A Blessed Child Read Free Page B

him: he is sitting in one of the two armchairs in the living room of the white limestone house, with his feet up on a pouf and his big rectangular spectacles on his nose. He is listening to a piece of Schubert, perhaps the slow movement of the C major string quintet. On the table beside the chair is the black tape recorder that he carries around the house with him. Erika is twelve and Laura is ten. They are lying side by side on the white wooden floor, reading and listening to the music with him. He lets them do that as long as they are quiet. The legs propped on the pouf are grasshopper thin and clad in worn brown velvet trousers. He once bought several pairs of velvet trousers of the same style and make. These trousers were patched over time and otherwise maintained by Rosa.
    I bet he’s still got those same trousers, thought Erika, but now it would be Simona who patched and stitched them. On his feet, a pair of warm sheepskin slippers. Isak often had cold feet. On the table beside the chair, three newspapers: two national and one local.
    It had been a year since Erika had seen her father. The last time had been in Stockholm, one of those dinner dates he liked to make with her and Laura. At first he had invited Molly, too, but she rarely came, so he stopped asking her.
    Erika followed the signs, just as Laura had advised. It worked. She was on her way now. She felt sure Isak would not have changed much since she last saw him. He wouldn’t have changed, his house wouldn’t have changed. She hadn’t been there for more than twenty-five years, but was sure he hadn’t moved the furniture around or bought any new clothes. He would still eat two thin slices of toast for breakfast, a bowl of kefir with a banana for lunch, and little meatballs with potatoes and gravy for dinner. That would be on Tuesdays. On Mondays and Wednesdays there was fish. And on Saturdays chicken casserole. The same dinners were cooked by Simona that had been cooked by Rosa in years gone by. After serving him his meal, Simona went home. He had told Erika all this on the phone, and sometimes Erika spoke to Simona to ask how her father was. Was he perhaps nearing death without any of his daughters knowing it?
    “He’ll never die,” said Simona.
     
    His face had more pockmarks and furrows and discolored patches, to be sure. But it was the same face. The same eyes, she thought, though she couldn’t picture her father’s eyes. She didn’t even know what color they were. Isak’s eyes looked at you and you either existed or didn’t exist in that look. He had been old for a long time. He had been old twenty-five years ago.
    Once he said on the telephone that he had changed since Rosa died. Isak Lövenstad’s formative years, according to him, had been between the ages of seventy-two and eighty-four.
    “Really?” asked Erika. “How’s that? I mean, how have you changed?”
    Erika stared at the windshield wipers moving back and forth without much effect. The snow was coming down heavily. The driving was difficult.
    He had said: “I’m maturing.”
    “You’re maturing?”
    “Yes.”
    “What does that mean, you’re maturing?”
    “I’m reading Swedenborg.”
    “Oh?”
    “And Swedenborg wrote that if you feel you’re living too long—and that’s certainly true in my case, isn’t it—then it’s your obligation to mature.”
    “So that’s what you’re doing?”
    “Yes.”
    “But what does that actually entail, Isak, you maturing?”
    “I understand things better.”
    “Such as?”
    “That I’ve never cared about other people. I’ve been indifferent.”
    “I don’t believe you.”
    “What don’t you believe?”
    “That you’ve been indifferent. I don’t believe you. It’s too easy just to say that.”
     
    A little boy with matchstick legs and scabby knees came running toward her, in and out of the light. Just occasionally, he turned to look back. She remembered the boy saying: “We need to find his weakness, where