She introduces herself and explains why she’s come, but the old woman doesn’t deign to look at her.
‘Well, as you know, I’m here to ask a few questions about one of your old clients,’ Jeanette says. ‘A young woman you saw twenty years ago.’
No response.
The old woman is still staring at something outside. Her eyes look clouded. Cataracts, Jeanette thinks. Could she be blind?
‘The girl was seventeen years old when you treated her,’ Jeanette goes on. ‘Her name is Victoria Bergman. Does that name mean anything to you?’
The woman finally turns her head, and Jeanette can see a trace of a smile on the old face. It seems to soften.
‘Victoria,’ Sofia the elder says. ‘Of course I remember her.’
Jeanette breathes out. She decides to get straight to the point and moves her chair a bit closer. ‘I’ve got a picture of Victoria with me. I don’t know how good your eyesight is, but do you think you might be able to identify her?’
Sofia smiles broadly. ‘Oh, no. I’ve been blind for the past two years. But I can describe what she looked like back then. Blonde hair, blue eyes. She had a wry smile and the look in her eyes was always intense, focused.’
Jeanette studies the picture of the serious young girl in the school yearbook. Her appearance matches the old woman’s description. ‘What happened to her after you stopped treating her?’
Sofia laughs again. ‘Who?’ she asks.
Jeanette starts to get suspicious. ‘Victoria Bergman.’
The distant look in Sofia’s face returns, and after a couple of seconds Jeanette repeats her question.
Sofia’s face breaks into a smile again. ‘Victoria? Yes, I remember her.’ Then the smile fades, and the woman rubs her cheek with her hand. ‘Does my lipstick look all right? Is it messy?’
‘No, it looks fine,’ Jeanette replies. She’s starting to worry that Sofia Zetterlund has problems with her short-term memory. Alzheimer’s, probably.
‘Victoria Bergman,’ Sofia repeats. ‘A peculiar story. By the way, you smell of smoke … Are you offering?’
Jeanette finds the abrupt twists in the conversation bewildering. It’s clear that Sofia Zetterlund has problems keeping hold of the threads in conversation, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that her long-term memory is damaged.
‘Smoking isn’t allowed in here, I’m afraid,’ Jeanette says.
Sofia’s response is probably less than entirely truthful. ‘I know that, but it is in my room. Push me back in there and we can have a smoke.’
Jeanette pushes her own chair back, gets up and carefully turns Sofia’s wheelchair. ‘OK, let’s go and sit in your room instead. Where is it?’
‘Last door on the right at the end of the corridor.’
Jeanette gestures to the manager that they’re leaving the day room for a while.
Once they’re in her room, Sofia insists on sitting in the armchair and Jeanette helps the old woman to get comfortable. Then she sits down at the little table by the window.
‘Now, let’s have a smoke.’
Jeanette hands her the lighter and cigarettes, and Sofia lights up. ‘There’s an ashtray on the chest of drawers, next to Freud.’
Freud? Jeanette turns round.
Sure enough, there’s an ashtray behind her, a large one made of crystal, and next to it is a snow globe.
Usually the image inside the globe is children playing, or snowmen, or some other winter scene. But Sofia’s snow globe contains an image of a very sombre-looking Sigmund Freud.
Jeanette stands up to reach the ashtray. Once she’s there she can’t resist shaking the globe.
Freud’s snowed in, she thinks. At least Sofia Zetterlund has a sense of humour. Then she repeats her question. ‘Did you ever meet Victoria Bergman again after she was granted a protected identity?’
The old woman seems more alert now that she’s got a cigarette in her hand. ‘No, never. There was a new law about secret personal details, so no one knows what her name is now.’
Nothing new so far, although at least Jeanette has confirmation that there’s nothing wrong with the old woman’s long-term memory.
‘Did she have any distinguishing features? You seem to remember her appearance very well.’
‘She was a very intelligent girl. She was probably too intelligent for her own good, if you know what I mean.’
‘No. What do you mean?’
Sofia’s reply has little to do with Jeanette’s question. ‘I haven’t seen her since the autumn of 1988. But ten years later I got a letter from her.’
‘Do you remember what she wrote?’
‘Yes, but not word for word, obviously. It was mainly about her daughter.’
‘Her daughter?’ Jeanette’s curiosity is aroused.
‘Yes. She was pregnant, and put her child up for adoption. She didn’t say much about it, but I know she went off to look for the child in the early summer of 1988. She was living with me at the time. For almost two months.’
‘She lived with you?’
The old woman suddenly looks very serious. It’s as if her skin tenses up and the wrinkles become smoother. ‘Yes. She was having suicidal thoughts and it was my duty to look after her. I would never have let Victoria go if I hadn’t realised that it was absolutely vital for her to see the child again.’
‘Where did she go?’
Sofia Zetterlund shakes her head. ‘She refused to say. But when she came back she was stronger.’
‘Stronger?’
‘Yes. As if she’d put something very difficult behind her. But what they did to her in Copenhagen was wrong. You shouldn’t do that to anyone.’
Stockholm, 1988
JUST BEEN GOOD.
‘You’re dead to me!’ Victoria writes at the bottom of the postcard, then posts it at Central Station in Stockholm. The picture on the front shows King Gustav XIV Adolf sitting in a gilded chair with the queen standing beside him, smiling and showing that she’s proud of her husband and that she’s the subordinate partner, ever obedient.
Just like Mum, she thinks as she walks down into the metro.
Victoria thinks Queen Sylvia’s smile looks like the Joker’s huge red ear-to-ear lips, and she recalls hearing that someone had said that the king was a real pig in private, and that when he wasn’t confusing people from Arboga with those from ?rebro, he would flick matchsticks at the queen just to humiliate her.
It’s Midsummer’s Eve, and therefore a Friday. Victoria wonders how a holiday that was originally a celebration of the summer solstice could now always take place on the third Friday in June, regardless of where the sun is.
You’re slaves, she thinks, looking derisively at the drunk people getting into the cool metro carriages with their bags full of food. Obedient lackeys. Sleepwalkers. She doesn’t think she’s got anything to celebrate, and is just heading back to Sofia’s house in Tyres?.
It was good that she returned to Copenhagen, because now she knows that she doesn’t care.
The child might as well have died, it wouldn’t have made any difference.