The Origin of Species Page 26

  But then here he was traveling the world while Ingrid had to work for a living.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking.”

  They had both grown awkward.

  “It’s not so important.”

  They were stuck afterward with Alex having to pay for the groceries, though they more or less cleaned him out of his Swedish cash.

  “It’s very silly,” Ingrid said, upset now. “I shouldn’t have said it.”

  “No, you were right.”

  They were silent most of the way home. Alex could still picture the brightness in Ingrid’s eyes when she’d met him at the terminal, then how it had faded.

  “The children are at their father’s,” she said finally, as if this was something she had been saving as a treat, before he had ruined things. “I don’t know if there’s something you’d like. Some excursion perhaps.”

  If only he had kissed her properly. Such a little thing.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry for what?”

  “I don’t know. For everything. For coming back. For starting out wrong.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “We’ll start again.”

  They settled on driving up the coast to Helsingborg and taking the ferry across to Hamlet’s castle. This was where they had met, on the Helsingborg ferry. It felt peculiar to be back there, as if they were bidding goodbye to their younger, more innocent selves. It was difficult to imagine the boy he’d been then, what Ingrid could have seen in him.

  Despite the sun they were the only ones who had braved the upper deck.

  “I should be very afraid now, I think, to talk to such a big bearded man as you were,” Ingrid said.

  “I was the one who was afraid.”

  “And now? Are you afraid?”

  “Maybe a little.”

  “Then we are the same.”

  The castle was nearly deserted. The old foundations had been overlain with a sprawling Renaissance construction, though from out on the battlements, looking out to the snow-covered coastline and the sea, Alex could picture the longships setting out a thousand years before, into the cold, unknown world. Ingrid leaned into him against the wind and he dared to put his arms around her.

  “I’m happy you came back,” she said. “I shouldn’t say it, but I’m happy.”

  It was well past dark by the time they got home. They made a meal together and opened a bottle of wine that Ingrid said had been sitting in her cupboard since before her conversion.

  “We had wine our first dinner,” Alex said, hoping she’d be pleased at the memory. But her face clouded.

  “Who knows what you thought of me then. What kind of evil woman I was. Or only sad, perhaps.”

  “It wasn’t like that.” But he could remember thinking of her in exactly those terms.

  “I know you think it’s only because of what I was that I became a Christian.”

  He didn’t like to answer.

  “I guess it’s just hard to understand how someone could change so much.”

  “I wonder it myself,” she said. “How I’ve been so many people. Perhaps you are right, each one only makes up for the last.”

  It wasn’t yet ten by the time they’d finished supper. Alex lingered over the dishes, not sure things were any clearer now than they had ever been.

  “I should go,” he said.

  “It seems a pity. The house is empty.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  They were looking into the same dead end they’d already been down.

  “Perhaps you can sleep in Lars’s bed,” she said finally.

  He had to pass through her room, the first time he had been up to it this trip. It looked nearly unchanged from before, still had the same economy and grace, the sense it had all that was needed.

  He could see Lars’s bed through the doorway that led to the children’s room, the shelves above it filled with his pictures and trophies.

  “Would it be all right if I lie with you for a bit?”

  “If you’d like.”

  This time he didn’t feel that they were hiding, that they were sneaking around like teenagers. Instead of waiting for her cues he went from one thing to the next as if she hadn’t a choice: that was what she wanted, he thought, not to be held responsible. She felt familiar beneath him, as if only days had gone by since they’d last made love.

  Afterward he lay over her kissing her face, her eyes, the line of her hair. He kept waiting for the guilt to come.

  “You all right?” he whispered.

  He saw she was crying.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s nothing. It’s nothing. It isn’t so easy for me again.”

  He fell asleep with her body curled into his. At some point he dreamt they were there, in her room, only now, for some reason, he couldn’t make love to her.

  “I see. Of course.” She was already naked except for a bra. It was humiliating for her, the more so, somehow, on account of the bra. “I think you are very foolish. You are afraid to give anything because you think it will take something from you.”

  He barely slept after that. He stared at the inky lump Ingrid made beside him, as mysterious as when he’d met her. She wasn’t so changed after all, not in any important way. She could just be some flake, he had thought at first, some frustrated housewife. But he would never have thought that now.

  It was still dark when she started to stir.

  “You are watching me,” she said.

  “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “Maybe you’re afraid you must marry me now,” she said, so matter-of-factly he felt a thrill.

  “Should I be?”

  “No. Not afraid.”

  “What about God?” he said. “What does he think of all this?”

  “I think maybe God doesn’t bother so much with us, when we are so small.”

  She rose and slipped on her robe. He watched her move through the room in her soundless way.

  “I must pick up the children for church. You can stay home, of course.”

  “No. I want to come. If you don’t mind.”

  He could see this wasn’t what she’d expected.

  “I would like it.”

  He was getting in deep, he knew it. It was hard to believe only a day had passed since he’d stepped off the ferry again. He would have been on his way to Rio by now, the next stop on his ticket, if he hadn’t come back. In his mind’s eye he saw his double, in a different version of things, walking off into palm trees and heat, as in the last scene of a caper film where the criminal makes his escape.

