Harbor by John Lindqvist (classic novels for teens txt) 📕

then asked, ‘Do you think you can know another person? Really know another person?’

Anders smiled. ‘You ought to be the expert in that field.’

‘I’m beginning to think I’m not.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean you can never become another person. However much you might sometimes imagine you can. Have you ever been in the situation where you’re so close to someone that sometimes…just for a moment…when you look at that person, you get the impression, just in passing, that…that’s me. A kind of confusion, a vacuum where you don’t know who is thinking the thought. If this other person is me.And then you realise. That you were wrong. That I am me, after all. Has that happened to you?’

Anders had never heard Simon talk like this, and he wasn’t sure he liked it. Simon was supposed to be uncomplicated and stable—Anders had enough existential uncertainty of his own. However, he said, ‘Yes. I think so. I know what you mean, anyway. But why? Is it something to do with Gran?’

‘Among other things. It’s strange, isn’t it? You can spend your whole life with another person. And yet you can’t know. Not really. Because you can’t become that person. Can you?’

Anders didn’t understand what Simon was getting at. ‘But I mean, this is obvious. We know all this.’

Simon tapped his index finger on the table. Quickly, crossly. ‘That’s the point. I don’t think we do know it. We take ourselves as the starting point, and we imagine a whole lot of things. And just because we understand what the other person is saying, we think we know who she is. But we have no idea. No idea. Because we can’t be that other person.’

When Simon had gone, Anders lay on Maja’s bed for a long time, looking up at the ceiling where the cobwebs floated outwards like dirty lines. He had made up a new bottle, and at irregular intervals he sucked away at it. He thought about what Simon had said.

We can’t become another person. But we think we can.

Wasn’t that what had driven him to ring Cecilia? The fact that he had assumed she would understand, that she would be able to see what he could see, because they had been a part of each other for so many years. Become the same person, almost.

But there was no mystical connection. They separated, and no longer had anything to do with one another. If their affinity had been real, it would not have been so easy to break. They would have soldiered on and understood each other completely, all the way through the hell in which they found themselves.

Anders raised his bottle and made a circular movement with hishand, encompassing the room and the house, and said out loud, ‘But I do understand you.’

Or did he?

He thought about all the times he had stood looking at Maja when she was a baby, sleeping in her cot. How amazed he had been at the rapid movements of her eyes beneath her eyelids when she was dreaming. How he had wished he could get inside her head, see what she could see, try to understand what it was that her young mind could possibly have to work through. What the world looked like to her, really.

No. We don’t understand.

After Maja’s disappearance he had carried her with him all the time. He had talked to her in his head, or out loud. As time passed, he had formed a clear picture of her. Since she was no longer alive, she couldn’t change, and he had carried her like a doll, a frozen image to turn to.

‘It’s not like that any more,’ he said out into the room. ‘Now I’m wondering what you’re doing. What it looks like where you are, what’s happening to you. I’m pretty scared, and I wish I could see you again. That’s what I wish most of all.’ Tears welled up in his eyes, spilled over and ran down on to Maja’s pillow. ‘Just to see you again. Hold you in my arms. That’s what I wish. That’s what I wish.’

Anders snuffled the snot back up his nose, wiped his eyes, dried his tears. He sat up on the edge of the bed and drew his shoulders together, cowering like an anxious child afraid of a telling-off. He spotted the heap of Bamse the Bear comics under the bed, and picked up the top one. Issue number 2, 1993. He had bought a whole pile at a flea market so that Maja would have something to read, or rather look at, when they were on Domarö.

The cover showed Bamse and his friends Little Leap the rabbit and Shellman the tortoise on a boat, on their way to an island shrouded in mist. As usual Little Leap looked terribly worried. Anders lay down on his back on Maja’s bed and started to read.

The story was about Captain Buster and some buried treasure,which turned out to be a trick. Anders carried on reading, smiling at the familiar dialogue he had read aloud to Maja so many times, in different interpretations:

‘Wait, Bamse! I’ve got some thunder honey.’

‘Puff…thank you, Little Leap…puff!’

‘Oh no! He’s dropped the pipe. Now they’re in trouble.’

Anders moved on to the next story, which was about the vanity of Jansson the cat. From time to time he had a drink from his bottle of wine. When he finished the comic and was looking at the back cover, a picture of two children wearing Bamse hats that you could buy for only fifty-eight kronor, he caught sight of himself.

He was lying in Maja’s bed with a Bamse comic in one hand and his bottle in the other. He laughed. Maja had stopped having milk and baby rice a long time ago, but at the age of six she still wanted her juice in a baby’s bottle so that she could lie there sucking at it while she was looking at her Bamse comics or listening to tapes.

He realised what he was