read out loud from an article in the country’s most widely read daily paper. ‘Vera Lundberg is the Swedish nurse who narrowly escaped being kidnapped by a splinter group of FARC guerrillas on the fifteenth of May. The Marxist branch of Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia…’
Peter had traveled in the Caribbean enough for his Spanish accent to be pretty good, but he still went too slowly for Kalle, who put his arms on the table to support himself and continued reading on his own, ‘…demanded a sum equal to 30 million kronor in exchange for releasing four European doctors and nurses, who, it is now feared, have been executed in the jungle.’
‘Yeah, apparently it takes real Marxists to demand a hefty sum of capital,’ grinned Peter.
Kalle eagerly read on, ‘Lundberg has criticized the freeing of Ingrid Betancourt by the military under false pretenses. The immunity and security of volunteers is now under greater threat… She wonders what has really been done to try to free her imprisoned colleagues.’
‘So what does she want?’ Peter interjected. ‘Does she want the military to undertake a rescue mission or not?’
Kalle studied the picture of a pale, serious girl with her leg in a bandage. ‘Isn’t she more like a … lame Florence Nightingale?’
When Peter looked more closely at the grainy photograph he realized: Vera Lundberg was the maddening, grey girl on crutches! But it was too late now. Do-gooder Kalle was determined to have her as ‘the world’s coolest and most worthy’ subletter and had already written down her telephone number. Damn! How the hell could he have known that her unbelievable sob story was actually true? Seriously, sometimes he talked before he had thought things through. He was filled with vague discomfort, as if an important test were approaching that he knew he wasn’t ready for.
6
Vera was surprised at how quickly she got back into the old routines. Morning meetings, care schedules, feeding, personal hygiene and the all-important ‘List’, which, if not properly filled out, could mean unnecessary enemas for the elderly residents. ‘Well, Ulrik hasn’t pooped for a week now.’ If it wasn’t written on the ‘List’, it made no difference what poor Ulrik tried to say about what he had actually produced.
Vera understood the importance of structure, rules and sticking to schedules. But rationalizing to the point where it felt like the people you were supposed to be helping were unhappy, that was where she drew the line. It was partly for that reason that she had quit her job at Solbacka the last time.
But it was mostly because something else had tempted her. She smiled at the happy memory of her life with Adam during their college years. Life was simple and full of meaning; they were on their way. His journey: first medical school and then training to become a surgeon. Hers: four years to become a nurse anesthetist.
They went home together in the late afternoons. They usually slipped into the supermarket to buy something for dinner, unabashedly discussing surgical alternatives in the fruit department. An endless number of solutions had been debated at the stove in their small, well-designed two-room apartment. They used to go to the movies, spend time with friends and go to church once in a while.
It was Adam who had first suggested that they go abroad after graduation – to help take care of people and contribute to the church’s mission by using their medical training to do volunteer work. His faith had always been stronger than hers, but Gunilla belonged to the same evangelical church, and she had made sure that her daughter attended revivals and bible study like the church’s other teenagers.
But the truth was that everyone involved had quickly realized that Vera wasn’t an ordinary child of the congregation. Her questions had stopped being harmlessly cute, like they had been in Sunday school, when she asked about something she thought was obviously wrong: ‘Why does it say that Abraham gave birth to Isaac? Everybody knows that mummies give birth to babies!’
When she got older she asked questions about morality. How could God become so angry at Pharaoh that he hardened his heart? When Pharaoh refused to let Moses and the Jews leave, why did God bring down plagues on all Egyptians? Isn’t it more like a human sin to be so vengeful, to want to punish an entire people?
And if you went to heaven if you were a good-hearted heathen who had never heard of Jesus – but not if you had heard of him, but hadn’t become Christian – didn’t you expose people to risks if you went out evangelizing? ‘I mean,’ Vera had asked, ‘if a stranger came along, someone who also took people from our country and enslaved them, how likely is it that we would want to believe in their God? What if the good heathens would have gone to heaven if only we had left them alone? What would Jesus have said about that?’
Someone in the congregation had eventually talked to Gunilla, who, ashamed of her daughter’s deviant behavior, took her out of bible school. When Gunilla got home she yelled at Sven-Erik because she blamed his Social Democratic atheism for Vera’s embarrassing defect – the endless questioning! It had always been important to Gunilla to fit in with her childhood congregation. She was anxious that no-one should ever whisper anything negative about her or her family.
Quitting bible study didn’t bother Vera. She genuinely wanted her questions answered, but she had pretty quickly figured out that the standard answer to the most interesting ones was: ‘If we had answers to all our questions, then we would be like God, and of course it is only God who is God.’ Why then did God give me a brain that wonders about all these things? thought Vera, but she kept her mouth shut.
Since childhood, Vera had been most interested in the practical question of how you can live a good life, and the best answer she had come upon was the golden rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That was something in the bible that rang true for her.
So the idea of doing volunteer relief work stuck with Vera and, over the years, grew into a decision. Obviously she would go with Adam and help where they were most needed. Every day, every page she read and practical exercise she completed was meaningful because it helped her develop the skills that would heal, ease and prevent illness somewhere out in the world. She had been proud of herself, and even prouder of Adam, who, thanks to a combination of skillful hands, mental acuity and perseverance, had developed into a surgeon with God-given talent. His incisions and stitches were so precise that the scars from his operations were barely visible on his patients’ skin.
The workday was over and Vera had only one errand left to do before going home. She walked through the hallways of the nursing home, no longer noticing how the fluorescent light reflected off the apricot-painted wallpaper, the practical and protective wall molding wisely placed at wheelchair level, the horrible silk flowers and the solitary, scrawny yucca plant. Filled with the memory of what had been a self-evident ‘we’, of Adam and her, she knocked on the door to Solveig Marklund’s room.
Solveig opened the door, saw Vera’s introspective, slightly sad smile, and asked kindly, ‘So how is Vera doing today?’
Vera looked at her favorite patient. Solveig was sitting in her wheelchair. She had been forced to move to Solbacka when her husband Gustav had died two years earlier, because she had been deemed too physically weak to take care of herself. But there was nothing wrong with her mind, and the walls in her little two-room suite were covered with photographs, paintings, colorful bits of fabric, buttons, ribbons and unusual souvenirs that testified to an unusually creative life.
‘I’m fine,’ said Vera, but realized instantly that Solveig’s gentle observation of her would reveal a more truthful answer. ‘Well, my knee isn’t better yet,’ she quickly added, pointing at her thin left leg, still stuck in a slightly bent position.
‘But
