Читать книгу Integrity - Anna Borgeryd - Страница 17

10

Fight the feeling, leave it alone.

Cause if it ain’t love, it just ain’t enough to leave

a happy home.

Pussycat Dolls, ‘Don’t Cha’, 2005

Vera felt strangely nervous. It was only Adam she was going to see – her husband, who loved her. Yet since the spring, he had also become a hurtful stranger. This duality tore at her, and when she met his eagerly searching eyes at the Arlanda airport arrivals gate, she was immediately forced to look away, to redirect her gaze to the floor.

This is where it can all fall apart, she thought as she looked at the tracks of thousands of travellers’ feet. Feet that were hurrying home to where they belonged. For her, it wasn’t that easy. She observed the distance to the floor, how far she would fall if she collapsed, and felt an inner trembling in her chest. He had reached her now and gave her a hug. Passively, she lifted her arms and lightly touched his back, recognized his familiar scent.

He was the same as ever: dark and slender. A restrained way of moving. But he looked older, more haggard and worried. Had he lost weight? His shoulders were more angular than usual. He had let his stubble grow, so his beard was no longer rough, but felt soft against her cheek. He was still strikingly handsome, with his dark hair, clear blue eyes and fine features. And the beard suited him, she thought. Yet he was no longer her Adam.

He had stopped asking for forgiveness. He talked about the weather. After a couple of hours at their favorite pub on Söder, the atmosphere was better and there were glimpses of how they used to be. In those moments, Adam’s face lit up like a 100-watt bulb. When they talked about her knee, he agreed that it sounded like something wasn’t right.

‘Unfortunately, it’s probably the cruciate ligament. I’m also guessing there is a meniscus splinter stuck here.’ With practised fingers, he pushed carefully on Vera’s joint.

‘I think so too, I’ve said so, but…’

‘You have very little thigh muscle left to stabilize it.’ He felt her left leg without embarrassment and looked concerned, ‘You are being really careful, aren’t you? You can easily twist it so it rips even more. It wouldn’t take much external force at this point.’

‘I know. I have a doctor’s appointment again in a month, so they’ll have to come up with a solution then.’ Vera shifted position, uncomfortable with Adam’s touching her.

‘Västerbotten County government,’ sighed Adam and removed his hands. ‘Pity I’m not an orthopaedic surgeon. I would have gone in and fixed it right away.’

‘Yes, you would have,’ Vera admitted.

‘And we would have done the ears too,’ smiled Adam as he stroked one of Vera’s ears.

It had been a standing joke between them, that he would remove some of the cartilage that made her ears stick out unusually far from her head. And she usually joked back that it would have been a good idea, if it wasn’t such a waste of resources. Because seriously, although it was tiresome that the priest at their confirmation classes had called her ‘You there, with the ears’, there was nothing really wrong with them. They didn’t hurt and her hearing was good. There were lots of people with real problems who didn’t get the surgical help they needed. Like her knee right now. Or the people with burn injuries in Colombia whom Adam could have given new faces, if only he had been there. But this time she couldn’t make jokes about her protruding ears. It was like something was stuck in her throat.

They sat close together on the bus home to the apartment on Liljeholmen, trapped in the moisture and heat with strangers who politely avoided each other’s eyes by looking out at the city, which was cloaked in a grey drizzle. Vera realized that she felt terribly lonely sitting beside her husband and all these people. When the radio station blaring forth from the driver’s seat switched pop songs, it hit Vera all at once. As soon as she heard ‘I know you want it, it’s easy to see,’ her breathing became uneven and she realized helplessly that it was going to get worse. She stared at the floor of the bus, at the black and yellow striped tape warning passengers to be cautious. She tried in vain to get her lungs to work normally.

