4

“Who’s Wilma?” I asked.

Johannes turned quickly to face me; his expression was surprised, but there was something else, something strained, like anger or suspicion, and I immediately regretted asking.

We were standing in front of one of Majken’s paintings, each of us with a sparkling fruit drink in our hand. The picture showed a skinny old woman in a hospital bed. She was lying on her side in the fetal position, her arms and legs locked in contractures—the picture was actually called Contractures. The woman was wearing green incontinence pants; apart from that she was naked. Above her, in the air, a shoal of white, long-tailed sperm was circulating.

“What do you know about Wilma?” asked Johannes.

“Nothing. When I woke you up on the lawn the other day, you said: ‘What is it, Wilma?’”

“Oh!” His expression softened, his eyes became calm again, less watchful.

“Wilma is my niece,” he said.

“Right,” I said. I wanted to ask questions—How old is she? Did you see her often? Did you get on well? Did you look after her sometimes? The questions stuck in my throat. I wanted to know what it was like to be close to a child, to be part of its social network, to look after a little relative, to be woken up by a niece or nephew who wanted to play with you or wanted help with something.

I had hardly ever seen my own nieces and nephews, let alone looked after them. After our parents died—with less than a year between them, first my father, then my mother—the gaps between telephone calls, letters, e-mails and visits grew longer and longer. It became clear that our parents had been the link that held us together, and when they were gone there was no longer anything for us to gather around or stick together for. Ole, Ida and Jens had been living in Brussels, London and Helsinki respectively with their families for a long time, and were very busy with their careers, which had vague titles like management consultant and marketing operator. I had never been to visit any of them, and couldn’t even imagine one of their children waking me up by gently shaking my shoulder and saying: “Dorrit? Auntie Dorrit?” The concept was just as unreal as the idea of a child shaking me and saying “Mom!”

At any rate, I just couldn’t bring myself to ask Johannes any more questions about Wilma.

After a little while we moved on to the next picture. It showed another woman, significantly younger; she was dressed in a long white dress and a tulle veil, and was swimming underwater with a net, chasing another shoal of sperm, but this time they were trying to escape from her. The sperm with their wriggling tails were swimming away from the woman and her net. This one was titled Fertile.

The next painting was small, around twelve inches square, and showed a bluish fetus in its fetal sac, against a warm, blood-red background with blue veins. The fetus was shown in profile, but was twisted in an unnatural shape: the narrow, still transparent arms and legs were bent into the fetal position, while the upper body and head were turned to the front, facing the observer. The head was also bent slightly backward, and the slanting, very dark oval eyes were squinting unseeing, it seemed to me, in different directions. The nose was a still-undeveloped bump without nostrils in the middle of the pale blue face, with its thin, downy skin. And the mouth was the most striking part—unnaturally wide with full red lips, locked in a twisted, gaping expression, perhaps a tortured grimace, perhaps a scornful grin, it was hard to decide. It was also difficult to decide whether the fetus was dead or dying, or capable of life but severely deformed. I leaned forward to read the title: To be or not to be—that is the question.

I started to laugh—involuntarily. Johannes looked at me and started laughing too, a low, rumbling, and slightly hesitant laugh; perhaps he was laughing out of politeness because I was laughing, or so that he wouldn’t seem stupid, or perhaps he was just as torn as I was; perhaps this was his way of laughing involuntarily.

Majken, who had been standing a little way off in the room talking to Alice and Vanja and some other visitors, was now on her way over to us with a half full glass in her hand.

“Do you find it funny?” asked Majken, gesturing toward the picture of the fetus.

“Yes,” I said. “Or no. Or both. It’s … unpleasant. And yet it’s funny.”

“Hm …” said Majken. “That’s actually how I felt when I was painting it. The other way around, though. My first feeling was a kind of angry humor. But as I worked the fetus became more and more distorted and frightening. In the end I was actually slightly afraid of it. And I still am, I think.”

I was watching her as she talked, her green eyes exuding a sense of calm and harmony. But at the outer corner of one eye a tiny nerve was vibrating, almost imperceptibly; it twitched and quivered beneath the skin. This quivering, together with just the tiniest hint of tension around her mouth, was the only thing that gave away the fact that this harmony was not complete, that there was something inside that was not calm, and I was seized by an almost irresistible urge to put my arms around her, to console and protect. To try to save her. But just as during our nighttime stroll in Monet’s garden a week ago, I was afraid I would ruin the atmosphere if I gave in to my emotions and impulses.

The gallery was, as galleries usually are, light and airy—polished wooden floor, white walls, high ceiling—and in this particular gallery there was daylight despite the fact that it was evening. Since Majken was principally a visual artist, the exhibition consisted mainly of paintings, colorful and figurative. But at the far end of the bright hall was a wall painted black. There was a doorway in the wall with a heavy black curtain in front of it. Above the doorway was a sign in big blue neon letters: HERE.

