Let The Old Dreams Die Part 21

The woman with the big earrings and severe lips who bought the painting said she liked its powerful erotic charge. Anna had accepted the two thousand-kronor notes and nodded in agreement. When the woman had gone and Anna was finally able to attach the red dot indicating that the painting was sold, she had scrutinised it carefully to try and fathom out what the h.e.l.l the woman was talking about.

In a fiery blue landscape stood a mountain pool, in the middle of which the outline of a door was just visible. Fir trees half-hidden in the mist stood guard around the pool, their branches outspread. Where was the erotic charge the woman could see?

When she told Josef and described the woman, he said he wasn't at all surprised. The woman had tried to come on to him at the private view, and no doubt she saw an erotic charge in everything.

Anna put down her cup and contemplated the painting on which she was working. It was called Vanished, and there was a lot of white. The idea was that the person looking at the picture would get the impression that something had been there, but was no longer there, something that had...

'Vanished,' she said to herself out loud. With fingers that were already frozen she squeezed a blob of zinc white onto her palette, sighed and tried to get down to work.

Josef came home later than usual. Later than he used to before, that is. These days it could sometimes be two hours or more between the time he finished work and the time she heard the Toyota's gloomy roar in the driveway.

Anna was standing at the bedroom window. In the glow of the outside light she saw him get out of the car, pick up a carrier bag from the front pa.s.senger seat, plug in the heating cable and set off towards the house. She felt nervous, but couldn't quite put her finger on it. It was as if she needed to arrange her expression. Greet him in the right way. Despite the fact that it was only Josef, her nearest and dearest.

But he had changed. The laughter was no longer quite so close to the surface these days. More often than in the past he got caught up in a thought, and remained there. She had hinted that perhaps he ought to let someone help him work through the accident, but Josef wouldn't hear of it. He was doing fine on his own.

And perhaps he was. Anna hoped so.

When the front door opened she went into the hallway and welcomed him home with a kiss. He returned her kiss, caressed her cheek. 'Hi, how's things?'

Anna shrugged her shoulders. 'Wasted a bit of paint, made some reasonable cakes, waited around a bit. That's it, really. What have you been up to?'

Josef hung up his outdoor clothes and shook the bag he was carrying. 'Library.'

Anna nodded. That was where he was when he didn't come home. In the library. It the living room there were piles of books by Bertrand Russell, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Simone Weil. Among others. Josef had started reading philosophy, or rather he had started borrowing books about philosophy. He never actually read them. They just sat there.

He took a couple of books by Wittgenstein out of the bag to add to his collection. They had already had a couple of reminders about books he hadn't read, and the piles were growing.

He placed a hand over her belly. 'How's the tummy feeling?'

'It feels good. Unreal still, but it feels good.'

'I'm looking forward to seeing it grow.'

'Are you?'

'Yes, of course.'

He took his hand away, and Anna replaced it with hers.

The winter came to nothing. The coldest days had been in November, and Anna was able to continue working in the garage after Christmas and New Year.

They spent Christmas with Anna's parents, but came home on Boxing Day when Josef couldn't stand it any longer. Anna didn't mind. The family's solicitousness around her pregnancy almost suffocated her.

The snow that fell at the beginning of January quickly melted away, and Josef didn't need to take the boat out of the water this year as there was no risk of ice.

Anna had begun to show. She didn't have a real baby b.u.mp yet, but it was there, and a few days into the new year she felt the first movement. A little fish jumping.

The heavy atmosphere around Josef had lightened somewhat, and now that Anna no longer needed to be the cheerful one, she took the opportunity to have a crisis. Perhaps it was the growing child that put things in a different perspective: what the h.e.l.l was she actually doing?

One Monday morning in the middle of January she was standing in front of her paintings, seriously thinking that the best thing would be to set fire to the lot. Stop trying. Stop thinking. Just paint seabirds on bits of wood, look after her children and bake bread.

She wandered around the house doing bits and pieces for a couple of hours. Towards midday she was overcome by a sense of melancholy and isolation. She had been a sociable person in Stockholm, with lots of friends and acquaintances. Now she was sitting in a miserable little cottage, and in five months she would give birth to a child and be stuck for ever. This is your life.

Panic threatened to overwhelm her, and the only thing she could think of to suppress it was to take a trip to Norrtalje. See a few people. Go to the library, perhaps. Wait for Josef there, see what was on at the cinema.

Yes. That would have to do.

