Open Grave: A Mystery

by Kjell Eriksson

  “Anna,” he whispered, “you should see me now.”

  He was amused by the thought that she was observing him from her heaven. He was not convinced that his mother would be that enthusiastic about his idea. On the contrary, she would be terrified.

  He thought something rustled and turned his head. His eyes fixed on the bicycle and he happened to think of his father. His father never got a driver’s license, but instead always bicycled to his job at Barnängen’s soap factory in Alvik on the outskirts of Stockholm. For many years he was responsible for two old-fashioned machines that spit out small hotel soaps.

  The rustling returned. He guessed that it was a blackbird and smiled to himself. Blackbird and him, two figures in the late evening.

  * * *

  Right after ten o’clock he got up, massaged the stiff muscles in his thigh and peered out into the darkness. There were lights on in more windows than yesterday evening, but everything seemed equally calm. Kåbo had settled down to rest.

  The sound of a car was heard at a distance, perhaps as far as away as on Norbyvägen. The blue-hued light from the associate professor’s tower cast a ghost-like glow over the neighbor’s house and backyard.

  Perhaps it was this, the Etosha tension—he could find no better way to put it—that was the driving force? Able to remain stock-still, listen, sniff like an animal in the wind, try to understand what was happening right then, patiently waiting out everything that could constitute a threat or obstacle, be the one who made the wisest decision, to strike or get away. Survive. He pushed aside the branches soundlessly and scouted one last time before he took off.

  After a few seconds he was at the cellar entrance, opened the door enough that he could slink in and close it soundlessly behind him. He took a deep breath to free himself from the tension.

  Once down in the cellar he let the flashlight play across the furniture and everything else that stood in an unorganized mess. He realized that it was the combined excess of generations that was down there. Much of it was probably old and useless while some was certainly antique and valuable. He withstood the impulse to start poking around—he had loved to stroll around at the market on Windhoek Platz to search for pearls in a sea of junk and scrap—and instead went immediately to the passage with all the boxes to check whether the keys were there.

  He grinned as he picked up the key ring. Then he suddenly became thoughtful. The first time he broke into the cellar could be explained by curiosity, but now he was taking a step over a boundary that could not be explained away as an innocent visit.

  “Well, what of it?” he mumbled, in an attempt to reinforce the feeling that he was morally superior to the owner of the house, that a break-in was a trifle in relation to the crimes that had been committed here earlier.

  He sat down on an old armchair, turned off the flashlight, and prepared to wait. He had decided to make his way up into the house right after midnight.

  It was pitch-black but that did not worry him. While others were afraid of the dark and saw various imagined dangers in the deep shadows, the deep night also constituted a shield for him.

  Miss Elly had sometimes called him “the cat” for his capacity to smoothly move in darkness. He understood that it was a compliment. In reality it was one of the reasons that she loved him, that apparently he melted in unimpeded with the African reality.

  With his thoughts in Africa he fell asleep and woke up with a start, for a moment unaware of where he was. He turned on the flashlight, looked at his watch, and discovered that he had slept for almost two hours.

  The house was silent. The stairs creaked slightly. The tension increased with every step. It struck him that perhaps the door was locked but he exhaled when it opened without difficulty. He turned off the flashlight and peeked out. He had come up into the house under a stairway.

  In the pale light from the street the details gradually emerged in what he understood was the hall. As long as he stayed on the ground floor he certainly did not need to be worried. He assumed that the bedrooms were one flight up. With cautious steps he opened the first door, one of four in the hall. A long passage stretched out ahead of him. He realized now that the house was considerably larger than he thought. He did not dare turn on the flashlight for fear that the light could be seen from outside.

  After ten minutes he found the Hauptmann safe squeezed into a corner behind the last door in the corridor. In the middle of the room was a billiard table. There was a twinge of excitement when he saw that the safe was the same model as his uncle’s. Karsten remembered the numbers 51 so well, embossed in the middle of the trademark that decorated the sturdy door of the safe.

