Chapter Thirty-Nine

 

IN JUNE, JUST before midsummer, I stood on the steps to the bank and saw the last of the mill workers leave. They had all accepted work at the other mill and Erik had gone ahead. The wagons rattled by, loaded with household goods and mattresses. Children sat dangling their legs from the back. I looked for the small girl but did not see her.

A month later I sat with Aunt Hedvig in her drawing room. The maid was fussing, wanting to know what kind of jam to serve with the scones. Hedvig waved her away.

Rammen had told Hedvig that I had decided not to marry Fredrik Otter after all. She said she could think of at least two or three young men right there in Gothenburg who would be glad to hear it.

“Come live with me,” she said. “Disa will have to take care of Rammen and Ulrika, but for you we can still find a husband.” 

I too had come to believe that Disa would never marry. I sometimes saw her draw in the lavender scent of her linen cupboard, where the sheets and the towels were folded so that her monogram showed. She would run her hand over a stack of pillowcases whose ribbons she had curled with iron thongs. Her feelings, I thought, had been stashed in there as well to prevent them from wreaking havoc with the rest of her life, which she tried so hard to keep in check.

“Please, Hedvig, there’s something you should know.”

“Such as?”

“I think I’m pregnant. I haven’t bled for four months.”

Hedvig studied me for a long while, the blue veins on her hands winding around patches of brown. “Does Otter know?”

I shook my head.

“Probably just as well,” she said. “I hear he already has a child.”

“I went to talk to the mother once. She said she had wronged him but she didn’t say how. I still hope they’ll marry, if only for the sake of the child.”

The maid brought the tea.

“I’ll pour,” Hedvig said and waved her away again.

“I would like to see a doctor,” I said. “I need to make sure that all’s well.”

The following morning we visited a lying-in hospital in Vasastaden. It had once been a private residence and Hedvig and the captain had been friends with the owner. Large maples shaded the back entrance, which everyone seemed to use.

Hedvig was in the room as the doctor examined me, and for once I found her presence reassuring. I lay on my back with a pillow under my pelvis, knees bent, the whole room smelling faintly of ether. The doctor asked about Hult, the kind of conversation you might have in a drawing room. I tried not to tense, but when I did, he told me to keep my mouth open and take deep breaths. After pulling on a plastic glove, he parted my thighs and entered me with his finger, all the while averting his eyes and reassuring me that it would soon be over. I tried to count the shiny instruments on the table beside me—tongs, scissors, and any number of scalpels, some of the blades triangular, others shaped like crescents—but when I looked at Hedvig, she stood looking out the window, her back rigid against the foliage of a maple. Afterward the nurse drew my blood to test for syphilis. Hedvig still stood with her back turned, the white wall stark against the spiky maple leaves.

Later Hedvig and I talked to the doctor in his private office. He said there was no doubt I was with child. When I said I was glad, he looked at Hedvig, who shrugged. He also said he would inform me about the result of the blood test as soon as he knew. “Meanwhile there’s the matter of the father,” he said, pen poised.

Both the doctor and Hedvig looked at me now.

When I did not answer, the doctor put down his pen. “Your aunt tells me he’s been visiting prostitutes. Should the blood test come back positive, the new law will force him to reveal the names of all the women he’s had intercourse with, prostitutes or not.”

“He always used protection,” I said.

“Still, you’ll be wise not to associate with this man in the future,” the doctor said. “We try to ascertain the health of the prostitutes but the situation is by no means under control. Condoms are no guarantee. Your child could have been blighted in the womb.”

I gripped the armrests of my chair but my hands were still shaking.

Even Hedvig seemed unsteady as we walked out of the doctor’s office. “While we’re here, we might as well have a look around.”

A woman showed us the visitors’ rooms on the first floor, and the bedrooms and the nursery on the second. It was not difficult to imagine what the house must once have been like, the closets filled with day dresses and evening gowns, sporting coats and capes and furs. Now young women ran up and down the stairs with bedpans and washing.

In the nursery the curtains were drawn for the children were asleep. Wet-nurses sat in rows by the children’s cribs, some reading, some knitting, some staring at the walls. All of them came with good recommendations, and most of them had agreed to offer their services in return for having their own babies housed and adopted. The children, the woman assured us, all went to good homes, and so far there had never been anything but happy endings.

