Handling the Undead (8 page)

In the bathroom she removed her dentures, brushed them thoroughly and put them in a glass that she kept in the bathroom. Did not understand people who kept them next to the bed like a grinning reminder of time passing. Glasses, yes. The security of having one's eyesight close at hand if anything should happen, but the teeth? As if something you had to chew was suddenly going to appear.

She went into her bedroom, took off her clothes and put on her nightgown. She folded the clothes carefully and placed them on the rolltop desk. She paused, looked at the photograph on the desk. Their wedding picture, her and Tore.

What a pair of lovebirds.

The photograph was originally black and white, but had later

been hand coloured in still-vivid hues. She and Tore looked like an illustration in a book of fairy tales. The King and Queen-shortly after 'and then they lived happily ever after'. Tore in tails, she in a white dress with a colourful bouquet of flowers at her breast. Both staring into the future with spookily blue eyes. (Tore had not even had blue eyes; the retoucher had made a mistake, but they'd never got around to having it corrected.)

Elvy sighed, stroking the photograph with her finger.

'That's how things can end up,' she said, not thinking of anything in particular.

She turned on the bedside lamp, wondering if she should try another session with Grimberg before she fell asleep, but before she had made up her mind there was something at the front door. She listened. The sound came again. A ... scratching.

What in the name of heaven ... ?

The clock on her bedside table said it was twenty past twelve. The scratching came again. Probably some animal, perhaps a dog, but what would it be doing at her house? She waited a while, but the scratching continued. Stray dogs were unusual round here. In the winter you might get a deer, wandering into the suburbs, but they never came to the door to pay a visit.

She pulled on her robe and walked to the front door, listening. Not a cat, she thought. Partly because the scraping was too strong, and partly because it appeared to be coming from chest height. Elvy leaned against the door post and whispered loudly, 'Who is it?'

The scraping stopped. Now there was a low whimpering instead.

It must be someone who's been injured in some way
.

She stopped thinking about it and opened the door.

He was dressed in his best suit, but it did not hang well on him. During his final years of illness he had lost about twenty kilos and the gabardine now drooped from his shoulders where he stood on the front steps, his arms dangling. Elvy backed up a couple of steps until her feet bumped the doorstop and she almost lost her balance, but grabbed the coat rack and straightened again.

Tore was standing still, staring at his feet. Elvy looked down. His feet were bare and white, his toenails untrimmed.

She stared at his feet and thought:

They cheated. They haven't trimmed his toenails.

For it was not terror or horror that she felt when she looked at her husband, dead three years after their fiftieth anniversary, now returned. No. Only surprise and ... a kind of exhaustion. Then she took a step towards him and said, 'What are you doing here?'

Tore did not answer. But he lifted his head. There were eyes, but no gaze. Elvy was used to this, she'd had the non-gaze turned on her for three years. It was just that now it was even more frozen, lifeless.

This is not Tore. This is a doll.

The doll took a couple of steps forward and entered the house.

Elvy could not bring herself to do anything to stop it. She wasn't afraid, but she had no idea what she should do.

It was Tore, there was no sense in pretending anything else. But how was this possible? She had felt for his absent pulse; had held the little hand mirror to his mouth and seen that he was no longer breathing. She had heard the ambulance driver say it, she'd been given certificates confirming the fact that Tore was dead, deceased, gone.

The resurrection of the flesh ...

He brushed past her and went on into the house. A cloud of chilled hospital smell reached her nostrils; disinfectant, starch ... and something sweeter, more fruity underneath. She quickly pulled herself together, grabbed hold of his shoulder and whispered, 'What are you doing?'

He paid her no attention, and continued his steps-jerkily, as if each one was an effort-in the direction of the other bedroom.
His
room.

It struck her suddenly that for the first time in seven years she was seeing him walk. Stiffly, as if unused to his new-found body, but walking nonetheless. Straight to the room where Flora was sleeping.

Elvy turned around, grabbed hold of both his shoulders from behind and whisper-shouted, 'Flora is sleeping in there! Let her be!’

