Ninni Holmqvist - The Unit

“Yes, but of course it wouldn’t have gone to somebody like that! Then again, why not? Everyone has the right to live. Even stuck-up bitches.”

“Oh yes?” said Elsa. “That’s what you think, is it? How noble!”

“Absolutely. Just call me Saint Alice.” She pressed her palms together as if she were praying, while at the same time crossing her eyes, her expression deeply serious and saintly, and from the depths of her lungs she intoned in her baritone voice:

“Aaamen…!”

It was impossible not to laugh, and that wasn’t such a good thing because it hurt to laugh, and Elsa and I clutched our scars from the operation.

Then we started comparing our scars. There was no one else in the sauna just then, except the surveillance cameras and the invisible microphones, of course. Alice ’s scar was bigger than mine, but mine was uglier, bumpier, and in shades of blue, green and pink. Elsa’s was the biggest and extremely bumpy, almost like a lump, and the area all around it was inflamed and purple, but then it was also the most recent. When we’d finished discussing our scars, Elsa said:

“Dorrit, I have something to tell you. I’ve been trying to find the right time, but… Anyway, this is as good a moment as any. It’s about your sister.”

“My sister?”

“Yes. Her name was Siv, wasn’t it?”

I nodded.

“She was here,” said Elsa. “She lived in B4.”

I remembered the wall hanging down in lab 2; I’d been right, then-it was Siv who had made it. I wasn’t surprised. I felt completely calm.

“How did you find out?” I asked Elsa.

“When I was in for my operation, I met a nurse. Clara Gransjö.”

“Gransjö? Is she related to Göran Gransjö?”

“She’s his daughter. Göran Gransjö was the principal of our school,” she explained to Alice before she went on. “Clara recognized my name, and I recognized hers, so we got talking about people at home in the village and checked to see whether we had any mutual acquaintances, and I was just about to mention you when she exclaimed: ‘Siv Weger! Did you know her?’ ‘No, but I know her sister,’ I said. ‘She’s in H3. We see each other every day.’ You don’t mind my saying that?”

She looked down at me anxiously.

“Of course not,” I said, climbing up to the top bench in between her and Alice, so that we were on the same level. “But tell me what you know about Siv.”

“Well,” Elsa began, “she came here when she was fifty, like most of us, and she was evidently involved in lots of medical and other experiments; she also went through three organ donations and a number of egg and bone marrow donations. The quality of her eggs was apparently as good as those of a twenty-five-year-old, and she was regarded as a real superwoman. And then she found love here, just like you. She met a woman called Elin or Ellen, Clara couldn’t remember which, and they were together until it was Elin or Ellen’s turn to donate her heart.”

I felt a stab of pain in the region around my own heart, and had to gasp for breath in the humid air of the sauna. I was thinking about Johannes, who was so much older than me and who had been in the unit for so much longer. I closed my eyes, thought “not today, not tomorrow,” and at the same time felt Elsa’s hand clutching mine.

“Are you okay?” she said. “Do you need to go out for some air? To cool down? Water?”

“No, no, I’m fine.” I said. I opened my eyes, met her gaze and nodded to her to carry on.

She pulled her hand away and leaned back cautiously against the hot wooden wall. Her whole body was shiny with sweat, mine too, and Alice ’s. Alice was sitting in silence with her knees drawn up and her arms around her legs, listening earnestly to Elsa’s story.

“After she had lost her Ellen-Elin, she applied to make her final donation.”

“Can you do that?” said Alice.

“Didn’t you know?” Elsa replied. “Well, anyway, now you do. Her application was approved-I think they always are-and just a week or so later there was someone with Siv’s blood type who needed both a heart and lungs. And… That was four years ago.”

By this time I was no longer calm, by this time I was seething, and it had nothing to do with the heat of the sauna. As I said, I wasn’t surprised. As I’ve already mentioned I hadn’t thought it very likely that Siv would still be alive. I would have been surprised if she had been, if I had bumped into her here, for example during a walk in the winter garden, large as life, just older than when I last saw her. Nor was I upset, not primarily at least. I was angry. The fact is that I had worked up a real rage, little by little, while Elsa was telling us what she had found out. And the knowledge that Siv’s heart and lungs lived on inside someone who needed them more than she did-someone who perhaps had five splendid kids to provide for-didn’t make me less angry in the slightest.

“But what about me?” I burst out, slamming my hand against the wall. “Perhaps I needed my sister, why doesn’t anybody care about things like that? That brothers and sisters might need each other? I needed my big sister, I still need her, she was my family, my closest relative, why doesn’t anybody care about that?”

I punched the wall, over and over again, the sweat pouring, almost gushing out of me, splashing as I banged and punched, until Alice and Elsa moved in close to me from their respective corners, grabbed my arms and held me, stopping me from punching and flailing. They enveloped me, they rocked and soothed me as if I were a little child, and our warm, damp bodies slipped and stuck together.

“You know that relationships between siblings don’t count,” said Alice after a while. “It’s only new constellations they approve of. People who make a new home and produce new people. You know that, Dorrit; you know that everything has to move forward.”

Sometimes at night I dreamed of Jock. We were usually on the beach or on our way home from there, tired and hungry, me with cold red cheeks, Jock with his breath steaming, and we went into the house, I put some wood in the stove and lit it, gave Jock some food and cooked something for myself. The seasons in the dream varied, but mostly it was autumn or winter. We were on the beach, I would throw a stick, and Jock would dash off barking with joy to fetch it, place it at my feet whereupon I would praise him, pick up the stick and throw it again. It was like a film, a loop, and I was very contented in those dreams, it was as if everything important was contained in that everlasting loop, as if everything else was unimportant, small, worthless. Sometimes I would wake up with the word “cycle” going around in my head, and I would stretch, then creep close to the still-sleeping Johannes and caress him or simply press myself against him until, half asleep and grunting slightly, he would begin to feel for my body with his hands, and before he was even fully awake he would part my legs and push inside me.

The night after Elsa told me about what happened to Siv, I dreamed the beach dream. This time it was unusually intense, the colors and contrasts unusually clear and sharp, almost like a film in Technicolor, and the sound of the waves, the wind, the gulls, the terns, the herons and Jock were clearly distinguishable. I could even smell the sea and the seaweed.

I was happy in the dream, but when I woke up it was with a feeling that I was falling apart, that I was cracking up from the inside and slowly falling to pieces. My heart was jumping and grating like a cold engine that doesn’t want to start, my skin was crawling and I couldn’t manage a single clear thought, it was as if all my thoughts were crushed to bits just as they began to take shape.