The Unit. Part 13

She drew herself up into a sitting position and I plumped up the pillows so that she had some support for her back when she leaned against the headboard.

"Yes, but you weren't ill," she said. "It's harder work with sick people, especially if they're going to die soon."

As I pa.s.sed her a cup of coffee I said I wasn't sure if I agreed with her. "A person who's physically healthy but in despair can be just as difficult to deal with, surely. Looking after someone who's ill is quite simple, really; at least you know what you have to do, in purely practical terms. But what do you do with someone you can't do anything for?"

Alice smiled.

"You listen, I guess," she said.

"Yes, and isn't that the hardest thing of all?" I said.

"Is it? It doesn't require any special knowledge or skills. Just the ability to hear. And a little calm in your body. The ability to sit still and listen. I don't see why it should be so difficult."

Then she turned her attention to her coffee for a while, taking tiny, tiny sips, closing her eyes for a second after each sip, looking as if she was really enjoying it. Then she suddenly stopped, looked at me and said: "Try not to be angry with Elsa."

"What?" I said. "So you know we ..."

I didn't know how to finish the sentence, so I let it hang there, gaping, incomplete.

"I've noticed," replied Alice in that slow, tired tone of voice that had become hers. She added: "You have told her, haven't you?"

"Told her what?"

"That you're having a baby, of course."

I frowned and glanced down at my stomach.

"Oh, it's been obvious from the start," said Alice. "Ever since ... let's see, it must have been just before Johannes died, I think. A week or so before that."

I must have looked as if I'd seen a ghost, because she laughed and said: "Don't look at me like that, there's nothing strange about it, I'm not psychic or anything. I've known so many women who've gotten pregnant and had children that I've learned to recognize the signs straightaway. Something happens to a woman's face when she becomes pregnant; it becomes a fraction broader, somehow, and so does the mouth. And there's something subtle about the posture and the look in the eyes that changes too, but I can't quite put my finger on it."

She put the cup down on the bedside table, her hand shaking; it was as if she didn't have enough strength to talk and hold a coffee cup at the same time.

"What are you going to do?" she asked. "Are you going to give birth to it?"

"Yes."

"And then?"

I snorted. "What do you think?" I said.

"I don't think anything," she said. "You tell me."

"They're going to take it away," I said. "They're going to take it from me and give it to someone else."

Alice looked at me, with absolute clarity, as if she were looking straight through me, but she didn't say anything else; it was as if she knew, or at least suspected, that I had a choice, a possibility, a way out.

There's something strange about people who know they're going to die soon. It's as if their senses are expanded to superhuman dimensions, as if they acquire X-ray vision and become mind readers and can see into the future and suddenly understand everything that's going on inside and between other people. And either that really is the case, or else we just want to believe it is, because it makes dying more attractive and easier to reconcile ourselves with, somehow.

In the end Alice said: "Anyway, try not to be angry with Elsa."

"I'm not angry with Elsa," I said. "She's the one who's angry with me."

"Try to understand her," said Alice. "I might have reacted like her as well, if it weren't ... if it hadn't been for this."

She tapped herself on the head.

"Try to understand her," she repeated, and I was afraid she was on her way into a new episode of short-term memory loss. But she went on: "You haven't forgotten how it feels to lose a friend because of a child, I hope?"

"But she isn't losing me," I said. "I'm here, I'm not about to disappear. And if anyone is losing anything it's me, losing my child."

Alice looked at me in that same way again, clear and omniscient. I didn't say any more, and we sat there quietly for a while. She reached for her coffee cup again. I offered her a plate with two cheese sandwiches that I'd made, but she shook her head. She looked even more tired now, and I had the impression that I was literally watching her disappear, little by little, before my eyes. I put the plate back on the bedside table, and all of a sudden I felt inexpressibly sad; it was as if a trapdoor had opened inside me, and I couldn't stop myself from crying. In a vain attempt to hide the fact that I was crying, I turned my head away.

"Dorrit, my dear ...," said Alice, putting her cup back down on the bedside table.

"I'm sorry!" I sniveled. "I ought to be strong. Strong for you. But it's just that I can't stand-I hate-the thought of losing you!"

"I know that, Dorrit," she replied calmly. "It comforts me to know that. And that's enough for me. You don't need to be strong."

That was the first time in my life someone had told me I didn't need to be strong.

"Hey," she said next. "How about climbing in here with me for a while? I think it would do both of us good."

I nodded, blew my nose on one of the napkins on the tray, then went around to the other side of the double bed, lifted up the covers and crawled in beside Alice. She was warm, red hot, like a stove.

