The Shadow Girls (24 page)

*

The following day Andrea called him with an ultimatum.

‘One month,’ she said. ‘Not a day more. Then we have to decide if we have a future together or not.’

The rest of the morning he walked around the apartment and worried about what was going to happen. Later in the afternoon he went out to buy the evening papers.

*

Tea-Bag was sitting in the stairwell when he opened the door. He frowned at her.

‘Why don’t you ring the doorbell?’ he asked. ‘I don’t want the neighbours to see you. They will start to wonder.’

Tea-Bag walked straight to the kitchen and sat down in her thick coat. She shook her head when he asked her if she wanted some coffee.

‘If you ask me anything I’m leaving,’ she said.

‘I’m not going to ask you anything.’

‘When are you going back to Gothenburg?’

‘I haven’t decided yet.’

Tea-Bag was restless and clearly worried. She stood up and Humlin thought she was going to take off.

‘Where can I find you?’ he asked.

‘You can’t.’

She hesitated. Humlin sensed that he could use the moment to ask her one of the most pressing questions he had.

‘You tell me I’m not allowed to ask you anything,’ he said. ‘But I’m not sure that’s completely true. Maybe you actually want me to ask you questions. There is one thing I’d like to know. And after all you have spent the night here. You and I were on our way to Gothenburg when you left the train. You had been telling me about how you came to Sweden. You told my girlfriend a slightly different story. But they are probably connected somehow. I know this is hard for you.’

She flinched as if he had hit her.

‘It’s not hard,’ she said.

Humlin took a few steps back.

‘But things haven’t been easy for you.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It can’t be easy living under a church.’

Her smile died away.

‘You know nothing about me.’

‘You’re right.’

‘Don’t feel sorry for me. I’m not a victim. I hate pity.’

Tea-Bag took off her thick coat and laid it on the ground. Her movements were very slow.

‘I have a brother,’ she said. ‘I had a brother.’

‘Is he dead?’

‘I don’t know.’

Humlin waited. Then the words started coming, finding their way with care, as if the story she had to tell could only be told slowly and with the utmost care.

*

I have a brother. He is dead, but I have to think of him as if he is still alive. When he was born I was old enough to know that babies didn’t simply arrive in the middle of the night; that babies were not simply old people who had gone into the forest, spoken with a god and returned as newborns. He was the first sibling that I understood had come from my mother’s body.

My brother was given the name Mazda. Two days before he was born a truck branded with that name had overturned outside the village, spilling its contents, and my father had carried home two big bags of cornmeal. Mazda, who started crying every morning at dawn just like a cockerel, learned to walk when he was only seven months old. He had crawled earlier and faster than any other child my mother had had or heard of. He had crawled over the sand as fast as a snake. Then at seven months he got up and ran. He never walked. It was as if he knew even then that his time on earth would be limited. His feet could move like no one had seen before.

Everyone knew there was something special about Mazda. He
wasn’t like other children. But no one knew if his life would turn out well or not. The year he was six there was no rain. The earth turned brown and my father spent a lot of time shouting to his unseen enemies from the roof. My mother stopped speaking and we often went to bed hungry.

It was then, one morning when we had looked in vain for signs in the sky that promised rain, that the woman with the blue hair came walking into the village. No one had ever seen her before. She smiled and her body rocked as she walked, as if she had an invisible drum inside that beat a rhythm for her to dance to. She must have been a stranger from very far away; no one recognised the dances she did. But she could speak our language and glitter fell from her hands and she stopped in the middle of the village. Right by the tree where my father and the other men held their meetings to decide important matters about the problems that inevitably arise when people live so close to one another.

She stood there and simply waited. Someone ran off and told my father and the other men that a strange woman with blue hair had come to our village. My father was the first to arrive. He stood some distance from her and looked her over. Since she was very beautiful he went home and changed his shirt. The chief of our village, called Mbe, did not have good eyesight and did not like strangers turning up in our village. My father and the other men tried to explain to him that glitter fell from this woman’s hands and that her hair was completely blue and it was probably wise to find out why she had come. So Mbe reluctantly allowed himself to be led over to her and asked the woman to approach him. Then he smelled her.

‘Tobacco,’ he announced. ‘She smells of cigarettes.’

The woman understood him. She took out a packet of thin brown cigarettes and gave them to Mbe, who immediately had one lit for him. Then he asked her who she was, what her name was and
where she was from. I was hovering in a group with the other children, as curious as they were, and I heard her say that her name was Brenda and that she had come to help us. Then Mbe shouted out – and he had a strong voice although he was nearly blind – that all women and children should leave at once. He wanted to listen to what Brenda had to say in the company of wise men alone.

The women did as he asked but hesitantly and with grumbles. Afterwards, when Brenda was resting in one of Mbe’s huts, my father came back and whispered things to my mother for a long time. Mazda seemed restless. It was as if he knew that their conversation had to do with him. We became quiet and fearful when we heard them quarrelling. I still remember all that was said.

‘You cannot know who she is.’

My mother was the one who said that, and her voice was filled with a despair I had never heard there before.

‘Mbe says we can trust her. A woman with blue hair is special.’

‘How can he know she has blue hair? He’s blind.’

‘Don’t shout. We told him about it so he can see what he cannot see.’

‘Maybe she eats children.’

This remark I remember especially well. Mazda stiffened and was so afraid that he bit my hand.

*

Tea-Bag held out her hand. Humlin saw the scars from a bite on her wrist.

*

It hurt so much I hit him. He curled up in the sand with his head buried in his hands. Shortly afterwards my father came over and
said that Mazda had to go with him. Brenda was gathering children from the poverty-stricken villages so that they could go with her to the city and go to school. She paid in cash – father had seen the money himself. What he had first assumed was a drum strapped to her waist had turned out to be a crocodile skin filled with money. After Mazda went to the city he would be able to send money home each month. After going to school he would be able to get a job so good that no one in the family would ever need to worry again about rains that didn’t come and rivers that dried up.

