More Bitter Than Death: A Novel Part 9

"Who did she catch you with?" I ask.

"What the h.e.l.l? Why does everyone have all these preconceived ideas?" Sven asks, and then gets up and starts pacing back and forth across the room with his cigarette in his hand. I can't tell if he's mad at me or just upset about the situation in general.

"Did I say something stupid?"

"I . . . no, I don't know. Somehow everyone thinks she left me because I was cheating on her with other women."

"Well, weren't you?" I say.

"Yes, I was sleeping with other people. She was too, actually. We had an open relations.h.i.+p. But people have such a hard time grasping that; they only see stereotypical pictures of what love is, the heteronormative nuclear family, you know."

He studies me from across the room, as if he's wondering whether I'm open-minded enough to understand what he's saying.

"Huh," I say. "I am honestly surprised. I'm totally not making any judgments about it, but I just never . . . guessed."

"Things are not always what they seem," Sven says.

"I guess you're right."

"Birgitta slept with plenty of other men over the years. And women."

"I see," I say, thinking of the plump, gray-haired woman, her full lips and weathered face, her linen suits and chunky silver jewelry, the immediate authority she radiates when she walks into a room, how she fills the s.p.a.ce with her confident, powerful presence.

Why shouldn't she have lovers? Male or female.

Sven sits down again, seems to have calmed down. He puts out his cigarette in the cake tin, where the ash mixes with crumbs from the lemon cookies from the bakery on Gotgatan.

His worn, rust-brown lamb's wool sweater has ridden up a little around his midsection, exposing his pale, flabby body. Sven is getting old, I think. Does anyone want to get old alone? Am I going to get old alone, given that I have such a terribly hard time letting anyone get close to me?

"But," I say timidly, "I don't think I understand. You said that she caught you?"

He laughs sadly, slowly shakes his head, and then buries his face in his hands. His large body shakes as he sobs.

"She caught me."

"But . . . ?"

"She caught me drinking. She found me with the bottles, you know. That was the one thing I wasn't allowed to do to her, the one thing I'd promised her I would never touch again, the G.o.dd.a.m.n booze. Do you remember last summer, at your crayfish party when I got so drunk? After that I had to promise her I would never drink again, otherwise she said she was going to leave me. She couldn't have cared less about other women, but the booze . . . I can actually understand where she's coming from. Twenty years ago I was well on the way to drinking myself out of house and home. I was drunk at work. My patients complained. I was close to getting fired. I suppose she thought . . . that that was going to happen again. You know?"

I don't respond. I hadn't been expecting this. Everyone just a.s.sumed that Birgitta left Sven because he'd cheated on her. His womanizing was legendary. But I had no idea he drank. Although of course he had mentioned at some point that he used to drink way back when. But in some way I guess I just brushed that off as youthful impropriety. I never suspected that he still had a problem.

Nothing is how it seems.

Sven, who has always done his job so carefully, who's so highly esteemed by his patients, and whom Aina and I turn to whenever we need guidance. An alcoholic? I have trouble believing it.

"And now?" I ask hesitantly. I don't want him to feel pressured into responding if he doesn't want to. What he's told me is profoundly personal.

"Right now I'm really craving a drink," he says, giving me a look that's hard to read. "But I'm done with that now. And I'm done with love too. I'm done with all of it."

I smile at him, lean over the rickety table, and carefully stroke his k.n.o.bby sweater sleeve, noticing his cigarette breath.

"Don't you think you're exaggerating now? Maybe you'll change your mind with time."

He takes my hand and turns to me.

"No."

"No?"

"I'm done with love. I don't want any more. It's not worth it. It's too . . . painful."

I nod quietly, because what is there to say?

We sit like that for a long time, my hand in his as darkness falls outside the window. Then he looks at me and says, "So, here we sit. Two alcoholics in the same office."

He squeezes my hand a little, a smile flits across his face, and I can't be angry at him. Even though he has mentioned the unmentionable, touched that which must not be touched. Instead I smile back tiredly and shrug.

He looks over at the door and there's Aina, white bags from Soderhallerna in her hand. She's still wearing her leather jacket, her striped cap, and way-too-big, hand-knit red mittens. She is looking right at me and I wonder how long she's been standing there, listening to our conversation.

"Falafel?" she tries softly.

"So her old boyfriend killed his new girlfriend?" Vijay asks from his chair.

