‘How do you think I reacted when I received your letter?’ Agnes asked.
‘I don’t know. I suppose you must have been surprised. Perhaps furious?’
‘I was relieved. At last, I thought! But then I wondered: Why just now? Why not yesterday, or ten years ago?’
She leaned back in her chair. She had long, brown hair, a simple hairslide, bright blue eyes. She gave the impression of being strong, decisive.
She had placed the samurai sword on a shelf next to the window. She noticed me looking at it.
‘I was once given it by a man who was in love with me. When we fell out of love, for some strange reason he took the scabbard with him, but left this incredibly sharp sword with me. Maybe he hoped I would use it to split open my stomach in desperation after he’d left me?’
She spoke quickly, as if time was short. I told her about Harriet and Louise, and how I now felt duty-bound to track her down, and find out if she was still alive.
‘Did you hope I wouldn’t be? That I’d died?’
‘There was a time when I did. But not any more.’
The telephone rang. She answered, listened to what was said, than replied briefly but firmly. There were no empty places in her home for errant girls. She already had three teenagers to look after.
I entered a world I knew nothing about. Agnes Klarström ran a foster home where she lived with three teenage girls who, in my day, would have been classified as tearaways. The girl Sima came from one of Gothenburg’s sink estates. It wasn’t possible to say for certain how old she was. She had come to Sweden as a lone refugee, hidden in a long-distance lorry via the southern port of Trelleborg. During her journey from Iran, she had been advised to dump all her identification papers the moment she set foot on Swedish soil, change her name and lose all traces of her original identity to avoid deportation should she be caught. All she had was a slip of paper with the three Swedish words it was assumed she needed to know.
Refugee, persecuted, alone.
When the lorry eventually stopped outside Sturup airport, the driver pointed to the terminal building and said she should go there and look for a police station. She was eleven or twelve at the time; now she was about seventeen, and the life she had led in Sweden meant that she only felt safe with the samurai sword in her hands.
One of the other girls in the household had run away two days ago. There was no fence round the property, no locked doors. Nevertheless, anybody who left was regarded as a runaway. If it happened too often, Agnes would eventually lose patience. When found, the girl in question would be faced with a new home where the gates would be substantial and the keyrings large.
The runaway, an African from Chad, called Miranda, had probably gone to stay with one of her friends who, for some reason, was called Teabag. Miranda was sixteen and had come to Sweden with her family as a refugee, as part of a UN quota.
Her father was a simple man, a carpenter by trade and very religious, who had soon buckled in the face of the endless cold weather and the feeling that nothing had turned out as he had hoped. He had locked himself into the smallest of the three rooms in which the large family lived, a room with no furniture, only a small pile of African sand that had been in their battered suitcases when they arrived in their new homeland. His wife used to place a tray with food and drink outside the door three times a day. During the night, when everybody else was asleep, he would go to the bathroom, and perhaps also go out for lonely walks around town. At least, they assumed he did, because they would sometimes find wet footprints on the floor when they woke up the next morning.
Miranda eventually found this too much to bear, and one evening she had simply left, perhaps hoping to go back to where she came from. The new homeland had turned out to be a dead end. Before long she was being picked up by the police for petty theft and shoplifting and ended up being shunted around from one penal institution to another.
And now she had run away. Agnes Klarström was furious, but was determined not to rest until the police had made a determined effort to find her and bring her back.
There was a photograph of Miranda pinned up on the wall. The girl’s hair was plaited and arranged artistically, clinging to her skull.
‘If you look carefully, you notice that she has plaited in the word “fuck” next to her left temple,’ said Agnes.
I could see that she was right.
There was also a third girl in the foster home that was Agnes Klarström’s mission and source of income. She was the youngest of the three, only fourteen, and a skinny creature reminiscent of a timid caged animal. Agnes knew next to nothing about her. She was a bit like the child in the old folk tale who suddenly finds herself standing in a town square, having forgotten her name and where she came from.
Late one evening two years previously, an official at the railway station in Skövde had been about to close down for the night when he found her sitting on a bench. He told her to leave, but she didn’t seem to understand. All she could do was hold up a piece of paper on which it said ‘Train to Karlsborg’, and he began to wonder which of the pair of them was going mad, as there hadn’t been a train from Skövde to Karlsborg for the last fifteen years.
A few days later she started appearing on newspaper placards as ‘The Railway Child in Skövde’. Nobody seemed to recognise her, although there were pictures of her wherever you looked. She didn’t have a name, psychologists examined her, interpreters who spoke every language under the sun tried to get her to say something, but nobody had any idea where she came from. The only clue to her past was the mysterious slip of paper with the words ‘Train to Karlsborg’. They turned the little town of Karlsborg on the shores of Lake Vättern inside out, but nobody recognised her and nobody could understand why she had been waiting for a train that stopped running fifteen years ago. An evening newspaper had conducted a poll of its readers and given her the name Aida. She was given Swedish citizenship and a personal identity number after doctors agreed that she must be about twelve years old, thirteen at most. Because of her thick, black hair and olive-coloured skin, it was assumed that she came from somewhere in the Middle East.
Aida didn’t speak a word for two years. Only when every other possibility had been exhausted and Agnes Klarström took her in was any progress made. One morning Aida came to the breakfast table and sat down. Agnes had been talking to her ever since she’d arrived, trying to stir up some reaction in Aida, and now she asked in a friendly tone what she would like.
‘Porridge,’ she said in almost perfect Swedish.
After that, she started talking. The psychologists who came flocking round assumed that she had picked up the language by listening to everything said by all those trying to make her speak. A significant fact supporting this theory was that Aida knew and understood a large number of psychological and medical terms that would otherwise hardly be normal vocabulary for a girl of her age.
She talked, but she had nothing at all to say about who she was, or what she was supposed to do in Karlsborg. Whenever anybody asked her what her name was, she replied as one might have expected:
‘I’m called Aida.’
She appeared on all the newspaper placards again. There were voices muttering in dark corners, suggesting that she had fooled everybody and that her silence had been a smokescreen to overcome all resistance and guarantee her full citizenship in Sweden. But Agnes thought there was a different explanation. The very first time they had met, Aida had stared at her amputated arm. It was as if the sight of it rang a bell with her, as if she had been swimming in deep water for years, but had now finally reached the shallows where she could stand up. Perhaps Agnes’s stump signified something Aida recognised and made her feel secure. Perhaps she had seen people having limbs chopped off. Those doing the chopping were her enemies, and those on the receiving end were the only people she could trust.