Breathless (25 page)

A
t first I didn't understand at all what Mama was talking about when she mentioned on the telephone something about a letter—by the way, in the middle of a conversation about something else entirely—that Lukas was supposed to have written to me. I was quite sure I hadn't received it. Oh yes, Mama insisted, a long time ago, a blue envelope, don't you remember?

She fell silent on the telephone as if she thought I was lying to her. The letter, she said again—she had acted as intermediary, folded it in two and put it in with one of hers that she sent at regular intervals.

She'd never referred to it before and now she wondered suddenly what Lukas had on his mind. As if conceding there may have been something.

For him to write to me must have been an almost impossible thing to do after what had happened. And besides . . . I couldn't remember ever seeing Lukas write anything, except possibly his name. It was one of the last things I saw him do before we parted, when he signed the devil's contract, leaning against the hood of the car that last summer. A letter from him must have required an almost insurmountable effort, not to mention the shame he had to overcome to go to Mama and ask her to send it to me. Without even being sure that I could decipher it. And the reply he'd received was silence.

The letters from Mama remained unopened. After all the moving and traveling, trips and years, I no longer even knew where the bundle of letters was. Just that I hadn't thrown it away. Gradually Mama and I had started to talk to each other again, in short conversations at long intervals about absolutely nothing—everything that might hurt was carefully avoided. And since we had started to phone each other, I'd forgotten all about her old letters.

It took forever searching among my unsorted belongings before I found the bundle, hidden and forgotten at the back of the trunk of Lukas's car. That's always the way, at the back, the last box, you know it will be, and yet you go through all the rest first, as if preparing yourself for the moment when you'll find it. I quickly ripped open Mama's envelopes with my fingers, one after the other without reading them, until I found the folded blue one from Lukas. She hadn't imagined it—it was there. There was nothing on the outside, but it still smelled of him.

I didn't open it immediately, thought: this evening. And when evening came: I will wait until tomorrow. And in the morning . . . tear it open quickly with my finger, skim through—a few seconds of temporary discomfort—how dangerous can that be? How difficult, how unpleasant? I already knew what must be in it.

To make it easier I tried to read it while doing something else. In the line for the car wash, by the freezer cabinet at the grocery, in the bathroom while the water was running. Sitting on the edge of the bath, brushing my teeth, I brought out the envelope without opening it.

Every so often I have to check that it's still in my pocket, as if a draft might suddenly whip it out like a chewing gum wrapper right up into the hot sun. It would burn like magnesium and be gone. That things can burn up, come to an end, is a relief as well as a dread. Each time I'm about to insert my finger, slippery with sweat, to slit open the envelope, I can't do it. For as long as I haven't read the words, they haven't reached me. It has been unopened for so long, it can stay that way a little longer. There's no rush. It's all too late.

—

I recall a story I heard on the radio a long time ago, a man and a woman, an extremely strong love between them, how circumstances forced them to part. The man had to travel to the other side of the world, but as soon as he had settled down there, sorted out the practicalities, and found somewhere for them to live together, he would write to her. That was what would have been agreed. She waited. And waited. No letter. Waited until her love had changed to bitterness, convinced that he had met another woman and didn't have the guts to tell her. The rest of her life she lived alone. After the woman's death some of her relatives were going to renovate the house to sell it. They pulled up the linoleum in the hall. There was the letter, wedged underneath by some careless postman. Fifty years had passed, and now, with her death, it was all irrevocably too late. If only she had swallowed her pride, written to him, tried to find him. If only he had swallowed his pride when he didn't receive a reply to the letter that never reached her, and written one more time. If only.

To have a weakness for someone is an expression I would rather not use, but sometimes there's no other way of saying it. To Yoel I was attracted, for Lukas I had a weakness. I remember his laugh, not because he laughed often but because he laughed so seldom. Time weighs so light in comparison; the letter in my back pocket is as heavy as if it were sealed with lead.

I can't imagine Lukas asking for help with anything at all, especially not from my mama. When I ask her how it happened, she says that a few weeks after I had gone he came up to our house. She saw him coming from far away, so immensely slowly he stopped for a smoke twice on the way up. She had hardly seen him after I left, and now he was there asking for my phone number. When Mama opened the door he had already gone down the steps, prepared to be sent away.

She told him the truth, that she didn't have my number, that all she had was a poste restante address for a post office in Stockholm. He didn't believe her. But it was the truth.

—

The day I disappeared it was Mama who got Lukas down from the blazing porch. A moment later the beams gave way and the burning roof fell in. She had probably saved his life, but at the time gratitude was not something he was capable of.

First, without understanding what was happening, Mama had been standing in the bedroom when she saw Yoel and me driving from the garage in Lukas's car, stopping at Lukas's house for a few minutes to have some papers signed, carried out quickly against the hood of the car. She wondered what was going on. Whether she ought to go out. But at least at the window she had a general view of the situation, if indeed it was one. It certainly looked like some sort of situation, only she had no idea what it was about. She wondered even more when she saw Lukas begin to carry things out of the house, throw them in a big pile until they formed a pyre, and set fire to it.

