The Red Address Book. Sofia Lundberg

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СКАЧАТЬ the dress lying there and pulled it over my head. I didn’t know it at the time, but I would be the youngest of the three servants, left with the jobs the others didn’t want.

      I sat on the edge of the bed and waited, my feet pressed firmly together and my hands tightly clutched on my lap. I can still remember the feeling of loneliness that enveloped me in that little room; I didn’t know where I was or what awaited me. The walls were bare and the wallpaper yellowed. There was a small bedside table next to each bed, with a single candle in a holder. Two half-burned down, one new, its wick still waxy.

      It wasn’t long before I heard loud footsteps on the tiles and the rustle of my new mistress’s skirt. My heart was racing. She paused in the doorway, and I didn’t dare meet her gaze.

      “Stand up when I come into the room. There. Back straight.”

      I got up, and she immediately reached for my hair. Her slim, cool fingers moved all over me; she craned her neck and came closer, inspecting every millimetre of my skin.

      “Nice and clean. That’s good. You don’t have lice, do you, girl?”

      I shook my head. She continued to inspect me, lifting wisp after wisp of hair. Her fingers moved behind my ear; I felt her long nails scraping my skin.

      “This is where they usually live, behind the ear. I hate creepy-crawlies,” she mumbled, a shiver passing through her body. A ray of sunshine had found its way in through the window, highlighting the fine, downy hairs on her face, which rose above a layer of light powder.

      The apartment was big and full of paintings, sculpture, and beautiful furniture in dark wood. It smelled of smoke and something else, something I couldn’t quite place. It was always calm and peaceful during the day. Life had been kind to my employer, and she never had to work; she was well-off enough. I don’t know where her money came from, but sometimes I fantasised about her husband. About her keeping him locked up in the attic somewhere.

      Guests often came over in the evening. Women in beautiful dresses and diamonds. Men in suits and hats. They entered, wearing their shoes indoors — a practice I find odd even to this day — and strolled around the drawing room as though it was a restaurant. The air filled with smoke and conversations in English, French, and Swedish.

      My nights in the apartment introduced me to ideas I had never heard of before. Equal pay for women, the right to education. Philosophy, art, and literature. And new behaviours. Loud laughter, furious arguments, and couples kissing openly in the bay windows and corners. It was quite a change.

      I would crouch down when I crossed the room to collect glasses and mop up spilled wine. High heels moved unsteadily between the rooms; sequins and peacock feathers floated to the floor and became wedged between the hallway’s broad wooden tiles. I would have to lie there until the early hours, using a small kitchen knife to remove every last trace of the festivities. When Madame woke, everything had to be perfect again. We worked hard. She expected freshly ironed table runners every morning. The furniture had to be shiny, the glasses free of flecks. Madame always slept until late morning, but when she eventually left her bedroom, she would walk through the apartment, inspecting it one room at a time. If she found anything noteworthy, it was always me, the youngest, who got the blame. I quickly learned what she might spot, and would do one last loop through the apartment before she woke, righting the things the other maids had done wrong.

      The few hours of sleep I got on the hard horsehair mattress were never enough. The seams of my black uniform irritated my skin, and I was constantly tired from the long days. And from the hierarchy and the slaps. And from the men who laid their hands on my body.

       The Red Address Book

      N. NILSSON, GÖSTA

      I was used to people occasionally falling asleep after having too much to drink. It was my job to wake them and send them on their way. But this man wasn’t asleep. He was staring straight ahead. The tears ran slowly down his cheeks, one by one, as his eyes focused on an armchair where another man — young, with a halo of golden-brown curls — was sleeping. The young man’s white shirt was unbuttoned, revealing a yellowed undershirt. On the tan skin of his chest, I could see a tattoo of an anchor, unsteady lines in greenish-black ink.

      The man noticed me.

      “You’re upset, sorry, I …” I hurried to leave.

      The man turned his head, lowering his shoulder to the leather armrest so that he was now half-lying across the chair.

      “Love is impossible,” he slurred, nodding towards the armchair he was staring at.

      I tried to make my voice sound firm. “You’re drunk. Please, sir, get up; you need to leave before Madame wakes.” His hand gripped mine as I struggled to pull him to his feet.

      “Don’t you see, miss?”

      “Don’t I see what?”

      “That I’m suffering!”

      “Yes, I can see that. Go home and sleep it off, and your suffering will feel a little lighter.”

      “Just let me sit here and look at this perfection. Let me enjoy this perilous electricity.”

      He tangled his words as he attempted to capture his mood. I shook my head.

      It was my first meeting with this delicate man, but it certainly wouldn’t be the last. Often, as the apartment emptied and the new day dawned over the rooftops of Södermalm, he lingered, lost in thought. His name was Gösta. Gösta Nilsson. He lived further down the street, at Bastugatan 25.

      “One can think so clearly at night, young Doris,” he would say whenever I asked him to leave. Then, with drooping shoulders and a bowed head, he would stagger off into the night. His cap was never straight, and the tattered old jacket he wore was too big; it hung slightly lower on one side, as though his back was crooked. He was handsome. Often tan, his face had classical features — a straight nose and thin lips. There was plenty of goodness in his eyes, but he was usually sad. His spark had gone out.

      Only after several months did I realise that he was the artist whom Madame worshipped. His paintings hung in her bedroom, huge canvases featuring brightly coloured squares and triangles. No theme to speak of, just explosions of colour and shape. Almost as if a child had been let loose with a brush. I didn’t like them. Not at all. But Madame bought and bought. Because Sweden’s Prince Eugen did the same. And because surrealist modernity had a particular power that most people couldn’t understand. She appreciated the fact that Gösta, like her, was an outsider.

      It was Madame who taught me that people come in many different shapes. That others’ expectations of us are not always right. That there are many routes to choose from on the journey we are all making towards death. That we might find ourselves at difficult junctions, yet the road may still straighten. And that the curves aren’t dangerous.

      Gösta always asked a lot of questions.

      “Do you prefer red or blue?”

      “To which country would you travel if you could go anywhere at all on earth?”

      “How many one-öre sweets can you buy with one krona?”

      After that last question, he always tossed me a krona. He flicked it into the air with his index finger and, with a smile, I caught it.

      “Spend СКАЧАТЬ