The Ice Child

UDDEVALLA 1971

When Laila discovered that she was once again pregnant, she had mixed emotions. Maybe she wasn’t suited to be a mother, maybe she wasn’t capable of feeling the love for a child that was expected of her.

But all her worries proved unfounded. Everything was so different with Peter. So wonderfully different. She couldn’t take her eyes off her son, couldn’t get enough of breathing in his scent, caressing his soft skin with her fingertips. When she held him in her arms, as she was doing now, he would look up at her with such trust in his eyes that her heart overflowed. So this was what it was like to love a child. She never could have imagined it possible to have such strong feelings for another person. Even her love for Vladek paled in comparison with what she felt when she looked at her newborn son.

Yet the moment she glanced at her daughter, her stomach would knot. She saw the look in the girl’s eyes, the darkness that stirred in her thoughts. Her jealousy towards her brother manifested itself in constant pinching and slapping, and fear kept Laila awake at night. Sometimes she would sit next to Peter’s cot, keeping watch over him as she fixed her gaze on his peaceful face.

Vladek began slipping further away from her, as she did from him. They were being torn apart by forces they never could have foreseen. In her dreams she would sometimes run after him, trying to go faster and faster, but the harder she ran, the greater the gap between them. Finally all she could see was his back, way in the distance.

Words had also deserted them. All those conversations in the evenings at the dinner table, the little signs of love that had brightened their days. Everything had been swallowed up by a silence broken only by the sound of a child crying.

She kept on looking at Peter, filled with a protective instinct that pushed away all else. Vladek could no longer be her everything. Not now that Peter was here.