Fredrik was the only one who knew about the child she was carrying. If he hadn’t told their parents about it by now, that is. He’d gotten her pregnant, and the night before she was taken, she’d gone to break the news to him. Julie was worried what her parents would say if they found out.
What a stupid thing to worry about. There was really no point in thinking about anything at all. The real world was somewhere else, somewhere beyond her. This became especially clear whenever she fell into an exhausted sleep. Those hazy seconds before waking or sleep, before reality set in, she wasn’t fully aware of where she was; it might be anywhere. In those moments she wasn’t bound and gagged. Or lying on a hard floor. For an instant, her dreams were like a mattress of warm air beneath her. How strange. So far she hadn’t had a single dream about being tied up. His voice hadn’t managed to reach into her sleep. She had dreamed about her dog, Bismarck, but not about how he was whimpering in a dark room far away. She dreamed that she was sleeping with her head resting on his stomach, just as she’d done in those confusing middle years when she was still afraid of the dark but too old to sleep in her parents’ bed. She was surprised to find that her dreams had very little to do with the mistakes she’d made or the one wrong step that had taken her away from her world.
Some things now seemed closer, some things more distant. Her friends were far, far away, while the memory of other things was still so strong, like the bathroom at home with the Donald Duck comics next to the toilet, and the feeling of her bare toes on the warm tiled floor in the morning. Her anger had disappeared. Instead, she recalled the fine hairs on her mother’s arms and the way her mother would hesitate in the midst of a quarrel, as if she was about to stop and have a good laugh at the whole thing. These things had all come closer. As Julie lay there, she spent a long time thinking about these things: the snow creaking under her feet as she shoveled, the streets in her neighborhood, the flickering light behind the letters in her father’s eye tests, the notes that were difficult to reach. A sick thought haunted her: Was this a test? Could something good come out of this?
She stood up. It was hard to do without using her hands, but she’d developed a technique of shoving her body against the wall and slowly rising. She tugged down her sweatpants and then sat on the bucket. A little while ago he’d come in to bring her food. At first he’d threatened to kill her, but then he’d gone back upstairs. Finally he’d come back and taken off the gag. That time he hadn’t said anything about killing her if she spoke. That was the first time he’d offered her food. The sandwiches reminded her of the ones she’d made when she was ten years old. She hadn’t said anything. Not one word. Nor had she touched the food. It was important to show strength even if her stomach was practically numb with hunger. At the moment she thought this somehow gave her the upper hand.
Most worrisome was Bismarck. His whimpering had grown fainter. The fear and anger that she’d heard in his barking when they were first down here in the dark had now gone. It sounded like he had given up, like the only thing he hoped for was not to die alone.
As she sat on the bucket, she looked down at the sheets of paper he’d left with her. They were copies of an old printed booklet.
She’d read the text several times. It had to do with sleep, written in a mixture of Danish and Swedish, and it reminded her a bit of a lullaby that Bellman might have written. The man had talked to her about this tune.
“You need to learn this song,” he’d told her. “I want you to sing it for me.”
Then he’d played a tune for her on the music box. He’d played it over and over outside the door. It was a dreamlike melody, and in a strange way it seemed to belong down here. This ice-cold basement room was not the real world.
When she was done, she used the wall to get up and then slid down onto the floor again. As she waited to fall asleep, she rubbed her bound hands over the small of her back. That was as close as she could get to caressing the baby now living inside of her. She wept, wanting to sing to it. She could hear Bismarck whimpering in the distance. Death cries, she thought. Death cries, music box tunes, and a baby that she could neither hear nor feel. This was all a dream. Sooner or later she would wake up. That was the thought that prevented time from stopping altogether.
Then he came down the stairs.
Go ahead and play that damned tune of yours, she thought.
But this time the music box didn’t start. She heard him go into the room where the dog was being held, and she knew this wasn’t good. He’d gone in there several times, and she’d heard what he’d done to Bismarck. If only she could have plugged her ears. But she heard everything. This time the kicks striking the dog’s body were louder than his whimpers.
Exhausted, she again got to her feet. She’d noticed something when she slid onto the floor. This time she made her way along the wall. The rope tied around her wrists rubbed against the rough surface. If she kept moving like this, up and down, maybe the rope would shred.
I have to get out of here, she thought. Not just for my own sake, but for Bismarck and the baby.