Buried Angels

FJÄLLBACKA 1961

Mamma knew best. That was a truth Inez had always taken for granted as she was growing up. She didn’t even remember her father. She was only three when he had a stroke and died a few weeks later in hospital. After that, she had only Mamma and Nanna.

Sometimes Inez wondered if she loved her mother. She wasn’t quite sure. She loved Nanna and the teddy bear that had sat on her bed since she was a baby, but what about Mamma? She knew that she ought to love her, just as the other children in school loved their mothers. The few times she was allowed to go home with another girl to play, she’d seen how mothers and daughters greeted each other with happy expressions and how the girl would throw herself into her mother’s arms. Inez had felt a hard lump in her stomach when she saw her classmates with their mothers. Then she had done the same thing when she went home. She had thrown herself into Nanna’s arms, which were always open to her.

Mamma was not a mean person, and she’d never raised her voice as far as Inez could recall. It was Nanna who scolded if she’d done something wrong. But Mamma was strict about the way things should be done, and Inez was not allowed to contradict her.

The most important thing was to do things properly. That was what her mother always said: ‘Anything worth doing needs to be done right.’ Inez was never allowed to be sloppy. Her lessons had to be written out neatly on the lines, and the numbers in her maths book had to be correctly formed. The faint impressions left by incorrect figures were forbidden, even if they had been carefully erased. If Inez was unsure, she had to write them down on a piece of scratch paper first, before entering the correct numbers in her notebook.

It was also important not to make a mess, because any sort of disarray at home would cause something terrible. She didn’t know what that might be, but her room always had to be in perfect order. She never knew when Laura might peek inside. If anything was out of place, her mother would look so disappointed and say that she wanted to have a talk with Inez, who hated those conversations. She didn’t want to make her mother sad, and that was usually the subject of such discussions – that Inez had disappointed Laura.

She wasn’t allowed to make a mess in Nanna’s room or in the kitchen either. The other rooms in the house – her mother’s bedroom, the living room, the guest room, and the parlour – were all off-limits to the girl. She might break something, her mother explained. Children didn’t belong in there. Inez obeyed, because that made life simpler. She hated quarrels, and she didn’t like having that sort of conversation with her mother. If she did as Mamma said, she could avoid both.

In school she kept to herself, careful to do everything that was expected of her. And that clearly made her teachers happy. The grown-ups seemed pleased when children obeyed them.

Her classmates paid no attention to Inez, as if it wasn’t worth the trouble to quarrel with her. On a few occasions they had jeered at her, saying something about her grandmother, which Inez found very strange, since she didn’t have a grandmother. She had asked her mother about it, but instead of answering, Laura had decided they needed to have one of those conversations again. Inez had also asked Nanna, but she had unexpectedly pursed her lips and then said that it wasn’t her place to discuss such matters. So Inez didn’t ask any more questions. It wasn’t important enough to risk yet another conversation, and besides, Mamma knew best.