The Origin of Species Read online

  He flagged down a car, finally, a battered Lada piloted by a couple of half-drunk Finns, and got a ride back to Kiruna, where he waited out the night at the airport and then paid his hundred kronor for the first connection south. He was back at Stig’s place in Västra Frölunda, where he’d left half his stuff, by the time Stig was getting home from work.

  Stig looked stricken at the sight of him.

  “But you are back!”

  Alex just wanted to be gone. His plan for the moment was to make for London and catch a cheap flight home.

  “I just came to get my things.”

  “But you’ll stay the night?” Stig said, seeming desperate for the matter not to lose all bounds of propriety.

  It was only when they were sitting down to a painful supper that Stig mentioned the phone call.

  “A lady,” he said. “A Swedish lady.”

  Oh, God, Alex thought, his heart pounding, let it not be some idiot from the Experiment office.

  “Did she say her name?”

  “She left her number. From Landskrona, I think.” Then, “You did not say you had a Swedish friend.”

  Alex’s hand was practically trembling as he dialed the number. He recognized her voice at once.

  “It’s me. It’s Alex.”

  “Alex.” A pause. “I did not think I should mind so much, not to see you again. But you see I kept your number.”

  He was on the road back to Engelström the following morning. Everything had changed now. Gothenburg, Kiruna, had become just anecdotes he’d tell Ingrid instead of some sort of final judgment against him. He got a ride almost at once, from a Danish couple in a tiny rusted-out Opel whose back seat was crammed full with camping equipment and sacks of clothing and guitars but who insisted on making a place for him, offering him salami and cheese and teaching him the chords for “Fire and Rain.”

  They dropped him at Ingrid’s front step. Alex felt a surge of fear when she came to the door that he’d made a mistake, that he’d misunderstood.

  “So I was right we would meet again,” she said, and kissed him so unguardedly that they seemed back at once to the intimacy of their night together.

  The children had come and gone again. It was as if he had never left, as if Stig Hörby had been a bad dream: here was her bathroom, her kitchen, her little cabin; here was her garden, with its fruit trees and birds.

  “It’s silly, after one day, but I had such a funny feeling when you went.” She smiled as if she was afraid she was showing too much of herself. “Such an awful one, I should say.”

  That night they made love. It wasn’t quite as he’d pictured it, but everything worked, at least. They started with Ingrid and he managed better, touching her and licking her until she came, with a tremble that unnerved him. The smell of her stayed with him as he fucked her, and then for a few minutes it seemed they were truly making love, that they were truly together. She had said she was safe, though at the last instant, remembering Robert, he had a twitch of doubt, and with it of guilt.

  “It was very nice,” she said after, “very sweet,” perhaps to reassure him. It didn’t matter: he was happy to have gotten through without disaster. He had that different sense of her again, when she was there beneath him, that she was small, that she was possessable, though he could hardly say what this might mean. All he knew was that there was this barest veil between them that he wanted to strip, to see what lay behind it.

  This time, he stayed on for days. He kept waiting for Ingrid to tire of him or see through him, but it didn’t happen. She seemed happy to be with him, to share her meals, her bed, without requiring anything special from him. Some days, they hardly left the house. They’d have breakfast, of cereal and fruit and a yogurty substance called sour milk, then coffee in the garden while Alex smoked and read and Ingrid sketched; they might even make love, because Alex had discovered he was free to touch her whenever he wished. They had quite a lot of sex, in fact, not just at the house but in the car, once, and in the woods, and on a deserted stretch of beach, so that their awkward first night seemed forgotten. That wasn’t really the best part for Alex, though—it was still when he felt most vulnerable, less from the fear of doing badly than because it seemed the most likely time for the thing to reveal itself to be a lie.

  What was the best for him, really, was just getting along with her, the not being afraid he had made some mistake.

  “You are suited to me,” Ingrid said, and it felt true. Despite the unlikeliness of it, they seemed kindred spirits. Maybe it was just that Ingrid brought out in him a new, more balanced person, the different self that had always felt occluded in him.

  Ingrid’s ex came by once to drop off some papers, coming around to the patio door in back and letting himself in as if he owned the place.

  “This is Carl, the children’s father,” Ingrid said pleasantly, as if he were the coal merchant.

  She’d made no attempt to hide Alex from him. He was beefy and large, older, well-built, a veritable man. Alex expected some sort of rebuff but he looked merely put out, shaking Alex’s hand as if he was actually ready to take him seriously.

  “You see how he is, a bit of a bully,” Ingrid said after. “You have to stand up to him is the only thing.”

  He had been so palpable, with his flushed face and ruddy hands. A smell of cologne had come off him and beneath that something more sweaty, more human.

  “When I was young I was very taken with him, of course,” Ingrid said. “To be the wife of a big engineer and so on. Silly things like that.”

