The Swimmer

by Joakim Zander

  Still, he’d known from the beginning it wasn’t going to work out. That there was something inside him that wasn’t enough, something inconsistent with what he and Klara were creating. Something he kept to himself, deep down in the most hidden corner of his heart. When Klara had been admitted to a master’s program at the London School of Economics at the end of law school, they solemnly swore that they’d commute, that they’d make it work, that distance was irrelevant to a relationship as strong as theirs. But Mahmoud had already known it was the end. Inside of him the light he’d struggled so long to stamp out blazed with a new, resolute flame.

  He would never forget Klara’s eyes as they stood at the airport, as he stammered through his memorized speech. That he thought it might be good to take a break. They’d be a burden to one another. They shouldn’t see this as an ending, but as an opportunity. All of which were good reasons, but not the truth. She said nothing. Not a single word. And she never looked away. When he was finished, or when words finally failed him, all love, all tenderness had left her eyes. She looked at him with a contempt so merciless that tears began to stream down his cheeks. Then she picked up her bags and walked to the check-in desk without turning around. That was three years ago. He hadn’t spoken to her since.

  Mahmoud bent over his computer and opened a new message. He drummed on the keyboard. It was the only thing he’d thought about since he’d been invited to that conference in Brussels: he should contact Klara. But he hadn’t. He hadn’t been able to bring himself to write to her.

  ‘Come on, man!’ he said out loud to himself. ‘Come on!’

  It took him almost a half hour to write a message of only five lines. It took yet another fifteen minutes to delete whatever might be construed as ambiguity, desperation, or references to a history that he no longer had access to. Finally, he took a deep breath and hit ‘send’.

  The first thing he saw when he left the building twenty minutes later was the gray Volvo, sitting in a dimly lit parking lot down by the river. When he unlocked his bike, he heard the engine start, saw the headlights turn on, a ghostly cone of light lit up the old metal railing along the Fyris river. For the first time in a very long time, he actually felt afraid.

  3

  December 8, 2013

  Sankt Anna’s Outer Archipelago, Sweden

  The silence that followed was almost as deafening as the two ear-splitting explosions of the shotgun. The only sounds were ducks quacking on their way over the bay and the dog struggling against its leash, whimpering weakly. Anxiously. Everything was gray. Cliffs and sea. Bare trees and bushes. The wind rustled in the faded reeds at the water’s edge.

  ‘You missed,’ said the old man holding the binoculars.

  ‘Not a chance,’ replied the young woman at his side. She was still resting the shotgun against her shoulder. The cherrywood of its butt felt cool against her cheek.

  ‘Maybe the first round, but no way I missed on the second,’ she said. ‘Let Albert go, and then we’ll see.’

  The old man bent forward and unhooked the leash from the spaniel’s collar. The dog bolted with a shrill bark, out through the reeds and up toward the cliffs in the same direction as the gun was shot.

  ‘You missed both times. Believe me. You’ve gone soft, Klara.’

  He shook his head in disappointment. The shadow of a smile flashed across the young woman’s lips.

  ‘When I come out here you always say that, Grandpa. You say I missed. That I’ve gone soft.’

  She mimicked the old man’s worried expression.

  ‘And every time Albert comes back with our Sunday dinner in his mouth.’

  The man shook his head.

  ‘I just say what I see in the binoculars, that’s all,’ he muttered.

  He took a thermos and two cups out of the worn backpack leaning against a rock at his feet.

  ‘A cup of coffee, and then we go home and wake up Grandma,’ he said.

  They heard a short bark followed by wild splashing down by the shore. Klara smiled and patted her grandfather on the cheek.

  ‘Gone soft, huh? Was that what you said?’

  The man winked one of his ice blue eyes at her, poured a cup of coffee, and handed it to her. Fumbling with his other hand, he took a small flask out of a hidden pocket.

  ‘Would you like a little bit of lightning to celebrate your triumph, big game hunter?’ he said.

  ‘What? You brought booze? Do you know what time it is? You know I’m going to have to tell Grandma about this.’