That was the last real conversation I had with the Alice I had gotten to know. That was the last time she knew it was me she was talking to for more than a couple of minutes at a time. Within a week she had made her final donation. A boy with diabetes received islet cells from her pancreas, and one of the country's most popular television personalities, a mother with two children, received her remaining kidney.

4.

My new writing project had remained more or less untouched over the past few months. The only thing I had done was to read through what I had already written: thirty pages or so, a good start-though I say so myself. But a good start doesn't go far, not if you no longer have any idea how you want the narrative to proceed, and particularly if you can no longer remember what you wanted to achieve with the story. It was as if the train had left, the train carrying the theme and my motivation.

I did, however, make one last attempt just after Alice's final donation. I thought perhaps I might find some solace in the project, I thought I might be able to rediscover my motivation through that solace. So I sat down on my fantastic desk chair with support for the base of my spine, my neck and my arms, switched on the computer, opened the file. Then I sat there for a good while, three or four hours or more. Wrote a few lines. Deleted them. Wrote a few more lines. Deleted them again. Took out a notepad and wrote by hand instead. Crossed out what I'd written, turned over the page and tried again, wrote, crossed out, turned the page and tried over and over again, but no, I just got angry and tired. In the end I decisively selected the doc.u.ment on the screen and moved it to the recycle bin, then emptied the recycle bin and shut down the computer. Leaned back in the chair against the headrest. My gaze happened to fall on Majken's picture of the deformed fetus, either grimacing with pain or smiling scornfully. And it was then, at that very moment, that I first felt a movement in my belly. A brief, fleeting movement a bit like an air bubble, somehow, that was definitely not gas or anything else connected with the digestive process.

I looked down at my belly and it happened again: a kick or a push, perhaps even a movement of the head, how should I know, but it was the first tangible sign that something was not only growing but also living-and living it up-in there.

"h.e.l.lo there," I whispered, and pressed my hand gently against my stomach over my s.h.i.+rt. "h.e.l.lo, little one."

I did nothing more that day. I just called down to lab 4, where I was currently partic.i.p.ating in a safe but irritating psychological experiment to do with living s.p.a.ce and territory and so on, and said I needed to rest today. The team leading the experiment was very understanding about that kind of thing. It was partly because they knew I was expecting a child and was tired and slightly nauseous almost all the time, and partly because they were psychologists, so I guess it was their job to be understanding. Afterward I went and lay down on the bed, took the fossil stone out of my left pocket and lay there holding it, turning it round and round in one hand while the other hand rested on my stomach beneath my s.h.i.+rt.

After an hour and a half I felt another bubbling movement in my belly, and at the same time a very, very slight, almost imperceptible pressure against the palm of my hand. I pressed back, carefully. Another movement, almost like a reply. I gasped, then I laughed, then I cried, then I got up and went to the bathroom and had a pee and washed my face. Then I went and lay down again and fell asleep.

If anyone had asked me whether these early kicks or pushes made me happy or unhappy, I wouldn't have known how to answer them. I didn't know whether what I felt was longing or loss, togetherness or loneliness.

A few days later I went for an ultrasound. Amanda Jonstorp herself was doing it. She squeezed out a blob of clear gel; it was cold and it tickled and I giggled a little. She smiled at me, then picked up the wide probe and began to slide it over my stomach, alternating between small movements and broad sweeps. At the same time she stared with concentration at a computer screen that was turned away from me.

"Does everything look okay?" I asked.

"Yes, everything looks great," said Amanda. "Better than expected, to be honest."

"So can I have a look now?" I said.

"What?" she said, stopping abruptly in mid-sweep through the slippery gel on my stomach, and I realized I wasn't meant to see my child on that screen, wasn't meant to carry around a blurred picture of my scan to show everybody I b.u.mped into who wasn't quick enough to come up with an excuse to get out of it.

Amanda had red blotches on her cheeks and something of Petra Runhede about her as she stumbled over her words: "I ... I'm ... really sorry, Dorrit. I thought ... I thought you ... realized. I thought ... You do understand it would be wrong for us to encourage you to ... to ... bond with the fetus."

As I was walking toward the elevators in the clinic reception area, I pushed my hand into my pocket and felt the key card. Just as when I had been carrying that little crumpled note with the message to Potter, I had changed pants several times since that day in February when I had been given the card, and by this time I had become very adept at moving it from the dirty pair on their way to the laundry to the clean pair I took out of the closet. I would hold it against my palm with my thumb and make sure I kept the back of my hand angled upward until I had slipped the card into the right front pocket of the clean pants. At the same time I would do my best to distract attention from that hand by doing something with the other: scratching my head, coughing into it, lifting the lid of the laundry basket and putting in the dirty pants, smoothing out a crease or picking off a loose thread. I was silent, quick and discreet, just as Birthmark had advised me to be.

