The Unit

So I sat down on the bench next to Potter, who held out the unclear little picture to me. I feigned interest and took it between the thumb and index finger of my right hand, with the other fingers still holding the piece of paper. He pointed at two paler kidney-shaped areas among all the lines and shadows on the picture, and I nodded and said something about how fascinating it was and asked how old they were now, the twin fetuses, and whether he was looking forward to being a parent, and he replied and explained and chatted, and somewhere in the middle of all this pointing and asking and explaining, while we were still sitting there leaning over the little photograph, I managed to pass the little crumpled piece of paper from my hand into his. When I had done it I glanced quickly up at his face. He didn’t look surprised, but just nodded, briefly, almost imperceptibly and with a tiny wink-I got the impression that he realized my interested questions had been nothing more than a kind of camouflage-and then, when we had finished looking at the picture, he put it into his wallet along with the crumpled piece of paper, and put the wallet back in his pocket.

It was several weeks before I bumped into Potter again, this time one evening in section E4. Alice lived there. She had borrowed a DVD from the library and invited me and Elsa and Lena and Vivi to watch the film and to have some homemade fruitcake and tea. The film was a romantic comedy, a frothy story full of mix-ups and misunderstandings that ended with a wedding. As soon as the titles rolled Elsa and Vivi left. They had begun to spend a lot of time together lately, just the two of them, and I was slowly starting to realize that there was something going on between them, that they were falling in love. I wanted to get back to Joha

“Is it blocked?” I said and stopped, hesitated in the doorway and then leaned on the door frame.

He looked up.

“Yes,” he sighed. “And it’s the third time in a week.”

And so we stood there for a little while-or rather I stood, while he was on his knees-and chatted about blockages and how to sort them out. As the former owner of a house with old drains and narrow pipes that often got blocked, I was able to give him some tips on how to solve the problem, and clever ways to help avoid it in the future.

When he had finished, at least for this time, as he said while replacing the grid over the drain, he got up and walked past me on the way out, and we said good-bye, and a neatly folded piece of paper was slipped into my hand, which I smuggled into my pocket.

Despite the fact that it wasn’t particularly late, Joha

I sat down at the dining table in the half darkness. From time to time Joha

I don’t see particularly well in the dark, and it took a while before I realized what the piece of paper was. It wasn’t a message, or a letter, not one single word was written or printed on it. It was two pictures. Two photographs, color photographs, printed next to one another in the middle of the piece of paper. I moved a fraction so that the light from the kitchen would shine down on the pictures.

They were taken in Sten and Lisa’s garden. In the left-hand picture Jock is with their youngest child, a little girl with round cheeks and curly black hair, big brown eyes and a fu

In the right-hand picture Jock and Lisa are sitting on the bench in front of the house and the flowerbed, where a few roses and marigolds are still hanging on, glowing along with the deep red ivy scrambling up the wall. Jock and Lisa are facing each other, one of her hands is resting on his back, level with his shoulder blades. His ears are pointing forward, her eyebrows are raised just a fraction, both of them have their mouths slightly open. It almost looks as if they’re singing a duet. It’s an amusing picture-and I laughed out loud. Inside me was a different kind of laughter, a kind of huge relief mixed with grief, exploding and bumping at my chest, just inside my breastbone, trying to get out. But it was impossible. I didn’t dare let it out. It was too big, this relief, it hurt too much to be set free.

I folded up the piece of paper with the pictures on it, smuggled it back into my pocket, got up, went and turned off the light in the kitchen, then fumbled my way back to the bathroom in the darkness, had a wash and brushed my teeth, crept into the bedroom, got undressed, and slipped under the covers close, so close to Joha

I never did find out how it had come about, that business with the photographs-whether Potter had been there, met Lisa and the girl and Jock and taken the pictures himself, or whether Sten and Lisa, or someone else, had sent them to him. I would bump into Potter from time to time in the future, but never had the opportunity to ask him; all I could do was thank him with a nod and a smile for the trouble he had gone to on my behalf. However, judging by the season and by the girl, who had grown since I last saw her, the pictures had been taken recently. And that was all I needed to know.