The Unit Read online

  After lunch one day, during one of my more or less daily walks in the garden, I arrived at the citrus grove just as the petals were falling. I went in among the low trees, into the Impressionist pattern of white dots, and stood there thinking of Majken and Jock-Majken because she liked the Impressionists’ way of portraying the world, Jock because I knew he would have loved this white blizzard of petals. I turned my face upward and watched the little petals as they drifted down toward me slowly and with dignity, like perfumed snowflakes that would never melt on this windless day, landing in my hair, on my forehead, on one eyelid, on the other eyebrow, on the tip of my nose, on my upper lip. I blew the last one away, then looked down again and gave myself a shake. Then I saw that I was not alone in the grove. A person wearing round glasses was standing a little way off in his pale green staff shirt, watching me through the white-dotted air. Potter.

  “Hi there!” he called out, raising a hand in greeting when he realized I had seen him.

  He started walking over, and when he got to me he asked:

  “How are things?”

  “Good,” I replied. “And how are you?”

  “Fine…” Then he seemed to hesitate, looking down at the ground, then up again before taking a deep breath and saying:

  “It was terrible, what happened.”

  “With Erik and the others, you mean?”

  “Yes. Mistakes like that just can’t be allowed to happen, and it just doesn’t matter whether the drug in question is being tested on those who are dispensable or on rats or amoebae or on those who are needed. It’s a completely indefensible…”-he searched for the right word-“… waste.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “They could just as well have thrown their research funding in the sea.”

  “A waste of people, I mean,” said Potter. “Not money.”

  “People are money,” I replied. “Just as time is money.”

  He shook his head.

  “People are people,” he said seriously. “Life.”

  “Yes, yes,” I said. “Of course.”

  “I nearly resigned,” Potter went on, clearly needing to unburden himself. “It’s difficult, seeing the way you’re treated here.”

  “We’re treated very well,” I said.

  “Do you think so?” He was genuinely surprised, and perhaps a little disappointed.

  “Yes,” I replied. “If you compare it with the way we’re treated out in the community. In here I can be myself, on every level, completely openly, without being rejected or mocked, and without the risk of not being taken seriously. I am not regarded as odd or as some kind of alien or some troublesome fifth wheel that people don’t know what to do with. Here I’m like everybody else. I fit in. I count. And I can afford to go to the doctor and the dentist and even to the hairdresser and the podiatrist, and I can eat out and go to the movies and the theater. I have a dignified life here. I am respected.”

  “Are you?”

  “Yes. In comparison, I mean.”

  Potter looked at me.

  “Okay,” he said. “I understand. I think.”

  I changed the topic of conversation.

  “So why didn’t you resign, then?”

  “Well… I don’t think I can afford to be out of work right now. My partner and I are expecting. Twins. We need a bigger place to live.”

  “Right,” I said. “I understand. I think.”

  He laughed. I smiled. Then we parted company. I carried on through the citrus grove. It was like walking through a landscape veiled in fresh snow, and suddenly I felt an intense longing for winter and wind, biting cold and steaming breath, mittens, a scarf and hat, and a little white dog with brown and black patches racing through drifts of powdery snow, tail wagging like mad, snuffling with his nose at the porous covering so that the white snow flew up ahead of him like little whirlwinds.

  And I got an idea.

  I had three things on my agenda for the rest of the afternoon: give blood at the central blood bank at the hospital, go down to the labs for a chromium injection-I was participating in an experiment where high doses of chromium were being tested as a means of raising the blood sugar-and go for a massage. Later, in the evening, Johannes and I were going to the theater to see a new play everyone was talking about.

  While I was giving blood, and during the full body massage that followed, I had plenty of time to work out carefully my idea for a plan, and as soon as I got home I set the wheels in motion:

  I opened my door and went into the living room, yawning and stretching lazily-a massage always made me sleepy-then ambled into the kitchenette and poured myself a large glass of water. Turned back to the living room with the glass in my hand, yawned again, then wandered across to the sofa, where I sank into a half-lying position and tried to drink my water. Then I put the glass on the table next to the remote, which I picked up and fiddled with absentmindedly. Turned onto my side with a sigh, pointed the remote at the TV and selected a channel at random. Watching television was something I had rarely done since I became dispensable, so I tried to make it look as if it were a spur of the moment impulse. The image of a hilly, lush landscape burst onto the screen: a valley with meadows and terraced vineyards scrambling up the slopes, the blue tones of distant mountain ridges in the background; then I lay there watching, apparently relaxed, a soap opera that was set in some French wine region.

