A Blessed Child (17 page)

Chapter 58

Molly isn’t allowed to get up in the morning until the man on the radio has finished talking about what’s going on in the world and another man has read out the temperatures for all of Sweden. The magic word is
Borlänge.
When the temperature man has declared what kind of weather the people of Borlänge may expect that day, Molly can get up.

Today is Molly’s birthday. She’s five. She wants a bikini. One like Erika’s, with polka dots. Isak says you don’t always get what you want. She might end up with a globe instead.

“There are hard lessons to be learned in life,” says Isak.

Molly has a radio in her room, on her bedside table. It’s small and oblong and gray, with a long aerial sticking up. Sometimes you have to twist the aerial to get a good sound. Molly knows how to do that.

The man on the radio says:
Wage earners’ investment funds were the most controversial issue of the 1976 election campaign and led to the Social Democrats’ fall from power. As this year’s election approaches, wage earners’ investment funds have been consigned to the political wilderness, but that particular bear is unlikely to sleep in peace indefinitely.

Molly sits up in bed and yells: “HELLO THERE, RADIO MAN! Bears never sleep!”

Molly wonders if she’ll get up even though the temperature man hasn’t started reading out the temperatures. This is the rule: the temperature man might say
Borlänge seventeen degrees Celsius
and before that he might say
Kiruna twelve
and
Luleå fourteen
and
Sundsvall nineteen,
but it’s only when he gets to
Borlänge seventeen
that she’s allowed to get up and run in to Isak and Rosa and shout at the top of her lungs BORLÄNGE SEVENTEEN! and hurl herself into their bed and tug at the quilt and jump up and down without Isak’s getting angry and bellowing that she’s to take herself back to her own bed and go back to sleep.

Birthdays are no exception, Isak told her yesterday evening.

Night is still night and day is still day, even on your birthday.

Molly has asked Laura if bears absolutely, definitely exist, and Laura says they do, and they can attack at any time. She shows Molly a newspaper article about a bear that has torn lots of sheep to bits. Laura reads out:
The idyllic scene in this beautiful northern valley has turned into a desperate hunt for corpses.

“What’s a hunt for corpses?” asks Molly.

Laura shrugs. She shows her sister a picture of three mutilated dead sheep. Next to one bloodied sheep stands a farmer with a rifle slung over his shoulder.

Rosa says there are no bears on the island, but Laura says Rosa’s lying because she doesn’t want to frighten her.

“Grown-ups always lie to little children,” says Laura.

“About what sorts of things?” Molly asks.

“They lie about world war and murderers and nuclear power stations and atom bombs and disarmament and fucking and cancer and death and God and Jesus and the Virgin Mary and everything. They lie about everything, get it?”

Molly is quiet for a moment. She eyes her sister.

“But they don’t lie about bears,” she says.

Laura groans.

“They lie about everything! Everything!”

The truth is, at night, when both the yellow ferries between the mainland and Hammarsö are lying still and the ferrymen are asleep in their beds, the bears slowly swim across the sound, one after another, in a long, long row. They paddle through the water like dogs. They have thick, shaggy white coats and sharp teeth and black eyes. Laura says God exists and God sees everything. Molly knows that. Jesus died a long time ago, so did Granddad and the bird that crashed into the window and other birds that crashed into other windows and the kittens the caretaker in Oslo flushed down the toilet. They all live in Heaven, with God, who sees everything.

Laura says it’s important to pretend she’s not afraid of the bears, because if God sees she’s afraid, he’ll cancel her birthday and then she’ll have to stay four for a whole year longer and maybe forever, for all eternity.

“God punishes everybody who’s afraid,” says Laura.

Molly gets out of bed, pulls the blue dress over her head, creeps out of her room and along the hall, and unlocks the front door. Then she runs down to the sea, and the wind blows around her ears, and she shouts to the wind that she’s Molly. I’M MOLLY! she shouts. HOY, HOY, HOY! The waves roar. Molly can swim although she can’t swim, so she takes off her dress and dips her toe in the water. It’s cold. She’s sure the man on the radio hasn’t said
Borlänge
yet; he hasn’t read out a single temperature. It’s terribly, terribly early in the morning. Isak would definitely call it night. Molly kneels down and the cold water comes up to her bottom; it laps at her and it’s cold and the sun sparkles on the horizon. The rough stones in the shallows open up an old gash on her knee, but it’s been reopened so many times that it doesn’t hurt anymore. Molly isn’t afraid of anything. I’M NOT AFRAID OF ANYTHING! she shouts, and looks up at the sky.

She puts her hands together and prays.

Most of all she wants a polka-dot bikini.

Chapter 59

Erika is lying on the rock in the sea with Marion, Frida, and Emily. And Frida has brought a magazine, an even dirtier magazine than those Marion steals from her father. The new magazine actually belongs to Frida’s brother Evert, who is eighteen and doing his military service. This raunchier one has mainly pictures and hardly any stories.

“Let me show you! Let me show you!” Frida says eagerly, fending off all the girls’ hands grabbing at the magazine and trying to see.

