Shame

mother. She was usually behind the closed bedroom door, and they used to tiptoe past it so they wouldn’t bother her.
    ‘Pappa never hit me but he hit Mamma, and that was almost the same thing.’
    Vanja looked at the picture again, and there was another pause before she went on.
    ‘We never knew who would be coming home when the front door opened. Whether it was Pappa or that other man who looked just like him but who was a stranger to us. All he had to do was open his mouth and say a single word and we could tell.’
    Maj-Britt hadn’t known. Vanja had never hinted with a single word what went on at her house.
    ‘You mustn’t forget that Örjan grew up the same way I did, with a father who lashed out and a mother who took it. So now I always ask myself where everything actually has its origin. It’s a bit easier then, a bit easier to understand why people do things that can never be forgiven.’
    It was quiet in the room. The sun had reached the windows and was filtering in through the narrow gaps between the slats in the blinds. Maj-Britt looked at the striped pattern on the opposite wall. Then she took a deep breath so she would dare to ask the question that she felt she had to ask.
    ‘Are you afraid to die?’
    ‘No.’
    Vanja hadn’t even hesitated.
    ‘Are you?’
    Maj-Britt lowered her eyes and looked at her hands in her lap. Then she slowly nodded.
    ‘This is how I usually look at it. Why should it be any scarier to die than to be unborn? Because actually it’s the same thing, only our bodies don’t exist here on earth. Dying is nothing but returning to what we were before.’
    Maj-Britt could feel the tears coming. She wanted so much to find consolation in Vanja’s words, but she couldn’t. She somehow had to reciprocate, that was her only chance. And all at once she remembered what she had come here to do. So that she wouldn’t let any hesitation overpower her, she started telling the story. She didn’t gloss over anything and she didn’t leave anything out. She put the entire sad truth into words. How it had been. What she had done.
    Vanja sat quietly listening. She let Maj-Britt spill out her whole confession without interrupting. There was only one thing Maj-Britt didn’t confess, and that was the plan she intended to carry out. The debt she had to pay off.
    In order to dare.
    Vanja sat lost in thought when Maj-Britt finished. The sun had retreated and the stripes from the blinds on the wall had faded away. Maj-Britt could feel her heart pounding. With each minute that passed, Vanja’s silence became more ominous. Maj-Britt was so afraid of what she would say, how she would react. Whether Vanja would condemn her too and not accept her excuses. It wasn’t merely the lies. Now that Maj-Britt understood Vanja’s loss, the life she herself had chosen seemed a sheer insult. To her consternation she realised that she carried even more guilt.
    ‘You know, Majsan, I don’t think you ever understood how important you were for me over all those years, how much it meant to me that I had you.’
    Maj-Britt was stopped cold in the midst of taking a breath. The abrupt change threw her off balance.
    ‘I was so sad when you stopped writing without telling me where you had gone. At first I thought maybe I had done something to make you angry, but for the life of me I couldn’t imagine what it might have been. I wrote a letter to your parents and asked them where you were living, but I never got an answer. And then time passed and … well, everything turned out the way it did.’
    What Vanja said was so amazing that Maj-Britt could find no words. How could she have been important to Vanja? It had been just the opposite. Vanja had been the strong one, the one who was needed. Maj-Britt had been the needy one. That’s how it had always been.
    Vanja smiled at her.
    ‘But I never stopped thinking about you. That’s no doubt why the dream felt so strong.’
    Again they sat quietly for a moment, looking at each other. So much time and yet so little had changed, not really.
    ‘Can’t you and I do something together when I get out?’
    Maj-Britt gave a start at her words but Vanja continued.
    ‘You’re the only person I know out there.’
    The question was so unexpected and the thought so disorientating that she had a hard time taking it in. Vanja’s words implied so much more, punching big holes in Maj-Britt’s solidly anchored image of the way everything was and would continue to be. To think