‘Majsan.’
She heard the voice but it was coming from far away. She was someplace other than where the voice originated. A faint shimmer of light penetrated at intervals through the mists of her vision, and the voice she heard echoed as if down a long tunnel.
‘Majsan, can you hear me?’
She managed to open her eyes. Vague contours of what was close by took shape, and her eyes reluctantly adjusted their focus and then lost it again.
‘It’s a little girl.’
And then she suddenly saw. The anaesthesia was slowly releasing its grip and she could see that he was standing there with a newborn baby in his arms. Göran was still there, he hadn’t abandoned her. And the baby in his arms must be their baby, the one her body had been unable to give birth to on its own. The child in his arms was wearing white clothes, she could see that too. It was perfect and clear and washed and pure and was wearing white clothes.
‘Darling, it’s a little girl.’
He placed the little creature on her arm and her eyes desperately tried to adjust their focus to the new distance. A little girl.
The door opened and a nurse rolled in a pay phone.
‘You probably want to call and tell everyone the happy news.’
And Göran called his parents. And Vanja. Maj-Britt only managed to say a few words, but Vanja shrieked with delight on the other end.
But they never called anyone else.
Things didn’t turn out quite the way Göran had said. Instead of taking a job he asked his parents for financial help so he could finish his second year at the school. And the flat that he had promised they would move to would also have to wait for a while. But he had talked with the Council and it shouldn’t be any problem when they were ready. Or so they said.
Maj-Britt continued to keep her thoughts to herself but at least now she had something to distract her. They decided to name the girl Susanna; they would have her christened in the church back home, by the same pastor who had married them. She wrote a letter to her parents and told them that they now had a grandchild and about the date of the christening, but she never received a reply.
There was something wrong with the girl, Maj-Britt could feel it. It wasn’t that she didn’t like her, but she felt it was necessary to maintain a certain distance. The baby needed so much, and it was important for her to learn from the start to control her needs. Raising a child was also about setting limits, and no responsible parent would let her child’s will subvert the authority of an adult. That would be doing them a disservice. She breast-fed every four hours as she had been advised to do, and let the child cry herself to sleep if she was hungry in between. At seven o’clock every evening she had to go to sleep; that was the proper time, as they had told her at the child care centre. It could take a few hours for the baby to fall asleep; eventually she couldn’t hear her shrieks any longer. But Göran had a hard time accepting this. The nights he came home before the baby went to sleep he would pace up and down, questioning more and more strongly the child-rearing methods that allowed a small girl to lie in bed alone and cry herself to sleep.
She was four months old when it was confirmed. Maj-Britt had known that something wasn’t right but she had refused to let her suspicions become fact. By means of various excuses she had succeeded in avoiding the latest check-ups at the child care centre, but finally they had called and threatened to pay a home visit if Maj-Britt didn’t bring the child in. Göran hadn’t been privy to her suspicions; she had borne them alone. Nor did he know that she was skipping the required check-ups. She didn’t want to go, didn’t want to sit there and get the news and pretend that she didn’t already know what was going on. Or the reason why it had turned out this way.
Self-abuse is what it’s called.
And it was as she had suspected. She received the news the same way she would have listened to road directions. She merely asked a few supplementary questions for clarification. In the evening she passed on the news to Göran in the same way.
‘She’s blind. They confirmed it at the check-up today. We have to go back in two weeks.’
From that day everything began to crumble. The last desperate remnants of their attempt to break away finally disappeared, and all that remained were shame, remorse and dread. The regret and the guilt ate through her body like acid, the body she hated more than anything on earth, and that never did her anything but harm. The same body on which the palpable proof of her sin was now dependent every four hours. An evil tree bears evil fruit. For the sake of sin each human being stands with real guilt before God and is threatened by His wrath and punishing justice. The overwhelming, dark desire for evil is propagated and is passed down from generation to generation, and this inherited sin is the cause of all other sins in thought, word and deed.
In her pride she had rebelled against God, and the punishment was more loathsome than she ever could have imagined. He had kept silent and ignored her, and He had turned His wrath on her offspring instead. He would let the next generation bear the punishment that she herself should have borne.
And then came the letter from her parents. They had heard it through the grapevine. They had not forgiven her, but the whole Congregation would offer prayers for her child who had been struck by God’s righteous retribution.
A few months passed. Göran grew more and more taciturn during the hours he was home. He didn’t even talk about the new flat anymore, the one they were supposed to move to in early summer. Two rooms and a kitchen on the ground floor, 68 square metres with a balcony. And a bathroom. Finally, they would get a bathroom so she could wash herself properly.
She had already started to pack because she needed something to do; it had become harder and harder to sit still. She had just opened the linen cupboard in the hall above the stairs and was reaching for a stack of sheets. They had got them from Göran’s parents, his initials were primly embroidered on them in blue. She saw that the girl was crawling across the threshold from the bedroom, that she bumped her head on the doorjamb and just sat there. There was no gate to protect her from the stairs. Maj-Britt walked past her and went over to the packing carton that was set up on the bed and placed the sheets inside. When she turned round she hit her shin on the bedstead. The pain was brief and explosive and only lasted a second, but it was as if the physical sensation swept away a barrier inside her. Everything turned white. The scream came first. She screamed until her throat hurt, but it didn’t help. The girl was scared by her wailing, and Maj-Britt saw out of the corner of her eye that she was sobbing and crawling farther out in the hall. Closer to the stairs. But her rage could not be quelled; it grew ever stronger, and she grabbed hold of the carton in front of her with both hands and hurled it with all her might at the wall.
‘I hate You! Hate You, do You hear that? You know that I was ready to sacrifice everything but it was never enough!’
She clenched her fists and shook them at the ceiling.
‘Do You hear me? Do You? Can’t You answer just once when someone speaks to You?’
All her pent-up fury exploded and gushed out like a tidal wave. She felt it throbbing in her temples and she tore the sheets off the bed and heaved them across the room. A picture on the wall was caught in their sweep and there was no gate on the stairs out in the hall, and now her blind daughter could no longer be seen, she had disappeared beyond the door frame. But something could no longer be stopped, something had once and for all shattered inside her, and now it had to get out or she would explode.
‘You think You can win, don’t You? That I’m going to pray and beg Your forgiveness now that it’s all too late, now that You’ve made her take the punishment I was supposed to have. Is that what You think, is it?’