Tore stopped, the cold from his body seeping through the cloth into her hands. After they had stood like this for several seconds, a memory rose up: those times when Margareta was little and Tore had come home drunk. The daughter sleeping in her bed, Elvy playing sentry in the hallway to prevent Tore from stumbling into Margareta's room and dribbling endearments over the terrified child.

She's sleeping! Let her be!

Often it had worked. But not always.

Tore turned around. Elvy tried to fix him with her gaze, nail him to the wall as she had done forty years ago. Make him stop moving, start talking. But it was like trying to pin a tack to a bowling ball; her gaze slipped, could not pierce his and for the first time she began to be afraid.

Despite the shadows on his hollow cheeks, the sunken lips and the missing twenty kilos, he was still significantly stronger than she. And in his eyes there was no emotion, no recognition. She could not bear to look any longer and backed away, defeated.

Tore turned and continued towards the room. Elvy tried to grab hold of him again, but just as his shoulders slipped from her grasp, the bedroom door opened and Flora came out.

'Nana, what .. .'

She caught sight of Tore. A whimper escaped her and she threw herself aside, out of the way of his cold determination. Tore appeared not to notice her and entered the bedroom as Flora stumbled and fell over the armchair and crawled toward the balcony door. She

sat down on the floor, wide eyed and screaming at the top of her lungs.

Elvy hurried over to her, took her in her arms and stroked her hair, her cheeks.

'Shushh ... shushhh ... it isn't dangerous ... shushhhh.'

The screaming stopped. Elvy felt Flora's jaw muscles tense under her hand. Her body started to tremble and she leaned towards Elvy, still tensed, her gaze directed at the bedroom. Tore had walked over to his desk and sat down, as if he had just come home from work and had a little paperwork to get through before going to bed.

They saw his arms moving, heard the quiet rustle as the papers moved over each other. They huddled there for a long time unable to move, until Flora freed herself from Elvy's arms and sat up straight on the floor.

Elvy whispered, 'How are you going there?' Quietly, so Tore wouldn't hear.

Flora opened and closed her mouth, made a half-hearted gesture at the coffee table, at the bedroom. Elvy looked over and saw what she meant. The cover of Flora's video game, Resident Evil, was on the coffee table. Flora mumbled something and Elvy leaned forward.

'What did you say?'

Flora's voice, less than a whisper, was quite clear, 'This is ... ridiculous.'

Elvy nodded. Yes. Ridiculous. Laughable, except that neither of them was laughing-and the facts remained. She stood up. Flora fumbled at the hem of her robe.

'Shh .. .' Elvy whispered. 'I'm just going to see what he's doing.'

She crept up to the bedroom. Why were they whispering, why was she creeping if all of this was so ridiculous? Because the ludicrous, the impossible, is located at the outermost limits of existence. One wrong move, the least little disturbance, and it falls. Or rises, roaring. You never know which. And you have to be careful; take precautions.

Elvy leaned against the doorpost, but only Tore's back and one elbow, pulled in, were within her line of vision. She took a step into the room, sliding along the wall to get another angle.

Is he looking for something?

Ghosts coming back to put something right. The fruity smell had grown stronger. She rested the tips of her fingers against the wall as if to maintain contact with reality.

Tore's white, stiff hands moved across the desk, over the photocopied texts of psalms they'd sung at the funeral, blank stationery, the copy of today's newspaper that Flora had brought. He lifted a piece of paper to his eyes, moving his head back and forth as if he were reading-

Only a day, one moment at a time

-whereupon he put the paper down, and picked up a new piece with the same text and read it with equal care.

'Tore?'

Elvy started at the sound of her own voice. She had not been planning to say anything, it just slipped out. But there was no reaction from Tore. Elvy relaxed. She did not want him to turn around, do anything or-

God help me

 -say anything.

She shuffled out of the room along the wall and closed the door gently behind her, listening. The paper sounds continued. She pulled the armchair up to the door, jammed the chair back under the door handle and wedged in a couple of books so that the handle wouldn't turn.

