The Unit. Part 14

"But," I went on, "I have to tell you that the smugness has nothing whatsoever to do with human economic growth. It's not that kind of self-sufficiency; it has absolutely nothing to do with what I can do for society or how good and valuable I am. Everything is here-and here." I placed my hand on my midriff, then on my head. "And I can't help it. It isn't something I have any control over, that's just the way it is. I'm at the mercy of my hormones!"

"Okay," she said. "I understand. I understand that's something I don't understand. I don't suppose you'd like to go for a swim instead of sitting here talking in riddles?"

I couldn't help laughing. I stood up, held my hand out and pulled her to her feet in a gentlemanly manner. She picked up her book, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights Wuthering Heights, and I folded up her blanket, and we ambled off arm in arm with the book and the blanket along the gravel path toward the galleria, stopping to say hi to Mats who was digging in a flowerbed, dressed only in shorts and heavy boots and a tool belt. On a cart behind him on the path were shrubs in pots, waiting to be planted. In the distance, on a bench, I could see Potter with his round, black-framed gla.s.ses. He was munching on an apple and flipping through a magazine. It was lunchtime; people were pouring up and down the staircase to the Terrace restaurant and its groaning buffet. Still arm in arm, Elsa and I emerged into the Atrium Walkway, and took the first elevator down to the sports facility.

We swam, slowly and for a long time, side by side, in silence. Afterward we had a sauna. I sat at the bottom, closest to the door, pus.h.i.+ng it open slightly from time to time, unsure what I had actually heard about pregnancy and saunas: had I heard that it was a good thing, or had I heard that it wasn't? Elsa sat right up at the top where it was hottest, on the third bench, and leaned back against the wall. We didn't say much, we mostly just sat there being friends again. From time to time one of us would say lazily to the other something along the lines of: "Have you heard that so-and-so is involved in an experiment with this and that?" or "So-and-so has finished with so-and-so, did you know?" or "Do you remember that guy back home in the village who was like this or that and who used to do this or that?"

But when we eventually decided we'd had enough, and Elsa climbed down, she said: "Dorrit, do you remember what we promised each other at the start?"

I remembered. Shortly after Majken's death Elsa and I had promised each other that the day one of us found out we were on the list for our final donation, we would tell the other-and not only that it was going to happen, but also when when. So that the other person wouldn't have to run around looking for someone who no longer existed.

"Yes," I said, looking up at her as she stood there in front of me, the sweat pouring down her wiry body, which was quite scarred by this stage.

"Why?"

"Does it still apply?" she said.

"Yes, I guess it does," I said, and felt the anxiety stab down into my chest and squeeze it, hard. Don't say it's time now! I thought. Don't say we have to part now, when we've just made friends again, don't say that she's going to ... and my voice was trembling as I repeated, emphasizing the question: "Why?"

"Oh," said Elsa, taking a step toward the door and pus.h.i.+ng it open, "I just wanted to check. I just wanted to know that's what will happen. That you won't just disappear. That you won't just be gone one day, without telling me in advance."

Feeling relieved I got up and followed her out. My legs were shaking, I had been so scared and now I was so relieved. In the shower room she turned to me.

"Can we promise each other, Dorrit? Can we promise each other again?"

"Of course, Elsa," I said. "Of course we can."

"Good," she said, and her voice gave away the fact that she was moved. It was trembling, somehow exposed, as she went on: "Shall we shake on it?"

We clasped hands and then we hugged each other, standing there naked and covered in sweat on the tiled floor outside the sauna. A woman with short white hair smiled at us as she pa.s.sed on the way in. She reminded me a little of Lena, but she had a longer, narrower face and her expression was more tired.

It was only some hours later, during the night, as I was lying alone in my bed with one hand on my stomach, gazing up at the ceiling, that it occurred to me: "disappear" didn't necessarily have to mean "make the final donation." It could just as easily mean "leave," "run away." And if I decided to go, if I decided to run away, I wouldn't be able to keep my promise to Elsa unless I revealed my secret to her, which would mean breaking the promise I had made never to tell anyone about the key card. And I am not the kind of person who breaks promises. I am not the kind of person who betrays a trust. For example, in this story I have not revealed the true circ.u.mstances under which I received the key card. Neither of the two nurses who met me when I raced into the surgical department that day has a birthmark. Nor was it either of those two who gave me the key card, and the conversation with the person who did give me the card did not in fact take place in the break room where I sat and waited as I gazed out at the snow-covered park with the pond and the ducks, but in a completely different room in a completely different part of the unit, and at another time. And the code is actually not 98 44 at all.

