He saw that she was a sleepwalker balancing on a slack rope over the abyss. Unbidden, he took it upon himself to be her safety net.
They met about a year after she had left the hospital against the doctors’ recommendation. They met, and she stayed with him. He did not oblige her to stayit was not in his nature to exercise power of any kindbut he offered himself and his undemanding ways. He never tried to force her into an intimacy she did not have to offer, but he kept an attentive steadfast watch at the threshold of her aloofness. He did not set out to conquer her no-man’s-land but waited patiently for the night to end, for her to awaken. To wake her himself would have been highly dangerous; he understood that.
When she hurt him, it was never a conscious, intentional actshe had no intentions at all, and her consciousness drifted through the shadow landscapes of the underworld. For her, he was a place of rest, of clear replenishment and peace. The most beautiful name he knew was Ljusvattnet, (lucent water), a lake in Norrland. Yes, she thought, that could be his own name, Lucent Water.
Their son was a quiet, serious child who observed his world with tolerant attention. The mother’s aloofness became, in her son, a kind of remote, though not cool, watchfulness. With an open book propped against the edge of the table, the milk bottle in her left hand and the child on her right arm, she would sit for hours, feeding the boy. After a while, mother and child would forget their common undertaking, the mother would become absorbed in her book and the child would stop sucking in his food, which was getting cold; his serious brown eyes observed his surroundings, but he did not participate.
Perhaps, if the father had not been there, the child would have forgotten even to breathe. While the woman lay on her bed in their one-room apartment in one of the worst slum districts of Stockholm, avidly devouring the books the man had lugged to their place from the library, he would be pushing the son in his baby carriage across the rocky hills and among the scrawny pines of the area. The father had something of the child’s guileless, defenseless nature, and the son had the moderation of the grown manthey both enjoyed each other greatly. The man became the woman’s and the child’s lifeline. Like small, light boats moored to the buoy of the mother ship, they drifted, gently swaying, on their separate currents. The man did not try to bring them to harbor, he just saw to it that they were not shipwrecked.
‘I guess the safety net should have been more finely meshed,’ he said with a touch of bitterness many years later, after she had left him. No, she thought, that’s not how it was. Love is not enough or can be too much. When she no longer needed his kindness and patience, when she began to take advantage of them, she had to leave. But she always felt grateful for the years of rest by the shore of the lucent water.
Translated by Joel Agee.