Flora was still sitting on the floor in the same position as before. Tore's return was inconceivable, quite beyond Elvy's comprehension, but she was afraid for Flora's sake. This was too much for her sensitive girl.

Elvy sat down next to her, and it was a relief when Flora asked, 'What's he doing?' since it meant she had not completely dissociated; she was interested. And Elvy had an answer for her.

'I think,' she said, 'that he is pretending to be alive.'

Flora gave a little nod, as if this was just the answer she had been expecting. Elvy didn't know what to do. Flora shouldn't be anywhere near this, but Elvy couldn't see how she could get her away. The buses had stopped running and Margareta and Goran were in London.

She couldn't have called her daughter anyway. Margareta might be generally better socially adapted than Flora and Elvy, but her capacity for hysteria, on the few occasions when it did break out, was enormous. Margareta would come over, and she would take care of everything. Margareta would be speaking very rapidly in a high-pitched voice, and if the smallest detail went wrong she would start to claw at her face.

Damn Tore.

Yes. As Elvy sat wrestling with the problem, she began to feel increasingly hostile toward Tore, whose fault this all was. Hadn't she already done enough? Hadn't she done everything that could possibly be done?

Wait a minute.

Something occurred to her and she smiled, in spite of everything. Of course it was only theological hairsplitting; but didn't it say, 'For better or for worse, until death us do part?' She looked over at the closed door. Tore was dead. Therefore this was no longer her responsibility. She'd made no promise to the priest, forty-three years earlier, to have, hold or cherish anyone after death.

A sound from Flora. Elvy asked, 'Sorry? What did you say?'

Flora looked her straight in the eyes and said, 'Aaaaah.'

A jolt of terror ran through Elvy. This was it. She'd failed to protect the girl, and now ... Her hands went up to Flora's face, stroking her cheeks. She said, 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry. 1 should call a taxi. Does that sound good? I'll call a taxi and then ... you and 1 can get out of here. Yes?'

Flora shook her head slowly, grabbed Elvy's hands and held them. 'Aaaaahhh,' she said again, with the shadow of a smile this time. Elvy gave a short, sharp laugh, almost a bark, of relief. Flora was joking. She was making the sound the undead made in her computer game.

'Oh, Flora, you scared me. I thought .. .'

'Sorry, Nana.' Flora looked around the room with her normal eyes. The emptiness in them had vanished. 'What should we do?'

'Flora, I don't know.'

Her granddaughter frowned.

'Let's think this through,' she said. 'The first thing is: is there a chance that he never really died? That he's sort of been gone, and now he's come back?'

Elvy shook her head. 'No. Unless we've all simply been duped somehow. I looked at him when I went down with his suit the day before yesterday and ... Flora, are you all right?'

'I'm fine. I'm just trying ... to work this out.'

Elvy was amazed. She was speaking in a completely normal voice, holding her fingers up in front of her and checking off the possibilities. It was as if she had gone through a few minutes of shock and doubt, and was now done with that. In its place, the side of her had emerged that she usually tried to suppress: the lawyer's daughter.

'Secondly,' Flora checked off on her middle finger, 'if he really is dead, what is it that brought him back to life? Does it have anything to do with what happened in the garden?'

'Ye-e-e-s .. .I think that's likely.'

'Thirdly .. .'

Elvy began to understand. This change in Flora, she thought, was not as straightforwardly positive as she'd believed at first. The rational way of talking had taken over beause she'd started to look at the whole situation as a video game; not as an impossible event, but as a series of problems, there to be cracked.

Well,
Elvy thought,
it could be worse.

' ... thirdly: is this something that only we can see or is it like real. .. well, you know what I mean.'

Elvy thought of the feeling of Tore's sloped shoulders under her hands, the chill that had radiated from them.

'It is real, and I think we should ... call an ambulance.'

Flora stood up. 'Can I?'

'Don't you think it's better if 1. .. '

'Yes. But can I do it?'

Flora had actually clasped her hands in front of her, entreating, and Elvy shrugged. She did not understand the child's enthusiasm but thought this was a good enough way to be. Flora went to make the call while Elvy sat on the floor, thinking.