*

Tea-Bag stopped her storytelling abruptly, got up and left the kitchen. It was as if she was running from the shadows of her parents’ house, Humlin thought. He followed her out into the living room, but when he saw that she had gone to the bathroom he returned to wait for her in the kitchen. After a while Tea-Bag came back.

‘Why do you follow me?’ she asked.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You were following me when you went to that church in the Valley of the Dogs and you were following me just now when I went to the bathroom.’

Humlin shook his head, but felt as if he had been found out.

‘The Valley of the Dogs?’

‘That’s where the church is.’

‘Why do you call it the Valley of the Dogs?’

‘I saw a dog there one time. A lone dog. It was as if I was seeing myself. It didn’t have anywhere to go. It had not come from anywhere. You followed me there. And just now you were standing outside the bathroom door.’

‘I was worried that you weren’t feeling well.’

She looked at him incredulously. But then she picked up her story as if nothing had happened.

*

A few years later, when my mother had had another son that she had also named Mazda since she was certain that the woman with the blue hair had eaten him up, a man came to the village. His name was Tindo. He told us what had really happened. Tindo was tall and had a beautiful face. All the girls in the village immediately fell in love with him. He came to help us plant our crops in the fields. Mbe had died by then and we had a new chief by the name of Leme. In the evenings I would hide in the shadows and listen to the elders talking. That evening I was hiding behind Leme’s hut. The conversation turned to the woman who had called herself Brenda and who had collected children to take to the city.

‘She probably ate them,’ Leme said without trying to hide the fact that he was upset. ‘She gave us money. When one is poor even a little money is a lot.’

‘No one in this country eats children,’ Tindo said.

When Tindo spoke it was as if he was singing. Even when he told them about the pain that Mazda had endured. Tindo knew about the men without conscience who sent out women to collect children from the poorest and most desperate villages. They offered money and promises of schooling and an end to poverty. But no schools awaited the children who were taken to the city. There were simply dark containers where the air was as hot as fire, there were dark stinking cargo holds in rusty ships that left the harbour with the lights turned off. There were long marches where the children were whipped if they tried to run away.

‘Leme, I know how much what I am telling you will haunt you,’
Tindo said finally. ‘Especially the question if and how you should tell the parents that they will never see their children again. But nothing is ever improved by concealing the truth. These children were taken away in slave caravans. Long lines of frightened children were herded over the mountains to the lands on the other side where the delicate and most valuable crops grow. There they were locked in huts and kept under constant surveillance. They worked at night and received only one small meal a day. When they no longer had the energy to work they were thrown out onto the city streets to beg for subsistence. No one has ever heard of any one of these children returning. Ever.’

*

Tea-Bag finished her story and left the kitchen. When she didn’t return he walked out to see where she had gone. She was standing by a window looking down into the street. There were tears in her eyes.

‘What kind of crops were they, do you think?’

‘Chocolate. Cocoa.’

She got her jacket from the kitchen and left the apartment without another word. He watched her walking along the street. Suddenly he saw something that made him jump. He squinted to see better. There was something attached to her jacket. A backpack? But he was sure she had had no bag with her when she came. He trained his eyes on the object. But he refused to accept what he was seeing.

There was a little monkey on her back. A little monkey with brown-green fur.

TWO DAYS LATER
they made the trip to Gothenburg for a second time. Humlin had no idea where Tea-Bag had been in the meantime. She had simply called him on a line full of static and asked him what time the train left. Like last time, she had simply appeared at the station. He had tried to convince her to continue telling her story but she had not cooperated, burrowing down into the thick jacket she wouldn’t take off. He had surreptitiously looked for claw marks on her back as they were getting on the train. There were some tears in the fabric, but it was impossible for him to verify if they were inflicted by a small monkey with brown-green fur. By the time they were passing Hallsberg, Tea-Bag was asleep. Humlin was forced to shake her when they finally pulled into the station in Gothenburg. When he touched her shoulder her arm automatically shot up and hit him in the face. The conductor, who happened to be nearby, stopped in his tracks.

‘What’s going on here? Is there a problem?’

‘Nothing. I was just trying to wake her up.’

The conductor gave him a sceptical look but continued on his way.

‘I don’t like it when people touch me,’ Tea-Bag said.

‘I was just trying to wake you up.’

‘I was already awake. I was just pretending to be asleep. I dream better that way.’

They took a cab to Stensgården. A boxing practice was still in session. Tea-Bag looked at the boys in the ring with frank fascination. Pelle Törnblom was standing by the ropes. He motioned for them to go to his office, but Tea-Bag didn’t move. Her eyes were trained on the exchange of blows. Törnblom blew on a whistle and the boys left the ring.

‘Tea-Bag,’ Törnblom said. ‘That’s a great name. Where is it you come from again? I’ve never really been sure about that.’

Humlin waited anxiously for the answer.

‘Nigeria.’

Humlin made a note of this answer.

‘I had a couple of boxers here from Nigeria. Just a couple of years ago,’ Törnblom said. ‘But then one of them disappeared. People around here claimed he had supernatural powers, that his father was some kind of magician. I don’t know about that. He sure didn’t have any powers that kept him from being knocked out in the ring. The other one met a Finnish girl and last I heard they were living in Helsinki.’

Tea-Bag pointed to a pair of gloves lying on a chair.

‘Can I try those?’

Törnblom nodded. He helped her on with the gloves then stood back as she started attacking a punchbag with surprising violence. Her thick jacket was still zipped up to her neck. Sweat started running down her face.