Jagannath Read online

  “That’s the last you’ll get,” he told Hercules. “I’m not going to feed you.”

  The steam engine seemed to glare at Franz from its corner. The oven hatch glowed with the heat from Anna’s body. Franz turned his back on it and picked the baby up, cradling it in his arms. It opened its mouth and cried with a whistling noise. Franz walked over to his side of the warehouse, holding the baby up in front of his airship.

  “We’re foster parents now, Beatrice,” he said.

  For the first time he could sense a reaction from her. It felt like approval, but it wasn’t directed at him.

  —

  The child was a girl. Franz named her Josephine. He tried to feed her cow’s milk at first, but she spit it out, hissing. She steadily lost weight, her pistons squealing and rasping, until Franz in desperation dissolved some coal in water, dipped the end of a rag in it, and stuck it in her mouth. When Josephine immediately sucked the rag dry, Franz understood what kind of care his foster daughter needed. He took the box of maintenance tools Anna had kept for Hercules and greased Josephine’s pistons carefully with good oil. He fed her a steady diet of coal water, gradually increasing the coal until it was a thick paste. When she had enough teeth, he gave her small bits of coal to gnaw on. The girl didn’t need diapers, as she didn’t produce any waste; she seemed to spend whatever she ate as body heat. If he fed her too much, she became unbearably hot to the touch, her pistons burning his hands. These peculiarities aside, she behaved much like a normal baby.

  Franz wrote a letter of resignation to the clinic. He sold Hercules to a factory, and Anna’s furniture to an auction house. The money would be enough for rent and food for a long time to come, if he spent it wisely. He would at least be able to take care of his airship and his foster daughter. Whenever he had to leave their home, he put the baby in Beatrice’s gondola. When he came back, the baby was always in a good humor, comfortably cradled in the otherwise hard seat, cooing and playing with dials or tubes that had somehow come loose from the console. When Josephine was old enough not to need constant feeding, he found work at another clinic. Josephine seemed content to spend her days in the gondola. Beatrice radiated affection whenever the girl was near.

  —

  The catastrophe came when Josephine was four years old. The little girl didn’t have vocal cords, but instead a set of minuscule pipes arrayed in her larynx. She whistled and tweeted until her fourth birthday, when she suddenly started modulating the noise into speech. It was early morning. They had just finished breakfast. Josephine was sitting on the table, Franz lubricating the pistons in her arms. Josephine opened her mouth and said in a high, fluting voice:

  “Father, her name isn’t Beatrice.”

  “Is that so,” said Franz, dripping oil on her finger joints.

  “She says so every time you call her Beatrice. ‘That’s not my name,’ she says.”

  Franz blinked. “Do you understand everything she says?”

  “Her name isn’t Beatrice,” Josephine repeated. “It’s something else. And she wants to say some things to you.”

  Josephine sat with her legs dangling from the gondola, warbling the airship’s thoughts without seeming to grasp their meaning. Franz was informed of the following: The airship’s name wasn’t Beatrice. It was something entirely different. She had lived as a slave under Franz, and he had raped her while pretending she was someone else. She hated him.

  “That can’t be right,” said Franz. “We worked on this marriage together. She was the one who wouldn’t make an effort.”

  “She says, ‘I had no choice,’ ” said Josephine. “She says, ‘You’re holding me captive.’ ”

  Franz felt his throat constrict. “I certainly am not,” he said. “I’ve worked so hard.” He shoved his hands in his pockets to stop them from trembling. “I’ve worked so hard,” he repeated.

  “She wants to fly,” said Josephine.

  —

  Franz opened the great double doors to the warehouse and slowly towed Beatrice outside. He knew what was going to happen. That Josephine was going to climb into the gondola while he was busy sorting out the tethers. That Beatrice II would tear free of her moorings and swiftly rise up into the sky, drifting east. That she would be gone in a matter of minutes, leaving him alone on the ground.