Frida turns to a picture of a woman lying on her side on the floor and being taken frontally by one man and from behind by another, while a third is kneeling over her face. Frida holds it up so they can all see and then passes it to Marion, who passes it to Erika, who passes it to Emily. Erika looks at the picture and giggles and feels a tingling inside her. To be utterly filled like that. Totally blocked up and torn apart at the same time. Outnumbered and mastered and powerless.

“Take a look at that, Erika!” whispers Marion, who is sitting next to her.

The other girls look at Erika and snicker.

“That could have been you,” Frida says in a low voice.

“You could have been screwed by Fabian on one side and his twin brother on the other side,” says Marion.

“While you sucked Pär’s cock,” says Emily.

“Pär’s mine,” says Marion, with an ominous look at Emily.

“All right, Ragnar then,” says Emily. “While she sucks Ragnar’s cock.”

“Yuck!” says Marion, and sticks her finger in her mouth, in and out, and makes a face as if she’s about to throw up.

Erika giggles. She doesn’t want to giggle; all this stuff they say isn’t worth giggling at, all this disgusting stuff that spews out of them every time they say Ragnar’s name—it’s like spitting on him—but she giggles anyway. It’s like that time, a few days ago, when they were looking through her old album and saw the photograph of her and her father and she said: My dad’s stupid. She didn’t want to say it, but she said it, even so. She doesn’t feel able not to. Marion puts an arm around her and says she’s having a party later in the week and lots of people are coming. Not just Fabian and his brother, but older boys, Frida’s brother’s friends, all on their military service. Erika can feel Marion tickling the back of her neck and bending over her and licking her ear. She thinks of the picture of the woman being taken from the front and the back and in her mouth, and there’s a tingling between her legs.

“NOW!” says Marion suddenly.

Frida grabs Erika’s arms, pushes her down onto her back, and holds her there. Emily pulls off her bikini briefs, forces her legs apart, and holds her there.

“No,” giggles Erika. “Don’t do it.”

Marion goes over to her beach bag and fishes out her vibrator.

“Please, no,” giggles Erika.

She can’t stop giggling. Marion approaches slowly and looks just too comical with the buzzing vibrator held out in front of her and an expression on her face (eyes half closed, pouting lips) that’s supposed to suggest the horny woman in the magazine. It
is
comical. It’s like being tickled, and Erika can’t keep herself from laughing. She laughs and laughs and laughs. She wants to sit up and recover, but Frida is gripping her wrists and Emily her ankles, and Erika can only writhe there, pinned at each extremity, her legs parted. Now they’re all laughing. Frida at her head, Emily at her feet, holding her down. Marion with the buzzing vibrator. Erika on her back with her legs splayed wide. They laugh and laugh, and the more they look at one another, the more they laugh, and it’s impossible to stop. Marion tries to recompose her incongruous face, but can’t do it. Her face dissolves into more laughter. She kneels down in front of Erika and moves the vibrator toward her, and Erika laughs and shouts: “No! No! No! No! Not that!”

Marion laughs, too, and pushes the vibrator into her, hard, and the pain is like being gored and speared and Erika stops laughing and screams
No! Ow!
But Marion carries on spearing her, and Erika screams and struggles against Frida’s and Emily’s hands. They keep her pinned and everybody’s laughing.

“Do you want it up your ass as well?” shouts Marion.

Frida and Emily try to roll Erika onto her stomach, but Erika manages to pull herself free, screaming at them to stop.

She’s crying now.

The three girls look at her inquiringly.

“Oh, come on,” says Marion. “It’s only a bit of fun. You were laughing as much as us.”

Erika has found her bikini briefs and wrapped a towel around her body. She doesn’t want to cry. There are so many tears. But she doesn’t want to cry in front of them. So she takes a deep breath and forces herself to smile.

She says: “I’ve got to get home for dinner, okay?”

Marion looks at her. She’s still got the vibrator, buzzing, in her hand, between thumb and forefinger. Everyone can see the traces of blood. Erika looks down at the ground. Nobody says anything. Marion flings the vibrator into the sea.

“There, it doesn’t exist anymore,” she says with a shrug.

Frida and Emily giggle. Erika turns away, doesn’t want them to see the tears streaming out of her. The shame is like vomit.

“Gone! Gone!” whispers Marion.

She takes Erika’s hand in hers and carefully wipes away the tears.

Chapter 60

There are still seven days until the opening night of this year’s Hammarsö Pageant, with the working title
An Island in the Sea.
Isak and Ann-Marie Krok have both failed to learn their lines. Quite a few of the young people are not turning up at rehearsals; the heat wave continues.

