Somewhere Within Us E-Book

Ulla Bolinder

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 233

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

It is in the middle of the1970s in a Swedish university city. Kicki and Eva-Lena, who have been best friends since school time, approach the age of thirty and try to live adult life as good as they can. Eva-Lena is married, while Kicki is still looking for a man to share her life with. The meeting with a younger male colleague makes Eva-Lena lose the grip of reality. Kicki tries to help and understand, while also recalling and reflecting on her own meetings and relationships. SOMEWHERE WITHIN US is the second part of three independent novels about Kicki and Eva-Lena. In the first, Hop in Then!, we met them as teenagers and cruising sisters in the1960s.

Leseprobe

Love is letting someone

be what he or she is.

Arthur Janov

Lasse and I have repapered our bedroom walls. Already when we moved in, the wall paper was worn, and now we have lived in the apartment for almost ten years, so it needed to be done. Especially where the beds stand the wall had become tarnished.

It doesn’t seem as if we have lived together for so long as ten years. The time has passed, but nothing has happened. If we had had children it would perhaps have felt different, but we cannot have any children. I have been sad about it and don’t think of it anymore. What Lasse feels I don’t really know. He doesn’t say very much. I suppose that he has accepted it. In any case, there is nothing that can be done about it.

Kicki, my best friend, doesn’t have any children, either, but that’s because she hasn’t met the right man yet. All relationships she has had so far, have ended. But she thinks it’s about time now, that the love of her life and the father of her unborn children turns up.

Every Saturday we visit Lasse’s parents and every Sunday we go to mine. It’s convenient not having to prepare dinner on weekends, but I don’t think it’s especially fun to be together with them. Well, with Lasse’s parents it’s okay, because there we talk, and Lasse and his dad and I usually play cards, but with my parents it is as dead as it has always been. There isn’t anything to say, and everything feels just painful. I hate listening to papa trying to discuss politics with Lasse and seeing how mamma put it on. I almost feel sick and just want to leave. Why do you have to be on visiting terms with people you don’t have the least in common with? I don’t want that.

But we can’t continue having contact with Lasse’s parents at the same time as we break off relations with mine. And how can I explain to them that we don’t want to visit them anymore? What should I give for a reason? That I think they are so stupid and limited that I can’t stand being in the same room as them? I can’t say that. And you must do your duty.

Henrik, a young guy who substitutes at the medical bath where I work, has an alcohol problem. He has come to work under the influence, and now my female work-mates have had a serious talk with him and discussed what they should do to try to help him. I haven’t noticed that he has felt bad, but he admitted to them that he drinks too much.

Well, I see! And what do they think they should be able do about that?

When I was sixteen years old I drank a lot. Kicki and I hung out with the raggare on Svartbäcksgatan at that time, and there it was easy to get hold of spirits. In the beginning I took it as a pleasure to be drunk and didn’t understand that you may drink because you are unhappy, and not just because it’s fun. Alcohol can be an anesthetic for mental pain, but I didn’t realize that in the beginning. Some who have drunk for a long time find perhaps other ways to ease their pain and stop drinking – they become sober alcoholics – but to be free you must get to the bottom of your problems, and you can’t force anyone to do that.

No one has asked me what I think ought to be done to help Henrik. I think my work-mates believe that I’m too well-behaved and inexperienced to know anything about alcohol abuse. But I know that they can’t help him. They can possibly get him to stay sober at work, but they can’t get him to stop drinking. He must want to do that himself first, and I don’t think he has come to that point yet. He has a buddy who works at the internal transport, and one day when that guy came to us with a patient, I heard them decide to meet in the evening and go out and have a grog.

When I started to be together with Lasse seriously, I stopped drinking. That was also when I was sixteen. Since then I have only been drunk at parties sometimes. Nowadays it almost never happens.

Lasse doesn’t drink very often either, and Kicki is a total abstainer. Her papa is an alcoholic, so she has always been an opponent of booze, but as a teenager she drank sometimes anyway, just to join me.

We smoked and drank. Now I’m the only one who does it, because she has stopped smoking as well. I know that smoking is damaging to your health, and I know that it hinders mental pain from entering consciousness, and I hate to feel tied to ensure that I always have cigarettes at hand, but I continue all the same. If Lasse didn’t smoke, it would perhaps be easier for me to stop. But I must manage even so, because otherwise I’ll never get to know the truth, and without the truth you’ll never be free.

