Breathless (4 page)

“Take it easy,” Grandfather says. Then, turning toward Lukas, who is already on his way, “You! Hey, you're going nowhere. I want to talk to you.” But there is something about him . . . the way he just defies Grandfather, throws his leg over the bicycle and sets off down the hill while Grandfather stands there, disarmed, glaring after him.

—

My mouth is throbbing and bleeding and has a thick taste of iron. I feel sick. Not so sick that I need to throw up, but still I bend over the burned September grass and force out a bit of school lunch so it splashes up over Grandfather's feet. It has the desired effect: they stop watching the boy, let him disappear while they look after me. Streaks of blood mingle like red worms in the gray fishy sludge. I squeeze out a few tears as well, which fall on top with ice-cold precision.

So cold that I do not recognize myself. That feeling again of not being able to touch the bottom, of having gone so far out into the lake and only imagined that I had something under my feet.

No, and again no.

Keep away from him.

Do what we tell you, do just what we tell you, this is not negotiable.

Up until this point I had lived surrounded by love without rules. Never a no, and then all of a sudden as many noes as there were adults in the house. The freedom to roam and do as I wished was abruptly over.

At night I can't sleep, my thoughts running in circles like flies until exhaustion takes them. Evil under the surface, winged devils, sunken laughter, the accustomed paths through my territory suddenly full of cracks. But I'm not afraid of them. What scares me is the attraction they hold.

He is taller than me by two heads. He can cover my hand with his so it disappears. His wrists are twice as wide. Is this the problem? I don't get a proper answer from Mama. On the other hand, I can spit much farther than he can. Mama's sister Katja, my instructor in technique, has taught me how to spit and how to kiss. When it comes to holding breath underwater, it is a tie. It is true, when we are standing in the sun, I disappear completely in his shadow, and he can pee much farther—I don't stand a chance in that. Or when we arm wrestle. But he doesn't make a big deal about it. There are more differences than similarities, but it's the differences that please us.

I shouldn't have repeated the crude stories to Mama, who immediately suspected where they had come from. About the nightingales who sing at their most beautiful when they have had their eyes poked out.

Lukas doesn't treat me as a child. He doesn't take it into account.

—

“I have something I want to show you,” he says one day, pointing toward the forest of the bats on the other side of the lake. For me the forest is still just a dark silhouette farther away than I've ever been. A boundary, beyond which I can't imagine what is waiting. He looks at me as if he has set a trap out there or discovered a secret grave or an abandoned fox cub we can tame.

“Come on.” I am stubborn, but Lukas won't give in. “You'll like this, I promise.” I don't think much of his promises, but I let myself be persuaded in the end. I'm able to ride on his bike rack until the greenery becomes too dense; then we hide the bicycle behind a blackthorn thicket and continue on foot. I follow his white T-shirt through the almost impenetrable foliage, a guide leading the way across the rugged terrain of pungent giant caraway and scrubby bay willow. An oppressive heat that forces your eyes out of their sockets. Sometimes I lose sight of him and I have to stop and listen.

Halfway we have to pass through the dead part of the forest. I've never set foot here before, even with him. Lukas comes to a halt, before taking a first step in among the silver-gray trunks. A sense that the ground under the leafless trees is poisoned. I grip his shirt and hold on tightly as I follow him. The naked elms, ghostlike in death, will be easy victims if there's a bad storm. Lukas nimbly dodges the huge skin-colored moths between the stumps. I stick close behind him to shield myself. Even before we have made it through I start thinking that we have to go back as well, before darkness sweeps in over the lake.

After the dead forest the vegetation becomes thick once again, a sweet and indefinable scent of wilderness. In the midst of the undergrowth is a large enclosure with guinea fowl, forgotten. No one seems to have passed this way for a long time. Lukas wants to release them, but he can't open the iron grille. Scared by our presence, they flap against the wire netting in a hopeless attempt at flight. We move on and there it is, overgrown and camouflaged by nature—the house Lukas found when he was trying to keep out of his father's way. The pearl fisher's house. He needs me. Someone small and flexible has to climb in through the broken window to open the door from the inside. I shake my head.

“Yes, Lo.”

“No way.” Not for anything.

“Sweets?”

I hesitate. Is there anything I wouldn't do for sweets? Negotiation has begun. Lukas lifts me up at the window and it looks like a horror film in there. Curtains of cobwebs, a rank smell of mold, darkness locked in long ago. I refuse.

There's a dead body in there. There must be. Otherwise how could the key be on the inside? Lukas can't answer that. Instead he brings out a bag of cough drops, prepared for me to be awkward. Still no. Not so difficult—cough drops taste horrible. He takes a piece of bubble gum out of his other pocket. I shake my head firmly. He holds out a whole handful. Nope. Then he produces the entire bag. When it comes to bubble gum, I am weak, and why shouldn't he take advantage of that? However much I go on about it, Mama never lets me have any because it always ends up getting stuck in my hair. I snatch the bag, and with my mouth full of bubbles I begin to wriggle in through the opening Lukas has lifted me up to. I scrape my back and whimper, but Lukas just pushes me forward. Too late to change your mind now, he says. I've already stuffed three pink pieces of gum into my mouth, so now I have to keep my side of the bargain. As soon as my feet hit the ground I hurry to unlock the door and let him in. The cobweb curtains sway. I stay close to the open door, chewing and blowing nervous bubbles, pretending to keep watch while Lukas checks around. Things we have never seen before and cannot fathom what they are. Things we do not know if we should be frightened of or not. It takes awhile before we realize that the odd-looking bits of trash hanging from the ceiling are dead bats that never woke up from their winter sleep.