  Klara shook her head sternly but let her grandfather pour a little drop of moonshine into her cup. Before she could take a sip, her phone started ringing deep inside one of the pockets of her oilskin coat. She sighed and handed the cup to her grandfather.

  ‘You can’t hide from the devil,’ her grandfather said with a crooked smile.

  Klara fished out her BlackBerry. She wasn’t surprised to see the name Eva-Karin flash across the display. Her boss. Social Democratic dinosaur and member of the European Parliament: Eva-Karin Boman.

  ‘Ugg,’ she moaned before answering.

  ‘Hello, Eva-Karin,’ she said in a voice an octave higher and considerably faster than usual.

  ‘Klara, darling, how lucky I am to catch you! Things are really getting tight, if you know what I mean. Glennys just called me and asked what our position was on the IT security report. And I haven’t even had time to open it yet, as you know. There’s just been so much going on with…’

  Her voice disappeared for a moment. Klara threw a quick glance at her watch. Just before nine. Eva-Karin was probably on the express train to Arlanda airport. Klara’s gaze swept over the gray, windblown cliffs. It felt absurd to talk to Eva-Karin out here in the archipelago. Eva-Karin’s voice felt like an intruder into her only refuge.

  ‘…so if you could get a summary to me by—what time shall we say? By five o’clock today, okay? So I can look through it before the meeting tomorrow? You’ll have plenty of time, right? You’re an angel, darling.’

  ‘Of course,’ Klara said. ‘Actually, Eva-Karin, maybe you don’t remember, but I’m in Sweden right now and won’t be flying back to Brussels until two this afternoon. I’m not sure I can have that to you by five o’clock—’

  ‘Klara, of course I know you’re in Sweden,’ Eva-Karin interrupted in a voice that brooked no further discussion. ‘But you can work while you’re traveling, can’t you? I mean, for goodness sake, you’ve already had the whole weekend free, right?’

  Klara squatted down in the wet moss and closed her eyes. It was Sunday morning. She’d only had Saturday free. It was as if all zest for life was being sucked out of her.

  ‘Klara? Klara? Are you still there?’

  Eva-Karin’s voice sounded in her ear.

  Klara cleared her throat and opened her eyes. She took a deep breath and tensed her voice, forcing it to sound alert, forward, and willing to serve.

  ‘Absolutely, Eva-Karin,’ she said. ‘No problem. I’ll e-mail the summary before five o’clock tonight.’

  Half an hour later, Klara Walldéen was back in the room she grew up in, surrounded by the pink wallpaper with the floral trim that she’d begged for when she was ten years old. The smooth, worn floorboards beneath her bare feet. Outside her window the Baltic Sea glimmered through the bare trees. She could see the whitecaps on the sea. A storm would be blowing in before the day was over. They had to hurry up. Her childhood friend Bo Bengtsson, who lived farther out in the bay, was going to bring her in to Norrköping by boat and car. Then she’d take the train to the airport and a flight down to her regular life in Brussels.

  She pulled the pilling Helly Hansen shirt over her shoulders, and replaced it with a light, tight top and an asymmetrical cardigan. She replaced the worn-out corduroy pants, which were actually her grandmother’s, with jeans of Japanese denim. She stepped into a pair of limited edition Nikes, forgoing the insulated rubber boots she’d worn on the morning hunt. Applied a little bit of smoky makeup around her
eyes. A few strokes of a brush through her jet-black hair. She looked like a different person in the mirror above the small white dressing table. The floorboards creaked as she moved.

  Klara rose from her chair and opened the door to a crawl space. Carefully, with much practice, she leaned into the darkness and pulled out an old, worn shoe box from which she took out a pile of photographs. She spread them out on the floor and crouched down in front of them.

  ‘Are you looking at those old photos again, Klara?’

  Klara turned around. Her grandmother seemed almost translucent in the pale light streaming in through the small attic windows. Her body was so brittle and fragile. If you hadn’t seen it for yourself, you’d never believe she could still hoist herself up to the top of the gnarled apple trees to beat the birds to the last of the fruit.

