Breathless (17 page)

“He didn't ask about you once, Lo. Not once. That's how I knew something was wrong. Then I saw him less and less. But why don't you go down and see if he's there?”

How can she ask? She knows that I never go down there. That I don't want to. Certain things are simply impossible. Perhaps for him as well. If he has been aware that I'm at home, he has always managed to keep out of sight.

“All this woodcutting business, Mama,” I say as a diversionary tactic.

“Yes?”

“Do you really think you should be doing it?”

“Why not?”

The word.

Full of shame.

A word I hesitate to voice. Her unseeing face is unreadable. She pushes the tin of mink fat into her pocket and fumbles for the ax again, tests its sharpness on her thumb, and takes the sharpening steel out of the other pocket of her padded lumberjack shirt. She has always cut wood, all the wood that was ever needed to keep this house warm; she has cut wood since the day we arrived here.

“Why not? Who else would do it? You?” You might as well stick the ax straight into me, she looks to be thinking. But make sure it is a deathblow . . . She hands me the ax, lingers a moment. “Why don't you go down there?” Turns her back on me and leaves.

—

Whenever I enter Mama's room I have to resist the feeling that it is out of bounds. Listen for her step in the hallway as I go around looking at her things. Sometimes I hope that she does the same, goes into my room and pokes around in my luggage, but I know that she would never do such a thing, never write,
Your mother who knows you,
like Jean Seberg did to her son.

I take a few books down with me. She has lit the stove in the drafty living room, where I fan the books out and let her fingers choose. I begin to read as I once read aloud for Lukas:

“I buy him cheese and yogurt and butter in Trouville, because when he comes in late at night he devours that sort of thing. And he buys me the things I like best—buns and fruit. He buys them not so much to give me pleasure as to feed me up. He has this childlike idea of making me eat so I don't die. He doesn't want me to die. But he doesn't want me to get fat either. It's hard to reconcile the two. I don't want to die, either. That's what our affection is like, our love. In the evening and at night, we sometimes throw caution to the wind. In these conversations we tell the truth however terrible, and we laugh as we used to do when we still drank and could only talk to one another in the afternoon.”

The impossible balance of love. Don't become fat, overfed, blasé, too sure of yourself. But don't starve or fade, either. How do you sustain each other to just the right degree? I have no clue. I remember hearing about a pair of lovers who arranged to walk twelve hundred miles along the Great Wall of China to meet up somewhere in the Gobi Desert, a fantastic idea. But it didn't work out as planned. Love ran out along the way. The reunion was meant to cement their relationship, but when they eventually met, they decided to divorce, having been a couple for more than twenty years.

Mama asks to pick another, not happy with her choice. This is not a night for love. I set out the fan of stories again. Her fingers stroke them gently and she chooses a new one. I open it and begin again:

“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. I'm stupid about executions . . . I knew something was wrong with me that summer, because all I could think about was the Rosenbergs.”

I walk around the room while I am reading. Mama is developing the hearing of a bat—she tells me to leave the Venetian blinds alone.

“What are you looking for? You're making me stressed, your footsteps are echoing. You can't keep still for a minute . . . Must you walk around indoors in your shoes, as if you're on your way somewhere?”

I am always on my way somewhere, Mama. And I don't take off my boots for anybody. Perhaps by arrangement, but definitely not to order. These boots have walked many miles through foreign towns, boots that know what they want, even when I don't.

“Shoes,” Mama says as I make an extra circuit around the room. “Is it a full moon? I've never understood what a full moon does to women. The rabbits in the field are on edge as well.”

“Can you feel that?”

“Yes. The vibrations,” she says.

She keeps the Venetian blinds closed most of the time nowadays, having become more sensitive to the light. Strange to be light sensitive when you cannot even see. I check Lukas's house, but there's no sign of life.

“Actually I don't think he lives there anymore,” Mama says, sensing where my attention is directed.

“Are you sure?”