  It was hard for Alex to fathom how he and Carl could both be connected to Ingrid, how only a few years earlier she had probably been living in a place like Stig’s Västra Frölunda, cleaning house and starting Carl’s dinner at five. It was as if he’d discovered some secret other life Ingrid had been hiding from him. One morning after Ingrid had gone down to start breakfast he snuck a look into the room off of hers in the loft, the children’s room: two beds, both with duvets in a seaside motif; a bookshelf; a desk with some model cars on it. It surprised him, suddenly, how absent the children had been while he’d been here, how little any awareness of them had impinged on him.

  On the wall above the desk was a photo of the children’s father, posed in a shipyard before a massive gray tanker.

  “You haven’t mentioned your children much,” he said at breakfast.

  He felt an instant chill.

  “I did not think you were so curious about them.”

  She brought out a photo album. The girl, Eva, was big-boned like her father, the boy more slender.

  “See,” Ingrid said. “You had only to ask.”

  “I just thought—”

  “You thought what?”

  But he didn’t dare pursue the subject.

  It was only now that he really noticed all the evidences of the children that were strewn throughout the house. Photos on the living room wall; trophies and ribbons in the alcove off the kitchen; a drawing stuck to the refrigerator—how could he have missed it?—signed by the boy, Lars, of a crude tractor and cow.

  “It was from a visit we made to a farm,” Ingrid said. “Two days, I think, before you came back.”

  It had been merely in his own mind, he realized, that the children had been out of the picture. For Ingrid, they were present in every cranny. She spoke to them nightly, something Alex had never remarked on—to keep from intruding, he’d told himself, though now it seemed he simply hadn’t bothered himself about them.

  He bore that awful chill of hers the entire day.

  “Yes, I should say so,” she said at supper. “I was very angry with you this morning.”

  This was it, Alex thought, when everything crumbled. It was too much for him, all of this, she could surely see that now.

  “We are only playing here in these days, perhaps it’s true.” He could tell she had girded herself for this. “But you must never say I am hiding my children from you like a bad person.”

  “I didn’t mean
that.”

  “No, perhaps not.”

  “It’s just that you sent me away before—”

  “I protect my children because they are young. But I am not pretending to you what I am. I am a mother. My children are the most important to me, always. So do not say I am hiding them.”

  They didn’t make love that night. With a few words he had shattered all the magic of the previous days. He felt the instinct to retreat, to slither back to the anonymity of the wider world.

  In the morning he thought that Ingrid had reached the same conclusion.

  “Tomorrow the children return again,” she said. “This time I don’t chase you away, maybe it was wrong to do it, but you must decide. It can’t be the same for us, with the children here.”

  It came to him that she wasn’t testing him but really wanted an answer, wanted him to decide for them. He felt terrified.

  “I suppose I should go,” he said, taking the easy way out, playing the youngster, as if he’d merely said what he’d thought she wanted.

  She smiled, sadly, and he could see her scaling back her expectations of him.

  “Oh, Alex. I should not have grown to like you so much, I think.”

  They spent their last day on the coast, picnicking on the cliffs that looked out to the sound. It was a day like a day from the end of time, everything poised, the wheeling birds, the pellucid sky.

  “It’s such a funny thing,” Ingrid said, staring out. “All of this, the sea, the sky. I can’t say it very well, what I mean.”

  In the morning he packed his things, early, and she drove him to the ferry. There was a mood of forced cheer between them as if to show that everything was for the best.

  “So,” Ingrid said. “I have stolen you from the sea and now I must return you.”

  She didn’t wave from the pier, just stood watching him as the ferry pulled out. By the time it had settled onto its course she was gone.

  He’d planned to put up in Copenhagen for a night or two with the Danes he’d met hitchhiking before pushing on to Paris. Instead a week passed, then another, and he was still holed up in a cold-water flat in Nørrebro not fifteen minutes from the ferry terminal, drinking Elephant Beer till all hours and smoking endless chillums of hash. He followed Ture, his host, on his daily peregrinations, to the community center for showers, to the Social Office for cash, to Christiania for some happening or protest or just for more hashish. Ture had the look of the blond Jesus of Alex’s grade-school readers, spending the whole day sometimes in pyjama pants he’d borrowed from Alex.

  One day Ture’s girlfriend, Maya, came home and told Alex she’d just had an abortion.

  “It’s very good now, you know, we have the Free Clinic. No hassles.”

  That night she and Ture argued.

  “It must be very boring, every day to be stoned like that.” She always spoke English around Alex so he wouldn’t feel excluded. “I think for Alex it must be very boring.”

  Maya had an actual job, something Ture avoided.

  “I think he likes it or he would just stop.”

  “You’re like a boy who has some candy or something. Even if you want to you can’t stop.”

  Alex slipped out of the apartment in the middle of this and called Ingrid from a pay phone.

  “But where are you?” As if he had called from outer space. “You must have reached Italy.”

  “I’m here. I’m still in Copenhagen.”

  “I see.” He could hear the question in her voice, the quiet note of injury. “So close.”

  “I was wondering if I could see you again.”

