Grace Read Online Free PDF Page A

lies. Pointless little lies that didn’t matter, lies never mentioned between them—or, rather, Johan never let on to her that he knew she was lying. Mai was proud, and proud people mustn’t be made to see that one has spotted their weaknesses. It’s upsetting, like stones thrown at a peacock that, in a moment of great ease, treats you to a display of beautiful feathers.
    Letting a coward know that she is, indeed, cowardly can, on the other hand, be very satisfying. Alice, his wife number one, was a coward. “Alice and I were two of a kind,” Johan was wont to say. “We tormented each other.”
    As for Mai’s lies: they were of no account. Simply not important.
    One evening many years ago, Mai set off on the last train to Göteborg. She had been invited to speak on colic in newborn infants at a conference of Nordic pediatricians. Three days without Mai, Johan thought. The truth was, he couldn’t bear being parted from her for so long. When the door slammed behind her, he sat in their apartment in Jacob Aals Gate, rolling a spool of thread around the dining table. It was a Friday evening, and he toyed with the idea of taking himself off to the summer cottage they had bought across the Swedish border in Värmland. Better to be alone in the country than here in town. At least there he had the trees to talk to. He went on fiddling with the spool.
    Then he said out loud, to himself, “Mai can sew.” And then he said, even louder, “Alice couldn’t sew. Alice couldn’t do anything but nag me. And count the pennies.
That
she could do!”
    He cast an eye around the empty apartment. He thought he heard laughter from one corner.
    “Alice, is that you?” he hissed. “Come back to haunt me, have you?”
    He heard the laughter again.
    “Bitch!” he muttered.
    It was late in the evening. Johan knew that when he started speaking his first wife’s name and, worse, when he started talking to her, then desperation lay just around the corner. So he promptly decided that he wouldn’t go to the country cottage in Värmland. No. First thing next morning he would travel to Göteborg and surprise Mai.
    Surprises are, of course, never a good idea. Johan was against surprises of any sort on principle, and one’s principles ought to be taken seriously. It was not a good idea to travel to Göteborg to surprise Mai. For one thing, they never even saw each other and she never found out that he had been there. Never. Not even after he was dead. And like as not she has forgotten all about that seminar. If, on his deathbed, he had asked her, Mai, do you remember seventeen years ago when you took the train to Göteborg to give a lecture on colic in newborn infants? she would have frowned and shaken her head. Mai’s memory has never been very good. The best that can be said of Mai’s memory is that it is selective. She remembers what she chooses to remember and forgets the rest. Johan believed this was one reason why she seemed so content and secure and why he, an insecure individual, could find peace with her. She simply forgets everything that she does not consider worth remembering.
    Johan did not forget. Johan forgot nothing. There were times when he thought that the boil on his face, the bedsores, the bloody incisions, all those things that seeped and ached and throbbed, all those things that were turning his body into a dense swamp, were memories of life lived. That only now, at the end, through pain, had he become a reality.
    “Reality is hell,” he said.
    Only Mai understood what he was saying toward the end, and at the very last not even she could make him out.
    He said to her, “You alone could have eased my pain, Mai.”
    Johan arrived in Göteborg before noon. It was pouring rain. He walked to the hotel, hoping she would still be in her room. He knew she wasn’t scheduled to give her lecture until two-thirty and guessed that she would spend the morning preparing. By the time he reached the hotel he was soaked through. His