She walked up to the bus stop and stood there moping with her hands in her pockets, thinking that she ought to take up smoking again. The landscape around her made her feel that way. Mist in the air, sodden fir trees surrounded by dirty snowdrifts, traversed by a grey road with the white lines in the centre worn away. Next to her there was a notice board, but the bus timetable had been ripped down. Somebody had scrawled 'b.a.s.t.a.r.d VISITORS GO HOME' on the wall of the shelter. Perfect for a smoke. Unfortunately she had given up five years ago, and while taking up the habit again during pregnancy would be an original idea, it wasn't very clever.

The bus came, cheerily red. She felt slightly better as she sat down by a window and looked out at more sodden fir trees, more dirty snow. At least she was on the move now.

In Norrtalje she wandered around the shops for a while. Spent some time in H&M fingering a little snowsuit with stars and moons on it, which she couldn't buy because they didn't have much money and because the family had given them bags full of baby stuff over Christmas and because if you a.s.sume that everything is going to be fine it will probably all go wrong and anyway the snowsuit was probably made by an Asian child with a chain around its ankle and f.u.c.k it all.

She went to the off-licence on the other side of the street and bought a small bottle of whisky instead. Shoved the bag into her coat pocket.

I am a bad person, she thought as she walked up to the library. It felt like a relief.

It was only half past three; Josef probably hadn't arrived yet. She stopped outside the library and looked at an old poster informing her that one of the more famous battles from the American Civil War would be re-created in a field outside the town one weekend in August. Hot dogs and stalls. All welcome.

This is your- Then she caught sight of Josef in the cafe next door to the library. She was about to raise her arm and wave, but stopped. He hadn't seen her, because he was completely absorbed in conversation with the person opposite him. The paper bag in her pocket rustled as Anna squeezed it. The person was a woman: slim, long-haired and with slender hands that moved slowly in the air as she spoke.

Josef looked up and spotted her. When their eyes met, Anna just wanted to run away. He looked as if he had been caught out. So what she had imagined in her darkest hours was true.

The future exploded into a thousand pieces.

The other person turned to face the window. It wasn't a woman. It was a man who looked like seven years of famine and seven years even worse than that. A face so hollow that it was impossible to tell how old he was. His hair, she could see now, was unwashed and hung down in lank strands over ridiculously sunken cheeks. Big, shining eyes.

But Anna had thought it was a woman.

We've drifted apart.

She went inside. Josef met her in the doorway, gave her a hug. 'Hi. What are you doing here?'

Anna let go first. 'I'm just...just having a little wander round. Couldn't cope with being at home.' She nodded in the direction of the table. 'Who's that?'

Josef glanced over his shoulder. 'Oh, just...just a friend.'

Anna made a vague noise, as if it was perfectly natural for Josef to have friends she'd never heard of. As if they had that kind of relationship.

Josef made no move to let her in, so she pushed past and went over to the table, her hand outstretched.

'h.e.l.lo, I'm Anna-Josef's...'

The man looked up at her, and Anna recoiled.

At close quarters his face carried the mark of death. Nothing but bones and pale skin, hanging loose with no flesh to adhere to. Narrow, chapped lips, and above them a nose that would have been comically large in the disappearing face, if the whole thing hadn't looked so dreadful. The eyes, burning bright, were looking at her. He didn't take her hand, but whispered, 'Sorry. Bit of a cold, better not...' He nodded in the direction of her stomach. 'With the baby and everything.'

Josef came over to the table, wringing his hands nervously. As if he were introducing his boss to his wife, he said, 'This is Karl-Axel.'

Anna managed to produce a smile. 'Karl-Axel.'

The man made a small sound of disagreement and said, 'Kaxe.'

'Sorry?'

'Kaxe. That's what I'm usually called.'

'Kaxe?'

'Mmm.'

Anna nodded. Kaxe nodded. Josef nodded. Anyone watching through the window would have thought they were all in perfect agreement.

An uncomfortable silence. Anna looked around. Three men with a southern European appearance were sitting by the newspaper section, absorbed in old news from their homelands. She didn't know what to say, so gesturing towards the street outside she asked, 'So do you live here?'

Without the slightest hint of a smile Kaxe replied, 'No, I just come in here for a cup of tea.'

I can't do this.

On another day she might have been able to make an effort in order to penetrate the barriers of hostility between her and Kaxe, but not today. So instead she said, with exaggerated briskness, 'Anyway, I must...get on.' She glanced at Josef and added, 'Have a nice time,' and turned to leave.

