Good Night, My Darling Read online

  My thoughts are my own and you’ll never get at them. I am inside them. Me, Flora Dalvik, a person with an entire name, an individual, the human being Flora Dalvik I will defend with my human body, however decrepit and atrophied it may be. It still has a functional brain and thoughts as all other people have; it is a living being’s body.

  The young women, and they were all young in relation to Flora, had impatience in their movements, as if to hurry the working day along and get it over with, so that they could hurry to the changing room, hang up their smocks and pants, and become private. Go home to their own things.

  Of course there were caretakers during the night, but they weren’t all that bothersome. They came in like shadows and turned her during the night. She usually knew when they would be coming, and she was ready for them.

  They started appearing more often since a young girl from Polhemsgården in Solna had raised the alarm on the mistreatment of the elderly. TV showed close-ups of bedsores and blackened toes, and the girl, who was an employee of Polhemsgården, received some kind of an award for bravery, and civil courage was spoken of quite a bit.

  This event, for Flora’s part, meant that the white-coated assistants got her out of bed every single day, even on the weekends-in fact, especially on the weekends, since visitors could show up unexpectedly then-seated her upright and tied her to the wheelchair. They combed her thin hair and made two braids from it. She had never braided her hair. That wasn’t her style.

  What had been her style?

  More and more, she was beginning to forget it.

  She was thirty-three years old when she moved into Sven Dalvik’s home. His daughter was just about five. Flora worked at his firm. Or, more exactly, she was employed as his secretary in order to assist Director Dalvik with everything he could possibly need.

  Head secretary. Did that position even exist these days? She had been proud of her job. She had gone to vocational school in business administration and then gone to BarLocks. Such ambitions were rare among her acquaintances. Most of her contemporaries had gotten married and had children as soon as they finished high school.

  And what did she do? Why didn’t she find some nice young man and get married at a reasonable time? She had no answer. The years went by, and Mr. Right had not shown up. Of course, she had gotten some offers, quite a few, in fact, especially during the time that she went dancing and danced everywhere in town or at Hässelby Baths. Young men came there from all over Stockholm, and she knew all the tricks. She could have pulled anyone to some dark corner if she had decided on it. Just like her friends did.

  No, that was too easy. And she was worried about what those city boys would say behind her back. They’d think she was just any old country girl.

  She was not. She was different.

  She lay on her back and stared at the ceiling. The woman in the bed next to her was in the midst of dying. The assistants had placed a screen between the beds, but the sound of approaching death could not be screened. They probably thought Flora didn’t realize what was going on.

  She listened to the labored breathing, each breath coming at longer intervals. The dying woman was old and had been in bad shape ever since she had arrived fourteen days earlier. It was time for her to leave the earthly plane; she was well over ninety.

  The woman’s son was somewhere in the room. He walked around, had trouble sitting still. He was also old. When he first entered the room, he nodded at Flora, unsure of whether she could notice him or not. She could nod back, even though she couldn’t lift her head from the pillow.

  He had mumbled something to the assistants about a single room, and they had explained and apologized. Lack of space and over capacity. Then they lowered their voices and Flora understood that they were talking about her.

  The son appeared to be in pain; she heard him groan behind the screen. Every time he did this, his mother’s breathing quickened, became shakier, as if she longed to be back in the time where she still could comfort him.

  This evening, they had put her to bed early. She would be disturbed, as the assistants would be running in and out all night to see to her roommate. They would be speaking in a softened tone, as if they would not be heard just as well. They would be turning on flashlights, and the smell of coffee would drift in to her from the personnel room.

  It would hardly be a good night.

  She thought about Sven and thought that it was unfair. His death had gone so quickly. She also would have liked to die in such a painless, sweet way, just leave everything behind and be on her way. Instead she stayed here as a living piece of luggage, and she was demeaned and violated just like a child.

  She and Sven had felt sympathy toward each other from the very beginning. And he asked her to address him informally with her, which was very unusual at the time but helped their work atmosphere quite a bit.

  She quickly discovered his incompetence in various spheres, but she did her best so that he would not discover what she knew. He was hardly a company head, and Flora became aware that he had taken over the family business without much enthusiasm. He did it because it was expected of him; he had been raised his whole life to do just that. His father, Georg Dalvik, had built the concern; he was the one who had created and launched the candy named Sandy, which was now famous world-wide: “Sandy Candy fine and dandy.”

  Sven was not exactly the kind of man she had been dreaming of when she was young, but he was sweet. He believed in her; he turned to her when things became difficult. He also would ask her opinion whenever he wanted to buy a gift for his French wife. Because of this, she thought that she knew him and his family fairly well, even though she had never met either the wife or the daughter. He had a photo of them on his desk, a dark-haired woman, somewhat chubby, with a laughing child on her knee. The child reached behind herself to embrace her mother’s neck.

  Sometimes, when he was abroad, she would go and look at that photo. It was taken outdoors, in Hässelby, where he had recently bought a house. You could make out one of the gables. Flora knew exactly which one.

