Ms Alice Lundgren, full name Alice Margareta Lundgren, a great aunt and well in her seventies, knew that the end wasn’t far. She did not repine the hard lived and tiring life she had gone through and had only few regrets and sins to confess.
“Lord, forgive sins of seeing” the young priest whispered and she felt the oily fingers touching her eyelids. She had seen a lot of those, she thought. Small society and even smaller family attract and construct sins and sinners. Faces morphed into one another, some recognizable by names, some list in time and space.
She could see her older brother, may God rest his soul, sitting on the family’s patio, beer in one hand a cigarette on the other. A drunken bull with no good words for anybody. Married late in his life a woman younger than her, the younger sister. A woman constantly hitting herself in doors and falling in the toilet, sometimes with a black eye, others with broken arm or fingers.
Alice could see her hiding behind the curtain and watching her husband from inside the house to make sure his beer glass was never empty. Fear constant look in her eyes. What was her name? Frida. That was her name. She remembered once her younger brother, Gunner, had joked that she was definitely not Frida Kahlo, without further explaining what he meant even though Alice and him burst out laughing.
Alice and Gunner, Gun for his friends and Alice, always laughed when they were together. That was their sin as a team or everybody else thought of it as a sin. “So some respect the two of you,” her mother used to say. “You act like infants.”
“But we are infants,” her brother used to answer, “almost toddlers.”
“Or brats,” Alice couldn’t stay behind in this game of shrewdness.
“Spoiled brats,” Gunner would finish it with both of them start laughing again.
But there was absolutely nothing jolly and spoiled about any of the kids for the Lundgren family. There was only sweat, pain, weariness and occasional tears. No personal touch, no encouraging word, no attitude for Matteo Lundgren; only hard work and Sunday mornings in the church.
Did she smile? She didn’t know. She couldn’t see or feel anything. She was just lying in her bed, fully covered with blankets feeling the oily finger brushing softly her temple. Why priests have always so soft hands?
Father Lucas was the priest of her youth. Despite her father’s and mother’s disapproval he loved Gunnar’s and hers laughs. “When the two of you laugh, I hear angels laugh,” he used to say when all of them gathered in the churchyard after the service. When he laughed, Alice felt like hell was ringing but she never told anybody, not even Gunner. For long time and when she told him it was too late. “The sins I’ve seen,” she thought again.
The thought of father Lucas brought the face of Stig in her mind, Gunnar’s best friend. He was always there in the churchyard after the service but never inside. Her father always looked at him with a combination of disapproval and dismay but as he often said to her mother, it was not the boy’s fault who his father and his mother were. Poor Matteo Lundgren, little he knew how his firstborn will grow to be.
Stig was like a shadow. First to Gunnar and then to the rest of the world. Short and thin somehow blended with the background, especially when this background was people. He lived a life of nonexistence most of the time or to put it better, a life with or without Gunnar. While with Gunnar Stig spoke, laughed, existed. Without Gunnar he was a kid trying to survive in a house where violence and brutality was a pattern mixed with hunger and alcohol. A kid making sure nobody would see him or even notice his presence because that often turned him into the heart of all violence and heartless brutality.
Even though my mother was not happy for his friendship with her younger son, she always made sure that when Stig was around was fed enough. For my mother food was the essence of life. “If you don’t have food on the table there is no life.” She used to say and she actually meant it but not really mean it.
What she was trying to say was that dinner time with all the family at the dinner table was family time, was the proof that the family was together, united and healthy. It was also the place to short out conflicts and disagreements or explore possibilities. It was the place to plan, to ask and get answers. It was the only place father would speak. And for her that was family and life together.
And if a stray kid, like Stig lack all those she felt that she had the Christian right to give him a taste. That’s why Stig always joined the family after Sunday’s service for the Sunday meal. Because he had to see that the wise God was with good people, good families and take lessons for his future if he wanted to have one. Her mother’s relationship with the church and in general with religion was peculiar and in a way self-serving; her father from the other side was more straightforward, “believe and act as the good book says otherwise you are going to die and go to hell.”
Thanos' Pulp Fiction 