Open Grave: A Mystery

by Kjell Eriksson

  “Have you gone on strike perhaps, Agnes?”

  Saliva was spraying out of his mouth.

  “No, but I’ve retired,” she said with forced composure.

  She could not keep from staring at the archipelago of drops of saliva on the shiny tabletop.

  “Retired?”

  “Like you did, professor, many years ago.”

  The words made her worried in an undefined way, as if she was guilty of something indecent and she was forced to repeat the word “retired” silently to herself to try to understand its full import.

  “What kind of talk is that!”

  She did not answer, did not dare try her voice.

  “Are you feeling unwell?”

  “Thanks,” she mumbled.

  “What kind of answer is that?” he barked, but immediately changed his tone. “You’re simply exhausted, Agnes. There’s been a lot going on the past few days. Isn’t that so?”

  She was unable to say anything.

  “Make a couple sandwiches, please, but no salami or liverwurst. Then you can take off the rest of the day, in any event until dinner. Forslund is coming over, but he’s not much for food, you know that. Just throw something together. He likes home cooking. You’ll solve that splendidly, Agnes.”

  Algot Forslund was the lawyer who had served the family almost as long as she had. If he was not much for food he made up for it in drink. “Home cooking” in Forslund’s case meant a plate of herring, but primarily aquavit.

  She looked intently at the professor, but was unable even to confirm that she had understood his words.

  “There’s been a lot for me too,” said the professor.

  She withstood the impulse to go up and wipe off the table.

  “Maybe we’re burnt out,” the professor said with a grin.

  She left the dining room, mute and with a sense of having been betrayed.

  Twelve

  “You can never have too many leaves,” said Karsten Heller.

  He smiled more broadly than the associate professor could remember anyone in his company having done for years.

  The gardener had packed half a dozen trash bags full of beech leaves. They resembled swollen black eggs, ready to burst at any moment.

  “You’re sure that—”

  “Take as many as you want,” the associate professor assured him. “I’m just happy to get rid of some of them.”

  He appreciated his new acquaintance, who became loquacious where plants were concerned, but otherwise apparently preferred to work in silence. The associate professor sensed that he worked a lot on his own.

  When another four sacks were filled Haller looked up. He resembled a hunter proudly observing the day’s catch.

  “I was thinking about something,” said the associate professor. “When we last met you said something about it being a stone that the police picked up in Ohler’s yard. How could you be so sure of that?”

  “Because I threw it,” Haller said simply.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I was the one who threw the stone. The evening before. It landed on the roof and evidently rolled down on the front side.”

  “Why is that?” the associate professor said sheepishly.

  Haller laughed.

  “Yes, why?” he repeated. “It was an impulse. It pleased me enormously. I could throw another, yes, I could let fly a whole flat of cobblestones. Preferably with a catapult, you know, one of these medieval devices, so that it would rain stones over the house.”

  He was smiling, but the associate professor could hear a kind of conviction behind the bantering tone.

  “It truly was a spectacle,” said the associate professor after a moment’s silence, and they both joined in a laugh.

  “Would you like a cup of coffee?”

  “That would be good,” said Haller.

  “I only have a few almond cookies,” the associate professor said apologetically.

  * * *

  The associate professor considered a moment whether he should invite Haller up into the tower but that didn’t feel quite right. When the coffee was ready and they were sitting down in the kitchen, after a while he ventured a question.

  “Do you know Professor von Ohler from before?”

  “No, not personally,” Haller replied.

  “You know that he’s been awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine?”

  “That has probably not escaped anyone.”

  The associate professor suddenly became thoughtful. He had been distracted by the talk about a catapult, imagined a siege, a boyish image, where showers of stones shot down from the sky, and for that reason he had been lured into laughter. But now he became wary. What did he know about the gardener on the other side of the table? There was something about him that did not tally with the image he had gotten of him yesterday.

  “Have a cookie,” the associate professor offered.

  Haller inspected the associate professor before he sank his teeth into the cookie.

  “What I do is probably pretty clear, but what is your occupation?”

  For a moment the associate professor considered fabricating something, denying his background, inventing something new, but realized that it was simplest to stick to the truth.

  “I’m also a doctor, a virologist like Ohler. We actually worked together for almost thirty years at University Hospital.”

  Haller looked a little surprised but said nothing. He seemed to be waiting for a continuation. The associate professor felt as though he had to explain himself, excuse why he had been a colleague of the professor for such a long time. It was as if that created a kind of distance to the gardener.

  “But we don’t socialize,” he added.

  “And you’re not getting any prize,” Haller noted.

  The associate professor stood up to get the coffee.

  “Refill?”

  “Thanks,” said Haller, pushing the cup closer to the associate professor, “but then it’s time to get going.”

  “How long will you be here?”

  “Just a few more days. I’m going to dig a couple more flower beds and prune the maple on the front side, maybe cut down a birch tree.”

  “Sensible,” said the associate professor. “I’ve dug up a witch alder, in case you’re interested.”

  Haller smiled and nodded. He emptied his cup and push the chair back from the table.

