Vera, and from her backpack she pulled out a little fruit, bread and cheese and a tin of crackers that she had bought for Solveig.
Solveig smiled gratefully and maneuvered her wheelchair back into the room to get her wallet.
But, as always, Vera refused. ‘We can take care of that later; it’s just so nice to talk to you. I know that you’re an evening snacker, and I don’t want you to starve because of Solbacka’s schedules. And you sleep so much better if you aren’t hungry.’
Solveig rolled herself back towards the door, smiled with her lovely, wrinkled face and took Vera’s hands in her own soft, liver-spotted ones. ‘Thank you, you kind person.’
Kind person, thought Vera as she carefully hobbled toward the bus stop. It’s kind people who make life bearable. Like that guy who called and offered her his dorm room, at least for a year, just when she had started to realize that she couldn’t live much longer under the same roof as her mother. In spite of everything, she could actually afford a room in a dormitory!
He said his name was Kalle, and he sounded confident, if a little shy. At first Vera was convinced that he had made some kind of mistake, but then he said that Cecilia Åström had mentioned her. Cissi, she’s also a kind person, Vera thought. Sometimes you’re lucky in the people you meet.
It was a friendly dormitory. She had felt the good atmosphere as soon as Kalle opened the door. He had looked just like she expected: broad and furry like a teddy bear. A young English guy named Matt had immediately turned up and introduced himself. There was some kind of little brother charm in his friendliness as he stood there peering out from under his hair in a much-too-big cardigan.
She had been surprised to discover that Peter Stavenius – that young, unimpressive lecturer from the summer course who had spent most of his time hitting on one of the students – lived in the room next to hers. But there was probably nothing really wrong with him either. What were you supposed to do if you happened to meet ‘the one’ in a strange setting? They seemed like they were a good match, he and Sandra – two blond, pretty-people types. ‘Ken and Barbie,’ the other students in the class had called them when they snuck away, thinking they were unobserved, and cuddled during the breaks. In Peter’s defense, it wasn’t easy to be compared to Cissi, who was a real superstar teacher.
On her way home to Ålidhem, Vera thought about how differently she looked at the world now. It was the same town, the same student neighborhood and the same university. But it wasn’t the same Vera. And not the same Adam… she almost added. But the pain caused by that line of thinking hit her full in the stomach and the analogy ended abruptly in a fuzzy haze. She remembered the trauma psychologist’s choice of words. Here was a ‘destructive spiral’ that her psyche blocked entirely.
The semester began and the city started crawling with students. Life in the dorm was congenial, and Thursday evenings were especially enjoyable. Those who felt like it got together to cook dinner and, for the third Thursday in a row, Vera and Matt joined in. Lotten, who was studying gastronomy, showed them little tricks with the confident authority of someone who knows what she’s doing. Lotten came from the far south of Sweden, and it struck Vera that the tall, fair-skinned woman reminded her of Camilla in many ways.
Matt was another story altogether, a young guy from Sheffield with loose body language and overgrown brown hair that was constantly dishevelled. He had begun his second year at the School of Design down near the river. Matt had spent a few summers in Sweden when he was a child and had studied Swedish the previous year. He already spoke it incredibly well, thought Vera, glancing over at his distinctive profile. His forehead stuck out almost as far as his nose, giving him a rough, caveman-like appearance that contrasted with his mild personality. It was mainly the small Swedish words that gave him trouble. Vera smiled inwardly at today’s incident as she stood slicing onions for the paella. Lotten had shown her how to first make a horizontal cut and then to slice the onion half in a fan shape before chopping it. That way, the thin pieces stayed attached to the root until vertical slices made straight across the onion detached them in small bits.
‘So how did the first years’ initiation go?’ asked Lotten, raising her light eyebrows without lifting her eyes from the neatly lined-up ingredients – a fresh raw chicken, rice, tomatoes, tarragon, bayleaf… Lotten’s fiancé Noel ran a trendy Spanish restaurant in Dublin, and tonight they were cooking the specialty of the house: Nueva Casa’s famous paella. She poured oil into her large, heavy-bottomed pan, which she kept in her room when she wasn’t using it, along with her cherished knives.
‘Fine. It was fun.’ Matt’s job was to peel the shrimp at the sink, and he carried out the task with almost meditative concentration.
Vera had bought dessert from the chocolate aficionados at the Fruit Corner, and on her way back to the bus she happened to run into the Industrial Design department’s initiation rite. The Matt she had seen there was completely different from the ordinary one. ‘He was dressed as a police officer, and the first-years were in striped clothes like prisoners wear. They were supposed to carry people cross the street…’
‘Oh, right,’ said Lotten, with the soft diphthongs characteristic of the Skåne dialect. ‘Was it Toby’s uniform?’ Toby, one of the more reserved dorm residents, was studying to become a police officer. He was in his last year of studies, and he went home to Skellefteå as often as he could.
‘Yeah.’ Matt continued to focus on the work his hands were doing.
‘An old woman aged about 75 came along, pushing her husband in a wheelchair…’ Vera began to giggle. ‘So imagine a couple of two-meter tall… well… giants lifting the woman up and carrying her away. And you know what she says?’
Smiling, Lotten looked up from the saffron just as the oil began spreading a delicious scent through the kitchen. She tilted the pan skillfully, stirred and added finely minced garlic. Matt glanced at Vera from the sink and prompted, in unison with her, ‘It’s OK, Theodore, it’s just that time of year!’
Vera laughed so hard that tears ran down her cheeks, and she felt the tension that she had been living with for months recede into the background. Lotten and Matt smiled at her. She put down the knife, pushed the chopped onions towards the stove, took off her glasses and dried her eyes with her right arm.
‘But I managed to scare old Theodore anyway,’ said Matt glumly.
‘Yeah, hahaha…!’ Now Vera was laughing so hard she was doubled over. ‘Sorry Matt, I don’t mean to, but…’
‘I was only trying to say, “Sorry, sir, let me push you”,’ said Matt, turning towards them. ‘So I said: jag •• •• ••• på dig.” His messy hair and innocently twinkling eyes made him look like an angel-faced boxer in an apron. Vera’s laughing had now infected Lotten.
‘I know, I know! The poor guy looked completely terrified.’ Teary-eyed, Vera patted herself like she was looking for something in her pockets. ‘He went like this, looking for his nitroglycerin, so I had to get involved.’
Lotten’s pale skin was beetroot-red from laughing. ‘Wha… what did you do?’ she stuttered.
‘I said uh…’ Vera got her breathing under control and steadied her voice. ‘It’s okay! He just has a little trouble remembering which words to emphasize. He means skjuter • •.’ And I wheeled him to the other side of the street.’
Matt mumbled from the sink: ‘Skjuter • •, ••
