The Shadow Girls (3 page)

‘I almost drowned. Something hit me in the head. I have lost my memory.’

‘Have you been examined by a doctor?’

Tea-Bag shook her head. Why was he asking all these questions? What did he want? She became suspicious again and tried to retreat.

‘I am treated with compassion and humanity by the Spanish authorities.’

‘How can you say that? You’re a prisoner here!’

He has a door, Tea-Bag decided. He is simply trying to determine if I am worthy of it. She had to restrain herself so she would not throw herself into his arms and embrace him.

‘Where do you come from?’ Now she was the one asking the questions.

‘Sweden,’ he said.

What kind of place was that? A town, a country, the sign on a door? She didn’t know. The names of so many cities and
countries were constantly circulating around the camp like swarms of bees. But had she heard the name ‘Sweden’ before? Maybe, she couldn’t be sure.

‘Sweden?’

‘That’s in Scandinavia, in northern Europe. That’s where we come from. We are writing a series on people without faces, refugees who are desperately trying to enter Europe. We want to tell your story. We want to give you back your face.’

‘I already have a face. What is he taking pictures of if I have no face? Can you smile without teeth, without a mouth? I don’t need a face, I need a door.’

‘A door? You mean somewhere to go where you will be welcome? But that’s just why we came down here. We want you to find somewhere to go.’

Tea-Bag strained to understand the words that reached her ears. Someone was trying to help her? This tall man who was still gently swaying must have access to a secret door that he was not showing her.

‘We want to tell your story,’ he said. ‘Your whole story. As much as you remember.’

‘Why?’

‘Because we will print it in our newspaper.’

‘I want a door. I want to get out of here.’

‘That’s exactly what this is about.’

*

Afterwards Tea-Bag never understood what had made her trust him. But somehow she sensed that door was actually opening for her. Perhaps she had been able to follow her intuition because her feet were firmly planted on the ground, just as her father
had taught her, the only thing he had been able to give her. Or perhaps it was because the man asking the questions had seemed genuinely interested in her answers. Or perhaps it was because he didn’t look tired. In any case she needed to make a decision and she decided to say yes.

They went into Fernando’s office where the dirty teacup that had given her her name still sat on the desk. But she said nothing of that. She started by telling them about her village, somewhere in a land whose name she had forgotten, about her father whom she had not forgotten and who was one morning led away by soldiers, never to return. Her mother had been harassed, they belonged to the wrong kind of people, the kind of people who were not in power. Her mother had urged her to escape, which she had done. She skipped parts of her story and said nothing of the Italian engineer and how she had sold her body to him in order to get the money for passage on the ship. She kept as many secrets as she told. But she was still swept up by the emotion of her story and she saw that the man in front of her who had turned on his tape recorder was also moved by it. When she came to the part about the terrible night in the cargo-hold when the ship began to sink she started to cry.

She had been speaking for four hours when she reached the end. Fernando had appeared in the doorway from time to time and she always weaved in words about ‘compassion and humanity’ when he appeared. The reporter seemed to accept this as a kind of secret code.

Then it was over.

The reporter who packed away his tape recorder had not in fact provided her with a way out of the camp. But she had still found her door. She had the name of a country far away where
people actually wanted to see her face and were interested in hearing her story: Sweden. She decided that that was where she was headed, nowhere else. Sweden. There were people there who had sent out someone to watch out for her.

She walked them to the front gates of the camp.

‘Is your name just Tea-Bag?’ he asked. ‘Nothing else? What about a surname?’

‘I don’t have one yet.’

He looked at her curiously but smiled. The photographer asked one of the guards to take a picture of the three of them.

*

It was one of the last days of the twentieth century.

It started raining again in the afternoon. That evening Tea-Bag sat on her bed and pressed her feet against the cold floor for a long time. Sweden, she thought. That’s where I’m going. That’s where I have to go. That’s my goal.