  Sven would tell her about his gardening difficulties. He had been raised in Karlavägen, in the middle of Stockholm, and he had no experience with green things. He would tell how his wife asked him to dig a patch for vegetables, and he just raised his palms in defeat. Once he complained about the raspberry bushes, which had been hit by a mysterious illness. Flora asked him to describe this.

  “Well, some kind of brown spots on the leaves and the shoots, and it spreads and it gets spotty and gray. And there aren’t any raspberries; they just shrivel up. I am so disappointed. We were going to sit on the balcony, my wife and I, and have fresh raspberries with cream.”

  She knew just what it was.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, while a warmth spread in her middle. “It’s a fungus and unfortunately it is the absolute worst thing that can happen to raspberry bushes.”

  Her boss stared at her.

  “Yes, absolutely true,” she continued. “You will have to dig them all up and burn every one that has been stricken with it. Then you have to spray the rest with copper calcite fluid and copper sulfite.”

  “Damn, what you know!”

  It was not like him to swear, but he did then.

  “You’ve forgotten my parents had a garden center. I’ve been raised with copper sulfite!”

  He laughed and gave her a hug. That was unusual. They hardly ever touched each other.

  They only touched each other two other times. The first time was one evening when they were working overtime. Flora made tea and sandwiches for them. When she placed the tray on his desk, he embraced her waist, but he took his arm away again quickly. She understood that he had thought he was at home for a minute. He was tired. He turned red.

  The other time was at a crayfish party, which had been organized for all the employees out on one of the islands. They both became drunk, both she and Sven, neither of them used to drinking so much brandy. They sat at the top of a hill and held
hands, nothing more.

  When Sven’s wife died, he was very strong. He came back to the office after only one day. He had left his child with his parents.

  He was changed, on the outside it looked like he had dropped a few pounds overnight. Otherwise, he seemed the same, but a bit quieter, a bit sorrowful.

  Flora placed a pot of St Paul’s in his window. Blue was the color of hope and consolation. She did not know if he even noticed it. She asked if there was anything that she could do. He turned his head toward her without looking at her.

  After the funeral, he started talking about his child. Her name was Justine. She was in a difficult stage. It certainly didn’t help that she had lost her mother.

  “My parents can’t deal with her,” he said. “They’ve never had much patience with children. And my father has a heart condition.”

  Flora listened patiently. The whole time she just sat and listened, without being pushy, without giving too much advice.

  The first year, he employed housekeepers, who took care of both the house and the child. Sometimes he thought about selling the house, but his wife was in the cemetery in Hässelby, and he went there a few times a week.

  “Do you think that she would want me to sell it?” he would ask her. “She loved that house so much. I bought that house for her sake.”

  He had trouble hanging on to housekeepers. Perhaps it was too lonely, down at the beach? Too isolated?

  That the girl could be behind the problem with housekeepers was a thought that never once entered into his poor, thick skull.

  Chapter FIVE

  The trees began to appear out of the fog, becoming black, visible. It was morning. Justine had slept the whole night sitting in the armchair, she was thirsty and her shoulders were stiff.

  The same feeling as over there. But not.

  Over there:

  She could still feel her relief which poured through her when she finally could make out the contours of things. The thick, tropical night had begun to move off, retreat; she lay with open eyes and took it all in. How everything reappeared, the tree trunks, the leaves, how they grew and took their forms as day came. And relief spread through her, made her limbs soft. She had been awake the whole night, and finally she fell into a light sleep, just as the others began to stretch and move around in their sleeping bags.

  Justine went downstairs, holding onto the handrail like a tired old woman. Yep, just like Flora used to shuffle up and down between the floors before she had to move to the hospice. She would have never gone there voluntarily, but after her stroke, she no longer had any strength.

  Down there, the kitchen was dark. She lit the stove and put on a pot of water. Her dress was all wrinkled; she must have been sweating while she was asleep. She hadn’t even noticed that night had come.

  Was dying like that?

  While leaning against the kitchen wall, she drank her tea in slow sips. Her ears strained for a sound. A sudden longing for words. Anything but silence. She called the bird. He was probably sitting on his branch and sleeping with his head turned backwards and his beak stuck under his gray feathers. He didn’t come and he didn’t answer. He was sitting in silence somewhere, remembering his wild origin.

  The house was walled in: this chill and brooding silence like insulation. It was in the stones, the foundation, the basement, the walls. Even a sunny August day could not force in its light and life.

  There. In the jungle. No silence existed there. Everywhere was living, creeping, crawling, peeping and trickling, as well as the rustling of leaves while it was all going on, an eating, chewing, steaming rot, millions of small masticating jaws that were never satisfied, the screams and the rush of rain, the howl of a saw.

  She asked Nathan, “Can they really be working here with tools, isn’t that called the destruction of the rain forest?”

  He did not answer her, forcing her to ask again. Then he turned and his eyes were just as changed as they had been since the day that Martina had joined the group in Kuala Lumpur.

  The sound was an insect. Such an insect that could make that howl, going straight to the marrow of her bones, and she froze, even though she was too hot.

