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A Fortune Foretold

A Girl's Memoirs

Other Press LLC

landing and taking off

Being alone with an as yet unwritten book is like lingering within the first sleep of mankind.

* * *

Letters from family, letters from friends. I read them in the 1990s after the death of my father, and made a decent job of sorting them out. Life, the result of which is death, made no demands. And yet they complained a little. Whimpered. All those who are dead.

Not that they complain in the letters, but because their lives are over, and yet ... unfinished. Once they were pressed close together, just as when the topmost branches of tall trees brush against one another, unseen by those down below, just as they do here by the old house in the archipelago.

I listen as I take the towels off the line in the mornings. The sound is melancholy. Helpless, somehow. It is August 10, and my father would have been one hundred years old today if he had lived. I sit in the room that was my Aunt Ricki's when she was a girl; it is very small, with a view over the steep drop down to the Sound. The trees have grown sky-high since I was a child. Down by the quayside there is a twisted pine tree.

It is old and in the process of dying, yet it still extends a gnarled arm out across the surface of the water. A child could lie there and read, like a character in an English children's book with lots of mysteries.

Quiet. Not even a sailboat to be seen.

I would like to understand what happened. And in what order. From memory. All the unanswered questions. Who were we? What is love? Surely a little love must linger, if it once existed?

Otherwise there is only death and indifference.

Memory is a liar, of course. I swim out into the warm August water. The girl who once was me, a child, can be seen far away in the distance, as if through a pair of binoculars turned the wrong way round. The others are there too. Far away in the distance. Like photographs that have turned to stone. I remember a photograph of Ricki when she was sixteen. A slender, sinewy body.

She is sitting on a garden chair in her swimsuit, a towel wrapped around her head. She is gazing out across the water; the pine tree is still full of life and vigor. She seems to be thinking hard about something. She looks that way in a lot of photographs.

In most of them I have not yet been born. But when I was twenty I went to visit Ricki in the Southern District Hospital; from the bus stop I thought it looked like a palace. That was the last time I saw her. Before the visit I had arranged to stay the night in her apartment on Drottninghusgränd.

It was stuffy and oppressive in the summer heat. I remember opening the window and closing the curtains.

Dropping to my knees in front of the bookcase.

Bergson. Freud. Nietzsche. Schopenhauer. Spinoza. Ricki's books. No one else in the family read that kind of thing. I made up the bed where I was to sleep, Ricki's little boy's narrow bed, with his Donald Duck comics in neat piles beside it. I couldn't sleep. I tried to masturbate, as I recall.

My approach was enterprising. Systematic. I wasn't a virgin, but had I ever had an orgasm, the way the sensation is described in Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, for example, when the earth moves?

There were two equally strong conflicting urges. To hold back, to give in. To let go, to maintain control. It became unbearable, and I gave up. My main objection to masturbation was the loneliness; it was such a powerful reminder that I was alone. Life consisted of disparate elements that were supposed to fit together, be placed in order, be reconciled.

I drank a glass of water in the bathroom.

I knew nothing about the person whose eyes I met in the mirror. I wasn't even sure whether I liked her. Probably not. I understood nothing. I hadn't a clue. Most of all I wanted just three things: to be free, to write, to have an orgasm. And later, much later, perhaps to have a child.

The idea of a child was so far in the future that it seemed like an illusion. I was worried about my visit to the hospital. I am trying to remember Ricki, but I am the one who takes center stage. Or rather she does — the girl.

* * *

My Aunt Ricki was an architect. For a long time she was employed by HSB, the Tenants' Savings and Building Society. My first memory of her — when was that? It was during the war when my father's younger sister came to visit us in Lund. I remember she spoke with a Stockholm accent.

I thought she sounded so funny; I made her repeat the same sentence over and over again, and it made me laugh every single time. In one of the letters — but I'll come to that later — it says that my father took off his wedding ring in 1948, and from then on he merely tried to put up with his marriage. Is that true?

Probably. But it was already too late. They had three children. It is only four years from my first memory of Ricki to 1948.

We came back from America in the late fall. We celebrated Christmas at my paternal grandparents' home. I can see the professorial apartment that went with my grandfather's job, but it is diffuse, in semidarkness. On the dining table was a silver bell that was rung to summon the maid (she was long gone, but the bell was still there).

Strained conversation. No one taking any notice of the children.

Christmas presents are handed out in the room known as the library. Cigar smoke and the cloying smell of soap drifting in from a long corridor. Book-covered walls, leather furniture. Everything appears as in a black-and-white photograph. Only Ricki is in color; that is because of the amazing present she gave me.

