A few days later I went for an ultrasound. Amanda Jonstorp herself was doing it. She squeezed out a blob of clear gel; it was cold and it tickled and I giggled a little. She smiled at me, then picked up the wide probe and began to slide it over my stomach, alternating between small movements and broad sweeps. At the same time she stared with concentration at a computer screen that was turned away from me.

“Does everything look okay?” I asked.

“Yes, everything looks great,” said Amanda. “Better than expected, to be honest.”

“So can I have a look now?” I said.

“What?” she said, stopping abruptly in mid-sweep through the slippery gel on my stomach, and I realized I wasn’t meant to see my child on that screen, wasn’t meant to carry around a blurred picture of my scan to show everybody I bumped into who wasn’t quick enough to come up with an excuse to get out of it.

Amanda had red blotches on her cheeks and something of Petra Runhede about her as she stumbled over her words:

“I… I’m… really sorry, Dorrit. I thought… I thought you… realized. I thought… You do understand it would be wrong for us to encourage you to… to… bond with the fetus.”

As I was walking toward the elevators in the clinic reception area, I pushed my hand into my pocket and felt the key card. Just as when I had been carrying that little crumpled note with the message to Potter, I had changed pants several times since that day in February when I had been given the card, and by this time I had become very adept at moving it from the dirty pair on their way to the laundry to the clean pair I took out of the closet. I would hold it against my palm with my thumb and make sure I kept the back of my hand angled upward until I had slipped the card into the right front pocket of the clean pants. At the same time I would do my best to distract attention from that hand by doing something with the other: scratching my head, coughing into it, lifting the lid of the laundry basket and putting in the dirty pants, smoothing out a crease or picking off a loose thread. I was silent, quick and discreet, just as Birthmark had advised me to be.

The key card had been constantly on my mind over the past months. I had often slipped my hand into my pocket to feel it as I was doing now, and every time I had done so I had repeated the code to myself: 98 44, 98 44-which I also did now. But I hadn’t done any more, not yet; I still hadn’t come to a decision as to whether I would use the card or not. I didn’t make a decision now either, but this time it was as if everything associated with the key card-the possibilities, the risks and the uncertainty -had moved up into the part of the brain that actually thinks. And I realized I had reached a point where I had to make a decision.

I don’t know if it was because of this shift or if I would have seen what I saw in any case, but just as I came out of the hospital lobby with my hand in my pocket and started to walk toward elevator H, I saw, in an alcove next to the row of elevator doors, a staff member fiddling with something, her face turned to the wall. The wall was the color of linden flowers just there, exactly like the uniform shirt she was wearing, and it was quite dark in the alcove. But not so dark that I couldn’t see her, and after a moment I also saw that she was actually standing in front of a door, a very narrow one, with no handle; it was the same color as the wall, surrounded by a door frame, again exactly the same shade of green, and she was fiddling with something next to this door frame, but not for long; it only took two or three seconds for her to do what was necessary to open the door, and a second or two more for her to push it open a little way, slip through it and disappear, whereupon the door quickly and soundlessly closed behind her.

5

Vivi carried herself just as beautifully as before, just as fine-limbed and lovely. But she was moving more slowly and more stiffly as she walked around the library pushing a little cart, replacing the books on the shelves. I saw her through the big window facing out onto the square as I came around with two films and a book to return.

For the past two weeks or so I hadn’t gone out any more than necessary; I had just spent time with my own thoughts and my steadily expanding belly. It was showing now, my belly, I could no longer hide it, even under the loosest, bulkiest clothes, even if it wasn’t yet quite so large that an observer could be 100 percent certain I was pregnant just by looking at me when I was fully dressed. At least that’s what I thought. When I walked into the library and Vivi caught sight of me, she stopped short and said:

“Wow! I mean: hi! I haven’t seen you for a long time, Dorrit.”

She left the cart of books between two shelves and hobbled over to me at the circulation desk.

She had lost great clumps of her thick, shiny hair and nowadays always wore a handkerchief knotted around her head. It made her face look smaller, and her eyes and mouth bigger, and the whole thing gave her a naked, vulnerable appearance.

“How are things?” I asked tentatively.

“Okay,” she said.

“And… Elsa?”

“Not bad. A little better than she was a while ago, actually.”

I placed the book and the films on the counter, and was just about to ask her to give Elsa my best wishes, when she said:

“What’s going on with you two these days? You never see each other. She never talks about you. And if I ask her about something to do with you, she changes the subject. What’s happened?”

“Hasn’t she said anything?”

“No, that’s what I’m telling you: she doesn’t say a thing.”

And that’s the way it was: Elsa hadn’t told Vivi about our conversation, our quarrel. She hadn’t told her I was expecting a child.

“You’re joking!” she exclaimed when I told her.

And then she laughed. “And there I was thinking… I was thinking you’d started comfort eating or something. Or maybe you were taking part in some experiment that made you swell up, or where you had to eat a load of candy and cookies all day and weren’t allowed to exercise or something, these researchers come up with so many dumb ideas. And in fact you’re…”

She broke off, and said: “But how did it happen? I mean, how is it possible? Have you had hormone treatment? Or fertilized eggs implanted?”

“Why would I have done that?”

“I don’t mean on your own initiative, of course,” she said. “But it could have been done to you, couldn’t it? While you were anesthetized.”

“But I haven’t been anesthetized,” I said. “Not since I donated my kidney, and that’s ages ago; only an elephant could be pregnant that long.”

“I see,” she said. “Well, maybe you were impregnated naturally.”

“I think so,” I said.

I was about to leave; I was tired and Vivi seemed kind of strained, somehow. But now she said in her usual warm, serious tone:

“Was it Johannes who…?”

I nodded.

“Did he… Did he find out before…?”

“Just about,” I replied.

She looked at me. It was too much for me, that sympathetic look. I glanced away, swallowed. Then she held out her long arms, pulled me close to her, wrapped me in her embrace and stroked my back. She was almost as tall as Johannes; the top of my head reached her chin, and I closed my eyes, allowed myself to be enveloped by her, leaning my cheek against her breast. The scent of her reminded me of honey and fields of oilseed rape in bloom. I thought about Jock, and my dilapidated house and the farms and meadows around it, I thought about early summer in Skåne, about the wind and the sound of tractors and blackbirds and nightingales and young crows and the neighbors’ children playing and the wood stacked up to dry and washing hanging on the line between the apple trees, flapping in the breeze, and I could see my blue-painted garden furniture and there, on one of the chairs, I saw Johannes sitting, scratching Jock behind the ears as I walked toward them with a tray of coffee and cookies. I could see it as if it were a memory, and I didn’t cry, but it was as if my throat had been ripped apart, as if I had been crying, and my legs were about to give way.