Anxious People(74)
“Knut’s dead,” she said for the first time, and swallowed hard.
* * *
Julia was looking down at the floor in irresolute silence. Anna-Lena sat and tried to think of something to say for a while, then leaned toward Estelle and tapped her on the shoulder with the wine bottle instead. Estelle took it and drank two small sips, before handing it back and going on, half to herself: “But he was very good at parking, Knut. He could parallel park in tiny spaces. So sometimes, when it’s most painful, when I see something really funny and think ‘He’d have laughed so hard his breakfast would have covered the wallpaper’—that’s when I fantasize that he’s just outside, parking the car. He wasn’t perfect, no man is, God knows, but whenever we went anywhere and it was raining, he would always drop me off just outside the door. So I could wait in the warm while he… parked the car.”
A silence forced its way between the three women, and gradually emptied their vocabularies until none of them knew what to say at all. Death, death, death, Estelle thought.
When Knut was lying in his sickbed those last nights, she asked him: “Are you scared?” He replied: “Yes.” Then his fingers ran through her hair and he added: “But it’ll be quite nice to get a bit of peace and quiet. You can put that on the headstone.” Estelle laughed hard at that. When he left her she wept so hard that she couldn’t breathe. Her body was never really the same after that, she curled up and never quite unfurled again.
“He was my echo. Everything I do is quieter now,” she said to the other women in the closet.
Anna-Lena sat for a while before she opened her mouth, because, although she was starting to get drunk, she understood that it wouldn’t be good form in the circumstances to appear greedy. They were wasted seconds, of course, because when she spoke the thought out loud, neither good intentions nor wild horses could hide the hopefulness in her voice.
“So… if your husband isn’t parking the car, can I ask if it was true that you’re looking at this apartment on behalf of your daughter, or was that…”
“No, no, my daughter lives in a nice row house with her husband and children,” Estelle replied sheepishly.
Just outside Stockholm, in fact, but Estelle didn’t say that, because she didn’t think this conversation needed to get any more complicated.
“So you’re just here… looking?” Anna-Lena asked.
“Seriously, Anna-Lena, she’s not competing with you and Roger to buy the apartment! Stop being so insensitive!” Julia snapped.
Anna-Lena stared down into the bottle and mumbled: “I was only asking.”
Estelle patted them both gratefully on the arm, one at a time, and whispered: “Now don’t fall out on my account, dears. I’m too old to be worth that.”
Julia nodded sullenly and put her hand around her stomach. Anna-Lena did the same with the wine bottle.
“How old are your grandchildren?” she asked.
“They’re teenagers now,” Estelle said.
“Oh, sorry to hear that,” Anna-Lena said with feeling.
Estelle smiled feebly. If you’ve lived with teenagers, you know they only exist for themselves, and their parents have their hands full dealing with the various horrors of life. Both the teenagers’ and their own. There was no place for Estelle there, she was mostly something of a nuisance. They were pleased that she answered the phone when they called on her birthday, but the rest of the time they assumed time stood still for her. She was a nice ornament that they only took out at Christmas and Midsummer.
“No… I’m not here to buy the apartment. I just haven’t got anything to do. Sometimes I go to apartment viewings out of curiosity, to listen to people talking, hear what they’re dreaming about. People’s dreams are always at their grandest when they’re looking for somewhere to live. Knut died slowly, you know. He lay in a care home for years, I couldn’t start living as if he was dead, but he… he wasn’t alive. Not really. So my life was on pause, somehow. I took the bus to the care home each day and sat with him. Read books. Out loud at first, then to myself at the end. That’s how it goes. But it was something to do. And a person needs that.”
Anna-Lena thought that yes, that was how it was, people needed to have a project.
“Life goes so fast. Working life, anyway,” she thought out loud, and looked very taken aback when she realized that Julia had heard her.
“What did you used to do?” the young woman asked.
Anna-Lena filled her lungs, simultaneously hesitant and proud.
“I was an analyst for an industrial company. Well, I suppose I was the senior analyst, really, but I did my best not to be.”
“Senior analyst?” Julia repeated, instantly ashamed of how that sounded.
Anna-Lena saw the surprise in her eyes, but she was used to it and didn’t take offense. Ordinarily she would just have changed the subject, but perhaps the wine had the upper hand on this occasion, because instead she thought out loud, without any hesitation: “Yes, I was. Not that I wanted that. To be a boss, I mean. The president of the company said that was precisely why he wanted me to do it. He said you don’t have to lead by telling other people what to do, you can lead by just letting them do what they’re capable of instead. So I tried to be a teacher more than a boss. I know people find it hard to believe of me, but I’m not a bad teacher. When I retired, two of my staff said they hadn’t realized I was actually their boss until they heard the speech thanking me for my work. A lot of people would probably have taken that as an insult, but I thought it was… nice. If you can do something for someone in such a way that they think they managed it all on their own, then you’ve done a good job.”