Kicki lives alone now, and we usually meet each other at her home. But a few years ago, when she was together with a guy called Åke, we almost lost contact, because I didn’t like him, and I couldn’t understand what she saw in him. He was like a mussel from whom it was impossible to get a sensible word out. Lasse perhaps doesn’t talk very much either, but you can have a normal conversation with him anyway.

Though it’s only with Kicki I can express all I want. Every time we meet, we share what has happened to us, and then we discuss and analyze it. We are like two serial stories that never end.

I don’t think you can be like that with a man, because men are not very interested in themselves and not as emotionally penetrating as women. Not in my experience anyway. Though Lasse is the only man I have been together with in that way. And for the most part, it depends on how good emotional contact you have, if you can talk with each other or not.

One day when Henrik’s buddy Johan sat in with us and waited for Henrik to be finished to go home, he started to solve a crossword in an old weekly news paper. When I went by, he called me to come and help him with a word that he couldn’t figure out. “Hetaera” it was above, and in the middle of the word there was an ‘o’ and a ‘k’ already written.

“It will probably be ‘hooker’”, I said.

“Aha”, he said and looked at me and smiled.

I don’t like when people say or do things that I don’t understand the underlying meaning of.

One of the women at work is driving me crazy. Her name is Astrid. If I am busy cleaning a bathtub, for instance, she can come in and place herself beside me and stare at me without saying anything. And if I ask her what she wants, she just comes up with some trifle that doesn’t explain what it really is. It makes me very annoyed, and I just want to push her away, but I become as paralyzed and don’t know what to do to put a stop to it.

Why does she act like that? What does she want? Why can’t she just let me be? I have tried to act indifferent and uninterested, and I have tried to avoid her and to only give short answers when she asks me something, but nothing has helped. It seems that she doesn’t notice or care that I’m dismissive.

And if I did what I really feel, and told her to go to hell, everyone would think I were nuts, because nobody can possibly be angry with Astrid who is so kind and sweet!

But what should I do to get rid of her? What should I do to make her understand that I don’t want anything to do with her?

I have been together with Lasse for eleven years, and as long as we have lived together, I have never been unfaithful to him. Once, a rather long time ago, I was interested in a guy at work, but it was only from a distance and nothing I was serious about.

I don’t think that Lasse has been unfaithful to me, either. This summer we have been married for five years. Directly after our wedding at city hall, we departed on our honeymoon to Dalarna. We had rented a cabin there, which we stayed in for a week.

Kicki isn’t married, but she has been engaged two times and lived with three different guys. She has not been unfaithful, either. Well, she has, but only when she has wanted a relationship to end.

If I happened to meet a guy that I felt physically attracted to, I would never go to bed with him if I were not in love with him also and knew that I would rather live with him than with Lasse. But from a distance, and in secret, you can be interested in others without doing any harm.

I happened to hear an old song from the ’60s on the radio – “Anyone Who Had a Heart” with Cilla Black – and that made me start thinking about what has become of my dreams and hopes from that time. “Anyone who had a heart would take me in his arms and love me true.” It hasn’t gone quite the way I thought, I have to say!

But I’m not unsatisfied with my life, even though there isn’t very much happening on the love front just now. Eva-Lena, my best friend, is comfortably off, married and settled as she is, but I think I have a hard time settling down. And when things have been calm and restful once in a while, I haven’t been satisfied with it.

I remember, for example, how it was when I was engaged to a boy called Bosse, and I started going out with my sister to dance. She and her husband were going to get divorced, and I was feeling a bit fed up in my own relationship and thought that nothing was happening with Bosse and me, so I started to go out.

And one evening I met another guy. I can’t say that I fell in love with him, but when he proposed that we should meet again, I went along with it. We met at first when we were out dancing, and then sometimes in private. And one evening – and I don’t know why I did it, because I didn’t actually want to – it happened that we lay with each other in his car.

Afterwards I thought: Now it’s over! Not because it had been a failure, but because it was as a confirmation that there wasn’t anything between us, and that everything was some sort of action against Bosse on my part. At the same time, I was flattered by the attention and the shown interest, because I felt that Bosse had cooled off concerning that.

