The Unit (10 page)

11

Johannes had cooked fish with saffron in a cream sauce, accompanied by crushed potatoes; I could already smell the aroma when I stepped out of the elevator, and all I had to do was follow it through the door into section F2 and down the hallway to his door, where the nameplate announced that Johannes Alby lived here.

I knocked. He opened the door. He had an apron knotted around his waist and a wooden fork in his hand. He kissed my cheek and said:

“Welcome—you look lovely! Dinner won’t be long. Have a seat while I finish up.”

I sat down at the table, which was already set for two: blue stoneware plates, glasses with a stem, blue napkins folded into triangles beside the plates, two candles in brass holders, a box of matches. A stone—grayish pink, about as big as a medium-size cell phone, and containing a white, cone-shaped fossil—lay next to one of the candle holders as a decoration. Johannes disappeared into the kitchen with his wooden fork; I could hear the sound of clattering and banging, and he was whistling and humming. I picked up the matches and lit the candles. Johannes came in with two placemats and a carafe of something that looked like white wine, but turned out to be grape juice. He smiled. “It’s ready now,” he said, placing the mats and the carafe on the table before disappearing and returning with a big frying pan, a saucepan and two ladles. Before he sat down opposite me, he switched off the overhead light.

And so we sat there, just the two of us, in the glow of the candles. The food was very good. I complimented him. We didn’t talk much while we were eating, just looked at each other from time to time; for some reason I was feeling shy, and it’s possible that he felt the same. At one point toward the end of the meal, when the fact that he was looking at me made me feel embarrassed, I looked down at the table and at the pink stone with the fossil.

“Where did you find that?” I asked.

“On a beach. On the south coast. Between Mossby and Abbekås, to be more precise.”

I put down my knife and fork, looked up at him. “When?”

“When? Er … let’s see … More or less exactly two years before I ended up in here. Just about five years ago. Why?”

“Because that’s my beach!” I said. “Well, when I say mine … I used to go there with … with my dog. At least two or three times a week. What were you doing there? We might have bumped into each other.”

He looked at me.

“Yes,” he said. “Indeed we might.”

Then he told me what had happened when he found the stone, and why he had kept it:

“It was autumn. I was working on a novel—probably my last—and I’d hit a block, and was on the point of chucking the whole thing. But to clear my head and avoid doing something too hasty, I borrowed a car from some friends and took a trip to the south coast; the sea is more open there than it is around Öresund, and I wanted to be by the open sea, I wanted to know that it was a long way to the next shore. So I walked there, along the beach, hour after hour, from Abbekås harbor to Mossbystrand and back again, several times. It was quite late in the autumn, so the twilight came early and it was steel blue, as the autumn twilight can be by the sea if it’s cloudy. Anyway, as I was plowing along through the sand and it was beginning to get dark, I was looking at the stones and shells and driftwood and all the garbage the sea had washed up. And that was when I caught sight of this stone. It was lying by the water’s edge. The fossil was chalk-white in the dusk.”

Johannes fell silent. The stone was still lying in my hand, resting palm upward on the table, and he placed a finger on the stone and caressed it with his fingertip in my cupped hand as he continued talking:

“It was lying there at the water’s edge glowing at me, or so it seemed. So I stopped and squatted, and at the very moment when I touched the stone, everything became clear. All the pieces fell into place. It was as if a ravine had opened up in front of me, and in the widening gap I could see the resolution to my novel—with absolute clarity. I put the stone in my pocket and drove home, and finished the novel in a couple of days. Since then I haven’t wanted to part from that stone.”

After dinner I went to sit in an armchair, Johannes on the sofa. We were drinking tea.

“Tell me about your dog,” said Johannes.

I hesitated, feeling the tears weighing heavy and twisting in my throat at the mere thought. I presume he could tell, because he added quietly:

“Only if you want to, of course, Dorrit.”

But I did want to, and so I told him; I told him about Jock and my love for him. Johannes didn’t seem to find it at all amusing that I was talking about love in connection with a dog, not even when I talked about the fact that the dog loved me; he listened with understanding and respect. And I went on talking, about my house, my garden, and a little bit about Nils too, once I’d got going.

Then Johannes told me about a woman he had loved when he was my age. They had lived together, and he had been very happy with her. But as soon as she got pregnant by him, she left him.

