2

“What if they find something wrong with me?” I said.

“Like what?” said Majken.

“Well, I don’t know,” I said. “But what if I’m not good enough, if it turns out that I’m…”-I was searching for the right word-“… that I’m unusable. What will happen to me then? What will they do with me?”

We were standing in the elevator. It was morning. It was Thursday. We were on our way down. She was going to her studio on level 2 to finish things off before her exhibition, which was due to open on Saturday. I was heading for lab 2 on level 1 for the obligatory health check for new arrivals. The elevator stopped on level 2 and the doors slid open, but instead of stepping out Majken put her arms around me and stroked my back.

She was warm. She was calming. She didn’t speak, she simply stood there holding me and stroking my back, while the elevator doors closed and it set off downward. We started to laugh, and she had to come down to level 1. I got out, turned to her and raised a hand to say good-bye. She waved back, the door closed, and the elevator took her back up again with a humming noise.

I was in a corridor not unlike a hospital’s, with white doors and pale yellow walls, decorated with the kind of reproduction paintings you often find in hospital corridors. I passed a Van Gogh, a Carl Larsson, a Miró and a Keith Haring before I reached the door with LAB 2 on it.

I was early, but Fredrik, Boel and Johanna were already sitting in the waiting room. They were sitting in a row along one of the walls. They were silent, simply nodding to me as I came in. I sat down next to Fredrik.

On the wall opposite us hung two large appliqué pictures. One of them represented an autumn landscape, with dark brown, golden brown and pale yellow fields, a sky in tones of white and yellowish gray, and flocks of black and white birds, both on the ground and in the air. The flocks of birds formed a pattern, an image; after a while I could see that it was a face. Siv, my older sister, had often worked in the same way. I got up and went over to see if the picture was signed, but it wasn’t. I carefully lifted one of the bottom corners and peeped at the back, but there was no name there either. When I went back to my chair and sat down, Johanna, Boel and Fredrik were all gazing curiously at me.

“I just thought it reminded me of… of an artist I used to know,” I explained.

Johanna made a small movement with her head to show that she understood. Boel nodded. Fredrik said:

“There are a lot of things here you thought you’d forgotten.”

“Yes,” I said. “But this wasn’t someone I’d forgotten.”

“A good friend?”

“A relative.” I tried to smile, then turned away.

Fredrik didn’t ask any more questions, but placed his hand briefly over mine for a moment.

We could hear lively voices from the hallway. The door opened and Elsa came in, along with Roy and Sofia. Her cheeks were red and her hair looked damp. She sat down next to me, smelling faintly of chlorine.

“Have you been swimming?”

“Diving.”

“Nice?”

“Fantastic!”

Then I looked around and counted. There were seven of us.

“Who’s missing?” I asked, but at that moment the door flew open and Annie burst in, out of breath, her hair standing on end, and with toothpaste at one corner of her mouth.

She looked around for a free chair, but didn’t have time to sit down before a door opened, leading into a room with a breakfast buffet laid out. A nurse with crow-black dreadlocks appeared.

“Good morning,” she said. “I’m Nurse Lis. Please come in!”

While eating our breakfast we each had to fill out a questionnaire about our health, ticking boxes in response to questions about whether there had been instances of diabetes, rheumatism, breast cancer or other chronic and/or hereditary diseases in the family, whether we ourselves were suffering from any chronic condition or had had any serious illness or injury, undergone any kind of surgery, had an abortion or a miscarriage, had or had had any kind of sexually transmitted disease, were on medication for any kind of somatic or psychiatric problem, were still menstruating and if so, whether our periods were regular or irregular, whether we were suffering from hot flashes, sleep disturbance or mood swings, whether we felt tired, stressed, anxious, depressed or completely healthy.

Once the questionnaires had been collected and breakfast was over, the examination itself began. We were weighed and measured. They took our pulse, blood pressure, blood samples, DNA, and gave us an ECG, a chest X-ray and a mammogram. They checked our sight, hearing and reflexes. We had a full gynecological examination, with a pap smear and tests for HIV, chlamydia, syphilis and gonorrhea. This went on all morning, on a rolling program where we moved one by one from room to room and station to station. It was like a kind of circuit training, where the pommel horse, vaulting box, ropes, weights, beam and mats had been replaced by various nurses and doctors with different items of equipment-syringes, sample bottles, blood pressure cuffs and stethoscopes, X-ray scanners, gynecological stirrups and so on.

I started with a mammogram, where Nurse Karl took care of me, gently pressing first one breast, then the other, in the big X-ray machine. Then I moved on to the gynecological room and Dr. Amanda Jonstorp. When I was finished there I went next door, where Nurse Lis and Nurse Hassan weighed and measured me, took my pulse and checked my blood pressure, then on to Nurse Yasmin who measured my reaction rate and hemoglobin and took some other samples, found out my blood group and took saliva from my mouth with a swab to get a DNA sample. And then on to the chest X-ray, ECG, eye and hearing tests and so on, until all eight of us had gone all the way around.

For lunch we were given a salad with boiled fillet of salmon. No bread, no potatoes or pasta-so that we wouldn’t get tired and dopey, but would get some nutrition, because after just an hour’s rest it was time for our fitness and strength tests.

On exercise bikes arranged in a semicircle, and with various cables and wires and sensors attached to carefully selected places on our bodies, we pedaled along, encouraged by music with a strong beat and an instructor yelling heartily in a shrill voice:

“Okaaay, let’s do this! One and two and three and fooouur! Come on now, everybody, one and two and three and fooouur!”

Meanwhile the machines and monitors to which we were connected via the cables, wires and sensors were measuring our pulse, lung capacity, calorie consumption and fat burning in relation to the number of pedal rotations per minute. The bikes were on the interval setting, alternating between easy and difficult. About halfway through this fitness test, which lasted half an hour, it became harder and harder, and then harder still, until it felt like cycling up a steep hill in a stiff breeze. Our legs wanted to pedal slowly, in slow motion-or preferably to get off. But the instructor kept driving us on, more and more:

“Come on, come on! Get those pedals moving, one and two, one and two, let’s get some speed up!”

She seemed almost deranged, and I decided that it probably wasn’t a good idea to give up, so I carried on as best I could, releasing the lactic acid in my thigh muscles, panting and groaning and grimacing with pain as the sweat poured off me. After a while it felt as if my heart were getting heavier, being pulled down and down, and the air grew thinner and thinner. It was like being at a height of three thousand feet.

However, it did gradually get easier, first as if we were cycling on level ground, then on a slight downward slope, and after a short cool-down the music came to an end. Nurse Yasmin and Nurse Karl came in and removed our sensors, and we were finally allowed to get off the bikes to stretch and have a drink and eat some fruit, which was displayed in a big basket.