The Antarctica of Love, page 2
“Come on,” he said.
* * *
And even if time hadn’t run out and even if there had been someone to call, Raksha or Shane or an angel, I still wouldn’t have had anything to say. For what could I have said now that I hadn’t managed to say before? Perhaps the reason I was already at the end, too soon, far too soon, on this muddy road at the edge of an unknown forest, was because I had no words for who I was and what I had come from. Inside me was voiceless silence, above me only a bare, defenceless sky and beneath me the earth’s unrelenting gravity, pulling me down.
“Mamma, Mamma, I don’t know where I am.”
“Is that you?”
“Yes, I think it’s me.”
“Whereabouts are you?”
“In the forest.”
“You have to tell me where you are so I can help you.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know where I am, I told you.”
“What can you see around you?”
“Rain and huge black trees. Ancient trees. A lake a bit further away. And birds screeching. No signs…”
“You mustn’t hang up now.”
“I only wanted to hear your voice. That was all I wanted.”
A few weeks later they found me. It was a woman out with her dog at daybreak. On the shore below Haga Palace there was a white suitcase containing parts of me. Later that summer they found another suitcase by a cliff at Hägersten right beside the motorway. They transferred the contents to a room of death, and this was all there was left of me. A pelvis with genitals and uterus cut out. Two arms, a femur, a calf and two breasts, but no head. And since the head was missing, cause of death could not be ascertained; in other words, they couldn’t rule out the possibility that, like Snow White, I had been poisoned by an apple or had choked on my own collar.
* * *
Nobody missed me at first. Valle and Solveig were too young and too far away, placed somewhere along the length of Sweden. Shane had disappeared and that I didn’t turn up at the local authority office when I should have done was nothing unusual. That was how it used to be. I came and went, and sometimes I went to ground and would be gone for months. For a long time, Ivan thought that was it, I was somewhere under the city, in the metro system or the culverts beneath one of the big mental hospitals. Ivan always had his theories and at the end of that first summer he began to search for me. He never believed it was me in those suitcases.
* * *
I could have told the police right from the start how it would end. I could have said straightaway that there was no point in bringing anyone in for questioning, the perpetrator would deny everything, that is what they do. I could have told them he would say that he had never met me, that he had never been to the desolate street that runs like a gaping wound over the Brunkeberg ridge. The guilty deny death with such force they end up believing themselves. And my life is no longer a legal concern; the statute of limitation expired ages ago. What sort of concern am I then? No concern whatsoever, presumably. I died, that was all.
We were at the edge of a lake in a primordial forest somewhere beyond the city. I had gone with him in the way I always went with people. Because I needed the money, because I had a mission that went on day and night and there was nothing outside that mission. “To be free,” as Nanna would say. “To punish myself,” as people who thought they knew a thing or two would say. What should I be punished for? They never said. I had followed him like a dog.
* * *
In some other time, something about him might have caused me to back off when we were on Herkulesgatan, to shut the car door and walk away. In some other time, I might have said to Nanna and the rest of them that they should beware of him, but that time was as distant as Nanna was now. Of course, you learn to pick up the signs on the street, it is pure instinct, but in the end you can’t even bother about signals any more. Signs such as the sky suddenly opening over the Brunkeberg ridge, letting unbridled light flood in, violet-yellow and ominous. Or the harsh strident squawks of the white bird screeching from the roof of the bank headquarters. Or the cloven-hoofed beat of the music streaming out of the car radio. He said it was Mozart, but it sounded like death. The silence hung over him like a cold smoke, the Arctic sea smoke that rises out of the water at dawn, and now I know the same silence enshrouds a grave.
I had arranged to meet him on Herkulesgatan. I was still wearing the wristband and joggers they had given me in the hospital and I had on my fox-fur boa and a pair of red shoes. I was clearly of this world, but it felt as though I was dead. I had brushed with death so many times, I had stopped being afraid and for some reason I had been flung back into the world of the living once again. He stepped out of the shadows.
“Come on,” he said.
* * *
We drove out of the city. When I turned and looked out of the back window, the road we left behind us was a sinking nothingness of mire and decay and the buildings were toppling into the abyss.
The forest we were in was inundated with brown water; I remember thinking the lake must have burst its banks because all around was the sound of running water. No, it wasn’t nature weeping. Not even I was weeping. And the ground had a strange undertow, as if invisible hands were snatching at me from the underworld and globs of dank saliva dripped out of his mouth onto my face.
* * *
The mellow sunshine that had lingered in the air made every movement restrained and slow, almost suspended.
