Integrity. Anna Borgeryd
home, leaning against her bicycle up the hill through the rustling pine grove, her head full of things she wanted to have said. It was only when she was going downhill that she carefully rode her bike, because she could not bend her left leg enough to pedal a full circle. Adam wouldn’t like this, she thought as the bike rolled downhill and she exposed her weakened leg to the risk of even greater injury. But do ‘we’ even exist any more? The question pained her.
On Monday she went to the department to see Cissi and discuss her chapter. Cissi was upset. There was some problem with the financing for her graduate studies.
‘They won’t let me finish,’ said Cissi gloomily. ‘Unless I agree to teach more, of course. If I teach full-time then there is money to pay me.’
‘But doesn’t that just delay the problem?’ wondered Vera. ‘How are you going to finish your dissertation if you teach full-time? Isn’t it better to take out a student loan and finish your research?’
Cissi shook her head, ‘Not allowed. No student loan after you’ve been accepted to graduate studies. Maybe I’ll have to settle for making it halfway and finish with a Master’s degree? She wiped a little tear from the corner of her eye and gave a forced smile. ‘But now we’re going to talk about your chapter!’
It still felt only half thought-through and unstructured, but thanks to Cissi’s guidance, Vera sensed that she was beginning to see a pattern. A basic problem with the economy as it exists today is that it is much more profitable to exploit a finite resource and mass-produce completely new stuff than to take care of something old and repair it when necessary, thought Vera as she sat on the bus on the way to the second-hand shop in Ersboda. Not to mention taking care of old people.
The second-hand shop was located in a big warehouse space, and to the right, beyond the shelves with knick-knacks and porcelain, were the used clothes. Vera looked through the assortment of full-length party dresses and found four that she thought might do. But it was more difficult in the changing room; three of the dresses were out of the question. There was only one dress, a green, empire-waist creation, that she could even imagine wearing to the banquet, and that was too big.
She sat down, disheartened, and wondered what she was going to do. She had to wear something, and pretty, full-length dresses didn’t grow on trees. She stood up again and faced the mirror, pinching the back of the dress, with its many shades of green. It immediately fitted better. She liked the short sleeves and the square-cut neckline. The dress reminded her of the ones in Jane Austen films. Vera thought that the dress would work if she took it in at the back. Solveig at Solbacka – she had been a seamstress – maybe she can tell me what to do and lend me her sewing machine?
Vera decided to chance it, so she paid the modest price for the dress – a quarter of what it would have cost to hire the red one. But she knew that, in contrast to the red one, which – with the brown bra – was ready to go, this one would require her attention. So appropriate, thought Vera, I have to devote time to reproduction.
When she went to Solbacka that afternoon she filled her backpack with a little food to snack on and the green empire-waist dress. After her shift she knocked on Solveig’s door. The old woman came to open it in her wheelchair and smiled radiantly when she saw Vera. After Vera had given her the fruit and bread and they had chatted a while, she summoned up her courage and asked:
‘Solveig, I wonder, would you be able to help me with something?’
Vera was invited into the small apartment. She looked around with interest at the walls, where bits of fabric and ribbon competed for space with photographs of a younger Solveig sailing, sailplaning and riding elephants. In several of the pictures she was with a happy man with a long, kind face.
‘Is that your husband?’ asked Vera, pointing to a picture in which Solveig and the man were embracing in front of a display window.
‘Yes, that is my Gustav,’ said Solveig warmly. ‘And there is my studio, which he helped me set up.’ She pointed at the picture. Studio Sun was painted on the enamelled plate that stuck out from the well-preserved wooden building.
‘Yes, you used to be a seamstress,’ said Vera. She picked up her backpack and pulled out the green dress. ‘I have a… job you could call it, at the university. And as part of the job I have to go to a party, one where I have to wear a full-length dress.’
‘Ah. Are you going to the fall banquet?’ A professional interest glittered in Solveig’s eyes as she felt the fabric of the dress. ‘Hmm, silk voile with Belgian lace.’ She looked at the price tag and smiled. ‘You got a bargain, I can tell you that!’ Solveig looked at the seams on the inside, ‘Well made. I’m guessing the 1960s.’
‘Yes, it is lovely, but, well, it doesn’t fit properly. It’s too big.’ Vera held the dress up to her body to show her. ‘But am I right that it can be taken in somehow and shortened?’
Solveig told Vera to put on the dress. She took out a pincushion and had Vera stand in front of a full-length mirror. With clever, practiced hands she pinched and pinned the dress. Vera watched her with admiration, but also with growing concern over the amount of work it was going to take to alter the dress. There was no way it could be done in 10 minutes by sewing some simple seam up the back, as Vera, in her ignorance, had thought. It was just as her father always said, If you think something is simple, that’s usually because you don’t have any idea how difficult it really is.
‘You’re still limping?’ asked Solveig, as she calmly concentrated on the job in front of her.
‘Yes, it feels like my leg is a little dislocated all the time. I think the meniscus is torn and a fragment isn’t in the right place, so it chafes and the knee locks up. But I have another appointment with the doctor next week, and then they surely have to understand the problem, because it hasn’t healed even though it’s been six months.’
‘Oh, that doesn’t sound good.’ Solveig looked at Vera with concern and continued working in silence. After a while she asked, ‘How are things with you otherwise?’
There was something about Solveig’s kind tone and the way she gently handled the dress. Copious amounts of salty tears started rolling down Vera’s cheeks.
‘It felt so obvious!’ She said the word as if she had said despair.
Solveig calmly worked on.
‘But now I feel completely lost. Everything is just… like a big black hole. And I chose it all myself!’ Vera’s voice was terribly thin, as if she had lost faith in everything.
‘Yes, you young people today, it isn’t so easy for you,’ said Solveig softly, handing her the roll of paper towels that was stuffed in between the geraniums on the windowsill. ‘You have so much freedom, and when things become difficult you blame yourselves.’
She rolled her wheelchair back a little and leaned her head to the side to study her work from a distance, then she rolled forward and started pinning again.
‘So what have you chosen that is so wrong, do you think?’ she continued softly.
Vera dried her face with a bit of paper, shrugged her shoulders and smiled wanly.
‘No, just small things really. Like my education, my job, and my husband, for example.’
Solveig lifted her eyes from the bodice of the dress and looked searchingly into Vera’s face. ‘Oh my,’ she said at last.
‘Because I can’t handle this,’ said Vera, her voice shaky from the pain.
Solveig looked at her attentively: ‘What is it that you can’t handle?’
‘I can’t even keep my own promises!’ When she said it, Vera realized that that was what was most unbearable. Adam had forced her into a corner in which even her own discipline didn’t work.
‘Well, what promises?’
She took a deep breath and her voice was a weak whisper.
‘To