but once in a while you should also show children that they can convince their parents to change their minds, using charm and a good argument. They should learn to convince people, to change their minds. Liza learns that from me.
After reading, I sing the two songs that I’ve sung to her since she was nursing. Just so she has constants in her life—something I never had. The first song is “Sleep, Children, Sleep,” and the second is an English children’s song called “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep,” which is about a sheep that takes its own wool to various customers’ homes. No idea what lesson it’s supposed to be teaching.
Finally I lie next to her in bed until she falls asleep. Our apartment is like a dungeon. There are only a few windows onto the street. The previous owners did all kinds of renovations in the building, almost certainly illegally. There’s just no way they would have gotten permits for all the things they did. Long, narrow hallways, miniature rooms without windows. Because some rooms are in the basement, it’s like a cold rabbit hole. People always get lost, even Liza sometimes. It’s a very intestinal apartment—as if the rooms and hallways are part of a giant, subterranean colon.
I’m also slowly beginning to worry whether the apartment makes us happy or not. When we moved in, newly in love, we didn’t care about the apartment’s backstory. Now that the honeymoon phase of our relationship is over, the story of the previous owners bothers me more and more. When you’re first in love, you think you are immune to anything bad in the world. Once daily life has begun to encroach on that feeling, you notice you’re not so unique, as you so arrogantly thought at the beginning. And then the things that happen to others suddenly make you think, too. In the case of the previous owners, she had money—she was in banking—and he was an ordinary worker. She started to waste away. He did, too, for a while. Then he got a liver transplant and was suddenly healthy and lively again. Then he left because he couldn’t stand her anymore.
And we moved into their apartment without even thinking about it for a second. If it were a movie you’d think, Oh, boy, there’s definitely trouble in store if you move in there. Or maybe you’d move into a place like that if you didn’t know about the history. But never with all the information at hand.
Liza lies down and acts as if she is ready to go to sleep. As a good example, I’ve closed my eyes and am breathing deeply, in and out. I learned to breathe that way from a masseuse—it’s a way to stave off panic attacks. You fall asleep better that way, too. It makes you feel as if you have your life under control. Crazy. It also shows how poorly you breathe otherwise, during the rest of the day. I listen closely to her breathing, to see whether it’s changed from the way it is when you are falling asleep to the way it is when you are deep asleep. But suddenly she speaks in the darkness.
“Mama, is Hitler still around?”
“What would make you think of that?”
Oh, man, please fall asleep. This is bad.
“At school, one of the kids said to another when they were fighting, ‘You’re as bad as Hitler.’”
“No, don’t worry. He killed himself a long, long time ago.”
“Oh, good. In that case I can fall asleep. If he hadn’t have killed himself, would he have gone to prison?”
“Of course he would have been put in prison. He killed so many people.”
“Mama, do we know anyone who has been in prison?”
“Why?”
“I’d like to visit someone in prison sometime. I want to see what it looks like in there.”
“No, unfortunately not. Maybe someday.”
I would love to take revenge on the newspaper publisher who capitalized on my family’s car accident to earn dirty money selling our blood and agony to voyeuristic readers. If I didn’t have a husband and child, I would have founded a terrorist organization immediately. I’ve sworn that as soon as my child is out of the woods, I will kill myself—which I want to do anyway—and take those responsible with me. If I get up the nerve. If the plan works and I don’t die, I’ll be put away for the murder of at least three people—as well as whoever else happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time—and you’ll have someone to visit in prison, my child. Maybe I won’t accompany them to the grave, because I couldn’t do that to my daughter or, to a lesser extent, my husband. But in any event I’ve already written in my will that Georg should seek out another woman immediately, that I want him to. He always seems to need absolution from me. He can even get together with a blonde woman with big breasts. It’s not like I’ll be around to see it happen. And it’ll happen sooner or later anyway.
Liza is breathing more deeply. I can make out her long eyelashes in the dark. It’s really funny the way every mother thinks her child is the most beautiful. Despite the fact that this can’t be true. Holding my breath, I pry my finger out of the vise grip of my daughter’s hand. Getting my finger out of her grasp while holding my breath is like giving birth. The child doesn’t want to come out. She stirs. Of course. That’s why fingers are constructed in such a complicated way. As an alarm system for when I try to escape.
She opens her eyes. Always the same sentence: “Mama, a little bit longer.”
“Yes, but let go of my finger, or else I will wake you up again when I leave.”
Always the same. Stuck in a loop, everything repeating itself. Not like the chaos I grew up in. I take my finger out of her hand. Then I lie down next to her again, but a little farther away, with no bodily contact. I know that she will now take four normal breaths and then begin to breathe deeply in and out, at which point she’ll sound like an old drunk man. That’s the sign that she’s asleep. Finally. Suddenly she shudders, but I’m familiar with this. Behind her eyelids she’s either falling or running into something. Free fall or, worse still, a collision. The same thing happens to me. And my husband. Right before you enter a deep sleep, boom, you shudder because you’re having a scary dream. I need to ask Agnetha about it—what it means and why our brains do that to us. I absolutely have to ask her that before I die.
Liza is finally asleep. I can go. I’m free, free from childcare. My shoulders start to relax. I feel like a weight has been lifted from my shoulders. Kids look their cutest when they’re asleep, so innocent and smooth, like newborns. Why is it that people always hope to have kids and then, when you have them, you’re happy when they’re asleep or somewhere else? And this thought makes you feel guilty every time it pops into your head. Sometimes I use the opportunity to work on my stomach muscles—lying silently with my legs stretched out, I raise myself without using my upper body. I use nothing but my stomach muscles and I raise myself slowly, without lurching. If I’m sitting down, I cross my legs Indian-style and stand up directly from that position. Then creep out. Extra careful on the wood floor by her door—it creaks if you step on one of the planks. I let out a deep breath outside and then dash up the stairs.
Georg notices the tension in my face. “What’s up?”
The same question every night after I’ve put her to bed. “I can’t stand it when she won’t let me go. It’s a nice feeling to be needed, but there’s something awful about it, too. You know how it is.”
“Maaaaaamaaaaa!”
Fuck. She’s awake again. I run back down the stairs and snap at her. “What is it?”
Naturally I think she’s going to complain that I left too soon, that she hadn’t really fallen asleep. She often claims she hadn’t completely fallen asleep, despite the fact that I