  He took out the keys. He remembered the order, first the middle one, then the small key down to the left and finally the big one in the centrally located lock. It creaked as he turned the last key. Uncle Helmuth never would have tolerated such a racket, he thought.

  After very slowly opening the door, careful not to create the slightest commotion, he turned on the flashlight and shone it into the safe. On the top shelf, where Helmuth stored the pictures of young black boys, a half dozen folders were stacked. As he reached out his hand to take out the top one a sound was suddenly heard from the top floor. He froze and instinctively turned off the flashlight.

  The sound of steps was transmitted and Karsten Heller got the feeling that the ceiling was vibrating. He peeked upward. The sound decreased. He waited on tenterhooks. Was someone on their way down? Half a minute passed. A minute. He carefully wiped the sweat from his forehead. The odor of the rubber glove nauseated him. He suddenly regretted his outing.

  Then came the reassuring explanation: a toilet flushed and there was a roar for several seconds in a pipe invisible to Karsten. He had to suppress a laugh of relief and turned on the flashlight again. He realized that either the professor or the housekeeper had relieved their bladder and now were on their way back to bed.

  Close, he thought, but still not. He put the flashlight in his mouth to have both hands free and lifted down all the folders. He put them on the billiard table, retrieved a chair, and sat down.

  The topmost folder was of no interest. He quickly browsed through the papers, a number of them yellow with age, and found that they all dealt with an association he had never heard of, the Gregorious Brothers. Probably a fraternal order.

  The following folders were equally uninteresting. There were various documents from University Hospital, deeds of conveyance, contracts and so on.

  He started to despair of finding anything exciting when from the sixth and final folder he pulled out a will. He quickly browsed through it and as good as immediately saw his mother’s maiden name. “Anna Andersson” it said, clear and obvious. He was forced to set the will aside a moment.

  He took the flashlight out of his mouth, looked around and discovered a flower pot with a sadly neglected hibiscus, got up and spit out the saliva that had collected in his mouth.

  What was he to believe? Perhaps it was another Anna Andersson? It was not exactly an uncommon name. There was only one way to find out, to read on, regardless of where it might lead.

  He found the section again and read: “To Miss Anna Andersson, who was in service in the house for a few years in the nineteen forties, I bequest 100,000 (one hundred thousand) kronor.”

  It was immediately clear to him that he would inherit from Professor von Ohler.

  His surprise was no less when he read the continuation: “To Miss Greta Andersson I bequeath 200,000 (two hundred thousand) kronor. To Miss Agnes Andersson, number three in the group of sisters and whose time of service now exceeds fifty years, I bequest 300,000 (three hundred thousand) kronor.”

  And right after that the parting shot: “Should I survive one or all of the misses Andersson, then the respective amounts return to the estate.”

  Now the inheritance was not as obvious, but what surprised him the most was the word “now.” That meant reasonably that the woman he had seen working in the house was this Agnes An
derson, “number three in the group of sisters.” In other words, she was his aunt!

  He checked when the will was drawn up and found that it was only two days old.

  For a long time he sat staring into space. He could have expected anything at all, but not this. He had been given a family.

  He read the will again, determined that the amounts Ohler bequeathed to the Andersson sisters were an insignificant fraction of what he owned in total in properties, securities, and cash bank deposits. This was shown by the appendices that were attached to the will. A major item among the agricultural properties was a farm outside Eslöv, which the Ohlers had apparently rented out since the early 1900s to the same farm family. Bertram von Ohler was determined that this would also apply in the future.

  But there were also other farms mentioned, including half a dozen in eastern Småland and two in the areas around Bålsta.

  The shares were distributed among some two dozen Swedish companies. The largest individual entry was in Alfa Laval with 180,000 shares, but the holdings in SKF, Handelsbanken, various pharmaceutical manufacturers, and forestry companies were also significant. The strangest information was a fifty-percent ownership of a car garage in Nybro, Johansson Brothers Welding and Forging.