No, I am not the kind of person who breaks promises. And so now I was faced with a dilemma.

I turned over, facing the side of the bed where Johannes used to lie. I placed one hand on the pillow where his head used to rest. The child in my belly turned over as well. Then we slept.

7.

In the newspapers, on the radio and on TV it was early summer. The national days had been celebrated, first the Norwegian and then the Swedish, with flag-waving, royalty, and parades with bands playing. The usual euphoria surrounding those national days was now gradually evolving into the usual euphoria surrounding midsummer. On the news, on talk shows, and in doc.u.mentaries, they had just finished picking over the to-be-or-not-to-be of the monarchy and the eternal question of why the Norwegians were so much more energetic in their national celebrations than the Swedes, and were just starting to fill report after report and feature after feature with the price of strawberries and new potatoes, and with midsummer poles ready to be danced around, regional variations on the national costume, wooden horses from Dalarna, with islands in the archipelago, barn dances and red-painted cottages, with herring and aquavit, drunken parties and drunk driving offenses. Obviously the old traditions were being kept alive out there. But here inside the unit we celebrated neither the one nor the other; we saw no sign of a flag or a midsummer pole. Aquavit and herring were not on the menu. We could get fresh strawberries all year round, they were grown in a greenhouse in the galleria, and I never heard anyone mention new potatoes. Personally, I have always thought that new potatoes taste unpleasantly doughy, somehow.

It was, however, time for the monthly welcome party, and I had decided to go. I had wanted to dress in a feminine way, but none of my dresses fit me any more. So I stuck to pants, s.h.i.+rt and jacket. I had put weight on all over my body, and had even grown the hint of a double chin. For those who didn't know me or didn't know about my condition, and weren't expecting to see a pregnant dispensable person, I expect I just looked fat. That suited me perfectly, because I didn't want to offend any of the new arrivals, didn't want to cause any kind of unpleasantness or consternation. Not tonight. Tonight I was in the mood to have fun. I was in the mood to dance and get to know some new people.

I combed my hair, then stood there looking at my reflection, alternating between the front view and profile. I pushed my hands into my pockets-in the left was the fossil stone, in the right the key card. I stood up straight. I actually looked strong; it was easy to understand why people were happy to believe that I was. I looked indomitable. I looked as if I had authority.

The menu consisted of apple and cauliflower salad with a yogurt dressing, b.u.t.terfly salmon with teriyaki sauce and stir-fried vegetables, plus, for dessert, chocolate and orange cream with mascarpone and crushed cookies. I was sharing a table with Mats, Vivi and a new arrival, Miranda, who was a sculptor. Like most new arrivals she was very quiet, poking unhappily at her food. I decided to make a point of talking to her during the party, to try to make her feel better. We started chatting, during the meal at first and then later in the bar as we tried out different drinks with umbrellas in them.

The band hadn't started playing yet, and slow, rhythmic music was churning out of the loudspeakers at a relatively low volume. Miranda was telling me about her work. She made small and large sculptures in clay-the biggest the size of a human, the smallest the size of thimbles-depicting humanlike figures in contorted postures. She had, as she put it, "a weakness for contorted bodies," and saw a great deal of beauty in the crooked, the misshapen and the scarred.

"There is," she said, "actually something beautiful in suffering. Even in purely physical pain. Does that sound perverse? Does it sound as if I'm a psychopath?"

"Well ..." I said. "Maybe it does. But I presume that an artistic eye, an eye that doesn't evaluate and a.n.a.lyze, but primarily observes, ought to be able to perceive beauty in more or less any shape or expression."

"Oh, it's so nice to talk to someone who understands!" said Miranda. "Because that's exactly how it is; it isn't about my evaluation, it isn't that I think it's cool if someone is deformed or suffering or in pain. I just happen to think it's beautiful."

There was something about her that reminded me of Majken. She was like "the dark side of Majken," she was the same but the reverse, you might say. And I told her about Majken's picture of the deformed fetus that was now hanging above the desk in my apartment.

"I'd really like to see that," said Miranda, and I told her where I lived and said she was welcome to drop by any time.

