The skin of the emaciated man lying in the hospital is covered with signs of advanced Kaposi’s sarcoma. He has only a few days left to live.
This tumorous disease only occurred among older Mediterranean men, and developed so slowly it was rarely a cause of death, until recently when there was a spike in reported cases, especially in the United States. The new version is also much more aggressive.
The arms, head, and neck of the man in the bed are spotted with the large brown lesions the cancer causes.
He has terrible bedsores on his lower back and bottom. They’ve packed foam rubber around the wounds so his skin won’t rub against the mattress, but that doesn’t help much.
His body is so thin it’s almost transparent. Weak from constant diarrhea. He’s pushed out even his own intestines.
The man is alone.
No one ever comes to visit.
He stopped speaking a while ago, just lies there apathetically, and suffers in silence. Sometimes he weeps. Whether from pain or sadness, nobody knows.
*
Two women are quietly performing their duties in a cold room where the windows are never opened, a room whose only exit is an air-lock door that leads directly to a courtyard. They circle around the body in the bed like priests attending to an altar.
The young man in that bed is staring straight up at the ceiling. He sweats and he weeps, but he says nothing.
The older nurse and her younger assistant are beside him. The older one has been working at Roslagstull Hospital for infectious diseases for many years. The younger one just started. They both wear protective gloves, face masks, and yellow coats.
The two of them just changed the dressing on one of the man’s bedsores, and the young assistant has temporarily stripped off her gloves, perhaps intending to readjust a sheet.
She leans over the young man and quickly wipes his tears away with the topside of her hand.
She does it without thinking, an impulse of empathy and compassion.
The older nurse’s eyes widen with disapproval.
The sick man closes his eyes. He’s still crying.
The two women leave the room quietly when they’ve finished their duties.
*
“You’d better disinfect your hands thoroughly now!”
They’ve just passed through the air-lock door—each room is insulated by two doors, which are never to be opened at the same time—and they’re standing in the courtyard outside the isolation ward.
The older nurse just can’t stop herself from disparaging her younger colleague. The younger one stares at her uncomprehendingly. The older one clarifies with irritation.
“If you’re going to be wiping tears, you need to wear your gloves!”
“But he was so sad!” the inexperienced one exclaims, desperately.
The older nurse sniffs.
“You know the procedure. When you go in to one of those patients, whether you’re making the bed or asking if he’s thirsty, you need to thoroughly wash your hands, put on your gloves, your mask, and the yellow coat. There can be no exceptions. Hospital routines are more important than your pity. Is that clear?”
“But,” the younger woman tries to protest, but is interrupted.
“Now you know. Don’t ever wipe their tears without gloves!”
The older one shakes her head.
Then she leaves.
*
This is the story of a particular time and place.
The story told here has already happened.
It happened in this city, on these blocks, among those who live here. It happened in this city’s parks, at its outdoor cafés, in its bars, its bathhouses, adult movie theaters, hospitals, churches, and cemeteries. It took place on these streets, in these buildings, and it happened to these people.
It was happening in many other places as well, but that’s someone else’s story to tell.
It’s still happening today, it’s been happening this whole time, but that too is another story.
Telling you this is a kind of duty.
A way to honor and mourn and remember.
To fight for memory in its struggle against oblivion.
*
The little house itself isn’t so remarkable, but its placement there on the edge of a cliff that plunges straight down into water makes it like an aerie overlooking the sea.
The house, an inheritance on their mother’s side, truly is more like a bird’s nest than a summer cottage. It was built parallel to the shore, but angled up towards the bay so that the verandah has a magnificent view of the water and the evening sun, but is still protected from any wind that’s not blowing due south.
“Like our very own Watchtower!” their father likes to joke. And it pleases them all when he does, because that’s exactly what it is.
This is their watchtower.
In the city, their lives are dark and cramped. Out here, an almost surreal light pours down onto them, and they can see as far as the eye can reach.
It’s like the difference between the shadow world where humanity lives now, the one that’s doomed to destruction, and the newly created world that awaits them, which springs from the light of Jehovah’s presence.
