ELEANOR
The light in the small room is cold, the stark, white glare of an eco-friendly bulb. I’m sure it’s meant to be reassuringly normal, just like the anonymous chair I’m sitting on, and the smooth, light-wood table in front of me.
When I look at my hands I can still see the blood, even though I scrubbed them red and raw with the antiseptic soap in the bare white bathroom.
The door opens and I give a start. The man who steps into the room is wearing a police uniform. He has short blond hair and is carrying a portable recording device in his hand.
He puts the recording device down on the table between us. It’s small, gray, and efficient, but it clinks heavily against the wood.
“Is it all right if I record our conversation, Victoria?” he asks.
Victoria, as if we knew each other.
Everything is spinning. I’m so tired, so cold. I close my eyes just to make it stop.
“Victoria?” he repeats, in that same artificially soft goddamn voice.
“Eleanor,” I say as I open my eyes, my tongue dry and rough. “My name’s Victoria Eleanor, but nobody calls me Victoria. Only Vivianne.”
“OK,” he says. “Can I tape our conversation, Eleanor?”
I nod.
“Can you tell me what happened when you arrived at your grandma’s?” he asks.
“Please, don’t call her Grandma. She hates it. Her name’s—her name was Vivianne.”
“OK,” he says amenably. “Can you tell me what happened when you arrived at Vivianne’s apartment?”
He has bright blue eyes, so even in color that they look unreal. Easy to remember. A good marker.
Does he know? I find myself wondering. Has anyone said the word prosopagnosia to him yet? Explained to him what it means?
I’m good at explaining it. Which isn’t surprising, given how often I have to.
Prosopagnosia, face blindness. It means my brain doesn’t process human faces the same way others’ do. I can’t recognize faces, so have to memorize distinguishing features instead.
Nope, it’s not so handy for parties. Yeah, it’s a good excuse, only it’s not an excuse. It’s my life. I can’t recognize a n y b o d y, not even myself in the mirror.
“I don’t know what happened,” I say.
He says nothing, forces me to fill the silence.
“I was going to her place for dinner. We have dinner together every Sunday; that’s our agreement. She won’t drop by our place or show up at my office or call me twenty-eight times in a row until I pick up, but in return I have to eat dinner with her every Sunday. And I always do. So I was just on my way there when…”
I stare at him. The words fail me.
“It doesn’t have to be perfect,” he says. “Just tell me what you remember.”
So that’s what I do.
ELEANOR
My footsteps echoed in the stairwell. I would always hang back on those last few steps up to Vivianne’s apartment, the place that had been my “home” for sixteen years. If it were up to me I would never go back.
The Sunday dinners were a compromise. Two hours, once a week, when Vivianne got to mutter and pontificate to her heart’s content, foist light sherry onto me in small, delicate glasses, and pick me apart with a fine-tooth comb. It was my therapist Carina’s idea, and the arrangement had worked well for almost four years. It was a compromise.
I didn’t want to cut all ties with Vivianne. She was my grandmother in theory, my mother in practice. Impossible to live with, impossible to live without.
Still, her phone calls that oppressively hot September week had breached our agreement. She wasn’t supposed to call me unless it was an emergency. I never picked up, but that didn’t stop her from leaving voicemail after voicemail: four on Tuesday, six on Thursday. One more late Friday night:
“I can hear them in the walls: they’re whispering to me.”
That last one had made my skin crawl.
I was used to Vivianne calling me drunk and angry, drunk and sad, or even drunk and manic, but this was different. It felt wrong to think of her as old—she was just Vivianne, ageless—but she was almost eighty. Had she started to lose her grip on reality?
I stopped by the front door to her apartment. V. Fälth glistened on the well-polished nameplate, concise and precise.
I braced myself.
Why was it always so stuffy in that damn building? I was already missing my airy apartment. Sebastian’s arm around my shoulders, our well-used Ikea couch, our way-too-expensive TV. I wished I could spend my Sunday nights binge-watching Netflix like everybody else.
I knocked at the door.
A few seconds passed. One, two.
The door opened.
I arranged my face into something resembling a smile and made to step over the threshold, but then I stopped. Something was wrong. The figure in the doorway didn’t fit.
I stared at the person in front of me, searching for Vivianne’s markers, but all I could find was a thick, knitted black hat where her shiny, meticulously coiffed hair should have been.
My eyes quickly dropped to their hands.
They weren’t Vivianne’s. Her long, red nails were missing, as was the bulky topaz ring she usually wore on her right index finger. And they were flecked with something that looked like rust.
“Who…,” I began, but the person had already pushed past me and scurried off down the stairs. I watched them go in confusion, then turned back to the door.
Vivianne was lying in the middle of the hallway. Something beside her on the patterned, slate-blue rug flashed in the light of the small chandelier. I opened my mouth to ask something, but then the smell hit me like a ton of bricks.
