When Time Runs Out Read online

  The fact that the woman did not leave a message, any explanation for her action, was dumbfounding. In some extraordinary way we have grown used to killing. We have grown used to the feeling of insecurity caused by violence, to the grief which everyone wants to share, to the huddles of candles in the streets and in the school playgrounds, to the hearts and cloying ballads of social media which people try to share after such events. We have learned to deal with death and a daily insecurity, but not with the silence of a killer. At a time when everyone is constantly receiving messages, it felt incomprehensibly presumptuous. Not because she had killed, but because she didn’t even try to explain why.

  6

  Hope is an essential part of human nature. If we lose the hope for a better future, what is left to us?’

  Before me are fifty environmental science students. They are among the purest and most fortunate of their generation, those to whom the rest of us entrust our hopes. They do not care for alcohol or tobacco, they like cycling, crocheting and hanging out with their friends, dream of time rather than money, hope for a long romantic relationship and switch languages without pause. The same is probably true of their thinking. They have personal carbon monitors and shares in solar energy companies, and they know that if they choose well they can also even make money from protecting the environment.

  When I was young, I believed that if we acted together we could ward off environmental catastrophe and bring peace to the world. When I was a little older than these students, deaths on the borders of Europe were still newsworthy events. No longer. There has been fighting in Egypt, Libya and Syria for so long that no one remembers where it all started, malaria is so widespread in Greece that tourists no longer go there, half of the young people of Spain have moved to Argentina and Chile, and the Swedish prime minister is a former skinhead. In Europe almost half the people have stopped voting in elections. If things go badly for you, you die before you’re sixty; if they go well, you can live in a private nursing home until you’re 100. We have grown used to snowless winters, endless rain and floods whose power is always surprising. We have grown used to refugees who wander from one European country to another and to the fact that walls are being built round new housing estates.

  ‘Everyone is of equal value!’ I shouted as a young demonstrator outside the House of Parliament, believing that, if we only tried hard, if we were to apply ourselves with enough diligence, the world could indeed become a better place for everybody.

  When I speak to young people, I am still full of hope. They may succeed where we did not. What looks now like an inevitable move towards the destruction of humanity may develop in unexpected directions. We may create versions of the future, imagine alternative worlds, new visions; one of them may one day come true. But we cannot be certain. The power of humankind may surprise us not only in destructiveness and selfishness, but also in wisdom, reason and the creation of the new.

  ‘Nothing is more pointless than to imagine the entire world revolving around you,’ said my grandmother when we were travelling by tram to the centre of town. She always got up to offer a seat to people who were younger than her but who looked more tired.

  ‘Your generation has everything most people in the world will never have. That is why you do not have the right to think only of yourselves.’ Granny grew up in a little farmhouse with eleven siblings and was present, as a child, when two of them were buried. As a young woman she worked in a factory, and later as maid to a rich man; she was the first to wake and the last to go to bed in the house, but there was one thing she would never compromise over.

  ‘If you want to achieve something in life, you have to be content when you look in the mirror,’ she said. She stood in front of the little mirror in the hall, adjusting a gossamer-fine net over her hair and carefully brushing mascara onto her eyelashes, which curved so beautifully that in another place and time her face might have made her famous. In the tram, Granny held on to the pole with a hand clad in a pale-brown nappa leather glove; from her wrist rose the spicy scent of perfume. I stood next to her, trying to stay upright in the swaying carriage.

  My granmother could have been something completely different, I thought. The idea was dazzling. She could have written books or acted in films. She could have defended oppressed people or participated in decisions about the country’s affairs. Instead, for most of her life, she prepared food for a man whose sense of taste was so impaired that he could not distinguish between fish and meat, polished silver spoons and ironed shirts which had to be washed once a week and which always had to be hung up neatly. All the same, Granny always behaved as if she had been able to do whatever she wanted. If life was a disappointment to her, she hid this from everyone else.

  At the university, I talk about a subject that I have been talking about for all my adult life. About why climate change is treated as if it were merely a question of practical economics, although the bigger questions are about ethics.

  ‘Your generation will solve the great ethical questions of humanity,’ I said at the beginning of my lecture, and the students raised their gaze from their reading devices and concentrated on me, fifty pairs of eyes whose brightness lit up the entire space.

  ‘Do we consider the lives of people who live far away as being as important as our own? Do we care what kind of conditions future generations will live in? Do we have the right to seek the short-term advantage of a minority regardless of what it means for the majority of the human race now and in future decades?’

  I show the students pictures of Arctic areas where bright water glitters beneath the ice sheet, or the Amazon, where dry land is conquering the rainforests, or the Mali village covered by desert sand which women leave, carrying their children.

  The students look at the images in silence, their fingers stroking the edge of their desks. Their serious faces still have a hint of the roundness of childhood.

  ‘Many people have decided that there is no longer any hope,’ I say.

  ‘But sustaining hope when problems seem impossible is the most important thing there is.’