  She had the same ice blue eyes as Grandpa. They could have been siblings—but that was no joking matter out here in the archipelago. Her face had a few lines but no wrinkles. No makeup, just sun, laughter, and salt water, she used to say. She didn’t look a day over sixty, but she was turning seventy-five in a couple of months

  ‘I just wanted to take a look, you know,’ replied Klara.

  ‘Why don’t you take them to Brussels with you? I’ve never understood why you don’t. What good are they doing here?’

  Grandma shook her head. Something sad and lonely flashed through the blue of her eyes. For a moment it looked as if she wanted to say something but changed her mind.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Klara said. ‘That’s just the way it has to be. They belong here. So tell me, are there any saffron buns left?’

  She collected the photographs and put them gently back into the shoe box, before following her grandmother down the creaking stairs.

  ‘Oh, there she is! She’s got her city slicker clothes on and everything!’

  Bo Bengtsson was already waiting on the dock when Klara walked down toward it. As she had so many times before. It was as if her feet found their own way. As if her brain or spine weren’t needed to avoid the roots, rocks, puddles.

  ‘Quit it, Bosse. You sound like Grandpa,’ Klara said.

  They hugged each other awkwardly. Bosse was a few years older than her, and they’d pretty much grown up together out on the island. He was like a brother to her. Two siblings with opposite appearances and personalities.

  They were an odd couple. Klara was small and slight, always top of her class, but so good at soccer that she’d played on Österviking’s boys’ team for a while. Bo liked fishing and—when he got a little older—hunting, drinking, and fighting. She was always on her way out of there. He would never even consider leaving the archipelago. But they had gone to school together day in and day out. During the warmer half of the year they took the school boat, and in the winter they traveled by hovercraft. Things like that create a bond stronger than most.

  Klara jumped on board and lifted the battered fenders of Bosse’s old workhorse of a boat while he maneuvered away from the dock. When she was done, she joined him in the small wheelhouse. The waves were rising outside the dirty portholes, their peaks white and purposeful.

  ‘There’ll be a storm tonight,’ Bosse said.

  ‘That’s what they say,’ Klara replied.

  4

  December 17, 2013

  Brussels, Belgium

  The small park looked bare, icy, and nasty from George Lööw’s panoramic window on the seventh floor of the office building of Merchant & Taylor—the world’s largest PR firm—situated next to the Square de Meeûs in Brussels. George Lööw hated December. Above all, he hated Christmas. He could see the Christmas decorations along the rue Luxembourg that led down to the European Parliament, and they filled him with irritation. And it wouldn’t be over even when December finally came to an end, because the lazy goddamn municipal workers would leave that shit up until February.

  Just a few more days until he’d be forced to go home to his family’s huge apartment on Rådmansgatan and give the annual accounting of his life. The apartment would be decorated with candles and an Elsa Beskow tree. The tasteful Advent stars would be lit, his old man’s desserts table would groan under all the marzipan, the toffee made by his new wife, Ellen, and the absurdly expensive chocolate George brought home from Brussels every year that they dutifully, and not without some embarrassment, added to the table.

  His family, stuffed and bulging with Christmas food, would sit scattered around on classic Svenskt Tenn sofas with steaming cups of homemade mulled wine in their hands. Full of their pathos and their bloody hypocrisy, they’d exchange condescending glances while asking George about his job as a lobbyist, a word they pronounced as if it were excrement or arriviste.

  ‘Assholes,’ hissed George to his empty office.

  The little coffeemaker sputtered and filled his Nespresso cup halfway. It was his third espresso this morning, and it wasn’t even ten o’clock yet. He was uncharacteristically nervous about his morning meeting with a new client calling themselves Digital Solutions. George’s boss, the American CEO of the European division, Richard Appleby, said they had specifically asked for George. That was good in and of itself. Word about him had apparently started to spread. That he was a man who got things done in Brussels. That he could change which way the wind was blowing.

