A Blessed Child (2 page)

Chapter 3

His lean frame, his slim hands, his narrow feet, and his large head. Erika knew that it wasn’t his looks that attracted so many women. It was his brain. That was what it said in the November
10, 1965
edition of
Life
magazine. Under his photograph, it said in so many words that Professor Lövenstad had a
brilliant
brain. The photograph had been taken in glaring sunlight and he was screwing up his eyes as he looked at the camera, which meant you couldn’t see them or any of his face particularly well, just a great round head and a shock of fair, curly hair. The article, which was long, said that the Swedish researcher, along with his fellow scientists from Dublin, New York, and Moscow, was on his way to solving one of the mysteries of life.

When Erika went to Hammarsö for her holidays for the first time, in the summer of
1972
, Laura took her hand, led her into the living room, and pointed out the article, which had been framed and hung on the wall. Erika could already read English without too much difficulty. The picture of her father with his big head, his fair hair, and his brilliant brain had stayed with her ever since, through her medical studies and then in her professional life as a gynecologist.

But she knew so little about her father, as he told her almost nothing. Now and then he would start a story, then stop in the middle. He would speak quietly under his breath; Erika had to lean in close or press her ear to the telephone receiver to hear. When he was angry, he would sputter monosyllabic roars, carefully chosen poisonous words. But whenever he was trying to tell some sort of narrative or answer questions (and Erika never posed one without considering it carefully), it was as if his voice faded away; the pauses grew longer and she sat waiting in vain for him to continue. And because he spoke so quietly, because Erika had to concentrate each time he said a word, as if what was passing between them was essential, like light or water, and because she could never be sure of having heard the whole story, any conversation with Isak gave her the sense of being let in on a secret.

Chapter 4

There had been two husbands. On paper, Erika was still married to Tomas, but he had left her.

Then there was the first husband, Sundt, the father of her two children, who above all was extraordinarily cheap. Isak once pointed out that whenever Erika mentioned him she always referred to him in the past tense. But Sundt was not dead. He also had a first name, but Erika had only ever called him Sundt.

In fact, Erika thought, it would have been better for Sundt if he were dead. Being dead didn’t cost anything, and the funeral, gravestone, flowers, as well as prawns, salmon, and roast beef sandwiches, were paid for. After the estate had been divided up, being dead would be free of charge and all cares, something Sundt would doubtless have preferred, if only he hadn’t been so scared of it. Sundt lay awake at night, feeling all his bodily irregularities and thinking about everything that could strike him down.

“Cheap people have their own way of counting,” Erika told Isak on the telephone. “Let’s say, for example, that Sundt was supposed to give me
ten,
let’s say Sundt owed me
ten;
well, without a moment’s thought
ten
would wind up
four,
and there wouldn’t be the slightest explanation; but if Sundt was expecting
ten
from me, then he’d have no problem making
ten
into
sixteen,
which he’d take off me even if I said
it’s my last sixteen here and we said ten—
at that moment it would seem as if
I
were the cheap one.”

“Yes,” said Isak.

“Cheap people always win,” said Erika. “Cheap people have all the power. Cheap people have no friends. They start off with lots of friends, then they have fewer friends, and in the end they have none. Who knows whether that bothers them. Do you think it bothers them?”

“I don’t know,” said Isak.

“Even the skinflint’s spouse can never get the better of the skinflint,” Erika went on.

“That’s true,” said Isak.

“Still!” said Erika.

“Still what?” asked Isak.

“Still, one evening I tried to get my own back,” said Erika. “One evening I tapped my knife on my glass, rested my head on my husband’s bony shoulder, and declared to our party:
This evening is Sundt’s treat! Champagne and oysters for everybody! Sundt has been looking forward to this!
And our friends knew exactly what I was up to; they were in on it, a coup d’état against Sundt, an assassination attempt, a temporary seizure of power—our friends gorged themselves on champagne and oysters, reveling in his pain. They saw him sweating and gritting his teeth; they heard his impotent hints about skipping dessert. And it didn’t end there. I started spending extravagantly, Father. I twirled around in new dresses, laid down new rugs, unpacked new books and a new stereo, shut out the light with new blinds. We couldn’t afford any of it, you see. None of it! Still, I dressed up and laughed and came home late in the evenings.”

And as Sundt lay in bed beside Erika at night, feeling all his bodily irregularities (a swelling in his right leg, a sharp pain in his chest, a change in the texture of his gums—possibly a symptom of decay?), she would not put her arms around him and comfort him the way she used to when they were first married. Instead she would tell him he was a wimp, a fool, a pathetic little figure, an affliction, even; then she would roll herself up in her new quilt and sleep through the night without giving his discomfort another thought. And so she was through with Sundt.

Chapter 5

The roads were slushy and icy, but for Erika it was still the roundabouts and the road signs indicating the way out of Oslo that were the hardest part. She always ended up in some tunnel leading somewhere she did not want to go.

“It’s not that difficult,” said Laura on the telephone. “It’s signposted all the way to Stockholm. All you have to do is follow.”