It was sweet and heavy—iron and meat and perfume—and it made my stomach turn.
A pair of scissors gaped on the rug before me, the blades spread. I had never seen them like that before. They had always been closed, untouchable: a beautiful, meticulously polished object that sat alongside her matching ornate hand mirror and tobacco pot on the sideboard in the dining room.
But this time they weren’t polished. This time they would stain.
Vivianne reached out for them with thin, splayed fingers.
Strange, my drowsy, sluggish brain thought in that split-second moment of stillness. What does she want the scissors for? And why doesn’t she just sit up and take them?
And then something broke my paralysis, and I realized it wasn’t the scissors she was reaching for, but me; that the wet, bubbling whimper I could hear was coming from her, was her attempt to call my name; that the patterned blouse she was wearing wasn’t patterned so much as punctured, repeatedly, by the scissors that lay glistening on the rug just a few feet from me.
I crossed the hallway in two steps and knelt down beside her, heard my voice babbling, as though far away:
“What is it, what’s happened, what should I do? What do you want me to do?”
She always knew the right thing to do.
So I kept on asking her, again and again, even though I could see the inside of her throat, red and moist. The flesh beneath the skin.
With her outstretched hand she grabbed my wrist, an echo of all the times she had grabbed it before, and clenched it so hard that our bones chafed, as though I were a lifeline and she drowning. Which in a way she was: I could tell from her strained, rattling breaths that the reddish-black stickiness that was gushing all the slower from her neck, onto her yellow silk blouse and her antique Persian rug, was also making its way down into her lungs.
I did the only thing I could think of.
I pressed my free hand to the gap in her neck.
ELEANOR
“Can you remember what the person who opened the door looked like?” the police officer asks. “Can you describe their face? Was it a man or a woman? Do you remember how old they were?”
I shake my head slowly. Meet his shiny blue doll’s eyes as my taut lips say:
“No.”
ELEANOR
It’s too hot in the car for my liking, but I keep my thoughts to myself. This winter has been unusually gray, and the passing fields lie pale, desolate, and frosty beneath a heavy sky, only a thin dusting of snow to shelter them from the wind. It’s enough to make anyone feel chilled to the bone.
Besides, it’s Sebastian’s car, and Sebastian’s driving, so it only feels fair that he should choose the temperature.
“Thanks for driving,” I say.
He gives a faint smile, keeps his eyes on the road.
“No problem. I like driving out here. It’s only in town that I get a little shaky.”
I put my hand on his knee because I know it’s the right thing to do, then give it a gentle squeeze. Even though we have been together six years, this type of gesture still doesn’t come entirely naturally to me.
For a few minutes neither of us says anything. Then Sebastian says:
“I wonder if the house is in a bad state or something. If that’s why your grandmother never mentioned it, I mean.”
“I don’t know,” I reply.
When Vivianne’s lawyer first mentioned Solhöga I assumed it was some sort of mistake. It was back when I was fresh out of the hospital, still unsure of how I would cope in the real world.
The lawyer was very matter-of-fact. He didn’t offer any condolences, which came as a relief.
First and foremost we should discuss Solhöga. That was how he opened the meeting.
He kept it brief. Said that Vivianne had documents relating to a property registered in her name, an old manor house with woodland and private hunting grounds around an hour and a half’s drive north of Stockholm. She had inherited it from her deceased husband. My grandfather.
“I think my grandfather died around Christmas,” I say to Sebastian. “From what I’ve heard they used to celebrate Christmas at Solhöga, so it might have happened there. That could be why she never went back.”
I see Sebastian’s brow furrow slightly.
“How did he die, again?” he asks. “Sorry, I’m sure you’ve told me.”
“I haven’t,” I say. “I’m not actually sure myself. She never talked about it—she didn’t like to talk about him in general. I’ve always assumed it was a heart attack or something. I don’t get the impression he was sick for long—it must have been pretty sudden.”
Out here the houses are fewer and farther between, the homely rural villas replaced by farmsteads, in turn replaced by isolated old cottages with bowed walls and broken windowpanes. The icy smattering of snow lies untouched on last year’s yellow grass. The entire landscape looks deserted. It’s easy to imagine that we’re alone out here.
I look out of the window and chew at my thumbnail, an ugly childhood habit I never quite managed to kick. For months at a time I’ll be able to keep my fingers out of my mouth, but then something will happen and I’ll fall back into it again. Ever since that night I’ve given up trying to stop. My nails are all stumps, squat and ragged, and my cuticles are constantly raw and inflamed.
The GPS impassively instructs us to turn right. Sebastian turns onto a forest-lined road.
The road to Solhöga.
Copyright © 2020 by Camilla Sten
English translation copyright © 2021 by Alex Fleming
