The Shadow Girls

6

At a quarter past ten that evening Humlin was knocked down by a giant Finnish gypsy man by the name of Haiman. Haiman hadn’t liked the way Humlin had patted his niece Sasha on the cheek. He felt it was too intimate. Sasha was not one of Leyla’s girlfriends gathered around the table and why Humlin ever took it into his head to pat her cheek was never clarified. But the blow that struck Humlin was forceful. Haiman had been playing rugby with his friends on a field in Frölunda for many years. His fist hit the totally unprepared Humlin on the left cheek and sent him straight into the wall before he crumpled on the ground. According to Törnblom — who had seen many knockouts in his life — it was a thing of beauty.

When Humlin came to his senses about an hour later he was lying on a stretcher at the hectic emergency room at the Sahlgrenska Hospital. Törnblom was standing at his side. It took Humlin a few seconds to orient himself.

‘The doctor said that nothing’s broken. You were lucky.’

‘Lucky,’ Humlin spat. The pain shot all the way down into his throat.

‘I can’t hear you. You’ll have to speak up.’

Törnblom found a piece of paper and a pencil in his pockets. He handed them to Humlin who wrote the question: What happened?

‘It was a misunderstanding. Everyone is very sorry. There are about twenty people waiting here at the hospital to see how you are feeling. They want to come in and say hello. They’re very concerned about you.’

Humlin shook his head in horror at the thought.

‘They won’t come in unless I tell them it’s all right. It was a misunderstanding. A culture clash,’ Törnblom said.

Törnblom gave him an enthusiastic pat on the shoulder. The pain in Humlin’s cheek increased.

‘This was exactly the kind of cultural insight you were looking for, wasn’t it?’

Humlin wrote another sentence while his hand shook with fury.

I never asked to be hit in the face by a lunatic.

‘Haiman is normally a very peaceful man. He just felt you were behaving inappropriately. You shouldn’t pat the girls on the cheek. It can be misunderstood. But you were lucky. The doctors don’t think you have a concussion. Still, they want you to stay overnight.’

Humlin kept writing.

I want to go home. I’m never coming back.

‘Of course you’ll be back. You’re just a bit shaken up. Everyone thought you were wonderful. This is all going to work out.’

A bright light hung above Humlin’s head and shone straight into his eyes. He turned away from it, looked at Törnblom and slowly shook his head. If he had been able to do so, he would have hit him. He wrote some more and said he never wanted to see any of the people waiting to see him ever again. Törnblom nodded in an understanding way and disappeared behind a curtain. Humlin fingered his cheekbone. The whole area was very swollen and throbbed with pain. Törnblom came back.

‘They’re happy to hear that you’re fine. They all look forward to seeing you again. I told them you thought the evening had been a promising start.’

Humlin wrote furiously on the scrap of paper.

Go away.

‘I’m waiting for Amanda. She’s going to sit with you for a few hours. Tomorrow I’ll come and get you and take you either to the airport or the train station, as you wish. And we’ll have to set a date for when you’ll be back.’

Humlin cursed silently and shut his eyes. He heard Törnblom leave. He tried to keep the pain at bay by thinking back to everything that had happened before the blow that had sent him into total darkness.

Törnblom had been blocking the exit. When the two of them entered the room a sudden silence had descended on everyone gathered there. He felt everyone’s eyes on him and then the murmurs had started up again, even more loudly. Humlin tried to avoid looking at everyone as he made his way to the table where Leyla, Tea-Bag and one other girl were seated. They had pulled up a seat for him. He thought with increasing desperation that when he reached the table and sat down he would be expected to know how to proceed.

For some reason he suddenly thought of his stockbroker. Maybe it was because the noise in the room reminded him of the chaos of the various stock exchanges he had seen on TV. Or perhaps it was simply because it had been over a week since he had been in touch with Anders Burén, the broker in charge of his investments. For a couple of years these investments had been unbelievably lucrative, but lately his shares had started to plummet, like all the rest of the stocks around the world.

If I survive this I should give him a call tomorrow, Humlin thought. He immediately started worrying that something dramatic was taking place somewhere in the world at this very moment, the effects of which would soon render all his investments as worthless as if they had been wiped out by a tidal wave. When he reached the table all chatter around the room ceased. He nodded to Tea-Bag, but it was Leyla who stretched out her hand in greeting. Tea-Bag seemed to be testing him somehow. The third girl sat with her face turned away from him.