As you approached the doorway and the curtain, you could hear, very faintly, a whispering voice from inside. It was enticing, this voice, there was something meditative and magnetic about it, and I was drawn all the way to the door; I moved the curtain aside slightly and looked into compact darkness. I walked in and let the curtain fall behind me. I stood still in the darkness, waiting for my eyes to grow accustomed to it, and after a little while I could just make out a faint, bluish light farther in.

I started to walk cautiously toward the light and the whispering, and immediately I could hear not one but two whispering voices. Or perhaps three, or even more, it was hard to make out, they were speaking out of the darkness, but from different directions. They were different distances away from me, coming and going, sometimes continuing on from one another, sometimes talking over one another. The voices were eager, but in a good way, not angry or pushy. It was impossible to make out what they were saying, but I had the impression that they were calling to me—well, not just to me, of course, but to me in my capacity as a visitor. The floor beneath my feet felt soft and silent, like a fitted carpet, and I couldn’t hear my own footsteps. I couldn’t see anything either, apart from the distant, bluish light far ahead; there was only black darkness around me, and I had the feeling that I was moving in a tunnel of some kind. After a while I also got the impression that there were several people around me. I couldn’t see anyone, but sometimes I thought I could hear breathing that wasn’t my own, or I felt a faint movement of the air as someone passed me, but I wasn’t sure.

The voices, the whispering voices, grew in number as I moved farther in. They didn’t get any louder, I was the one approaching them. I passed individual voices, leaving them behind me, but only to approach several more. Suddenly I was surrounded by these gentle, enticing, whispering voices. There were both women’s and men’s voices at first, but after a while I could hear the occasional child’s voice, shriller and higher, among the rest.

The blue glow ahead of me grew brighter and expanded; I was getting closer and closer, and it was getting cooler now, not cold but cool, and the smell of damp earth crept toward me. It was as if I were going into a cave, and when I got even farther in I heard, in the distance, something dripping among all the whispering voices, then the echo of slow footsteps. The whole thing was very calming: the sounds, the darkness, the smell of earth and the coolness, and I could feel my heartbeat literally slowing down and finding a more measured rhythm. My arms, shoulders, and the back of my neck felt pleasantly relaxed. My steps also grew slower, lighter, almost as if I were moving in slow motion. I was completely calm; my brain was lying there with its full weight inside my skull—for the first time in my life I could feel the weight of my brain. It lay there, heavy and silent. It wasn’t thinking, it wasn’t having opinions, it wasn’t arguing, it wasn’t analyzing. It was only controlling my bodily functions and sensory organs, and I don’t think my senses had ever been so sharp before. And in this very clear, highly receptive and yet incredibly relaxed state I stepped into an oval room with high, small glass paintings along the black walls, my footsteps echoing on a marble floor. There were obviously people in here; it was their footsteps I had heard, accompanied by the whispering voices and the sound of dripping.

The people were dark shadows, moving as if they were in a trance. The dripping sound was louder now, closer, the whispering voices as before, some close, some farther away, children’s voices and adult voices, women and men, and the words were still impossible to make out. It was dark in here too, but the glass paintings, with abstract motifs in shades of blue and turquoise, were illuminated and in their faint glow I could see, apart from the figures moving slowly around the room, a large rounded stone, a natural rock, about the same height as the withers of a small pony or a large dog, in the center of the room. And from somewhere above a drop of water fell at regular intervals, perhaps every five or six seconds, straight down into a hollow in the top of the stone. The hollow was full of water and the water was overflowing, running down the curve of the stone into a round black vat in which the stone was standing.

I stood there watching the falling droplets and the running water, covering the stone like a clear veil, until I became conscious of the warmth of another body at my side, and looked up. It was Majken herself, and she nodded silently at me. I nodded back. The whites of her eyes were luminous in the bluish glow of the glass paintings; her hair had its nocturnal golden gray sheen and looked very soft and silky, like angora, and without thinking about what I was doing I raised my hand and stroked her hair gently and slowly with the tips of my fingers—it really was very soft—and let them glide down over the nape of her neck and along her spine. When I reached the base of her spine I stopped, and slowly withdrew my hand.

And now I felt someone doing the same thing to me—exactly that: someone, because it wasn’t Majken, it was someone standing directly behind me, moving their fingertips lightly down from the top of my head over my hair, down the nape of my neck and my spine, stopping at the base of my spine and disappearing. Afterward I turned around, but too slowly, I didn’t see who it was, I just heard the echo of measured footsteps moving away and dissolving into the darkness.