A mixture of snow and rain was falling outside. He did not manage to hail a taxi. Two drunk Finns begged a few cigarettes off him and then followed him in a threatening manner for several blocks. When he got home he was wet through and freezing. Andrea was sleeping. He had been hoping he would be alone. In order to avoid her sharp questions he buried the soiled shirt in the bottom of the rubbish. Looking at it, it occurred to him that the wine stains looked curiously like blood.
Since he was still worked up he decided against trying to sleep immediately. Instead he sat down in his study and tried to prepare for his second meeting with the girls in Gothenburg. Suddenly he was not so sure that Tea-Bag would meet him at the station and this made him disappointed, almost sad. He thought about what she had told him, the unfinished story. How much of what she had said was true? He couldn’t know, but as he sat there he started working on what she had said, filling in the blanks. In a way he felt he was taking her by the hand and leading her into her own story. He had never been to Africa but now it was as if he could finally go there in his imagination because he had found someone who made it come alive for him.
He walked into the kitchen and got a tea-bag that he put on his desk in front of him. It seemed to him that the small black specks behind the thin paper were letters, words, sentences, perhaps even songs that all told the real story of the girl with the big smile. .
‘Why are you sleeping with a tea-bag in your hand?’
Andrea was bent over him. He had fallen asleep at his desk. He tried to get up but fell back into his chair. One of his legs had fallen completely asleep.
‘I’m asking you why you have a tea-bag in your hand.’
‘I was going to make myself a cup and fell asleep.’
Andrea shook her head as if he were a hopeless case. He massaged his leg until he heard the front door slam shut behind her. He could see through the weak dawn light that it had stopped snowing outside. He crawled into bed on the side that was still warm from Andrea’s body. He slept heavily without dreaming.
He was at the Central station at exactly a quarter to two. He looked around but saw no one who smiled at him, everyone seemed despondent as if on their way to undesirable destinations. He was just about to give up when someone touched his arm.
Tea-Bag was smiling.
The train left the station with a jerk just after they had stepped on board.
Everything was going well until they reached Hallsberg. There Tea-Bag disappeared without leaving a trace. But before she left, she had continued to tell the story she had abruptly cut short in Humlin’s apartment. There was something so unbelievable about her narrative that Humlin started to think it was probably true. She had told him — in her broken but clear Swedish — how she had managed to reach Sweden from the internment camp in Spain. Humlin wondered if there could be anyone quite as alone as a young refugee on her way through a Europe that was as forbidden to those without legal access as if it had been fenced off with high walls and barbed wire.
As far as Södertälje she had sat motionless in her seat and had not even — this irritated him since he felt she should have shown more gratitude — reacted when he bought a ticket for her from the conductor. She had simply sunk down into her thick jacket and stared out of the window. Humlin tried to poke a hole in her silence by asking her a number of essentially meaningless questions but she had not answered, and after a while he wondered what he thought he was trying to achieve. They went through a series of tunnels in Södertälje and when they were back in daylight it was as if the darkness of the tunnels had inspired her. She removed her jacket and he couldn’t help but notice that she had a very beautiful body.
‘Do you want me to tell you about the monkey?’ she asked.
‘Please,’ he said. ‘But why don’t you finish the other story first. You were in the rowing boat that had started swaying from the wake of the barge. There were shirts hanging out to dry. You waved even though you didn’t see any people.’
‘I’d rather tell you about the monkey.’
‘You should always finish the stories you tell. Unfinished stories are like restless ghosts. They will continue to haunt you.’
She looked at him attentively.
‘I assure you I know what I’m talking about. Unfinished stories can become one’s enemies.’
Slowly, hesitantly, she started up her narrative again. At points she spoke with a certain amount of reluctance, as if she wanted to smash parts of her story because it caused her too much pain.
