’s that time of the afternoon when the light is at its whitest. Everything is white and glaring. You have to screw your eyes up really tight to see anything at all. Ragnar isn’t waving back. It’s not her he’s looking at. He’s looking at Isak. That’s hardly surprising, thinks Erika, because Isak does look very odd—at least if you’re seeing him from a distance, as Ragnar is. Isak is standing on a rock out in the water with his fake beard fluttering and his arms raised to the sky. He is speaking. It’s a kind of sermon.

Erika turns back to Ragnar. He doesn’t notice her. She tries to wave, but Ragnar is looking only at Isak. He is standing quite, quite still behind the tree, staring at her father.

Isak is the wicked king from the land of Dofeatovhok who has bewitched the island and everyone who lives there—the people, the sheep, the cows, the trees, the fish. He has an ear as big as the tall windows of the community center. He hears everything. Every sound. The slap of the flounder against the stony seabed. Fir cones opening. Your breathing as you run away through the woods. And everything he hears, he writes down in a book he hides in his house. In the grandfather clock? In the writing desk? Ragnar will defeat him, find the book, burn it, and free the king’s daughters. When Isak is dead, they will live in the secret hut in the woods and rule over land and sea themselves. But first, you must tell me everything about him: what he does in the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening, in the night when you all think he’s asleep. To kill him, I need to know him as a son would know him.