“It was fun,” he typed. Then he deleted that and tried to think of a clever word for inauthentic, for fake, one he wouldn’t have to explain to her in any great detail, but he couldn’t focus and simply wrote, “Had a good time. See you tomorrow.”
By four, the storm had passed. He went out on the balcony, the icy snow crunching under his feet. Below on the street, a siren, car horns, the horse-breath exhale of bus hydraulics. The sun crept upward and Lennart watched the city change colors.
The Apartment
Louise knew someone had moved in by the new name on the call box. She’d seen lights and movement in the apartment, which was across the courtyard from her and Martin, for the past few days. The new name confirmed it. Someone had finally bought the place. The name had been typed onto a small green piece of paper and taped to the call box beside the apartment’s number. She’d known a man with the name Jahani at school. Arman had been a doctoral student in French the year she’d started at Stockholm University. He’d taught the conversation tutorial she took fall term. She looked at the green paper again. All that was so long ago. He was the second man she’d ever slept with. Martin still didn’t know about it. She checked her watch. She was on her way out to meet her son Jonas for lunch. The metro she wanted to take was due in ten minutes. Arman had come from Iran to study, or maybe he’d come to escape the revolution. She couldn’t recall the details now. The years fell into one another. A bus rushed past on the street and the blast of warm air stung her neck.
Jonas wanted to try a sushi restaurant he’d heard about. They took a table on the patio. It was September but very warm out. She let him order. Arman had died in the early ‘90s. He was a professor of French at the university by then and his death had been noted briefly in the culture section of DN. One of his books about French cognates had caused a minor controversy. She remembered it well. His obituary mentioned two children, a daughter and a son. Maybe one of them had moved into her building.
“News from home,” she said after the waitress had brought their drinks, water for Jonas, white wine for Louise. Jonas hadn’t lived with Louise and Martin for more than a decade, but she still thought of the apartment as his home. “The apartment across the courtyard finally sold.”
“The neighbor who died?” he said. “Dad mentioned it.” Martin served on the co-op board and would have known about the sale. He rarely shared such information with Louise.
“That’s right,” she said. “Barbro Ekman. Her children had been trying to sell the place for months. You can’t imagine the smell when the body was first discovered.” The apartment, which was one floor lower than her and Martin’s, had been empty since Barbro Ekman died before Christmas the previous year. Her body was found only after Martin, who’d been up in the attic storage area on that side of the building to retrieve a box of decorations, smelled the decomposition. The air was sour and rotten, even two floors up. He’d been upset, Louise remembered, that no one in the building had noticed for so long, that no one who lived closer to Barbro Ekman had been alarmed by the overwhelming stench of her rotting body. “They’re all so selfish,” he’d said. But Louise suspected he was really only upset that he’d been the one to make the discovery.
Jonas took a drink of his water. “Gruesome,” he said.
It had been snowing the day the cleaning company came. She watched from her kitchen as they worked. They scrubbed walls and floors, removed furniture. They even took some of the fixtures and appliances from the kitchen. The idea that humans are so unclean on the inside preoccupied Louise for weeks. “Well,” she told her son, “I can’t imagine what a relief it must be to her family.”
“I don’t think I ever met that woman,” said Jonas. “Not that I remember.”
“She was very old,” Louise said. She couldn’t tell if he was telling the truth or only saying this to annoy her.
From the bedroom on the courtyard side of their apartment, there was a clear view of Barbro Ekman’s living room. When Jonas was young, that bedroom had been his. Now Martin used it as an office. She rarely went in the room anymore. Martin was private about so much. “Do you remember the blue light from her window?” she asked Jonas. “How it used to reflect on the flower box?”
“I think so,” he said.
“It used to scare you.”
He tore open the paper wrapping of the chopsticks, pulled them apart, and rubbed them together to smooth the edges.
“It was so easy to explain,” she said. “It’s just her television, I always told you. But you never believed me.”
The waitress arrived with two rectangular plates and set them down in the center of the table. Colorful pieces of fish were arranged on each plate. She’d tried to listen to what Jonas had ordered and follow along in her own menu, and she’d easily been able to do so, but now that the food had arrived she couldn’t tell one piece of fish from another.
Jonas pointed with his chopsticks. “Salmon,” he said. “And yellowtail. Whitefish. Eel on this plate here.”
She’d always disliked eel. Eel could travel great distances out of the water and she found this disturbing.
“Who bought the apartment?” Jonas asked.
“I only know a name,” Louise said. Arman had been a good teacher. She could still recite the conjugation of several French verbs, hear his voice reading from lists he’d put on the chalkboard. Present indicative, present conditional, present subjunctive. She remembered the strangest things. There couldn’t be that many Jahanis in Stockholm. Jonas was thirty-four. Would she feel jealous or relieved if the person in the apartment was close to that age?
She watched her son eat.
He talked about a problem at his office. An e-mail had been accidentally sent to the wrong person and Jonas found this uncomfortably funny. He’d only been in his current position for a year and everything he said about his job, positive or negative, surged with fresh excitement.
When they finished, Jonas insisted on paying the check. As he was figuring out the tip, she typed an e-mail to herself on her phone with a reminder to deposit money in his account.
She walked him back to work. They said good-bye to each other outside the glass-walled entryway of the building’s lobby. Jonas vanished into the crowd of office workers. It was remarkable how similar to her son they all looked. It had been the same when he was in school. They were all identical. Hundreds of them crowded the spaces of his childhood. His soccer matches, ski lessons, piano. She’d always been at ease with being the mother of a child who was like everyone else. It had been a relief to exist so close to the middle. She’d believed this all her life. There were so many fewer risks. She watched the crowd fill the lobby. These could all be my children, she thought.
She decided to walk home. Systembolaget had a location near Jonas’s office and she wanted to buy a bottle of wine. It embarrassed her to buy wine more than twice a week from the same Systembolaget and she’d been to the location closer to her apartment only the day before. Lately, she’d been interested in South African wines. She picked two bottles of a cabernet that, according to a sign fastened to the shelf in the store, had ranked very highly in a blind taste test. She paid for the wine, and, as she left the store, she looked up and down the street to see if there was anyone who might recognize her. Then she stuffed the bottles into her purse, concealing what wouldn’t fit all the way in with her scarf, and walked the rest of the way home.