coconspirator. The truth, whatever and wherever it was, had to be kept secret from his mother at all costs.
To protect her.
Year in and year out.
And then the constant question inside him of why his pappa did what he did.
There were plenty of people in town who knew. He remembered all the conversations that would suddenly stop when he and his mamma entered the grocer’s and that resumed again as soon as she turned her back. All the sympathetic smiles that were directed at her from neighbours and girlfriends, people she thought were her friends, but who year after year out of sheer cowardice held their tongues about the truth. And he, too, walking beside her and holding his tongue as well, he was the worst traitor of them all. He recalled a conversation he had heard once when she was sitting with a neighbour in the kitchen. His mother thought that he had gone out and didn’t hear, but he was lying in bed reading a comic book. He heard her in tears, talking about her suspicions that her husband had met someone else. Heard how she sat there at the kitchen table and overcame her own reservations enough to dare express her shameful misgivings. And the woman lied. Straight into his mamma’s face she lied as she accepted coffee and home-baked buns. Lied and said that his mamma was surely just imagining things and that every marriage had its ups and downs and that there was certainly nothing to worry about.
And then the slaps on the back from the men urging his father on to new conquests, and more overtime to keep alive his reputation as an irresistible ladykiller, while Jonas stayed at home covering for him. Constant lies that were compensated for by the growing pressure to perform his rituals to dull the sense of dread. And then new lies, to hide the compulsion.
How he had wondered about all those women. Who were they, what were they thinking? Did they know that his father had a wife and a son somewhere, waiting for the man they were seducing? Did it mean anything to them? Did they care? What made them give their bodies to a man who only wanted to fuck them and then go home and deny them to his wife?
He never could understand it.
The only thing he knew was that he hated each and every one of them.
Hated them all.
The bubble burst a few months before his eighteenth birthday. Something as trivial as a little lipstick on a shirt collar. After five years of lies the constant betrayal was revealed, and his father had used Jonas’s knowledge like a scared rabbit to protect himself from her pain. To avoid bearing all the guilt himself.
She had never been able to forgive either of them.
She was doubly betrayed.
The wound they gave her was so deep that it could never heal.
He had remained in the house in silence after his father moved out, watched her from a distance in the destroyed home. It reeked of shame and hatred. She refused to talk to anyone. In the daytime she seldom left her bedroom, and if she did it was only to go to the toilet. Jonas tried to make up for his betrayal by taking care of shopping for food and other errands, but she never came out to the table when he fixed their meals. Every night at two-thirty he set off on his moped to his job delivering newspapers, and when he came home at six he could see that she had taken something to eat from the refrigerator. The dishes she used stood carefully washed in the dish rack.
But she never spoke a word to him.
‘I don’t have time to talk now.’
He cut off the connection and leaned over the steering wheel.
This is the third embolism she has had in two months. And each time her level of consciousness drops.
How could she do this to him? What more did she want from him to convince her to stay?
He wouldn’t be able to stand the loneliness in the flat. Not tonight.
He looked over his shoulder and backed up. He didn’t know where he was going.
Only one thing.
If she didn’t touch him soon, he would go crazy.
Eva had a hard time remembering the last time she had left work early, if ever. The biggest advantage of the fact that Henrik worked at home was that he could collect Axel from day-care or dash over there on short notice if the boy was sick. This went without saying ever since she became a partner and also contributed the major part of their common income. But she tried never to get home later than six.
Today she was going to surprise him and come home earlier than usual.
No one could claim that she got very much done that day. With her eyes on structural efficiencies and profitability calculations, the grinding anxiety had constantly intruded on her thoughts. She had a feeling of unreality. He had suddenly put in question the only thing she had never questioned.
The family.
Everything else was replaceable.
She raised her eyes from the computer screen and looked out the window. The only thing she saw was the façade on the other side of Birger Jarlsgatan. Another office full of other people; she had no idea what they were working on, she didn’t know a single one of them. Most of the daylight hours, day after day, year after year, they spent thirty metres from each other and saw one another more than they saw their own families.
A nine-hour workday, if she didn’t work through lunch, and half an hour’s travel time in rush-hour traffic. It gave her scarcely an hour and a half each day with Axel, an hour and a half when he was tired and cranky after eight hours with twenty other children at the day-care centre, and she was tired and cranky after nine hours of demands and stress at her job. And then at eight o’clock, after he went to bed, she and Henrik would have their time together. The grown-up hour. That was when they were supposed to sit in peace and quiet and see to it that their relationship was fantastic, talk about their day, take an interest in each other’s work, what had happened, share their thoughts. And then somehow manage to make heartfelt love with each other when they finally tumbled into bed. According to the Sunday supplements, that was how they should ensure their marriage would last. And then, of course, plan short romantic trips and get a babysitter so they could have their own gilt-edged time together. If there had been a slave available who could go grocery shopping, drive Axel to swimming lessons, get involved in the parents’ group at the day-care centre, prepare dinner, wash clothes, call the plumber and ask him to fix the leak underneath the kitchen counter, do the ironing, make sure all the bills got paid on time, clean the house, open all the window envelopes and take care of all the family’s social contacts, then it might have been possible. What she wanted most of all was to be able to sleep an entire weekend. Undisturbed. To see whether there was any possibility of getting rid of the exhaustion she felt, the weariness that permeated marrow and bone and longed only for things to get done without her participation.
She thought about the seminar the company held last autumn. ‘Taking responsibility for your life.’ She had felt energised afterwards; many truths had been uttered that sounded so simple though she had never thought of them herself.
Every moment I choose whether I want to be a victim or the creator of my own destiny.
Full of inspiration she had hurried home to tell Henrik about her experience. He had sat silently and listened, but when she offered to get tickets for the next lecture the man would be giving, he wasn’t interested.
What