“I only want to be close to you,” he whispered, and I laughed, because it was so unexpected, such a childish thing to say, almost comical, and I wasn’t afraid anymore and all the pain from the hurt before was gone now. I laughed, and I heard the hard, metallic noise I made, and I wanted to say something, but when I tried, earth dribbled out of my mouth, a turbid, greyish fluid, a mixture of sludge and slime and decaying leaves. And there was no sound, no words, just those lumps of graveyard soil and something white, a grainy, rancid liquid with the stench of truffle. He gave my head a quick, hard twist and from the side a sliver of sky reflected in my eyes. Sky, against my will. But what was my will, in truth? I had wanted to be free, light as a gossamer, but it didn’t work. I had one hand reaching for the firmament and one hand scrabbling in the mud. And in the heavens, night was falling now. Pink clouds, slightly frayed and fuzzy, clung to planet earth’s great membrane. How could there be such beauty in heaven and such horror on earth? Where do you run to when you have nowhere to go?
* * *
“I only want to be close to you,” he whispered, over and over. It sounded like a sermon and I laughed again, louder this time, and I don’t think he liked people laughing, especially not girls, because then darkness came, as if someone had thrown a blanket over the sun, a dreadful howling blackness, and I was falling through an immense void. In the passage of an instant and a thousand years. I prayed for an angel to come, but there was no angel. I hoped this wasn’t the end, but it was.
One day nothing about my story will matter anymore, not even to me. One day all of us will be part of the thin black layer of earth that covers this planet, amongst all those who died in bygone times. The human body is so easily damaged, its substance mere fluids and chemical compounds. Our bodies give us a place in time, and time is a form for evil, a vessel for dark encounters. Though sometimes I think brightness is worse; there were instants entirely without shadow and yet Shane and I couldn’t sustain them. Like the moment Valle soars into the sky in his baby swing and Shane and I watch him whizzing away and hurtling back towards us. And now I have so much time, I see that all along he looks at me with eyes full of openness and trust, and those eyes still have faith in me.
* * *
Raksha’s birthday came and went in June, soon after I turned twenty-four. Even though I didn’t keep in touch at any other time, I always rang Raksha on her birthday, so she began to count the days. Two days passed, then ten, and suddenly it was three weeks. It was a time when nights were never more than twilight, when daylight lingered all night long, summer nights when dawn was just a breath on the horizon, a softly glimmering veil. Did Raksha realise I was dead, that I was no longer anywhere in this world? Was she aware that what had once been part of her was swimming in liquefied remains? Did she feel relief when they discovered the suitcases, a kind of wild release, something forbidden that went through her head like a flake of ash from a night-time fire? At last it’s over, there’s nothing left to grieve. Not Eskil, not her.
When I was seven I was given a baby brother. It was the best thing I ever had from Raksha and Ivan. We used to keep him in a laundry basket and transfer him from room to room, like a tiny candle that we had to keep alight. But a few days before my twelfth birthday he drowned in the river.
* * *
Raksha and I are in the same situation. We should have every opportunity to understand one another, and yet we never do. Then again, perhaps we did understand one another, but we didn’t like what we understood. If I turned up at her house now, she might ask, like she used to ask, “Surely you’ve missed me a teeny bit, my silly little girl?” And she would be right, because I always longed to be with Raksha, even though I was hurt by her every time I came close. Later she would whisper, in her stifled, guilty little voice:
“You know I’m always so clumsy. I lose everything and miss what’s important.”
“Yes, I know.”
“I even lost my beautiful babies.”
“That makes two of us, Raksha,” I could say at that point, since it was true, even if nobody cared about the truth anymore; but there is a certain kind of misery you cannot share, at least not with the one who bore you.
It is an archaic landscape swept by cold, harsh winds; it looks modern but it is ancient. A cluster of islands surrounded by motionless seawater beneath a naked sky. A patchwork of faded facades in yellow and pink with modern buildings made of black steel and glass. Bank headquarters, shopping malls and multi-storey car parks have a futuristic look, but age-old thoughts fill people’s minds, ponderous, inalterable; there are victims, there are perpetrators, there are witnesses, and they all peer down at the ground. The well-heeled live in the centre, as they always have. And the lifeblood of this city circulates along Herkulesgatan and from there to the banks, the money moves in and out of the state, and the architecture framing all of this is raw and cold. Some are doomed to failure, others destined to advance, a certain few will rise above the rest; and you can see the early signs, children defined from the start. A secret watermark or a caste mark glowing under the skin on a child’s brow. And in this city there is also someone who has been stalking me for quite some time, or chasing someone like me, a girl who no longer cares what happens to her. Let us call him the huntsman.
* * *
Imagine this scenario, and a city on the go, cars and people and the pulse of the future beating in everything; the future is all around us for now, sweeping like a mighty motorway or river through the landscape. We believe it will take us with it, but to think about the future is to yearn for death, and there will always be someone left behind on the riverbank, abandoned in the mud and mire. Now imagine a chequered public square in the middle of the city and a few metres from this chessboard I stand and wait.
We had met a few days earlier, on one of the many evenings I spent on Herkulesgatan, and he had said:
“I’m going to show you something. I think you’ll like it.”
There were very few things I liked in the world and I found it hard to imagine that this would be one of them, but I didn’t say it.
“What if I don’t want anything anymore?” I said.