And all at once, I told him everything. Then he collapsed and thought that we should break our engagement and move apart. Yes, and I thought that it was just as well that we did. I took it very easily, I remember, while Bosse looked more and more miserable for each day that passed. Finally, he sat one evening in the leather easy chair in the living room and tore and pulled on his undershirt, so a hole was worn in it, and he looked so miserable that I softened and asked him what it was. Then it came out that he was sorry, and that he not at all wanted it to end. I had been in the firm conviction that it was just as well that we separated, but when he became that sad I melted, and so we reconciled and continued.

I have been to mamma and helped her with her hair. She wanted it washed and set, and I helped her with that. Afterwards, I sat with her a while and talked. She didn’t feel especially alert and needed to take oxygen several times, and I think it’s so sad that she must be sick!

It started when she got a cold, and then it developed into pleurisy. And when she came to the hospital, it turned out that she also had emboli in both her heart and lungs. I felt guilty about it, because it was I who had given her hormone injections, which had been prescribed for her by a gynecologist for her menopausal difficulties. It’s surely because of those shots she has gotten emboli! I though. Because there is a calculated risk that emboli can develop because of hormone preparations. And she didn’t get well and had to start with oxygen.

A few years earlier, papa had got early retirement pension. Actually, he should have been fired, because he had begun to tipple at work. But before that happened, an accident occurred. He lost his foothold when he stood on a metal ladder and caught one leg between the stepping pins and broke it so the bones stood out in two places.

For that reason, he was home all day, and finally mamma couldn’t cope with him, because he couldn’t cope with her being sick. When he had drunk only a few beers, he was annoyed and couldn’t tolerate anything. He scolded her and was impatient, and she tried not to cough to avoid bothering him.

And that was what finally drove her to get a divorce from him. Finally, but too late, because she has never had any joy in her freedom. She has got it more peaceful, but she can never do what she wants because she is sick.

Eva-Lena called and asked how I felt when I fell in love with Bosse and how I could be certain that I loved him. I don’t really know why she was interested in that, all of a sudden, but I answered as well as I could.

I met him in Funbo, when I were there with a friend and danced. I was sitting alone at a table, when a guy called Gurkan walked up to me and invited me to dance. He had been drinking and was drunk, and I didn’t want to dance with him or speak with him, but he sat down beside me and started talking. He tried to hold me and kiss me also, and I felt more and more bothered and didn’t know how to get rid of him. Then another guy suddenly came across the dance floor and up to me and asked me to dance.

And that was Bosse. He came like an angel to the rescue, and I was so relieved that I said yes immediately. Then we danced several dances during the evening, and when it was time to leave, Solan and I got a lift with him and his mate in their car. They drove us home, and in the car Bosse asked if he could see me again. It wasn’t love at first sight from my side – and not from his either – but I thought he seemed nice and said yes. How long it took afterwards before I realized that I was in love with him, I don’t remember.

Speaking of being drunk, it seems that Eva-Lena has begun to drink again, after a break for more than ten years. She claims that it’s related to a young guy who she has met at work. But she seems so confused, and I don’t quite understand the reason for it. I can understand if she worries about that it can become difficult in her relationship with Lasse, if he should find out that she is interested in another, but that doesn’t seem to be the reason. And she probably doesn’t expect to be forced to tell him about it. But in that case, whatever she feels for that guy can’t be especially serious.

Before Christmas, Eva-Lena and I intended to apply for an evening class in English in the spring and study a little during our free time. We meant to start at the gymnasium level. Actually, we have that knowledge already, but it doesn’t do any harm to refresh one’s memory, we said. We have normalskolekompetens, which is what the exam from the girls’ school was called. It’s more than realen but less than studenten. But our intentions came to nothing.

At that time, when we still went to school, Eva-Lena wanted to be a journalist, I remember, and I was thinking about becoming a psychologist or a nurse.

But I never studied beyond the girls’ school. I was together with Bosse then and wanted to move away from home as soon as possible, so I began to work directly after school. I got employed as an assistant nurse at Kungsgärdet’s hospital. Eva-Lena worked first at Salabacketvätten and later at a restaurant, before she came to the Academic Hospital, where she works now. I sometimes think that I should continue to educate myself within health care and get an exam, but so far nothing has come of it.