Just as I said that, the rock band came on stage. I only needed to hear the first two or three beats of the intro to recognize the ballad "For My Girl," and out of the corner of my eye I saw a figure approaching from the side with a self-a.s.sured walk, straight-backed, lithe, his s.h.i.+rt sleeves rolled up, his forearms muscular, his face weather-beaten and healthy and with a slightly cheeky but somehow shy smile, sparkling eyes, a playful look in those eyes that were-so it seemed to me-seeking mine; and as he came closer I turned slowly to face him, ready to hear him say: "Dorrit, you look lovely tonight," and to bow and kiss my hand.

But it was someone else of course, someone I had never seen before, someone who didn't even stop, but just walked past me with a polite nod.

Miranda said something to me, I didn't hear what it was, the music was loud now. I was just going to ask her to repeat it when there was a movement inside me, a push or a kick. Automatically I pressed my hand against my stomach. Another push now, against my hand, very clear. It was as if we were giving each other a high five, and I wanted to tell someone-no, not someone someone, I wanted to tell Johannes, I wanted to tell Johannes and no one else that I had just done a high five with our baby. I wanted to take his hand and place it on my stomach, feel the warmth of his hand, let him feel the movements of our child. Let him say h.e.l.lo to his baby.

I could see that Miranda was saying something else, closer now, right next to me. She looked troubled, I thought, but I still couldn't hear what she was saying, and suddenly I didn't know how to open my mouth and speak. I must have looked like an idiot, staring at her vacantly and stupidly, as if I suddenly had no idea who she was. But the baby was somehow pressing on my bladder, because all of a sudden I was desperate for a pee, and I came to my senses, smiled apologetically at Miranda, and said: "Sorry, what did you say?"

"Don't you feel well?" she almost shouted.

"I'm fine, it's just ... It's just ... it's this song, it ... Old memories, you know."

She nodded.

"Do you feel like dancing?" she asked.

"Sure. But I have to go the bathroom first," I replied. "I'm bursting. Back soon, I won't be long!"

I pushed my way through the sea of happy party people, residents and staff mixing together; many well-known faces, roughly the same number vaguely familiar, and a small number completely unknown, I said hi and nodded and waved to the left and the right and soon I had reached the toilets at the far end of the room: a row of doors with people going in and out. Voices rumbling and roaring, laughing and shouting, music pulsating from the main room: "This is for my girl, this is for my woman, for my world. Baby, baby, this is all for you ..."

The baby must have taken its foot off my bladder-or moved its bottom or head or elbow-because the pressure had gone and suddenly I didn't need to go to the bathroom at all. Perhaps that was why I now noticed three extra doors at the end without the toilet symbol on them. These three were a bit smaller and looked more like some kind of decoration, a kind of fake door rather than real doors. There were no signs on them, no handles, and it was only when I-sauntering up and down in front of the doors in an attempt to look as if I were desperate to pee-got really close that I saw the narrow metal-framed slot in the door frame.

Without thinking-as if I were on autopilot, simply functioning, simply acting, like a robot-I took the key card out of my pocket and swiped it through the slot as if in pa.s.sing. A small gap in the door frame immediately slid open, revealing a keypad not much bigger than that of a cell phone. In a state that can best be described as a panic-stricken trance, I keyed in 98 44, pushed open the door, stepped over the threshold and onto the other side, and before I gave myself time to see or register where I had ended up, I grabbed the handle on my side of the door and pushed it firmly shut.

It was incredibly bright. I was bathed in a white, harsh neon light and a silence so complete that my own heart sounded like thunderclaps recorded on a loop and played back at a very high speed. It took a little while, I don't know how long, seconds or minutes, before I was able to see in the cold light. And when I finally saw that I was on a landing in a stairwell, exactly as the person I call Birthmark had explained, my feelings caught up with me. Panic grabbed hold and penetrated my body and raced through my veins and arteries, rus.h.i.+ng and roaring right through me.

Up or down? I thought feverishly, shrugged my shoulders and started to run upstairs; the party room was on K1, and should therefore be below ground level. It was only when I had gone up a couple of floors that I remembered my experience in the break room in the surgical department, where there had been a window facing onto the outside world despite the fact that it was located on what was called the bas.e.m.e.nt level.