Kaxe raised his hand.

'Sail in peace, sister.'

She got out into the street and had no idea where to go. Nothing had actually happened. Except that everything was...wrong.

As she had expected, Josef came hurrying after her.

'Anna...Anna?' he said.

'Hi.'

'Don't you want to come in?'

'No, it all felt a bit too...difficult.'

Josef looked down at the ground, chewing his lower lip. 'I was thinking...of inviting him round one day?'

'Right. Yes. Fine.'

This approval didn't make Josef any happier. He folded his arms, kept moving his feet up and down. Anna waited. She was well aware that he was on the point of telling her what this was all about, and she was equally well aware when the impulse left him. He put his face close to hers and said, 'Trust me.'

She threw her hands wide. 'Josef, I don't understand.'

'You will. I promise.'

'Josef, this isn't good. You talking like this, the fact that we... that we can't...'

Josef clamped his lips together.

'I know, I know, I know. It's for our sake, OK? I promise. I love you. I love you.'

A sense of grief swept through Anna. Something had been lost here, on the steps outside Norrtalje library. But still she said, 'I love you too. What are you up to?'

Josef looked slightly relieved.

'Soon,' he said with a grin. 'It's a kind of surprise for your birthday.' He laughed. 'When it's ready I'll tell you everything. OK?'

Anna nodded, even though it wasn't OK at all. She went into the library and browsed listlessly through the CDs for a while. Then Josef came in and they went home in the car together.

He asked how her work had gone, and she said it was c.r.a.p. It was pointless, all of it. He tried to console her, telling her that she'd done so much that was really good, maybe it was to do with the child, things were bound to improve. He did it mechanically. His mind was elsewhere.

While Anna was in the library, it had been decided that Kaxe would come to visit them on Thursday.

Those days, those days between Christmas and New Year...

Josef was somehow transformed once again. Before he went to work on Tuesday he laid out her breakfast and wrote her a little note: he would be lost without her, she meant everything to him. When he got home he was full of affection, stroking her arm, her back, the nape of her neck at every opportunity. He wanted to get close to her again, wanted to get back in. But he wanted it now, he wanted it quickly, and it was like carrying out an archaeological dig with a great big mechanical digger. Things got broken along the way.

She spent the mornings staring at her paintings and searching her heart and mind. She ruined a beautiful piece of driftwood by painting Kulkan from Dungeons and Dragons on it, complete with grazing sheep. But she made the sheep into skeletons, grazing in a meadow where the gra.s.s was fingers, the sun a grinning skull.

When she took a step back and looked at the painting as a whole, she felt happy with something she'd done for the first time in a couple of months. The combination of tourist kitsch and romantic horror had something. The fact that the picture had been dashed off quickly didn't matter at all; the blurred lines gave it a dreamlike quality.

For the rest of the day she felt happier than she had for a long time. She did bits and pieces around the house, listening to her body. The child was there. Even when it wasn't kicking or moving she could feel its presence like a faintly perceived tickling sensation, another person in the room. There were two of them now.

When Josef got home she showed him the driftwood picture and he laughed until he cried. Said he would happily have coughed up two thousand for it if he'd been a visitor. She gave it to him. He said he was going to hang it in the staffroom at the nursery, perhaps with a little sign saying SMOKING KILLS.

'Sheep don't usually smoke, Josef.'

'No, but these did, and look what happened.'

That evening Josef talked about Kaxe. He was a philosopher, or at least a student of philosophy. He had read through the history of philosophy and had come out on the other side feeling totally disillusioned. He was the most depressing person Josef had ever met. As if to prove the idea that inner emptiness leads to disease, he had contracted leukaemia and had only a year to live at the most.

While Josef was telling her this, he kept biting his nails. Anna gently took his hand and moved it away from his mouth.

'Josef, what is it?'

'Nothing, I just...I feel sorry for him.'

Anna took a deep breath. 'This business with...with Kaxe. Does it have anything to do with your accident?'

Josef's little finger found its way back to his teeth. He nibbled on the nail for a while, then said, 'He wants to die.'

Anna waited for the next bit, but nothing came. In the silence the words still hung in the air. He wants to die. She opened her mouth to get him to continue, but Josef got there first. 'What were you thinking of doing on Thursday?'

'On Thursday?'

'Yes. When he comes round.'