  I waited until a commercial break, and until the second advertising slot, which was for diapers; then I pretended that I’d had an idea, an idea for my writing, sat up quickly and put my feet on the floor, grabbed the notepad and pen that were always on the coffee table, placed the pad on my knee, bent over and scribbled feverishly. But my handwriting was much smaller than usual, and I had worked out what I wanted to say in advance, while I was giving blood:

  I have a Danish-Swedish farm dog called Jock. He is white with brown and black patches; his left ear is white, the other black, and on his back he has a bigger brown patch that looks like a saddle that has slipped to one side slightly. He lives with Lisa and Sten Jansson, Verkholma Farm, just outside Elnarp, the second farm on the right just after the speed limit sign if you’re driving toward Kasstorp. Please, if you possibly can, find out how he’s getting by, and let me know!

  When I had finished I read through the four sentences, said, “No, no!,” ripped the page from the pad, screwed it up and threw it on the coffee table, then slumped down on my side on the sofa again and finished watching the soap.

  A while later, after a quick shower and a change of clothes, I was tidying the room while I waited for Johannes, who was being a gentleman and picking me up for our visit to the theater. I picked up the glass and the crumpled piece of paper, and as I walked toward the kitchenette with the glass in my left hand, I pretended to straighten my pants with my right hand, and took the opportunity to slip the piece of paper into my pocket. I put the glass down on the counter, then just to make things look right I opened the cabinet under the sink and pretended to throw something in the trash.

  Then all I could do was wait. For Johannes, first of all, and then for the moment when I might bump into Potter again. I sank back down on the sofa, and half lay there wondering what might have come first: the name or the glasses. Was Potter a nickname he had acquired since he got those glasses with their round black frames, or did he go for glasses like that because he was called Potter? But who calls their child Potter-as a first name? If he’d been a girl, what would they have called her? Longstocking?

  Johannes arrived. Kissed me on the mouth. His lips were cool, as if he had just come from the real outside world, from an outside world where the temperature was below freezing, or almost. I closed my eyes and pretended that was the case.

  “You look happy,” he said.

  “Yes, you taste of winter. That’s why. You taste as if you’ve just come in from a storm.”

  He laughed. “It almost feels that way. I feel as if I’ve been running against the wind all day. I’m shattered.”

&nbs
p; Johannes had started on a new experiment involving drugs that lowered the blood pressure; perhaps his blood pressure was a bit too low. I frowned in concern:

  “They are carrying out regular checks on you? Pulse, blood pressure, and so on?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Don’t worry. Shall we go?”

  The play was long and not particularly entertaining, but its premise was interesting: it was about a couple who had one miscarriage after another, and how their love grew stronger and stronger through this constant blossoming of hope that was dashed every time, how grief and yearning and their common goal bound them closer and closer together into a single unit. But when, roughly halfway through the play, they managed to carry and give birth to this longed-for child, they began, slowly but surely, to drift apart, only to end up as two strangers who didn’t speak the same language-quite literally; they spoke different languages and were unable to understand each other-and all communication was carried out through the child, who had to act as an interpreter between the parents. All very strange.

  Johannes slept through most of the second act, which meant he was wide awake when it finished.

  “A beer would be just fantastic right now!” he said, stretching as we came out into the square after he’d just woken up.

  “A proper snowstorm and a good strong beer!” I said, because that was exactly what I felt like right then.

  “You seem really into all this winter stuff. How come?”

  “Oh, the petals were falling in the citrus grove today.”

  Then we went back to my place. When I got undressed I was careful to fold up my pants so that the piece of paper wouldn’t fall out of the right-hand pocket.

  “My, you’ve gotten very tidy all of a sudden,” said Johannes from the bed; he was already undressed and under the covers with one arm behind his head.

  “I just don’t want them to get creased.”

  “They already are.”

  “Well, even more creased then.”

  “Since when did you start worrying about that kind of thing?”

  I wanted to change the subject.

  “Since I met you,” I said, and quickly took off the rest of my clothes-folding them neatly if quickly and draping them over the chair on top of my pants-then lifted the duvet at the foot of the bed to make a gap and crept up the bed alongside one of Johannes’s legs, with its soft, curly hairs, its slightly rough skin that smelled of man, that smelled of precisely this man who smelled of sunshine and something that reminded me of cumin, coriander and cinnamon, the calf muscles pressing down against the mattress, the lower part of the kneecap particularly coarse and slightly knobbly and rough like a cat’s tongue, and the thigh-the huge thigh muscle at the front, tensing and swelling as my hands found their way further up.

