My legs started trembling now as well, and on these trembling legs, which were threatening to give way, I went over to the door and pushed it wide open.

Dick and Henrietta were in there. They were chatting away quite normally as they wandered around among Majken’s things, Henrietta with a black garbage bag, Dick with a big metal box on wheels-it reminded me of the kind of gurneylike contraption they use in hospitals to transport patients who’ve died, although this box was shorter and deeper.

Dick was the first to notice me, as I stood in the doorway.

“Oh dear!” he said, looking at me but speaking to Henrietta. “Looks like we forgot to lock the door.”

“Oh dear!” echoed Henrietta; she put down the bag, came over to me and took hold of my arms, tilted her head to one side and was presumably about to say something sympathetic, something comforting. But I didn’t want to hear it, so I tore myself free, turned on my heel, rushed into my room, slammed the door-hard-and turned the key. (This was a symbolic gesture more than anything, since all staff members had their own master key that opened all the residents’ rooms.)

After that I stood just inside the door of my apartment, not knowing where to go next. For the first time I was seriously bothered by the surveillance cameras. Eating, sleeping, reading, writing, watching TV, talking on the telephone, cleaning your teeth, picking your nose or poking about in your ears, taking a shower, having a pee or a shit, changing your tampon: it was fine to do all that with someone watching. But, I asked myself, why should the bastards see this?

This-this was when my legs finally gave way and I sank helplessly to the floor and just sat there, not moving, with my back against the door, and, without being able to stop myself or even keep the noise down, howled like a mortally wounded animal.

6

When my older sister Siv was about to turn fifty I called her to ask if she wanted me to come over, but all I got was an automated message: “There is no subscriber at this number.” When I tried to e-mail instead, the message bounced back; no one with that address existed. Then I got in touch with my other sister and my brothers, but they said they hadn’t heard from Siv for several years and knew nothing. In the end, after having written an ordinary letter to her and gotten it back with her name and address crossed out and RETURN TO SENDER written across it, I got in the car and drove to Malmö, to her apartment on Kornettsgatan. But there was a different name on the door, and when I rang the bell, a young man answered. He said:

“No, there’s no Siv Weger. My boyfriend and I have lived here for over two years.”

He was lying! Or…? I was confused. As far as I could remember, I had seen Siv at home here in this very apartment as recently as a year ago, on her forty-ninth birthday. We would try to meet up at least twice a year, on each other’s birthdays, and sometimes over Christmas and New Year’s as well. It could happen that a birthday get-together might occasionally be postponed or canceled because we didn’t have time to travel to see each other, or because we couldn’t afford it. Therefore I now came to the conclusion, if somewhat reluctantly, that my memory was playing tricks on me, and that I was mixing up the last couple of years-as so often happens when we hit middle age. The order in which things had happened, and the length of time between events in my relatively recent past, tended to be a little unclear in my mind these days. Time, the past, had lost its linear structure to some extent, my memory had started to prioritize as it had never done before, breaking up time and rearranging my experiences and reference points, putting them in an arbitrary and changeable order. I therefore decided it must have been over two years since I was last in Siv’s apartment.

But of course I didn’t just leave it at that; the fact remained that she had gone off somewhere without getting in touch with me, and that wasn’t like her. I therefore reported her disappearance to the police, even though of course I suspected she had been taken to a unit. But I wasn’t sure; it was true that she had no children, but she could easily have become successful in her profession all of a sudden, or managed to find a steady partner who loved her. Or both. We weren’t in the habit of asking about each other’s love lives, and Siv wasn’t the kind to start talking about that sort of thing. So it could have happened without my hearing about it. She could, for example, have met someone from another part of the country and moved there with him or her, and simply forgotten to tell me. Or something terrible could have happened: she might have moved to another part of the country with her partner, intending to tell me, but hadn’t had time because she had been involved in an accident or a violent crime with a fatal outcome. Perhaps she was buried in some forest or bog, or had been dumped in the sea, or perhaps her dismembered body was in someone’s freezer. Or maybe she had decided to go mountain climbing and had fallen without anyone seeing and had landed somewhere where people hardly ever went. Anything could have happened. That was why I reported her disappearance.

However, the police investigation led nowhere. At least that’s what they said whenever I phoned to ask how it was going. “We are doing everything in our power to find out what happened to your sister. But so far our leads have unfortunately been unsuccessful.”

Sometimes when I had to visit Malmö I would bump into one of Siv’s old friends, and I always took the opportunity to ask if they’d heard from her or if they knew anything. I might get an answer like this:

“No, it’s ages since I had any contact with Siv. But you know what she’s like; she’s probably just given notice on the flat, sold everything and taken off on a long trip somewhere. You’ll see, she’ll be sitting in some ashram chanting a mantra, or sailing around Cape Horn on a raft or something like that. I’m sure she’ll pop up like a jack-in-the-box any day now.”

Or they’d say something along these lines:

“Oh, you know, contact between Sivan and me has always been pretty sporadic. I haven’t a clue what she’s up to these days.”

Later, after a year or so, when I had accepted the fact that Siv was gone and wasn’t coming back, I did think that one of her friends must have known what had actually happened to her, but hadn’t said anything. I thought she might have told someone in confidence that she was going to be dispensable, and that this person had promised to say nothing if I or anyone else should ask. I really wanted to believe that this was what had happened. I really wanted to believe that Siv had a friend like that, someone so close to her that she could confide in them. I really wanted to believe that she hadn’t only had “sporadic contacts.”