Invisible Blood, page 25
“What sort of impact did this have on Marta?”
“She inherited all those seeds sown by her grandmother. She kept on deliberately destabilising herself.”
“But you were telling me earlier that her instability was a more recent factor and that she had previously displayed no signs of it?”
“That’s correct. What was subconsciously happening inside her was not visible to her or anyone in her close circle of acquaintances. Tomas didn’t see it coming. Nor Linn.”
“What about you, Anna?”
She swept the flat of her hand across the tabletop, as if wiping off dust.
“Neither did I. I too didn’t catch the signs that might have set off an alarm. You know, it’s a bit like when you have debilitating migraines and the doctor tells you that your headaches are due to stress; he advises you to take up sport, or meditation, and six months later they discover you have a brain tumour the size of a peach. Initially, I thought her tired, then later tense and worried. It’s when she began to show signs of depression that I realised something was radically wrong. Something was off. But it was already too late.”
“Why?”
Anna moved her head from side to side to blow aside the strands obscuring her eyes.
“Because she was already pregnant. Four months in.”
She pulled on the flap of her jacket, which was bunching up around her waist.
“She hadn’t realised she was. Her periods had always been irregular and no specific symptoms had manifested themselves.”
“You said it was too late? I don’t understand why you say that.”
Anna appeared surprised.
“Because it’s too late to have an abortion when you’re four months down the line.”
“So it was her state of pregnancy that was causing her general distress?”
“Yes, her pregnancy reopened all the family scars inhabiting her. She had no wish to be colonised by something that was going to consume her from the inside. She came to that understanding when she learned she was pregnant; she had never thought that carrying a child would generate such feelings, or she would have avoided falling pregnant.”
“How did she convey this to you?”
“I’m the one who brought it up. I had…”
Anna bit her upper lip.
“It was the way she was assuming her pregnancy. She felt she was harbouring a parasite eating her out from the inside, like a tumour.”
“Did she use those specific words? Parasite, tumour?”
Anna nodded in agreement, her eyes fixed on her hands that lay across her thighs.
“She felt a foreign body had taken control of hers. She felt deformed. She even confessed to me that she had looked up how to generate an abortion on the Internet.”
“What was your answer to her?”
“I wanted to warn Linn and Tomas, but she begged me to keep silent, that it would alarm them unnecessarily. She assured me that her dark thoughts were merely due to hormonal imbalance, and that given time matters would revert to normal.”
“What did you do?”
“What I shouldn’t have done: believe her. One week later, she cut her stomach open in her bathroom.”
The memory of Marta spread out in the slimy bath water returned, clear as daylight: every single detail in terrible focus. Until now, her brain had occluded the more painful details, polished the uglier ones away, those that gnawed at her soul.
Anna’s eyes were full of horror.
“Anna, are you OK? What’s the matter?”
She opened her mouth wide, searching for words appropriate to describe what she had seen, but it all died in her throat.
“Anna?”
She closed her eyes, tightening her eyelids, then opened them again. She seized the water bottle and drank it dry. She only stopped when the plastic neck crinkled between her lips under the pressure of her suction.
“Anna?”
“I’m fine… I’m fine…” she reassured him breathlessly, setting the bottle down. “I’m sorry, Inspector.”
“What happened?”
“I think I… I’d hidden away some of the memories of the day I discovered Marta. There were three razor blades on the floor by the bathtub. In a pool of blood…”
She swept the tears from her cheek.
“I thought I… I could picture the scene again and I was almost certain the bath water was almost opaque and that I couldn’t see Marta’s body inside it. But… That wasn’t the case, Inspector.”
A sob took shape in her throat. She swallowed hard to chase it away.
“It’s not the case! The bath water was not cloudy at all: I could see Marta’s body, Inspector! Her mutilated stomach! She’d slashed away, all the way to her sex! Her round stomach… Her round stomach…”
She leaned her elbows on the table and vigorously massaged her temples.
“How could I have forgotten that, Inspector?”
She looked up at him, imploringly.
“It’s a frequent mechanism of self-protection, Anna: your brain blanked it out, as you were unable to cope with the emotional violence of the situation. It was protecting you, filing those terrible images out of sight, until you’d reached the stage when you could finally live with their brutality and face the trauma. It’s not your fault, Anna.”
“It’s not my fault…”
“No, it’s not your fault. Anyone would have reacted the same as you did.”
“Anyone, I know. But the two of us were so close.”
In turn he settled his elbows on the table.
“Anna, could you tell me a little about your relationship with Marta?”
Anna immediately frowned.
“My relationship with Marta?”
“Yes, your relationship. You said you were very close.”
“We were.”
“How long had you known each other?”
Anna had a tired smile.
“Forever. That’s the way it felt to us, at any rate.”
“You didn’t have a specific reason to visit Marta that morning, did you? She wasn’t expecting you, but nonetheless you woke up with an urgent compulsion to go and see her.”
“Indeed.”
“How can you explain that?”
“The bond between us was very powerful.”
