Inger Frimansson - Good Night, My Darling

The hotel was built like a patio, with an inner courtyard covered by a ceiling. When she came out of her room, she could see all of the floors. Down on the stone floor, she could see heaps of laundry. A woman was standing on the stairs with a mop. When Justine walked past, she looked away.

She walked down the flights of stairs carefully. On one landing, she saw a little house altar with incense and candles. She drew in the sour aroma.

This is as far away from home as a person can get, she thought. She felt wiped out from exhaustion.

A large man, wearing a patterned short-sleeve shirt, sat in the hotel foyer. The shirt clung to his back. A fleck on the counter, a fleck on his shining forehead. Justine gave him the keys to her room and asked if he would be able to exchange some money for her.

“No, no,” he answered in English. He pointed down the street.

She stepped into a burning wall of heat. She had to go through it. She had to get money and get something to eat, some water and food. The boy on the street was gone, and she felt relieved. She started to walk in the direction that the doorkeeper had indicated. The traffic was lively, the air heavy. The direct light made her eyes hurt. It was one great dizziness, a whirling, smoking inferno with pieces of street all around, like a labyrinth. She followed what she believed was the main street, thought she saw a sign with the word “bank.” She turned to the right, trying to imprint on her mind the look of the houses and the signs.

It wasn’t a bank, but some kind of office. She saw how people milled about in there behind the shiny window panes. She grasped the door handle, but the door was locked.

She stood in the way of two women with colorful dresses and head scarves.

“Excuse me… but where can I exchange my money?”

They both stuck out their chins, the same confused gesture.

She had to turn back, but then realized that she didn’t know where she was. Everything looked the same-same signs, same cars, same buildings. She felt faint; everything was going round and round, smells and sounds and thirst.

She heard someone call her name. She didn’t know where she was. She looked around, but didn’t see anything, blinded by the light and the sun. A taxi had stopped, the door opened.

“Justine, what are you up to?”

Nathan.

She grabbed the pocket of his shirt, heard a ripping sound from the seam loosening.

“Hey, relax!”

He led her to the taxi, helped her in.

Up in the room, he gave her water from a large plastic bottle.

“You better make damn sure that you don’t go out there without having a lot of water in you,” he admonished her.

“I didn’t have any local currency,” she said.

“You could have asked the guy at the desk. You could have gotten something in the room.”

“And you, you could have stayed here with me and not taken off like that.”

“I didn’t want to wake you up. You said you hadn’t slept a wink on the plane. It was out of consideration to you that I went out by myself.”

She curled up in the bed and began to wail.

“But Justine… you should know that I would have to explore the area.”

“You didn’t have to start immediately.”

“Yes, I did. I already had made some appointments. I’m here to work, you know. This is not a vacation if that’s what you thought.”

She lay there in her wrinkled dress and the elastic cut her waist. Her fingers were swollen from the heat.

She thought, maybe if we made love.

But when she touched him, he broke free.

She had met him at the dentist’s. It was during a period of time when she was there fairly often; she had problems with a bridge. Every time she entered the waiting room, he was sitting there, and finally, they both broke into laughter.

“It seems our dentist is also a matchmaker,” he said.

He was a few years older than she was. He had gray, tufty hair that would normally look ridiculous on a man of his age, but strangely did not on him. She heard someone call his name, Nathan Gendser.

Finally, they managed to come out into the waiting room at the same time. She was numb in her jaw from the Novocain. He was paying at the cashier.

“I’m finally done,” he said. “Feels great.”

She felt a twinge of disappointment.

“Lucky you!”

“Do you have much left?”

“Once or twice more. It wasn’t just the bridge; there were some cavities, too.”

“I have my car outside. Can I drive you somewhere?” Her own car was around the corner. She thought a moment, then said, “Thanks.”

It was summer. His plump, tanned hands; no ring. “Dalvik…,” he said. “I was wondering about that. Are you related to the Sandy Candy business?”

She nodded.

“Oh, I get it. That’s why you have to go to the dentist’s so often nowadays. Too much candy when you were a child!” “I didn’t eat too much of that candy. I didn’t like it much.

But I ate a lot of other kinds of candy.”

“I’m not surprised.”

He sat quietly for a minute. Then he asked her where she was going.

“Where are you going yourself?”

“Well, I can let you off at the subway station next to Odenplan? I live in the vicinity.”

“That’d be perfect.”

“Are you on vacation now?”

“No, I don’t work.”

“What! You don’t work! Are you unemployed?” “Not exactly.”

She felt his look; she stared stubbornly straight ahead.

People often were bothered when they found out that she didn’t work. She had never really started a career. She had been sick most of her teenage life. Then she thought it was too late for anything. But you just couldn’t say this to strangers. In order to avoid questions, she sometimes said that she’d worked for the family concern but was now thinking of trying something else. And then she would change the subject.

“I usually call myself an odd-job man,” he said. “But the last few years, I’ve been working as a tour guide.” He let her out in front of the medical building on

Odenplan. When he drove off, she went into the subway and rode back to the dentist’s to get her car. Once she got home, she looked up his name in the telephone book. He lived on Norrtullsgatan. She got out the city map and found the exact place where he lived.

The next day, she did something unusual. She went there. This was unlike her. She talked to herself: what are you doing here, what are you expecting?

It was as if she were tipsy.

His car was parked next to the building. She glanced up at the façade, wondered which window was his. So that he wouldn’t discover her, she went into a nearby bookstore and thumbed through some books, finally buying a paperback just for appearances. Then she walked along the sidewalk, up and down, in front of his building. As if she knew he was coming any minute, an intuition.

Her sixth sense was correct. He came out of the apartment building a half hour later. He was alone. She sped up, as if she were just walking along that minute, she said, “Hey, it’s you… I didn’t expect to see someone I knew!”

His face: a look of surprised happiness!

“I was just going out to grab a bite to eat. Do you want to come, too?”

They took a boat out to the royal palace island of Drottningholm. He invited her to lunch at the exclusive restaurant. She felt she was waking up from a period of paralysis.

She had been silent for so many years. With him, the language began to return, one word at a time.

He stroked life into her body; he awakened her. “You are so beautiful, I love women who are not anorexic.

Like you, you’re so alive.”

She became violently jealous of all the women he had made love to.