by
Ia Genberg
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[...] The coffee was done and he moved the pot to the table while I unbuttoned my coat and sat down. “Okay,” he said when he saw my belly, “okay, I can see why you want to get hold of him.” The coffee was disgusting, but I drank some anyway while we talked, Jens was going on tour with another band the following week and added my number to his phone in case he’d hear from Alejandro against all odds. “Well, good luck then,” he said as I was leaving. He made a sweeping gesture, “You know, with everything.”
lol
We live so many lives within our lives—smaller lives with people who come and go, friends who disappear, children who grow up—and I never know which of these lives is meant to serve as the frame. But whenever I’m in the grips of a fever or infatuation there is no confusion; my “self” recedes and gives space to a nameless joy, a unified whole that preserves all the details, inseparable and distinct, next to one another. Afterward I always remember this state as one of grace. That might be one way of describing the whole, people filing in and out of my face in no particular order. No “beginning” and no “end,” no chronology, only each and every moment and what transpires therein. At this point, now that I’ve started writing, there’s one person I can’t escape. Birgitte. I used to think that a sharper sense of being alive was to be found in the forest, that I would be able to walk my way to it between the tall pines, that I would find it while sitting alone on a tree stump with the sun in my eyes, or while gazing out on the sea from some rocks on the shore; that I could only be fully awake among the silent elements. But it turned out that I already had everything right here, in the details around me, that it’s simply a question of being attentive in looking at all of it, of letting myself go and directing my attention outward, and I mean truly outward. That’s where this sharper sense of being alive is found, in the alert gaze on another. It was how I came to understand Birgitte, by observing her attentively.
[...] Birgitte wasn’t particularly adorable anymore, but everything that appealed to these men’s instincts to help, shore up, guide, and understand, was still there. I no longer lived at home and didn’t see her a lot during this period, but my sister was there and she told me about the men she bumped into in the kitchen eating filmjölk in the mornings, the men she encountered when they rang the doorbell late at night with flowers in hand. Birgitte was able to pick and choose, though that’s probably not how she experienced it, and some men stayed for a month while others had to slouch off as the night wore on, the flowers they’d brought left in a vase on the kitchen table. In hindsight it might look like she had the upper hand, suitors competing for her favor, but of course their protection had terms. There were clauses to their goodwill. Her anxiety could seem so crazy, so deranged and psychiatric and primitive, but outside our family, meaning the family made up by her, my sister, me, and our dad, she was able to tame it into the range of what’s considered normal. This lifelong undertaking, the effort to make her instability seem normal, was her life’s great struggle, the great stipulation for being touched by the love of others. [...]
Four already seemed like a lot, but in actual fact we were merely a fraction of the horde of translators contracted by twenty-seven publishing houses around the world to translate this book. Detaljerna, published earlier that year, had been a runaway success and would go on to win the prestigious August Prize in November. It’s the fourth novel from Ia Genberg, who debuted at forty-five after leaving a career in journalism and retraining as a nurse in order to be able to save her writing for fiction.
hell yeah
[from the translator's note]
[...] Really he was a solitary thinker, not interested in most of his colleagues. The vision he had for the school – with children as thinkers and artists at its core – went needless to say against the grain of public policy on education. It went against the way the world worked. And unlike Zachary, Alex had no conviction that progress was possible, or that you could build any institution into a power for good. There was a contradiction, Christine thought, between his passionate scepticism and his commitment to the children’s education. He didn’t believe that anything could get better, and was often despairing – yet he dedicated himself to building and nourishing their imaginations, as if hope depended on it. She also sometimes thought, when she was angry with him, that when they left his class he forgot them.
There was something intolerable in the expectation in that room, strained around Zachary’s absence, which could not be filled. The time when they might have been waiting for him to walk through the door was so recent, so close at hand, that it seemed vividly possible; they could imagine how he’d make his entrance, noisy with reassurances, full of jokes, puzzled by their glum faces. He was always so up to date on everything, so full of news. It seemed impossible he didn’t know this latest fact, his own death.
In the street things were better. She gulped down the tarry, tainted city air, felt the heat of the car engines on her legs and the paving stones hard under her feet, took in the shopfronts one after another in all their vivid detail: the bolts of African fabrics, rows of bottles of coloured varnish in the nail parlour, jars of vermilion peppers lined up on the shelves of the Polish delicatessen. All this was a relief: the impersonal solid forms of the world which would persist without Zachary, without happiness, without her.
Alex turned on his side, to face her in the dark; he put his hand on her pyjama top, onto her breast. Christine was shocked by the violence of her reluctance to make love to him. She knew they ought to be opened up to each other: Alex was right, his instincts were always good, more generous than hers. She half longed for the comfort he wanted to give her, and to comfort him. It was the same as when he’d made her listen right through to the end of the music, the day before. In her mind she understood how sex and death were both part of the mystery of entrances and exits, both opening onto this same strange place where they all belonged now, in the sudden shadow of Zachary’s death. But her body contracted against him in spite of her mind, she felt withdrawn inside her flesh, concealed in its sealed chamber, fierce against its violation. She wanted to try to explain to him that she couldn’t bear to be touched, not now, not yet: but she couldn’t, the words seized up in her chest, they wouldn’t come out. She pushed his hand away without a word, turned over with her back to him and pretended to sleep.
Lydia felt herself at some crisis, now they’d arrived at the end of their formal education. Dissent and scepticism had been easy while they were held tight inside its frame – now something more was called for, and she dreaded testing her reserves of imagination and energy, finding them empty. At first she had played at falling in love with Alex because it gave a shape to her days, and a motivation: then her obsession had swallowed up its original purpose. Her lack of him gnawed at her, making her incomplete; she thought fatalistically that if she had any talent it was probably for this, for a destructive passion. Lydia had the biggest room in the shared house, with the biggest bed – where she slept sprawling luxuriantly in dirty sheets, rarely getting up before midday. Her room was chaotically untidy, with clothes heaped on every piece of furniture, or dropped on the floor where she’d taken them off. She had a gift for finding treasures – old couture silks and satins, stiff net petticoats – among the dross in junk shops; everything smelled of mothballs, or of beer and cigarette smoke from the bar.
Christine was bemused now by the long days when she had nothing to do except study in the university library, or at her desk at home. She didn’t need a job because she had a full grant for her PhD – and she hadn’t embarked yet on any university teaching. She was diligent, and liked her work, but it couldn’t really fill all the hours of her day, or all the space inside her. And so she too, like Lydia, lived in a suspended state, expecting to discover something more serious to be the business of her life. Perhaps it would be motherhood, Christine sometimes thought. Her own mother spoke significantly about the happiness that came with children, and Christine believed in it – and yet that possibility seemed remote, so she waited patiently.