That afternoon I wandered alone through Gothenburg, gathering my thoughts. A sign at one of the livery stables warned that some of the horses had caught the Spanish flu. I had read about it in the newspaper. Several stables had reported cases of high fever and swollen eyes and legs. The veterinarians were at a loss what to do. The symptoms usually lasted five to six days, provided the horses were allowed to rest. Given the hard times and lack of good feed, their resistance was already low. At least one of the articles mentioned that people had begun to catch it too.

In the harbor, men shouted on decks and gangways, while huge cranes swung back and forth. The water was gray and choppy, white spume against the blackened rocks. I thought about Rammen and Ulrika walking along the wharves on the day of their betrothal, Ulrika pregnant with Adolf’s child. Rammen used to say that people in Gothenburg were more courageous than others. Every day they looked out over the open sea and something responded inside them. Perhaps that also happened to me.

The shop was squeezed between a haberdashery and a tavern. A bell jingled as I opened the door. The woman behind the counter wore a green dress with a crocodile sash, her straw-colored hair curled tight.

I told her I was pregnant with Fredrik Otter’s child.

“Don’t know what that has to do with me.”

“I’m worried about the child.”

“What has he told you?”

“He said he used protection.”

“I would have insisted.”

I picked up a small porcelain unicorn, white with a gold-trimmed horn.

“I heard he helped to have your name removed from the lists,” I said.

“He did.”

A man stopped on the sidewalk and stood looking at the figurines on display in the window.

“Those inspections will soon be a thing of the past,” she said, running her feather duster over the cups and saucers on the shelf beside her. “The new law will do away with them entirely and that’s all to the good. Talk to any of the women whose names are still on the lists. They’ll tell you about standing in line at the police station with their skirts hiked up. One woman I know was actually infected during the inspection. I held her hand when she died.” 

The bell jingled and the man stepped inside. While he looked around, the woman dusted a Dresden ballerina with delicate roses strewn on her skirt.

“More pieces in the back?” he asked.

She nodded and pointed to a door. I caught a whiff of her perfume. Elderberry? Not as strong but almost as sweet.

“I can’t marry him but I want to have his child,” I said as soon as the man was out of hearing.

For the first time she truly looked me over. “You must be Anna,” she said, her eyes not unkind.

All I could do was nod.

“Well, Anna, I can see you’re in a difficult situation. I haven’t seen him in several months. He came to say goodbye. Said he was going to marry you.”

“And before that?”

“On and off, whenever he happened to be in Gothenburg. I gather he was looking for a farm.”

I steadied myself against the counter.

She pointed to a chair.

I sat.

“There.” She handed me a glass of water. “Shall I send for a doctor?”

I shook my head. Part of me wanted to know more. Where did he leave the money? On the bedside table? Did she count it as he dressed? Did he tell her when she could expect him back? The other part wanted to flee.

I caught her glancing toward the back. She must have known I understood.

“It’s the war,” she said. “Forced me back to my old occupation. Can’t make a living on bric-a-brac when most people don’t have enough for food. Fredrik Otter didn’t judge me. Not in his nature.”

Still unsteady, I bought the unicorn and waited while she wrapped it. As soon as I left, the Closed sign went up in the window. The doctor’s words kept ringing in my ears. Your child could have been blighted in the womb.

Hastening down the sidewalk, I tried to fight back my sense of doom. I almost collided with a man pushing a wheelbarrow. A policeman blew a whistle when I crossed a street, just in time to stop me from stepping straight in front of a fast-moving horse.

Back in the apartment, Hedvig was waiting. I finally told her that I had become pregnant on purpose and had no intention of giving up my child.

“I plan to move to Stockholm,” I said. “I’ve put away a good amount of money from my salary and it should keep me going until the child is born. I’ll introduce myself as a widow. No one has to know.”

“And after the child is born?”

“I’m sure I’ll find work at one of the banks. Boy or girl, the child will have opportunities I myself could never have dreamed of. Tekla once told me that no one in Stockholm thinks twice about a woman wanting to become a doctor or a lawyer. At some point I’ll inform Fredrik but not until I’m settled in every way. I want the child to know its father.”