JESPER HUMLIN, ONE
of the most successful writers of his generation, was worried about losing his tan. This fear easily surpassed his other anxieties, such as the fate of the impenetrable collections of poetry he published every year on the sixth of October, which happened to coincide with his mother’s birthday. This morning, a few months after his latest book had come out, he was looking at his face in the mirror and noted to his satisfaction that his tan had an unparalleled evenness of tone. A few days earlier he had returned to a chilly Sweden from a month-long sojourn on the South Seas, first in the Solomon Islands and then on Rarotonga.

Since he liked to travel in comfort and stay in the most expensive hotels he would not have been able to undertake this trip if he had not received the Nylander grant of 80,000 kronor. It was a newly established grant, the donor a shirt manufacturer from Borås who had long nourished the dream of becoming a poet. He had been bitterly disappointed to see his dreams of poetry disappear in a lifelong battle with arrogant shirt designers, suspicious labour unions and unhelpful tax authorities. His time had been spent on button-down collars, colours and fabric swatches. In an attempt to come to terms with his own disappointment he had established the fund that would go to ‘Swedish writers in need of peace and quiet for completion of their work’. The first grant had gone to Jesper Humlin.

*

The phone rang.

‘I want a child.’

‘Right now?’

‘I’m thirty-one years old. We either have a child or it’s over.’

It was Andrea. She was a nurse anaesthetist and never knocked on doors. Humlin had met her at a poetry reading he had done a couple of years earlier when he had just sworn off the bachelor lifestyle and decided to settle down with one woman. With her slim face and dark hair he had immediately been attracted to Andrea. He had also fallen for her enthusiastic response to his poems. When she was angry at him, which was a fairly common occurrence, she liked to accuse him of having picked her in order to have constant access to someone in the medical profession, since due to his hypochondria he was always convinced that he was suffering from a fatal illness.

This time she was furious. Humlin wanted children, many children. But not right away and possibly not with Andrea. Naturally this was not something he was prepared to discuss with her, at least not by phone.

‘Of course we’ll have children,’ he said. ‘Many children.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Why not?’

‘You’re always changing your mind about everything. Except, apparently, about waiting to have children. But I’m thirty-one.’

‘That’s no age at all.’

‘For me it is.’

‘Maybe we could talk about this a little later? I have an important meeting coming up.’

‘What kind of meeting?’

‘With my publisher.’

‘If you think your meeting is more important than this conversation then I want to break up with you right now. There are other men.’

Humlin felt a pang of jealousy arise in him and escalate to painful proportions.

‘What other men?’

‘Men. Any men.’

‘You mean you are prepared to leave me for some man, any man out there?’

‘I don’t want to wait any longer.’

Humlin sensed that the conversation was spiralling out of his control.

‘You know, it’s not good for me to have these kinds of discussions so early in the morning.’

‘And you know I can’t talk about these things at night. I need my sleep because I have a job that starts early in the morning.’

The silence travelled back and forth between them.

‘What did you do in the South Pacific anyway?’

‘I rested.’

‘You don’t seem to do anything else. Were you unfaithful again?’

‘I haven’t been unfaithful. Why would you think that?’

‘Why not? You’ve done it before.’

‘You
think
I have. That’s not the same thing. I went to rest.’

‘To rest from what exactly?’

‘I happen to write books, as you well know.’

‘One book a year. With about forty poems. What’s that – less than one poem a week?’

‘I also write a wine-tasting column.’

‘Once a month, yes. In a trade paper for tailors that no one
else reads. Now,
I
could have really used a trip to the South Pacific to rest.’

‘I invited you to come with me.’

‘Since you knew I couldn’t get away. But I’m about to take some time off. There’s something I want to get started on.’

‘And what’s that?’

‘I’m going to write my book.’

‘About what exactly?’

‘About us.’