Pitiful. That is what she had become. She – who used to dare to do everything she wanted to do. She had dared to work at a field hospital, in the midst of communicable diseases, mere kilometers from the war. But now she couldn’t even deal with the sound of a little dance music. Vera felt a rising pressure in her chest and her hands tingled and started to go numb. In the end, she made a decision. Panic-stricken, she pushed the stop button, got up and stumbled off the bus as soon as it stopped. Full of questions, Adam grabbed her backpack and followed her.

‘I feel sick,’ was all Vera managed to say as she hobbled anxiously along the edge of the park, looking for an undisturbed corner. There was no tree cover, no dense vegetation, no big rocks. At last, in desperation, she lifted the lid of a dog-waste bin. There was a pile of black plastic bags inside, and the stench overwhelmed her. She vomited on the disgusting pile of plastic and closed the lid. Her delicious lunch – thrown up on the park’s collected dog shit. She dried her mouth on a wet hazel leaf that nature had kindly provided. Weakly, she sank down on a wet park bench. Adam dried off a patch of the bench with his gloves and, pale, sat down beside her. Awkwardly, he put his arm on her shoulder.

‘Darling Vera… I’ll call a taxi.’ He got out his mobile phone and began pressing buttons.

Ominous thoughts came into Vera’s head. ‘Darling Vera’? What do you mean by that? Unspoken questions filled her whole world. She noticed that he was worriedly seeking eye contact with her, but she continued to watch the rain hitting the grass. All she could think was, you have to stop saying that!

‘How do you feel?’ he asked when he opened the door of the taxi for her.

She was wet; she was shivering, but at least the empty, hard knot that was her stomach felt calmer. ‘Better, I guess.’

He stroked her hand as, in silence, they travelled the short distance to the three-room apartment that they had renovated together.

‘Maybe you’d like to take a warm bath?’ he asked in the elevator, and tears formed in her eyes at the familiarity of his thoughtfulness.

‘Maybe,’ she managed to say before turning to face the corner and pretending to look for something in her backpack so he wouldn’t see her tears. She shuddered in the face of what she now knew. If I just go inside it will be better, she promised herself. Come home? Come… in.

But the metallic click of the key in the lock released a seeping anxiety. Adam went straight into the bathroom and began to fill the bathtub. Vera stepped hesitantly into what had been her home. She went into the half-renovated kitchen and ran her hand over the tiling that they had chosen together. She was listening to the second hand moving with precision around the face of the kitchen clock when she caught sight of something in the dish drainer – my cup! At least it’s washed now. Was that what he had planned to do with himself too… And then just act like normal again, clinically correct, as if nothing had happened? The sound of running water stopped.

‘I did the laundry; I’ll just run down and get it so you have clean towels.’

She heard Adam’s happy voice disappear out into the stairwell. His light steps on the stairs were a cruel contrast to what was going on inside her.

She walked around in the apartment, her eyes wandering. She remembered that the only thing she had thought about when she had been rescued was coming home here and seeking protection. On the painful trip over the Atlantic she had pictured how Adam would build a fire in the fireplace, sit on the sofa with her in his arms and soothingly stroke her back. And everything would heal. But it hadn’t turned out that way at all. The coffee table caught her attention and something inside her protested violently: I don’t like surprises any more than you do! And once again it was as if she were lying defenseless and the only thing between her and the guerrilla was the darkness and a little downy grass.

She knew that a bus would be arriving at the stop across the street in about three minutes. If she could just keep out of sight so that he didn’t see her… She grabbed her backpack and left.

Cissi kept her promise. Vera accompanied her back to her office after her lectures, and Cissi explained what Future Wealth and Welfare involved. Vera was given tomes and compendiums to read through, and then Friday came, the day she was to be interviewed by the department’s executive board. The board members would decide if she was a suitable representative of ‘the common people’, yet also capable of saying something of interest about future welfare.

On the way down the hall, Vera whispered, ‘What do you think they’re sitting there hoping for?’