“Well, you’ll get it anyway. Sometimes you get things you never knew you wanted.”
* * *
The light emitted from the streetlamp above was like electric rain, static and grey. Streetlamps had been installed here a while ago, to get rid of the dealers; I kicked the lampposts every time I walked past them and sometimes they went out and night would descend again over the street and I could move about without feeling pursued by the glare. He had been fingering something in his coat pocket, a small silver packet that he produced. It was straight morphine, he said, and it was absorbed by the heart. A pure sensation of fire and gemstone; and I had always thought that drugs were like being on fire without burning yourself, falling without hurting yourself. In the end, of course, you did hurt yourself, sooner or later you fell through the world before people’s eyes, but the sensation is what I am trying to describe. And so it was. We fell together, Shane and I. The tragedy of falling is that it takes such a bloody long time, because you can’t help resisting, even though you long for it to end. I really wanted something to defeat me, but it didn’t, the will to live kept on ticking inside me like a terrible eternity clock. That is how you end up waiting for a hunter.
“I think I know what you want,” he had said. “I think I can give it to you.”
He was talking about death, but I didn’t realise at the time, I thought we were talking about something else; I was thinking about my mission, unable to think beyond that. It is liberating to have a purpose, the only thing to fill your being, a form to inhabit, like a prayer. He was thinking about death. A secret desire forcing through him like a surge of water.
“OK,” I said.
Because the hunger tore through my blood vessels. A storm raging within me, drowning out everything else. I only hoped he wasn’t one who liked to talk. It was always the same story anyway, and I didn’t want any more stories, I wanted reality to be an open, bleeding wound. That was why I had loved Shane; he never lied to me.
* * *
There he sat in his car with the passenger door open, waiting for me, without saying anything, not even looking at me. As if we already knew one another, as if we had an agreement. He didn’t seem particularly eager; he was neither angry nor drunk. He wasn’t dark either, and by that I mean the kind of darkness that encases certain people. He sat still as a statue behind the wheel and if I hadn’t seen his lips move I would have thought the voice came from inside me.
“Are you coming then?”
* * *
“How did you find me?” I asked Shane once, right at the beginning.
“I was always looking for you,” he said. “I just didn’t believe you existed until I found you.”
I didn’t believe it either, that the person I became with him existed. The girl who was afraid of nothing, whose laugh made people turn in the street. It was as though life finally began when I met Shane.
* * *
Before we had Valle, I thought that if I was still going to perish, I wanted it to be with Shane; I believed that if I died it wouldn’t matter, because I would die with him. I had pictured our dead bodies so many times, it was as real as if it had already happened; we were lying side by side on the floor in an empty apartment, lips black, eyes open. That, for me, was death, and the image no longer scared me. I never stopped to think we might not be together when death came.
The only thing that moved inside the car was a single black-and-white photograph vibrating in the draught from the blower on the dashboard. The photo was of an old woman whose eyes were so pale it looked as though the iris and pupil had burned out. It was hot and stuffy in the car and the seats were scorching against my thighs from the sun; there was the smell of Little Trees air freshener and sheet metal. When death comes, it comes quietly. No tattooed lilies, no Devil’s footprints. You climb into a car as you have done a thousand times before, with no thought for the past or the future, no notion that fate has prepared something special for you. And yet you know. When you sift through your memories afterwards, you understand it all, you see everything as if through cold, clear water. You see his entire soul, the solitary beast of prey resting beneath the wavering sun before it springs. You see the gods hold their breath.
“Are you coming then?”
* * *
It was just like the deadly disease that would take all my friends later on. We saw it make a grab for us like the hand of darkness on Herkulesgatan, but we all thought we could deal with it. No prayers could relieve that sickness; it interfered with love at the very moment two bodies became one pulsing eye. But by the time all that happened, I was long gone.
* * *
Nanna and I used to sit on the bridge over Kungsgatan and watch the cars speeding past below us. We always sat up high and looked down on the streets and it gave us a sense of eternity, at least for me. Up there we were untouchable, no-one could get at us while we sat like old thieves or angels watching over people’s lives below us. We could face anything as long as we were able to sit there together raised aloft above everything else. We laughed at the old men and the young boys, we laughed at the people who were agitated, or sentimental, or furious, we laughed at the people shouting for their mother or for God as they passed.
“Working the streets is like being in a bloody church service,” Nanna said.
Her words always set us free, like her high, brittle laughter.
I think I should say a few words about my childhood, but it feels so remote, as if it happened to someone else, and I don’t know which parts of it I ought to include. A lot of what happened much later seems more relevant, such as becoming a mother myself, or dying. First of all, you are condemned to being a child, like being in prison, and then one day you come out and find you are responsible for your own life. What difference do the experiences you have had actually make? I think of Raksha’s silky hands, the freckles that looked as though they were sprinkled over her skin, and her face as she lay sunbathing, half asleep, by the riverbank. I remember how the whole of her was soft as sand, the smell of her hair, the sound of her voice.
