“Yes.”

“Are you going to raise it so that it doesn’t grow up to be one of those idiots who don’t take their backpack off when they’re on public transport?”

“I’ll do what I can,” Julia promised.

Estelle was thinking about another author now, one who almost a hundred years ago wrote that your children aren’t your children, they’re the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself.

“You’re going to be fine. You don’t have to love being a mother, not all the time.”

Anna-Lena interjected: “I didn’t like the poo, I really didn’t. At first it was okay, but when children are around a year old they’re like Labradors. Fully grown ones, I mean, not puppies, but—”

“Okay,” Julia nodded, to get her to stop.

“There’s something about the consistency at a certain age, it gets like glue, sticks under your fingernails, and if you rub your face on the way to work…”

“Thanks! That’s enough!” Julia assured her, but Anna-Lena couldn’t stop herself.

“The worst thing is when they bring friends home, and suddenly there’s a five-year-old stranger sitting on your toilet demanding to be cleaned up. I mean, you can put up with your own kids’ poo, but other people’s…”

“Thanks!” Julia said emphatically.

Anna-Lena pursed her lips. Estelle giggled.

“You’re going to be a good mom. And you’re a good wife,” Estelle added, even though Julia hadn’t even mentioned that last anxiety. Julia was holding the palms of her hands around her stomach, and stared down at her fingernails.

“Do you think? Sometimes it feels like all I ever do is nag Ro. Even though I love her.”

Estelle smiled.

“She knows. Believe me. Does she still make you laugh?”

“Yes. God, yes.”

“Then she knows.”

“You have no idea, I mean, wow, she makes me laugh all the time. The first time Ro and I were about to… you know…,” Julia smiled, but stopped when she couldn’t think of a word for what she was sure neither of the two older women would actually be horrified to hear.

“What?” Anna-Lena wondered, uncomprehendingly.

Estelle nudged her in the side and winked.

“You know. The first time they were going to go to Stockholm.”

“Oh!” Anna-Lena exclaimed, and blushed from her head to her feet.

But Julia didn’t quite seem to hear. Her eyes lost their footing; there was a joke there somewhere in her memory, one Ro had made in the taxi that first time that Julia had intended to talk about. But instead she found herself stumbling over the words.

“I… it’s so silly, I’d forgotten this. I’d done some laundry, and there were some white sheets hanging over the bedroom door to dry. And when Ro opened the door and they hit her in the face, she started. She tried not to let it show, but I felt her flinch, so I asked what the matter was, and at first she didn’t want to say. Because she didn’t want to burden me with anything, not as early as that, she was worried I’d break up with her before we’d even got together. But I kept on nagging, of course, because I’m good at nagging, and in the end we sat up all night and Ro told me about how her family got to Sweden. They fled across the mountains, in the middle of winter, and the children each had to carry a sheet, and if they heard the sound of helicopters they were supposed to lie down in the snow with the sheet over them, so they couldn’t be seen. And their parents would run in different directions, so that if the men in the helicopter started firing, they’d fire at the moving targets. And not at… and I didn’t know what to…”

She cracked, like thin ice on a puddle of water, first just some hairline wrinkles around her eyes, then the rest, all at once. The collar of her top turned a darker color. She was thinking about everything Ro had told her that night, the incomprehensible cruelties that terrible people are capable of inflicting on each other, and the utter insanity of war. Then she thought of how Ro, after all that, had somehow managed to grow up to be the sort of person who made other people laugh. Because her parents had taught her during their flight through the mountains that humor is the soul’s last line of defense, and as long as we’re laughing we’re alive, so bad puns and fart jokes were their way of expressing their defiance against despair. Ro told Julia all this that first night, and after that Julia got to spend all of the world’s everydays with her.

* * *

Something like that can make you put up with living with birds.

* * *

“An affair that started in a flower shop,” Estelle nodded slowly. “I like that.” She sat silent for several minutes. Then it burst out of her: “I had an affair once! Knut never knew.”

“Dear Lord!” Anna-Lena exclaimed, now sensing that this was starting to get out of hand after all.

“Yes, it wasn’t all that long ago, you know,” Estelle grinned.

“Who was it?” Julia asked.

“A neighbor in our building. He read a lot, like me. Knut never read. He used to say authors were like musicians who never get to the point. But this other man, the neighbor, he always had a book tucked under his arm when we met in the elevator. So did I. One day he offered me his book, saying: ‘I’ve finished this one, I think you should read it.’ And so we started to swap books. He read such wonderful things. I don’t have the words to describe it, but it was like going on a journey with someone. Where didn’t matter. To outer space. It went on for a long time. I started to fold down the corners of pages when there was a bit I really liked, and he started to write little comments in the margins. Just the odd word. ‘Beautiful.’ ‘True.’ That’s the power of literature, you know, it can act like little love letters between people who can only explain their feelings by pointing at other people’s. One summer I opened a book and sand trickled out of it, and I knew he’d liked it so much he hadn’t been able to put it down. Every now and then I would get a book where some of the pages were crumpled, and I knew he’d been crying. One day I told him that, in the elevator, and he replied that I was the only person who knew that about him.”

“And that was when you…,” Julia nodded with a naughty smile.

“Oh, no, no, no…,” Estelle squeaked, and looked like she might have liked to finish the sentence by saying that she might possibly have wished it had happened, but of course that didn’t change anything. “We were never, it never, I could never…”

“Why not?” Julia asked.

Estelle smiled, proud and full of longing at the same time. It takes a certain age for that, a certain life.

“Because you dance with the person you went to the party with. And I went with Knut.”

“So… what happened?” Anna-Lena wondered.

Estelle’s breathing didn’t show any sign of speeding up, she didn’t have many big secrets left. After this one, possibly none at all.

“One day in the elevator he gave me a book, and inside it was a key to his apartment. He said he didn’t have any family living nearby, and that he wanted someone in the building to have a spare key ‘in case anything happened.’ I didn’t say anything, and I didn’t do anything, but I got the sense that maybe… maybe he would have liked it. If something had happened.”