More Bitter Than Death (5 page)

“I’m Malin. I was raped by a guy I thought I could trust. I’m here because I hope it’ll make me a little less angry. And because I don’t want to feel like a victim. I think talking about it helps. I think things can get better.”

Her voice is strong and clear and she tentatively makes eye contact with Aina. As if she’s challenging her.

Aina writes something on her notepad and then moves on to the next woman. She’s the oldest one in the group, probably in her sixties, permed hair, dyed red, and fingernails yellow from smoking. Her face is wrinkled and marked with age spots. Everything about her seems tired and downtrodden. As if life hasn’t been kind to her. For a second I wonder what I have in common with these women. Probably nothing, I scold myself silently. I urge myself to focus on them, the women in the group, not on myself. I feel like a hopeless egocentric and keenly long to be outside in the darkness thick with rain.

“I’m Sirkka,” the woman says in a thick Finnish accent. “I’m here because I was abused by my husband. As I have now come to understand, after all these years. He died last winter, and after that I started wondering.”

She sighs, a sigh so deep that it causes all other activity in the room to cease. She has everyone’s attention.

“I wish . . .” Doubt. “I wish I could start over again, like you young girls who are here. I’m too old now, but I guess I still hope that I can . . .” More
doubt. “Make peace with myself, maybe.” Sirkka bobs her head to indicate that she’s said what she wanted to.

Now to the last of the participants, a beautiful woman in her forties, short, dark hair that frames her face, green eyes, deep, wine-red lipstick, perfectly applied. She’s impeccably dressed, the kind of woman you notice. She glances up from the table and decides to focus on me instead of Aina.

“I’m Hillevi, and right now I’m living in a shelter with my three kids, my boys.” Hillevi smiles and looks happy, maybe at the thought of her sons.

“I lived in Solgården before I started getting beaten up by the father of my sons, uh, well, my husband.” Hillevi pauses. It’s not an interruption because she’s not sure what to say next, but rather a carefully considered pause, and it strikes me that Hillevi is an experienced speaker, comfortable talking in front of a group. She looks around the table but then turns her eyes back to me.

“I can live with the fact that he beat me. I was raised to believe in marriage. My parents are conservative Baptists and they taught me that marriage is for better or worse, come rain or shine. Jakob didn’t hit me often, and afterward he was always unbelievably full of remorse. He’s not a misogynist. He respects me. He loves me. He’s just so hot-tempered. He just gets so mad. We’ve seen a marriage counselor. Jakob has been trying, working on his behavior. I thought it had gotten better.” Hillevi stops to think. “It did get better. Really. But then he hit Lukas.”

She stops talking again. I look her in the eye and only now do I see the shame.

“He hit Lukas, that’s our oldest son. He’s almost seven.”

Hillevi bursts into tears and lets them flow down her cheeks and down over her thin, pale neck.

“I’m here because I need to accept that I can’t live with the man I love and because I need to forgive myself for not being able to protect our children.”

I nod slowly to confirm that I’ve heard what she said. That I’ve witnessed that her world is crumbling and needs to be put back together in a new way.

Aina’s voice brings me back to the group again and to the evening’s agenda.

“Okay,” she says. “Now we know a little more about each other. We thought we would proceed by describing some of the common reactions in people who have been the victims of these types of things, and also some of the most common phases people go through in dealing with such a crisis. But this isn’t a lecture. It’s intended more as a dialogue, so please feel free to interrupt me.”

I clear my throat and turn around to grab a whiteboard pen. It’s my turn to speak.

“People usually describe a crisis as having different phases. Have you ever heard this before?”

I outline the anatomy of a crisis on the whiteboard in front of us. The group sits quietly, watching me, waiting for my instructions. Suddenly I feel my cheeks burning. I’m not used to this, not used to leading groups this large. Not used to talking about the assault and abuse of women, not used to getting so close to my own fears while I’m at work.

Self-consciously I rub my hands over my black tunic and look down at the linoleum floor.

“Okay, we have fifteen minutes,” I say. “I was thinking that maybe a couple of you would like to share your stories with us in a little more detail?”

To my surprise someone actually offers to go first. Malin silently raises her hand to indicate that she’d like to speak.

“I’d be happy to go first. It’s not that hard for me—how should I put this—to talk about this stuff. Mostly it just makes me . . . angry.”