So I turned and ran downstairs instead, two floors, three, then down another half staircase which came to a stop at another door, a substantial door made of metal. This time the slot wasn't hidden in the door frame, but was on the wall next to it, in full view and with a keypad similar to the ones you find in stores for customers to key in their debit pin number.

With my hand shaking-shaking and sweating-I swiped the card, my other hand hovering over the keypad, ready, and-oh no! It was as if the code had been completely wiped out of my memory, the code was-yes, that was it, I remembered, keyed in 94 88. But nothing happened, there was no click. I pushed down the handle anyway, but the door was locked, obviously.

I tried again: 99 48-no.

48 99 then? No.

There was something wrong with those four numbers, they were right but yet they were wrong. My whole body was shaking now, sweat pouring down my back, my mouth was dry and I was on the verge of tears, almost hysterical, my head was spinning-when that trivial refrain suddenly echoed through my brain and stopped the spinning: This is for my girl, this is for my woman, for my world. Baby, baby, this is all for you ...

All at once I was perfectly calm, perfectly clear, and firmly keyed in the combination 98 44, whereupon the door obediently gave a faint click and I pressed down the handle, pushed open the heavy door, walked out, took two steps, and the metal door closed behind me.

I was out. Outside. There was a breeze, that was the first thing I noticed. I could feel it against my face, I could feel it in my hair, lifting it and messing it up. I could feel it making the legs of my pants flap loosely against my calves. It was almost dark; the sun was drawing its last burning threads from a part of the sky that was already dark and full of stars, toward a still-glowing strip on the opposite side. It wasn't cold, but it was very cool; the night was likely to be quite chilly.

I stood there for a moment just outside the door, watching the wind run its invisible fingers through the leaves on the trees, making the flowers on the lilac bushes nod and bow and the birch trees rustle and whisper. I was in a park. There were lawns and gravel paths; one of the paths led to the left, around the corner of the building. Beyond the corner there was, from my point of view, only darkness. A little way ahead of me, over to the right, I could just see a pond among some low bushes. Tall trees towered up behind the pond, their huge crowns swaying. It was the same pond I had seen from the window of the break room that day in February. My first impulse was to run over there, to get behind the bushes and in among the trees, and to hide myself somewhere. But I realized at once that if there were surveillance cameras out here, which seemed likely, and if anyone saw me running, that would attract attention. It would look suspicious, because why would a staff member run out of the workplace and in among the bushes to hide? No, that would be silly, I reasoned, the only sensible thing I could do was to follow the path around the corner. So that's what I did.

The gravel crunched beneath my feet-deafeningly, it seemed to me-and I expected to hear running footsteps behind me at any moment, to be escorted back into the building by a couple of strong guards, or for a patrol of some kind to be waiting around the bend. But n.o.body came running and no patrol was waiting. When I got around the corner I saw instead, in the romantic, ghostly atmosphere of the twilight, with its mixture of evening sun and darkness, heightened here by the glow of the streetlamps, that the path led over a patch of gra.s.s to a low white wooden fence with an open gate in it. I walked the twenty yards or so to the fence which was ridiculously low, hardly up to my knees; the open gate was completely superfluous, but as the path led to the gate I went out through it anyway, and found myself on a road that was illuminated for fifty yards or so in each direction.

On the other side of the road was a rolling landscape of fields and forest groves and individual farms and houses, their outside lights twinkling like lanterns in a sea of night. Above this sea there was still a glowing, golden pink strip from the sun. So that was the west, I established, or rather northwest, as it was around midsummer. In other words, the road ran north-south-roughly, at any rate. After a moment's hesitation I chose to go north.

When I had gotten beyond the scope of the streetlights, and the golden twilight strip in the northwest had changed to a faint grayish glow, I found myself surrounded by black, cool night. With each step I took it was like climbing further and further into total nothingness. I wasn't afraid, it didn't feel eerie, just uncertain. Since I couldn't see the ground in front of me, I looked up instead, and above my head the sky was so clear that even the most distant stars could be seen-some so distant they have never been named and do not appear on any map of the constellations. The sky was covered with them. Less distant, far below these billions of anonymous stars, was the Little Bear, which Johannes had taught me to find. And there was the Dipper, and there, just to the side and in a straight line from the two stars at the back of the Dipper, glowed the North Star.

PART 4.

