Good Night, My Darling Read online

  They didn’t have any children, and eventually they stopped having sex as well.

  “We just have a different kind of relationship,” he told himself, convincing himself that she agreed.

  She didn’t. One Saturday evening, four years after their marriage, she told him that she wanted a divorce.

  “I’ve met someone else,” she said, nervously pulling at her earlobe, shying away a bit, as if waiting for a blow.

  He was completely calm.

  “Bernt and I fit together in a different way than you and I did. Just to be honest, you and I have never really had all that much in common, other than literature. And you can’t live from literature alone.”

  A feeling of sorrow entered him, light and fluttering, came and went.

  She embraced him, her little frozen hand on his neck. He swallowed, and swallowed again.

  “You’re fine,” she whispered. “There’s nothing wrong with you, nothing like that… but we never see each other and Bernt and I, we…”

  Hans Peter nodded.

  “Forgive me. Say that you forgive me.”

  She was crying now, the tears traced their way down her cheeks, hung on her chin, fell and were soaked up by her sweater; her nose was red and shiny.

  “There’s nothing to forgive,” he said, as if his mouth were full of oatmeal.

  She sniffed.

  “So you’re not angry with me?”

  “More like disappointed, that it didn’t work out.”

  “Maybe we needed a little more… fire.”

  “Yes, perhaps we did.”

  The next day she moved out of the apartment. She only took essentials with her, and moved in with Bernt. Later that week she returned with a moving truck which she had rented from a garage. That surprised him. She never did like driving.

  He helped her carry out her things. He kept most of the furniture and the kitchen utensils. Bernt already had a completely furnished apartment in a building on Blomsterkungsvägen.

  “Can I offer you a cup of coffee or something,” he asked when they were done.

  He didn’t want to ask; he really wanted her to go as soon as possible so he could be alone. He didn’t understand why he asked, the words just fell from his mouth.

  She hesitated a moment, then agreed.

  They sat together on the sofa, but when she wanted to lay her arm on his shoulder, he steeled himself against her.

  She swallowed.

  “So you’re really pissed off at me, aren’t you?”

  That was the first time he heard her use bad language. That surprised him so much that he burst out laughing.

  Many years later, he ran into them at Åkermyntan. They were weighed down by grocery bags, and they had children, though he forgot their names right away.

  Her new husband was tall and strong, with well-trained abs. He was wearing a jogging suit.

  Stupid jock, he thought, but without any real aggression.

  Liv had cut her hair. It was curly now.

  “Come over for a drink sometime,” she said, and her husband nodded.

  “Sure, do that. We live in Baklura, you just take bus 119.”

  “OK,” he said without much enthusiasm.

  Liv touched his sleeve.

  “I wish that we wouldn’t lose each other totally,” she said.

  “No,” he answered. “We won’t.”

  Sometimes his mother reproached him, although indirectly. She wanted grandchildren, which she never said directly, but she would do things like pointing at a picture of a child in the newspaper or make some kind of sorrowful comment. Or she would turn the television on right when the children’s programming was starting.

  This drove him crazy, but he never let on.

  He would go out with various women. Sometimes he brought them home and introduced them to his parents, mostly to give his mother a bit of hope.

  He knew his parents were disappointed in him. No real job, no family.

  You really couldn’t blame them.

  Everything would have been different if that accident with Margareta hadn’t happened. He would not have lost his own bearings.

  On Christmas Day it began to rain, and it kept raining all week. His mother did her best to pamper him. She prepared breakfast trays, and when he lay in bed waking up, he heard her careful knock on the door.

  “My big boy,” she murmured, as she placed the breakfast tray on the bedside table.

  Then he’d want to hug her and cry, but that gave him a bad taste in his mouth, so he lay still under the blanket, not moving.

  He stayed until the day before New Year’s Eve. Then he couldn’t take it any longer: their breathing, their chewing, the sound of the TV at the highest possible volume. They were both over seventy. One of them would be dead soon and he didn’t know which one of them would have the hardest time being alone.

  They had known each other since they were in their twenties.

  He longed for his own cool apartment, where he could uncork a bottle of wine, solve the crossword puzzle, and listen to his own choice of music, Kraus and Frank Sinatra.

  He told his mother that he was invited to a New Year’s Eve party.

  He barely made it in the door when the phone rang. One of his women friends.

  Dammit, he thought. I can’t take more of this.

  “How’s it going?” she said girlishly.

  “Fine. I just got home.”

  “Were you with Kjell and Birgit?”

  She had only met them once and already acted as if they were close.

  “Yeah.”

  “I thought so. I’ve been trying to reach you.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Hans Peter? Can I come over tomorrow evening? Can we celebrate New Year’s Eve together?”

  He thought about telling her that he had to work at the hotel, but couldn’t bring himself to do it.

  She came over, and she had taken an effort with her clothes and make-up. He hadn’t remembered that she was so cute. He understood that she had made an effort, just for him, and it made him feel guilty.