His posture is marginally better than a heap of driftwood's. A cigarette hangs from the corner of his mouth and his hairy arms jut out of his too-tight orange T-s.h.i.+rt. His sneakers are sitting just inside the door and he's wearing a pair of sheepskin slippers. Fluffy tufts of wool peek out around the ankles. Again I think that he is actually turning into one of those eccentric professors whose lectures we used to sit through when we were in college, the ones who got away with being socially incompetent, slept with young students, or talked to themselves in the hallways.

"Yes, he killed her."

Aina exhales the answer with alarming speed, as if she wanted to beat me to it or maybe didn't think I could answer this simple but crucial question.

We've gathered for a sort of crisis meeting at Vijay's office. Aina and I are both shaken by what's happened, by the way in which reality has forced its way into our little sisterhood group just as we were starting to get to know one another, reminding us once again of why we're actually meeting. Our meetings are not gossip sessions, they're counseling sessions for abused women.

Outside the window it's drizzling. Gray clouds are brooding over the city and an icy cold wind sweeps over the wet lawns that surround the Department of Psychology's ma.s.sive brick building. It's just after three in the afternoon on a Friday and the university is already starting to look deserted.

Our damp autumn clothes sit in a heap in the corner. Vijay was never overly concerned about tidiness, but ever since he and his boyfriend, Olle, moved in together, he has tried. Olle is the kind of person who hangs his T-s.h.i.+rts on matching hangers, who inserts cedar shoe trees into his sneakers, and who makes sure that cords to any electronics are wound around color-coded cable organizers so as not to clutter the apartment.

"f.u.c.k," Vijay mumbles, lighting yet another cigarette.

"What are we going to do?" Aina says.

"Nothing, or I mean of course you should proceed as usual. The group is going to be even more important to the partic.i.p.ants now. Not just for that patient, but for the others too. And if this . . . Kattis is in some danger, well then that's for the police to deal with. And I'll order one of those panic b.u.t.ton alarms for your office too. I probably should have thought of that before." Vijay is quiet for a second, studying us and slowly blowing out a curtain of smoke between us in a way that the uninitiated might interpret as trying to convey some message, but I know him, know that he's thinking. Given what we've told him.

"What?" I say.

Vijay drums lightly on the desk with his fingernails, takes another deep drag, and seems troubled by something.

"What I'm wondering is, how are you guys doing? Can you handle this?"

The room is quiet for a moment before Aina attempts to respond.

"We're . . . okay. I think so, anyway. And before all this happened, I was actually starting to like our meetings. It's unbelievably interesting to be confronted with all these women's stories. They're all so different. And yet they have this one thing in common, they've experienced violence. I think I'm starting to get a slightly clearer picture of what violence against women actually means."

Vijay laughs quietly and says, "This group isn't actually all that representative."

"What do you mean by that?" Aina asks.

"Your group is not representative of women who have been victims of violence. To begin with, your group isn't particularly diverse, ethnically speaking. You have, what, one woman who's not Swedish? And she's from Finland, which is pretty similar to Sweden in terms of culture. All the others are Swedish. That's not representative. In reality, other ethnicities are more p.r.o.ne to abuse, as are certain segments of the population like addicts and the homeless and women with disabilities. And then of course there are wars and conflicts. Girls and women are vulnerable in situations like that. Female soldiers are routinely subject to rape, and civilian women are raped and mutilated during times of war."

"But there hasn't been any war in Sweden in decades . . ." That comment just slips out of me and I can tell right away that Vijay finds my naivete tiresome.

He puts out his cigarette in a bottle of Italian mineral water and leans toward me. Speaks slowly and enunciates clearly, as if I were a child. "No, but we have a lot of girls and women here who come from other parts of the world. Which is why it is also our problem, and not just on a moral level but also in a purely practical sense. We're the ones who get to deal with that trauma."

I nod, ashamed of my ignorance, because I was just a.s.suming that violence against women meant Swedish women who'd been hit by Swedish boyfriends in some suburb where expensive but blandly beige modernist buildings pop up like mushrooms from the fertile Scandinavian soil.

As if he can hear what I am thinking, Vijay continues, "It's not as simple as you might think. The definition of violence against women is not clear-cut. It's not just about physical abuse in the home but about threats, psychological abuse, extreme control, underage marriage, conscious underfeeding of girls, checking their hymens. You know."

"So is there a common denominator?" Aina asks.

