Open Grave: A Mystery

by Kjell Eriksson

  Ottosson nodded.

  “And that was probably a good thing,” Lindell added.

  “I see, he’s one of those.”

  Now it was her turn to nod.

  “Have you talked with Ola at all?”

  “Not for a couple of weeks,” said Lindell. “When he was in Stockholm visiting someone.”

  “A lady?”

  “Hard to believe.”

  At one time, Lindell had felt attracted to Ola Haver. It was not long after the separation from Edvard. Now, in retrospect, she had a hard time understanding why.

  “Is he coming back?” asked Ottosson.

  “Don’t think so.”

  “He doesn’t want to talk with me. The last time he hung up. So he’s probably coming back when I’m gone.”

  Ottosson sounded sincerely worried. He was not self-pitying, instead sad that perhaps he had said or done something that upset Haver.

  “No,” said Lindell. “He’s angry, not at you personally but at the department in general and you’ll have to take the blame since you’re the boss. He’s angry at life, at Rebecka, at everything and everyone.”

  Ottosson observed her.

  “There are many who are angry these days,” he said a bit cryptically.

  “Complaints?”

  “No,” said Ottosson. “Sometimes you wish that more people complained.”

  “Go visit our Nobel Prize winner,” Lindell encouraged him. “He complains about most everything.”

  After a few minutes Lindell left. She felt a certain impatience and she knew why. She wanted to call Gräsö.

  Seventeen

  The notes from Africa no longer interested him. He had long intended to edit the scattered paragraphs into a coherent text. Obviously a lot would have to be deleted, but there was enough that held up to closer inspection.

  Now he didn’t know. Small observations of nature by a white man in a black country, what would that be good for? Miss Elly would have been immensely amused, he smiled at the memory of her merciless laughter. He read a couple of sentences: “I know nothing about fireflies. That worries me.” Miss Elly would have choked.

  No, I’ll throw the piles of papers in the garbage can, he decided, but changed his mind at the same moment. What if his mother had thought the same way and actually thrown away her diaries? Then he would be suspended in ignorance of who she really was, and above all he would never have gotten an answer to questions he had wondered about ever since childhood. Perhaps the answers came a bit late, but he experienced a great warmth at the sight of his mother’s primitive scribbling.

  But on the other hand, he had no children who would read and understand in retrospect. They never had any children. That was why Miss Elly died, there was no other explanation. Her shame at being a barren cow was too great. Her despair hollowed her out until only a dry skin remained. She weighed nothing when she passed away. He carried her casket alone on one shoulder.

  So who would read his notes? He had no ambition to stand out as intelligent, because he had never seen himself that way. He was good at a number of things, he could track, haul wood, imitate bird calls, likewise lay an acid-soil bed and a whole lot more. None of this was especially remarkable. The birds sang better than he did. Millions of people in Africa could track, but he had been given a talent that not many white people had, Miss Elly thought. In that area she was impressed by his skills. Otherwise his experiences could be sorted under the “everyday” category.

  He harbored no ambitions to be an author either. He had never read that much; during the years in Africa there had simply been a lack of books. At his uncle’s in Windhoek there were only German novels of miserable quality and pornography of even lower quality. Then, in the northern provinces, he never experienced any need for books.

  If he had at least been agitated when he jotted down his lines, then perhaps it would be instructive or at least readable for a wider audience. Strangely enough, though, he thought in retrospect, the notes were chemically free from comments about what was happening in the country. Not even when the resistance struggle intensified and the armed groups went past, sometimes only gangs of boys from the high plateaus equipped with a few automatic rifles, did it leave any traces in his writing. He had not hesitated a moment about where his sympathies were; many times he had ended up in arguments with other whites, not least the Haller family in the capital, but none of this appeared in his writings, not a single expression of anger.

  In his texts animals and nature dominated, skies, stars and desert sand, rain that fell or was absent, mooing, bellowing, and shrieks in the night, sunrises so beautiful that he wept with gratitude.

  A few lines about Miss Elly. If I had written more about her and love anyway, he thought, I could have filled however many pages. No, instead I wrote about fireflies. No wonder she laughed.

  The conclusion was that what was most interesting to others, most universally applicable or exciting in a more conventional sense, was lacking.

  But perhaps, he concluded his train of thought, perhaps in the future could there be a person, in Sweden or in Namibia, who would find the text interesting? The problem was how this person would get hold of his notes. That was an insurmountable problem. When he died the text would die with him.

  He should let chance decide! As part of his estate, his typed-out African meditations would be neatly collected. Those to whom the task fell of cleaning up after him would have to decide. Either the papers would end up in a black garbage bag along with old vouchers, warranties for the toaster, and everything else he had collected, or else the finder would sit down and start browsing, perhaps enticed by the exotic photo on the front page depicting Miss Elly sitting on the skull of a hippopotamus, and after a couple of pages would say to his assistant, “This is really interesting.” Then the other person, tired of the first person’s passivity, would encourage him to take the papers home and continue reading there.