A shiny box emerges from the wrapping paper. A magician in a black cape, gloves, and a top hat can be seen on the red lid. Inside the box are mysterious objects: glass containers, wands and cubes, decks of cards, dice and strings, a silk scarf that can be made to vanish or grow longer. It is all so dazzlingly magical that she cannot breathe.

She practices her sleight of hand in the kitchen at home in Årsta. Everything in the new apartment is unfamiliar. The harsh light falls steeply from outside. But as time goes by she is able to turn a small piece of string into a necklace with dangling beads. Command the dice to land with the sixes uppermost. Make invisible writing suddenly appear on a blank sheet of paper.

It is so exciting, it gives her butterflies in her tummy. It gives her power.

And from then on Ricki, who chose this present especially for her and who knows something about the secrets of transformation, is surrounded by a magic all of her own.

The suburb is newly built. Her maternal grandparents managed to secure the apartment for the family while they were in America, otherwise they would have had nowhere to live when they came home. From the balcony on the seventh floor you look down on a bare rockface and a chilly pine tree. The development is still a building site; it is quite desolate, with long distances between construction projects. She is eight years old.

Curled up on the kitchen sofa, she practices diligently to make the hidden script appear, with its magic message. Her mother wants to play the piano in peace. She is given the task of taking her younger sisters down in the elevator. It descends with ineffable slowness.

Outside they are surrounded — herself, Ninne, and Ia — by hostile children. Cold, staring eyes. No one says a word. A little boy with white-blond hair prowls around them and breaks the silence. They stink of cat piss. The children laugh and disperse. In a trice it is as if they have been swallowed up. The playground is empty. Sunlight filtering through the trees, the blind facades of the houses. They don't stay long at the swings. What has just happened makes them feel uncomfortable.

More than that: they are frightened. She and Ninne, who is six years old, have started school in Årsta. It's a very long walk. They stick close together, followed by grinning little boys who fling insults at them. They are wearing the wrong clothes: American coats and headscarves.

It is snowing. It snows all the time, the icy wind whipping the wet flakes into their faces.

The schoolyard is teeming with unknown children. Why didn't she keep quiet about America? She is regarded as cocky and stuck-up because she has lived there. Her red plastic schoolbag doesn't help; it too smells of arrogance. And the way she speaks; her accent is a mixture of Skåne and America. She begs her mother for an angora hat, just like the ones most of the other girls wear: knitted in fluffy yarn, covering metal ear flaps. Blue or pink, and highly desirable.

Her mother can't see the problem.

She and Ninne are both kitted out in a beret, a ridiculous piece of headgear that her mother just happens to like. Gustav Vasa, the children shriek in the schoolyard, referring to the picture of the king on crisp bread packets. She would do anything to avoid going to school, but there is no escape. The magician is kind to her; he provides her with transport that picks her up at the kitchen window and deposits her behind her desk in the classroom.

She is whisked back home in the same way, which means she doesn't have to speak to anyone, thank goodness. But the journeys to and from school make her head spin. She travels over cliffs and lakes, with sudden detours over forests and streams. Is she arrogant? No. She is locked in fear.

It is the spring term of third grade, and it is the fourth time she has encountered a new crowd of classmates. She found out a long time ago what it is like to stand there exposed before the hostile eyes of strangers. The children in Årsta are the worst so far.

She spends her time in the schoolyard all alone. She clenches her fists deep in her pockets. She is very frightened. The memory is strong.

* * *

In the spring she turns nine, and Ricki, who gave her the amazing magic box, comes to Årsta one evening to babysit. At bedtime Ricki puts on a pair of white silk pajamas. Silk! They are allowed to feel the fabric: it is as soft as a caress. She smells delicious, of perfume or expensive soap. No lipstick, no red fingernails.

Her face is a little heavy, almost masculine. She speaks slowly, drawling in her Stockholm accent through her big nose. Never anything unconsidered, teasing, knowing. Other adults chatter about things that are irrelevant; not Ricki.

She is surrounded by an infectious aura of calm.

She has brought with her a set of architectural drawings from her job, and when the two younger girls have fallen asleep in the nursery, she spreads them out on the kitchen table. Houses for tiny little people. Have you drawn all these? the girl asks. Ricki corrects her: she has drawn only the toilets. A pang of disappointment — toilets! — but she furnishes the sketches in her imagination, allocates herself a room of her own.

Ricki thinks it's okay not to go to sleep right away. It's okay to read for as long as you like. That's what Ricki is going to do; she settles down with her book on Mom's couch. Everything is quiet. There isn't a sound from the living room. After a while she notices that Ricki has turned off the light, so she too switches off the light above the kitchen sofa, which is her bed.

In the morning she finds Ricki at the kitchen table in those wonderful silk pajamas. In the cold light of day, drawing toilets seems pretty unimpressive.