Later, when Benjamin thinks back on his childhood, it’s the summerhouse that comes to mind first. The sea, the light—almost surreal—the verandah, the narrow, rickety stairs that lead down to the jetty and the beach. This is how he imagines eternity.
It’s an early summer evening. The gulls are screeching. The sun shines down on the bay below, reflecting off the verandah’s windows.
Winter has finally been defeated.
Nothing else exists. Like the sea when Jehovah establishes his kingdom. “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the former heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea is no more.”
They had spent the day fishing for herring. Now their mother stands by the stove frying fillets coated in breadcrumbs. Benjamin is tumbling around with his little sister Margareta. All winter they’ve been longing for this cottage, and now they’re finally here.
Slowly, the house is coming back to life. When they unlocked the front door on Saturday morning and stepped inside, it felt as if time had stood still over the winter, like a stopped clock.
The house had been cold and a little damp. Benjamin found three green plastic soldiers and a little toy car on the floor. Margareta’s sleepy-eyed doll sat resting in a corner. They must have left the house last autumn while he and his sister were still playing.
On the dining table, an issue of Dagens Nyheter lay open, dated October 7, 1969. That was last year. Benjamin could now spell his way through the headline. He hadn’t been able to do that last year. He learned during the winter.
Over the weekend they’d opened the house for the season, cleaned it, aired it out, washed all the sheets. Benjamin and Margareta spent their time running around, jumping, playing. Like frisky calves, their father likes to say with a laugh.
While their mother is preparing dinner, their father is washing the windows on the verandah. Benjamin and Margareta’s boisterousness doesn’t seem to bother him.
When Margareta climbs onto the verandah rail, he doesn’t stop working, doesn’t even glance at her, just casually gives her an order.
“Margareta,” he says, “don’t climb on the railing. You could fall.”
“But I won’t fall.”
“You don’t know that.”
Father continues washing the windows with deep concentration. He loves this work.
Making things clean. Wiping away stains. Repairing them.
Like a wave that washes away sandcastles and footprints and leaves behind a smooth and beautiful beach. Like a kind of correction.
Benjamin stops playing and leans over the railing, staring down onto the steep cliff plunging into the sea. It makes him dizzy.
Mother comes out with plates, cutlery, water glasses and starts setting the table.
“Would you die if you fell from here?” Benjamin wonders.
They are so very high up. Falling is a sin.
He who falls has challenged God.
“Let me see.”
His little sister also leans forward from her spot on the railing. She too wants to stare down from the precipice like her big brother. Benjamin leans a little further out. Margareta laughs and mimics her big brother.
The sun shines. The gulls screech.
Mother places knives and forks beside each plate.
Precise. Methodical. She hums while setting the table.
Benjamin can feel his muscles tensing up, his body preparing to jump. He balances on the railing. There’s a flutter in his stomach as he almost loses his balance. Below him lies the deep.
Margareta laughs and climbs even higher and heaves herself outwards, and then something goes wrong. She loses her grip and starts to fall forward, down, slowly at first, then faster.
But at that very second, Father rises in a flash from his window washing and grabs hold of her, she doesn’t even have time to be scared. He has her in his arms and lifts her from the railing before the accident can occur, while still answering his son’s question in the same calm but firm voice as before.
He says: “Well, Benjamin, I suppose it’s probably better not to find out.”
No other answer. The discussion is over.
“At any rate, the herring is ready,” Mother says and goes back into the house to fetch the food.
The family sits down at the table on the verandah. Father leads them in prayer, and then they eat fried herring with mashed potatoes. The children use their hands.
Mother considers dinner a time when they’re all supposed to gather and converse, so she begins: “Such wonderful weather we’re having.”
It’s not really a question, and she receives no answer. It’s more an example of what one might say while eating dinner with one’s family. A pleasant remark.
“Can we go swimming later?” Benjamin asks between bites.
“Benjamin, please use your fork when you eat,” Father says without looking up from his plate.
“Can we go swimming later?” Benjamin repeats his question.
“We’re lucky to get an evening this mild in late May,” Father says.
“Can we go swimming later?”
“Yes, we are, and that means the summer will be a long one,” Mother says.