When he took Leyla’s hand it was like grasping a dead, sweaty fish. But fish don’t sweat, he thought in a confused way. And girls must be allowed to sweat if they get nervous. Perhaps I can use this image in some future poem, although it seems unlikely I will publish another collection. My future right now is determined by two books I will never write. The marketing campaign for one of them is already underway.

Humlin held on to Leyla’s hand, afraid that he would lose his tenuous hold on the situation if he let go of it. He greeted them all in a friendly fashion. Somewhere in the room behind him someone started clapping enthusiastically.

‘I see you brought some friends with you,’ Humlin said to Leyla, trying to sound casual.

‘They really wanted to be here. You’ve already met Tea-Bag.’

Humlin shook Tea-Bag’s hand. She pulled her hand back as if he had squeezed too hard. He didn’t manage to catch the third girl’s name. She didn’t stretch out her hand and sat turned away from him. He sat down on the empty chair. At the same time a group of people in the room who had been sitting at the very back got up and made their way to the front.

‘They’re my parents,’ Leyla explained.

‘All of them?’

‘The two tallest ones are my brother and sister. The other two are my parents.’

Leyla pointed to them as she spoke. They all looked equally short to Humlin.

‘My family would like to be introduced to you.’

‘I thought only your brother was going to come,’ Humlin said.

‘I have three brothers. My grandmother is also here. And two aunts on my father’s side.’

Humlin was introduced to the family members one by one. They were friendly enough but were also clearly looking him over. Humlin heard their names but forgot them all immediately. When all the introductions were over they started their way back through the rows of other people. Humlin felt sweat running down his chest, inside his shirt. The windows looked nailed shut. He looked over at Törnblom who was standing by the door like a bouncer. Humlin felt a growing panic and cursed the fact that he had for once in his life forgotten to bring the pills he had for calming his nerves.

‘This is Tanya,’ Leyla said, indicating the girl who sat with her head turned away.

Humlin half-expected to hear a new group of family members approach the table, but heard nothing. Tanya must have come on her own.

‘Where are you from?’ Humlin asked.

‘She’s from Russia,’ Leyla answered.

‘And you are here to learn to write? To tell your story?’

‘She has been through more than any of us,’ Leyla said. ‘But she doesn’t talk very much.’

This turned out to be an accurate observation. Tanya did not say a single word all evening. Humlin looked at her surreptitiously from time to time. He assumed she was the oldest of the three, perhaps twenty-five or twenty-six. She was the complete opposite of Leyla, slender and with a beautiful oval face framed by straight brown hair that fell to her shoulders. She was very tense and stared at a fixed point on the wall. Humlin realised that he didn’t have the slightest idea what she could be thinking, not even when he employed all of his imaginative powers. He also realised, with the usual mixture of anxiety and anticipation, that he was starting to feel attracted to her.

Next to Tanya was Tea-Bag, the young woman he had first met in Mölndal and who had asked him the question that was the real reason he had returned to Stensgården. That time she had struck him as outspoken and strong. Now she seemed preoccupied and insecure and never quite met his gaze.

There was a hush in the room. Humlin realised that the orchestra had arrived, and that he was the conductor. He had to think of something. He turned to Leyla.

‘Why do you want to write?’ he asked.

‘I want to be a TV star,’ she said.

Humlin was taken aback.

‘A TV star?’

‘Yes, to be on TV, ideally a programme that comes on every night for ten years.’

‘Well, I hardly think I can help you with that goal. We’re not going to be talking about the TV business.’

Humlin didn’t know how to continue. The whole situation seemed preposterous. A low buzz had started up again in the room. On one side he had Leyla, who was sweating and who had just told him she wanted to be a TV star, on the other side was Tanya, who still had her face turned away from him, and Tea-Bag whom he no longer recognised. In order to buy some time he pointed to the pads of paper the girls all had in front of them, labelled ‘Törnblom’s Boxing Club’.

‘I want you to write two things,’ he said and was immediately interrupted by someone with a heavy accent asking him to speak up.