Have you got a boyfriend, Ricki?

Her aunt is drinking coffee and turning the pages of the newspaper, Dagens Nyheter. She shakes her head without looking up. The girl is embarrassed. How could she ask such a question when she is no more than an insecure nine-year-old? Who doesn't even have any friends. Who spends her time in the schoolyard all alone. Kerstin, who lives on the first floor of the apartment block, is one of her classmates.

She doesn't know Kerstin. Tanja on the fifth floor is in the same class as Ninne; her parents are immigrants. Tanja's father forbids them from eating ham, and her mother isn't allowed to smoke. Before he gets home she stands by the kitchen window, wafting the smoke away with a tea towel. If Tanja's father catches her, he beats her with a leather strap, the one he normally uses to sharpen his cutthroat razor.

Sometimes he beats Tanja too. Tanja's mother told Mom in the laundry room. She doesn't know them. She doesn't know anyone. And she keeps on asking Ricki about things that are none of her business.

Surely there must be someone who wants to go out with you?

Ricki measures half a teaspoon of sugar and sprinkles it in her coffee cup. No more than half a teaspoon. She is careful about what she puts into her body. Not too much sugar or salt (which allegedly binds water and expands the cells, making you fat. That's what she said last night).

No, Ricki says, rustling the newspaper.

She could have silenced her niece with a reprimand, but Ricki doesn't do that. She treats her as an equal, which fills her with astonished gratitude, a feeling she cannot put into words. She manages to say that she expects Ricki will soon find a boyfriend. She can't wait much longer. She is thirty, which is really old. Doesn't she want children?

Ricki glances at her without saying a word, while the girl ends her tirade with a reproachful, supercilious exclamation mark.

I'll soon be giving up on you, Ricki!

Her aunt reaches across the table and cuts a couple of pieces of bread. She unscrews the lid of the marmalade jar, which was so tight that no one has been able to open it until now. She handles the cheese wire so adeptly that the white slices are thin and even. She goes for a shower and emerges from the bathroom fully dressed, with the silk pajamas neatly folded over her arm.

The girl is ashamed of herself afterward. She thinks she has upset Ricki. She thinks she has been over familiar and hurtful, just so that she could show off and make herself feel important.

She is ashamed. For many years. The nine-year-old. Insecure, but with a big mouth. I think I know why she was teased at school in Årsta. Not because she was arrogant, but because she always tried to behave like an adult, which was intolerable.

I didn't know that Ricki had been to see a fortune-teller with her friend Lisa; they were hoping to change their lives. But I was intuitive, like many children. Shame scurries in wherever it can find a foothold.

* * *

Ricki and her friend Lisa are invited to dinner in Årsta. Lisa's husband, who calls himself an inventor, is also there. After they have eaten in the kitchen, both children and adults move to the living room to play A Cargo Ship Comes Sailing In.

A cargo ship comes sailing in, laden with apricots from Andalucía.

With buns from Borås. And cherries from China. The inventor, red in the face, rocks on his chair. He is so drunk that he can't even catch the handkerchief rolled into a ball.

Long after everyone else has left the letter B and moved on, the inventor is still stubbornly struggling.

Breasts, broads, from ... B-b-breasts and broads f-f-from ...

He can't tear himself away from the breasts and the broads, and after a while Ricki and Lisa manage to ease him out of the apartment and into the elevator. Later on she wants to know what was wrong with him. They don't want to tell her, and only then does she realize it's something embarrassing.

Eventually Dad explains that he might have had a little bit too much to drink.

Mom is more direct, and says that the so-called inventor is a drunk. She can work out for herself what he wanted. When she puts two and two together, she feels sorry for Lisa, whose husband sits there bellowing about women so that everyone can hear.

Lisa is a dentist; her office is on Kornhamnstorg. Shortly after this incident the girl develops a raging toothache. Dad calls Lisa, who kindly agrees to see her even though it's a Sunday. While Lisa is drilling the tooth, the inventor turns up. She realizes this only when Lisa removes the drill from her mouth. He is demanding money, and has no intention of leaving until he gets it.

There is a scene. In her peripheral vision she sees Lisa fetch her purse and open it. Don't ever come here again.

When the inventor has gone, Lisa remains resolutely silent.

Which means that she can't say anything about it either. It's not the first time she has noticed that adults keep quiet about things that are unpleasant. By doing so they also force children to lie and dissemble. The most taboo subject of all is anything relating to sex. The mouth and the vagina have something in common. They are both unprotected orifices leading right inside the body.

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Excerpted from A Fortune Foretold by Agneta Pleijel, Marlaine Delargy. Copyright © 2015 Agneta Pleijel. Excerpted by permission of Other Press LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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