The Shadow Girls Read Online Free PDF

poetry for her.
    It was a quarter to eleven when he rang the doorbell. His mother Märta was a night owl. She rarely got up before noon and didn’t go to bed until dawn. Her best time was right around midnight. While Humlin was waiting for her to open the door he thought about all the evenings he had spent fighting exhaustion while she grew more and more animated.
    When she opened the door it was with the expectant yet suspicious energy that was typical of her. This evening Märta Humlin was wearing a trouser suit that resembled a uniform and which reminded him vaguely of the kind of clothes people wore in films from the thirties.
    ‘I thought you said you were coming at eleven?’
    ‘It is eleven.’
    ‘No, it’s a quarter to eleven.’
    Humlin started to get angry.
    ‘If you like I can wait in the hall.’
    ‘If you don’t keep better track of the time you will never get anywhere in this life.’
    ‘I already have got somewhere. I’m forty-two years old and I’m a successful writer.’
    ‘Your last book of poetry is worse than anything else you’ve written.’
    Humlin decided to leave.
    ‘I’ll come back another time.’
    ‘Why would that make any difference?’
    ‘Do you want me to come in or not?’
    ‘Why would I want us to keep talking out in the hall?’
    He followed her into the apartment and almost tripped on a large cardboard box.
    ‘Watch your step.’
    ‘Why is this box here? Are you moving?’
    ‘Where would I move?’
    ‘What is in this box?’
    ‘That’s none of your business.’
    ‘Does it have to be right here so people trip over it when they come to visit?’
    ‘If you’re going to be like this all evening perhaps it would be better for you to come back another time.’
    Humlin sighed, took off his coat and followed her into the rest of the apartment, which reminded him of an overstocked antique store. Here his mother had squirrelled away everything that she had ever come across. Humlin could still remember fights his parents had had about things Märta had refused to get rid of. His father had been a quiet man, an accountant who had treated his children with a mixture of surprise and general goodwill. For the most part he had been a silent partner to his energetic wife, apart from those times when he found his desk or his side of the bed covered with newspapers that his wife refused to throw away. Then he would have a violent outburst of temper that could last for days. But it always ended the same way, the newspapers or the knick-knacks remained in the apartment and he fled back into silence. In contrast, Humlin could not remembera single occasion when his mother had been silent. She was possessed by a deep-seated need to always make herself heard. If she was in the kitchen she banged her pots, if she was on the balcony cleaning the rugs she beat them so the blows echoed in the courtyard.
    Humlin had often thought that the unwritten book closest to his heart was the one about his parents. His father, Justus Humlin, had devoted his youth to the hammer throw. He had grown up in Blekinge, in a village close to Ronneby. He had trained with his homemade hammer behind the family farmhouse. Once he had thrown it so far that it would have set a Nordic record under controlled circumstances. Unfortunately, he was only accompanied by his two younger sisters. They measured his throw with an old tape measure. The Nordic record at that time was held by Ossian Skiöld and measured 53.77. Justus Humlin measured his throw four times and came up with 56.44, 56.40, 56.42 and 56.41. He beat the Nordic record by over two metres. Later, when he started competing regionally, he never managed to throw the hammer past fifty metres. But he insisted until he died that he had once thrown it further than anyone else in Scandinavia.
    Märta Humlin had never been interested in sport. Her world had been that of culture. She had grown up in Stockholm, the only child of a successful and well-to-do surgeon. Her