Far too close, she was thinking. Far too close to the wooden house, dry in every nook and cranny after so many weeks without rain. The lighting of fires was prohibited after a summer so hot and long that the days burned by themselves. When the fire had taken hold he went inside and fetched more things that he threw onto the flames. At the same time I came back along the path by the lake with Yoel and the luggage we had collected. Mama had no idea who Yoel was, as he sat behind the wheel in Lukas's car with me beside him. And then we drove off. She had assumed that we would stay when we saw Lukas, try to persuade him to listen to reason, but we just drove past. The fire took hold on the steps. Mama had no time to think about me and where I was going. She saw Lukas get up on the porch, not to try to put out the flames—he just stood there as if he . . . had lost. She raced down to the kitchen, called the fire brigade, and ran.

—

Lukas was no slender thirteen-year-old now, as he had been when she'd used mild force to drag him out of the flames in the field fire along the railway line. She could only use words now to try to persuade him to save himself. She knew that there was a lack of oxygen near large fires and that lack of oxygen led to confusion, so she needed to act quickly to bring him down from the flames. She doesn't remember exactly what she said, something about me.

“After that? For God's sake, Mama, what happened after that?” No one has ever told me about this.

“You disappeared, Lo, and since then you've never asked about any of it,” she answers, as if I have thereby forfeited my right to know. Then she tells me anyway: at the last moment Lukas came down from the burning porch, disaster averted, the emergency part of the disaster at any rate. The help Mama had sent for arrived and she let them take over. After that she didn't see him until he came and knocked on her kitchen door a few weeks later. He looked tired and black as if he had been rooting around in the charred remains in search of anything that had escaped the flames. Should she ask him to come in? He really looked as though he were in need of a bowl of broth, and she had cooked enough for a whole army, still not used to the minimal size of her reduced family. He looked so lean around the eyes. He looked like someone who could easily become emaciated, as if he only had his body on loan, like everything else that had just been taken away from him. But she couldn't bring herself to.

“He didn't ask about you, and what would I have said? I had no idea . . .” she says. “About why you, from one day to the next, had decided to leave everything behind. I knew even less than him—but it must have had something to do with the two of you. He didn't ask for any answers, either. Just the phone number. He wasn't satisfied with the address.”

“He couldn't write, Mama,” I interrupt.

“What?”

“No, he couldn't.”

“But he wrote to you in the end. I sent that letter on myself . . . What did he want?”

When I don't reply she continues. Lukas had looked so dejected that she was afraid he would throw himself in the lake, so she tried to inspire some hope in him. Of what, I ask.

“Of you coming back eventually—if that was what he wanted.”
Give her a little time,
Mama had said, when Lukas came back two days later with an unaddressed blue envelope that he asked her to send to me. And perhaps it was that hope that made him start to demolish what had been burned and decide to rebuild Gábriel's house. He set about the house construction in a sorrowful frenzy, as if something might rise up out of the ashes. Mama could see from our place how the work was progressing. When the first cold spell came, she saw him buy two propane heaters for the derelict house he had moved into, for want of anywhere else. It must have been cold and damp, so near the lake. Bit by bit, when he had the time and the money, he rebuilt Gábriel's house. The same house that he'd allowed to catch fire—as if all he'd wanted was to be free of it.

His spare time he spent building, single-handed, everything apart from the roof trusses that a framer in the village helped him with. As soon as the outside was finished the building work stopped. Lukas never set foot in there after it was finished, as far as Mama knew. This empty mausoleum at the end of the gravel road became a refuge for the river rats then, the ones his papa had forced him to catch and drown. It was at the point when he gave up hope of me returning, Mama says, that he also gave up building. After that he left it, one of many houses in the area standing empty since the layoffs at the factories.

I never understood why Lukas didn't move away as soon as he dropped out of school and started work. Away from his papa, as soon as he could. There were cheap apartments near the leather factory. But maybe he couldn't imagine waking up every morning to any other view than the one over the lake, the highway, and our house up on the hill.

“Were you happy with that guy you left everything for?”

“Yoel? I didn't leave everything
for
him, I left everything
with
him. And yes, I was happy. For a while. What more can you want? Were you happy with Papa?” She doesn't answer, just says something about how it could have been anyone at all, that guy, couldn't it? No, not anyone at all, but certainly someone else. I was forced to go away to become the person I am. There had been a relentless breaking-up atmosphere for a long time. Papa and the other brothers and sisters who moved away, Mama's father with his burning lungs, and her mother with her heart embedded in the fat of grief, and Papa's mother with her cancer, and Gábriel with his crumbling bones. Death, death, death that summer. Good God, I was only seventeen and it felt as if life was over.

Just in time Yoel came gliding in over the disaster area and winched me up. I'm not lying when I say that I have thought of Lukas every day, but going away from here is the best thing I did. You shall leave your father and your mother, that is the way it is. It was not me who made it up. But maybe you could say goodbye first and clean up your messy room, Mama thinks. I don't know. There's nothing about that in the Bible.