  He sorted out the tethers. Meanwhile, Josephine climbed into the gondola. Beatrice II suddenly pulled at the moorings, which snapped, and she ascended without a sound. Franz stood outside the warehouse, watching the sky, until night fell.

  Some Letters for Ove Lindström

  HI, DAD.

  It’s Saturday and it’s been thirty-six days since they found you. You lay in the apartment for three days before the neighbors called the police because the cat was howling. That was on a Friday. They said at the hospital it looked like a massive heart attack, probably quick. They asked if you and I were close. I said no: I couldn’t cope with your drinking, broke off contact with you many years ago.

  That same night I dreamed about Mom for the first time in many years. She was standing at the edge of the forest, her back turned. Her dark hair tumbled in tangles down her back. The hem of her red dress dragged at the ground. I was sitting in the sandbox. I couldn’t move. She walked in among the trees and there was a tinkling sound on the air, like tiny bells.

  —

  I entered your apartment prepared for something like the last time I was there: floors covered by a thick layer of newspapers and milk cartons, piles of clothes, and dirty dishes on the furniture, and a layer of greasy filth over everything. Fruit flies in the kitchen. Maggots in the sink. The stench of rot and unwashed human.

  But I opened the door to empty rooms and a smell of pine soap. Floors and surfaces were scrubbed clean, the kitchen immaculate. I couldn’t see any bottles or beer cans. Did you quit drinking? When? There was no smell of smoke either. I wonder when you quit the cigarettes and when you decided to clean out the apartment. There were a couple of suitcases standing near the door.

  I took care of the cat. I don’t know what you named her, but I call her Squeak—she’s thin as a pipe cleaner and meows like a squeaky toy. She’s hungry and pissed off, but fine.

  I called Björn and Maggie. Björn said he’d talked to you on Monday. You’d said you were getting your act together: going out to the old schoolhouse at Munsö to start over. It was going to be just like old times.

  “Maybe he had a feeling something was about to happen,” Björn said. “But on the other hand…I don’t know. He would do that about once a year. He’d clean the flat and go to Munsö to start over, and then he’d come back a couple of weeks later and it’d be just like before.”

  “He never told me that,” I said.

  “Maybe he was afraid to. I know I was. I didn’t tell you because I knew he’d just fall off the wagon again. Just as well you didn’t hear about it.”

  I’m glad Björn didn’t tell me.

  —

  These people came to the service: Björn and Maggie, Per-Arne, Eva and Ingeborg, Peter and Lena, Dolores, Magnus, Alice. I hadn’t seen any of them except Björn and Maggie since I was maybe eighteen. They have changed. They’re not just older. They came in expensive cars, with rounded bellies under designer shirts and dresses. They’re not starving activists anymore. Björn and Maggie showed up in denim. That made me feel less abnormal. Maggie held my hand all through the service.

  Most of them stayed for the funeral coffee. I had to answer questions about what I was up to these days. They offered apologies for not keeping in touch. It was because you had pushed them away. They hadn’t been able to cope with it.

  Then they talked about old times, telling the obligatory story about how it all started. How a surly farmer (you) was persuaded to rent out the old schoolhouse to a bunch of hairy communists from the city. How the surly farmer eventually joined them and grew a beard. All the parties, and the harvest festival, and the magazine they printed on a hand-cranked printing press in the cellar; and the
first commune baby (me), tiny and fat and precocious, who could chant “U.S. out of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia!” by the age of two. We didn’t mention Mom. Then it was over, everyone went home, and I don’t expect I’ll see any of them again except Björn and Maggie.

  You’ll be buried next to Sten and Alva, your parents that I know nothing about. You never told me anything about them, only that they were sickly and died early. It seems to be a family trait.

  —Viveka

  Hi, Dad.

  I finished the paperwork last week. I figured I’m between jobs anyway, so I might as well go on a trip. I’m sitting at the kitchen table in the janitor’s house at Munsö. That makes me the fourth generation to own the schoolhouse.