Cissi grinned crookedly. ‘They probably want a car mechanic with a burning interest in financial derivatives. Unfortunately, I don’t know any, and I think it would be hard to find one given the time constraints we’ve been working under…’

It wasn’t an answer to lessen Vera’s nerves.

Aware of the seriousness of the situation, Vera was pale-faced as she entered the seminar room. Its walls were decorated with portraits of straight-backed men, each one bearing a plaque engraved with the date of their promotion to professor. The executive board members, all of whom were over 50, sat with their backs to the sun: tall Professor Överlind, with bushy, greying hair; department head Marianne Lange, a small, tough lady; Professor Sparre, with his dark, sharp eyes; and, of course, the day’s main protagonist, Professor Åke Sturesson. Secretary Lilian Blom sat a bit off to the side in a flawlessly ironed white blouse, ready to take notes. A blazer was completely appropriate for the situation, Vera noted with relief, stroking her arms lightly.

After a few polite introductory comments, including an invitation to Cissi to join them, they began to question Vera about her background. Vera felt like she was at a job interview. They seemed particularly interested in her years as a thoracic anesthesiology nurse, when Adam had been training to become a surgeon.

‘So then, opened chest cavities are bread and butter to you?’ Överlind touched his breastbone.

‘Well, I don’t know if I would say that,’ Vera answered, smiling tentatively towards their silhouettes in the backlight, ‘but, yes, I have participated in a number of heart and lung operations.’

‘Why don’t you still work there?’ Sparre sounded suspicious.

Why do you ask that? Vera wondered as she tried to answer. ‘I was waiting for… I was going to go with…’ She stopped and looked down at the table. ‘I had planned to work as a volunteer, so I went abroad last year, first to the Congo and then Colombia…’

‘And now you are back in town,’ Sparre persisted, ‘but not at the hospital?’

‘No, I have actually applied for a part-time position in anesthesiology, but…’ Vera wondered if she should mention all the complications with her knee and the discussions with the unemployment office about her degree of disability. She opted instead for the more impersonal reason why she was not, at the moment, doing the thing she was trained to do.

‘You know how the labor market is for college graduates in this town.’

They nodded; this was a well-known problem. The unemployment office in Umeå struggled with the country’s, if not the world’s, best-educated group of unemployed people. Who wanted to employ someone with a PhD in physics to work in a grocery store? He would probably be Einstein-eccentric and give customers the wrong change because he was busy daydreaming about formulas. Vera knew someone with a pure physics PhD who started playing online poker and now earned three times as much as he had earned as a graduate student, just by ‘reading the board’ – code for systematically winning money from people who couldn’t count the odds, but humbly folding when the opposition was superior.

‘You know about these things; is it true that you can perform a heart massage directly with your hands?’ asked Överlind, as he squeezed his left hand lightly in front of his chest.

‘Yes, it is. I’ve done it myself.’ From the corner of her eye, Vera saw Cissi looking at her in surprise.

‘In other words, you can hold a heart in your hands and get it to start pumping again?’

Överlind’s interest made Vera wonder if he felt himself in need of such help. ‘As the anesthesiology nurse, my clothes aren’t usually sterile. I stand behind a cloth sheet. It is my responsibility to make sure the patient is properly anesthetized, and only the surgeon touches the patient.’

‘But you said that you have held a living heart in your hands…’ said Sparre with a critical tone.

‘Yes. We had an emergency situation on the ward once – a patient who had been operated on to repair a coronary artery went into cardiac arrest. You are not supposed to compress the thoracic region of a person who has just been through an operation. In that case you open the sternum wire.’ Vera saw that nobody understood, so she explained: ‘That’s the steel wire that holds the chest cavity together after the operation.’

‘Why can’t you apply compression from the outside to get the heart started again?’ asked a pale but fascinated Överlind.

‘When you attach a new coronary artery to a heart, one possible reason for cardiac arrest is that a stitch is leaking. In that case, applying pressure will just make it worse.’