  A numbing enumeration of companies and figures. Page up and page down that testified to a financial power that was hard to imagine. This was no chance lottery winning but instead columns of riches that had accumulated over many years, perhaps centuries, Karsten Heller suspected.

  He was dispirited, melancholy in a way that he did not completely understand. Not just at the discovery that extraordinarily enough his mother was mentioned but rather over the massive weight that the will expressed. There was no mercy, that was how he experienced it. Pure and sheer power. How could you object to such wealth? It stood out as a massive colossus of granite, obvious and imperturbable. The Ohler family had succeeded, to put it simply. To oppose it was to air your envy, nothing else.

  He gathered up the papers into a package, not caring whether they were in the right order, pushed it all down into the folder and nonchalantly tossed it into the safe. The remaining contents he had not been concerned with so far, but now he crouched down to investigate what was on the other shelves. He picked a little absentmindedly for a while in the piles of papers, which appeared to be letters. But under everything he glimpsed something that he recognized from his uncle’s safe: bills. In a shoebox were bundles of five-hundred-kronor notes, held together by rubber bands. He rooted in the box and picked up a bundle.

  Money doesn’t smell, it was said, but that wasn’t quite true—Karsten remembered the story about the hotel in San Francisco that washed and ironed the guests’ currency—the professor’s money smelled greasy and musty.

  There must be a dozen bundles. Half a fortune, all in five-hundred-kronor notes. He wondered how much it could be, surely half a million, maybe more.

  He pocketed the bundle without really thinking about it, then got up, numbed by all the wealth and not least by the will. He closed the safe.

  A hundred thousand kronor his mother would have gotten. That was the amount that Ohler thought was suitable to pay for a ruined life. She had never really recovered from the rape. It was not about forgiveness, Karsten understood that when he read her diaries. Sure, you could try to forgive even the cruelest actions, but the wound was so deep that it could never possibly heal. His mother had been deprived of so much, not only her virginity, but above all a kind of faith in the future. She had always, as long as Karsten could remember, lacked faith in herself, always expressed an anxious worry that perhaps things wouldn’t go well, that any temporary happiness sooner or later would be ended.

  He only realized now that the reason for her anxiety perhaps had its background in what played out in Ohler’s cellar in 1944. While she was alive he had often been irritated at her vacillation and nervousness. Now he regretted that deeply. If he had only known!

  She had never recovered from the loss of the fetus either, even though it was the result of an assault. She had written something about that: “It was my chance to have a child of my own.” Those were words that hurt. In his late teens Karsten found out that Anna was not his biological mother. It had been a cataclysmic piece of news but still did not constitute a terrifying shock. He had always felt surrounded by Anna’s and Horst’s love and concern, so the message did not basically disturb his trust in them. At the same time his parents told him that Anna had adopted him.

  When he read the diaries and his mother’s words about “a child of my own” he had been angry and heartbroken to begin with, but gradually the anger had subsided. He understood her longing and boundless despair that the abortion also made her sterile. In reality the circumstances enlarged the image of his mother as the considerate and loving person she had always been. She had never uttered even the slightest little comment that could have made him feel sidelined or a kind of substitute for a “real” child.

  He leaned his head against the safe, whose steel was not cool. On the contrary, it burned his forehead.

  One hundred thousand kronor for a rape. A domestic servant’s virginity, future life, and peace of mind.

  Anna Andersson. Anna Haller. Raped, dead, and buried.

  Someone called, woke him out of his daze. It was Miss Elly, his companion. She was calling as usual for justice. He raised his head, looked up toward the ceiling, burrowing his gaze through the brown-stained paneling and screamed with Miss Elly.

  He started going like a warrior through the house, firmly determined to administer justice, but stopped suddenly when he came out in the hall. It was too simple to kill the professor, it struck him. He wanted to create greater damage than that. Then the old man could die in shame and disgrace.