  They had met at a mutual friend’s place, and had gone out for a while since then. Sporadically. Nothing steady. But she had been one of the women he had taken to meet his folks in Stuvsta.

  “You don’t think that I am being too eager, do you?” she asked directly. “A woman is not supposed to take the initiative. Or so they say.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Well, I’m here now.”

  She had two grocery bags full of food, wine, and champagne. OK, he thought, this is how she wants it.

  There was something about her that made him excited, more than he felt with anyone else. Something in her way of putting her head to one side and looking a little bit guilty.

  He was frightened of his own strength.

  Afterwards, she got right out of bed.

  He knew that she didn’t like it, that he had come too soon. He wanted to explain, but couldn’t find the words. We’ll just do it again, he thought. Later.

  They set the table together, and she didn’t say much, but after she drank half a glass of wine, she began to cry.

  “Sweetie, what is it?” he asked.

  She didn’t answer and began to cry harder.

  He threw his fork on the table.

  “I’m a real asshole!” he exclaimed.

  She turned to the side and didn’t look at him.

  “Little sweetie,” he said. “Why did you want to come here, anyway?”

  “I like you. I was longing for you the whole damn Christmas holidays.”

  He got up and walked around the table, took her into his arms, lifted her out of her chair.

  “Should we just finish the food, then?”

  She took out a tissue and nodded.

  After dinner, she fell asleep in the sofa, leaning on his arm. She breathed heavily and noisily. He was uncomfortable, but didn’t want to move, afraid that she would wake up and demand more from him.


  A feeling of desolation crept over him.

  Chapter THREE

  Nathan had been wearing the green fatigues which were too tight for the jungle. He didn’t know that when he bought them; he just thought that they were practical and cheap. “Economical,” he said. Justine remembered his exact word.

  No one saw him go to be by himself for a few moments. No one but Justine.

  He probably screamed, more from surprise than anything else, although it probably stung a little. He tumbled outward immediately. The rapids and the waterfall drowned every sound, and they were so powerful that whatever became caught in them would be dashed to pieces.

  Sometimes she thought she heard that scream. She was home now, at home in her house, but even so… And when she heard that scream, she also saw the body, how it turned once while falling. She saw his arms and his hands that she had loved.

  Her house was narrow and tall in an almost Dutch kind of way. Originally it had been built with just two stories, but to get more room, her Pappa had had someone remodel the attic. But they were hardly ever there. In the summer it was too hot, and in the winter too cold.

  Her father had never been an entirely practical person. He had hired carpenters, young men with suspenders. They had rushed up and down the stairs and formed their lips in silent suggestions whenever she came out in her nightgown. She had been confined to her bed. She lay in bed and listened to their steps and their hammering, and slowly she began to realize that she wasn’t a little girl any longer.

  The oil heater was down in the basement. The driver of the oil tanker used to mutter about how difficult it was to reach it properly when it was time to refill it with oil, as the house was down so close to the beach that it was impossible to get the hoses stretched that far. Pappa used to bribe him with a bottle of whiskey, and this was something that Justine continued to do, once she was alone. Naturally, it was no longer the same driver. This one was bony and ill-tempered, and he spoke a dialect that made it almost impossible for her to understand his words. She felt herself shrink when she heard the sound of the oil truck. For a time, she thought about discontinuing oil delivery, but she didn’t know any other way to warm the house. There was a fireplace on the second floor, but it wasn’t big enough to heat the entire house. The raw chill of the lake seeped straight into the walls and floors.

  In any case, she only had to deal with the trucker once a year. She always placed the whiskey bottle near the basement window, tied with a paper bow.

  “Thanks for bringing the oil,” she would write on a slip of paper that she placed under the bottle. The piece of paper would still be there afterwards, the ink smeared.

  The basement also held a large old-fashioned washing tub, which Flora had insisted on using. Twice a month Flora did laundry down there, and on those days both Justine and her father would feel ill at ease. She made herself look really ugly on those days, Flora, as if she enjoyed changing herself into a repulsive washerwoman. She knotted a handkerchief around her hair and wore her smelly patterned skirt which had missing buttons. It was a kind of reverse Cinderella transformation, and her fingers left stinging damp marks on Justine’s cheeks.

  The hall was minimal, but they still had to store their outerwear there. Everywhere in the house there was a shortage of wardrobes. Once she became an adult, she had sometimes wondered why her pappa, with his wealth, had decided to continue living in that small house, even if it was adjacent to Lake Mälar. Something to do with her mother, something nostalgic.

  Justine had stowed Flora’s capes and blue fox fur, packed them away in plastic garbage bags. Pappa’s loden coat, his caps and hats were stowed in another bag. She had decided to give them away to charity but she changed her mind at the last minute and carried them into the basement. Just the thought of meeting a strange woman wearing Flora’s fur gave her a feeling of distaste, as if her stepmother’s eyes would be staring at her from the strange woman’s face. Nail her to the pavement, force her back.