“One evening she told me we were expecting a baby, and I was so happy. I was so proud that I was going to be a father. But a couple of days later, when I got home from jogging, her shoes and coats were gone from the hallway, and her closet was empty, and her shelf in the bathroom, and her books, her photographs, her laptop, everything that belonged to her was gone. After that I became cold. I was incapable of loving. I couldn’t even have sex. Couldn’t get close to anyone. And time just passed. Suddenly I was sixty and ended up in here, on the glass mountain. Or rather
in
the glass mountain.”

“So how are things now?” I asked.

“What do you mean?” he asked, although I could see from his eyes and from the softening of his mouth that he understood what I meant.

“Would you be able to now?” I said.

“Be able to do what?” he said, and now there was something teasing in his expression.

It made me embarrassed.

“Oh, you know …” I mumbled.

My cheeks felt hot, and I realized I was blushing. I looked away.

There was silence for a little while. Then he said:

“Dorrit. Come and sit here.”

His voice was soft, not at all peremptory. But it was also firm and determined, like the voice of someone who knows exactly what he wants, and it made something tremble inside me, shooting and throbbing. This was just the way things had been with Nils; he also used to sound as if he knew what he wanted, and he could also make me tremble just by expressing a simple wish in a gentle but firm voice.

I have always had a tendency—far too much of a tendency—to be turned on by people who know what they want and are able to express themselves without yelling and shouting and blustering. I have always been turned on by people who sound as if they are in control of a situation. So I sat there in Johannes’s armchair, trembling and throbbing like a heart that has just been cut out of one body and is about to be inserted and stitched into another, and I could feel myself pulsating down below, the sensation spreading along the inside of my thighs, and my cheeks were burning and my eyes felt hot and shiny, as if I had a temperature. But I said nothing and did nothing, I just sat there in the armchair being all those physical reactions and feelings.

“I want you to come and sit here on the sofa next to me,” said Johannes in that same gentle, firm voice, and I didn’t look at him, but I could feel him looking at me, my whole face could feel his eyes searching for mine.

“And I want you to do it now,” he added.

“Why?” I croaked.

“You know the answer to that,” he said. “Come over here.”

And I tried. I tried to get my legs and arms to work and heave myself out of the armchair to walk the two or possibly three steps over to the sofa, but I had become a helpless simpleton with no will of her own—no, that’s not true, I did have a will of my own, because I wanted to move, I wanted to move so much it hurt—and couldn’t control my limbs, let alone make them move. I gave up.

“I think you’ll have to come and get me,” I whispered.

And he did. Without a word he got up from the sofa, came over to the armchair, lifted me in his arms, and carried me over to the sofa. And I did nothing. I just lay there limp in his embrace, allowed myself to be laid down on the cushions. I did nothing when he kissed me, I just kissed him back, hungrily eating my way in between his lips, sucking on his tongue as if it were a teat and I were a starving lamb. I did nothing when he unbuttoned my shirt and my pants and undressed me, one item of clothing at a time; nothing when he looked at me as I lay there undressed in front of him, just parted my legs a fraction before his gaze. I did nothing when he took hold of me, when he caressed my skin with his hands—everywhere, searching, as if he were looking for scars and other traces of incursions, attacks, accidents—nothing when he caressed my hands, my arms, my neck, face, breasts, stomach, thighs, bottom, vagina. I did nothing, I didn’t move a muscle when he bent down between my thighs and pressed his tongue against me, nor did I do anything when he tensed the muscles in his tongue and began to stimulate my clitoris with it; I did nothing but let myself come in warm waves, flooding and flooding through me. After I had come, the second after, before I had even managed to catch my breath, he plowed into me, from the front, from above, supporting himself on his arms, his thrusts sometimes slow and teasing, sometimes hard and deep. He screwed me—this really was being screwed. He took me, he took me the way a veritable male chauvinist and oppressor of women, a caveman, a Neanderthal, a male animal with a reptilian brain would have taken a woman. And I did nothing, absolutely nothing, just allowed myself to be taken, and it was … no, there are no words to describe how it was.

12

I hadn’t thought it would be possible to have sex in the reserve bank unit. I didn’t think anyone would want to or would be able to, partly because of anxiety and stress, partly because of the surveillance, which made any kind of private life impossible in the true sense of the word. But I didn’t feel as if I lacked a private life. We were all monitored everywhere all the time, whatever we were doing, but by this stage I had stopped attaching any importance to it. I never really managed to ignore or forget the cameras, but they just became a part of life, almost something natural. It was presumably similar to the old days, when religion had a clear place within daily life, and people were convinced that God was keeping a constant, watchful eye on them, that he saw and heard everything they did and said and thought and felt, and that there was no point in trying to hide anything.

