He hated stiffs, drips, and drags.
He loved hushed, svelte girls with nimble fingers.
Whenever he had a moment.
He worked on my casket.
Sometimes he bit me.
Then Hilma would come with a band-aid.
Sometimes he tied me up.
Then she put a bow in my hair.
Sometimes he gently caressed my brow.
And I believed that I was bewitched.
I thought that soon everyone would see.
That I was actually a princess.
What a lovely ponytail, Hilma said then.
And closed the nursery door.
The water fell like a wedding gown.
And they were both decent individuals.
One did it for a living.
The other for pleasure.
One locked me in.
The other broke me down.
One was a humble woman.
The other was make-believe.
Both had fun.
Perhaps it was the Lord Himself who hired them.
Perhaps it was He who built the bed I could not roll out of.
Verily I say unto thee, whispered Percy Wennerfors to me.
Death has put on her best pair of shoes.
She sits in the cleaning cupboard, waiting.
When you fall asleep, a day will come where you cannot get up.
In a room with walls that are suddenly glass.
And stray cows and cars come roaring right through.
Your daddy is canoeing far away.
Your mom has gone to her piano lesson.
Deep under the sea.
*
It is not permitted to poo or pee in public, that was what my mom
used to often say.
I mean, if one is not a pig, she added, kind of kidding around.
My mom was an amusing and amiable individual,
but absolutely no bon vivant.
She told me all about a young man by the name of
Rudolfino.
He was lord of a silver castle and got caught in a combine harvester on her seventeenth
birthday.
Since then, she could only get in touch with him via a medium,
and that cost seventy-five crowns per hour.
But it was worth it, she said.
But then I had to be alone with Hilma.
I didn’t want to be alone with Hilma.
But of course I would be alone with Hilma.
She was going to take care of me.
That was her job, of course.
What’s more, she had to change all the bedsheets and her
fiancé called non-stop.
He had troll blood, Mama said, so I had to go lay down
somewhere and look at the colored plates in the children’s bible
until they called for me.
Of course they called for me, when I had been quiet for
long enough, and Percy was bored without me.
He thought it was touching that Hilma had a fiancé and since
Mama wasn’t back yet, he tickled my tummy
so that I couldn’t stop laughing
until he slapped me.
Try to sleep now, he said.
Put on your white knee-highs and go to sleep, he said.
*
When I was an awful little girl I always slept with my thumb
in my mouth.
Four gleaming teddy bears stood watch around my bed
and the fridge was always full of semolina pudding and pork
chops.
No one meant me any harm, I knew that.
They just wanted me to sleep.
They didn’t want me to wet myself.
Just sleep.
And if I felt lonely that just meant I had
a bad dream.
I had so much to be thankful for.
I had all the reasons in the world to be thankful, that much I knew.
Percy Wennerfors had one brown and one blue eye and a
Volkswagen bus with tart candies in the glove box.
He had a daughter who reminded him of me.
But he had already forgotten her.
You’ll forget, too, he said.
Just wait.
Just wait until we’re married, said Mr. Wennerfors to me. Then
he kissed me, slit me open, and threw me in an
overgrown ditch.
And my kindly mother forgave me that, too.
*
It costs nothing to cut the head off, for example, one chubby
little girl.
To cover her face, for example, with a pillow and press down
a while.
Someone who, it is wholly self-evident, has no grit.
Someone who, to boot, resembles an uncooked side of beef, a
clumpy mustard dressing, a snotcake.
Indeed, the best thing would be to drag her by the hair to a
remote parking lot.
And bury her there.
So she is spared being sad and keeps quiet.
*
My mom was like an angel.
And my dad, what he wanted most of all was to gallop at top speed
through his secret forests on a temperamental mare named Silver Star.
Perhaps he had my picture in his breast pocket.
Perhaps he was searching for someone else, but on occasion I
would do a little dance to please my dad.
I smelled of blood then.
It would have been much better if I smelled, perhaps, like luscious
green grass and pancakes with bacon, which appeal
to man and dog alike.
Daddy didn’t know of my plans to steal the neighbor’s shaggy
watchdog and give it to him in December.
I thought he could name the dog Karo and use him for all kinds of things.
But of course I stumbled in the decisive moment, upon which
the dutiful creature awoke and I could no longer remember whom I
longed for.
I got it in my head that I had to cry.
I got it in my head that I had to run around and cry and scream
bloody murder and of course one is not to run around and
cry and scream bloody murder when Mama is drinking her morning tea, when
she has just lit the first cigarette of the day, when a most dreadfully
interesting article has appeared in the Home section.
But anything is better than maniacal laughter.
What is clear is that one is not to laugh when no one has said anything funny.
No, I do not want anyone to go into cardiac arrest.
Nor does Mama.
Sometimes she earned a housewife’s vacation, and I got to come
into the bathroom and sit on the toilet seat and suck a
lollipop while she plucked hairs from her chin and
washed herself between the legs with a flannel washcloth that smelled
heavenly all day when I didn’t know what
I would do without her.
But first in hobbled Hilma, sporting a tacky beret
with a packet of Commerce in her apron pocket, and she had
to dunk everything in coffee before sticking it in her mouth, since she
had no teeth.
A housekeeper doesn’t need teeth, Percy Wennerfors told me.
Not an elderly housekeeper, anyway.
Mama thought Hilma was reliable and gave her money
for cough medicine and Falu crispbread.
Take care now, she said, and then I got difficult.
The wind blew and everything shuddered and rattled.
Diminutive ladies gathered in all the shadowy crannies.
Solemn garçons stood silent in the corner.
And it was not hard for the enemy to track us down.
They just followed Percy’s footprints under the apple tree.
The window with the chalk-white curtains was mine.
That is where he stood and waved with genuine feeling.
The little girl is asleep, he shouted.
The little girl is asleep and when she wakes up.
She’s going to squeal like a pig.
*
And I remember there were tame foxes and dead crows that I
could pick up and carry a few kilometers, until someone came
and had to intervene.
Alone.
Like an idiot.
On the dusty highways.
I went and shrieked.
I thought that I cried.
But I went and shrieked.
And heavy trucks drove past and ambulances and limousines and
forklifts and red helicopters flew past and past.
Other moms went back and forth behind pastel curtains
and ate veal in aspic to kill time.
And the public health official’s wife always served fresh danish
in her custom-ordered bedroom.
A girlfriend of hers took the lives of her three little children.
She couldn’t stand it anymore, the poor thing.
They must lock her up.
The husband had enough presence of mind to remarry and start a new
family.
His mother-in-law went off the deep end.
His aunt got lice.
His mistress cried for days.
There are so many unhappy women lying on rickety cots
bemoaning themselves in today’s world, said Percy Wennerfors.
So many overweight with stringy, greasy hair who secrete saliva
at all times, year in, year out.
So many poor singles who gesticulate wildly
at the slightest setback.
There are far too many women without a clue as to how men operate.
Far too many slack vaginal and anal muscles.
Far too many tears.
Far too little fragrance.
But I am going to be CEO when I grow up.
I am going to have a VHS player that costs 30,000 crowns.
I am going to have an automated answering machine and an automated
door-opener and an automated clothes hanger.
I am going to have two pleasant office girls in a sound-proofed
duplex.
I am going to have a wife who can deck and dice and whet
and whip and trim and slim.
I am going to have a wife who can whistle and pin and polish and spin
and iron and weave.
I am going to have a wife who can grunt and knit and gleam and knead
and lacquer and whimper.
That is the kind of wife I will have, Percy Wennerfors told me.
