‘Do you know what Benjamin said?’ I said from the doorway.
‘No,’ she said, looking up at me with sudden interest.
‘He said you were the nicest girl in the nursery.’
I had never seen her filled with such light. She was glowing with happiness. I knew that neither Linda nor I would be able to say anything to make her react like that, and I understood with the immediate clarity of an insight that she was not ours. Her life was utterly her own.
‘What did he say?’ she answered, she wanted to hear it again.
‘He said you were the nicest in the nursery.’
Her smile was shy but happy, and that made me glad too, yet a shadow hung over my happiness, for was it not alarmingly early for others’ thoughts and opinions to mean so much to her? Wasn’t it best for everything to come from her, for it to be rooted in herself? Another time she surprised me like this was when I was in the nursery. I had gone to pick her up and she ran towards me in the corridor and asked if Stella could go with her to the stables afterwards. I said that things didn’t work like that, it had to be planned in advance, we had to speak to her parents first, and Vanja stood watching me say this, obviously disappointed, but when she went to pass on the news to Stella, she didn’t use my reasons. I heard her as I was rummaging in the hall for her rain gear.
‘It’ll be a bit boring for you at the stables,’ she said. ‘Just watching isn’t cool.’
This way of thinking, putting others’ reactions before your own, I recognised from myself, and as we walked towards Folkets Park in the rain I wondered about how she had picked that up. Was it just there, around her, invisible but present, like the air she breathed? Or was it genetic?
I never expressed any of these thoughts I had about the children, except to Linda of course, because these complex questions belonged only where they were, in me and between us. In reality, in the world Vanja inhabited everything was simple and found simple expression, and the complexity arose only in the sum of all the parts, of which naturally she knew nothing. And the fact that we talked a lot about them did not help at all in our daily lives, where everything was a mess and constantly on the verge of chaos. In the first of the Swedish ‘progress conversations’ we had with the nursery staff there was a lot of talk about her not making contact with the teachers, not wanting to sit on their laps or be patted, as well as her shyness. We should work on toughening her up, teaching her to play a more dominant role in games, taking the initiative and talking more, they said. Linda replied that she was tough enough at home, took the lead in all the games, always showed initiative and could talk the hind leg off a donkey. They told us the little she said in the nursery was unclear, her Swedish wasn’t correct, her vocabulary was not that large, so they were wondering if we had considered speech therapy. At this juncture in the conversation we were handed a brochure from one of the town’s speech therapists. They are crazy in this country, I thought. A speech therapist? Did everything have to be institutionalised? She’s only three!
‘No, speech therapy’s out of the question,’ I said. Until that point Linda had been the one to do all the talking. ‘It will sort itself out. I only started talking when I was three. Before that I said nothing, apart from single words which were incomprehensible to anyone except my brother.’
They smiled.
‘And when I started speaking it came in long, fluent sentences. It all depends on the individual. We are not sending her to a speech therapist.’
‘Well, that’s up to you,’ said Olaf, the head of the nursery. ‘But you’re welcome to hang on to the brochures and give it some thought.’
‘OK then,’ I said.
I collected her hair in one hand and stroked her neck and the top of her back with one finger. Usually she loved this, especially before going to sleep, until she settled for the night, but this time she squirmed away.
On the other side of the table the stern woman had struck up a conversation with Mia, who gave her her undivided attention while Frida and Erik had begun to clear away the plates and cutlery. The white layer cake, which was the next item on the agenda, stood proudly on the worktop, decorated with raspberries and five small candles, beside a column of square cartons containing Bravo, a sugar-free apple drink.
Gustav, who until now had been sitting beside me with his back half-turned, swivelled round to face us.
‘Hi, Vanja,’ he said. ‘Are you having fun?’
As he didn’t get a response, nor any eye contact, he looked at me.
‘You’ll have to come and play with Jocke one day,’ he said, winking at me. ‘Fancy doing that?’
‘Yes,’ Vanja said, regarding him with eyes that suddenly dilated. Jocke was the biggest boy in the nursery. Going to his house was more than she dared hope for.
‘We’ll fix something up,’ Gustav said. Raised his glass, took a swig of red wine and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
‘Are you writing anything new then?’ he asked.
I shrugged.
‘Yes, I’m keeping busy,’ I said.
‘Do you work at home?’
‘Yes.’
‘How do you go about it? Do you sit waiting for inspiration?’
‘No, that’s no good. I have to work every day like you.’
‘Interesting. Interesting. There are not many distractions at home then?’
‘I manage fine.’
‘Ah, you do, do you? Well…’
‘Let’s all go into the living room then,’ Frida said. ‘And we can sing for Stella.’
She took a lighter from her pocket and lit the five candles.
‘What a wonderful cake,’ Mia said.
‘Yes, isn’t it?’ Frida said. ‘And it’s healthy too. There’s hardly any sugar in the cream.’
She lifted it up.