  They picked the children up at their father’s house outside Landskrona, an imposing place surrounded by immaculate gardens. Around the back Alex made out a jungle gym and a wooden playhouse done up as a castle.

  “He has his new family now to look after,” Ingrid said. “Of course, he is kind enough with Lars and Eva, when they’re with him.”

  The father came out to the door to see the children off, looking even more the burgher than Alex remembered. From the scowl that crossed his face at the sight of Alex in Ingrid’s car, it was clear the children hadn’t mentioned him.

  Alex could feel a hundred shades of shame coming off Lars. “You are coming to the church?” he said.

  “If that’s all right.”

  Ingrid spoke in English for Alex’s sake but Lars answered in Swedish, in grunting monosyllables.

  “You must try in English,” Ingrid said. “So Alex can understand.”

  “Is too difficult.”

  “But you must try.”

  “Nej!”

  Ingrid let the silence fester a moment.

  “Perhaps after. When you’re not feeling so rude.”

  The church wasn’t one of the clapboard ones whose spires dotted the countryside, but a modern building that could have passed for a credit union or insurance office. Alex expected heads to turn as they came in and whispers and glares, but when they took
their place, a young couple next to them smiled over at them as if they were just a normal churchgoing family. The church wasn’t much bigger than a living room, everything in white and pale wood tones. To one side of the altar was a marble baptistery that was large enough to climb into.

  An avuncular man in a gray suit was standing up front talking to some of the people in the front pews. It was only when he turned out to face the room and began to address the whole congregation that Alex realized he was the pastor. A few notes rang out from a Hammond at the back and Ingrid and the children raised up their Swedish voices for the opening hymn, Lars’s not-quite-broken one holding surprisingly in key.

  Alex had been picturing people in ecstasies or breaking into tongues, but apart from the occasional mumbled hallelujah, the service had the informal air of an information meeting or a Rotary Club lecture. Afterward people milled in the foyer and Ingrid introduced him to the pastor, who took Alex’s hand in both of his as if Alex had paid him some tremendous honor.

  “You are welcome, you are welcome!” he said, blushing at his halting English.

  Alex had thought he and Ingrid would stick out like people with scarlet letters on their breasts, but everyone smiled at him with the same shy, pleased air the pastor had had, exclaiming over his travels as if he were Amundsen back from the Pole. Alex didn’t quite get it, not just this friendliness but that Ingrid was leading him around like some Christian exchange student she’d taken in, when all he could think of was that they’d been making love not twelve hours before.

  “So finally we meet him, your Canadian!”

  A woman had come up and taken his arm with a very un-Swedish forthrightness, a great lumberjack of a man, easily twice her size, looming behind her.

  “These are my good friends Erik and Anna,” Ingrid said. “My best friends, I should say.”

  Anna still had a hold of him.

  “You have a very nice coat,” Erik said, and everyone laughed.

  Alex must have looked dazed. He stared down at his coat, a parka Ingrid had got hold of for him.

  “It was Erik’s coat,” she explained. “He was your good Samaritan.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t realize.”

  Anna hugged his arm.

  “Don’t mind Erik. He is only jealous that you are more handsome in it.”

  Ingrid had invited them for supper. The whole day Alex could still feel the press of Anna’s arm against him, vaguely foreboding. At supper she sat across from him and her attention kept circling back to him like a hawk’s.

  “So you are a world traveler,” she said. “You must be tired, after so many travels.”

  “I’m almost at the end now.”

  “Ah. And then back to Canada?”

  He felt cornered.

  “Yes, I suppose.”

  Erik had got the children onto the subject of Christmas and they began to explain to Alex all their peculiar Swedish traditions, competing with one another until they had the others in stitches at their tortured English.

  “I think Alex can help with the tree,” Lars said.

  Underneath the table Ingrid’s leg moved against Alex’s.

  “We’ll see. If he’s still with us.”

  He ended up alone with Anna afterward doing the dishes.

  “Ingrid is very fond of you,” she said.

  It seemed this was the moment the evening had been leading to.

  “I’m fond of her too.”

  “Yes, I think so. You have made her happy.” He could feel the weight of that judgment settling over him. “It’s some time since she was so happy.”

  It was easier, it seemed, to get by with one big lie than with many little ones. Every day Alex grew more ensconced in his little hovel, padding his nest out like a wintering rodent, and every day the question of leaving seemed less pressing. In the mornings, if Alex stayed home, he brewed a pot of coffee and repaired to the cabin as a monk to his cell, reading and writing his letters and filling his journal until the air was opaque with cigarette smoke; in the afternoon he’d be there to greet Lars when he got home from the elementary school in the village, and Eva when the bus dropped her from the high school in Landskrona. By the time Ingrid returned Alex would have supper going and the children would be at their schoolwork, and the lie would look so seamless and whole that it could hardly be told from the truth. Then at night Ingrid would come to his bed and there were no longer any limits to be kept to, so that it was possible to forget there had ever been.

