Shadow

23

The pizzas had remained untouched in their cartons, which were still lying on the landing. Kristoffer was sitting on an uncomfortable Windsor chair in the single room of the flat. The alternative had been to sit down next to Torgny on the unmade bed. There were piles of newspapers, empty glasses, dirty clothes, overflowing ashtrays and things that had been left wherever they’d been put down. Everything he saw seemed filthy and old, and it was clearly a long time since anyone had tried to put the room in order.

With long pauses their conversation had stumbled along; both of them were too overwrought to be able to complete a logical train of thought. Most of what was said had come from Kristoffer’s lips, a result of Torgny asking whether it was his mother who had sent him. He had told him the truth, finding no reason to lie under the circumstances. It had been easier this time to talk in detail about his life. About steps inside the entrance to the amusement park. About the fact that he didn’t remember anything from his first years, and that he’d always wondered who his parents were and why he’d been abandoned. Torgny sighed and went to fetch two beers. Kristoffer said that he didn’t want one. The spectacle of Torgny and his home made abstinence easy.

It could have been him if his character had been any weaker.

Halina.

His mother’s name was Halina.

Not Elina as they thought the four-year-old had said. Two letters had made all the difference. A tiny misunderstanding that meant the police had never been able to locate her.

Torgny sat down on the bed again, dazed. He lit a cigarette. Kristoffer shook his head when Torgny held out the packet to him.

He sat staring at an oil painting. In this context it looked like a captured peacock in a junk-shop. He tried to avoid looking at anything except the face, but his gaze kept sliding along the naked female body. Lying indolently with her head resting on one hand and the other half-heartedly hiding her crotch.

He had found his mother.

He didn’t want to see her like this.

He dropped his eyes and blushed.

‘You can see for yourself how much you look alike.’

Torgny looked at the painting, and although Kristoffer knew that his eyes must have wandered over her naked body an infinite number of times, he still wanted to ask him to stop. He wanted to cover her up, take her down and turn the painting to face the wall.

‘It was your father who painted it, the swine. But he could certainly paint.’

Kristoffer didn’t know whether he could stand hearing any more. It was dizzying, like standing at the edge of a cliff. Utterly unprepared he had trudged up the stairs with his pizza cartons, and now he was sitting in a flat that looked like a crack den and was expected to absorb the precious information he had always sought.

‘So she left you at Skansen… Jesus.’

Torgny heaved a sigh and shook his head, taking a deep drag on his cigarette and a swig of beer.

‘If only I had known.’

Kristoffer sat in silence.

‘So you don’t remember living here when you were little?’

Kristoffer looked around.

‘Here?’

‘Yes, until January 1975. That was when she packed her bags and left. Since then I haven’t heard a word.’

‘But she didn’t leave me at Skansen until May the tenth.’

Torgny seemed not to be listening. Or else the information made no difference. He took a few gulps of beer.

‘If you knew how I searched for you. I just about turned half the city upside down trying to find the two of you, but nobody knew a thing. I found some weird commune where you apparently lived for a month or so, but they didn’t know where you’d gone after that. They couldn’t keep her there since she was ill, they said, although they seemed screwier to me than she ever was. It was all that sodding seventies new age crap and shit. But she could be really strange when she didn’t take her medicine. You could see it in her eyes, like somebody threw a switch or something. Something that had never bothered her before would make her crazy the next time you did it. In the morning she’d be like a pitiful little bird, asking me to promise never to leave her, then in the afternoon she would be screaming that she hated me. It wasn’t always easy to cope with.’

He lowered his eyes and plucked at the pull-tab on the beer can.

‘But Christ, I really loved her.’

He sniffed and wiped his hand across his face. Then he got up and went over to the bookshelf, searched for a moment and pulled out a book.

‘This one is about her; it’s the last book I ever wrote. After that there weren’t any more.’

Torgny stubbed out his cigarette in a filthy ashtray and handed the book to Kristoffer.

He read the cover: The Wind Whispers Your Name. A picture of a woman turned away.

He turned over the book and read the blurb on the back cover.

George is a bitter, middle-aged man who has given up hope of finding love. When he meets Sonja he is forced to re-evaluate his view of life, since this powerful love leaves him no choice. But Sonja is carrying dark memories that slowly take over their lives…

With uncanny authenticity Torgny Wennberg depicts a man’s downfall after the end of a love affair. In the powerful portrait of George and Sonja he paints a gripping portrait of the difficult art of being human.

‘You can have it if you want. I know how it ends.’

Torgny gave a little smile and raised the beer can to his lips but discovered it was empty. He crushed the can and dropped it on the floor, picking up the one he had offered to Kristoffer.

‘Maybe she took her own life. She threatened to do it sometimes when she was really bad.’

Kristoffer sat in silence. Why was he the way he was? Was there any family resemblance? What had been influenced by what?

He was getting some of the answers, but he was suddenly terrified of the questions.

He swallowed.

‘What was wrong with her?’

Torgny shrugged.

‘The hell if I know. When she was healthy she didn’t want to talk about it, and when she felt bad she didn’t know she was ill. But you have to understand, your mother was a fantastic woman. She couldn’t help it if she acted the way she did; it was a disease she had, and most of the time she was well. When she took her medication everything was fine, but sometimes the mare would ride her at night, as they say. I remember she used to cry out in her sleep. Then it was almost impossible to wake her and make her understand she was only dreaming. It could take hours to calm her down.’

