Europa Blues
Page 36
They sat for a moment longer. The wall between them had risen once more.
‘I’ll get the diary,’ he said, getting to his feet.
Magda waited on the veranda. She looked out over the paradisiacal landscape, and no one, absolutely no one in the world, could have known what she was thinking.
He came back and handed her the diary. They parted without a word. He watched as she wandered down the narrow, steep, crooked road to Greve.
Chianti was showing its best side. The sun was playing on her back and made her black clothes almost glow. She disappeared behind the crest of the hill like a piece of glowing coal.
The shadow of her seemed to linger long after she had gone.
It would probably never disappear.
Söderstedt stood there bathed in the scent of nineteen different varieties of basil. A warm wind gently caressed his cheek. The winemakers were pacing slowly back and forth along their vines on the sun-drenched hills. The children were running around increasingly wildly, and black could no longer be distinguished from white, white no longer from black; the clamour of their voices rose in a paean to the luminous wisps of cloud hanging in the clear blue sky.
Everything was wonderful. And everything was false.
He was standing on top of bodies in order to see Paradise.
And he wasn’t alone. He was an entire continent.
Anja appeared from her basil-scented landscape like a misplaced marrow. She walked over to him on the veranda and took a sip of his Vin Santo.
‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ he said, stroking her stomach.
They stood there for a moment.
Eventually, he said: ‘How’s the little rascal doing?’
Anja laughed and hit him with her gardening gloves.
‘What is it with you?’ she exclaimed. ‘I’m not pregnant.’
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Copyright © Arne Dahl 2001
English translation copyright © Alice Menzies 2015
Arne Dahl has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published by Harvill Secker in 2015
First published in Sweden by Bra Böcker AB, a division of Albert Bonniers Forlag, Stockholm in 2001
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library