Father interrupts.
“Benjamin, you’re seven years old. Don’t eat with your hands. Use the fork.”
*
Another hospital. Another room.
Söder Hospital. Section 53. Hall 5.
White.
Bare walls without a single painting.
A graphic poster. Some overlapping rectangles. Who decided to hang that there? Is it supposed to make the room feel warmer?
Beside the bed a table with absorbent cotton, saline solution, medicines, a vase of red tulips, yesterday’s papers, March 10, 1989, headlines about the interrogation of Carl Lidbom and the never-ending Ebbe Carlsson affair, a glass of juice with a straw. At the foot of the bed, an IV stand supplies the young man in the bed with morphine, antibiotics, and a nutritional solution through tubes running into his nose and arms.
Beside the bed another young man keeps watch from his chair. Earlier in the day a few friends came by to keep him company, but now it’s only him. And he’s reading poetry out loud to the patient.
“Next is a poem by Karin Boye,” he says. “An eternity long / our summer was then. / We roamed in sunny days / that had no end . . .”
He glances outside. It’s winter. He wants to open the window, but it can’t be opened.
Everything here is closed. Isolated.
He closes his eyes and calls forth in his mind an early evening in May. It’s at the very beginning of something. The scent of bird cherry wafts through the window. The summer they had been waiting for had finally arrived, the one that was their goal.
“Until the summer,” they’d said to each other and shook hands on it. It makes him quite desperate to think back on it.
He opens his eyes, and he’s here. The window is closed. The room smells of disinfectant and something indefinable, nauseatingly sweet, which he will always associate with this room.
It’s not summer. It’s winter.
*
“I’m done now. Can I scrape my plate?” Margareta says.
“Is your tummy full?” Mother asks. The son rises impatiently.
“I’m full, too. Can we go swimming now?”
Benjamin turns around and catches his reflection in the newly washed window.
“Isn’t it too cold for that?” Father objects.
“It’s not too cold at all,” Margareta says.
“You don’t know that,” Mother says. “Would you like some coffee, Ingmar?”
“That would be lovely, thank you, dear. Well, either way, you two need to wait a half hour after eating, so you don’t get cramps.”
Benjamin stares at his reflection in the newly washed window.
He sinks into his own mirror image. As he does sometimes.
Slowly he moves an arm and watches as his reflection does the same. Studying his eyes, his face, his head tilted first in one direction, then the other.
Then he presses his palms against the windowpane, and his hands leave behind a clear imprint.
“Why did you do that?” Father exclaims, annoyed. “I just washed that window!”
Only now does Benjamin snap out of his trance. He stares down at his handprints in surprise.
He thinks to himself: “I am here.”
It’s an enormous and electrifying insight.
He’s discovered that he exists.
He will remember this moment for the rest of his life. A summer evening, the verandah, the sea. His handprints on the glass. How he caught sight of himself.
How he saw something in his reflection in the window. How that something stared back at him and nodded affirmatively. It will be one of his earliest memories.
“Now go get a rag and wipe away those handprints.”
Father continues eating. That’s how he does it. He never raises his voice. He doesn’t get angry. He decides, and then that’s that. The rest of them submit. They want to obey.
Benjamin loves his father. And he loves his father’s authority. Loves that he decides how things will be.
“That’s no problem,” the boy says happily, “because I like cleaning windows.”
*
The young man in the bed has opened his eyes. His gaze darts worriedly back and forth across the ceiling.
He sweats. He gasps. Stubborn, terrified.
Breathing is a struggle. He lies with his palms upwards, as if in prayer. He whimpers. He’s both very tired and very scared.
Tears roll down his face. He can’t stop weeping.
The young man sitting next to him tries not to look at those tears. Instead, he concentrates on the poem he’s reading out loud.
Doesn’t raise his voice.
Doesn’t allow himself to be overcome by worry for the other.
Remain calm. Maintain authority. And with this authority, he will be able to persuade the sick one.
Love and control. They’re impossible for him to separate.
What he really wants to do is cry out and grab onto his beloved, shake the life back into him, strike him, caress him, comfort him: “Don’t cry, my love. Don’t you cry!”