So we made love, Johannes and I, we made love with no modesty, physically, quite openly. We made love for the rest of that evening after the saffron fish, and more or less all night. And the next evening and night, and the next, and the next—and so on. We simply became a couple. We became a loving couple. And we made love in the old-fashioned way without the least trace of embarrassment. He was the seducer, the one who took the initiative, the active one. He took what he wanted from me, and I accepted, allowed myself to be passive. It was like making love with Nils again, but better, freer. Johannes and I were living our lives locked away, outside the community, and therefore had nothing and no one to be ashamed of.

Nor did we need to part over and over again because Johannes had to go home to his partner; I was his partner. We couldn’t move in together—that wasn’t allowed in the unit—but we could spend the night with each other as often as we wished, and I wasn’t “the other woman.” I was simply The Woman. And I enjoyed it, I enjoyed the fact that we could walk along openly holding hands, the fact that everyone knew we were a couple and accepted it. We even had mutual friends that we spent time with: Erik, Elsa, Alice, Lena and many others. Sometimes we would meet up with other couples. We would go out to dinner with couples. It was something completely new and fantastic, to be invited to dinner by a couple along with other couples, and to be part of a couple, not always the fifth wheel on the wagon, but regarded and treated as someone who belonged with someone else.

With Nils (as with a number of other men before him) everything had happened in secret. We never met up with other people together, no one in his family or circle of friends knew of my existence, and none of my friends knew about him. And that wasn’t only because he was someone else’s partner, but because much of what we were doing was taboo.

Nils was actually breaking the law. He could have gone to prison over and over again for both the oppression of a woman and the improper use of male physical strength. When we got together he would often spend time chopping wood for me, or mowing the lawn or cutting the hedge or pruning trees, while I was in the kitchen preparing lunch or dinner for us. He also sometimes changed the tires on my car, fixed a leak in the roof, put up new guttering and mended cracks in the facade of the house. And I showed my gratitude by dressing sexily and cooking something really delicious and making the table look particularly nice.

It was a very special feeling, standing there in the kitchen with an apron over my dress, which in turn hid my silky lingerie, cooking for myself and my big strong lover—my big strong man—as he stood out in the cold and the wind, swinging the hickory ax and splitting one log after another just as easily as if they had been made of wax, and at a speed I found hugely impressive. Nils could chop as much wood in an hour as I could in two. And whenever he changed over to winter or summer tires on my car, he did the whole job in the time it usually took me just to loosen the wheel nuts. Not having to do these heavy and often dirty jobs myself—not having to get sweaty, filthy, to end up with strains and pains in my arms, shoulders and back—and still to get the work done was of course very satisfying in itself. But it was much more than that. When Nils came in after his hard work I would get out a clean bath towel for him, and while he showered and changed into clean clothes (which he always brought with him from home in a briefcase) I would finish cooking and setting the table. And then, at the very moment when I could hear the splashing of the water and Nils singing in the shower, I would sometimes stop and kind of taste the whole scenario, drink it in, fill my mouth with it and hold it there, and at those times I felt so alive, so involved, almost as if we belonged together, Nils and I. Almost as if we were needed by each other.

There was also a sexual dimension, of course. I was seething with lust as I stood there busying myself in the kitchen with my apron knotted around my waist, like an obedient little housewife as I heard the logs being split against the chopping block outside, or the constant hum of the lawnmower or hedge clippers, the pounding of the hammer or the churning of the cement mixer. There was an infinite bubbling expectation in preparing food with housewifely care, not to mention the satisfaction of seeing Nils eat it later with the hearty appetite that comes from physical exertion. Yes, it was all sexual, it was sex, it was part of our foreplay. And it was—or it could have been—a lifestyle. If we had been a proper couple we would presumably have lived by this division of roles. Not openly, perhaps, but when we were alone. When we were alone we would have allowed our feelings and our bodies, not our thoughts, to decide who did what.

I think it’s beautiful when men show their physical strength openly without being ashamed of it or apologizing. And I think it’s beautiful when women dare to be physically weak and accept help with heavy jobs. I believe there’s a kind of courage in that, and courage is beautiful. If I can choose between mind and body, I choose body. If I can choose between brain and heart, I choose heart. With Johannes I could make that choice without being forced to hide it.