Karin Alvtegen: Shame

Vanja stopped and shoved her hands in her jacket pockets.

‘It’s important to have someone waiting for you outside. It’s a little easier that way. I know, because I’ve tried it both ways.’

Monika looked down at the snow. She had no one waiting out there. Maybe her mother, but she wasn’t sure. Her mother had called a few times but Monika had never answered. She didn’t know if her mother knew where she was now. And to be honest, it didn’t really matter.

Vanja took a handkerchief out of her pocket and wiped her nose.

‘It’s pretty rough in here, so it’s not always easy to be the new girl. But it’s fairly calm in the section you’re in. Get hold of some cigarettes, you’ll need them.’

Vanja raised her hand to shield her eyes from the sun and gazed out over the glittering fields that stretched beyond the fence. Monika stole a glance at her.

‘Check out how beautiful it is…’

Monika followed her gaze out across the landscape and they stood in silence for a while.

‘To think that we’re so stupidly negligent with everything we have. That we don’t understand things better. You and I are actually prime examples of how little we comprehend, otherwise we wouldn’t be standing on this side of the fence.’

Monika was inclined to agree, but she wasn’t ready to express it in words. Vanja made a little noise that sounded like a snort.

‘We think we’re the top of the line, that everything’s perfectly formed and done with just because we happen to exist at this moment. But the little space of time we’re alive on this earth is only a little fart in the universe in the grand scheme of things. I read that we aren’t even really completely developed enough to walk on two legs, that there are some suspension thingies inside that haven’t yet managed to adapt properly.’

She made a circular motion with her hand over her stomach. Monika wondered which of the body’s tissues she could mean, but chose not to ask. Just at this moment it didn’t seem so important.

A flock of birds flew across the sky, and Vanja leaned her head back so she could watch their path. Monika followed her example.

‘You know, in the Milky Way alone there are two hundred billion stars. That’s incredible, two hundred billion, and we’re talking just about our own galaxy. It’s quite strange to think that our sun is only one of that whole spray of stars.’

The birds disappeared over the woods. Monika closed her eyes and wondered what they were seeing way over there.

‘Imagine how afraid people must have been when they were told that the earth was not the centre of the universe. What a terrifying scenario, to walk about here in peace and quiet and know that God created the earth and all the people as the centre of everything, and then suddenly to hear that we are only a tiny flyspeck.’

Vanja took out her handkerchief and wiped her nose again.

‘It was no more than four hundred years ago we believed that, but it’s all fine to walk about now and sneer at how stupid they were. And we think we’re so fantastically enlightened, all you have to do is look around to see how well it’s all going.’

Monika stole a look at Vanja. This was undeniably a peculiar woman she had run into, and she realised in amazement that she appreciated the walk. No one she knew ever talked about things like this. If they hadn’t been confined inside a barbed-wire fence it would have felt quite refreshing.

Vanja looked at Monika and smiled.

‘I usually amuse myself by wondering how many people will have the opportunity to laugh at us in four hundred years. And what things that we’re so sure of now will later turn out to be bullshit.’

Monika smiled back and Vanja looked at her watch.

‘It’s almost time.’

Monika nodded and they turned back. Her spirits had lifted somewhat. It felt good to know that there was someone like Vanja in here.

‘Do you have anyone waiting for you outside?’

The question made Monika’s smile die out. For a brief moment the face that she missed more than anything else floated by. She lowered her eyes and shook her head.

‘Are you absolutely sure? I had someone, even though I didn’t know it.’

Monika didn’t want to be sure, so she chose not to reply. But how could she hope even in her wildest dreams that he would still be waiting? She had made her life’s second gigantic mistake when she let him go.

‘You can’t know anything for sure until it’s been proven.’

Monika stopped.

‘What?’

But Vanja said nothing more. She just kept walking and the only thing that came out of her mouth was her white, swirling breath.

The will to go on is needed even for the smallest steps. She had read that somewhere, but no longer remembered where or when. She was familiar with small steps; that was all she had devoted herself to since everything came crashing down. But she no longer knew what it felt like to have the will to go on. For so many years she had struggled to excel, doing her utmost to decorate the outside with the loveliest mosaic, but along the way she had neglected what was on the inside. She had become her accomplishments and her possessions, and there was nothing else. When the glorious exterior had been peeled away, all that remained was the emptiness from what she had given up. The opportunity she had thrown away.

She had only one wish.

Only one.

To dare to take that step, she needed courage that went beyond reason. But if she didn’t dare, there would never be an occasion to dare to do anything ever again.

And with the courage that only someone who is truly, truly afraid can summon, she finally picked up the phone.

‘It’s me. Monika.’

For an eternity there was silence before he finally said something, and she could spill out what she needed to say.

‘There’s so much I want to tell you.’

And with all her hopes directed at the secret that she so fervently wished would exist somewhere, she said the words.

‘Thomas, I’m longing to come home.’

KARIN ALVTEGEN was born in Jönköping, Sweden, in 1965 and had a varied career, including work in set design for film and stage, before she started to write. She won Sweden’s most prestigious crime novel award, the Glass Key, in 2000 with her novel, Missing, and further acclaim with her next two novels, Betrayaland Shame. She is the great-niece of Astrid Lindgren (author of the Pippi Longstocking stories), and lives in Stockholm.

STEVEN T. MURRAY is a publisher and translator who has been translating from Nordic languages for over thirty years. He is the prize-winning translator of Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander books.