Anxious People(78)

She cracked, like thin ice on a puddle of water, first just some hairline wrinkles around her eyes, then the rest, all at once. The collar of her top turned a darker color. She was thinking about everything Ro had told her that night, the incomprehensible cruelties that terrible people are capable of inflicting on each other, and the utter insanity of war. Then she thought of how Ro, after all that, had somehow managed to grow up to be the sort of person who made other people laugh. Because her parents had taught her during their flight through the mountains that humor is the soul’s last line of defense, and as long as we’re laughing we’re alive, so bad puns and fart jokes were their way of expressing their defiance against despair. Ro told Julia all this that first night, and after that Julia got to spend all of the world’s everydays with her.



* * *




Something like that can make you put up with living with birds.



* * *




“An affair that started in a flower shop,” Estelle nodded slowly. “I like that.” She sat silent for several minutes. Then it burst out of her: “I had an affair once! Knut never knew.”

“Dear Lord!” Anna-Lena exclaimed, now sensing that this was starting to get out of hand after all.

“Yes, it wasn’t all that long ago, you know,” Estelle grinned.

“Who was it?” Julia asked.

“A neighbor in our building. He read a lot, like me. Knut never read. He used to say authors were like musicians who never get to the point. But this other man, the neighbor, he always had a book tucked under his arm when we met in the elevator. So did I. One day he offered me his book, saying: ‘I’ve finished this one, I think you should read it.’ And so we started to swap books. He read such wonderful things. I don’t have the words to describe it, but it was like going on a journey with someone. Where didn’t matter. To outer space. It went on for a long time. I started to fold down the corners of pages when there was a bit I really liked, and he started to write little comments in the margins. Just the odd word. ‘Beautiful.’ ‘True.’ That’s the power of literature, you know, it can act like little love letters between people who can only explain their feelings by pointing at other people’s. One summer I opened a book and sand trickled out of it, and I knew he’d liked it so much he hadn’t been able to put it down. Every now and then I would get a book where some of the pages were crumpled, and I knew he’d been crying. One day I told him that, in the elevator, and he replied that I was the only person who knew that about him.”

“And that was when you…,” Julia nodded with a naughty smile.

“Oh, no, no, no…,” Estelle squeaked, and looked like she might have liked to finish the sentence by saying that she might possibly have wished it had happened, but of course that didn’t change anything. “We were never, it never, I could never…”

“Why not?” Julia asked.

Estelle smiled, proud and full of longing at the same time. It takes a certain age for that, a certain life.

“Because you dance with the person you went to the party with. And I went with Knut.”

“So… what happened?” Anna-Lena wondered.

Estelle’s breathing didn’t show any sign of speeding up, she didn’t have many big secrets left. After this one, possibly none at all.

“One day in the elevator he gave me a book, and inside it was a key to his apartment. He said he didn’t have any family living nearby, and that he wanted someone in the building to have a spare key ‘in case anything happened.’ I didn’t say anything, and I didn’t do anything, but I got the sense that maybe… maybe he would have liked it. If something had happened.”

She smiled. So did Julia.

“So in all that time, you never…?”

“No, no, no. We exchanged books. Until he died a few years later. Something to do with his heart. His siblings put the apartment up for sale, but his furniture was still there at the viewing. So I went along, pretending to be interested in buying it. I walked around in his home, ran my hands over his kitchen counter, the hangers in his closet. In the end I found myself standing in front of his bookcase. It’s such an odd thing, the way you can know someone so perfectly through what they read. We liked the same voices, in the same way. So I let myself have a few minutes to think about what we could have been for each other, if everything had been different, somewhere else in our lives.”

“And then?” Julia whispered.

Estelle smiled. Defiantly. Happily.

“Then I went home. But I kept the key to his apartment. I never told Knut. It was my affair.”



* * *




Silence settled in the closet for a while. In the end Anna-Lena plucked up the courage to say: “I’ve never had an affair. But once I changed hairdressers, and I didn’t dare walk past the old one for several years.”

It wasn’t the strongest anecdote, but she wanted to feel that she was participating. She had never had time for an affair, how on earth does anyone find the time? All that stress, Anna-Lena thought, and a whole new man to deal with. She had spent her life working and rushing home, working and rushing home, and always felt guilty for not being good enough in either place. In those circumstances it’s easy to feel sympathy for other people who aren’t quite good enough. That’s probably why, out of all the people in the apartment who had already had the thought, it was Anna-Lena who was the first to say out loud: “I think we should try to help the bank robber.”