For Laura, this sort of thing was easy. But Erika had, for reasons she failed to understand, always done the exact opposite of what the signs said. If the arrow pointed right, she turned left. In her nine years behind the wheel, she had caused many near accidents and received several fines, just like her mother, who was possibly an even worse driver.

Sometimes people would wrench open Erika’s car door in the middle of a road junction just to shout at her. The difference between Erika and her mother was that Erika apologized whereas her mother shouted back.

Laura said once that Erika’s nature behind the wheel, so totally contrary to her nature in all other areas of life, grew out of a profound split, an unspoken rage. Erika did not agree. She attributed this lack of confidence to some kind of dyslexia, an inability to read and process simple signs and codes or calculate distances.

Before Erika got into the car and drove off, she rang Laura and said: “Can’t you take some time off, too? Can’t you come with me?”

“Actually, I’ve got the day off today,” Laura answered.

Erika could hear her gulping coffee and visualized her sitting in front of her computer, surfing the Internet, still in her pajamas though it was nearly eleven. Erika said: “I mean, can’t you take the week off and come with me to Hammarsö? You could drive,” she added.

“No!” retorted Laura. “It’s not that easy to get a substitute teacher. And anyway, none of them want to take my class.”

“Can’t you come down at the weekend, at least? I’m sure Isak wants to see both of us.”

“No!” said Laura.

“It would be an adventure,” said Erika.

“No,” repeated Laura. “I can’t. Jesper’s got a cold. We’re all exhausted. Everything’s falling apart. The last thing I have the energy to think of right now is going down to Hammarsö to see Isak, who, besides everything else, I am sure doesn’t want to see us.”

Erika would try again. Erika wouldn’t give up. It was perfectly feasible to get a substitute teacher. Laura always moaned about her students, but in fact she didn’t like entrusting them to other people; she didn’t like other people doing her job. Nobody did it well enough, in her view.

Erika said: “What if Isak dies while I’m there?”

Laura laughed out loud and said: “Don’t count on it, Erika! The old man will outlive us all.”

Chapter 6

Every summer from
1972
to
1979
, Erika had flown by herself from Oslo to Stockholm, and then taken a smaller plane down to the port on the Baltic coast that was the last stop on her journey. She had a big blue plastic wallet around her neck; inside the wallet were her plane tickets and an official-looking piece of documentation on which her mother had written who was escorting her to the airport in Oslo and who would meet her at the airport in Sweden, as well as her name, age, and other such information.

“In case the stewardess loses you when you’re changing flights in Stockholm,” Erika’s mother told her, putting a large, flowery handkerchief to Erika’s nose and telling her to blow. Hard.

“Blow it all out before you get on the plane. Isak doesn’t want children with colds coming to visit.”

Elisabet had long auburn hair, strong, well-turned legs, and high-heeled, snot-green pumps. Erika was her only child.

“And if the stewardess happens to lose you, then find another stewardess and show her this sheet of paper,” she said. “Are you listening, Erika? Can you manage that? All you have to do is show her the paper.”

At the airport in the town on the shores of the Baltic, Rosa and Laura would be waiting for her. The drive to Hammarsö took an hour and a half, but sometimes they had to wait in a queue of cars to get onto one of the two ferries that transported residents and tourists between the mainland and the island. Then it would take two and a half hours or even longer. For Erika, it was like a small eternity. Going to Hammarsö was something she did every summer. She sat beside Laura in the backseat and followed their route on the road signs, saying: Now there are only fifty kilometers to go, now only forty, now we’ve passed the halfway oak and now there are only twenty kilometers to go. Rosa! Rosa! Are we nearly there? Can’t you speed up?

“No!” said Rosa. “Do you want us to crash, for the the police to come and pull bits of our bodies from the wreckage?”

Erika looked at Laura, who was to be her sister for a whole month, and laughed.

A kilometer is like a minute.

Ten kilometers are like ten minutes.

Rosa said the girls could watch for the kilometer signs and work out for themselves how far they had left to go without whining.

But it wasn’t just waiting in traffic or even the prospect of seeing Isak again that made the ride from the airport seem like a small eternity. It was anticipating the white limestone house and her room with the floral wallpaper. It was her half sister Laura and eventually Molly, too. And it was Ragnar.

It was Hammarsö itself, Erika’s place on Earth, with its flat heath, gnarled trees, knobbly fossils, and vivid red poppies. It was the silver-gray sea and the rock where the girls sunbathed and listened to Radio Luxemburg or her friend Marion’s special tapes. It was the scent of everything as the ultimate confirmation of now! now it’s summer!

The summers in Hammarsö were the real eternity.

The drive was a small eternity on the way to the real one.

Chapter 7

Erika drove slowly, talking out loud to herself. Talking out loud to herself was something she had learned from her driving instructor, Leif.

Erika knew she should have failed when she took her driver’s test nine and a half years before (the day before her thirtieth birthday), and having somehow failed to fail she should have refused to accept her driver’s license, simply giving it back to the authorities.

“You’re not relating naturally to others on the road,” Leif would say.

“I don’t relate naturally to anybody,” said Erika.

“Neither do I,” admitted Leif. “But if you’re going to drive a car, you have to relate naturally to others on the road. That’s just the way it is.”