“No, but it feels empty down there.”

A vague impression of absence—I can feel it too now. “And the house?”

Who would be interested in that? She sighs. Difficult to sell now that the factories have closed, everyone moving away, no one moving in. Always the same old story: foreign companies buy them out and shut them down, ignite hopes and blow them out again, until people give up and clear out, leaving their houses even if they can't sell them. Especially noticeable here in the outskirts—empty houses and overgrown gardens everywhere. The paradise my mother once migrated to has packed up and moved on.

“Perhaps he's waiting for better times,” she says hesitantly.

Yes, if I know Lukas, that's exactly what he's doing.

Still, I can't imagine where he could have gone. He may not have belonged here, but he belonged still less anywhere else.

“Just try to think when you last saw him,” I say. It must have been a long time ago, as it was a long time since Mama could see her own reflection in the mirror. If Lukas had moved away, she would hardly have noticed. Nor would anyone else. Did anyone around here know him? Apart from me. And his papa. She rubs a woodcutter's muscle in her neck.

“Never asked about you, Lo, when I happened to meet him anywhere in the village, isn't that strange?” She half turns, her silhouette slender as a boy's. “What does it matter anyway if he's still there? In all these years you've never been down to see him. It makes a person suspect the worst.”

“The worst?”

“Yes. That something went very wrong at the end.”

—

The last chore of the day: I wash the piles that are growing in the laundry room. Feel a warm breeze through the window while we fold the sheets. An acrid waft from the mink farm. The furs don't sell here any longer, but are sent to Russia and China where they sell like hotcakes, if Mama is to be believed. It's not appropriate for wild animals to be kept in captivity. The humiliation makes them smell bad. I recall how they used to climb up the mesh, chattering hysterically, when Lukas and I passed the low pens. One male or several females in every coop. Reminded me of the rat traps in Lukas's attic.

Only once does she cast her eyes straight at me, squinting like someone looking at the sun through grimy glass. “Lo, just think . . .”

“That I've grown so much?”

“That you're my daughter.”

Mama was the woman who cut wood faster than her own shadow. Collapsed into bed at night, exhausted after the day's work. Now she needs to take a long bath each evening and listen to all the reruns on the radio, ritualize going to bed in order to cast out its demons. I go into the bathroom to ask her what films she'd like to see tomorrow, I've brought a few with me that I think she will like.
Repulsion
? She shakes her head deprecatingly.

“Something with Marlene Dietrich?”

“Oh, no . . .” she says as she lets the hot water run.

Breathless
? Not that either. She hasn't watched that since Jean Seberg died, she says.

With the years she has become less sensitive to horror but more easily moved by sadness. You need to lay yourself open when you are young and shield yourself when you are older, says the person who warned me against everything when I was a child.

“You tolerate less. That's all I mean,” she adds, as if sensing my objection. Because you realize how unfair life really is. What havoc it causes for certain people. Lukas, for example . . . She has thought about him from time to time, she admits. And about not being able to see, about being so worried about me, about him having a bad time. She rinses her face with the shower without shutting her eyes, and says no more.

The one cloud in my sky for a long time had been the cloud that hovered constantly over him. The pools of blood beneath his skin that subsided, only to be replaced by new. His problems were my problems, just not apparent in my skin. And the jealousy, I was frightened of catching it, the melancholy, as if he were filled with darkness, but there was something shining under all the mire, was I the only one who could see it? The way he saw the river rats was different from the way I did, and he couldn't bear to see them trapped and helpless. Gábriel nearly wrecked his face the time he found Lukas leaving the disposal of the rat cages to me. Lukas never recovered from the shame. Nor did his face.

A
fter Copenhagen nothing felt straightforward and we couldn't talk about it. I looked at him. He looked back in that new way he had of looking at me since we'd come home. Black jewels nestling in their case behind bulletproof glass, those sorts of eyes. We were attached to each other without touching, on a fixed path, like the planets. Silence was his weapon, the only thing I have never coped with, the face turned away. Like Mama when I was younger, how she sometimes withdrew her love, to get me where she wanted me.