  I brought Squeaky. She seems familiar with the place. She catches mice, crunching on them under the table. She’s a tidy eater, leaving only the hearts. I find them here and there, lying on the floor like red raisins.

  You must have been here in the spring. The hothouse is full of squash, tomatoes, beans, and pumpkins, ready for harvest. The pantry’s full. There’s even firewood, and it’s clean. I found mint tea. It’s the same sort you used to drink when I was little. These are the smells from when things were good—firewood, mint tea, and old house.

  I used to sleep on the sofa bed in the kitchen, you in the bedroom. You were too tall for the sofa bed, you said, otherwise you’d let me have the bedroom. You were always a little hunched over, hitting your head on doorjambs and lamps. I can see you standing over the sofa bed, reaching out with a long hand to pull the covers all the way up to my chin. Snug like a dolma, you would say.

  I’m sleeping in the bedroom tonight. I’ve grown too tall for the sofa bed.

  —

  If only you’d kept a journal. The only thing that tells me how much time you spent here are the newspapers by the stove. About once a year, for a few weeks at a time, just like Björn said. According to Svenska Dagbladet (which you insisted on reading despite calling it a bourgeoisie rag), the last time was in May.

  I went over to the schoolhouse today. The front door had warped, and was difficult to get open. In the cloakroom I turned right and the long tables still stood there, and the benches, and the serving table at the back. The breeze blowing in from the open door stirred up dust in the air. The flypapers spiraling down from the ceiling were black with little corpses. I went into the kitchen at the back: the old orange curtains still hanging in the windows, the massive rounded refrigerator graying in the corner. Through the kitchen into the common room with its brown corduroy couches and the IKEA bookshelves: dust and silence. The smell of wood and mold. Through the common room, full circle into the cloakroom. Up the steep stairs at the back of the cloakroom, with the rosette window halfway up. The attic with its bedrooms that used to be storage, like empty monk cells in a row. I remember everyone leaving: Lena packing the huge toy turtle, its plush skin worn through where I had sat on it every day. I cried when she stuffed it into a box.

  The empty gravel driveway, the hothouse that slowly went to seed, the absence of voices, before you boarded up the schoolhouse and janitor’s house and packed our things into the car.

  In the photos of you and Mom, you’re so in love, so lost in her. One of the pictures is of the schoolhouse steps. She’s standing with a hand on the rail, looking into the camera. She’s wearing a knee-length black dress with a white yin-yang pattern, her belly big and round. You’re wearing jeans and an orange shirt, one hand resting on her belly. Ignoring the photographer, you’re looking sideways at Mom with a soft smile. She’s so tall. You’re not hunched over next to her. You smile like that in all the photos from then, Dad.

  —Viveka

  Hi Dad.

  I got your bike out from the shed—you kept it in good shape—and went down to the old co-op for food. I used the forest path that goes past the lake. It took about half an hour when I was a kid, but this time I must have taken a wrong turn; here and there I couldn’t recognize where I was. It took me an hour to get there. Things are supposed to feel much smaller when you visit places from your childhood. The old co-op was unrecognizable. They’ve renovated. Not that it helps. They don’t know what tofu is.

  This is my very first memory: it was August. I was three years old. Vladimir Vysotsky was rasping through the gramophone. The air smelled of damp wool and crayfish and toast. It was getting cold. You opened your cardigan so I could climb inside, and then buttoned it up again so that I sat there like a kangaroo pup, head sticking out, your beard tickling at my neck. When you sang along in the chorus, my whole back vibrated. Mom sat across the table. She was staring at us, her face very still.

  —

  Of course she refused to give birth in a hospital. Maggie has told me so many times. She gave birth in the janitor’s house, assisted by one of the commune members (Annika?) who happened to be a certified midwife. It took eleven hours. I was healthy and weighed three and a half kilos. You didn’t take me to the hospital. I wasn’t to be registered, checked, or vaccinated. You wanted the authorities to stay out of our lives.

  It’ll be the twenty-fifth anniversary of her disappearance, soon.