  Just off the hall was the blue room, which they had used as a dining room. Everything there was either blue or white, from the wall-to-wall carpet, to the silk draperies, the flowerboxes in the window with its Saint Pauls and its Browallias. The flowers had not survived her sojourn to that hot country. She had soaked them with water prior to her departure, and placed layers of brown cardboard over the dirt, but it hadn’t helped.

  The bird didn’t suffer. She let him live in the attic and set him up with bowls of seeds and water and a whole basket of peeled apples. He was having a grand old time.

  Even the pictures on the wall continued the blue and white theme: a winter landscape, sailboats, and a weaving from silk rags that took up an entire wall. Justine’s mamma had woven it long before Justine was born. It had always hung there, an extension of her being.

  She only had a few fragments of memory about her mother. A rumbling rain, a covering under which they sat close together, old sour socks sticking to her toes.

  The smell of fluffy flowers, something hot with honey.

  Against his will, her father told her.

  Her mother had been standing, cleaning the windows. It was the window that faced the water on the second floor and the day had strong sunshine and the strong call of seagulls. The wind was still, and the ice was still lying thick over the water, but it was beginning to thin out, and perhaps she was happy about that, and perhaps she was humming to herself in the sunshine, perhaps she was even planning to go out on the balcony after she was finished in order to sit with her face turned toward the sky. She had quickly taken to this Nordic ritual. She had come from Annecy, a little town in France near the Swiss border, and he had taken her from there, against her parents’ wishes, to be his bride.

  It was a Thursday. He came home from work at seven minutes after four. She was lying on the floor, with her arms outstretched as if she had been crucified. He could see right away that there was nothing that could be done.

  “How could you tell?” Justine asked. She was in a period where she had to know as much as possible about her mother, obsessing about her.

  He couldn’t answer.

  “Perhaps she was still alive. If you had called a doctor right away, maybe he could have saved her.”

  “Don’t accuse me,” he said, with a wry twist at the corner of his mouth. “Once you’ve seen a dead person, you will know what I mean.”

  First he had thought that she had fallen from the stepstool and broken something important, but the autopsy showed that an artery in the brain had burst, and her life had run out with it.

  “Aneurysm!”

  Pappa pronounced that word slowly and clearly every time during Justine’s youth whenever the subject came up.

  Sometimes she worried that it could be inherited.

  She asked about herself.

  “Where was I, Pappa? What was I doing?”

  He didn’t remember.

  She was just three when it happened, three years old and a few months. How does a three-year-old react when her mother falls off a stepstool and dies?

  She must have been somewhere in the house, she must have called and cried, she must have been terrified at her mother’s sudden change.

  Sometimes she woke up from a dream that her forehead was aching as if after a long hard cry; she looked at herself in the mirror and saw her eyelids swollen and glassy.

  Fragments of sinking, of mud and of flowers which never had any odor.

  A pappa standing on the ice and screaming.

  She saw pictures in the photo album of the woman who had been her mother. The strange face did not resonate with her. Thick hair combed back, curly on the sides. Justine did not look like her one bit. There was distance in the woman’s eyes, which did not match Justine’s memories.

  A steep narrow staircase led up to the second floor. Up here is where her mother had stood to clean the windows. To the left was the bedroom, to the right the hall widened and created a living room with a view toward Lammbar Island and beyond Lake Mälar.
Bookcases covered the walls, but there wasn’t much furniture: a stereo, an oval glass table and two armchairs.

  Those had been Pappa’s and Flora’s.

  Many times Justine had been offered a great deal of money for the house. The real estate agents hassled her, stuffed their information into her mailbox, and even called her from time to time. One of them was especially pushy. His name was Jacob Hellstrand.

  “You could get a few million for the place, Justine,” he chatted away, using her first name as if they had been close friends. “I have a client who wants to rebuild it. He’s always dreamed of that location.”

  “Sorry, but I don’t really want to.”

  “And why not? Think of what you could buy with that money! A single woman like yourself, you can’t just sit and rot out there in Hässelby. Buy yourself a condo in the city instead and live life!”

  “You don’t know a thing about whether I am living life or not. Maybe I’m already living life.”

  His laughter came through the handset.

  “You’re right, of course. But admit it, Justine, admit that there’s something to what I’m telling you.”

  She should have gotten angry, but she didn’t.

  “Just let me know when you’ve decided. You have my cell phone number, right?”

  “Of course.”

  “It’s not easy for a single woman to take care of such a big house. All by yourself, that is.”

  “If I decide to sell,” she said, “I’ll give you a call.”

  She didn’t have a single thought of selling. She didn’t need any money either. Pappa left a great deal when he died. She would live well on that for a long time. In fact, as long as she lived.

  And Flora wouldn’t ever be able to demand a single penny of it.

  Chapter FOUR

  The most difficult thing to endure was the smell. Flora remembered it from that summer long ago when she moonlighted at a hospital for mentally ill women. The mix of floor polish, unwashed hair, and flower water.

  Now she smelled like that.

  Despite what she had most feared, the nights weren’t all that bad. Rather, the night belonged to her. She could count on being left alone: no one tried to communicate with her, no question of her taking part in things.