“So it seems. You told me earlier that you woke up with such a strong inner feeling circling your thoughts. An uncontrollable impulse, a sense of urgency, so acute that—I quote you—you felt you had ‘written it down in capital letters in a notebook’. You desperately had to see her. How can you explain that feeling to me, Anna? That imperious need to go visit Marta?”
Anna shook her head from side to side, her lips puckering.
“I don’t know.”
“Anna, earlier you were telling me about Linn and the problems she had experienced about her pregnancy and her impending motherhood.”
“Yes.”
“Maybe I’m wrong, but I get the feeling you were resentful of her, as if you thought that she wasn’t supporting her daughter as a mother properly should.”
Linn’s features stood invisibly between them, her wrinkled cheeks, the permanent state of anxiety that lent a form of sadness to her eyes, the way she had of clenching her lips to express her disagreement, putting forward her own version of events, always bathed in pessimism; her hand holding on to Marta’s shoulder in an attempt to comfort her but only serving to reinforce her disapproval, tormenting her even further.
“You’re not wrong, Inspector.”
Anna looked him straight in the eyes.
His head shifted to the side, as if in readiness to acknowledge what she was about to say, or maybe avoid it.
“She’s the one who dug her grandson’s grave.”
His right arm stretched towards the tabletop, palm set upwards, like an invitation. Like a supplicant’s hand, Anna thought. She imagined it full of water, like a cup, her lips resting across the callous flesh, slowly sucking up the liquid. The freshness of the water reviving her face all the way from her throat to her ears and causing her to smile.
She set her own hand down in the hollow of his. He closed his fingers, catching her in his grip. This was no sexual moistness, no lubricious caress. Just a reassuring form of contact, as if this hand embodied the essence of succour of a parent.
“Anna, earlier you referred to Linn’s children; you said ‘her children’.”
“Yes.”
“Her children. Plural.”
A tremor ran across Anna’s face.
“I know, yes, I know. It’s just that it’s so difficult to talk of the others.”
“The others.”
“The others, yes. I was one of them, I know.”
“Yes, Anna. Linn is your mother, you too.”
“Yes.”
Linn had cast a seed of doubt above Marta’s shoulders, as she had done to herself; she had maintained that heavy brass blanket above their heads until both had been crushed by it. Anna had attempted to set aside her mother’s toxicity. That acid bath which gnawed away at all feelings and joy. She pretended to be a mother, but she clearly wasn’t. Giving birth doesn’t necessarily make you a mother. And neither does motherhood come into life with the child: it grows alongside it. It’s a learning curve; the art of abnegation, or rather the capacity to be able to conquer your fears, your anxieties and your doubts so they are not passed on to the child; the talent to protect them without suffocating them, to love with no holding back.
“And Marta?”
“Marta is my sister. My twin sister.”
“Yes, she is, Anna. Marta is your sister.”
“Marta is my other half.”
They had just celebrated Linn’s birthday. That particular year, Anna and her sister had prepared things in a rush; between the end of year exams and organising the celebrations for the Studenten, they just about had time enough to devote to their mother. Throughout the meal, Linn’s face had been drawn, tentatively blowing on the candles with pursed lips, barely eating any of the cake. She’d begun to open her first present when she interrupted herself. She’d crossed her arms with slow deliberation, gazing firmly at each of her daughters in turn, and then had told them the story of her own hellish pregnancy. How distressed she had been to become a mother. Her wish to have an abortion, to rid herself of the twins. And then she continued to unwrap her presents. Mother Linn. Linn.
“Marta is my sister, yes.”
“That’s why the pain she endured became yours.”
Anna lowered her head towards the desk, pressing her cheek against the lukewarm surface.
“What about the baby, Anna? Could we talk about the baby?”
“Marta’s baby. He was inside her tummy when she lacerated herself with the razor blades. Three blades.”
“Did the child have a name?”
Anna freed her hand and straightened up.
“Could one even call it a ‘child’ at that stage?”
“Some babies are born at only seven months, Anna.”
“No, he had no name.”
No name. No room. This ‘child’ who only existed so far when it moved inside its mother’s womb. Marta was submerged in her anxieties. Tomas was insistent they prepare for the baby’s coming. As for Anna, she was trying to lighten her sister’s mood, bringing her home decoration magazines and humorous books on the subject of pregnancy, but Marta kept on saying they still had enough time, that it was tempting fate to organise everything in advance. If anything did go wrong, the ensuing fall would just prove more painful. So Tomas and her had retreated back. After all, she was the one who was carrying this ‘child’.
“So, what was inscribed on the gravestone then, Anna?”
Her mouth went dry.
“I don’t know. It’s Tomas who dealt with it.”
Tomas had selected the tiny coffin, the gravestone, the lines from the Bible the pastor had read out. She’d never thought to ask what he had had carved into the stone. She had not found herself capable of taking her eyes away from the coffin, thinking how the baby had just been moved from one form of container to another, from the womb to this box. From one dark coffin to another.
“What would you have called it, Anna?”
“Marta and I had prepared a list of names. Or rather I’d made a list for her.”
“What was your favourite? And hers?”
“Oscar. We both liked Oscar.”
