Grace by Linn Ullmann Page B

think so. I’ve changed.”
    “Have I changed?”
    Mai looked at him, her eyes on his face. And in her eyes he could read where things stood with him. He asked her for a mirror, and she produced a compact from her purse.
    The first thing he saw was his waxen skin. And then the boil, intent on devouring his whole cheek. Finally the familiar wryness, the result of his plucking one eyebrow bald and leaving the other bushy.
    He said, “I don’t know what you see in me. I’m old and ugly and I’ll be dead soon.”
    “But you’re still my Johan, and I love you.”
    Her voice was soft and persuasive. Still looking at himself, he laid his head on her shoulder.
Maj from Malö,
he hummed,
bonny Maj, you whom all the waves long to kiss.
She stroked his face and gently took the mirror from his fingers. She drew closer to him and whispered, “You’re in pain, I can tell.”
    The time had come for a conversation of another sort. He could tell by the sound of her voice:
You’re in pain, I can
tell.
He wasn’t up to it. He would really rather not.
    He said, “Yes. It does hurt sometimes. It hurts to turn over in bed at night. And my head . . . this headache. But I don’t feel so nauseated now. So that’s a good thing.”
    “I spoke to the attending physician. Emma Meyer.”
    “The dancer.”
    Mai looked at him blankly. “What are you talking about?”
    “Oh, forget it.”
    “Anyway, Emma says—”
    “Emma?” Johan interjected. He hated this bandying about of first names. Emma! He didn’t like the idea of a physician who was making decisions regarding his life being called something as . . . as
literary
as Emma and— particularly—being in some way a friend of Mai’s.
    Mai corrected herself. “Dr. Meyer says the last tests show the reason for your headache.”
    She didn’t need to say any more.
    “I thought the headache was caused by the changing weather. It’s been so hot and humid,” Johan remarked flatly. “And I’m feeling a little better now. My head doesn’t hurt as much as it did last week.”
    “No,” Mai said quietly.
    “So, as I say, I thought it had something to do with the weather or the strain of the last few weeks, a psychological reaction of some sort. Headaches can be stress-related, everybody knows that. Even children have headaches brought on by stress these days. I was just reading an article about it in the paper. They catch stress from their parents. It’s a big problem.”
    Mai nodded.
    “But what you’re saying is that Dr. Meyer’s tests have shown something else,” Johan said, looking her in the face.
    “I wanted to tell you myself,” Mai said. “I thought you’d want to hear it from me.”
    “I would actually have preferred to hear it firsthand from a doctor,” Johan snapped.
    “I
am
a doctor!” Now it was Mai’s turn to snap.
    Johan lowered his eyes. Didn’t it count for anything that he fought every day? Sometimes he actually came close to giving up, but other times . . . at other times he looked around him and could say to himself:
This day too I am here. It
grows light in the morning and dark in the evening, and I am here
in that light and in that darkness.
Didn’t that count for anything? That it grew light in the morning and dark in the evening; that he repeated these words to himself like an incantation, as proof . . . but of what? He wasn’t quite sure. Still, it calmed him to say it again and again. Say it a thousand times. Say:
It grows light in the morning and dark in the
evening.
But did that count for anything with the others? With Mai? With the white coats?
    They took pictures of his body, imaged his innermost recesses, slid him into machines with eyes that could see straight through him—they were treacherous, those eyes. They scanned his organs one by one and decided that the problem lay there and there and there. And this
there and
there and there
told them all they needed to know about Johan Sletten.
    He looked at Mai. “Am I going to lose