My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry(74)

Lennart turns to Elsa.

“I think your grandmother wanted me to start at the beginning.”

And that was the day Elsa heard the story of the boy with a syndrome. A fairy tale she’d never heard before. A tale so terrible it makes you want to hug yourself as hard as you can. Lennart tells her about the boy’s father, who has more hatred in him than anyone could think would be possible to fit into one person. The father used narcotics. Lennart stops himself, and seems worried about frightening Elsa, but she straightens her back and buries her hands in the wurse’s fur and says it doesn’t matter. Lennart asks if she knows what narcotics are, and she says she’s read about them on Wikipedia.

Lennart describes how the father became a different creature when he used drugs. How he became dark in his soul. How he hit the boy’s mother while she was pregnant, because he didn’t want to become anyone’s father. Lennart’s eyes start blinking more and more slowly, and he says that maybe it was because the father feared the child would be as he was. Filled with hatred and violence. So when the boy was born, and the doctors said he had a syndrome, the father was beside himself with rage. He couldn’t tolerate that the child was different. Maybe it was because he hated everything that was different. Maybe because, when he looked at the boy, he saw everything that was different in himself.

So he drank alcohol, took more of that stuff on Wikipedia, and disappeared for entire nights and sometimes for weeks on end, without anyone knowing where he was. Sometimes he came home utterly calm and withdrawn. Sometimes he cried, explaining that he’d had to keep out of the way until he’d wrung his own anger out of himself. As if there were something dark living in him that was trying to transform him, and he was struggling against it. He could remain calm for weeks after that. Or months.

Then one night the dark took possession of him. He hit and hit and hit them until neither of them was moving anymore. And then he ran.

Maud’s voice moves gently through the silence that Lennart leaves behind him in the kitchen. In the bedroom the boy with a syndrome snores, which is one of the first sounds Elsa has ever heard him make. Maud’s fingertips scramble about among the empty cookie tins on the kitchen counter.

“We found them. We’d been trying, for such a long time, to make her take the boy and leave, but she was so afraid. We were all so afraid. He was a terribly dangerous man,” she whispers.

Elsa grips the wurse tighter.

“Then what did you do?”

Maud crumples up by the kitchen table. She has an envelope in her hand, just like the one Elsa arrived with.

“We knew your grandmother. From the hospital. We ran a café back then, you see, for the doctors, and your grandmother came there every day. A dozen dreams and a dozen cinnamon buns, every single day! I don’t know how it started, really. But your grandmother was the sort of person one told things to, if you see what I mean? I didn’t know what to do about Sam. I didn’t know who to turn to. We were so terribly frightened, all of us, but I called her. She arrived in her rusty old car in the middle of the night—”

“Renault!” Elsa exclaims, because for some reason she has a sense that he deserves his name in the fairy tale if he’s the one who came to their rescue. Lennart clears his throat with a sad smile.

“Her Renault, yes. We took the boy and his mother with us and your grandmother drove here. Gave us the keys to the flats. I can’t think how she got her hands on them, but she said she’d clear it with the owners of the building. We’ve been living here ever since.”

“And the father? What happened when he realized everyone was gone?” Elsa wants to know, although she actually doesn’t want to know.

Lennart’s hand seeks Maud’s fingers.

“We don’t know. But your grandmother came here with Alf, and said this is Alf and he’s going to fetch all the boy’s things. And she went back there with Alf and the boy’s father turned up and he was . . . nothing but darkness then. Darkness from deep inside. He hit Alf something terrible—”

Lennart stops himself the way one does when suddenly reminding oneself that one is talking to a child. Fast-forwards through the story.

“Well, of course, he was already gone by the time the police came. And Alf, gosh, I don’t know. He was patched up at the hospital and drove home by himself and never said a word about it again. And two days later he was driving his cab again. He’s made of steel, that man.”

“And the father?” Elsa persists.

“He disappeared. Disappeared for years. We thought he’d never give up trying to find us, but he was gone for so long that we hoped—” says Lennart, interrupting himself as if the words are too heavy for his tongue.

“But now he’s found us,” Maud fills in.

“How?” asks Elsa.

Lennart’s eyes creep along the tabletop.

“Alf thinks he found your grandmother’s death notice, you see. And using that he found the undertaker’s. And there he found—” he starts to say, then looks as if he’s reminding himself of something once again.

“Me?” Elsa gulps.

Lennart nods and Maud lets go of his hand and runs around the table and embraces Elsa.

“Dear, dear Elsa! You have to understand, he hasn’t seen the boy in many years. And you’re about the same size and you have the same hair. He thinks you’re our grandchild.”