Breathless (6 page)

“If your love is unrequited?” she said one evening when they had unrolled their sleeping bags and were just about to go to sleep. Her voice rose cautiously at the end, making the words a question. He looked at her in astonishment. What in heaven's name did she think he knew about all that? She'd fallen silent and blown out the candles in the beer bottles, their only source of light here where, in contrast to home, nights in early summer were dark.

“Well, then you take the name Karenina like in a Russian novel about impossible love . . . and then you put up with it . . . until it passes,” he said.

Put up with it until it passes? Was that all he had to say?

Put up with it until it passes . . .

Didn't he understand? Was that really the only thing he could advise her to do? He knew nothing about Russian novels. Had just happened to see the copy of
Anna Karenina
that she was reading in the evenings and picked up the name from the back of the book. He knew nothing about anything. Unrequited love included.

T
o your last breath, Lukas said. It was September, and all the most important things that have happened to me have always happened in September.

Lukas's eyes were black as river pearls. When it was cold they turned blue, the Japanese rice cooker dirty pink, the mosquito net gray from many summers' insects.

There was a strong smell of angelica in the late-summer air. The flies that had lapsed into a coma during the hottest weeks had come back to life and become annoyingly intrusive. And they buzzed around Lukas in particular.

“To your last breath,” he said, but I wasn't so sure.

“It's dangerous,” I said, a pointless objection, a lame protest.

He just shrugged his shoulders at my warning.

I didn't intend to stop him, nor to go with him.

“You'll have to do it yourself,” I said.

“Sure. You'll never be a real man, you're too cowardly.” Mild scorn in his voice.

Maybe so, I thought, maybe he's right. Or I simply didn't have enough desperation within me. This water was too deep for me—even though anyone could see how much the lake had shrunk in the summer heat. Anyway, I didn't want to be a man, I wanted to be a woman. This was what I thought but didn't say.

I disappeared into his shadow. He'd shot up that summer and I hadn't kept up with him. He'd had an erection for several days, he said. It was as if something had locked, a mechanism that had gotten stuck, impossible to bring down. Now he had it in his head that it would help to swim across the whole lake underwater, hold his breath and count, focus on survival. He looked at me inquiringly, but to be honest I had no idea whether it would work. Perhaps it was good to give his blood something else to do instead of collecting in one place in his body, causing problems. But he had to do it himself. With my tiny leather pouches for lungs I'd sink like a stone halfway across. And his problem was hardly going to go away because
I
held
my
breath, was it? If we shared the same bloodstream, maybe. It was what he wished for, that we two should be one. We weren't, just as our village wasn't a proper village and the lake wasn't a proper lake, only a place where the flow of water swelled and the river spread out, deep like a lake.

I had a rough idea how it worked, even though I didn't have one of my own. It wasn't mechanical, as Lukas seemed to think. It was blood that made it stand straight out in his blue boxer shorts. Or possibly an evil spell as punishment for paying it too much attention. Some things don't thrive on attention—that was what he used to say to me.

I glanced at it, as if it were an overexcited puppy that someone had played with too much. “Don't think about it, it'll go.”

“I can't
not
think about it. I can
only
think about it.” He had flies around his mouth, and something in his eye made me feel uneasy, made me scratch away at old insect bites just to distract myself from the feeling of impotence—not my own, but his.

He took his hands away from his crotch and pointed. “Will you feel it? It's sick.”

I shook my head.

“To hell with it, then,” he muttered. “Maybe you don't believe me . . .”

I did believe him, perceived his desperation. I was ten years old and yet I knew more than he did about certain things, despite his sixteen years. Unlike Lukas, I had someone to ask. He had to discover everything by himself, and sometimes played up his incomprehension to diminish the age difference between us.

“Can't it be emptied?” I asked cautiously.

Lukas pulled an exasperated face. “I've tried that.”

“That's not what I mean. I mean empty it of blood.”

He shook his head in distaste and consternation. “Blood's all connected up together in the body, just one system, like, one single lot of blood . . . You can't empty one part of your body without emptying the rest. You'd bleed to death.”

For all I knew he might be right, but his own tactic sounded just as dangerous: to swim the whole length of the lake underwater without coming up for breath once. You can breathe in your imagination, he maintained, right up to your very last breath, for there's always a last breath, even in your mind.

