Victoria leafs forward a few pages in the diary.
Solace wasn’t dead. She woke up, but she didn’t say anything, she just had a stomach ache and cramped like she was going to give birth. Then he came to us, into our room.
When he saw us he looked very unhappy at first. Then he blew snot all over us. He put his finger against one nostril and blew snot out of the other!
Couldn’t he just have spat on us?!
She hardly recognises her own handwriting.
24 January 1988
Solace refuses to take off the mask. I’m starting to get tired of her wooden face. She just lies there whining. She squeaks. The mask must have grown into her face, like the wooden fibres have eaten into her.
She is a wooden doll. Silent and dead, she just lies there and her wooden face squeaks because it’s so damn damp in the sauna.
Wooden dolls don’t have children. They just swell in damp and heat.
I hate her!
Victoria closes the diary. Outside the window she hears someone laugh.
That night she dreams of a house where all the windows are open. It’s her task to close them, but as soon as she closes the last one, one she’s already closed opens again. The strange thing is that she’s the one who decides that all the windows can’t be closed at the same time, seeing as her task is far too easy. Closing, opening, closing, opening, on and on until she gets fed up and sits down on the floor and pees.
When she wakes up the bed is wet and it’s run through the mattress and onto the floor.
It’s no more than four o’clock in the morning, but she decides to get up. She washes herself, gathers her things together, leaves the room, taking the sheet with her and dumping it in a bin out in the corridor, and then goes down to reception.
She sits down in the little cafe and lights a cigarette.
This is the fourth or fifth time in less than a month that she’s woken up after wetting the bed. It’s happened before, but never so frequently, and never in connection with such vivid dreams.
She gets some books out of her rucksack.
Her university psychology course book and several books by R. J. Stoller. She likes the fact that someone with a name so close to the Swedish word for crazy can write about psychology, and finds it just as amusing, if not ridiculous, that the paperback of Freud’s Theory of Sexuality that she’s also brought with her is so thin.
Her copy of The Interpretation of Dreams is so dog-eared now that it’s almost falling apart, but in contrast to what she expected before she began reading, she found herself in complete opposition to Freud’s theories.
Why should dreams be an expression of subconscious lust and hidden, internal conflict?
And where’s the sense in hiding your own intentions from yourself? That would be like her being one person when she was dreaming, and someone else when she woke up, and what would be the logic in that?
Her dreams simply reflect her thoughts and fantasies. They might include symbolism, but she doesn’t believe she could get to know herself better by thinking too much about their meaning.
It seems idiotic to try to solve life’s problems by interpreting your own dreams. She thinks it might actually be dangerous.
What if you were to read something into them that wasn’t there?
It’s more interesting that her dreams are so clear and lucid; she realised this after reading an article on the subject. She’s aware that she’s dreaming while she’s asleep, and she can influence what happens in her dreams.
She giggles to herself as she concludes that each time she’s wet herself in her sleep, it’s been an active choice.
It gets even funnier when you consider that people who have lucid dreams are, according to psychological research, supposed to have unusually high brain capacity. In other words, she wets herself because she has a brain that is considerably more refined and better developed than other people’s.
She stubs out the cigarette and pulls out another book. An academic overview of attachment theory. How an infant’s relationship with its mother affects the future life of the child.
Even though the book isn’t on the reading list for her course, and also makes her feel depressed, she can’t help dipping into it every so often. Page after page, chapter after chapter about something she had been denied by others, but had also abdicated from herself. Relationships with other people.
Everything was wrecked by her mother as soon as she was born, and the ruins of her ability to form relationships have been carefully managed by her father, who denied anyone else access to her.
She no longer smiles.
Does she miss relationships? Does she actually long for anyone else at all?
She certainly doesn’t have any friends to miss, nor any friends who might miss her.
Hannah and Jessica are long since forgotten. Have they forgotten her as well? And the promise they made to one another? Eternal friendship and all that?
But there is one person she has missed since she arrived in Denmark. And it isn’t Solace. Down here she’s been able to manage without her.
She misses the old psychologist at Nacka Hospital.
If she had been here now, she would have realised that Victoria visited this hotel for a specific reason: to relive her own death.
But Victoria has realised what needs to be done.
If you can’t manage to die then you can become someone else instead, and she knows how to go about that.
First she’s going to take the ferry to Malm?, then the train to Stockholm, then the bus out to Tyres?, where the old woman lives.
And this time she’s going to tell her everything, precisely everything she knows about herself.
She has to.
If Victoria Bergman is to be able to die properly.
Mariatorget – Sofia Zetterlund’s Office
LINNEA LUNDSTR?M IS sitting in the chair on the other side of the desk, and Sofia is surprised how quickly she has managed to gain the girl’s trust.
‘This is you, isn’t it?’ Sofia asks, pointing at the three drawings. ‘And this is Annette?’
Linnea looks surprised, but says nothing.
‘And perhaps this is a friend of the family?’ Sofia points at Viggo Dürer. ‘From Sk?ne. Kristianstad.’
Sofia gets the impression that the girl relaxes slightly. ‘Yes,’ she sighs, ‘but he didn’t look like that then. He was thinner.’
‘What was his name?’
Linnea hesitates, and when she eventually answers she does so in a whisper. ‘That’s Viggo Dürer, Dad’s lawyer.’
‘Do you want to tell me about him?’
The girl’s breathing becomes shallow and less regular, as if she’s struggling for air. ‘You’re the first person who’s ever understood my drawings,’ she says.
Sofia thinks about Annette Lundstr?m, who had pretty much misunderstood every single detail of Linnea’s pictures.