him and left.
Peter didn’t understand. Every other time when he, uncharacteristically, had been the one to make the advance, he had immediately been victorious. But with Vera… His usual way of making contact didn’t work, exactly when it was important that it did work, just when he had actually met an Elf in real life.
Of course he knew she was a real person – a nurse in her late twenties from inner Västerbotten. But there were several puzzle pieces that pointed directly at something that he longed for, something completely unique. She was beautiful in a hard-to-discover, secret way; she was petite yet strong, wildly curly-haired yet disciplined, superior yet good-hearted, stubborn yet evasive. She was completely unlike all the other women he had known and he sensed instinctively, without really knowing why, that she had something he needed.
When Peter realized that Vera had actually rejected him numerous times, he understood that he had approached things all wrong. The definition of idiocy is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting a different outcome, as his Uncle Ernst used to say.
She was completely different from all the other women he had met. Obviously, he would have to use a completely different approach to get close to her. But different how? There were endless ways to be and do things. How could he get Vera to change her mind? How could he get her to see him the way young women usually did?
A wave of understanding washed over him, and he realized that he needed to get to know his opponent, something his jujutsu instructor had been nagging him about for years. Luckily, Peter, who sometimes had trouble even remembering women’s first names, recalled masses of seemingly unimportant details about Vera. Thus, he had no difficulty remembering that Vera thought books like The Gaia Atlas of Green Economics, Global Women, and State of the World were worth reading. He went to the library and looked for them. The only one that wasn’t out on loan was Green Economics. Peter realized that Vera probably still had the library’s only copy of the other two. In a fit of uncharacteristic ambition, he borrowed other books on welfare and economic development instead.
He called his father and said he couldn’t come to the board meeting next week, because he had too much work to do on the project. Lennart had sounded unexpectedly negative. When Charlie couldn’t come to board meetings it was usually accepted with considerable understanding. And Peter had thought that Lennart must have been a driving force behind him even being asked to join Future Wealth and Welfare. Perhaps Lennart had not realized that the project would take time away from Escape, and maybe even from his usual studies? If so, that was typical of his father. He always wants to have his cake and eat it too, thought Peter, with an irritation that surprised him.
Peter was also surprised that he was even considering reading about welfare. As usual, he found it difficult to read the books from cover to cover. But he read the headings and summaries until he thought he understood the important parts. It was unexpectedly interesting to pit ‘the richest one per cent’ perspective against the argument about welfare and well-being for everyone. The books about welfare on the reference list that Åke had distributed to the members of the project were about the welfare of Sweden as a whole and the welfare of the European Union.
Vera’s brief and jumbled book took a fuzzy global perspective. It was suddenly the welfare of all of humanity, and, as if that weren’t enough, even the whole planet’s. In fascination, Peter realized that it was fully possible that the scrawled pencil notes in Green Economics were Vera’s. He therefore made sure that he read everything that was circled, marked and underlined. It started with a quote from some Manfred in the preface, which claimed that we needed to change economic logic. As if logic can be changed just like that! Either it’s logical, and then we already know it, or it’s illogical, thought Peter.
Then came a depressing list of complaints. The Industrial Economy. Rape of the Earth. Exploitation of Women. Destruction of community. Disposable people. Money in trouble. Catalogue of shame. And finally, the question, ‘All for what?’ to which the response was, ‘Above the poverty level, the relationship between income and happiness is remarkably small.’ The richest one per cent who go on Great Escapes would beg to differ, thought Peter, remembering the classic line that people can say what they want about money and happiness, but it was better to cry in a limousine than a bus.
No wonder she’s bitter, if she spends her time reading stuff like this!
He skimmed the pages restlessly and read a clearly circled passage that claimed that half of the world’s population did two-thirds of the world’s work, earned one tenth of all income and owned less than one per cent of all its assets. It was referring to women.
Suddenly he realized how wrong it had been when he said that Vera was expected to ‘do her Duty as Woman in the project’. For him it had been a humorous way to offset the deeply private humiliation of asking someone to dance and getting a no. He realized now that there was a significant risk that, for Vera, it sounded like he was demanding that she conform to a World Order. An order which, if she agreed with the stuff in this mixed-up book, in her eyes put unreasonable demands on women for a remuneration that was entirely too small. Peter also understood that, at least for her, it was a completely different and worse type of humiliation. And, above all, it wasn’t his. With the social gifts that his mother’s nurturing had honed in him from boyhood, Peter knew that one could joke about one’s own humiliation, but never about other people’s.
Peter put down Green Economics. If he carried on reading stuff like this, would he become as gloomy as Vera? And even if Peter was strangely drawn to her, despite that unattractive quality, it certainly wasn’t something he aspired to himself. He lay a long time with his hands behind his head and thought. This could be a really good game. He imagined how he and Vera would debate, and how he would convince her that her pessimism was exaggerated. He was satisfied. Yes, half an hour with Vera’s book had done the job. He thought he understood more about why she was like she was, and how he could get her to change. He was like a spy after a successful mission. He had broken a code and entered, in order to dig out decisive information. He turned off the light with the satisfied feeling of having done his homework.
18
The night before the fifth of November, Vera woke up in a sweat, pulse racing. She had had a strange dream about a doctor who stood sorting people into different lines, injured and uninjured. In the dream, Vera’s aching left knee was a pulpy mess due to a gunshot wound, and she wound up in the line with the injured. After a while a small, furious dwarf in a red cap showed up with a yardstick and declared that the line for the injured was too long, because it was longer than his yardstick! The doctor obediently changed his mind and his decision. Vera was moved to the line for the uninjured, and showing him the gunshot wound to her knee made no difference. When she awoke from the dream her cheeks were wet with tears.
With a pounding heart, Vera hobbled over to her desk and turned on her computer. She did a search on the comforting words Healthcare guarantee. So it was that, at 2:41 in the morning on the fifth of November, Vera realized that, because she wasn’t yet in a queue for an MRI scan, all the time she had waited so far didn’t count, and the healthcare guarantee period had not yet begun. She toyed with a conspiracy theory that pharmacy companies bribed doctors not to treat joint injuries too quickly, so that they would have the opportunity to sell a lot of pills, then rejected the idea.
But there must have been some reason why they wanted to keep her off the x-ray waiting list? The other horrible suspicion was not so easy to reject; it stuck to her like her now ice-cold pajama top. Because there it was on the screen: The guarantee regulates only the period of time within which one is to be offered treatment which has been approved by qualified healthcare professionals. It was obvious that