Palle Quist is not happy with the title
An Island in the Sea.
Too humdrum and inconsequential, he thinks, not least because all islands are by definition in the sea. So he lies in his bed night after night, twisting and turning and trying to think of a better title, all the while knowing that he desperately needs his eight hours’ sleep—because without sleep he will never be able to pull together this year’s production, which already has more problems than anticipated. The leading lady, Ann-Marie Krok, is clearly suffering from senile dementia, and Isak Lövenstad, in his role as Wise Old Man, has not even once managed to get through the crucial long rhyming poem that rounds off the play and is concerned with not only the dead and their longing for life but also the final confrontation between God and Satan. It is a vital monologue! If Isak Lövenstad chokes on opening night, the whole play will be ruined and that loathsome young summer critic wannabe from Örebro will have more than enough ammunition to massacre the playwright’s thoughtful endeavor when writing his review in the local paper.

It is a difficult time for Palle Quist, who has so many things to worry about as he lies awake at night. He worries about the pianist, who—out of sheer devilry—regularly oversleeps, so the actors have to practice their songs without accompaniment. He worries about black-haired Marion, who skips rehearsals and chews gum or just laughs her way through her lines. He worries about his scenery, which is now being completely sabotaged by the caretaker of the community center. The caretaker maintains that for safety reasons it is impossible to make a hatch in the floor, which—with a great rumble!—would open up and let out the wood sprites. The whole point, said Palle Quist, was for the wood sprites to come out onto the stage
as if they really were streaming from underground realms!
The caretaker, a tanned, weather-beaten man with blue eyes, a stub of cigarette in his mouth, and a sow in labor back at his farm, had sighed and said he could not authorize any such damage to community center premises and declared that Palle Quist would have to assume all responsibility if any were done. He further considered it his duty to remind Palle Quist that the Hammarsö Pageant was but one of the ongoing programs of the community center that summer, and just imagine what would happen if they all came and demanded their own hatches in the floor and God knows what else. With the sow about to give birth, the caretaker, being extremely short of time, remained intransigent on this and all other points of scenery—and visions of wood sprites streaming from underground realms utterly failed to move him. Just the opposite, in fact. The bastard, who had doubtless never read a book or seen a play in his entire life, was incapable of entering into or being carried along by, much less undertaking himself, any daring leap of the imagination, and he made Palle Quist feel stupid and ridiculous in his big flowing clothes, his long artist’s scarf, his proud beard, and his faltering magnum opus, now so hopelessly close to its premiere. So at night he lies tossing and turning, staring into his own inadequacy, his joints, his muscles, and his head aching, and more than ever he hates the puppy from Örebro, the critic with the pretentious German surname, whose sole mission in life seems to be to ridicule, trivialize, and destroy him. And once he is lying in bed and staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep, he starts thinking about Ragnar, the skinny boy in black with the birthmark between his eyebrows, the boy who stares morosely at him or sneers ironically when given instructions and lets a kind of trembling death throe run through his body every time he reads his line
I am an angel from the north!

“Dear Ragnar. My dear friend…”

Palle Quist furrows his face in friendly concern.

“The idea is not for you to shake and gasp for air and feign the spasms of a dying man. You’re an angel. The idea is…”

Palle Quist hesitates.

“The idea is…”

Ragnar fixes him with a look and says: “So the idea is what?…You’ve really got me curious now!”

“The idea is that the angel—that is, you!—is
life itself
! And as a symbol of life, you mustn’t frighten the audience with those death spasms, but
embrace
them! Like this!”

Palle Quist throws out his arms, hugs Ragnar, and cries happily: “I AM AN ANGEL FROM THE NORTH!”

He lets go of Ragnar, looks at him and smiles.

“See what I mean?”

Ragnar smiles churlishly but does not answer.

There is nothing about the thin boy’s smile remotely reminiscent of
life itself,
and Palle Quist muses bitterly, as he does whenever encountering any resistance, great or small, that his play is going to be a total disaster.

In all fairness, it was not
his
idea to give Ragnar the part of life itself.
He
is not at fault, and that is important to Palle Quist. Neither Ragnar nor Ragnar’s mother had contacted him about the possibility of a part before the tenth of May deadline had passed, and Palle Quist was therefore under no obligation to write the boy into the play. It was Isak who insisted.

“But why?” Palle had said.

“Because…,” replied Isak, faltering. “Because this is something I must ask you to do, and which you simply cannot refuse. The lad must have a part!”

Deep in his heart, which is big and capacious and beats for the meek of the world, Palle Quist is a defender of children. He sits on various committees in Stockholm devoted to promote the UN’s Year of the Child and the importance of children’s rights. Still, he finds Ragnar an irritating individual. He is forever running off to the toilet and disrupting rehearsals. His hand shakes, his small, small hand, apart from everything else that is peculiar about him. But instead of accepting Palle’s concern, for Palle is one of the few to show him any, Ragnar pushes him away. Palle Quist has reached the limit of his strength. He knows very well how important it is to show care for other people, regardless of who they are or how they look or where in the world they come from, and Palle is not one to stint in demonstrating his good nature: touching, comforting, hugging, or offering the encouraging word. But Ragnar is a thankless child. He shows no signs of gratitude much less for his inclusion in this year’s Hammarsö Pageant, or for the generosity and warmth with which Palle Quist has enfolded him. He has done all he can for Ragnar, ungrateful whelp!

Not so much as one unforced smile in return.

It’s hopeless. It’s all so hopeless.