“Do you think that’s what Tomas had carved on the gravestone? Oscar Hellenström?”
“Oscar Ljung.”
“Ljung?”
“That was Tomas’s family name.”
Her head slumped over her shoulders.
“Anna?”
“I was thinking of the burial. The baby’s burial, Inspector.”
He leaned towards her, his hand reaching the tabletop.
“Do you want to talk to me about it, Anna?” he asked her, looking straight into her eyes, trying to connect.
She could recall the smell of the damp earth that lingered in the air, similar to the smell emanating from fallen tree branches and bark debris after a storm; the heavy barrier of clouds suspended above their heads; the smoothness of silk on skin; the hands intermittently gripping her naked shoulders; the pain chewing through her stomach; the unpleasant tone of the pastor’s voice; her mother’s smothered sobbing.
“All four of us were there.”
“All four?”
“Yes, that’s what I just said, Inspector, all four. Tomas, Linn, Marta and me.”
“Marta too?”
“Yes, Ma—”
Anna jumped up, throwing the chair back. With a trembling hand, she pulled her skirt up all the way to her navel. Scars streaked across her stomach down to her pubis. Pink and blistered, they covered the whole surface of her abdomen. Even her navel seemed stretched into an abominable smile.
She emitted an animal shriek. It died inside her throat and tears took over. Shaking her like an earthquake, turning her into a bush caught in a violent storm. She swung from front to back, her dishevelled skirt still gripped by her hand.
“It will be OK, Anna. It will be OK.”
He stood right by her. She hadn’t noticed he had moved alongside her. She buried her face in his chest and kept on crying. One of his hands settled on her shoulder blade while the other stroked the top of her head. He waited for the flow of tears to come to an end and her breath to settle down before assisting her back onto the chair.
She sat, wiped away the tears and snot running across her face, and looked over to him, lost.
“I don’t understand. I don’t understand. Is it me, Inspector?”
He moved his chair to face her again and sat himself down.
“Your name is Anna Hellenström. You’re thirty-two. You’re an accountant. You live with Tomas Ljung. You’ve known him for a long time, since…”
“Since high school,” she continued, her voice like a rasp.
He looked at her sympathetically.
“Exactly, Anna. Do you remember your address?”
“Bokvägen 37, in Kållered.”
“Perfect.”
“My mother’s name is Linn Hellenström. My sister is Marta Hellenström. She is my twin sister. They also live in Kållered.”
“That’s it,” he answered, smiling. “That’s very good, Anna.”
Anna’s eyes moved swiftly from left to right as if she was following a tennis match.
“Shall we have a rest?”
“No, no, I want to continue. I’m fine. I can see it all now. I wish to continue.”
She sighed heavily and then spoke again.
“That morning, I woke up after Tomas had left for work. I had my only coffee for the day while listening to the news on the radio. I remember hearing a mother speaking about the death of her two-year-old son. The terrible emptiness it left behind. I envied her that sense of emptiness. The baby wasn’t born but was already taking over so much space in my life. Too much space. When I rose to clean up the kitchen table, the baby moved. He was wedged against one of my ribs and my breath was briefly obstructed. It felt like having a snake in my stomach. A snake who was kicking against me in an attempt to burst out. And, as if he could read my thoughts, he began moving even faster. Trying to make me understand my own body no longer belonged fully to me: he inhabited it and was in charge. I was no longer the captain of my own ship. He would decide what I was allowed to eat, how long I would sleep, how much strength I was allowed and how heavy my breasts would feel. He stretched the skin of my stomach like a drum and turned all attempts to make love into a laborious and insipid parody. He was preventing me from being a woman and turning me into a mother.”
Pregnancy… baby… fish… toxic…
Anna’s lips twisted in a show of disdain.
“I decided I should take a warm bath to sooth the pain and calm down. I had no alternative but to accept the child’s reality; I had become aware of it too late to arrange a termination. I had to live with it. With him. Or her. I walked over to the bathroom next to the spare room as our bedroom only had a shower stall. I was wearing my nightshirt with the thin straps; it was white with pink dots, and four buttons down my chest and a silk bow. One of those awful garments I’d had to purchase to accommodate my growing stomach and my misshapen breasts.”
She looked up to the ceiling as if profoundly exasperated by this forced dereliction of her fashion sense.
“I ran the bath. Or, more precisely, I ran our bath. When I lay down in the bathtub, I reflected on how much the baby was already interfering with my lifestyle, my tastes, my desires. I hate taking baths. Which is why there was no bathtub in our own bathroom. It’s a waste of time. It’s only Tomas who uses the bathtub when he has to shave his chest or pubes, because it annoys me intensely to find hair in the shower stall. So, anyway, I settled inside the damn bathtub. With my enormous breasts and stomach emerging provocatively from the water. It began to move inside me, forcing an elbow or a knee from inside against the skin just above my navel, creating yet another deformity. It had to stop. That’s what I told myself as I gazed at my absurdly shaped belly. I no longer wanted a parasite to harbour inside me. I could no longer stand this tumour eating me out from the inside. After all, it was my body. My body.”