  That night I dreamed of Jock and the beach and the stick I picked up and threw over and over again, and which he brought back to me over and over again. But the dream was different this time. Sometimes it wasn’t Jock who came back to me with the stick in his mouth, but Johannes running toward me with his arms outstretched and his hair standing on end in the wind. And sometimes it wasn’t me throwing the stick but Johannes, and when Jock brought it back we both praised him. And then suddenly we were in the car outside the house, my old car and my old house. We got out of the car and went into the house and all three of us lived there. Johannes was hanging pictures on the walls, framed photographs. I asked him:

  “What are those photographs?”

  “Can’t you see?” replied Johannes. “Those are our children, of course.”

  “Our children?” I said, and then I woke up and the dawn light was in the room.

  I didn’t tell Johannes about the dream, not then. It frightened me. It was beautiful and we were very happy in it. And yet-or perhaps that was exactly why-it felt threatening in some way. During the rest of the day I tried to forget the dream, shake it off, the way you try to shake off nightmares. But I couldn’t do it, it had fixed itself in my consciousness and it sat there all day, coloring everything I did and everything that happened and everything that was said. Everything was colored by the feeling that I had a man and children and a house and a car and a dog.

  20

  Another day at lunchtime when I was out walking, I caught sight of young Potter in the winter garden again. This time he was sitting on a bench on a patio reading a book. It had been several weeks, or maybe a month or so, since the day when we had chatted in the citrus grove, and of course I had worn several different pairs of pants during that time. Each time I had carefully smuggled the little piece of paper from the right-hand pocket in one pair to the same place in the other, so that I always knew where it was, and when I saw Potter in there among the palms, half hidden by the little fountain, I pushed my hands into my pockets, wandered onto the patio, stopped and said hi.

  He looked up absentmindedly from the book.

  “Well hi there,” he said when he recognized me. “How are things?”

  “Absolutely fine,” I said. “How about you?”

  “Yes. Good.” He adjusted his glasses with his index finger, his gaze flickering up and down slightly; he clearly wanted to get back to his book, but he was polite and made an effort to give me a friendly smile. I didn’t want to give the impression that I was the kind of person who would insensitively impose on people who wanted to be left in peace, so I made as if to continue my walk, but then stopped and asked, as if in passing:

  “And how are you getting on with finding a new place to live?”

  It worked; he brightened up and closed the book with one finger keeping his place as he decided to take a break.

  “Good,” he said, “we actually went to look at a really nice apartment yesterday. Four rooms with a little garden. It’s really close to the neighbors, but the garden is pretty mature and you can’t see inside. And it’s on two floors with a view over a park from the top floor. A big playground just outside, a day nursery and school close by, and lots of families with children in the community.”

  I shuddered involuntarily at the very idea of living in a place like that, hemmed in between families noisily spreading themselves out, practically spilling over like rising bread dough, around and on top of people who were on their own and who neither wanted to make themselves heard nor were able to do so, who didn’t want to spread themselves like that, and thus became invisible and annihilated-crushed to nothingness. But Potter was feeling chatty now and in full swing, so I steeled myself and tried not to let it bother me as he told me in detail about the lovely, child-friendly residential area, and I pulled my right hand out of my pocket with the piece of paper pressed between my palm and my little finger, ring finger, and middle finger. Potter carried on explaining: about the apartment, its practical design, how they were going to decorate the children’s room, about an ultrasound scan of the twins in his partner’s stomach.

  “Would you like to see it?” he said. “I’ve got it here.” Without waiting for a reply he pulled a wallet out of his back pocket.

  Normally I would have hesitated and perhaps even refused, made some excuse and said that I was in a terrible rush-I had already had my fill of blurred ultrasound images of the developing babies of those who were needed-but of course I realized I couldn’t let this opportunity slip through my fingers just because of that.

  So I sat down on the bench next to Potter, who held out the unclear little picture to me. I feigned interest and took it between the thumb and index finger of my right hand, with the other fingers still holding the piece of paper. He pointed at two paler kidney-shaped areas among all the lines and shadows on the picture, and I nodded and said something about how fascinating it was and asked how old they were now, the twin fetuses, and whether he was looking forward to being a parent, and he replied and explained and chatted, and somewhere in the middle of all this pointing and asking and explaining, while we were still sitting there leaning over the little photograph, I managed to pass the little crumpled piece of paper from my ha
nd into his. When I had done it I glanced quickly up at his face. He didn’t look surprised, but just nodded, briefly, almost imperceptibly and with a tiny wink-I got the impression that he realized my interested questions had been nothing more than a kind of camouflage-and then, when we had finished looking at the picture, he put it into his wallet along with the crumpled piece of paper, and put the wallet back in his pocket.