The key card had been constantly on my mind over the past months. I had often slipped my hand into my pocket to feel it as I was doing now, and every time I had done so I had repeated the code to myself: 98 44, 98 44-which I also did now. But I hadn't done any more, not yet; I still hadn't come to a decision as to whether I would use the card or not. I didn't make a decision now either, but this time it was as if everything a.s.sociated with the key card-the possibilities, the risks and the uncertainty -had moved up into the part of the brain that actually thinks. And I realized I had reached a point where I had to make a decision.

I don't know if it was because of this s.h.i.+ft or if I would have seen what I saw in any case, but just as I came out of the hospital lobby with my hand in my pocket and started to walk toward elevator H, I saw, in an alcove next to the row of elevator doors, a staff member fiddling with something, her face turned to the wall. The wall was the color of linden flowers just there, exactly like the uniform s.h.i.+rt she was wearing, and it was quite dark in the alcove. But not so dark that I couldn't see her, and after a moment I also saw that she was actually standing in front of a door, a very narrow one, with no handle; it was the same color as the wall, surrounded by a door frame, again exactly the same shade of green, and she was fiddling with something next to this door frame, but not for long; it only took two or three seconds for her to do what was necessary to open the door, and a second or two more for her to push it open a little way, slip through it and disappear, whereupon the door quickly and soundlessly closed behind her.

5.

Vivi carried herself just as beautifully as before, just as fine-limbed and lovely. But she was moving more slowly and more stiffly as she walked around the library pus.h.i.+ng a little cart, replacing the books on the shelves. I saw her through the big window facing out onto the square as I came around with two films and a book to return.

For the past two weeks or so I hadn't gone out any more than necessary; I had just spent time with my own thoughts and my steadily expanding belly. It was showing now, my belly, I could no longer hide it, even under the loosest, bulkiest clothes, even if it wasn't yet quite so large that an observer could be 100 percent certain I was pregnant just by looking at me when I was fully dressed. At least that's what I thought. When I walked into the library and Vivi caught sight of me, she stopped short and said: "Wow! I mean: hi! I haven't seen you for a long time, Dorrit."

She left the cart of books between two shelves and hobbled over to me at the circulation desk.

She had lost great clumps of her thick, s.h.i.+ny hair and nowadays always wore a handkerchief knotted around her head. It made her face look smaller, and her eyes and mouth bigger, and the whole thing gave her a naked, vulnerable appearance.

"How are things?" I asked tentatively.

"Okay," she said.

"And ... Elsa?"

"Not bad. A little better than she was a while ago, actually."

I placed the book and the films on the counter, and was just about to ask her to give Elsa my best wishes, when she said: "What's going on with you two these days? You never see each other. She never talks about you. And if I ask her about something to do with you, she changes the subject. What's happened?"

"Hasn't she said anything?"

"No, that's what I'm telling you: she doesn't say a thing."

And that's the way it was: Elsa hadn't told Vivi about our conversation, our quarrel. She hadn't told her I was expecting a child.

"You're joking!" she exclaimed when I told her.

And then she laughed. "And there I was thinking ... I was thinking you'd started comfort eating or something. Or maybe you were taking part in some experiment that made you swell up, or where you had to eat a load of candy and cookies all day and weren't allowed to exercise or something, these researchers come up with so many dumb ideas. And in fact you're ..."

She broke off, and said: "But how did it happen? I mean, how is it possible? Have you had hormone treatment? Or fertilized eggs implanted?"

"Why would I have done that?"

"I don't mean on your own initiative, of course," she said. "But it could have been done to you, couldn't it? While you were anesthetized."

"But I haven't been anesthetized," I said. "Not since I donated my kidney, and that's ages ago; only an elephant could be pregnant that long."

"I see," she said. "Well, maybe you were impregnated naturally."

"I think so," I said.

I was about to leave; I was tired and Vivi seemed kind of strained, somehow. But now she said in her usual warm, serious tone: "Was it Johannes who ... ?"

I nodded.

"Did he ... Did he find out before ... ?"

"Just about," I replied.