  They seldom spoke of her faith. She lent him an English Bible once and he made stabs at the Gospels, trying to get beyond the deadening familiarity of them.

  “There is something, you must see it,” she said. “Even you, with your education.”

  There had been a line in the story of the prodigal son, it was true, that had brought tears to his eyes. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him. But what he said to Ingrid was, “I admit he might have been a great teacher. It’s just all the rest. It seems so far-fetched. Like stories for children.”

  “I see.” He had gone too far. He was calling her a child. “Perhaps you read too much with your head.”

  “My head is all I’ve got. It’s as if you’re asking me to stop thinking.”

  He could hear how smug he sounded.

  Ingrid gave him a controlled smile.

  “Perhaps we shouldn’t discuss these things.”

  He knew what the problem was, of course, the same one that had tortured him as a kid: the fear that the failure was in him, that there was something lacking in him that cut him off from higher understanding.

  Later, he tried to make it up to her.

  “It’s just all this stuff messed me up as a kid. It’s hard not to get emotional.”

  “So you are emotional, then.”

  He took her point. Maybe his rejection of these things was no less visceral and unreasoned than her acceptance of them.

  “How was it for you?” he dared to ask. “How did you know?”

  He felt as if he’d asked her to describe something hopelessly intimate, a sex fantasy or a bodily function.

  “It’s very hard to explain.”

  “You don’t have to tell me.”

  “No. I would like to. It was Anna who did it. I had met her, I was very sad then—you should say depressed, I think—and she became my friend. And so she started to talk to me now and then about Jesus, just making conversation and so on, and of course I thought it was very silly. But she was a good friend and I didn’t mind so much. Then once I went with her to the church, just to see it, and I thought, yes, it’s very nice, but nothing for me. Then in the night, the feeling came. It’s hard to describe it. As if I was floating. As if I was flying.”

  “But how did you know what it was? How did you know you were supposed to become a Christian?”

  “He came to me,” she said simply.

  “Who?” Then he understood. “Jesus? You saw Jesus?”

  “Perhaps we should stop,” she said.

  She was right. This wasn’t something she should trust him with.

  “We don’t have to talk about it.”

  “No. Perhaps not.”

  He felt no further ahead than he’d been before. It all came down to that mysterious quantum leap.

  “You didn’t say why you were depressed.”

  “For silly things. Always the same, really. Worried for money. Worried to find a man.”

  She was about to say more but stopped herself.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s nothing. I hadn’t wanted to say. It’s just that night, after I went to the church, there was a man who came, someone I knew from the town. It was nothing so special—the children were with their father, he came for supper, we had a very nice evening. Not so different, I should say, from our own evening the first time you came. And then to bed, of course. Only that. After, I asked him to go, I can’t say why, and he was very surpr
ised, he thought he should stay the whole night. Then when he’d gone, not so long, I had the feeling.”

  Alex held his tongue.

  “You’re thinking it’s because of that, and so on,” Ingrid said. “So you see why I hadn’t wanted to say. But why this time? Why this man, who wasn’t a bad man, very suited to me—he called for many weeks after that, he couldn’t understand why I shouldn’t meet him again. Even now, I still see him in the town and sometimes he asks to come, but when I see him I only see my old life. It’s a very strange thing, as if there was something to pay. That it should happen after so many years of looking for a man, just with one who suited me.”

  They sat silent. There was something in the story that made Alex want to resist explaining it away.

  “Perhaps you will never believe as I do, it’s true. But you are looking. It’s enough, I think.”

  He felt as if she’d bestowed a benediction.

  “I wouldn’t mind if I actually found something.”

  It must have crossed Ingrid’s mind that what they were doing now wasn’t so different from how she’d lived in those dark days before her conversion. Why could she bear him, Alex wondered, and not this man who might have continued to woo her, who might have married her, might even have found a place in his heart for her Jesus? Perhaps it was just that he’d come at the vulnerable moment. Or perhaps he and Ingrid were birds of a feather, drawn to each other because they recognized in one another the same instinct to self-sabotage.

  She had seen Jesus. They had names for people like that. He didn’t see how, in good conscience, he could go on with her in the face of something so fundamental, so utterly foreign to his view of the world. Or maybe her faith didn’t matter. Wasn’t the new Ingrid even more like him than the old one had been? She had her new job; she belonged to a solidarity group for refugees; she was raising funds at her church to build a school in Zimbabwe. It all had a missionary tinge to it, but then what had Alex been doing in Africa except following the lead of the priest-heroes of his childhood?

  They drove into Lund in the week before Christmas for a conference Ingrid had at the university. Alex was surprised at how venerable the campus looked, dotted with lofty halls and ancient half-timbered buildings and gothic towers. While Ingrid was at her sessions, he wandered into the town, through cobbled squares decked out for Christmas and past bookstores and cafés crammed with students. He pictured himself living in such a place, in one of the narrow brick houses in the old quarter or some cavernous nineteenth-century apartment that smelled of plaster and old wood. He might learn Swedish, do some graduate work at the university, perhaps go on to teach. It did not seem so unpleasant or strange, such a life, not so out of keeping with what he’d imagined for himself.