Vijay nods, runs his hand over the black stubble on his chin, which is becoming increasingly speckled with gray as the years go by. "Power," he says. "Power and control. That's always what it comes down to in the end."

I nod, looking out the little unwashed window that hardly lets in any of the gloomy autumn light.

Power.

Is it that simple?

I wonder if the man who once pursued me, the man who wanted me dead, was also driven by that-the power to control existence, to pa.s.s judgment, the power to decide over my life, my death.

"Her daughter saw everything," Aina says quietly.

"How old?" Vijay immediately asks.

"Five."

"Then they'll never get anything helpful out of her. Do you know how hard it is to question a five-year-old? Not to mention getting anything out of her that will actually stand up in court."

He shakes his head and looks out the window, at the rain and the muddy fields. A dog is barking somewhere. Black birds fly past the window in formation, maybe on their way to some warmer place.

"Are you sure?" I ask.

Vijay sighs and gives me an exhausted look. "Of course. They'll enlist the help of a social worker or a child interview specialist. They will question her, but they won't get anything useful from her. Studies show that it is extremely hard to get reliable witness testimony from children under five. They don't have the same sense of chronology as adults; they mix up imagination and reality. They remember details but not the overall picture. Besides, she's probably traumatized, which can make it even harder to access the memories. She probably won't remember what happened. Was she physically hurt herself?"

"No, she didn't seem to have any physical injuries. The police found her under the kitchen table, in the middle of a pool of blood. She was drawing."

"Was the kitchen the scene of the crime?"

"I think so," I say.

"Well, then it's not definite that she even saw anything, is it? I mean, she could have been in a different room and come in looking for her mother, found her, gotten scared, and hid under the table. Right?" Vijay asks.

"Yeah, I suppose," I concede.

Aina suddenly looks pale, rubbing her thighs with both hands as if trying to brush something away. Her nails are chewed down and I can see the remnants of dark-red polish. "How can you be so f.u.c.king disturbed that you would kill someone you love, or at least claim you love?"

But Vijay ignores the question, unaffected, continuing his line of thought. This is his MO, a.n.a.lyzing the more pathological aspects of the male psyche, the motives of criminals and violent men, the origins of evil.

"It's very unusual for these men to actually kill anyone. Last year in Sweden there were about twenty-seven hundred reported cases of domestic violence, and that is most definitely a gigantic underestimate. But on average in Sweden only seventeen women a year are killed by a man they are in a close relations.h.i.+p with. In other words, it's extremely uncommon for it to end this way. And if you look at the perpetrators in those cases, eighty percent are mentally ill, sixty percent have done time, and fifty percent are alcoholics. I mean, I don't know anything about this specific guy, but chances are that he meets at least one of these criteria."

I avoid saying that I've actually met Henrik myself, that he came to see me. The last thing I want is for Vijay and Aina to start worrying about me again.

Aina shrugs and says, "I don't think he's an alcoholic or that he's been in the slammer, but what do I know? According to Kattis, he is violent. He also seems to have been incredibly in love with her, had a hard time letting go of her, couldn't move on, stuff like that. And she doesn't seem to be able to let go of him either."

Vijay laughs and leans toward Aina, gently brushes away a strand of her long blond hair that has fallen out of her messy bun, tucking it behind her ear, a gesture that is both intimate and tender.

"Not love. It's never about love, my friend. It's about power. Don't forget that."

Excerpt from the Student Health Records, alvangen Elementary and Middle School

The mother called during phone consultation hours today and is very worried about her son, who's in third grade. She says the boy is complaining more and more of tummy aches and headaches and saying that he's sick. The mother has to nag him to get him to go to school. She says the other kids tease the boy at school because he's so slow and a little overweight. On one occasion some of the older boys tricked him into eating rabbit p.o.o.p, which they said was candy. She's also afraid that some of the other kids might be manipulating her son because he's gullible and a little naive. She thinks other kids got her son to shoplift from the corner store by promising him candy and magazines.

The mother is very upset and cries during much of the call. Says she doesn't know what to do and that all she wants to do is help her boy but that she isn't getting through to him. She also says that the situation is increasingly causing conflict at home and that her husband thinks she's too lenient and indulgent.

We decide that the boy and the mother should come in and meet with me. I also recommend that she take him to the health care center for tests to rule out the possibility of anemia, etc.

Sara Solberg, school nurse

Aina and I squeeze under a little red umbrella on Gotgatan. Heavy sweaters, scarves, and shoes can't keep the raw cold out.