Erika had never really intended to take the test. But when she and Sundt got divorced, she decided to learn to drive, and that was how she met Leif. He was a white-haired, quiet, melancholic man who opened his mouth only to pronounce sarcastic statements of the obvious, usually related to vehicular traffic. Erika drove around Oslo in Leif’s company for a number of months; she paid for a hundred and thirty-four driving lessons.

“The older you are, the more lessons it takes,” Leif said.

The newly divorced can latch on to the strangest people, and Erika latched on to Leif. She viewed him as a wise man, a mentor, if a bit gnomic. Every time he said something, one of those sarcastic statements of the obvious,
a stop sign means stop,
for instance, she would interpret it at a more profound level.

Laura, Isak, and even Molly had thought Erika was spending too much time with Leif. Nevertheless, in that time she did learn to talk out loud to herself when she was behind the steering wheel. This prevented her concentration from lapsing so she could stay focused on the act of driving, if not quite the direction of her trip. It was like this:

Now I’m at the roundabout.

Now I’m stopping at this red light.

Now I’m joining the motorway.

Now I’m keeping my eyes firmly on the middle of the road.

It was winter; she was on her way to Hammarsö she was driving. She passed a roadside café. She didn’t want to stop yet. Although she was hungry, she didn’t want to stop yet.

Chapter 8

Whenever Erika spoke to Isak on the telephone, and that was often, this was how she visualized him: he is sitting in one of the two armchairs in the living room of the white limestone house, with his feet up on a pouf and his big rectangular spectacles on his nose. He is listening to a piece of Schubert, perhaps the slow movement of the C major string quintet. On the table beside the chair is the black tape recorder that he carries around the house with him. Erika is twelve and Laura is ten. They are lying side by side on the white wooden floor, reading and listening to the music with him. He lets them do that as long as they are quiet. The legs propped on the pouf are grasshopper thin and clad in worn brown velvet trousers. He once bought several pairs of velvet trousers of the same style and make. These trousers were patched over time and otherwise maintained by Rosa.

I bet he’s still got those same trousers, thought Erika, but now it would be Simona who patched and stitched them. On his feet, a pair of warm sheepskin slippers. Isak often had cold feet. On the table beside the chair, three newspapers: two national and one local.

It had been a year since Erika had seen her father. The last time had been in Stockholm, one of those dinner dates he liked to make with her and Laura. At first he had invited Molly, too, but she rarely came, so he stopped asking her.

Erika followed the signs, just as Laura had advised. It worked. She was on her way now. She felt sure Isak would not have changed much since she last saw him. He wouldn’t have changed, his house wouldn’t have changed. She hadn’t been there for more than twenty-five years, but was sure he hadn’t moved the furniture around or bought any new clothes. He would still eat two thin slices of toast for breakfast, a bowl of kefir with a banana for lunch, and little meatballs with potatoes and gravy for dinner. That would be on Tuesdays. On Mondays and Wednesdays there was fish. And on Saturdays chicken casserole. The same dinners were cooked by Simona that had been cooked by Rosa in years gone by. After serving him his meal, Simona went home. He had told Erika all this on the phone, and sometimes Erika spoke to Simona to ask how her father was. Was he perhaps nearing death without any of his daughters knowing it?

“He’ll never die,” said Simona.

His face had more pockmarks and furrows and discolored patches, to be sure. But it was the same face. The same eyes, she thought, though she couldn’t picture her father’s eyes. She didn’t even know what color they were. Isak’s eyes looked at you and you either existed or didn’t exist in that look. He had been old for a long time. He had been old twenty-five years ago.

Once he said on the telephone that he had changed since Rosa died. Isak Lövenstad’s formative years, according to him, had been between the ages of seventy-two and eighty-four.

“Really?” asked Erika. “How’s that? I mean, how have you changed?”

Erika stared at the windshield wipers moving back and forth without much effect. The snow was coming down heavily. The driving was difficult.

He had said: “I’m maturing.”

“You’re maturing?”

“Yes.”

“What does that mean, you’re maturing?”

“I’m reading Swedenborg.”

“Oh?”

“And Swedenborg wrote that if you feel you’re living too long—and that’s certainly true in my case, isn’t it—then it’s your obligation to mature.”

“So that’s what you’re doing?”

“Yes.”

“But what does that actually entail, Isak, you maturing?”

“I understand things better.”

“Such as?”

“That I’ve never cared about other people. I’ve been indifferent.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“What don’t you believe?”

“That you’ve been indifferent. I don’t believe you. It’s too easy just to say that.”

A little boy with matchstick legs and scabby knees came running toward her, in and out of the light. Just occasionally, he turned to look back. She remembered the boy saying: “We need to find his weakness, where he’s vulnerable, but it won’t be easy.” Erika gripped the steering wheel, but the car went into a skid and grazed the snowy bank before she could regain control. She stopped at the next gas station and bought herself a coffee. She closed her eyes for a few minutes before setting off again.

“That’s how people get killed,” she said to herself. “They drive in weather like this.”

“And yet I told you not to come,” Isak would have said.