‘This is not actually intended to be a lecture,’ Humlin replied in a loud voice. ‘What I want at this point is for the girls to write down the answers to two questions: “Why do you want to write?” and “What do you hope to do in the future?”’

A murmur of surprise and anticipation filled the room. Törnblom made his way over to the table with a glass of water.

‘Can’t we open a window in here? It’s so hot!’ Humlin asked.

‘We’ve had too many burglaries. I was forced to nail the windows shut.’

‘I’m suffocating!’

‘You’re just dressed too warmly. But this is going very well, I think. Keep it up.’

‘It’s going to hell. I’m going mad. And if I don’t get any air I’m going to faint. I can’t faint. What I should do is kill you.’

‘I don’t think you can since I’m much stronger than you are. But don’t worry. Things are going well.’

Törnblom returned to his place by the door. The girls were busy writing on their pads of paper. What do I do next? Humlin thought and felt a growing sense of desperation. He decided not to do anything at all. He would just gather their answers, read them and then ask them to write something for next time — though there would be no next time — about how they had experienced this evening. After that he would be able to leave this suffocating room and maybe even make the last train or flight back to Stockholm. He was never going to return. He looked around at all the people in the room. A woman who was breastfeeding her child nodded encouragingly to him. Humlin nodded back politely. Then he gathered up the pages that the girls had written. He did not plan on reading their answers out loud. In order not to have to deal with wild protests from the crowd he turned to Leyla and whispered, ‘I want you to tell these people that these answers have been written in confidence. I am not going to read them out loud.’

She looked horrified.

‘I can’t do that. And I don’t even know all the languages these people speak.’

‘Surely they understand a little Swedish?’

‘You can’t be too sure about that.’

‘Why can’t you tell them the notes are written in confidence?’

‘My brothers might think I was writing a secret message to you.’

‘And why on earth would you do that?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I can’t run a writing seminar if everyone always has to know everything that’s going on. To write is to tell stories from deep within yourself. It’s a process of revealing your innermost self.’

Leyla thought about it.

‘You don’t have to read our answers out loud,’ she decided. ‘But you will have to give them back to us so that I can show them to my family when I come home. It doesn’t matter in the case of Tanya or Tea-Bag, of course.’

‘And why not?’

‘They have no family. We are their family.’

Humlin saw they were not going to get any further. He stood up.

‘I will not read these answers out loud,’ he announced.

A grumble broke out among the crowd.

‘But naturally the girls will keep what they have written.’

The protests slowly dwindled in volume. Humlin sat down again and threw Leyla a grateful glance. Then he looked through the notes. First there was Tanya’s. Her page was blank except for a drawing of a little heart that appeared to be bleeding. Nothing else. Humlin looked at the image of the bleeding or weeping heart for a long time. Then he looked at Tanya. She was still staring at a point on the wall opposite her and seemed to be somewhere far away from this stuffy room. He folded her note, realising it had moved him, and handed it back to her.

Next he looked at Leyla’s note. She wrote that she wanted to be an author so she could tell people what it was like to be a refugee in a country like Sweden. But she had also added an honest addendum: I want to write so I can be thin. Humlin wondered if this was perhaps the most honest answer he had ever received to the question of why someone wanted to be a writer. She had also written that she dreamed of one day becoming a talk-show host or actress.

The last page was from Tea-Bag. I want to write about what happened on the beach. In answer to the question of her future she had also written that she wanted to be a talk-show host.

The answers were interesting but also confusing. Humlin searched his increasingly weary mind for a good way to round off the evening. He looked at the three girls, and then at the ever more impatient crowd. I’m just going to lie, he thought as he stood up. I’m going to lie and I’m going to do it well. Not because I’m mean-spirited or full of disgust, but because this whole project has stalled before it even got off the ground.

‘I’m not going to keep you here any longer this evening. Now we know a little bit more about each other and I have a better idea of what you would like to get out of the writing seminar. I will be in touch to arrange our next meeting. Thank you very much for coming here tonight.’

There was a second of confused silence, then someone started to clap. Humlin felt a huge wave of relief that it was all over. He started making his way towards the exit and stopped to shake the many outstretched hands along the way. That was when the seventeen-year-old girl Sasha had smiled at him and he — without ever knowing why — patted her on the cheek. Then everything went black.

