Vanja sat in silence for a moment.
‘Do you remember what you did sixteen years ago?’
Maj-Britt thought about it. 1989. She had probably been sitting in her easy chair. Or maybe on the sofa, because she was still able to do that back then.
‘Since then I’ve been locked up in here. But actually I only exchanged one prison for another, and I can assure you that at first this was sheer paradise in comparison. Except for all the thoughts that flowed in when it was no longer just a matter of getting through the day without making him angry. Or whatever it was that he felt.’
Vanja looked down at her hands resting on the table.
‘A prison sentence is actually the same thing as a fine, it’s just that you pay with time instead. And the big difference is that you can always get more money.’
Maj-Britt chose to remain silent.
‘It’s impossible to survive in here if you don’t learn to look at time differently than you did before. You have to try and convince yourself that it really doesn’t exist. If you’re locked up here you have to transport yourself to another place to survive.’
She tapped her index finger against her silvery head.
‘In here. At eight o’clock every evening they lock the door and after that you’re alone with your thoughts. And I promise you, some of them you would do anything to avoid. The first year it made me terrified, I thought I’d go crazy. But later, when I couldn’t fight against it any longer and just surrendered…’
She left the sentence unfinished and Maj-Britt waited impatiently for the rest. Vanja sat silently, staring out into space, and seemed to have finished talking. But Maj-Britt wanted to hear more.
‘What happened then?’
Vanja looked at her as if she had forgotten she was there but was glad to see her.
‘Then you realise that you can hear quite a bit if you only dare to listen.’
Maj-Britt swallowed. She wanted to talk about something else now.
‘What are you going to do when you get out?’
Vanja shrugged. Then she turned her head and sat looking at the picture she had examined earlier. The forest-covered landscape.
‘You know, there’s only one thing I think I’ve longed for out there. Know what it is?’
Maj-Britt shook her head.
‘To ride a bike, on a gravel path, through the woods. Preferably in a strong headwind.’
She looked at Maj-Britt again. Smiled, almost with embarrassment. As if her longing would seem ridiculous.
‘It might be hard for those of you on the outside to understand how someone can long so much for something like that. Because you can do it every day if you want.’
Maj-Britt looked down at the tabletop. She felt herself blushing and didn’t want Vanja to see it. Her own truth was a reproach in this context. Sixteen years Vanja had paid. Maj-Britt herself had thrown away thirty-two of her own free will. She hadn’t been near a gravel path. Or a forest. And if the wind was blowing a little she would close the balcony door. She had voluntarily entered her prison and thrown away the key, and, as if that wasn’t enough, she had let her body become the final shackle.
‘No government can grant me a pardon.’
Maj-Britt was hauled out of her thoughts by the sorrow she heard in Vanja’s voice.
‘What do you mean?’
But Vanja didn’t answer. Just sat there looking at the picture. Maj-Britt suddenly felt that she wanted to offer solace, reassurance, for once be the person who was there for Vanja instead of the other way round. She searched urgently for the right words.
‘But what happened wasn’t your fault.’
Vanja gave a deep sigh and ran her fingers through her hair.
‘If you knew how tempting it’s been for all these years to hide behind the argument that none of what happened was my fault. To blame everything on Örjan and what he did.’
Maj-Britt grew more excited.
‘But it was his fault!’
‘What he did was horrid, unforgivable. But he wasn’t the one who…’
Vanja broke off and closed her eyes.
‘Imagine, after all these years I still can’t say it. Not without my whole body hurting.’
‘But he was the one who drove you to it, he was the one who made you do it. He made you believe that there was no other way out. You wrote to me yourself and explained it all in the letter.’
‘But we’re talking about years. All those years when I stayed and let it happen. It began long before we had children. I even wrote an article about it once, saying that you should leave after the first time you’re struck.’
She sat in silence for a moment.
‘I don’t know whether anyone can understand how ashamed I was that I let it happen.’
Vanja passed her hand across her face. Maj-Britt wanted to say something but couldn’t find the words.
‘Do you know what my biggest mistake was?’
Maj-Britt slowly shook her head.
‘That instead of finally leaving I chose to see myself as a victim. That was when I let him win, it was like going over to his side and telling him he was right to behave the way he did, because all a victim does is give in, she can’t do anything about her situation. I simply couldn’t break the pattern that I had been used to from the beginning in my own family.’
Maj-Britt thought about Vanja’s home. She had experienced it as a refuge from God’s stern countenance, a place where there was always a blessed commotion. Everyone knew that Vanja’s father got drunk sometimes, but most often he was happy and never scared her. It was mostly his stupid jokes that could be so tedious. You never saw much of Vanja’s mother. She was usually behind the closed bedroom door, and they used to tiptoe past it so they wouldn’t bother her.
‘Pappa never hit me but he hit Mamma, and that was almost the same thing.’
Vanja looked at the picture again, and there was another pause before she went on.
‘We never knew who would be coming home when the front door opened. Whether it was Pappa or that other man who looked just like him but who was a stranger to us. All he had to do was open his mouth and say a single word and we could tell.’
Maj-Britt hadn’t known. Vanja had never hinted with a single word what went on at her house.
‘You mustn’t forget that Örjan grew up the same way I did, with a father who lashed out and a mother who took it. So now I always ask myself where everything actually has its origin. It’s a bit easier then, a bit easier to understand why people do things that can never be forgiven.’
It was quiet in the room. The sun had reached the windows and was filtering in through the narrow gaps between the slats in the blinds. Maj-Britt looked at the striped pattern on the opposite wall. Then she took a deep breath so she would dare to ask the question that she felt she had to ask.
‘Are you afraid to die?’
‘No.’
Vanja hadn’t even hesitated.
‘Are you?’
Maj-Britt lowered her eyes and looked at her hands in her lap. Then she slowly nodded.
‘This is how I usually look at it. Why should it be any scarier to die than to be unborn? Because actually it’s the same thing, only our bodies don’t exist here on earth. Dying is nothing but returning to what we were before.’
Maj-Britt could feel the tears coming. She wanted so much to find consolation in Vanja’s words, but she couldn’t. She somehow had to reciprocate, that was her only chance. And all at once she remembered what she had come here to do. So that she wouldn’t let any hesitation overpower her, she started telling the story. She didn’t gloss over anything and she didn’t leave anything out. She put the entire sad truth into words. How it had been. What she had done.
Vanja sat quietly listening. She let Maj-Britt spill out her whole confession without interrupting. There was only one thing Maj-Britt didn’t confess, and that was the plan she intended to carry out. The debt she had to pay off.
In order to dare.
Vanja sat lost in thought when Maj-Britt finished. The sun had retreated and the stripes from the blinds on the wall had faded away. Maj-Britt could feel her heart pounding. With each minute that passed, Vanja’s silence became more ominous. Maj-Britt was so afraid of what she would say, how she would react. Whether Vanja would condemn her too and not accept her excuses. It wasn’t merely the lies. Now that Maj-Britt understood Vanja’s loss, the life she herself had chosen seemed a sheer insult. To her consternation she realised that she carried even more guilt.