“It hurts, don't you understand!”

I lowered my gaze and stared at the problem. Hurts as in a sore that he has picked at?

He gave a murderous look and reached out for me just as I turned my back to him, groped in the air a second too late.

“The only sore I have is you,” I thought he said, but perhaps I just imagined it. He often said that I imagined things, and now I had reached the house and opened the door that was hanging askew on its single hinge. The pearl fisher's house, our hiding place. A well-kept secret tucked away in the thick greenery by the lake.

—

The day had been doomed the moment I opened my eyes, and had only gotten worse. Chatter, laughter, squabbling, Grandmother Anna's clatter in the kitchen, Mama's chopping, Grandfather Björn's voice penetrating everything, my aunts' music, cars in the yard, all the familiar noises, and every now and again something unfamiliar that could make me prick up my ears and sneak closer—these were the normal sounds in our house that never slept. But this morning only quiet—a sound all its own—as when a prevailing wind suddenly abates and the silence is so palpable it can be heard. I had fumbled for Mama and Aunt Marina on either side of the bed, although I was aware they couldn't be there because I couldn't hear them breathe.

Hello, here I am all by myself in bed and it's my birthday, I wanted to shout, but to whom? I waited for the morning light to travel over the cloudberry-patterned wallpaper. When it seemed that my humiliation was complete, I rose to look for them, confront them, demand congratulations, banana cake, restore order. From room to room in the large house I went, not finding a living soul. At last I heard faint sounds outside the open kitchen window, voices muted as if they were each talking into a plastic bag.

There was a gloomy atmosphere around the garden table. I had never been to a funeral, but knew it must feel like this, the air heavy to breathe. I saw in Mama's face that something was very wrong. She had never been good at hiding things, and now, red with weeping, her legs curled under her on the cane chair, she wasn't even trying to. I hadn't seen Mama's face like this since Papa left us the year before. She was smoking, although she had stopped long ago—no one would forget the dramatic finale when, to prove that smoking was over forever, she'd thrown out every ashtray we had in the house, including the blood-red crystal one she'd been given by Papa's father. An exaggerated gesture, and what was it worth now? Still, it is possible to smoke without ashtrays, and this she did. The saucer before her was piled high, despite the early hour. Papa's sister Marina had also lit a cigarette without any protest from her mother, and Mama's brother Isak was sitting on the back of the chair with his dirty boots on the seat, another offense no one objected to, murmuring:

“It's awful. Fucking awful, and that's a fact . . .”

I lurked on the windowsill, a wretched circus monkey in front of a miserable audience who wouldn't even look at me. What about
me
! I wanted to shout. But the sight of Mama filled me with a knot of anxiety that only she could evoke. Instead of saying anything I leapt through the air and landed crouched on my heels in the middle of the table. It was intended as a pleasant surprise, but Mama didn't even raise her eyes. I didn't notice how the others reacted, because I only had eyes for her, all my attention directed to her half-closed eyelids and smoking mouth. She was the center of the distress, there was no mistake about it, and it reminded me of something I didn't want to be reminded of on any account.

Rikard shooed me off the table like one of the irritating flies in the September heat. Mama lit another cigarette as Marina in one deft movement drew me to her. She held me hard and in a practiced maneuver lifted me onto her lap, even though I'd shot up too that summer, all arms and legs, and could hardly fit on her knee any longer.

“Is it something to do with Papa?” I whispered in Marina's ear. She blew the smoke past my face and brought her lips close up:

“No, for once it's nothing to do with your papa. But you must leave your mama in peace today.”

“What about the cake?” I pleaded, and she laid a finger on my lips. It stung like a nettle.

“We'll sort it out, hush, don't be such a baby.”

It began to feel like the garden of death, but I didn't know who had died. No one answered my questions, as if I too were talking into a plastic bag and the questions stayed inside it. If you were invisible, you might as well disappear. I went inside and packed the essentials, the secrets in the dust: the hunting knife, the steel strings, the porn magazine, the aftershave, the cigarette, still unsmoked since the night of the fire. The bicycle that Papa had left behind was far too big—I had to ride at a slant under the crossbar, and although it was downhill all the way along the gravel track between the fields of stubble, it was very difficult to pedal.

