Карин Тидбек - Jagannath

“I don’t follow,” I said.

“Would you get the idea to cut a pregnant woman open with a breadknife and take the baby out?” She was talking through her scarf again, voice muffled.

I shuddered. “Of course not.”

“Or poke someone’s eyes out with a paper clip?”

“Come off it.”

“Three days, Sara.”

Of course. This was what she was on about. Karl.

“He used everything he could get his hands on.”

“I know, Becks. You’ve told me everything.”

She went on as if I hadn’t said anything. “You couldn’t imagine the things he came up with, not in your worst nightmares. Get it? And you know something else?”

“What?” I said, although I knew what she was going to say.

“How could He let it go on for three days before He decided to do something about it?”

“He did deal with him,” I said, as I usually did.

“Yeah, after three days. Why did He wait so long?”

“I don’t know.”

We were quiet for a while, sipping coffee.

“And I’m still here,” Rebecka said. “It’s like I’m being punished too.”

“I don’t think you are,” I said. “You’re not being punished. He doesn’t do that. Like I said before, maybe it’s a test.”

We went through the motions like that, until I said I had to go home and dropped her off at Slussen, where she would take the subway.

She didn’t take the subway. She tried to throw herself in front of it. It was in all the morning papers: Rebecka jumped from the end of the platform, so that the train would hit her at full speed. The driver later told reporters that he’d had a sudden impulse to brake before he was supposed to. The train had stopped a meter from where Rebecka was lying on the tracks.

“Maybe now you’ll believe me when I tell you,” she said across the kitchen table the following day. “Listen, I’m ashamed for all the times you’ve had to come and clean me up.”

“It’s all right,” I said.

“No, it’s not. I know you think I’m a coward who’s afraid to really go ahead and kill myself. I know you wish I could make up my mind and either die or start living again.”

I couldn’t meet her eyes then.

“It’s always been for real,” she said. “It really has. I can’t sleep through a single night without waking up because Karl is there. He’s standing at the foot of the bed, and I know he’s about to do all those things to me. I want it to stop. I want to sleep.” She looked at me. “Every time I went for my arms with the razor they stopped bleeding. Every time I took pills and alcohol I started throwing up. I never once stuck my fingers down my throat. I promise. I just started throwing up. And if I didn’t, absolutely nothing would happen even though I should be passing out.”

“So what are you saying?” I said.

“It’s getting worse. I don’t even get injured anymore. I swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills yesterday, you know?”

“And…?”

“They came out the other end this morning. Whole. The Lord is fucking with me.”

“Don’t swear,” I said.

“I’m telling you. The Lord is fucking with me. I hate Him. He won’t take the nightmares away. Or the scars, all the scars. But He won’t let me kill myself either. It’s like He wants me to suffer.”

“Rebecka, we’ve been through this one before.”

“Would you stop taking His side all the time?” she shouted. “I’m your best friend!”

“Rebecka,” I said.

“I know what you’re going to say. He’s not my nanny.”

“That wasn’t what I was going to say.”

“If He thinks I’m supposed to deal with this myself, He could have just not come back in the first place. That way I would have known what to do. But now, this is the way things are. And I really don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

“Me neither,” I said.

The next time Rebecka called it was early morning.

“You have to come over,” she said. “We have to talk.”

I took the bike over to her apartment, expecting to see another scene of a failed suicide attempt. Her face was pale under the scarring when she opened the door.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” I said. “I’ve taken the day off.”

She let me in. There wasn’t anything on her or in the apartment to indicate she had done anything to herself, just the usual mess. I sat down by the kitchen table while she poured tea. The blue tablecloth was crusted with cup rings. I traced them with a finger.

“You had me worried,” I said. “What’s going on?”

“I’ve realized what I have to do.” She put a steaming cup in front of me and sat down in the opposite chair. A smoky Lapsang smell wafted up from the cup. Rebecka rested her elbows on the table and leaned towards me.

“I’m serious about not coping anymore,” she said. Her tone was matter-of-fact. “I want to die, Sara.”

“I don’t want you to,” I said.

“Are you sure?”

“I really don’t want you to.”

“Well, it’s not for you to decide anyway.” She took a sip from her cup. I didn’t know what to say, so I drank my tea. It was sweetened with too much honey.

“I suppose you’re going to tell me,” I said eventually.

“The Lord isn’t going to do anything,” Rebecka said. “I know that now.”

There were white dregs at the bottom of my cup.

“Rebecka, what did you put in my tea?” I said.

Her face was set, almost serene. “I’m going to make Him listen,” she replied. “I’m going to do something he can’t ignore.”

I was naked when I woke up in her bed. My wrists and ankles were tied to the bedposts. Rebecka was sitting on a chair beside me, a toolbox at her feet.

“I love you,” I said.

“I know,” she said.

Herr Cederberg preferred leaving the office to have lunch outside. He would sit on a bench next to the fountain on Mariatorget, reading the newspaper with a sandwich or two, especially now that the weather was nice. It was June, and the flowerbeds were full of giddy insects that every now and then buzzed over to Herr Cederberg to make sure he wasn’t a flower. Other office workers populated the adjacent benches with their lunch boxes, and some even stretched out on the lawns, drinking the first summer sun like pale lizards.

Herr Cederberg was vaguely reading an article on the national economy when feet crunched by on the gravel, and a girl’s voice mumbled,

“…like a bumblebee.”

Another voice tittered. He didn’t have to look up to know they were talking about him. He was already very aware of his swelling thighs and bulging stomach, and that his feet were not quite touching the ground. The most common simile was pig, followed by panda, koala, and bumblebee, in no particular order. Herr Cederberg looked up from his newspaper. Two rosy and adolescent faces quickly looked away and leaned towards each other. The one who had giggled continued:

“Oh, I love bumblebees, they’re so neat. You know how the laws of nature says they shouldn’t be able to fly, right, but they fly anyway?”

“Yeah, but how?” asked the first girl.

“Because they don’t know they’re not supposed to!”

The girls burst into shrill laughter. Herr Cederberg couldn’t summon the energy to say anything. They had no idea of their own idiocy and wouldn’t for years to come, if ever. He looked at the fat little insects bumping around in the tulips, their wings, if one could see them in slow motion, oscillating in a beautiful figure-of-eight pattern. He imagined himself fluttering his arms in the same fashion, slowly ascending into the sky.

Herr Cederberg had long ago converted his garage into a workshop. His first passion had been for model planes, but the last few years he had been experimenting with different types of kites. His finest work to date, a Balinese dragon, covered the ceiling in bright red and gold.