She must have realized that I had thought about all this for a long time for all she did was sigh.

Before she retreated to her bedroom, she placed her hands on either side of my face and kissed the top of my head. “It must run in the family. This proclivity for misery.”

That night I could not sleep. For all my plans, I had not planned for this.The prostitute’s thoughts must have been the same as mine, for she had certainly not gone out of her way to calm me. What if Fredrik had visited other prostitutes too, women I had never heard of? The doctor was right. Condoms could break. It had happened once in the cabin, had it not? Like so many others, he could carry the contagion without exhibiting any symptoms himself. Syphilis was everywhere, or so the newspapers informed us. Its march was so secret and its attacks so insidious that none of us could be certain to escape. I thought about Edit examining her newborn son, counting his fingers and toes. She had read the newspapers too, harrowing descriptions of children covered with sores, their faces rotting, the stench of the nurseries so revolting that only the mothers would want to stay.

All night long I kept hearing Wikander’s voice, gravelly and dark. Think what harm will come to your children if your marriage begins in sin.

By dawn I had worked myself into such a state that I could hardly breathe.

 

LIKE MOST VILLAGES in our region, Ljunga was remote and hidden in the forest. I got off the train and walked over to the small, white church. The sun shone from a cloudless sky, insects were busy with summer, and my shoes had turned brown with dust.

The church itself was plain. The only adornment was a vase of flowers on the altar, grayish green foxtail and ox-eye daisies. I had not been back since I was a small girl and Rammen took me to see Lars’ wooden Christ. Now the Christ was freshly varnished. Someone had repainted the blood, dots of red on his temples and brow. The gash in his side was redder too, as if he had begun to bleed anew, but the grotesque angle of his head was just as I recalled.

I bent below the Christ and prayed for my child, but when I looked up, I could not see his eyes.

Afterward I took a seat in the pew. Someone coughed by the door. A tramp entered and sat on the other side of the aisle. His cough was thick and gurgling. A cleaning woman came out of the vestry with a man I took to be the sexton. They spoke to each other in whispers and the man told the tramp to leave.

The tramp struggled to his feet, and I followed him out the door. A lark flew up in song. On reaching the road, the tramp faltered and fell. Thinking it would ease his coughing, I sat beside him and told him to rest his head in my lap. I must have been aware of the risk, but hearing the lark made me lose all fear, a reckless variation of warbles and trills, the high notes climbing higher and higher as the small bird rose and disappeared into the sky. That was when I recognized Rammen’s old coat.

He said the devil had followed him to the church and had waited for him to come out.

By now two boys were kicking stones on the other side of the road. A farmer drove past and I hailed him, telling him the tramp needed a blanket to keep him warm. He threw us an empty sack and continued on his way. Soon people were gathering all around, their faces cold and wary. I recognized none of them and they seemed as suspicious of me as they were of the tramp. The tramp kept coughing. When I asked one of the men for a handkerchief, all he did was murmur and back off.

The tramp’s beard had turned almost white, and his lichen hair had thinned. He must not have washed for weeks, for the smell of him was foul. Over and over he told me he his soul was bound for hell.

“I met you once,” I said. “You came to our farm. You told me to dance and laugh.”

His eyes burned with fever and he seized my arm.

“We don’t want him,” a woman said with a snarl. “He’s not one of us. Where are his papers?”

Dark green vomit spilled down the tramp’s chin and I used my sleeve to wipe it off.

“Stand back!” one man called out. “He’s got the flu!”

The people scuffled to the other side of the road. The tramp’s hold was still firm on my arm and blood seeped from the cracks on his callused hand.

“You followed your calling,” I said. “You said one step led to the next. Surely God won’t punish you for that.”

Peace spread across his face. “God bless you,” he murmured. He must have heard the heartbeats of the child, for he added, “And God bless your child.” His hold on my arm slackened, his throat rattled, and he was gone.

Moving my hand over his eyes, I closed his lids.

I waited as they loaded the body onto a wagon and covered it with two more sacks. By the time I boarded the train, I had gathered his words and saved them.