  “May I ask a personal question? Not because it concerns me, but you seem to harbor a certain animosity with respect to Professor von Ohler.”

  “That was nicely put,” said Haller. “But it’s true. I don’t know him personally, as I said, but to me he represents the worst thing about this town.”

  “And that is?”

  “The so-called educated classes’ contempt and suppression.”

  “And how do you know that the professor stands for such values? I mean, if you don’t know him personally.”

  “I know him anyway,” said Haller with a sarcastic smile. “As I assume that you know your colleague very well. And then you yourself live in this educated area in a millionaire’s house.”

  The associate professor felt how embarrassed he became, at the same time as he was provoked by the other man’s slightly scornful tone.

  “Excuse me,” said Haller. “I didn’t mean to be insolent.”

  “What’s wrong with education?” the associate professor asked calmly, but then it was as if an immense force filled him. “Tell me that! Is education wrong? I am sitting on a farm worker’s kitchen bench, the bench of my childhood. Any education I’ve acquired I’ve had to fight my way for, inch by inch.”

  Haller was astonished at the other man’s sudden transformation. He never would have expected such fury from him.

  “Inch by inch!” the associate professor repeated and underscored his anger by striking his index finger on the table. “Not an inch for free!”

  “Excuse me,” said Haller again, raising his hands in a conciliatory gesture, but the asso
ciate professor would not let himself be stopped.

  “I’m sitting in this house, yes, it’s true, worth several million kronor today, an inconceivable amount of money. My father grew up in a drafty farm laborer’s shack in Rasbo, full of snotty children and wall lice. Two of his siblings died from the Spanish flu. I speak several languages, my mother knew a little Finnish, that was all. My father only went to school for three years. I became a medical doctor in a specialty that he could not even conceive of. He could not have pronounced the title of my dissertation. I have traveled all over the globe, the farthest my father got was to Skinnskatteberg to bury a brother. My parents would burst with pride if they could see me today. Tell me, master gardener, have I done wrong? Should I regret it?”

  “Excuse me,” Haller repeated for the third time. “Of course you didn’t do wrong. I didn’t know about your background, the fact is that I—”

  “You talk about contempt,” the associate professor interrupted, feeling the heat in his face. “But you are the one who is contemptuous.”

  Haller looked at him with a mixture of admiration and sorrow, as if he had stepped on something valuable.

  “I’m just a bitter mole,” he said, “someone who digs and digs in the earth.”

  “But you’re not blind.”

  “Blinded,” said Haller.

  “By what?”

  “Perhaps I’ll tell you sometime.”

  Haller fell silent and looked down at the floor, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. He had pushed his chair out so far from the table that he seemed to be sitting in the middle of the kitchen. The associate professor felt exhausted. He had seldom if ever let his emotions run away like this.

  “If there’s an occasion,” Haller continued.

  It was this addition, expelled like a sigh, that made the associate professor regret his vehemence. He had also seen the solitary man’s misgivings in his sorrowful eyes and tormented expression, and he sensed that Karsten Haller was simply a lonely person, like himself unused to contact with others. He felt that he was guilty of a blunder that he now wished he could undo.

  “I’m sure there will be an occasion,” said the associate professor, trying to adopt a more conciliatory tone. “You have a Fothergilla waiting,” said the associate professor. “A cultivated witch alder.”

  Haller looked up and nodded mutely.

  “But you are right on one point,” said the associate professor.

  “And that is?”

  “Perhaps I can tell you some time,” said the associate professor, and was rewarded with a cautious smile and a nod.

  * * *

  They separated in mutual silence, both of them embarrassed at how the coffee break had developed. Haller loaded the sacks of leaves on his trailer, after having declined help with a deprecating gesture, and took off. A few minutes later the associate professor could see him carrying the sacks onto the neighbor’s yard and emptying them out. Against the wall of the house several yellow sacks were also visible that he suspected contained peat moss.

  He realized that it would be a long workday for the gardener. There, at work, perhaps he was happy in his solitude, mixing a cultivation substrate—wrestling with a bale of peat and kicking leaves and spruce needles around—and demanded no social competence, no education either in the classical sense.

  The associate professor went up to the tower and watered, increasingly sparingly the further into autumn it was. What was it that made him so upset? He could not remember when that last happened. At work he had seldom if ever taken sides; there he let pure idiocy and bullying pass by. He usually backed off to avoid hearing more, with a look that expressed the point of view of the morally superior, a silent demonstration that did not seem to impress anyone.

  Was it out of pure cowardice? Or perhaps simply an expression of the sense of inferiority that he recognized as the driving force in Haller’s primitive condescension? Because of course he had despised, downright loathed, many of his fellow students for their ill-mannered behavior and monumental ignorance of life outside the dormitories and student societies. There was a certainty in their demeanor, a lack of humility, as if they could never be wrong. If they were caught in a lie or momentarily bothered by something, they immediately dismissed the discomfort, as if to say, “Of course, maybe that wasn’t so successful, but what of it?” They were protected, and knew it.