All eyes in the sunny room were on Vera. She didn’t understand. She had studied economics and read about welfare, and they were asking questions as if she were applying for a job with an air-ambulance team and they suspected her of pretending to be an anesthesiology nurse.

It was Lilian Blom who finally broke the silence. ‘Was it leaking?’

‘No. It was a ventricular fibrillation – the heart hops and shakes, but it doesn’t pump. I lifted the heart out of the pericardium and touched it really gently until they came with the… well, they’re like small metal spoons that are used to shock the heart and synchronize the electrical impulses.’

‘Did it work?’ asked Överlind.

‘Yes, he survived. In fact, it’s surprising how often things turn out well. Even if it was tense at the time.’

‘And now you are… one of our first-year students?’ Marianne Lange sounded surprised when she consulted her papers.

‘Yes.’

‘Why is that?’ Sturesson and the others looked searchingly at Vera.

She fell silent. I have been sent by what remains of the aboriginal people… because everything we have the power to take, is not actually ours for the taking. She looked at the group in front of her. No. She could not say ‘Koyaanisqatsi: little brothers and sisters, what are you doing?’ Instead she said, ‘Because I want to understand, to know more about how the economy functions and the ideas behind how we use our resources.’

‘And what are you going to do with that knowledge?’ wondered Lange kindly.

Suddenly, Vera saw the connection. Perhaps the antenna that flickered like an electric field around her spine had not taken a strange, 90-degree turn after all? In the academic world, it was two different disciplines, but for her it was the essence of what had always been her calling. ‘I want to help. To ease, to heal, to prevent. I want to… save the world.’

She shrugged her shoulders in embarrassment and, as soon as she had said it, she realized how silly it sounded. Words were insufficient to explain the cluster of characteristics and life experiences that motivated her. What could she say about those chaotic months in Kivu when she tried to help victims of rape and people infected with cholera in the middle of a merciless war? Or about her time in Colombia? How could she explain that four volunteer workers being kidnapped had been the last straw that had forced her onto a new path?

The senior academics chuckled and exchanged amused glances. Vera blushed, and rushed to correct herself, even though she felt that the essence of what she had said was true.

‘I mean, I want to participate and contribute… to something that can change the world for the better.’ That’s the way it is, Vera thought, almost defiantly. Now she sat before them, her life’s goal on display, like a throat exposed for a flock of predators. She had assumed – wrongly it seemed – that the interview would be an economics test. A rejection now would sting much more than if she had failed that kind of test. On the other hand, she thought, if they don’t want me now, then the project isn’t for me anyway. But then, despite the strong backlighting, she thought she saw that Sturesson actually looked flattered.

‘Yes, our investigation definitely has a chance to change EU member states’ welfare systems for the better. And that’s as good a start as any other, right?’ said Sturesson, and he winked at Överlind and Sparre on his right. Överlind smiled, but Sparre did not look amused.

‘Do you know anything about economics, then? For example, can you explain Pareto optimality?’ Sparre’s dark, close-set eyes bored into her.

‘Well, I’ve only been studing economics for six weeks…’ Vera began.

‘And The Development of the Discipline of Economics during the summer,’ added Cissi.

‘Perhaps it is not necessary to conduct a direct interrogation here,’ said Överlind, looking around. ‘Didn’t the application say that the point of the last place was to have someone who isn’t an economist?’

But Vera did not want to avoid the question. ‘Yes, I am a beginner, but as I understand it, it means that resources are optimally distributed; at Pareto optimality it is impossible to make any individual better off without making at least one other person at least equally worse off.’

They looked at her. Överlind amused, Sturesson, Lange and Lilian kindly, and Sparre with a hard-set expression on his face.

Vera continued: ‘Based on that, the first theorem of welfare was formulated, which states that welfare is optimized when the production of goods and services takes place in a completely free market.’

Överlind pushed his chair back and put his hands behind his head.