  “Do you know what your father used to say,” Maggie said once. “He used to say that your mother just came out of the forest one day.”

  —

  I’m having tea on the veranda. It’s still warm out. A few more weeks and the forest will be full of mushrooms. And all the vegetables in the hothouse, I wonder if I could learn to can them so they don’t spoil. Weren’t Lena and Peter fanatics about that stuff?

  The cell phone rang for the first time since I arrived here. It was my caseworker at the unemployment center who wanted to know why I didn’t show up for our meeting yesterday. It had completely slipped my mind. Caseworker wants me to report for inspection immediately. If I don’t provide a list of all the jobs I’ve applied for this month, my benefits will be cut off. I figure that’s about to happen anyway, so what difference does it make? I’ll be cut off, and then I’ll have to apply for welfare, and they’ll tell me I can’t have any because I own property. Then I’ll either have to sell this place or tell the welfare people to sod off. In which case I’ll settle out here and live on mushrooms and canned vegetables. I wonder how long I could do that. I wonder how long it would take before anyone except my caseworker missed me.

  —Viveka

  Hi Dad.

  I’ve been weeding in the hothouse. Some of the plants died during the summer, others are growing wild. It’s not much of a hothouse, what with the hole in the roof. The vegetables going nuts are the ones that got rain on them. I don’t think I could survive on them if I lose my benefits.

  —

  This is my second memory: I know now that it’s about a week after the crayfish party. I was sitting in the sandbox outside the house. The sand was cold and damp under the dry top layer. I had taken my shoes off, digging into the chill with my toes. Mom kissed my forehead and then she walked away. She was wearing the red dress. She was barefoot. Mom walked in amongst the trees and there was a tinkling sound on the air, like tiny bells.

  You came back from the store to find me howling in the sandbox. You put off calling the police until the next day. You tried to report her missing, but were told she didn’t exist. She wasn’t in the national registry.

  Of course, neither was I, which they found out. I was registered and received a personal identity number and the mandatory vaccinations.

  And that was that. Mom didn’t come back.

  You did what a dad is supposed to do. You made sure I went to school; you cooked dinner; we watched television together; you helped me with homework. I was never yelled at. You were never mean. When you started drinking, it was quietly, in the armchair by the television. You’d get distant and fall asleep at odd times. I learned to make myself dinner.

  I feel almost jet-lagged. The sun is so low in the sky. The sunset just goes on and on.

  —Viveka

  Hi Dad.

  I thought yo
u might want to know what I was doing while you were getting drunk. Once we’d moved into the two-roomer in Hökarängen I was over at Maggie and Björn’s place most of the time. You didn’t want to see them. You were at work, or you were watching television at home, drinking. One evening I was in Maggie and Björn’s kitchen—we had just finished dinner—and I asked Maggie about you and Mom.

  “Actually I don’t remember how it was,” said Maggie. “She didn’t arrive with any of the others—it was me, Björn, and Peter from the Jester commune, Eva and Ingeborg from Nyköping; Per-Arne was from Norrköping, he was Ingeborg’s friend from FNL…but your mother, I don’t remember how she ended up there. But she was there from the start, that she was. A very private person. She and your father were a good match that way, I suppose. They liked keeping to themselves.”

  “How do you mean, private,” I said.

  “She never talked about herself. I mean, she didn’t talk about personal stuff, or offer opinions. I never found out what she thought about anything, not in all the years she was there. We thought she was a bit touched, or she’d been through something difficult, so we didn’t make a big deal of it. And then there was that bit about her not being in the national registry. Maybe her identity was protected. Maybe she’d run away from an abusive husband. That’s what I think. But why she left you and your dad…” Maggie patted my cheek. She put an arm around me. “That was a shitty thing to do,” she said. “If I’d had a child like you, I wouldn’t have left you for a second.”

  I sat quietly inhaling Maggie’s scent, a mix of softener, cigarettes, and warm skin.

  “Do you know what your father used to say,” Maggie said. “He used to say that your mother just came out of the forest one day.”