Yes, he was a
foreigner despite looking like a Japanese teen with marginally dyed
hair. No he wasn't fluent in Japanese. Yes, he spoke English. No, he
didn't come from the USA. Yes, there were other places than the USA
where people spoke English, hence the term 'English'. No, he didn't
come from England.
So tiresome.
His plans to keep a low profile didn't seem to work. He was too much
of an outsider. Just how much of an outsider his classmates, apart
from Yukio, didn't know. Only a few did, including his guardian.
Thinking of
her made him ashamed. His legal guardian. Thirty years old and part
of the police force. She really was adorable, more like a daughter to
him than a younger sister. But she hadn't been adorable when he first
met her, and he had hurt her badly.
Ulf
turned left at the corner and brought his bike straight into the
wind. Has it really
been a year already?
Those first days here had been madness, and that interrogation hadn't
helped at all. He hit the
brakes, wheeled into a playground and switched from his bike to a
bench. One year ago.
Gods!
And in his
mind he travelled that year back in time.
“Are you
trying to tell me that unless I can express the feeling of loss I'm
not an adult?”
Ulf waited for
the translator to relay his question. When the unexpectedly callous
affirmation was delivered he sighed.
“Look,”
Ulf started. “I could talk about a funeral, my grandparent for
example, because that's what I assume you expect, but I won't.”
In one corner
the female police twisted uncomfortably, as did her older uniformed
companion, but the investigator in civilian clothes just smiled
condescendingly. Ten years my junior, tops. Probably
younger, and more arrogant in his belief that he's seen
life. “I could,” Ulf continued and let his memories wander a
decade, “try to make you understand the ugly feeling of relief you
feel when your wife calls you from the hospital.”
The female
police shuddered and shook her head, silently begging him to stop,
but Ulf relentlessly moved on: “You know, it's funny how calm you
are in a taxi from work to the hospital when your daughter has her
final treatment. You realize that you'll have your life back again.”
The older uniform held the hands of his younger colleague in
sympathy, and her hands were clenched into hard fists. I'm
stirring a bad memory here. The arse facing
me could stop this if he wanted, but I'll take him down if he
doesn't.
“Did you
know that back home, when there's no more hope, they let you inside.
You can see the monitors spewing numbers that even a layman can
understand.” Ulf glanced at the woman in uniform. She was
whispering something in Japanese. Ulf didn't need to understand the
language to know that she was pleading with the other two to end the
interview. The translator had gone ashen as well and translated
tonelessly from English to Japanese. There were no longer any phrases
to be translated the other way.
“You go
thinking: Hey kiddo, when did you grow so small?” Ulf locked eyes
with the investigator. “Because that bony ghoul in the bed is still
your little girl, and all that plastic tubing makes her look so much
smaller than the laughing bundle of chaos you remember from a year
earlier.”
The sound of a
sudden gasp reached him from the end of the table. Then the female
police suddenly turned expressionless, as if something had died
inside her.
“The numbers
get lower and lower, and you watch those damn displays in trance,
because that way you don't have to look at your dying child.” But
I watched my wife as well. Ulf forced down a lump in his throat
at the memory. She sat there staring out the window. She had
nothing left by that time, but the shit hole here doesn't need to
know how she had to make all the ugly arrangements
alone earlier that morning, so that I wouldn't be
disturbed during my business meeting.
“And then
they unplug your child so the tubes aren't in the way when you hug
that cooling, limp body before passing it along. And it weighs almost
nothing.” Again Ulf caught the investigator's eyes with his own.
“Did you know that in death your daughter's eyes are no longer
blue? They're black all over.”
The woman
breathed heavily. By now her outward calm only made her inner turmoil
all that much clearer. Her companion gave Ulf a murderous stare, and
the translator had reeled backwards at the last sentence.
It wasn't that
Ulf had described anything they didn't know. He knew that, but the
police ran that interview to find out some kind of background for
Ulf's absurd claims. After all, he very much looked the fourteen year
old Japanese school kid they told him he was, and very, very little
the fifty year old foreigner he said he was.
Ulf kept the
investigator's eyes locked. “Do you want me to describe how you
call your friends to your favourite pub the same evening your
daughter died, and spend it pulling stupid jokes and enjoy three
truly fun hours for the first time in months?”
Ulf drew a lungful of breath.
“Or do you
want me to describe the loss you feel the day after when you find all
those hospital supplies in your kitchen? When your hands mechanically
start making that damned, hated breakfast which is the only one your
kid is allowed to eat. When you remember that you'll never need to
make that breakfast again. Do you want me to describe, in detail, how
that feels?”
The
investigator, finally, backed down.
Ulf fought his
thoughts back to the present.
I wonder
why she suggested she step in as guardian for me. I hurt her so much.
I knew she had lost someone. Ulf sighed. Little sister rather
than a daughter, but we share the same kind of loss.
He had moved
in with her a few days later. Legally mother and son, but in his
thoughts father and daughter.
And behind the
scenes government officials fabricated a background for an Ulf
Hammargren who had never existed in this world. Even though they
finally believed him when he told them he was a fifty year old
Swedish corporate CEO (mixed background, naturalized Japanese mother,
Swedish father), he looked like an early adolescent kid with a runny
nose. Albeit a tall one. So they needed to go for the teenager story.
Officially he
was Hammarugen Urufu, with a string of katakana to go with the alien
sounding name, but he would always remain Ulf. They even tried to
make him use the unfamiliar letters to sign his name. Sometimes he
did, but for well over thirty years, before retina scans and
fingerprinted passports, his old signature had been his formal
identity. It wasn't something you could just let go of.
And here he
was, an orphan of two divorced parents he had never seen (both
deceased in accidents that had actually occurred). He had been told
he was in the transition between a Swedish citizenship and a Japanese
one, because, albeit Swedish officials apparently had been helpful in
fabricating their end of the lie, Sweden didn't see him as one of
their own, and thus Japan was left with the booby prize. At least
that was how the story was told. However, he knew that immigration
laws in the two nations really should have left him in Sweden rather
than in Japan. Something smelly was being played out, but he wasn't
in any position to dig deeper.
He left the
bench and straddled his bike. Another five minutes to the station,
ten minutes with the train and a few more to the apartment complex
where he lived.
Amaya,
you're trying so hard.
He'd pop into a speciality store he knew on his way home. This
evening he'd treat her to something very Swedish. His mind's
adopted daughter, his
legal guardian.
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