But Vera was not finished. ‘It’s like we vote with our money about what should be produced. Whatever people are most willing to pay for is assumed to give us the most welfare. But…’

Vera was just about to bring up what she saw as problems with a blind faith in ‘the invisible hand’ of the market, when she suddenly felt a sharp pain in her right ankle. She turned her head and looked at Cissi. Vera realized that Cissi thought she should keep quiet.

The atmosphere became more disorganized and relaxed. Sturesson wondered about formalities. Vera answered that she could begin right away and that she would gladly accept Cissi as her advisor.

Cissi looked happy and held up the compendium that had been put together for the project. She asked, ‘Just a detail – in my chapter, how much attention do you want me to pay to the question of the share of GDP that goes to the public sector?’

Sparre quickly asked, ‘Yes, what was Sweden’s GDP last year?’

Vera’s hand leafed distractedly through the folder as she glanced at Cissi. But Sparre pointed sternly at Vera. ‘No, no. I am asking you. And I don’t want you to look up the answer.’

Vera saw in the backlight that everyone was looking at her and waiting. It became embarrassingly quiet. She took her hand off the compendium. ‘Sweden’s GDP last year was 2,995 billion kronor.’

Lange and Överlind exchanged a satisfied glance. Lilian put down her pen. Vera’s cheeks had turned red, but she couldn’t stop herself. She held up the folder and said, ‘But that information isn’t in here.’

Sparre twisted irritably, looked at the clock, mumbled something about how they had gone on longer than planned and got up to leave the room. Sturesson glared at Sparre as if he had just scored an own goal.

Vera felt like she had been interrogated for 24 hours. Her hands were cold as ice and her pulse was racing. She and Cissi waited alone in the corridor outside the room. All the members of the department’s executive committee remained inside, except for the one who had departed hastily.

‘Don’t worry about Sparre,’ Cissi whispered. ‘He’s against the whole idea; it has nothing to do with you. He thinks that if you don’t have a PhD in economics you can’t contribute anything of interest. But I think you disproved that.’ Cissi looked proud.

Vera wondered for a second whether or not she dared speak up; then she said: ‘But why did you kick me just when I was getting to the most interesting part?’

Cissi looked down and said, ‘I just thought… it was really just a factual question, and you had already answered it correctly. Sometimes it’s just as well to save the objections for later.’

Suddenly the door opened and they streamed out.

‘So, we have made a decision. Welcome on board!’ said Sturesson and shook Vera’s hand. Överlind and Lange did the same. Lilian was carrying so many binders and papers that her hands were full, but she smiled and told Vera that she should come to her office to complete ‘a little paperwork, signatures and suchlike’.

When the group wandered off, Cissi dropped her papers and threw her arms around Vera: ‘Congratulations, research colleague!’

With her free arm, Vera hugged her back. Even if she had failed today, it would still have been worth it, she thought warmly, because she had spent time with Cissi and learned so much. ‘Thanks for all your help! And you were right; they did ask about Pareto optimality. Not to be confused with the Pareto principle, which states that 20% of the time we talked about what was 80% important – namely economics,’ Vera said smiling.

‘I think they just wanted to know a bit about your background and stuff. But somebody who has literally held a heart in her hand – that’s somebody you should be able to trust, right?’ Cissi looked appreciatively at her.

Just before Sturesson disappeared he stopped so suddenly that Lilian almost ran into him with her pile of binders. He called Cissi from the far end of the long, empty corridor. ‘You… um… Ågren?’

Cissi winced and began to pick up her papers, which were spread all over the floor. ‘Mmmm?’

Vera thought it was strange. Hadn’t Åke Sturesson been Cissi’s dissertation advisor for three years? ‘Her name is Åstr…’

Cissi stood up abruptly and the elbow she drove into Vera’s side was enough to silence her.

Sturesson’s voice sounded authoritative: ‘The banquet. Formal attire. At minimum!’ He nodded distractedly at Vera. ‘Yes, that includes you too, of course.’