  That is what would happen when the text started to have a life of its own. What would happen then no one could know. The number of possibilities made him dizzy.

  He laughed, stirred a little absentmindedly the bowl of pasta he was cooking, and thought about the police officers he had met earlier in the day. The man, Nilsson he had introduced himself as, stood out as a cheerful fellow. Or was he just pretending? No, Karsten thought to himself, he seemed genuinely pleasant, open and talkative. But the woman who came up later looked like seven years of famine.

  She had inspected him suspiciously. Perhaps she despised people who dug? Or else she was angry at her colleague, thought that he was wasting time, and then let her displeasure spill over on him.

  What surprised Karsten was the information that new threats had been made against the professor. What the threats consisted of Nilsson would not say, other than that it concerned something that was placed by the mailbox. No, Karsten had not seen anything, he was fully occupied with excavating and could not possibly perceive what was happening in the neighboring yards, especially on the other side of the houses. The policeman seemed content with that.

  It was obvious that the professor was being attacked from several directions. The morning’s article in the newspaper spoke for itself. The academic feuding was a fact, and clearly not only in Sweden. It serves him right, thought Karsten contentedly, taking the pot from the stove and pouring the pasta into the colander, rinsing it with cold water, adding a little butter, and tilting it up onto the plate.

  But who had set something by the gate, and what? You might think it was a bomb, the way the police were acting.

  The meat sauce, bought ready-made, was not especially good, but he still shoveled it in with good appetite. Perhaps the associate professor knew more? He decided to look him up. There was a witch alder waiting for him, after all.

  He picked up his workbook, opened to a new page, and noted how many hours he had put in at Lundquist’s, how many kilometers he drove during the day and how much he had spent on plants. Everything had to be noted for
later accounting, but also for his own sake.

  There was a certain joy in this, browsing back in the workbooks, recalling things large and small, plantings or stone paving that he was especially pleased with, which customers had been grateful, or for that matter who had complained. The latter were, however, clearly in the minority.

  It struck him that this was as good a diary as any. Since his return to Sweden he had filled a combined thirty-eight workbooks. All were lined up on the bookshelf.

  * * *

  He was a lonely man, it had gradually occurred to him. Not because he thought about himself and his own situation that much but because he observed other people. He saw how they sought each other out, clumped together, terrified to have dinner at a restaurant on their own or sit on a park bench down in the City Garden and philosophize, read a book or simply casually watch people passing by. Not to mention going to a concert or a play alone. Everyone tried to look as if they were waiting for an acquaintance, looking at their watches, taking out their cell phones, conversing with someone or at least pretending to converse.

  That was foreign to him. He was usually most content being by himself. Recently, however, a new type of worry had come over him, perhaps triggered by his mother’s death. He became dazed by the new thought that the loner’s existence was in opposition to the very idea of life, the African thought and attitude to life that he was so familiar with, where loneliness was considered an illness.

  For it occurred to him, late in life it might seem, that everything he did was measured not only against his own conceptions but also other people’s dreams and needs. Of course your own satisfaction counted for a lot, but still it was a little sad now: Lundquist was out of town, he had no one to talk with, show his progress to. Even if most of his customers were ignorant, and downright thankful not to have to think and decide on something, they were still polite, pretending to be interested or impressed by the progress in their gardens.

  Now he was groping along, in principle sure of his business, he knew every species and its characteristics and needs, but subjected to the vacuum of loneliness he was listless and perplexed. The notes of the workbook became hours and kronor, nothing more.

  He was a solitary person who erected monuments that people barely noticed.

  The dishes were soon done and there were hours until it was time to go to bed. He sat down in the sparsely furnished living room and continued thinking. He was not particularly good at it, he was a man of action, but the recent years’ practice in brooding was starting to produce results. He was getting ever more persistent and capable. Just so I don’t get like Father, he thought, who could sit for hours staring into space.

  Karsten understood early on that it was the war that was raging in his father. The eighth of May 1945 meant peace but not the end of the war. He was marching as long as he lived inside himself the long way from East Prussia to Stralsund, over and over again.

  On lampposts and provisional gallows to the right the “traitors” were hanging and to the left the “Nazi swine” were swaying in the wind. Their tongues were swollen. Often they had pissed and shit on themselves. Birds were sitting on their shoulders. Flies buzzed. At their feet were dogs.

  Between them marched columns of the destitute, hungry, terrified, stinking, apathetic, wounded, dying. Westward. Karsten was in this parade of human wreckage too, secured to his father’s body with a belt from a German soldier. Karsten still had the belt with the eagle.

  He remembered nothing himself, he was an infant. What was he fed on? A mystery. “On love,” said his father, who then burst into tears; Karsten saw how he struggled to hold it back. He hugged Karsten, then age fourteen, so hard it hurt. He still felt that grip, almost fifty years later.

  Karsten Haller smiled. What strength, he thought. What love that surrounded him. The gratitude of his parents’ energy and consideration shot up like laughter.

  He understood that he had turned his thoughts around. It was here that the skill showed itself. Only a couple of years ago it would have gone in the other direction, right toward the abyss. Nowadays he could stop and reset his course. The happy memories took over.

