Humlin half-expected to hear a new group of family members approach the table, but heard nothing. Tanya must have come on her own.
‘Where are you from?’ Humlin asked.
‘She’s from Russia,’ Leyla answered.
‘And you are here to learn to write? To tell your story?’
‘She has been through more than any of us,’ Leyla said. ‘But she doesn’t talk very much.’
This turned out to be an accurate observation. Tanya did not say a single word all evening. Humlin looked at her surreptitiously from time to time. He assumed she was the oldest of the three, perhaps twenty-five or twenty-six. She was the complete opposite of Leyla, slender and with a beautiful oval face framed by straight brown hair that fell to her shoulders. She was very tense and stared at a fixed point on the wall. Humlin realised that he didn’t have the slightest idea what she could be thinking, not even when he employed all of his imaginative powers. He also realised, with the usual mixture of anxiety and anticipation, that he was starting to feel attracted to her.
Next to Tanya was Tea-Bag, the young woman he had first met in Mölndal and who had asked him the question that was the real reason he had returned to Stensgården. That time she had struck him as outspoken and strong. Now she seemed preoccupied and insecure and never quite met his gaze.
There was a hush in the room. Humlin realised that the orchestra had arrived, and that he was the conductor. He had to think of something. He turned to Leyla.
‘Why do you want to write?’ he asked.
‘I want to be a TV star,’ she said.
Humlin was taken aback.
‘A TV star?’
‘Yes, to be on TV, ideally a programme that comes on every night for ten years.’
‘Well, I hardly think I can help you with that goal. We’re not going to be talking about the TV business.’
Humlin didn’t know how to continue. The whole situation seemed preposterous. A low buzz had started up again in the room. On one side he had Leyla, who was sweating and who had just told him she wanted to be a TV star, on the other side was Tanya, who still had her face turned away from him, and Tea-Bag whom he no longer recognised. In order to buy some time he pointed to the pads of paper the girls all had in front of them, labelled ‘Törnblom’s Boxing Club’.
‘I want you to write two things,’ he said and was immediately interrupted by someone with a heavy accent asking him to speak up.
‘This is not actually intended to be a lecture,’ Humlin replied in a loud voice. ‘What I want at this point is for the girls to write down the answers to two questions: “Why do you want to write?” and “What do you hope to do in the future?”’
A murmur of surprise and anticipation filled the room. Törnblom made his way over to the table with a glass of water.
‘Can’t we open a window in here? It’s so hot!’ Humlin asked.
‘We’ve had too many burglaries. I was forced to nail the windows shut.’
‘I’m suffocating!’
‘You’re just dressed too warmly. But this is going very well, I think. Keep it up.’
‘It’s going to hell. I’m going mad. And if I don’t get any air I’m going to faint. I can’t faint. What I should do is kill you.’
‘I don’t think you can since I’m much stronger than you are. But don’t worry. Things are going well.’
Törnblom returned to his place by the door. The girls were busy writing on their pads of paper. What do I do next? Humlin thought and felt a growing sense of desperation. He decided not to do anything at all. He would just gather their answers, read them and then ask them to write something for next time — though there would be no next time — about how they had experienced this evening. After that he would be able to leave this suffocating room and maybe even make the last train or flight back to Stockholm. He was never going to return. He looked around at all the people in the room. A woman who was breastfeeding her child nodded encouragingly to him. Humlin nodded back politely. Then he gathered up the pages that the girls had written. He did not plan on reading their answers out loud. In order not to have to deal with wild protests from the crowd he turned to Leyla and whispered, ‘I want you to tell these people that these answers have been written in confidence. I am not going to read them out loud.’
She looked horrified.
‘I can’t do that. And I don’t even know all the languages these people speak.’
‘Surely they understand a little Swedish?’
‘You can’t be too sure about that.’
‘Why can’t you tell them the notes are written in confidence?’
‘My brothers might think I was writing a secret message to you.’
‘And why on earth would you do that?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I can’t run a writing seminar if everyone always has to know everything that’s going on. To write is to tell stories from deep within yourself. It’s a process of revealing your innermost self.’
Leyla thought about it.
‘You don’t have to read our answers out loud,’ she decided. ‘But you will have to give them back to us so that I can show them to my family when I come home. It doesn’t matter in the case of Tanya or Tea-Bag, of course.’
‘And why not?’
