Bring Me Back to Life

They all sit silently after Oda has spoken. The hissing of the radiators can be heard. A slushy liquid, neither snow nor rain, splatters the windowpanes. She picks up the photograph they thought she’d forgotten, and holds it toward herself so all they can see is the cardboard and strips of brown tape on the back. Only Oda knows that face. The skin really was just as fine and still as sensitive as the photographer’s tinting job made it appear. That male, flower-like face: Lars Arpman rests behind dusty glass against her aging, protruding belly. He is wearing his second lieutenant’s uniform and looks pleased. He is one of the men going to war to fight for the cause Johan never doubted. That was more than half a century ago.

She doesn’t have to turn the picture over to know what the back of it looks like. But she cannot bear to show it. Not this time. Now she knows why she seemed to hear the voice of Dido while Ulla was reading the incantation against oblivion. She even had the urge to play part of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas for them. But she’s not going to. Not now.

Remember me!

It must be an ancient phrase. Formed and possibly stammered forth when the indifferent, the things at which one turned up one’s nose and relegated instantly to oblivion, became the unbearable: disintegration and decomposition. Corpse.

He is dead.

The voice of Dido—a vortex created by an object dropped into dark water, a bird flying toward deserted plains: re-member me! She will vanish after him. He is a decomposed body. Limbs spread out in the clay and darkness. Disjecta membra.

Re-member me! the voice pleads. Put my limbs together again. Bring me back to life. Bring me back to life!

Translated from the Swedish by Linda Schenck for this portfolio. Reproduced by permission of Bonnier Rights, Sweden.