Shame

then.’
    She vanished into the hall and when she opened the front door she called back towards the flat, ‘By the way, I put the earplugs you ordered on the kitchen table. See you!’
    Maj-Britt didn’t answer, but to her dismay she felt like crying. A thick lump in her throat made her frown and she hid her face behind her hand until Ellinor had gone.
    Ellinor was puzzling. Maj-Britt could not for the life of her understand the friendliness that never diminished no matter how she behaved. There was every reason to be suspicious, because there must be something that Ellinor was expecting in return. She was like one of those advertising flyers that came through the letter-box, some even printed in type that looked like handwriting, as if it were sent solely to her. Dear Inga Maj-Britt Pettersson. We are pleased to make you this fantastic offer . The better the deal seemed, the more reason to be suspicious. There was always a catch, carefully concealed in the gush of kindly language; the harder it was to discover, the greater reason for caution. Nothing was ever done out of sheer kindness. There was always a profit motive. That’s how the world worked, and everyone did their best to get a piece of it.
    Ellinor was like an advertising flyer.
    There was every reason to mistrust her.
    She took the picker-upper and reached out for the letter. It had been lying like a magnet there on the desk, waiting for her to capitulate. Now she could no longer resist it. Her hands trembled as she unfolded the rest of the letter.
    I’ll never forget the time I questioned your father’s faith. Now I don’t understand how I dared. We had just read in school that Christianity wasn’t the biggest religion in the world, and I remember how surprised I was by that. If there were more people who believed in a different God then maybe they were the ones who were right! Jesus, how angry he was. He explained that those sorts of thoughts would land me in hell, and even though I didn’t believe him, it took a long time to get over his words. It was the first time I experienced God as a threat. He said that everyone who didn’t acknowledge Jesus Christ as the Son of God was not welcome in the Kingdom of Heaven, and I wanted so much to ask about all those people who lived before Jesus was born. Whether it wasn’t a little unfair to them, since they hadn’t even had a chance, but I never dared ask. It was enough to have been damned once that day .
    I always thought it was so strange that we human beings were ‘sinful’ and that in church we were supposed to pray to God to forgive us our sins whether we thought we had committed any or not. I remember you tried to make me understand that it wasn’t only sins we committed consciously that counted, but also the original sin we were born with. ‘Through the carnal conception because of our sinful seed.’ I will never forget those words. They were so upsetting that I didn’t reject them until many years later when I realised that ‘the carnal conception’ was the only way for us to propagate. I decided that God probably wanted us to do it, since He had taken so much trouble creating us .
    When we were growing up, sex was something that boys were ‘unfortunately’ interested in and that we girls understood that sooner or later we would ‘have to learn to tolerate’, but that we absolutely mustn’t ‘give in’. We weren’t supposed to wonder why it got so confusing when we reached our teens and boys were the only thing we thought about and we actually wanted to ‘give in’ a little, of our own free will. I wish that amongst all the warnings and all the scare propaganda they had added a little footnote and explained that it’s quite natural for all people to feel desire and want to reproduce .
    Another strong memory from my childhood was the time we found those magazines in your father’s desk drawer. For the life of me I can’t remember what we were doing in there, but I assume it was my big idea. I was always the one who decided we should do things we weren’t supposed to do. Those magazines were quite tame by today’s standards, but finding them at your house was like discovering the sign of Satan in the church, and you were utterly terrified. You were convinced that someone had broken into your house and put them there, but nothing on earth was going to make you say anything to your parents. Do you remember how we put the magazines on the floor and then hid under the bed? I