Jensen Beach - Swallowed by the Cold - Stories

“I don’t think I ever met that woman,” said Jonas. “Not that I remember.”

“She was very old,” Louise said. She couldn’t tell if he was telling the truth or only saying this to annoy her.

From the bedroom on the courtyard side of their apartment, there was a clear view of Barbro Ekman’s living room. When Jonas was young, that bedroom had been his. Now Martin used it as an office. She rarely went in the room anymore. Martin was private about so much. “Do you remember the blue light from her window?” she asked Jonas. “How it used to reflect on the flower box?”

“I think so,” he said.

“It used to scare you.”

He tore open the paper wrapping of the chopsticks, pulled them apart, and rubbed them together to smooth the edges.

“It was so easy to explain,” she said. “It’s just her television, I always told you. But you never believed me.”

The waitress arrived with two rectangular plates and set them down in the center of the table. Colorful pieces of fish were arranged on each plate. She’d tried to listen to what Jonas had ordered and follow along in her own menu, and she’d easily been able to do so, but now that the food had arrived she couldn’t tell one piece of fish from another.

Jonas pointed with his chopsticks. “Salmon,” he said. “And yellowtail. Whitefish. Eel on this plate here.”

She’d always disliked eel. Eel could travel great distances out of the water and she found this disturbing.

“Who bought the apartment?” Jonas asked.

“I only know a name,” Louise said. Arman had been a good teacher. She could still recite the conjugation of several French verbs, hear his voice reading from lists he’d put on the chalkboard. Present indicative, present conditional, present subjunctive. She remembered the strangest things. There couldn’t be that many Jahanis in Stockholm. Jonas was thirty-four. Would she feel jealous or relieved if the person in the apartment was close to that age?

She watched her son eat.

He talked about a problem at his office. An e-mail had been accidentally sent to the wrong person and Jonas found this uncomfortably funny. He’d only been in his current position for a year and everything he said about his job, positive or negative, surged with fresh excitement.

When they finished, Jonas insisted on paying the check. As he was figuring out the tip, she typed an e-mail to herself on her phone with a reminder to deposit money in his account.

She walked him back to work. They said good-bye to each other outside the glass-walled entryway of the building’s lobby. Jonas vanished into the crowd of office workers. It was remarkable how similar to her son they all looked. It had been the same when he was in school. They were all identical. Hundreds of them crowded the spaces of his childhood. His soccer matches, ski lessons, piano. She’d always been at ease with being the mother of a child who was like everyone else. It had been a relief to exist so close to the middle. She’d believed this all her life. There were so many fewer risks. She watched the crowd fill the lobby. These could all be my children, she thought.

She decided to walk home. Systembolaget had a location near Jonas’s office and she wanted to buy a bottle of wine. It embarrassed her to buy wine more than twice a week from the same Systembolaget and she’d been to the location closer to her apartment only the day before. Lately, she’d been interested in South African wines. She picked two bottles of a cabernet that, according to a sign fastened to the shelf in the store, had ranked very highly in a blind taste test. She paid for the wine, and, as she left the store, she looked up and down the street to see if there was anyone who might recognize her. Then she stuffed the bottles into her purse, concealing what wouldn’t fit all the way in with her scarf, and walked the rest of the way home.

The green piece of paper was still there on the call box, partly obscuring the name Ekman. One corner of the paper curled outward in the heat. With her fingernail she started to peel the tape up so she could reposition it over the paper but she stopped herself.

The stairwell was dark. Someone in an apartment on the ground floor was playing music very loudly. The volume faded as she climbed the stairs. By the second floor, she could no longer recognize the song.

She set her purse on the kitchen counter. The bottles clinked. Her purse muffled the sound. It was two, according to the oven clock. Martin was at work. That evening he was going out with colleagues to celebrate his retirement. They were taking him to a karaoke bar. She didn’t expect him to be home until late. Martin was retiring early. They didn’t need the money and he was bored with work. She opened one of the bottles of wine and poured herself a glass. Sometimes she worried she was damaging her health. The music was still playing and it seeped clearly into the kitchen. She took her wine to the balcony and sat looking out over the courtyard. The curtains in Barbro Ekman’s apartment were drawn and the apartment was dark. A new song came on, one she recognized. She mouthed along to a few words of the chorus, took a sip of her wine. The wine tasted good and the song reminded her of someplace nice. She couldn’t place the memory exactly, but the song made her think of the outdoors, of a beautiful view. There were trees and snow. Maybe the song had been on the radio frequently during a trip they’d once taken. The stairwell light flickered.

In the apartment just below Barbro Ekman’s place lived a woman named Johanna. Her two sons were grown now. One of them played ice hockey in America, somewhere in the southern states, Louise thought, North Carolina maybe. The other was a lawyer up north in Kiruna. Louise remembered when the family first moved in. Now the boys were grown, though they’d seemed so young when they first arrived. That was right before Louise had gotten pregnant with Jonas. She liked the family. She’d helped the boys plant a small herb garden on her own balcony because it faced east and got good morning sun.

Once, about a month before Jonas was born, Johanna had asked Louise to come sit with the older of her sons. The younger one was very sick, and Johanna hadn’t wanted to take them both to the hospital. Louise wasn’t feeling well herself and didn’t want to get sick with whatever the boy had. So she volunteered Martin to go in her place.

After barely an hour, he came back. She heard his footsteps in the hall outside their apartment. She heard the front door open and Martin’s heavy steps as he walked back to the bedroom. He was tired, he told her, and had forgotten to take a book to read.

“Who’s watching him?” she asked. “Has Johanna come back?” The bed was warm and comfortable, and Martin’s silhouette in the doorway appeared much larger than he actually was.

“I need to find my book,” he said.

“They have books there,” she said. “And a television.”

“I’m tired, Louise,” he said. The shadow of her husband stepped out of the doorway and disappeared into the hall. She heard a door open and close, then another. Then the airy creak of leather as he settled himself down into his chair in the living room.

She got out of bed and wrapped herself in her robe. It had happened many times since, but this was the first time she could remember hating her husband. Over the years that became such a familiar, even comfortable, feeling. It was cold out and she crossed the courtyard as quickly as she could. She was careful to avoid an icy patch where the shadow from a first-floor balcony kept the ground wet even in the warmest part of the day. Before she’d reached the door to the other building, a gust of wind blew and she felt the chill on her bare legs.

She could remember so much about that evening but not what the problem with the boy had been. She couldn’t recall Johanna coming home. But she remembered distinctly waking up on Johanna’s couch, her throat and stomach on fire with heartburn and hatred for Martin. The next time she saw Johanna, she’d ask about that night. We inhabit memories so differently from one another. Or, better, our individual memories of a shared event mean such different things to each of us. It had something to do with identity, she supposed, but she didn’t feel like chasing after the thought any further.