  The last picture is of Canada. It shows hands in blue plastic gloves, covered in oil. Environmental activists from all over the world are cleaning up an oil spill in the Arctic with native people and workers from the oil company. I look out of the window at the street lamps, which are coming on, pull my mouth into a zip-tight smile and seek the words that I wish to believe myself.

  ‘Do you remember that catastrophe?’ A few of the students nod.

  ‘For me it was a kind of turning point,’ I continue.

  ‘Before it happened, I talked and wrote continually about how destructive it would be to drill in the Arctic. I met ministers, members of parliament and CEOs of oil companies. Each one of them promised to familiarise themselves with the studies I presented them with. They smiled at me as if I were a child. When this happened, I was enraged. I thought the human race had no future. I wanted to go and live alone on a faraway island. But when I saw pictures of people who had arrived from different parts of the world starting to cleanse the area together, I realised that giving up hope was a symptom of my own inability to imagine a better world, not on what could really happen.’

  As I put on my coat I glance at my phone. Eerik is at Heathrow.

  See you soon. I’ve missed you. ♥ My Eerik has at last, at the age of fifty-nine, learned how to use the heart emoji.

  We met at an old gravel pit almost forty years ago. Eerik had a camera round his neck and was explaining how the derelict area could be transformed into a meadow, the gravel pits made into ponds where local residents would be able to swim. Eerik was wearing a frayed jumper and gumboots; he had shaved his head but left a few long hairs at the back of his head. I was reading environmental politics and was funding my studies by writing articles for political papers. Eerik was studying to be an architect and his diploma project was the renovation of the gravel pit into a park for local residents. We arranged an interview at the spot where Eerik was ta
king photographs for his project.

  When Eerik loped up in his dirty boots to shake me by the hand, his eyes glowing with his imagined landscapes, I did not want to let go of his hand. We walked round the vast wasteland and Eerik told me about a Swedish mine which had been transformed into a fabulously lit open-air theatre, and an English landfill site that had been planted with grass. From above, the lawn looked like a woman’s body.

  ‘I am really inspired by the idea that a run-down, even devastated, landscape can be reshaped to become beautiful,’ Eerik explained, drawing curves in the air with his hand as if he were painting the landscape he was designing. Our arms touched; Eerik smelled of the forest and of sweat, and I grasped his face with both hands.

  We undressed each other at the bottom of the gravel pit; the sharp stones scratched our backs. We took the train back to my home and made love many times; on the other side of the window we could hear the chirping of wagtails, the sounds of drunks and police sirens. We spent three days and three nights together; my flat smelled of wine, sweat and lavender oil, and the sun shone all the time.

  I never liked dating. After I moved away from home, I wanted clear boundaries between myself and other people. I wanted to keep my mind and my body as a sealed package; I was prepared to concern myself with the future of the globe, but not with the private sorrows of any one person. I took men home with me, friends and strangers, but at the point when they began to talk about dating I stopped returning their calls.

  With Eerik, we never talked about dating. He arrived in my life like an early spring, and suddenly the world was full of light. When we weren’t together, I thought about his skin. I cycled to lectures thinking about my hand running up and down his belly and nearly ran a dog over. When we were together, I undressed him. We ate quickly, we went for quick runs and sometimes to the cinema, but all the time I was waiting for the moment when I could grab the hem of his shirt. I didn’t want to meet his friends or introduce him to mine. I wanted to keep him in a warm room with David Bowie playing and spend the whole day naked.

  During our years together I have often hated Eerik. I have wanted to go away and never return. I have gone away, and I have always returned. I have been in love with another person, and I know that Eerik has too, even though he has never told me.

  But nevertheless, after all the moments of uncertainty and weariness, after all the nights filled with lonely wandering, after all the disappointed glances and concealed bitterness, I always cheer up when I see Eerik’s face in the crowd. At the end of a long day I wait for the time when we can cook together, open a bottle of wine and talk about the details of the day that have made us laugh and the sorrows we conceal from others, and ask questions to which only the other knows where to look for answers.

  As I tie my scarf I imagine Eerik walking to the arrivals hall of the airport pulling behind him the suitcase on which I have written his name. Eerik knows me better than anyone else, and sometimes I have to leave for precisely that reason. We embrace in the hall amid the other people, I press my face against his ancient sweater, inhaling the scent of coffee and aeroplane; my clothes carry the scent of the autumn weather and he brushes away a leaf caught on my coat collar. We decide to take the bus to the centre of town and walk home from there, to stop for a drink or just walk hand in hand; in the biting cold weather he’s the warmth of a familiar hand, and a shared sense of humour cultivated over many years, brings us home long before we have opened the door.

  Eerik has spent a week in Zambia, where he is planning the transformation of an old copper-mining area into a public park.