She looked at me. It was too much for me, that sympathetic look. I glanced away, swallowed. Then she held out her long arms, pulled me close to her, wrapped me in her embrace and stroked my back. She was almost as tall as Johannes; the top of my head reached her chin, and I closed my eyes, allowed myself to be enveloped by her, leaning my cheek against her breast. The scent of her reminded me of honey and fields of oilseed rape in bloom. I thought about Jock, and my dilapidated house and the farms and meadows around it, I thought about early summer in Skne, about the wind and the sound of tractors and blackbirds and nightingales and young crows and the neighbors' children playing and the wood stacked up to dry and was.h.i.+ng hanging on the line between the apple trees, flapping in the breeze, and I could see my blue-painted garden furniture and there, on one of the chairs, I saw Johannes sitting, scratching Jock behind the ears as I walked toward them with a tray of coffee and cookies. I could see it as if it were a memory, and I didn't cry, but it was as if my throat had been ripped apart, as if I had been crying, and my legs were about to give way.

Vivi led me over to her chair behind the circulation desk. I sat down. She fetched me a gla.s.s of water and pulled out a chair for herself, then sat down beside me with her arm around me. I drank a little of the water. Then we just sat there, behind the desk, until some borrowers came along needing Vivi's help.

6.

Elsa was lying on the lawn in the winter garden. She was lying on her side in the sun on a blanket. She was resting her head on her arm; an open book lay beside her. But she wasn't reading, she was sleeping. Her rib cage was heaving, long deep breaths, even, almost completely free of that rattle now, but she coughed in her sleep from time to time. I stood in the shade on the gravel path just a few yards away from her. Stood there missing her. Dare I go over? Dare I go over and sit down next to her, be there when she woke up?

I did it, I walked from the crunching gravel onto the silent gra.s.s, sat down cross-legged an arm's length away from her, in front of her, so that I wasn't casting a shadow over her.

I had thought a great deal about what Alice had said. "You haven't forgotten what it feels like to lose a friend because of a child, I hope?" Of course I hadn't forgotten that feeling of being abruptly pushed out of a close circle to some distant periphery. Coming second, third, fourth, last. Being treated like someone less knowledgeable, someone inferior. Being shut out-and yet, paradoxically enough, being taken for granted. The old friends out in the community who had become parents had continued wanting to see me, but when we did meet up they were distant, sometimes condescending and always inaccessible, as if they were wrapped in invisible padding, at least when the children were small. The strange thing was that this only applied to my female friends; the men were certainly very much preoccupied with the child and with the upheaval involved in becoming a parent, and later with the chaos that ensued when they had their second child, which intensified when they had the third, fourth, fifth and so on. The men were absorbed, yes, but it was as if the women were on Valium: they talked and laughed and nodded and smiled, but they weren't really there. It was as if they focused all their energy and all their interest in others on one single ent.i.ty: the child.

I had always thought this was a deliberate stance, that they actually chose to close themselves off to more or less everyone except the child, who of course was dependent on them for its existence. I had always been convinced that this was a conscious decision to prioritize. But now I wasn't so sure anymore. Now, while I was carrying something that would be a child, I noticed that I was changing; I was becoming self-absorbed in a new way that was hard to define, and I was beginning to sense that the self-sufficiency of those parents I had known was perhaps not a matter of choice. It wasn't that I didn't care about my friends anymore. My senses were heightened as never before, particularly my sense of smell and my hearing, and I was sensitive and easily moved, but at the same time I was becoming less and less receptive to the sorrows and troubles of those around me, and to their joy and happiness as well, when it came down to it. My friends meant a great deal to me-the few who were left. I didn't think any less of them than before, quite the opposite, in fact. I rejoiced in the new ones, Gorel and Mats and a couple of others, was immensely grateful that Vivi was such a good friend, and I grieved for Alice and Lena and Erik and Vanja and Majken and all the others I had lost. And Elsa, lying here in front of me on the gra.s.s, her head resting on her arm-I missed Elsa so much it felt as if my heart were being ripped out of my body. I enjoyed meeting and spending time with my friends, and when I did see them I registered everything they said and reacted to it, but a second later it slid off me like rain off a newly polished car: rapidly and without friction and without a single drop penetrating the surface. It was strange: in one way I was more sensitive than ever, in another I was more or less closed off.

When I had perceived this change in my own att.i.tude, I couldn't help asking myself if there might be a biological cause, if this might be some form of primitive behavior on the part of the female mammal that women couldn't escape, just as we couldn't escape the fact that if we were to become a parent naturally, then unlike men we didn't have all the time in the world.

At any rate, I had to admit that Elsa was right, and I intended to tell her so as soon as she woke up, which I did. She had just about realized that I was sitting there, when I said: "You were right, Elsa. I am indeed waddling around looking smug and important and on a higher plane, just like all those needed stuck-up b.i.t.c.hes out there in the community."

She sat up, pushed her hair back, yawned, and rubbed her eyes. "Oh yes?"