It smells like another country in there. Not that we have ever, apart from Lukas's first dim recollections, been in another country. But we imagine it would be like this.

The house is small and dark like the innards of a clam and has been empty for so long that the hinges have rusted up and creepy-crawlies have taken over. The amount of dust, like a thick layer of radioactive fallout, indicates that no one has set foot in here for a very long time. There are traces of scampering mice and outspread wings of owls in the dust on the floor, drifts of droppings, moths and dead wasps along the walls.

Everywhere are these remarkable things on dusty cluttered shelves. Tiny skeletons of animals we don't recognize, a lacquered box with razor-sharp knives, beautifully ornate chopsticks. Ancient crumbling herbal cigarettes that according to Lukas were some sort of drug. That doesn't stop him smoking them, the sweet stench of the exotic sapped by lying forgotten for decades, but still powerful enough to intoxicate, at least enough to make him spew in the sink.

There are so many strange things to smoke, so many foreign places to make your own. This is a place made for hiding away, a refuge from curious eyes. Despite the mummified bats on the ceiling, we go there. Despite the giant ghostlike trees of coral in the windows where the spiders have spun new webs on top of old. And under the floor, no, we can't even begin to think about what lies under the floor. The pearl fisher's forsaken loves, Lukas says.

We've heard about the pearl fisher. No one seems to have known him, but everyone knows the stories. How he journeyed to Japan to try his luck in the pearl waters there, only to discover that the Japanese pearl fishers were all women. So much for his macho adventure.

—

We try to make the space our own in a cleanup operation. We sweep in a frenzy, haul out the heavy rugs and wash them in the lake, and then the Japanese quilts, which float like marbled paper in an oil bath before they fill with water and sink. Clean out the flues to the stove as well as we can and test it with a fire, unaware that we are sending smoke signals to the entire village from our secret den.

This place unnerves Lukas, and yet he wants to come here. The derelict house has something going on in its walls, something crawling and breathing, but nevertheless this is where we head all the time.

Every morning I wait for him at a different spot we have decided on the night before, according to an ingenious system no one would be able to discern a pattern in—just as the points in a constellation resemble nothing unless you already know what they're supposed to represent. Sometimes I wait under the wrong tree or behind the wrong greenhouse, dovecote, garage, in the wrong out-of-the-way spot by the lake. But he always finds me in the end. The village is not very big.

Below the pearl fisher's house we can bathe without being seen, concealed by a dense thicket of waterside trees. The land around the lake is covered in a thick growth of bay willows, water plantains, and wild angelica shielding us from view on all sides. As long as no one comes up close we won't be discovered. You have to be careful not to become entangled in the plants growing wild underwater. They seize hold of your legs and hold you down under the surface. The water snakes. The slow-swimming adders.

Mama is looking out of the window. She has done this the whole time we have been sitting in the empty classroom that smells of glue, book dust, mother's sweat.

“There must be a mistake.”

“I don't think so,” the teacher says coldly.

I say nothing. Through my effort to sit still I can see out of the corner of my eye that the door is ajar. There is a way out, at any rate.

“A misunderstanding,” Mama tries again.

“The only misunderstanding here,” the teacher says slowly, “is Lo's.”

Difficult to sit still on the sweat-slippery stool, but I try at least not to look provocative, because provocative is what the teacher calls me and is something she can't stand. When I asked Papa what it meant, all I could grasp was that it was something you shouldn't be.

“Not at your age,” he said. “You can wait awhile for that.”

“We've never had a first-year playing truant before. But this”—the teacher performs a peculiar wriggle of her upper body in an attempt to adjust her bra unobtrusively—“young lady does it like a fully fledged high school student.”

Mama's gaze rests somewhere out in space. I look at the teacher, who in turn looks at Mama. No one's eyes meet, and it's best if it stays that way.

“I think Lo has totally misunderstood what compulsory school attendance means. Do you know what compulsory school attendance means in Sweden?” Without taking her eyes off Mama, she directs the question at me. I shake my head. “No. There you are. Just as I thought.”

“But for goodness' sake, she's only seven,” Mama objects weakly.

“That's what I'm saying,” the teacher replies. “If you play truant like this at the age of seven . . . then it can only get worse. There are
statistics
to prove it.”

Accusing blue eyes in the stale air of the classroom. I look at the teacher who looks at Mama who looks at a crow who is sitting high up on the frame of the swing.

“You and your husband had better make clear to your daughter what's important. Otherwise there's no point in her making an appearance here for the rest of the term. In the autumn perhaps we'll let her start the year again.”

The crow lifts its tail, shits, screeches, and flies away.

“Well,” says Mama, as if this were a sign, “in that case we'll go. Come on, darling, I've got an appointment at the hairdresser's in a minute.” But no one is going to escape so easily. The teacher wants to talk to Mama alone. “Lo stays here,” says Mama, not wanting to be left alone with the teacher.