Elsa, one of our patients, is very trying. I know that she hasn’t had an easy time in her life, with a man who drank and a son who is a drug addict, but I react negatively to her behaviour all the same.

It’s worst in the mornings, before she has been washed and dressed. Then I don’t know how many times she can ring. And when I come to her, she says: “Help me sister, help me, I think I’ll faint!” But there isn’t anything physically wrong with her in that way, and everyone knows that she is only shamming.

The thing that makes it tough for me, I believe, is that her helplessness reminds me of my mamma. I have difficulty tolerating her aura, which says that she wants to be taken care of. It gives me the creeps when I’m near her, and I feel that I want to distance myself from her, but because I know that my reaction is related to mamma, I never express it.

Why has it always been so difficult for me to assert myself and express what I feel?

When I was little, there was always so much nagging from papa’s side at the dinner table, I remember. “Sit properly on the chair!” and “Don’t butter on that side!” and so on. There was so much that was to be exactly his way. But I never dared to protest or be angry.

I couldn’t be angry with mamma either, because she took such offense at it. To her I was most often surly instead. But I have gotten angry with her later. Once I was close to hit her. I don’t remember now what it was about, but I stood in front of her about like papa and said: “God, how I would like to smack you!”

That I haven’t been able to object, must depend on that I have felt hindered – partly because of papa’s anger, and partly because of mamma’s despair – and I don’t think I’m really free from it yet.

I have been interested in a guy at work. His name was Johan. He worked at the internal transport and was a friend of Henrik, who substituted with us previously.

The first time I saw Johan I thought: I’m not afraid of you. I don’t know why that thought appeared in my mind, because I couldn’t know how he was when I had never met him before. It was as if a voice inside me said it to him in my thoughts.

But it took a while before I realized what I felt for him. In the beginning, I believed that I felt unsure and confused when I talked to him just because I didn’t understand him. And I didn’t want to fall in love with a much younger guy. I didn’t want to fall in love at all. I tried to avoid admitting that I had. But I was waiting for him every day and hoped that he would come in with patients, so I would get a chance to see him. I was disappointed if he didn’t come and upset when he did. Finally, I had to admit the truth to myself.

Now he is no longer at work. If I had known that he would disappear, I would perhaps have told him that I was interested in him, but I thought that we had plenty of time, and I was afraid that he would become afraid and deny that what I felt was mutual, if I went straight to the point.

Now I don’t know what to do. I hoped that I would stop thinking about him when I didn’t meet him anymore, but it hasn’t turned out that way. I felt so close to him, even though nothing was said or done… But he probably thought that I was too old, because once he called a girl my age a hag. I don’t know how old he was. Twenty, perhaps.

I have found out Johan’s telephone number. I don’t know what the purpose of it is, because I dare not call him. Just thinking of doing it, makes me upset. He probably wouldn’t remember me, and it would be so difficult to explain to him who I am. What would I say? “Hello, this is Eva-Lena, do you remember me?” No, I can’t say that. And what else would I say? That I love him and want to see him?

I could perhaps send him a letter, to give him time to think about it and get used to it. But I don’t know. The best thing is probably to let it be and try to forget him.

Once when I came out to the parking lot at work, I caught sight of Johan, who was scrapping some ice away from the wind shield on his car. One front door was open, and just as I went by, he took out a sheepskin and shook it, at the same time as he looked at me.

I don’t know what happened then. It felt like an invisible power tried to draw me to him. I had to force myself to continue walking, because my legs became totally stiff, and I almost couldn’t move my feet.

I had thought that I wanted to come along with him to his home, but I didn’t want to scare him, and if you do things that aren’t guided by reason, you have no control over the consequences.

But now I have written a letter to him. I didn’t sign it, because it expresses his feelings as well as mine, and I believe that he knows nevertheless that it is from me. “I love you”, I wrote. Then I took the letter with me when Lasse and went shopping and asked him to stop at a mailbox. I didn’t think of it then, but now I find it strange that he didn’t ask me what I was going to post, because I usually never send any letters.