  But it was uncomfortable as hell not to know anything about them. There were literally thousands of firms named Digital Solutions. Impossible to know what this one actually did. There was no way to prepare. He would just have to use his charm and drive. As long as they paid his generous fee there was nothing to worry about. Merchant & Taylor had no scruples. You pay, you play was the unofficial motto. Chemicals, weapons, tobacco. Go right ahead. Hadn’t Appleby even represented North Korea for a while back in the early 1990s? Or was that just a rumor? Whatever. But George preferred to know something about the client he’d be sitting across from before a meeting began.

  He was still sweating from an early squash game at the gym. The light blue Turnbull & Asser shirt stuck to his back. Hope it stops before the meeting, he thought. This coffee probably wouldn’t help matters.

  He knocked back the espresso with a grimace. George drank his coffee like an Italian. Just a quick espresso on the go. Sophisticated. Stylish. Even when he was alone in his office, he took his coffee standing up. It was important to never drop the attitude.

  Nine fifty-five. He gathered a stack of papers, a pad, and a pen. The papers had nothing to do with Digital Solutions. But the client didn’t need to know that. He didn’t want to look like a goddamn intern, going into a meeting with just a pen.

  George had loved the conference room on the corner of the seventh floor since joining Merchant & Taylor, and always booked it when it was available. The corner room’s two glass walls faced the interior of the office floor, where George himself had begun his career. If you pressed a button next to the power switch behind the door, the glass walls instantly frosted over, becoming as opaque as thick ice. The first few weeks on the job, when George sat in front of his computer, working on uninteresting business analyses for customers in the sugar industry, auto industry, polymer industry, whatever, and writing brain-dead newsletters, he thought those glass walls were the coolest thing he’d ever seen. He loved to watch the more experienced consultants float across the wooden floor in their handmade Italian leather shoes and disappear into the ice cube. Epic.

  Nowadays George was the one gliding across the floor on his way to the ice cube. He felt their eyes. Looks just like the ones he used to throw when he was sitting there on the floor. Many of the people he’d started working with were still there. Not all of them had had the same rocket career trajectory as George, and maybe not all of the eyes following him were entirely adoring. But everyone put on a good face. Waved. Smiled. Played the game.

  It still felt like a fluke that he’d managed to land this job after resigning from Gottlieb, a Swedish law firm, three years ago. The fact that he was working at Gottlieb with something as cr
ude as corporate law, and mergers and acquisitions, had been difficult for his old man to accept. In the Lööw family if you became a lawyer in private practice, you practiced criminal law. Big principles, right and wrong. Nothing as dirty as business transactions and money. That was for upstarts ‘without ancestry, habits, or wit,’ as the old man used to say. At least he wasn’t aware of the actual circumstances surrounding George’s resignation.

  Though the old man had been somewhat appeased when George, after his sojourn at the law firm, had been accepted into a prestigious postgraduate program at the Collège d’Europe in Bruges. A bona fide elite school in the French mold with a fast-track into the EU crème de la crème in Brussels. They’d finally make something out of the kid. Maybe he’d end up at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs? Or the European Commission in Brussels? Something proper.

  George knew that a career in Sweden was out of the question after his short stint at Gottlieb, so with his recent EU law degree in hand Brussels was the natural place to start looking for a job. He dismissed the idea of working at a law firm immediately. He was finished with boxes full of dry annual reports and endless nights of searching through hard drives for contracts and more or less fishy settlements.

  PR firms proved to be something else entirely. Lavish offices. Hot chicks from all over the world in slim suits and high heels. Refrigerators stocked with free soda and beer. Espresso machines instead of filtered coffee.

  To go from the gray, dirty sidewalks of Brussels into the cool and softly lit glass and wood office building of Merchant & Taylor, with its silent elevators and overall whisper noise-level, was heaven. Sure, the starting salary wasn’t as good as at the American law firms, but there was the possibility of really big money. After a few years they gave you a company car. And not just any old crappy car, but an Audi, a BMW, maybe even a Jag.

  The huge English and American PR firms were the mercenaries of Brussels. They sold veneer, information, and influence to the highest bidder, regardless of ideological or moral convictions. A lot of people looked down on lobbyists. George loved them unconditionally from the first second. He was in his element. These were his people. His old man and the rest of the family could think whatever the hell they wanted to.