Malin stops and looks right into my eyes from the opposite side of the ring of women. The room is completely silent, just the sound of traffic humming by from somewhere outside, out in the autumn darkness.

“Who are you angry at?” Sofie asks, hesitantly. And everyone suddenly turns to look at the slender girl to my left. She says it with such caution that it sounds like an apology instead of a question.

“At myself. Obviously,” Malin says, and then laughs briefly but loudly with her mouth open. From the corner of my eye I can see Aina nodding, picking up her pen and making a note.

“Can you tell the story from the beginning? What happened?” Aina asks.

“It’s really a very . . . pathetic story,” Malin explains. “We met online, this guy and I, in a chat room, not on one of those shady sex sites or anything. It was a website for long-distance runners. I’m a runner, you know. Anyway, I knew who he was. It’s a really small world, you know, those of us who are involved in running on that kind of serious level, and he lives out in Värmdö too . . .”

Malin’s voice fades away and to my surprise I can see that her hands are clenched onto her jeans-clad thighs with a convulsive tightness. On the surface she seems relaxed and open, but I conclude that this is actually very hard for her to talk about. Suddenly she exhales, a deep sigh escapes her, and she shakes her head a little.

“I know you can never really know who someone is online, not truly. I mean not, like, for real. But we used to chat and then, after we exchanged email addresses and phone numbers, we started emailing and texting each other. It was . . . well, it was kind of like flirting, I admit. Although it’s not like there was anything graphic in those emails or text messages, nothing explicit, if you know what I mean. Although, okay, flirtatious and a little suggestive maybe. But there was absolutely nothing that . . . nothing that . . . would explain what . . . what happened.”

Everyone nods, watching Malin, who pulls out a tube of lip balm in silence and holds it in her hand without using it.

“And then one day we talked to each other on the phone and decided we should meet, just like that, at his place. I know, that was a huge mistake,” Malin says, shaking her head so that her short blond hair swishes around the top of her head like a helmet. She brushes her bangs to the side, raises the lip balm, and slowly runs it over her pale, full lips with a vacant expression on her face.

“That was my first mistake, but not my last,” she said. “It was a Friday and I had been out for beer with a bunch of coworkers after work that day. We had just had our big bonus meeting at work. I sell advertising and every quarter we get a bonus check if our sales numbers are good enough, you know? And that day we’d all just found out that we had all made the cutoff, to get our bonuses, I mean. So everyone was feeling really . . . well, celebratory. To say the least. Everyone probably drank at least four, maybe five beers, me included. The problem was that I hardly ever drink. I mean, not that that’s really a problem, but . . .”

Malin stops and looks at each of us one by one in silence as if she’s wondering if she can trust us, if we can be trusted, if we deserve to be trusted.

“So I was drunk,” she admits. “I’m so incredibly stupid.”

Another deep sigh. She lowers her head and clasps her hands around her knee. In a quiet, solemn way that makes me think of a nun or something. And suddenly she looks more sad than angry and there’s something in her facial expression, something in the deep furrow between her eyebrows, in the sharp lines around her mouth, that makes me think that she is older than she first seemed. There is something resigned and maybe a little cynical about her revelation.

“I don’t get it, I don’t get it, I don’t get it,” Malin wails. “How could I be so damn stupid? I went to his place, the home of this guy I’d never met, alone, drunk. What the hell was I thinking anyway? Then, when I got there—he lives
down in those apartment buildings by the beach, out by the sports field—I had such a strange feeling when he opened the door. He gave me this . . . this really weird look and kind of smiled, but not in a nice way. I had this feeling that he was laughing at me for some reason, like you would laugh at someone who had done something clumsy, you know, spilled a glass on the tablecloth or . . . Whatever, I could have turned around and left then. It’s not like he jumped on me right there by the front door, but I felt so dumb, so I went in anyway. So incredibly stupid.”

The room is completely quiet. Everyone is looking at Malin, sitting there hunched over in her chair. Her muscular arms are wrapped around herself, as if she were cold or looking for comfort from her own body.

