Antiquity by Hanna Johansson

Author:Hanna Johansson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2023-12-12T00:00:00+00:00

ONE MORNING Helena ate the honey in her yogurt again, she swirled it around her spoon, she asked me to buy bread and tomatoes, that evening she wanted us to go out for dinner together. Olga did not want to join and Helena made no attempt to convince her. This irritated me, not because I wanted her company but because I didn’t think it was right that she had the choice and also, partly, due to a complicated sort of jealousy: the ease with which she said no to a person I wanted to be close with irritated me.

As if she had read my mind, Helena explained to me, as soon as we were alone, that Olga’s dad had given her Steppenwolf that summer, and this book had made her ill-mannered. Helena didn’t like the book, she didn’t like that the dad had given it to Olga, who does he think she is, some guy, a cineaste in a beret, he really has no soul, it’s tone-deaf, honestly. Helena didn’t like the way Olga said “I love you” on the phone to her dad. In English it sounded tasteless and fake, like a line from a movie.

For as long as I’d known her, Helena had been circumspect about her marriages, the first one in particular, which she only referred to as a span of time—“this was when I was married to my first husband; this was two years after I’d married . . .”—she never said his name when she talked about him. As for the second marriage, the one to Olga’s father, she sometimes hinted that there was a story there that she was hiding from me, that there was something seriously wrong with him, that he was crazy, that he was violent. She used words that could be euphemisms: he was particular, he was strong-willed. Almost every time, including now, she got angry when he came up, and her uninhibited way of expressing this anger made it seem justified. Most of the time her hints left me with the sense that I was being misled, that her inscrutability was a question of hiding not a dark truth, just a boring one: she’d once been married to a person she no longer loved. I wondered if she missed his last name, which Olga still bore. I wondered if she envied Olga’s natural bond to this man the way I envied Olga’s natural bond to Helena.

“Oneiro” means “dream,” Helena told me; it was the name of the restaurant: beautiful, isn’t it.

We ate ice cream with mastic and poppy seeds. In the backyard where we sat, lamps were strung between the leafy walls and the sky overhead was warm, taut like a tablecloth. It looked expensive, that sky, the walls and the leaves, the cool on the tongue and the taste of resin, metallic and ancient. We ate from the same spoon, passing it back and forth. Aside from a family of four, we were the restaurant’s only guests. The others

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