The Demon of Dakar - Kjell Eriksson [8]
Eva had talked to him before. He would often sit on the bench by the little play area and watch his five-year-old son build an endless series of sand castles. Sometimes the son was gone and Eva guessed he was with his mother. Pär was from the north. That was the only thing she knew about him.
The woman above her came from the south. She had mentioned Tuzla, but also a village that Eva could no longer remember the name of.
They had all gathered in a building with fifty-seven other families. Eva imagined them all walking from various directions, leaving behind them lives, relatives, and friends, in order to end up in a rental apartment building on the outskirts of Uppsala.
An area at the outskirts of the city where the cries of the tawny owl could be heard from the forest.
Earlier she had not thought about her surroundings so much. It was only after her divorce from Jörgen that she felt that she had the room to think. While they were still living together, it was as if he took all her time, used up all the oxygen around her, filling the space with his volubility and his thundering laugh. There were those who felt that he was sick, that his incessant talking was a manic fixation on the threat of silence, but Eva knew better. It was an inherited characteristic; his father and grandfather had been the same.
It was possible that he suffered from an overinflated self-confidence. The problem was that he seemed to nourish this self-confidence by turning to his surroundings, preying on Eva like a predatory digger wasp in order to strengthen himself.
Sometimes she pitied him, but only sometimes, and more rarely lately. As they sat in the lawyer’s office discussing the divorce, she felt only fatigue and great scorn. Jörgen was going on as usual, as if he did not understand that they were there to discuss the custody arrangements for the children.
The lawyer interrupted his stream of words by asking if he could really afford to stay in the highly mortgaged condominium. That halted his speech and he gave Eva a terrified look, as if seeking the answer to a question he had never posed. Eva understood that it was not the financial aspect that frightened him, but the sudden realization that he would have to live alone from now on.
Since then, this anxiety did not seem to want to leave him. It did not make him quiet, quite the opposite, but for Eva, Jörgen’s tentative questions about her well-being and tiptoeing into areas that they had not previously touched on were indications that he was not really mature, not conscious of what it meant to share one’s life with another person, that their marriage had simply been an extension of Jörgen’s life with his single mother. She, the bitch, as Eva called her in private, really had only one close friend, and that was her son.
Now the thoughtfulness and questions came too late. Eva was never tempted to grab one of the hooks he tossed out that they should perhaps try again. She maintained her distance and was mostly exaggeratedly formal. She knew that it hurt him, but in an obscure way it gave her a sense of satisfaction. It was a primitive revenge, but she could not be bothered with his sad monologues, where self-pity always lurked behind his account of how difficult life was.
Jörgen came and picked up Patrik and Hugo every other weekend and Eva put up a wall held together with indifference and suspicion toward his incessant drivel, glad to have escaped but careful not to become mean or ironic. He complained that he and the boys did not have a good relationship, but when Eva suggested that the boys should spend longer periods of time with him, he backed off.
Nowadays she had all the time in the world. The only schedule she had to observe were the appointments at the employment agency, and her only duty was to care for her two children, make sure that they got off to