Karin Alvtegen - Shame

‘Can I ask you one thing?’

Ellinor’s voice sounded different now.

Maj-Britt sighed.

‘I have a hard time believing that I could actually stop you.’

‘Do you enjoy being so mean, or is it only because you feel you’re such a failure?’

Maj-Britt felt to her dismay that she was blushing. This was outrageous. No one had ever talked back to her before. Nobody had dared. And to presume that she regarded herself as a failure was an insult that could get this loathsome little person sacked.

Maj-Britt turned up the volume with the remote. She had absolutely no reason to reply to an insult.

‘I’m proud of my body and I don’t think there’s any reason to try and hide it. I think I look great in this shirt, if that’s what’s making you so upset.’

Maj-Britt still didn’t shift her gaze from the TV.

‘Well, it’s up to you whether you want to walk around looking like a whore.’

‘Right. Just like it’s up to each of us to decide whether to lock ourselves in a flat and try to eat ourselves to death. But that doesn’t mean that a person has no brain. Or what do you think?’

That was the last thing either of them said that day. And it annoyed Maj-Britt to bursting point that Ellinor had had the last word.

As soon as she was alone she called the pizza delivery.

Six days had passed since she sent her reply. Six days to let her feeling of repugnance slowly but surely fade away; or at least it no longer bothered her more than she could stand. She had enough to think about with being annoyed at Ellinor. But then one morning she again heard a noise in her useless letter basket, and before the flap on the letter-box snapped shut she knew that it was another letter from Vanja. She could feel it through the whole flat; she didn’t even have to go to the door to have it confirmed.

She let the letter lie there, and avoided looking towards the door when she passed by in the hall. But then Ellinor arrived, of course, and beaming with happiness she stuck it right under Maj-Britt’s nose.

‘Look! You’ve got a letter!’

She didn’t want to touch it. Ellinor put it on the table in the living room, and there it lay while Ellinor cleaned and Maj-Britt sat silently in the easy chair, pretending it wasn’t there.

‘Aren’t you going to read it?’

‘Why’s that? Do you want to know what’s in it?’

Ellinor kept cleaning and exchanged a few words with Saba instead. The poor beast couldn’t escape, and Maj-Britt saw her quietly lying there, suffering.

Maj-Britt got up and headed towards the bathroom.

‘Does your back hurt?’

Would this person never learn to shut up?

‘Why?’

‘I just noticed you grimacing and putting your hand there. Maybe it’s something a doctor should have a look at.’

Never in her life!

‘Why don’t you just see about finishing the cleaning here and then pack up and leave. Then you’ll see how much better my back will feel.’

She locked the bathroom door behind her and stayed in there until she was sure that the unpleasant little person had gone.

But her back did hurt, she couldn’t deny it. The pain was always there, and it had been more pronounced lately. But never in her life would she consider undressing and letting herself be examined by someone who would touch her body.

The letter lay there. For days and nights, consuming every molecule of oxygen in the flat and making Maj-Britt long to get out of there for the first time in ages. She was incapable of throwing it away. She could see that it was a thick letter this time, considerably thicker than the first one. And it lay there like a reproach and shrieked at her day and night.

‘You have no backbone, you fatty! You can’t resist reading me!’

And she couldn’t either. When the refrigerator was empty and the pizza delivery had closed for the night, she had no more defences. Even though she didn’t want to read a single one of the words that Vanja had written.

Hi, Maj-Britt!

Thanks for your letter! If you only knew how happy it made me! Especially hearing that you and your family are doing well. Yet another sign that it’s the voice of the heart we should listen to! The last time I saw you, you were pregnant and I remember how you suffered at having to go against your parents’ will when you married Göran. It makes me so glad that everything worked out and that your parents finally saw reason. No one should die without resolving matters, it’s so hard for those who are left behind. If you only knew how I admired your decisiveness and your courage and I still do!

I often think about our days growing up. Just think how different our situations were. At my house it was always a mess as you recall and we never knew what sort of state my father would be in when (and if) he came home. I never said it straight out, but I was so ashamed in front of the rest of you and especially you. But I also remember that you always wanted to come to my house to play, and you said you had a good time there, and that made me so happy. I have to admit I was a little scared of your parents. They talked a lot about the congregation that you all belonged to and how strict the rules were. At my house there really wasn’t anyone who talked about God. Something in between your house and mine would probably have been best, at least as far as spiritual nourishment was concerned!?

Remember the time we played ‘doctor’ in your woodshed and that Bosse Öman was there? We must have been ten or eleven, I think, weren’t we? I remember how scared you were when your father discovered us and Bosse said that the game was your idea. I still feel ashamed that I didn’t take the blame myself that time, but we both knew that you weren’t allowed to play games like that so it probably wouldn’t have done any good. It was such an innocent game, the kind all children play. You weren’t at school for several weeks after that, and when you came back you wouldn’t talk about why you’d been gone. There was so much I didn’t understand because our families were so different. Like that time several years later, it must have been when we were teenagers, when you told me how you used to pray to God to help you take away all the thoughts you didn’t want to have. We all thought about boys at that age so I probably didn’t understand how you suffered, I must have thought it was just a little odd. And you were so beautiful, you were always the one the boys were interested in and I was probably jealous of you because of that. But you prayed to God that He would crush you and teach you to obey and …

Maj-Britt dropped the letter to the floor. From the depths of everything she had forgotten, the nausea came rushing in like a berserker. She wrenched herself up out of the easy chair but made it no further than the hall before she threw up.

You’re a doctor. You can handle this. Tell them anything!

Twenty-three expectant faces were turned to her. Monika’s mind was a blank. Only one memory erupted like a boil from the nothingness and made all invented fantasies impossible. The seconds passed. Someone smiled encouragingly and someone else sensed her torment and chose to look away.

‘If you like we can skip to the next person now and you can speak later. If you would rather think about it for a while, that is…’

The woman gave her a friendly smile, but being pitied was more than Monika could stand. Twenty-three people were thinking at that moment that she was weak. If there was anything she had devoted her life to, it was to being regarded as the exact opposite of that. And she had succeeded. She heard it often. How colleagues on the job said that she was so capable. Now she was sitting with twenty-three unknown people and had just been granted special treatment because of her weakness. Everyone in the room viewed her as an ordinary, second-rate person, incapable of carrying out the task that Mattias had executed in such a brilliant manner. The need to reclaim her position was so strong that it succeeded in conquering her indecision.