But he didn’t say anything. He stopped the car, and I climbed out and went up to the postbox. My legs felt totally stiff, and when I dropped the letter in the box, it was as if two strong forces collided in the air above. It was like a discharge, like in a thunderstorm, but invisible and without sound. It was heaven and hell that met, I believe. But I wasn’t afraid, because I knew that I was in the right.

Heaven is God and truth, and hell is the devil and lie. If you deny yourself and what you feel, you leave an opening for the devil to come in. Then he takes place in your soul and forces you to do things that you don’t want to do. To be free you must disclose all lies that you have believed in and admit that you’re worth real love. That’s why the devil tried to scare me so that I wouldn’t send the letter to Johan.

I love you.

I have started to drink again. It’s strange that Lasse hasn’t said anything about it, because I haven’t drunk this much since it was over between us eleven years ago. He hasn’t asked why I do it, and he doesn’t seem surprised. He just accepts it without a word.

Sometimes he drinks a little himself, but never so much that it shows. In the beginning, I offered it to him, but he doesn’t like vodka and wine, so now he buys his own booze. Though he doesn’t drink as often as I, and not as much. He doesn’t like to lose control, he says. He thinks it’s beneath his dignity to be loaded and not know what he says and does.

But it’s not beneath my dignity. When I am drunk, I am able to know what Johan is feeling. I can identify with him, so that I become him. Sometimes it’s he, and not me, who lives here. Emotionally it’s he, and rationally it’s me. And I go along with it, because I don’t want to be separated from him.

Once Lasse began to talk about girls he was together with before he met me. Them he has never told me about. But he told Johan, when they sat here and drank together.

I want to meet you.

I have sent Johan a postcard that depicts the castle and Svandammen. I went up to the kiosk by the cafeteria and bought it. I am the castle that he can live in if he wants to, and his long-necked swan is welcome to swim in my pond.

I know that he perhaps gets angry when he receives cryptic messages, but if you don’t understand with your intellect, you can react more easily emotionally, and I know that his feelings can comprehend my pictures.

When I dropped the card in the mailbox, an old man nearby began to whistle a melody that mamma used to sing when I was little. “When spring comes to the mountains, may I come to you then?”

It was a sign, I think. Subconsciously, other people perceive my need for Johan and try to give me information about him. If I listen emotionally, I can get to know it.

The best thing, of course, would be to meet him in reality. I have written to him and told him that I want to do that. But I don’t know how it can be done. When he wants to get a girl, he usually goes to Baldakinen and dances. If I dared, I could go there also and perhaps meet him. I wonder how it would feel to dance with him – if I could dance, that is. But he would never ask me.

The easiest would be if we met in a car. There you are secluded, and you can do what you feel without having to worry about what other people would like and think about it.

But how can we meet in a car if he never comes and asks if I would like to ride with him?

Do you want to meet me?

The last time we were at Lasse’s parents, and Lasse and his dad talked about something that I didn’t listen to very carefully, I heard Lasse say: “You don’t help an alcoholic by being a half alcoholic yourself.”

I became upset and felt stung. At the same time, I thought that it isn’t applicable to Johan and me. He is not an alcoholic, and I don’t think that I help him by drinking. It’s what I get to learn about him when I drink that can be of help, and when I know enough, I won’t need to keep on with it anymore.

A guy who just had come back from a desert expedition reported:

“On the third day the whiskey was gone, and on the fifth day the beer was gone.”

“But didn’t you have any water?”

“Water? Who the hell is thinking of washing himself in that situation?

Once when Johan sat in the caretaker’s office, and I happened to pass by, he called me.

“Eva-Lena!” I heard. “Come here!”

In front of him on the desk he had an open weekly.

“Do you know why the Norwegians have stopped using ice cubes in their grogs?” he said.

“No?”

“Because the guy who knew the recipe for ice has died.”

I laughed then, but actually I didn’t want to, because it felt as if he were trying to joke away that he wasn’t happy. I think that you should admit and experience the pain instead of denying it.

I looked at his neck and shoulders and took a ruler that lay on the desk and drew it over his hair. He sat motionless and let me do it without objecting.

Afterwards I thought: Why did I do like that? I didn’t understand it, but now I think I know the reason. There was no physical limit between us, and that’s why I felt that I had the right to do whatever I wanted with him.

I want to marry and have children with you.