But he doesn’t shout. He doesn’t beat or soothe him. He just continues reading a poem by Karin Boye, seeking a way into her words: “We sank in fragrant green depths without floor . . .”
He can’t stop his voice from catching in his throat. He has to take a deep breath to choke down the tears welling up inside him, but he forces himself to keep reading, calm and matter-of-fact, just as he was raised to do it, just as his father would have done it.
“We sank in fragrant green / depths without floor / and felt no fear / of eventide’s hour.”
The sick man tosses his head, feverishly. His eyes rove.
He’s choking. Either from anguish or terror. He’s suffocating.
The young man lying in the bed is dying, and he knows it.
He’s very afraid to die.
*
A naked Margareta and Benjamin are playing at the water’s edge, beneath the evening sun. It’s no warmer than fifteen, maybe sixteen degrees Celsius, but they’ve been waiting so long for summer, and they can’t wait anymore.
Their parents look on. Their father occupies himself with clearing the beach of stones, which he throws back into the sea. Even in the evening, the sun shines so brightly that the sand looks like it’s burning. The water glitters, and the birches and aspens near the jetty glow.
“I’m going swimming,” the son decides suddenly and takes a few steps into the water.
“Benjamin, that water is freezing!” his mother objects from her place beside Father on the beach.
The boy wades out into the water without paying her any mind. It is freezing, but he keeps going anyway.
“No further than your navel!” his father shouts.
Benjamin stops, crosses his arms and takes a deep breath.
Then he sinks down slowly and stubbornly into the sea that is still so cold.
*
The young man is lying in the bed, sweating and crying because he will die. The other young man is sitting in a chair, trying to control his emotions by reading a poem by Karin Boye.
“Where did our eternity go? / How did we forget / its holy secret? / Our day became too short.”
The young man who’s reading continues to read.
It’s like an incantation.
Like a prayer, now that he can no longer pray, now that he’s lost his right to.
He thinks: “We, the unbelievers, still pray. It’s just that nobody listens to us when we do.”
“In strife we form,” reads the young man sitting on the chair, “in spasm we rhyme,” he pauses between each line, “a work that shall be eternal— / and its essence . . .”
He looks up at the sick person in the bed, who has temporarily calmed down and closed his eyes again. Two orderlies, who have changed the dressing on his bedsores and adjusted his place on the bed, exit the room silently after finishing their chores.
“. . . is time.”
The young man in the chair puts away the book of Karin Boye’s poetry, a collection he purchased at a book sale in February. He watches the other one breathe.
Short and fast, like a terrified bird. Head still turning back and forth on the pillow, but now the movements are so slight.
The young man in the chair rises to wash the sick one’s face. The sick one moans as if his concentration has been broken. The young man caresses his chest.
Feels the ribs. Lets his hand rest there.
Feels the heart still beating.
*
Benjamin submerged himself, but now he’s racing out of the water.
“Did you see me dive?” he shouts out proudly, then heads straight back into the water.
“Very good!” Father replies without even looking up, his watchful eye still on Margareta sitting in the wet sand. “Come back up now before you freeze to death.”
Britta slips her hand into Ingmar’s, wanting him to abandon his control if only for a moment. Of course she loves him for it, and for the responsibility he takes on, his authority, but there are moments when a person needs to let go just a little, let everything just be for a moment.
She stares out at the mirror-like water, at the children splashing. She sighs, happily?
“An eternity long / our summer was then...” she says and squeezes her husband’s hand gently.
He must not have recognized the Karin Boye line, or noticed her hand squeezing his, because he lets go of her and picks up his large beach towel. As always, there’s a shiver of disappointment when he turns his attention to something else. He does it with such simplicity. It costs him nothing to reject her.
“I told you kids to come back up!” he calls out and holds the towel up like a summons to Benjamin, who’s still out waist deep in the chilly water, and Margareta, who’s sitting with her backside in cold, wet sand, “I said, up now, and dry yourselves off!”
Both children obey, running into his arms.
He wraps them in his warmth like a guardian angel.