  There were passengers in the back seat of her old Volvo when she collected him the next morning at the Landskrona terminal. This time there was no impulsive kiss, just a neutral pleasantness that reminded him of how she’d greeted her ex-husband.

  “And here of course are my children,” she said. “You remember them from the photos.”

  Alex was hardly able to take them in. They were sitting completely silent and still, blinding almost in their stunning blondness.

  “They are very excited to practice their English,” Ingrid said.

  “I think you have come from Canada,” Eva said haltingly. “We have study it in our school.”

  Ingrid kept up her smiling neutrality the whole way home, hardly uttering a word that didn’t somehow direct him back to the children. Eva was able to manage an exchange or two, but Lars’s eyes went at once to his mother at any question.

  “Lars’s English is not yet so good. But perhaps now he will have a chance to improve it.”

  This was the first indication that she wasn’t going to put him back on the ferry by nightfall. At the house she had Lars take him out to the cabin—it was the first time he’d actually set foot in it. It looked like a fairy-tale place, a little desk against the wall, a little cot with a colored quilt.

  “Is your bed,” Lars said. He had the same Oxford inflection as his mother.

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  For most of the day he was under Lars’s commission, Lars laying out his trophies and ribbons before him like credentials. They had to pass Ingrid’s bed to get to his room. It did not seem conceivable to Alex at that moment that he had shared it with Ingrid, that he was anything more than another of her charges.

  Lars held out a model of a Plymouth Duster with a tiny spoiler at the back.

  “My friend had one in high school,” Alex said.

  “Is very fast, I think.”

  “Yes. Very fast.”

  By suppertime, Lars had assumed a protective custody over Alex.

  “You sit here, please,” he said, pulling out the chair next to his own. He crowded the platters of food around Alex’s dish as if he were to test them.

  “Lars is wondering if you have such vegetables in Canada,” Ingrid said.

  They were having potatoes, cucumber salad. He saw Eva suppress a smirk.

  “Yes. We grow them on our farm.”

  Lars seemed duly taken with that.

  “He wants to know if you are a farmer, then.”

  “Well, no.” Alex could see the disappointment. “My parents’ farm.”

  He seemed such a little man, full of dignity and pride, so clearly Ingrid’s son yet so different from her, so utterly male. Alex marveled at the perfection of his little body, as streamlined as a cheetah’s. He hadn’t thought so much of that, of the flesh-and-boneness of children, but that was what he noticed. At bedtime they all sat together on Ingrid’s bed while Alex read from Charlotte’s Web, and it was hard to separate Ingrid from these extensions of her, to sort the carnal from this other new territory of awareness.

  In the living room afterward, Ingrid put a finger to her lips when he was about to speak.

  “We will wait till they sleep. We’ll speak in the cabin.”

  He hadn’t so much as put a hand on her the entire day. In the cabin she took a seat at the desk and left him to the bed, which stood so low he was practically squatting beneath her.

  “Alex, why did you come?”

  The truth was he didn’t know. Because he could.

  “I don’t know. I missed you.”

  She let that pass.

  “It’s not a joke now, Alex. Yes, in the beginning, it was for fun. But now when you are bored in this place or that, ‘Oh, well,’ you think, ‘Ingrid will take me.’”

  “It’s not like that.”

  She let him stew.

  “I missed you,” he said again.

  “And next week, or next month, when you are home, what then?”

  He had no answer to that. He had not thought beyond the next hour or day, really, the next swing of his mood.

  “Do you want me to go?”

  He didn’t dare to look at her, sitting hunched there beneath her like a repentant schoolboy.

  “I don’t say so. Somehow we’ll manage.”

  And so he stayed on. He felt like a drowning man going down for the third time: each time the water grew more ins
istent, more familiar, the urge to resurface more dim. Maybe this was the life he’d always been headed for, with a house and a garden and the sound of children in the background.

  “You need only make a place for them,” Ingrid said. “You must make a house inside you for them.”

  She was the one making the house, of course, for him too, though maybe he could manage something more modest, a little cabin, at least.

  That was where he remained, in the cabin, though soon they were making love there almost nightly after the children had gone to bed. Once Ingrid fell asleep with him on his little cot and Lars came out in the night to knock sullenly on their door.

  “Do you know where is my mother?”

  They were more careful after that but it was clear their trysts had not gone unnoticed. Ingrid gave no sign of apologizing for them, which with Lars seemed to have the effect of making them acceptable. Eva was harder to read—she seemed so anxious to please, to avoid unpleasantness, that she gave off the air of waiting with bated breath for some imminent catastrophe.

  He lost track of the days. July passed and the end of the summer loomed and yet he was still there in Engelström, in a country that had barely figured in his thoughts when he had set out. He followed Ingrid into Landskrona to the school where she taught to help her prepare for the coming year, feeling the ghost of his childhood at the sight of the desks in their rows, the smell of the construction paper and chalk.

  “Perhaps you will be a teacher,” Ingrid said. “I see it in you with Lars.”

  It would have been the death of him to have a teacher like Ingrid—he would have built altars to her, would have pined away to nothing.