Now he was lying in a hospital bed. The left side of his face was extremely swollen. Pulses of pain came and went. A harried doctor pushed aside the curtain and looked in on him. He did not speak Swedish very well. From his nametag Humlin assumed he was Polish or Russian.

‘The X-rays look good,’ he said. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘It hurts.’

‘Take some painkillers. You will feel much better in a few days. Were you intoxicated when this happened?’

‘Are you asking me if I was drunk?’

‘That is the normal reason for fights.’

‘I don’t appreciate your insinuations. I was not drunk, as it happens. Someone attacked me.’

‘Then you should report it to the police,’ the doctor said.

Törnblom came in through the curtain at that moment and heard the last thing the doctor said.

‘There’s no need to fill out a police report. It was just a family dispute that got out of hand.’

The doctor left. Humlin forced himself to sit up with the intention of telling Törnblom what he thought of him once and for all, but the pain was too great. He was forced to lie back down again.

‘What do you mean by a “family dispute”?’ he whispered.

‘We feel like one big family out in Stensgården. Or should do. You’re becoming part of it now.’

Humlin gestured towards the curtain.

‘They’ve left,’ Törnblom said. ‘They wanted me to tell you that they all look forward to seeing you again. Haiman is very sorry. He’s going to give you a present next time you meet.’

‘There won’t be a next time. What kind of a present?’

‘He said something about a rugby ball.’

‘I hate rugby. I don’t want a rugby ball. I’m never coming back here if I can help it.’

Then Humlin thought of something. It had slipped his mind.

‘What about the reporter? You said you had talked to somebody. Was he there? Did he see what happened?’

‘He was very enthusiastic about it. He’s going to give you a good write-up.’

‘The only thing he’s going to write about is that I was knocked out. It’ll be in all the tabloids. And the guy who hit me will claim I was sexually harrassing his daughter or cousin or whatever the hell she was. How am I going to be able to defend myself? I’ll look guilty before I even have a chance to say anything.’

‘He’s not going to write anything about all that, I promise. He’s actually more interested in your writing seminar.’

Humlin looked sceptically at Törnblom but decided in the end to believe him.

‘I’m going now,’ Törnblom said. ‘Amanda will stay behind for a while. I’ll take you to the station tomorrow morning so we can agree on a date for your next visit.’

Humlin didn’t bother answering. Amanda went to get him a glass of water. Humlin looked admiringly at her backside, then thought about Tanya and immediately felt a little better. That bleeding heart had touched something in him. He had also been affected by her looks. But then he pushed these thoughts aside. He wasn’t coming back. The whole idea behind this writing seminar was ludicrous. Or at least he was the wrong man to do it. For the first time it seriously occurred to him that maybe he should try to write this crime novel. Maybe there had been something to what Lundin had said, and that he might actually be able to come up with something unexpected, something innovative that would leave all the conventional crime thrillers dead in the water.

Törnblom drove him out to the airport the following morning. Humlin still had a great deal of pain in his left cheek and the swelling had not yet started to go down.

‘That was a very interesting evening last night,’ Törnblom said. ‘People have already been asking me when you’ll be back.’

‘I’m never coming back.’

‘In a few days everything will look different. You’ll realise what an important experience this was. When is the best time for you?’

‘Wednesday. But only on one condition.’

‘What’s that?’

‘That the girls only have one chaperone each.’

‘That’s a tough one.’

‘It’s non-negotiable.’

‘I can ask them to cut the numbers down.’

‘I’m taking it for granted that the man who hit me will not be there again.’

‘I can’t do that. He’ll be insulted.’

Humlin was outraged.

‘He’ll be insulted! What about me? I wasn’t only insulted, I was injured!’

‘He wants to give you the rugby ball to make up for it.’

‘I don’t want a rugby ball.’

‘Just take it. You can always get rid of it later. But you have to accept his apology.’

‘What if he hits me again?’

‘You are filled with prejudice, Humlin. You really don’t know much about this country and the people who live here.’

‘Why was he there in the first place?’

‘He’s considering sending his daughters to your next seminar.’

‘What next seminar? There will not be a next time.’

The pain in his cheek had increased while he talked. Humlin sat quietly for the remainder of the trip. He was also unsure of how to counter the accusation that he was filled with prejudice, since it was probably true. Törnblom dropped him off at the airport in the wet snow. Humlin hoped no one recognised him. His cheek had turned purple and blue.