I did get to see her. Only for a moment, but still. She had black hair. Her face was smooth and delicate, like a doll's. She had Johannes's nose, his upper lip and his mouth. And his chin too, I think. But there was also something of my mother in her face, perhaps something about the forehead, perhaps it was the actual shape of her face. She was a little bundle: arms and legs curled in the fetal position, those incomprehensibly tiny hands clenched, the fingers of one hand curled around the thumb. Eyes tightly closed, her toes alternately bending and flexing in time with her cries.

That was what I saw and heard when the midwife held her up in front of me: that she was real and that she was alive and healthy. Then she was taken away. And I was st.i.tched up as I lay there on the operating table, anesthetized from my rib cage downward.

Petra Runhede had said: "Let me know if there's anything I can do for you, Dorrit."

She had said it that morning after Johannes's final donation, and-amusingly enough-she said it again when I b.u.mped into her in the crowd at the party just a few minutes after I returned from my nocturnal stroll beneath the stars. I had been gone for about an hour and had had time to think about a lot of things, so when she asked me I was perfectly clear about what she could do for me.

"Okay," I replied. "Do you want to know right now?"

"Sure," she said. "Let's go and sit somewhere a bit quieter."

We went out into the lobby. There were low tables, sofas with short backs and round padded stools; it looked like an airport lounge, impersonal and no more comfortable than necessary. I sat down on one of the sofas, with Petra on a stool opposite me. She took a notepad and pen out of the inside pocket of her jacket, then nodded to me in her everlastingly sincere way.

"Three things," I said. "I want to be awake during the C-section. I want to see the child. And I want"-I stretched out my left leg so that I could get my hand in my pocket, took out the fossil stone and held it up in front of Petra in the palm of my hand-"the child to have this, I want the adoptive parents to promise to give it to the child, along with a letter from me, when it begins to ask about its biological parents-or at the latest when it comes of age. The letter will not contain anything that reveals the fact that the parents were dispensable. Can you arrange it?"

Petra scribbled feverishly, then she looked up: "Yes. I think so. Of course I can't guarantee that the parents will actually keep their promise, but I can certainly get them to sign an agreement."

She promised to come back to me with further information, I thanked her, and we returned to the party, where we went our separate ways; I then went to look for Miranda. When I found her I explained my absence by saying I'd b.u.mped into someone who was upset and needed to talk.

"The way you looked," said Miranda, "I would have thought you were the one who needed someone to talk to."

I laughed, a.s.sured her I was absolutely fine, and asked if she was up for that dance now. She was.

It's February again. Eight months have pa.s.sed since that party. And just about four months since I gave birth. There are two reasons why I've hung on for so long.

For one thing, I wanted to finish writing this-even if it will probably be one of the ma.n.u.scripts that immediately ends up in some underground pa.s.sage beneath the Royal Library in Stockholm. That's if it ends up anywhere at all, and isn't simply destroyed.

For another, Vivi was sent for her final donation just after I gave birth, and I wanted to be there for Elsa, because she was there for me after Johannes's final donation.

But now Elsa is gone too, and no one here needs me anymore, not even myself. I only have a few lines left, then that's it. This time tomorrow my heart and lungs will belong to someone else, to be exact a local politician, the mother of two children.

My daughter's parent, by the way, is a single woman, aged forty-two, the director of a small recruitment company within the business and office sector. I've seen a picture of her. She looked nice, but also a bit sad. She's had several miscarriages and has been on the adoption waiting list for a long time. I have also been offered the chance to see pictures of her together with my daughter, but I have declined the offer.

According to Petra Runhede, the adoptive parent was happy to sign an agreement promising to pa.s.s on the stone and the letter according to my instructions. Of course I can't be sure that Petra is telling the truth, but I have chosen to a.s.sume that she is, just as I have chosen to believe that the adoptive mother will not break the agreement.

In the letter to my daughter I wrote some of the things I would have told her if I had chosen freedom along with her instead of giving her up to someone who can give her security and the chance of a dignified life. I wrote that when she was born she had her father's nose and mouth and chin, and that if I look like my mother, then she had her own mother's forehead and the shape of her face. I wrote that the stone with the cone-shaped fossil had belonged to her father, that he died before she was born, that the stone was the only thing I had left of him, and that I wanted her to have it as a memory of him from me. I wrote that he found it on the beach between Abbeks and Mossbystrand the day we met each other in the November twilight, when he was out collecting stones and I was walking my dog.