  He never enlightened them about the life and conditions in a farm laborer’s home, but instead assumed a passive attitude. Only a few of his fellow students came from working-class homes, and probably none from the rural proletariat. He was basically alone in his experiences, alone in his language. He was proud of his background but never took sides, never got involved in controversy, did not even respond to the worst forms of class-conditioned contempt and ignorance, as he had now done with Haller.

  The associate professor had become righteously angry at Haller’s impolite manner but at the same time in some strange way embarrassed on the other man’s behalf and therefore he wanted to tell him off, and perhaps by that means himself. Because he understood very well that Haller’s open contempt for the professor, and above all his apparently pleasurable hurling of the stone, had wakened his own bad conscience, reminded him of Bubb’s insistent encouragement to take part in the campaign against the Nobel Prize committee’s selection, as well as his own extremely real feeling of having been discriminated against, both before and now.

  The professor’s words that there was no absolute justice in the world, above all not in academia, had been grinding in his head and now the meaning of the words was clearer to him than ever.

  * * *

  At Lundquist’s the gardener worked away, the preparation work was as good as finished, it was soon ready for planting. Haller knew his business, that was clear. He had laid out two planks as walkways to avoid trampling down and compressing the soft, inviting beds.

  The associate professor felt a stab of jealousy. Haller could lose himself in meaningful work, while what he busied himself with in his tower resembled therapy. But I’ve done my share, he thought further, I contributed to a scientific breakthrough that reduced suffering and saved human lives. I don’t need to apologize for my actions or because now I cultivate exotic plants in a tower. I paid back with interest what it cost society to educate me and I think I have the right to enjoy …

  “But am I enjoying myself?” he asked right out loud and turned toward Lundquist’s lot, as if the answer could be found there.

  Haller looked up at the same moment. The associate professor understood that he was well outlined against the dull foliage of the olive tree. He waved and Haller waved back.

  Perhaps Haller can become a friend? The thought was mind-boggling, as if the mere idea of the existence of a friend was beyond reasonable. It struck him that he had not even used the word “friend” in many years. When would that have been? Well, perhaps when he wrote the obligatory Christmas letter to Düsseldorf, which he always began with “Lieber Freund.”

  The associate professor laughed joylessly at these ridiculous thoughts. Should Horst Bubb be the one he called and told about his worries, the one he asked for advice and sought support from? Bubb, who was filled by a single thought: disqualifying Bertram von Ohler, a person he had never met or had any difficulty with. Whatever he would say to his “dear friend,” the German would reply with a salvo about the Academy of Sciences and Wolfgang Schimmel’s heroic struggle for the melancholy Alan Ferguson in Vermont.

  But he would not quarrel, he would not choose sides, despite the sense that an injustice had been committed. Did that make him a lesser person, a coward? Was it struggle that could lift the discomfort from his shoulders?

  After a final glance toward Haller the associate professor left the tower.

  Thirteen

  Algot Forslund held out his hat. Agnes thought it smelled bad, a mixture of smoke and something rotten, and quickly consigned it to the shelf. He wriggled out of his coat and hung it up all
by himself.

  She and the attorney were the same age but he looked considerably older. The change had come quickly, his posture had always been poor but his face had collapsed during the past year. The previously so fleshy and rosy cheeks now hung loose and gray in color.

  Agnes sensed that it was not only the daily alcohol consumption that was the reason. He’s sick, she was sure, but she felt indifferent in the presence of the bent man who passively stood and waited for her to open the door to the library. Forslund had never interested her, either young or old, sober or tipsy, so why should she start caring now?

  These days Bertram von Ohler was his only client and he would visit the house four or five times a year. There were always some papers that had to be arranged. Agnes suspected it was the will that was up for discussion again. Now and then it would be adjusted, some detail added or removed. During the day the professor had been rooting in the “archive,” as he called the old safe. Agnes knew, the only one besides the professor himself, where the key to the safe was stored: in an old tin can in the cellar.

  She had to retrieve it, he usually did not dare make his way down the steps himself. The talk about her being able to rest awhile after lunch had evidently been immediately forgotten. He filled the afternoon with constant new instructions and orders and now she felt very tired. As always when she was forced to walk a lot the pains in her left hip also increased. She limped, which even the dim-sighted Forslund observed.

  “What’s the matter? Is he after you?” he said with a grin.

  “Go right in,” said Agnes, holding open the door.

  The attorney turned into the library.

  “Thanks, Agnes,” said the professor. “We’ll have a bite to eat in an hour. Or maybe half an hour,” he corrected himself after taking a look at Forslund.

  * * *

  Was she herself in the will? She thought so. The professor had mentioned something several years ago. But since then it had been rewritten several times. Forslund would no doubt gladly remove her as a beneficiary. He had previously shown a certain interest in her, hinted that there were many rooms in the house where she could have a private legal consultation. During a certain stage of intoxication he always tried to grope her and when that didn’t work he would change to verbal indecencies. She had always refused him, sometimes brusquely. But that was many years ago now. They had both withered a bit.