“Okay, maybe the way I was dressed wasn’t that great either,” she says. “It was a very, uh . . . short skirt . . . I know, I know, people always say that doesn’t matter. Obviously that didn’t have anything to do with it. Obviously that shouldn’t have had anything to do with it. But sometimes I wonder . . . If I’d have been sober. If I’d have been dressed differently . . . like in something that was just totally unsexy. If I’d gone there after a run, really needing a shower, ugly, with really bad breath. Would that have mattered? Did I contribute in some way to what he did? Even though, obviously, it’s not supposed to matter what you wear.”

Malin sighs again deeply, with her arms still wrapped around her body as if she were wearing a straitjacket.

“Anyway. We talked for a while in his kitchen. Drank a little more beer. And . . . well, then we made out a little, and I was totally into that. But then suddenly something happened, it was like he changed, got rough. Or maybe I changed, because suddenly I felt like I didn’t want to do anything else, and I told him so. I told him to stop, that I didn’t want to. I said it a bunch of times. I may have screamed. I don’t really remember. But he just pushed me down on the kitchen floor and held me there with one arm on my neck while he shoved his fingers into me. And I . . . I just lay there because I couldn’t move. I could hardly breathe. He was so incredibly strong. I mean, I’m strong, but he was . . . And it was like he was furious at me, like he suddenly hated me, like he wanted to kill me. I can’t understand where all that rage came from, what I said or did that made him get so extremely pissed off. I’ve been thinking about it, I mean, since it happened, about why he got so mad. And then there’s that whole powerless thing. I’m so used to being a strong person, but I just lay there, totally powerless. Looking under his refrigerator, noticing that there was a ton of dust
under there, thinking that he must not have cleaned under there in ages. Dust and little bits of old cheese and food wrappers. Why do I remember that? Why would anyone ever think about something like that when—”

Suddenly Malin stops talking. She sits there quietly with her hands clenched around her knee.

“And then he did it.”

“Malin,” I say, “sometimes it can be a relief to describe the actual crime in a little more detail. It often feels really uncomfortable, but in the long run it can help you move beyond the rape.”

Malin nods mutely. She doesn’t look like she thinks it’s a good idea.

I explain, “If you don’t want to say anything else about it today, we can come back to it some other time. You don’t need to feel like there’s any kind of pressure.”

“No, I want to,” Malin continued. “Talk about it, I mean. The fact that he . . . raped me there, on the floor in the kitchen. He was shouting the whole time too, ‘whore’ and ‘cunt,’ stuff like that. And that’s when it clicked for me, that this was serious, that this was for real. For a while I thought it was just kind of a joke, a prank that was just coming off wrong, maybe. But then . . . even though I got that it was for real, it didn’t feel like I was actually there. It was like he was hitting someone else, someone else’s body. It felt like I was sitting there at that little kitchen table looking down at us lying on the floor, thinking, ‘This doesn’t look good. I wonder if she’s going to get away.’ Like I was some stupid sportscaster. I came to the conclusion that he was strong and fast, and I was . . . drunk and stupid. The odds weren’t very good, you know? Then—I don’t know if this was the assault or something else, some defensive mechanism maybe—but I just got totally passive. Like he could do whatever he wanted with me. And he did.”

Malin’s voice has dropped to a faint, scratchy whisper. Her eyes remain trained on the linoleum floor in front of her.

“He raped me several times, vaginally, anally, hitting me in between rounds, not as much as in the beginning. It was like . . . he was running out of energy. He slapped my face a little now and then, kicked me a little, pulled my hair. But in general he kind of lost interest more and more as time went by. I just lay there in . . . my blood and . . . my own urine and . . . and . . .”

“How long did all this take?” Aina asks in a surprisingly steady voice.

“How long?” Malin seems taken aback by the question. “How long? At least a few hours anyway.”

“A few hours? That’s crazy,” Kattis says, upset.

“What happened? Did you manage to get away?” Sirkka asks cautiously.

“He fell asleep. That shithead fell asleep. Can you believe it?” Malin says. “He fell asleep right there on the kitchen floor and all, and I could just walk away. So I did the normal thing, went home and showered and scrubbed and showered. I tried to get him off my body, out of my body. I reported him to the police four weeks later. By then, obviously, there was no physical evidence left, no visible injuries either, but the police said they had a good case. He had evidently molested some girl six months earlier and the police found . . . what’s it called? Rohypnol at his place. They said that was why he was so aggressive, kept at it for so long. Rohypnol combined with alcohol apparently has that effect.