The Princess of Burundi - Kjell Eriksson [62]
She took out the stroller and decided to walk. She was heavier now than before the pregnancy. Her breasts and thighs had swelled up and her formerly taut stomach was softly rounded. She wasn’t particularly concerned about it but she knew that a woman her age easily puts on a pound here and a pound there, only to end up overweight and immobile.
The weight gain was surely connected to her new lifestyle. She moved around less now, ate more frequently and in larger portions. It had become one of her weaknesses to help herself to a little extra, to indulge in rich food. Her social life had never been very extensive, but now she rarely socialized with anyone. She enjoyed staying at home watching TV, eating a good cheese with crackers, or perhaps ice cream. She was surprised at how quickly she had adjusted to this life. Of course, she missed her work, the stress, chatting with her colleagues, and the excitement of moving among so many people. At the start of her maternity leave she had felt a big relief, but now she was getting restless.
She was no longer in charge of any investigations, did not attend any morning meetings, and was never woken up by calls relating to violence and misery. She felt released from responsibility. Erik was a surprisingly easy baby. If she kept him on a reasonably regular schedule, he was content. He didn’t have even a hint of colic. The first real problem, if you could call it that, was this rash.
Ann was in town after twenty minutes. She was sweating inside her coat. Earlier she had rarely worn a coat, preferring a short jacket or just a sweater.
“You’re turning into a real lady,” Ottosson had said when she last came down to the station for a visit.
“He means a real old lady,” Sammy Nilsson had added.
They had looked at her in a way they had never done before, or so it seemed to her. She didn’t know what she thought of that. She was proud to be a mother. To be caring for a son on her own. It was no grand achievement, she knew, it was something that millions of mothers had done throughout the ages, and most often without the help of a maternity ward and one-year checkups, but in this matter it was she, Ann Lindell, who was the mother. No one else, neither man nor woman, could take this point of pride from her. She knew it was an old-fashioned and ridiculous thought, but in some way she felt she had been judged good enough. She had been taken up in the ranks of all mothers, living and dead. It was an exclusive club, automatically excluding half of humanity and many others besides, those who could not or did not want to give birth.
Was it the same for men? she wondered. She sensed that she knew too little about them to be able to say. Of course she had met fathers pushing baby carriages with that exalted, almost silly expression, but did it feel the same for them? She had no man to ask. Edvard, the man she had been closest to, had been pained by a lack of contact with his two boys. But he was the one who had left them. Would a woman have been able to escape the way he had done? She was getting tired of these quasi-philosophical homemade analyses but couldn’t shake them off entirely. She knew they provided her with a way of dealing with her loneliness and frustration. For all her intoxication with the wonders of motherhood, she remained alone.
To give birth to a child and watch him develop was a wonderful experience, but at the same time it was rather boring. This was the word she used to herself. She missed the excitement of police work. She now understood more fully why she had chosen this career. It was not so much for idealistic reasons as for the tension, the anticipation of the unknown, the extraordinary, the feeling of playing a furious game where the stakes were nothing short of life and death.
Shortly after one o’clock she arrived at the children’s clinic and was shown into an office to see Katrin, a nurse-practitioner she had met several times before. She liked Katrin, a little woman in gold-colored sandals. She had talked to Ann about