Inger Frimansson - Good Night, My Darling

It was a Thursday. He came home from work at seven minutes after four. She was lying on the floor, with her arms outstretched as if she had been crucified. He could see right away that there was nothing that could be done.

“How could you tell?” Justine asked. She was in a period where she had to know as much as possible about her mother, obsessing about her.

He couldn’t answer.

“Perhaps she was still alive. If you had called a doctor right away, maybe he could have saved her.”

“Don’t accuse me,” he said, with a wry twist at the corner of his mouth. “Once you’ve seen a dead person, you will know what I mean.”

First he had thought that she had fallen from the stepstool and broken something important, but the autopsy showed that an artery in the brain had burst, and her life had run out with it.

“Aneurysm!”

Pappa pronounced that word slowly and clearly every time during Justine’s youth whenever the subject came up.

Sometimes she worried that it could be inherited.

She asked about herself.

“Where was I, Pappa? What was I doing?”

He didn’t remember.

She was just three when it happened, three years old and a few months. How does a three-year-old react when her mother falls off a stepstool and dies?

She must have been somewhere in the house, she must have called and cried, she must have been terrified at her mother’s sudden change.

Sometimes she woke up from a dream that her forehead was aching as if after a long hard cry; she looked at herself in the mirror and saw her eyelids swollen and glassy.

Fragments of sinking, of mud and of flowers which never had any odor.

A pappa standing on the ice and screaming.

She saw pictures in the photo album of the woman who had been her mother. The strange face did not resonate with her. Thick hair combed back, curly on the sides. Justine did not look like her one bit. There was distance in the woman’s eyes, which did not match Justine’s memories.

A steep narrow staircase led up to the second floor. Up here is where her mother had stood to clean the windows. To the left was the bedroom, to the right the hall widened and created a living room with a view toward Lammbar Island and beyond Lake Mälar. Bookcases covered the walls, but there wasn’t much furniture: a stereo, an oval glass table and two armchairs.

Those had been Pappa’s and Flora’s.

Many times Justine had been offered a great deal of money for the house. The real estate agents hassled her, stuffed their information into her mailbox, and even called her from time to time. One of them was especially pushy. His name was Jacob Hellstrand.

“You could get a few million for the place, Justine,” he chatted away, using her first name as if they had been close friends. “I have a client who wants to rebuild it. He’s always dreamed of that location.”

“Sorry, but I don’t really want to.”

“And why not? Think of what you could buy with that money! A single woman like yourself, you can’t just sit and rot out there in Hässelby. Buy yourself a condo in the city instead and live life!”

“You don’t know a thing about whether I am living life or not. Maybe I’m already living life.”

His laughter came through the handset.

“You’re right, of course. But admit it, Justine, admit that there’s something to what I’m telling you.”

She should have gotten angry, but she didn’t.

“Just let me know when you’ve decided. You have my cell phone number, right?”

“Of course.”

“It’s not easy for a single woman to take care of such a big house. All by yourself, that is.”

“If I decide to sell,” she said, “I’ll give you a call.”

She didn’t have a single thought of selling. She didn’t need any money either. Pappa left a great deal when he died. She would live well on that for a long time. In fact, as long as she lived.

And Flora wouldn’t ever be able to demand a single penny of it.

The most difficult thing to endure was the smell. Flora remembered it from that summer long ago when she moonlighted at a hospital for mentally ill women. The mix of floor polish, unwashed hair, and flower water.

Now she smelled like that.

Despite what she had most feared, the nights weren’t all that bad. Rather, the night belonged to her. She could count on being left alone: no one tried to communicate with her, no question of her taking part in things.

My thoughts are my own and you’ll never get at them. I am inside them. Me, Flora Dalvik, a person with an entire name, an individual, the human being Flora Dalvik I will defend with my human body, however decrepit and atrophied it may be. It still has a functional brain and thoughts as all other people have; it is a living being’s body.

The young women, and they were all young in relation to Flora, had impatience in their movements, as if to hurry the working day along and get it over with, so that they could hurry to the changing room, hang up their smocks and pants, and become private. Go home to their own things.

Of course there were caretakers during the night, but they weren’t all that bothersome. They came in like shadows and turned her during the night. She usually knew when they would be coming, and she was ready for them.

They started appearing more often since a young girl from Polhemsgården in Solna had raised the alarm on the mistreatment of the elderly. TV showed close-ups of bedsores and blackened toes, and the girl, who was an employee of Polhemsgården, received some kind of an award for bravery, and civil courage was spoken of quite a bit.

This event, for Flora’s part, meant that the white-coated assistants got her out of bed every single day, even on the weekends-in fact, especially on the weekends, since visitors could show up unexpectedly then-seated her upright and tied her to the wheelchair. They combed her thin hair and made two braids from it. She had never braided her hair. That wasn’t her style.

What had been her style?

More and more, she was beginning to forget it.

She was thirty-three years old when she moved into Sven Dalvik’s home. His daughter was just about five. Flora worked at his firm. Or, more exactly, she was employed as his secretary in order to assist Director Dalvik with everything he could possibly need.

Head secretary. Did that position even exist these days? She had been proud of her job. She had gone to vocational school in business administration and then gone to BarLocks. Such ambitions were rare among her acquaintances. Most of her contemporaries had gotten married and had children as soon as they finished high school.

And what did she do? Why didn’t she find some nice young man and get married at a reasonable time? She had no answer. The years went by, and Mr. Right had not shown up. Of course, she had gotten some offers, quite a few, in fact, especially during the time that she went dancing and danced everywhere in town or at Hässelby Baths. Young men came there from all over Stockholm, and she knew all the tricks. She could have pulled anyone to some dark corner if she had decided on it. Just like her friends did.

No, that was too easy. And she was worried about what those city boys would say behind her back. They’d think she was just any old country girl.

She was not. She was different.

She lay on her back and stared at the ceiling. The woman in the bed next to her was in the midst of dying. The assistants had placed a screen between the beds, but the sound of approaching death could not be screened. They probably thought Flora didn’t realize what was going on.

She listened to the labored breathing, each breath coming at longer intervals. The dying woman was old and had been in bad shape ever since she had arrived fourteen days earlier. It was time for her to leave the earthly plane; she was well over ninety.