He carefully lifted it and carried it to the table adjacent to ours, where two women and a man in their sixties were sitting with a woman in her thirties and what had to be her two small children. A family outing with grandparents.
Vanja unleashed one of her dreadful screams, which she had started to do in recent weeks. She launched it from the bottom of her lungs. It went right through my nervous system and was unbearable. I looked at her. Both the tin box and the keys were on the floor beside the chair. I picked them up and placed them in front of her. She grabbed them and threw them down again. It could have been a game had it not been for the ensuing scream.
‘Don’t scream, Vanja,’ I said. ‘Please.’
I forked the last bit of potato, yellow against the white plate, and raised it to my mouth. While I was chewing I gathered the remaining pieces of meat on my plate, loaded them onto my fork with the knife, together with some onion rings from the salad, swallowed and lifted it to my mouth. The man who had taken the chair was on his way to the counter with the older man, whom I guessed to be his wife’s father, since none of his facial features were recognisable in the older man’s more ordinary face.
Where had I seen him before?
Vanja screamed again.
She was just impatient, no reason to get excited, I thought, as anger mounted in my chest.
I placed the cutlery on my plate and got up, looked at Linda, who would soon have finished as well.
‘I’ll take her for a little walk,’ I said, ‘just through the cloisters. Would you like a coffee afterwards or shall we have one elsewhere?’
‘We can have one somewhere else,’ she said. ‘Or stay here.’
I rolled my eyes and leaned forward to pick up Vanja.
‘Don’t you roll your eyes at me,’ Linda said.
‘But I asked you a simple question,’ I said. ‘A yes-or-no question. Do you want to, or don’t you? And you can’t even answer.’
Without waiting for her response, I put Vanja down on the floor, took her hands and started to walk, with her leading the way.
‘What do you want then?’ Linda asked behind me. I pretended to be too busy with Vanja to hear. She moved one leg in front of the other, more in enthusiasm than pursuit of a particular destination, until we reached the steps, where I carefully let go of her hands. For a moment she stood upright and swayed. Then she went down on her knees and crawled up the three steps. Set off at full speed for the front door like a little puppy. When it was opened, she sat back on her haunches and peered up at the newcomers with saucer eyes. They were two elderly women. The one at the back stopped and smiled at her. Vanja cast down her eyes.
‘She’s a bit shy, isn’t she?’ the woman said.
I smiled politely, lifted Vanja and carried her into the courtyard outside. She pointed to some pigeons pecking at crumbs under a table. Then she looked up and pointed at a seagull sweeping past in the wind.
‘Birds,’ I said. ‘And look over there, behind the windows. All the people.’
She glanced at me, then stared at the people. Her eyes were alive, as expressive as they were open to impressions. When I looked into them I always had a sense of who she was, this very determined little person.
‘Brr, it’s so cold,’ I said. ‘Let’s go in, shall we?’
From the steps I saw Cora had gone over to our table. Fortunately she hadn’t sat down. She was standing behind the chair with her hands in her pockets and a smile on her lips.
‘How big she is!’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘How big is Vanja?’
Usually Vanja was proud when she could answer the question by stretching her arms above her head. But now she just leaned her head against my shoulder.
‘We’re on our way home. Aren’t we?’ I said, looking at Linda. ‘It’ll take half an hour to get a coffee now.’
She nodded.
‘Yes, we have to go soon as well,’ Cora said. ‘But I’ve just arranged with Linda to pop round one day. So I’ll see you soon.’
‘That’s nice,’ I said. I sat Vanja on my lap and started to put on her romper suit. Smiled at Cora so as not to appear stand-offish.
‘What’s it like being a house husband?’ she asked.
‘Dreadful,’ I replied. ‘But I’m hanging in there.’
She smiled.
‘I mean it,’ I said.
‘I got the message,’ she said.
‘Karl Ove’s hanging in there,’ Linda said. ‘That’s his method in life.’
‘It’s an honest answer, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘Or would you rather I lied?’
‘No,’ Linda said. ‘I’m just sorry you dislike it so much.’
‘I don’t dislike it so much,’ I said.
‘Mum’s waiting over there,’ Cora said. ‘Nice to see you. And see you again soon.’
‘Nice to see you too,’ I said.
As she left I met Linda’s glare.
‘I didn’t say anything out of place, did I?’ I said, and put Vanja in the buggy, tightened the belt and kicked up the lever on the wheel.
‘No,’ Linda said with such vehemence that I knew she meant the opposite. Tight-lipped, she bent down and lifted the buggy when we came to the steps; tight-lipped, she walked beside me out of the courtyard and onto the road to the centre. It felt as if the wind was blowing straight into our bone marrow. Around us, everywhere was teeming with people. The bus stops on both sides were packed with shivering people clad in black, not unlike birds from a certain angle, the ones that hunch together and stand motionless on some cliff in the Antarctic, staring into the sky.
‘It was so lovely and romantic yesterday,’ she said at length as we passed the Biological Museum and caught fleeting glimpses of the gleaming black canal between the branches. ‘And then there’s nothing left of it today.’
‘I’m not the romantic type, as you know,’ I said.
‘No, what type are you exactly?’
She wasn’t looking at me as she said it.
‘Cut it out,’ I said. ‘Don’t start on that stuff again.’
I met Vanja’s eyes and smiled at her. She lived in her own world, which was connected to ours through emotions and perceptions, physical touch and the sound of voices. Alternating between worlds, as I was now, being cross with Linda one moment and being happy with Vanja the next, was strange; it felt as though I was leading two quite separate lives. But she had only one, and soon she would be growing up into the second, when innocence was a distant memory and she understood what was going on between Linda and me at moments like this.
We reached the bridge over the canal. Vanja’s head moved back and forth from one passer-by to the next. Whenever a dog came along or she saw a motorbike she pointed.
‘The thought that we might be having another child made me so happy,’ Linda said. ‘It did yesterday and it does today. I’ve been thinking about it almost non-stop. A shot of happiness in my stomach. But you don’t feel the same way. That makes me sad.’
‘You’re mistaken,’ I said. ‘I was happy too.’
‘But you aren’t now.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘But is that so strange? I’m not in such a great mood.’
‘Because you’re at home with Vanja?’
‘Among other things, yes.’
‘Will it be better if you can write?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then we’ll have to start Vanja at a nursery,’ she said.
‘Do you mean that?’ I asked. ‘She’s so small.’
It was the middle of the rush hour for pedestrians, so on the bridge, which was a bottleneck on the route towards Djurgården, we were obliged to walk slowly. Linda held the buggy with one hand. Even though I hated that, I said nothing, it would have been too petty, especially now, during our discussion.
‘Yes, she is much too small,’ Linda said. ‘But there’s a waiting list of three months. By which time she’ll be sixteen months old. She’ll be too small then as well, but…’