Childhood is a reverse telescope that keeps the world at a distance, but I was no longer a child. The railway was an enticing stream of silver that I wanted to float away on every time I saw it from my bedroom window.

To fill the emptiness that had developed between Lukas and me, I devoted myself for the first time to school. A little late in the day, according to the teachers, but Mama was relieved that, thankfully, I appeared at last to have realized there was life after being a child. I was at the age when it irritated me to do what she wanted, but it was so much more satisfying to shock the teachers. I improved my grades, raised them above shame and ruin.

“You can do it, you see, that was what we thought. If you keep on like this, then . . .”

Then what? The bright future would soon be mine? The reward for doing well in your studies was more studying. That much I understood.

—

The autumn I turned sixteen, the rainy period just starting—the windows misting up again, the road transformed into a deluge and all the trees in the arboretum up to their ankles in water—nothing drained away. The parasites had a whale of a time all through this endless period of wet. Grandfather was powerless. The arboretum was his harem. That poor army of trees was supposed to fulfill all his desires, Mama said.

Almost imperceptibly I was drawn back to Lukas and he began to look me in the eye once more. Time did something for us that we couldn't do ourselves. Nothing was as before, but we had to take what remained or lose each other completely.

After Copenhagen Mama had let go of me as if I were no longer hers, a young runaway animal who'd come home smelling unfamiliar. She stopped asking me where I was going and where I'd been. There was a sad feeling of freedom that should have been intoxicating. Whatever Mama thought we were up to before, at least it was no longer illegal. Even if she didn't approve, she could hardly stop us.

“I see how you look at him and it worries me,” she said one evening. That afternoon Lukas and I had been sitting at home in the kitchen in full daylight for the first time. Mama came past and happened to see us, stopped abruptly, regained her composure, came in and took a drink out of the fridge, and went out again without a word. “And that's nothing compared to how worried I am when I see how he looks at you,” she added. There was something about him that was weak, and weak people are the most dangerous, they drag you down. Strong people you can fight to free yourself from, but the weak get under your skin. After having warned me about Lukas's strength, now she was warning me about the reverse, as if it were the same thing. But “weak” was the wrong word. He wasn't weak. There was no word for what he was. When he slept, when he laughed, emptied the buckets of rainwater, ate bananas, when he said that ordinary happy moments are the best, I could see the pain in his face.

There's no such thing as fairy tales, he'd said, but perhaps it was just happy endings there was a shortage of.

Lukas's papa, Gábriel, kept himself to himself. In all the years he lived in the village he spoke to no one, mixed with no one. If he hasn't learned Swedish yet it must be because he is either stupid or stuck up, people said, and they didn't know which was worse . . . He was a steppe wolf at any rate, a recluse, odd, a rum one, as they said in my family. He went his own way in the community. It was alleged that he couldn't ride a bicycle. People alleged so many things, were so good at gossip. It was alleged that he had answered a personal ad. That was what brought him here, if you believe the rumor, and most people did. Things went well with the woman for a while, a very short while, and then they started to go wrong, so he took his suitcase and his son and moved to the wooden house that he'd bought for next to nothing. According to some, he hadn't bought this house by the lake at all. Just moved in because it was standing empty and no one laid claim to it. He made it decent, cleared the yard, fixed everything that was hanging off, and chased away the vermin. Soon it was one of the best-maintained houses in the district, even if it was jerry-built. He painted it a color like no other house in the area and it was difficult to know what to call it, when you spoke about it. Hungarian green, said my mother's sisters, who could not help spying on it every now and then. A color that was hardly going to meld with the surrounding greenery. At least Gábriel was particular about keeping things neat and tidy. And a good worker. Could have worked his way up, become a foreman, if he'd had the language, but he didn't—or didn't want to. There were different views on that.