He sighed and lit another cigarette.

‘I think what she was most afraid of was being abandoned again. She had been through so much shit it’s no wonder something broke inside of her. My own crappy childhood was a luxury cruise in comparison. It’s fucking shit when you think about it.’

‘Tell me.’

And so Torgny told him. That Kristoffer’s mother was Jewish and had been born in Poland in 1938. That she was sent to a concentration camp and lost her entire family. That her mother was shot, her father was probably taken to another camp, and that she never found out what happened to him. That her sister died in the camp and left her alone. Only after Torgny had been talking for a while did it dawn on Kristoffer that this was his own family he was talking about. This wasn’t someone else’s. He came from Poland instead of Sweden, and his whole family had been wiped out. The more information he heard the more confused he became, and finally he had to ask for a pen and paper so he could take notes.

‘Imagine yourself as a six-year-old seeing your mother’s brains blown out. She told me he’d laughed afterwards, the man who shot her mother. He’d bet another soldier that he could shoot someone in the eye. It was just random that he happened to choose her.’

His grandmother. They were talking about his grandmother. And his mother who had been forced to watch. Kristoffer suddenly thought of Joseph Schultz. From Jan-Erik Ragnerfeldt’s lecture. Maybe there was something in him that was especially affected by that story, an inherited cry for justice.

‘Someone said that Halina went back to Poland, and maybe that’s what she did. She didn’t have any family left, but that’s where she was from, after all. She still spoke the language fluently, and there was nobody here to keep her. Sadly.’

Torgny took a swig of beer.

‘The thing was, she never felt the same about me as I did about her. Otherwise, she would never have left me.’

He fell silent and looked at the floor.

‘She seemed to retreat when I showed her how I felt, as if she didn’t think she had a right to be happy in any way. I remember that sometimes it felt as though she liked me best when I didn’t care as much; that’s when she became more loving. But then when I loved her back she would retreat again.’

Kristoffer listened intently. Torgny spoke with ruminative pauses, and something told Kristoffer that these memories had waited a long time to be aired.

Kristoffer looked at the book in his hands. The picture of the woman turned away.

‘You mustn’t believe that your mother was some sort of idiot just because she had a problem. On the contrary, she was probably the smartest person I ever met. When she was well she was like a… I don’t know, I can’t describe it.’

Torgny smiled and looked around as if searching for a suitable description.

‘Damn, what great times we had when everything was good. There was no one else quite like her. I know, because I’ve looked.’

He stopped talking and fell into a reverie.

Torgny had been quiet for a long time. Kristoffer felt a profound weariness but he knew that the conversation was not over yet. There was more he needed to know. Yet he no longer knew what he was going to do with the information. ‘You said that it was my pappa who painted that picture.’

He nodded towards the painting and Torgny snorted.

‘That brute. Luckily for him he managed to drink himself to death before I had a chance to kill him.’

‘So he’s dead?’

‘Yes, a long time ago, and you should be glad of that. Karl-Evert Pettersson was his name. An artist, but he evidently drank so heavily that nobody wanted anything to do with him. He was the sort who flies into a rage when he’s drunk and wants to fight and cause trouble. He was drunk when he did it.’

‘Did what?’

‘When he raped her.’

Kristoffer shifted in his chair in an attempt to shake off what he was hearing. Now he didn’t want to hear any more. No more.

‘She was modelling for that painting, trying to make a little extra money. She wanted to be a writer but she never managed to get anything published.’

Torgny broke off suddenly as if he’d said something he didn’t want to talk about.

Kristoffer felt that something was starting to fall apart. His fantasies during his childhood, the dream world where hope was kept alive. The images of how happy his parents would be when they finally found him. How they would be heartbroken and had fought to get him back.

‘That was when we met, after she got knocked up. She was desperate because she didn’t want to… Well, I might as well tell you the truth. She had been raped, but the abortion laws were different then. The new abortion law that gave women the right to choose and all that wouldn’t be passed until a few years later, and you should be damned glad of that.’

A feeling of nausea washed over Kristoffer.

‘But then, after you were born, she was happy. She was a good mother, she really was. It was only sometimes, when she wasn’t feeling well, that she could be a bit harsh.’

Kristoffer tried to get up, holding on to the back of the chair.

‘She must have been ill when she left you at Skansen. She would never have done anything like that if she were feeling well.’

With the book in his hand he managed to make it to the hall.

‘Kristoffer.’

Torgny was still sitting on the bed, but Kristoffer couldn’t speak. He reached for the door handle.

‘Why don’t you get in touch again sometime, Kristoffer? We could see each other again, the two of us.’

He went out to the landing and managed to pull the door shut behind him. His ears were filled with a piercing scream. His hand shook as he grasped the banister, and his legs felt stiff as if seized by cramps. He barely managed to make it down the stairs.

Everything was in ruins.

His hidden inner world that had always glittered like a distant oasis, enticing him with its promise of bliss. Empty and ravaged, it had dissolved and slipped away. All the endless waiting. All the lost seconds. The hope that had driven him onwards. How could he accept that all the waiting had been in vain?

They had never looked for him; he had never been missed.

From the depths of his being it came surging up – the grief he had never permitted to exist. Like a howl for restitution it came flowing and knocked his feet from under him. With his back against the wall he slid down to the floor.

He hadn’t wanted to know any of this!

All he wanted was to get it back.

The hope.

The hope of one day finding an explanation that would bless him with the ability to forgive.