That’s why her clothes are sometimes dirty and torn. Stained with grass from lying on her back in a park. She knows that the present is a moment that will be a gap in her memory tomorrow.
They’ll compete to see who can buy her the most expensive drink. Like flies on a sugar cube. The winner gets the back of his hand stroked and, after the third drink, her thigh against his groin. She is genuine, and her smile is always real.
She knows what she wants them to do to her, and she’s always very clear about saying so.
But if she’s going to be able to smile she needs wine, she thinks, and takes a swig from the bottle.
She can feel herself crying, but it’s only wetness on her cheek and she carefully wipes it away with the ball of her thumb. Mustn’t damage the surface.
Suddenly the phone rings from her jacket pocket, and she weaves out into the hall.
She sees it’s Jeanette, presses reject and then switches the phone off. She goes into the living room and sits down heavily on the sofa. She starts reading a magazine she finds on the table, and leafs through to the centrefold.
So much time has passed, and still the same life, the same necessity.
A colourful picture of an octagonal tower.
She squints through the drink, focuses her gaze and sees that it’s a pagoda next to a Buddhist temple. The article is about a guided tour to Wuhan, provincial capital of Hubei, on the eastern side of the Yangtze River.
Wuhan.
Alongside is an article about Gao Xingjian, Nobel Prize winner, and a big picture of his novel One Man’s Bible.
Gao.
She puts the magazine down and goes over to the bookcase. Carefully she pulls out a book with a worn leather binding.
Eight Treatises on the Nurturing of Life, from 1591, by Gao Lian.
She sees the catch holding the bookcase in place.
Gao Lian.
Gao Lian from Wuhan.
First she hesitates, then slowly lifts the catch, and with a tiny, scarcely audible creak the door slides open.
Bella Vita, Victoria Bergman Vita Bergen – Sofia Zetterlund’s Apartment
BELLA VITA. GOOD life.
It could have been different. It could have been fine.
Could have been good.
If only he’d been different. If only he’d been good.
Just been good.
Drawings everywhere. Hundreds, maybe thousands of childish, naive drawings scattered across the floor or stuck to the walls.
All of them very detailed, but done by a child.
She sees the house in Grisslinge, before and after the fire, and there’s the cottage in Dala-Floda.
A bird in a nest with its chicks, before and after Victoria attacked it with a stick.
A little girl by a lighthouse. Madeleine, her little girl, taken from her.
She remembers the afternoon she told Bengt she was pregnant.
Bengt had flown up from his armchair, with a look of terror. He had rushed over to her and screamed, ‘Get up!’
He had grabbed her arms and dragged her from the sofa.
‘Jump, for God’s sake!’
They had stood facing each other, with him panting in her face. The smell of garlic.
‘Jump!’ he had repeated. She recalls shaking her head. Never, she had thought. You can’t make me.
She remembers him crying after he sat down in his armchair again and turned his back on her.
She looks around the room she has used as a place of refuge. Among all the drawings and scraps of paper on the walls she sees a newspaper article about Chinese refugee children arriving at Arlanda with fake passports, a mobile phone and fifty American dollars. And how they then go missing. Hundreds of them, every year.
A sidebar of facts about the hukou system.
In one corner the exercise bike she’s been using. Cycling for hours, then anointing herself with fragrant oils.
She remembers how Bengt had grabbed her hand and squeezed it. ‘Up onto the table!’ he had sobbed, without looking at her. ‘Up onto the table, for God’s sake!’
It had felt like she was inside a different body as she finally climbed onto the table and turned to face him.
‘Jump …’
She had jumped. Climbed up onto the table and jumped again. And again. And again.
She had carried on jumping until the African girl had come down the stairs. She was wearing the mask. Her face was cold and expressionless. Empty, black eye sockets with nothing behind them.
It didn’t die, Sofia thinks.
Madeleine is alive.
Sunflower Nursing Home
THE NEXT MORNING Jeanette drives straight to Midsommarkransen to visit the older Sofia Zetterlund. She eventually finds a free parking space close to the metro station and switches off the engine of her old Audi.
The nursing home that is Sofia Zetterlund’s registered address is located in one of the yellow modernist blocks near Svandammsparken.
Jeanette has always liked the districts of Aspudden and Midsommarkransen, built in the 1930s as small towns within the city. Not a bad place to spend your final years, she thinks.
But she also knows that there are cracks below the idyllic surface. Until just a few years ago the Bandidos motorcycle gang was based just a few blocks away.
She smokes a cigarette before she goes in, thinking about Sofia Zetterlund the younger.
Is it because of Sofia that she’s started smoking so much? She’s now up to something like a pack a day, and has caught herself trying to conceal the fact from Johan on several occasions, like a naughty teenager. But the nicotine makes her think better. Freer, faster. And now she’s thinking about Sofia Zetterlund, the Sofia she might be falling in love with.
Or is it just a temporary feeling, no more than a childish infatuation after a kiss? A passing fancy?
Anyway, what does being in love really mean?
She once discussed the subject with Sofia, and was confronted with an entirely new way of looking at it. For Sofia, being in love wasn’t something mysterious or pleasant. She said it was the same as being psychotic. The object of love is just an idealised image that doesn’t match reality, and the person in love is merely infatuated with the feeling of being in love. Sofia had compared it to the way a child might ascribe feelings to a pet that it couldn’t really have.
She stubs out the cigarette and rings the bell of the Sunflower Nursing Home.
Now for Sofia the elder.
After a short conversation with the manager she is shown to the dayroom.
At the far end of the room, by the balcony door, sits a woman in a wheelchair, staring out through the window.
She’s very thin, and dressed in a long blue dress that reaches all the way to the tips of her toes. Her hair is completely white, and reaches to her waist. She’s wearing garish make-up, blue eyeshadow and bright red lipstick.
‘Sofia?’ The manager goes over to the woman in the wheelchair and puts a hand on her shoulder. ‘You’ve got a visitor. It’s a Jeanette Kihlberg from the Stockholm police, and she’d like to talk to you about one of your old patients.’
‘They’re clients.’ The old woman’s reply is rapid, and not without a hint of contempt.
Jeanette pulls up a chair and sits down beside Sofia Zetterlund.