Gábriel was most often seen walking beside the bicycle, which it was said he couldn't ride, on the road between his home and the factory. Like a dog walking alongside. What would a steppe wolf need a dog for, company or protection? He was good-looking, at least that was what my mother's sisters said, and his looks seemed to guard him from a worse fate. Despite everything, people were not as suspicious of him as they might have been. They talked about him, sure, but they let him be.

My fear of Gábriel wasn't logical. It was Lukas's legacy. I always felt awkward in his presence, and it was made no better that he was always kind toward me when we met. If my family treated Lukas like something the cat had dragged in, his papa seemed to view me as something unknown that you offered a chair to and treated with reserved respect. The unpredictable bouts of anger he directed at Lukas were never shown to me.

One afternoon when Gábriel was at work the telephone rang. Lukas was trying to do some repairs on the Taunus in the yard, though jobs requiring an adjustable wrench weren't his forte. It was raining as well. It had been raining the whole day, for weeks. The only progress Lukas was making was to become more and more greasy, more and more wet. He'd gotten it into his head that he could change the drive belt himself, because he couldn't afford to take the car in to the garage and he couldn't stand being unable to drive around. I'd been sitting perched with my feet on the bumper, watching his endeavors for a whole hour. I realized that he wasn't going to manage it; I had seen both Rikard and Katja do it on our cars, and Lukas was doing everything wrong. And he refused to listen to me.

He didn't bother about the telephone either, though I urged him to answer it. It must be something important: the telephone never rang in their house.

“You might have come into a big fat inheritance there and you've missed it,” I said when the ringing had stopped.

“There aren't any relatives, you know that,” he hissed, and knocked me so hard that I fell off. “Go and do something useful, rustle together a few leftovers or find something else you can do . . . answer the phone, for example, if it rings again.”

That might happen in another year, I thought. But I was wrong. I had gone in even though I really wanted to go home, because when Lukas was in this mood it was like waiting for a time bomb to go off. When I heard the telephone again, I followed the sound through the house, until I found it in Gábriel's bedroom. A man's voice that didn't introduce itself asked to speak to Gábriel Puskás. Because Lukas's papa still didn't speak any Swedish, I went out to fetch Lukas instead. Reluctantly he left his fruitless repair work, went inside in his wet boots, and pushed me away to a safe distance before going into his father's room and taking the receiver.

From the monosyllabic, hesitant answers as his face stiffened, it was immediately obvious that something wasn't right. In the end he turned his back on me and stood silently with the phone in his hand. I was rooted to the spot by the door, trying hard to catch what was being said at the other end. But the conversation seemed to be over already, at least for Lukas. He stood with the receiver in one hand, propping himself up against the wall with the other.

“Fucking hell,” he whispered.

I went up to him. Didn't dare to touch him.

“Lukas?”

“Go home,” he said softly, but I didn't.

This is the sort of thing that happens when people are stressed and fail to pay attention—“a breach of confidentiality”—and this is how we learned, even before Gábriel himself, that he was dying. Bone cancer. Very advanced. Incurable.

—

We hadn't noticed that the illness had taken up residence in the house a long time before. Like an uncomfortably discreet uninvited guest, it had been very unobtrusive so far. None of us had been aware that Gábriel was ill—doomed, in fact.

Lukas's soundless and at the same time violent reaction surprised me. He and his papa had lived side by side for so many years in a strange silence, such an absence of words and feelings that even their body language was mute. When Lukas had grown too big for Gábriel to beat him, the last remnant of bodily contact between them ceased.

Gábriel was the only family Lukas had, and there was a sort of love between them, even if I'd never seen any warmth. Coldness, distance, and violent arguments were the only things their coexistence appeared to consist of. And in a way, it was the “almost” nature of it that was the most painful. Because every now and again there was a moment's contact, a smile, a glance between them that gave just a hint that under other circumstances, in a completely different life, they might have been close.