  Martina… she wasn’t much bigger than an insect herself. Keep thinking like that. You grind insects under your heel until they are squished. Insects like Martina are not worth much more than that. That’s what she had to keep thinking.

  She herself was like the house. Made of silence and enstoned.

  As if her words took time to construct, they had to search for a pathway that led out of her.

  People got tired of waiting.

  Nobody likes to wait for words.

  Some people thought it was a sign of shyness. Others of a sense of self-importance. Her teacher used that exact word, self-important, about her, after only a few weeks of class. The next morning, when she thought about it, she was overcome by dizziness and sank to a squat with her head between her knees.

  Flora was standing on the rag rug, right in the beige square, or maybe it was the Isabella-colored square; anyway, there she stood with her heavy, brown-lined eyelids, opening like small shutters.

  “Get up, Justine!”

  No. She sank deeper, into the rug. Flora was wearing boots, fine leather boots with stiletto heels. She saw the heels clearly from her position on the floor, how a tiny leaf had gotten caught in one of the points.

  Flora’s hand on her head, at first lightly, as if reassuring her. Then the fingers bent, the nails, her hair, like ice in their roots when she was lifted up, ooowwww.

  “So, at least you can open your mouth!”

  Like a pendulum, back and forth, the short, delicate strands, how they burst.

  Flora put her down. It was cold, she had stayed in her bed, and heard how Flora returned through the front door. In just her nightgown, she then went down the stairs.

  “Do you know what your teacher, Miss Messer, said to me this evening? She said that you were stubborn and had a sense of self-importance. Stubborn and proud. That’s what she called you. I was forced to say that I was sorry, but she was absolutely correct.”

  “That’s not true, that’s not true! She hates me!”

  “No strong words, Justine. No one hates. This is called raising a child and it is her duty according to the law to contribute to the raising of a child.”

  “Forgive me then, but tell me what I am supposed to do to get her to like me…”

  “If I hear a single complaint from your teacher again, I will do such things to you that even your father won’t recognize you.”

  Justine covered her ears, her eyes turned inside out, ugly and cold in her whole body, ugly and burning. Turned her face to the floor. The same rug, that one again?

  Flora’s little booted foot, yes, it was little; she had heard her father say so when she stood in the hallway one night when they thought she was sleeping. She glimpsed Flora, nude and thin, like a girl, wearing her boots on the clean sheets.

  Now the rug pressed against her temples, every bump and uneven spot, the smell of stale food. Flora pressed lightly with the sole, ground her foot against Justine’s cheek.

  “I want you to say it loud and clear. That you are a disgusting repulsive child that no one likes.”

  She couldn’t do that.

  “That you are a spoiled, nasty and lanky child that no one in the entire world could love. Say it!”

  She fell unconscious and everything was gone.

  The bird came, his wings whistling. She boiled a couple of eggs, gave one to the bird and ate the other one. He was a large, well-shaped creature. He peeled the egg with his beak and shook the shell and bits of egg all over the kitchen.

  “Fritz?” she said, not paying attention. “Is that your name?”

  The bird screeched, flapped his wings, and flew to her shoulder. She stuck her finger against his gray stomach, and felt that his body was like a warm, living broiler underneath his feathers.

  “I should get you a friend,” she said. “
We are too lonely, you and I.”

  He nipped her finger, lightly, lifted it, pecked it away.

  He arrived at the house the day that Flora left it. Justine saw an ad in the newspaper: “Bird for sale due to change in family circumstances. Friendly and tame.”

  Change in family circumstances. That was her case, too.

  Without thinking about it for long, she grabbed the phone. The bird was at the other end of town, Saltsjöbaden, and at first the car wouldn’t start, but after a few sprays of 5-56 under the hood, she managed to get it going. It was an old Opel Rekord, and she always felt nervous using it, as it wasn’t very dependable.

  She drove the wrong way at Slussen, and drove in circles for a while until she found the exit for Nacka. She had drawn herself a map, using large ink lines, and thanks to that, she finally was able to arrive at the right place.

  The villa appeared well taken care of, and pleasant, just like all the other houses in the area. She parked outside the gate and rang the bell. After a minute, a man came and answered, she had spoken to a woman on the phone. The man was her own age; his face was terse and reserved.

  Divorce, she thought.

  He knew at once who she was, and asked her to come on in. Inside the house was complete chaos. There were halfpacked cardboard boxes placed throughout the hallway, a little farther in she could see the living room floor. It was covered with books, as if someone in a fit of rage had torn out everything in the bookcases. From the kitchen came the smell of something burning.

  The bird was also in the kitchen, in a tall, ornate cage. It was dozing, ignored her totally.

  “Is that him?” she asked. “For some reason, I thought he was a parrot.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Maybe because parrots are more common pets.”

  “I guess. So you’re not interested any more?”

  “No, no. It doesn’t matter what kind of bird he is.”

  The man took a glass coffee carafe off the stove.

  “Dammit, I forgot all about this.”