When he got home he went straight to the bedroom, shut the curtains and crawled into bed. The phone woke him up a few hours later. He hesitated before answering, but picked up on the seventh ring. It was Törnblom.

‘The reporter wrote great things about you.’

‘Nothing about the fight?’

‘There was no fight. You received a blow to the face that can only be described as a perfect uppercut. But he didn’t say a word about it. He writes about “an admirable initiative by one of our leading poets”.’

‘He wrote that?’

‘To the letter.’

Humlin sat up.

‘What else did he write?’

‘That other writers would do well to do the same. “Why write crime novels when one can engage with reality?”’

‘Really — he said that?’

‘I’m quoting straight from the article.’

For the first time in many days Humlin felt the relief of feeling like a real person again.

‘Next time he wants to interview you. I’ve also had some calls from TV.’

‘Which channel?’

‘Two different ones.’

‘I’m happy to speak to them.’

‘See, I told you this would all start falling into place once you felt better.’

‘I don’t feel better.’

‘Let me know when you’ve booked your flight or train and I’ll arrange to come and pick you up.’

Humlin hung up and stretched out between the cool sheets. Even though he was still troubled by the situation in Stensgården and was not sure how to get out of it he was pleased that he was finally getting some media attention that did not simply paint him as a respectable but boring poet. The most pleasing aspect was how this news would affect Lundin and Viktor Leander. Lundin would most likely break the oars of his rowing machine in a fury over the fact that one of his authors had not taken his good advice.

Humlin recalled a time when he had been invited to Lundin’s apartment on the exclusive Strandvägen. Expensive art filled the walls. Late that evening, when Lundin had had more than a little to drink, he had wobbled around with an equally unstable Humlin and told him which authors had made him the profits to buy which paintings. They finally stopped in front of a miniature watercolour landscape by a lesser-known west-coast artist in one corner of the hallway which Lundin announced — with a certain measure of needling disapproval — that Humlin had managed to scrape together the money for.

As Humlin now lay in bed he relished the idea that Lundin’s blood pressure was about to shoot up to new heights. But he was not completely able to banish the thought that Lundin was in fact a big player in the world of publishing and one who had the power to slam many doors in his face.

Viktor Leander’s reaction was easy to imagine and it provided him with a less ambivalent pleasure. Leander would lie sleepless for a number of nights and worry that Humlin’s idea would prove better than the number of lemming-like attempts by contemporary authors to jump on the crime novel bandwagon. In the on-going power struggle between Humlin and Leander the chief motivation was to cause sleeplessness in the other. This time it would be Leander’s turn to lie awake.

Humlin spent the rest of the day in bed. In the evening he took a taxi to Andrea’s apartment. There he explained what had happened. He changed some details, however, and omitted the fact that he had patted a girl on the cheek. He claimed instead that an unstable gypsy man had become violently upset when Humlin decided not to let him into the seminar.

‘Why couldn’t you have let him in? Gypsies have always been discriminated against in our society.’

‘I decided to restrict it to girls.’

‘Couldn’t you make an exception?’

‘Then I would have had at least ten boxers lining up.’

‘Why boxers?’

‘Törnblom has a boxing club. I can’t tell you anything more. It hurts to talk.’

That night they had sex for the first time in three weeks. The next day, when Andrea had left for work, Humlin immediately opened her diary to check what she had written. He knew she always wrote in the morning. What is going on with him? He comes so fast I hardly have time to feel anything.

Humiliated, Humlin took his revenge by imagining a night of passion in a Gothenburg hotel with the beautiful and mysterious Tanya. There was more than one reason for him to return to Stensgården and continue this unruly mess of a class that he had not organised so much as landed in the middle of.

He went home. He spent the afternoon trying to find ways of concealing his bruise with self-tanning lotions. Whenever the phone rang he stood over the answering machine and let it pick up. Both Lundin and Leander called. Humlin didn’t take either call, nor did he call either of them back. His face hurt when he smiled.

Shortly after five o’clock he decided to take a walk. When he opened the front door he saw that someone was sitting in the stairwell. It was dark enough that at first he didn’t recognise who it was. Then he saw that it was Tea-Bag.