  He stood up, went over to the window. On the other side of the street was a woman who usually had dinner at this time. She was perhaps in her forties, had moved in a year ago. Karsten thought she was divorced. No children were ever seen. Her kitchen table was lit up by a red lamp, shaped like a funnel. It was like a painting: the gentle light, the woman with small, deliberate movements, she always ate slowly, always alone, sometimes she browsed in a magazine.

  He observed her awhile, let his eyes rest. It was like at Okanga, the southern water hole, where he also used to stand concealed for a half hour or so and study the animals that came to drink.

  Eighteen

  The low-built church was shrouded in haze. On the cemetery wall out toward the road sat an old man dangling his legs. It was such a peculiar sight that Ann got the idea that something was not right. It was dark and a little raw, it had rained hard.

  As she drove past the man turned his head and followed her with his eyes. She was driving very slowly and could see that he was smiling. She accelerated up the rise and turned left, passed the store, and was struck by a sensation of dizziness. So many years ago. She tried to figure out exactly to the day how long it was, but gave up at once. During the drive there she had decided to live in the present, not let herself be dragged down into a morass of guilt and wasted chances.

  Should she have brought Erik with her? It only struck her now, with just a few kilometers left. Viola certainly would have appreciated that. But probably not Edvard.

  Ann had said that she would be back no later than nine. Now it was ten past six. She had checked the ferry schedules. She would have to leave Viola’s no later than seven thirty.

  She did not need to hesitate about the way. She had driven here many times as if intoxicated, filled with expectation and desire, sometimes in jubilant joie de vivre. And the fact was that despite her intention the old feeling took hold of her. She felt it purely physically as a thrill through her whole body.

  She opened the window, as if to blow out all the thoughts that were circulating in the car. The wind had picked up, due west, she noticed. She thought about Edvard and his musings about weather and wind, how he drew her into his speculations. At the start of his time on the island he was a little uncertain, accustomed as he was to inland weather phenomena, a farm worker’s observations of the outlook for precipitation or clearing. But as he became more sure, Viola, and above all the old neighbor Viktor, also taught him a great deal about the idiosyncrasies of archipelago weather.

  The side road down to Viola’s had been widened. That was surely thanks to Edvard. He had always complained about the road. Viola seldom left her farm and experienced no great need for a good road. Edvard on the other hand commuted to his job as a construction worker and was of a different opinion. Ann wondered whether he was still in that industry. She knew nothing about his present life.

  There were two cars in the farmyard. One was a pickup, probably Edvard’s, thought Ann. Behind it was hidden a Corolla that was at least twenty-five years old. I should have called, it struck her when she caught sight of the car. Perhaps he was living with someone? That was not an impossibility, more likely probable. He was surely still an attractive man, of which there was a shortage on the island.

  She got out on shaking legs, prepared to throw herself back in the car at any moment and take off. Steeled herself to look relaxed. She realized that Edvard had already heard the car, unless his hearing had gotten even worse.

  There were lights on in the kitchen, in the parlor, and one flight up. Viola’s bedroom—Ann assumed that the old woman was bedridden—faced out toward the sea.

  When she was a few meters from the glassed-in porch, and noticed that all the door and window frames were freshly painted, the door opened. Edvard. He had not turned on the light, perhaps he had stood and watched her for a few moments, unce
rtain whether he was mistaken. But to her his shape was so familiar that she would recognize it among thousands.

  “You,” was all he said.

  “Me,” said Anna.

  You and me, she thought.

  “I heard that Viola was ill.”

  He nodded, perhaps he was waiting for a continuation. Was the shock so great that he was incapable of saying anything? Perhaps his disgust at her unexpected visit made him mute?

  “Do you have … company?”

  The question was unbelievably silly, she realized that immediately, but she could not get herself to put it another way.

  “Yes, a buddy of Viola’s is here,” said Edvard, nodding toward the Toyota. “She’ll be leaving soon.”

  She sensed that he understood her embarrassment. Buddy, she thought, and could not help smiling a little. Viola’s buddy.

  “How is she doing?”

  He was still standing with his hand on the doorknob. Perhaps he didn’t want to let her in.

  “She’s very weak,” he said.

  Ann heard from his voice that he was tired.

  “You’ve fixed the road,” she said.

  He nodded.

  “And painted the porch.”

  “Yes, a lot has happened since the last time,” he said, and she could not determine whether he was teasing or amused at her remarks.

  “Nice,” said Ann, “very nice,” and nodded eagerly as if she wanted to underscore that she thought everything seemed to be in tip-top shape with the side road, the house, Edvard, and life.

  “Come in,” he said curtly, leaving the door and disappearing into the house.

  She followed him as if he were an executioner and these were her last steps up onto the scaffold.

  The smell was the same. In the kitchen to the left as usual it was sparkling clean. Ann suspected that Edvard had help, he never cleaned up completely himself, there was always something left on the counter, a cup on the table or crumbs on a cutting board. Perhaps there was another woman in the house?