Shame

distorted by her despair over the truth. She had been sleeping in the living room on the ground floor! Liselott had promised to turn off the sauna heater! Weeks of terror that one of the kids who had gone home might have heard her promise to turn off the sauna or seen her upstairs on the sofa. But her statement was allowed to stand unchallenged, and with time it had become the official story about what happened.
    ‘What happened to your brother?’
    Monika couldn’t get the words out. She hadn’t been able to then either, when her mother came rushing across the lawn with only a robe over her night-gown. The top floor had collapsed and the firemen did their best to extinguish the flames that refused to be brought under control. Someone had called her and she had rushed out and jumped into her car.
    The clearest image that remained in Monika’s mind was her mother’s face when she spat out her question, her eyes wide with terror because of what she already knew but refused to comprehend.
    ‘Where’s Lasse?’
    It was impossible to answer. Impossible to utter the necessary words. It couldn’t be true, and as long as nobody said it, it was still not reality.
    She felt her mother’s hands on her shoulders, the fingers making her sick to her stomach as her mother tried to shake an answer out of her.
    ‘Answer me, Monika! Where is Lars?’
    A fireman came to her rescue and it only took him a couple of seconds to say the words that made everything irretrievable, that meant nothing would ever be the same again.
    ‘He didn’t make it.’
    Each syllable slashed down between then and now, irrevocably. The past, so unsuspecting and naïve, was forever sliced away from the future.
    And that was when she saw it. She could sense it in her mother’s eyes as she stood there in her night-gown, desperately trying to protect herself from the merciless words. She saw what would become the greatest sorrow in her life, and what she would spend her whole life trying to change.
    But never could.
    Her mother’s grief over Lasse’s death was deeper than the joy she was able to feel that Monika was still alive.

8
    ‘A nd if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell.’
    She opened her eyes. It had been her mother’s voice. She pulled her hand close and was disgusted by what she smelled. As soon as she could, she got up and went to the sink in the bathroom, washed herself with soap and let the hot water rinse away the sickening vomit.
    It was all Vanja’s fault. Her letter had opened up small channels that Maj-Britt could not control, small trickles of thoughts that she didn’t want to deal with sneaked in, and she wasn’t able to keep them out. As long as the threat had come from the outside she could master it with her old tricks, but now it was coming from inside, and years of defence were levelled, leaving the battlefield wide open.
    Impure thoughts.
    At an early age they had come to her, she never understood from where, suddenly they were just there inside of her. Crawling like black worms out of her brain and making her want things that were unthinkable. Sinful. Maybe it was Satan tempting her after all, the way they said. She could remember it now, what they had said.
    She didn’t want to remember!
    Suddenly she was being forced closer and closer to the screen that protected her, and when she got close enough it was possible to make out details on the other side, details that shouldn’t be allowed to exist. Trickle after trickle came seeping through the tiny channels, piecing fragments of memory together into a whole. Fragments that rooted out everything she thought she had managed, once and for all, to forget and leave behind her. Next to the words that Vanja had written they had wound their way into her consciousness. No one would fight by her side this time. Her parents were dead, and their Jesus had abandoned her long ago.
    She had prayed and prayed but never managed to share their faith; God had not wanted her prayers. She gave up everything to show her obedience and to be embraced by His love, but He never answered. Never showed her a single word or sign that He was listening, that He saw her struggle and her sacrifice. He silenced her because she was not worthy. He rejected her and left her alone with her filthy thoughts.

    She went into the kitchen. There was a little left