  ‘Children could plant their own trees here,’ he explained, his drawings before him, his eyes gleaming in a way that makes everything around him shine. I want to hear everything about the trip. I want to see if he has remembered to protect his face with sun cream or whether his nose is peeling again.

  In the university corridor a teaching assistant approaches me. I wave to her and she grabs my hand hard, as if one of us were in danger of falling.

  ‘They’re asking for you,’ she says, nodding at two policemen standing by the wall.

  Aava

  I do not have the strength for grief. Doctor, please let me die too!’

  The woman may be younger than me, but her face, framed by its violet scarf, is crisscrossed with wrinkles. The fingers that squeeze my wrist are bony and hard.

  ‘I am so sorry.’

  I have said this many times. The words have no meaning. I have nothing else to give.

  The woman’s daughter had eyes the colour of toasted almonds and an intense gaze. When I visited the village for the first time, the girl broke away from the giggling crowd of children that had followed me at a safe distance and approached me as if I were an animal that might attack or run away.

  The village children formed themselves into a straggling line from which each of them stepped forward in turn to be weighed and let me measure the thickness of their arms. I noticed the girl who was walking beside the queue, although she turned away as soon as I glanced at her.

  ‘What is your name?’ I asked. For the village children, I had practised a soft, calm way of speaking so that the presence of a white adult would not frighten them.

  ‘Haweeyo.’

  ‘A lovely name. Would you like to come and help?’

  The eyes of the other children in the queue turned from me to the girl. She stood still for a moment, then adjusted her scarf and came to me, picked up the tape and listened intently while I explained which part of the arm should be measured.

  ‘Auntie. I would like to be a doctor like you.’ The whisper was so soft that at first I did not hear it at all.

  It was the first calm moment of the day. The last child had left. I was packing my things and going through the children’s health cards with the nurse. The girl stood next to the wall of the hut, drawing circles in the earth with her toes.

  ‘What, my love?’

  ‘I want to be the same as you. I want to fly in an airplane and give children peanut butter,’ the girl said clearly, and the nurse, too, looked at her, smiling.

  ‘You could work with me,’ the nurse said cheerfully.

  ‘We three could make miracles happen!’ said the girl solemnly. The light of the setting sun filtered through the thatched roof; from outside came the song of the sacred ibis. We three. How beautiful the thought was.

  The village elders approach the woman. The men wear long white garments, cool in the heat, henna-dyed beards and penetrating gazes beneath their furrowed brows. I follow them to the village chief’s house, sit on a carpet on the floor and gratefully accept a warm Sprite. Beneath my scarf, my bulletproof vest and my long-sleeved shirt, drops run along my skin: insect slime. A nauseating taste rises in my throat. I swallow it as I have learned to swallow in markets stinking of fish that has been left in the sun. I taste the sugary drink and prepare to answer all their questions.

  ‘The doctor was away too long.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ I say again. My throat is dry. I have to cough. I raise my hand in front of my mouth and try to do so quietly, but the sound is loud, my body shakes, tears come to my eyes.

  ‘It is not enough. You fly here when it suits you, arrive full of self-importance and give instructions. But when something bad happens we are always left alone.

  ‘If you had come earlier, she might have survived.’

  ‘I wanted to come,’ I say. My voice is clear and steady again. ‘But after the murder, the security department would not let anyone come here.’

  ‘But no foreigners were killed.’

  ‘The local doctor died. The murder was completely absurd.’

  ‘A quarrel about a land deal.’

  I squeeze my hands, hidden by my long sleeves, into fists. The murdered doctor had clear eyes and a firm handshake. He told children who were frightened of injections a joke about a man who had grown up in the village and went to the United States to meet some relatives. At the airport the man’s mother sai
d, ‘May Allah open doors for you.’ When the automatic doors at the new country’s airport opened for the first time, the man smiled happily. Allah was with him.

  ‘His name was Suldaan. He was my colleague.’

  ‘And once more a child died, a child who otherwise would have stayed alive,’ said the village chief. The veins in his neck were as thick as a lizard’s tail, his fingers as twisted as the staff with which he tapped the ground as he spoke.

  ‘I would like to do much more,’ I say. ‘But as long as the security situation is as it is, there are very few opportunities.’

  When I rise to leave, the village chief grasps my hand. I am startled. In this village men never shake hands with women. I squeeze the man’s hand. His palm is soft, even though everything else about him is furrowed and hard. The aeroplane awaits me on the narrow runway in the midst of the dense scrub. The khaki nose of the plane glimmers through the dark green leaves. Under the patchy paint, rust is visible. I do not wish to think about the condition of the parts of the plane I cannot see. The children run after me in a squealing crowd, spreading their arms into wings and shouting:

  ‘Sister, take us with you!’

  The village chief takes a stick from the ground and uses it to drive the children away, gently but firmly.

  8

  I close my eyes. Gerard presses his thumbs into my shoulders, into the spots where hard knots lurk. The pain pierces down to my toes. I press my teeth together and let the tears rise to my eyes.