I used to imagine that the lake was an enormous eye, the only visible part of an even more enormous underground creature. This beautiful, terrifying giantess Hyrrokkin would one day rise up and surprise us all, distort our perspective, dislodge woods, factories, roe deer, houses, and fields of corn, which would collapse into the crater where her body had lain, and she would just walk away. She belonged to a different and a better world, like Lukas and me. She'd just rested here awhile and would leave devastation in her wake.

It was Papa's father who had told me the story about Hyrrokkin. He was interested in mythological women, particularly the demonic ones with extraordinary powers: Jezebel, Lilith, the sisters Fenja and Menja who made the sea salty. He liked to watch Mama when she was chopping wood too, her shirtsleeves rolled up and her hair Medusa-curly with sweat, a cigarette in the corner of her mouth when she thought no one could see her. Hyrrokkin meant smoke, Grandfather said, and I had seen smoke rising out of the earth at dawn, especially over her eye when it was turned to ice in winter. Now she was tucked up under the ground, invisible except for her mirrorlike eye. You could bathe in it if you dared. It was not for the fainthearted.

Her eye was gazing right at me, with a beguiling look that enticed me even from afar. Almost no one ever bathed here. There were rumors about people who drowned themselves and people who were drowned. I was so young that I had only vaguely heard them, but I had been warned numerous times about the lake—like everything else Mama warned me about, I didn't let it seriously affect me.

—

After a while Lukas entered the pearl fisher's house, where I was stretched out on the bed waiting for him to think better of his underwater tactic. I was far more concerned about him diving right into Hyrrokkin's eye than about his hard-on, which after all couldn't last forever.

He found my hastily packed canvas bag next to the bed.

“Have you run away from home? Couldn't you have brought something to eat?” he said as he rummaged through the contents, flicked through the porn magazine, and then fished out the holy cigarette from our first meeting. Before I had time to open my mouth, he picked up a lighter and lit it . . . it burned like tinder.

“And what the hell are we going to do now?” he said and blew the smoke hard at the ceiling.

I shrugged my shoulders. “Dunno. It's my birthday, but why should we worry about that?”

“I mean, what are we going to do about this?” In a forced manner he indicated toward his stubbornly swollen prick—there were many words for it, but “prick” was the ugliest and most ridiculous and Lukas said it all the time, which gave me the impression that he didn't like it.

After searching among the books under the bed I found an old medical book that I had looked in many times before. I blew off the dust and opened it at a page with pictures that looked as though we could be on the right track. Lying on my back, I read it silently to myself first and then out loud for him:

“Erectile dysfunction.” I raised my eyebrows questioningly, but Lukas was stamping up and down on the spot and appeared not to have heard of it.

“Priapism?” I carried on.

“Uh, I don't understand a single word of this stupid language. Get to the explanation.”

“Urological emergency,” I continued. I had always been a good reader, even when I had no notion what it was about.

“But skip that bit, get to the point—farther down, farther down . . .”

I let my eyes skim over the text. Lukas's mouth was twisted in torture, as if his condition from one moment to the next had become untenable.

“Prolonged and painful erection not caused by sexual arousal. The causes for this condition may include: leukemia, psychoactive drugs, anabolic steroids, recreational drugs such as alcohol and cocaine, protracted sexual activity, a burst artery in the scrotum . . . scrotum?”

“Yes. Don't know. Haven't a clue.” He looked pale and signaled to me to continue.

“Bite from a black widow spider, tumor, carbon monoxide poisoning, spinal cord injury, or lacking diagnosable cause. The problems are due to blood trapped in the erectile tissue. An erection lasting more than four hours is deemed to be a medical emergency.”

Lukas was no longer complaining; he nodded at me to read on.

“Four hours, it says. How long did you say it's been like this?”

“Days, on and off.”

“
Days?
”

“Yes, for a while it seemed to be getting better, but then it got worse again.”

“But listen: the condition requires immediate medical attention, to prevent scar formation that could result in permanent inability to maintain an erection.” I looked at him as he stood in front of me, legs wide apart, with the face of a maniac.