Humlin felt an unpleasant pain in his stomach. Of all the things he had to worry about, the thought that Andrea might prove the more talented writer seemed to him to be the worst. Every time she brought this up he felt as if his very existence was threatened. He sometimes lay awake at night and imagined the sensational reviews of her new book, how the critics embraced her as a new talent and wrote him off as a has-been. For this reason he always devoted an extraordinary amount of time to her whenever her authorial ambitions kicked in. He cooked her dinners, talked about the inordinate amount of suffering and hard work it took to complete a book and had, up until now, always been able to talk her out of her plans.

‘I don’t want you to write a book about us.’

‘Why not?’

‘I want my private life to remain private.’

‘Who said anything about your private life?’

‘If this book is about us, it involves my private life.’

‘I can call you Anders.’

‘What difference would that possibly make?’

Humlin tried to take the conversation in a different direction.

‘I’ve thought about what you said.’

‘About being unfaithful?’

‘I haven’t been unfaithful. How many times do I have to tell you that?’

‘Until I believe you.’

‘And when are you going to believe me?’

‘Never.’

Humlin decided to retreat from this topic.

‘I’ve been thinking.’

‘What about?’

‘That you’re right. We should have a child.’

‘Are you sick?’ Her voice was sceptical.

‘Why would I be sick?’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘I’m not sick. I meant it. I’m a very serious person.’

‘You’re childish and vain. Are you serious?’

‘I’m neither childish nor particularly vain.’

‘Are you serious? You don’t think we should wait?’

‘I’m at least prepared to take it into serious consideration.’

‘Now you sound like a politician.’

‘I’m a poet, not a politician.’

‘If we’re going to have a baby, we can’t talk about it over the phone. I’m coming over.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What do you think? If we’re going to have a baby we have to go to bed first.’

‘I can’t. I have a meeting with my publisher.’

Andrea hung up. Humlin returned to the bathroom and looked at his face, looking past his suntan to the warm long nights on the Solomon Islands and Rarotonga. I don’t want to have any children, he thought. At least not with Andrea.

He sighed, left the bathroom and poured himself a cup of coffee in the kitchen. In his study he leafed through the latest reviews of his book that the PR department had forwarded. Humlin had given them careful instructions as to what kind of reviews he wanted to read. He only wanted to see the good ones and had an old-fashioned ledger where he noted which papers and critics continued to praise his work as ‘the primary representative of mature poetry at the end of the twentieth century’.

Humlin read the latest reviews, made some notes in his ledger, and noted that the
Eskilstuna Courier
had once again given his work too little notice. Then he walked over to the window and looked out. Andrea’s latest outburst worried him. There was a chance he would soon face the prospect of either making her pregnant or accepting the fact that she might finally write her book.

At seven he called a taxi service, giving the receptionist plenty of time to recognise his name. He got in the taxi and gave the driver the address. The driver was African and spoke poor Swedish. Humlin wondered grumpily if he would actually be able to find his way to the little restaurant in the Old Town where he was going. It was not, as he had told Andrea, his publisher he was going to meet. That meeting was tomorrow. But this was something equally important.

Once a month he met fellow writer Viktor Leander. They had met when they were still young and unpublished and had taken to meeting regularly to compare notes and pick each other’s brains. They had never liked each other very much. They were competing for the same market and were always afraid that the other was going to have a brilliant idea and leave his rival in the dust.

The driver had no trouble finding his way among the narrow
alleys of the Old Town. Humlin took a few deep breaths before getting out. Viktor Leander was waiting for him at their usual table in the corner. He was wearing a new suit and had let his hair grow somewhat longer than normal. Viktor Leander was also tanned. A few years earlier he had managed to purchase his own solarium bed with a couple of well-paid articles about ‘new horizons’ in a magazine for data consultants.

Humlin sat down.

‘Welcome back.’

‘Thanks.’

‘I got your postcard. Nice stamps.’

‘It was a good trip.’

‘I look forward to hearing about it.’