*
Benjamin is in the upper bunk, Margareta in the lower. The way it’s supposed to be.
The boy is wearing his too small, faded pajamas with tiny elephants balancing on what look like beach balls. He forgot them here over the winter. He smells them. His summer pajamas.
He’s curled up to make room on his pillow for his two favorite stuffed animals, a well-loved teddy bear and a tiny cloth cat. He likes to give them the most comfortable spot on his pillow and curls up below them on the mattress.
Margareta is lying with her Donald Duck comics in bed, as usual. His mother is sitting on a wooden chair beside the lower bunk reading the evening prayer. The blinds sway slightly in the evening breeze, the cooler air trickles into the room. Everything is precise, just as God has ordained. Everything is just as it should be.
Mother prays for them:
“Jehovah God,” she begins, and Benjamin and Margareta close their eyes so Mother’s voice can more fully reach them with her invocation: Jehovah God. Jehovah God.
Jehovah God who appeared to Moses in a burning bush. Who led his people through the desert. Who parted the Red Sea and allowed his chosen people to walk dry-shod across the seabed. Who caused manna to rain down from heaven to feed them.
“Jehovah God,” she prays, “we thank you for allowing us this day that we may be witnesses to you. We ask that you watch over Margareta, Benjamin, Dad and me tonight so that we may sleep soundly and wake up to a new day and continue to honor and sanctify your name in all we do . . .”
Benjamin has rolled up into a tight ball on the mattress. For a moment, he glances up to make sure his teddy bear and cat are where they should be on the pillow. He hears his mother’s voice. A mosquito net hangs in the window letting in cool evening air. He rests in the security of Jehovah. He closes his eyes again, and if his mother were to look, she would see him smiling.
*
Ingmar cleans up after dinner. He has a kitchen towel over his shoulder. He loves clearing away and washing up, restoring, correcting. Even if his wife already took care of the kitchen, he’ll go over it again with a cloth, make those last details perfect. It’s not that his wife’s work isn’t up to snuff: he just likes doing it, and he thinks—a possibly immoral thought—this must have been how Jehovah felt on the seventh day of His creation when He looked out at all He had made and saw that it was good.
That’s how he feels now: satisfied, in control, clean.
Now the night can come, and the next day, if God wills it.
They’re ready.
Suddenly he notices his son’s handprints on the glass, gleaming in the late evening sun.
They were never washed away. Benjamin took off obediently to fetch the rag, he remembers that much, but something must have come up.
Now the children have gone to bed, and he can’t wake them again for such a small thing, but he can’t very well leave the prints where they are either.
He takes the kitchen towel off his shoulder and goes over to the window. The outlines are so clear in the evening light. It’s the fat from the herring Benjamin ate with his hands.
For a moment, he stops and contemplates his son’s handprint.
Five fingers on each hand. A kind of perfection. Gratitude washes over him. For having been entrusted to become a father. That Jehovah has granted him something so enormous as the responsibility for two human lives.
For a moment, he’s helpless in the face of such a love.
He stands just like that, completely still, staring at his son’s handprint. He wants to thank and bless Jehovah for this moment. He wants to pray that his two children will become good servants to Jehovah and that their lives will always consecrate God’s name.
For a long time he stares at those handprints. As if wanting to hold onto this moment.
The hands of his son are so small. Splayed. Like the Stone Age handprints on the walls of French caves.
The sun sinks behind a mirror-blank bay.
Doubt.
*
The young man lying in bed is still breathing. One breath at a time. Everything in the room is concentrated on these short, arduous breaths. The young man sitting in the chair takes control of his own mouth and throat, which still heave, like a sea whose waves have yet to level out.
*
Doubt, but there’s no room for doubt.
Doubt is more harmful than anything else.
So, without any doubt, he wipes his son’s handprints from the window with a shiver.
It’s just something that has to be done.
Now the glass is clean again. Only the sinking sun and the sky are reflected in it.
*
The young man lying in bed suddenly clenches his hands. Tightly, tightly he balls them up. Then he lets go.
The young man sitting in the chair next to him looks up, his attention broken.
“Rasmus?”
He jumps from his chair.