  Perhaps it was the thought that he had been given an aunt, perhaps two, that made him calm down. They could fill out his mother’s life story about her childhood and youth, a period in her life she never talked about.

  The return through the cellar out into the fresh air went quickly. He was no longer afraid of being seen, whether from inside the house or by the neighbors. What of it, he thought rashly, I’m the one who’s sitting with the strong cards.

  He jumped over the fence, took his bicycle, pulled it out onto the street, and disappeared from the block.

  Twenty-six

  It was with mixed emotions Agnes noted that Birgitta and Liisa Lehtonen had decided to spend the night in the house. After finishing the wallpapering they shared a couple bottles of wine and then decided to continue the renovation work the following day.

  Cleaning and mess—dust and garbage to take care of—Agnes had thought the evening before, but now at the breakfast table having the two women there felt refreshing. The Finnish woman was in an unusually good mood besides and entertained the others with hilarious episodes from the time she was active as a competitive shooter.

  The professor preferred to have breakfast in the dining room and had then withdrawn to his study.

  “Did you hear all the commotion last night?” asked Birgitta. “Were you the one who was up?”

  She looked with a curious expression at Agnes, who realized that Birgitta saw a chance to ventilate her theories about night sleep, the position of the planets, and inner harmony. Agnes denied having left her bed.

  “I usually sleep like a log,” she said. “You know that.”

  “And then someone screamed,” said Birgitta. “But that was probably Daddy having a nightmare.”

  Agnes had also heard the scream but was convinced it was not the professor, the scream had come from the ground floor. She thought Birgitta and Liisa had quarreled, and fell back asleep almost immediately.

  “Maybe it was a ghost,” Liisa suggested. “Strange things do happen here in the house. And probably always have. What was his name, that chauffeur who worked here long ago that we saw a year or so ago?”

  “I don’t remember,” said Birgitta.

  “Don’t be that way, of course
you remember!”

  Birgitta shook her head.

  “What was it? Something short, like Malm or Berg,” Liisa forged ahead. “Maybe we can ask Bertram? He must know.”

  “Wiik,” said Birgitta.

  “That’s it!” Liisa exclaimed. “He maintained that you could hear someone sighing and moaning in the cellar.”

  Agnes saw that Birgitta was becoming more and more irritated.

  “What was that?” she asked.

  “It was before your time,” said Birgitta, “and the old man was ancient and gaga when we saw him.”

  “I think he was as clear as anything,” said Liisa with an unconcerned expression. “He maintained that awful things had happened in the house.”

  “Talk,” Birgitta said.

  Now there was not just irritation but also discomfort in her face.

  “When was that?” asked Agnes.

  “During the war,” said Liisa. “He claimed that he was fired by the old Ohler. That he knew about things that—”

  “Stop now!” Birgitta screamed suddenly and started sobbing. “I don’t want to hear a rehash of untrue old rumors. It’s enough with all the new untruths.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Liisa’s voice sounded unusually melodic. Agnes sensed the breakdown. From a pleasant conversation at the kitchen table to a stormy quarrel. She had experienced it before. There was something in the Finnish woman’s voice that called forth these recurring eruptions.

  But this time Birgitta’s customary vehement reaction and the accompanying escalated dispute did not appear. Instead she leaned her head in her hands and Liisa mumbled something that could be understood as an apology.

  Agnes had listened to and observed it all with increasing astonishment. She had never heard mention of any Wiik who might have worked in the house. Whatever the story was about, untruthful rumors or not, they must have been buried deep in the hidden chambers of the house. Rumors had a habit of propagating among the employees, sometimes for generations. There were few circumstances that the servants did not know about. Here was evidently a case that had been effectively hushed up. Agnes understood that it meant several things: The rumor was completely or at least mainly true; it concerned something sensational; and the servants had been properly frightened and certainly warned. Her coworkers during the early 1950s, who surely would have known who Wiik was, had kept their mouths shut, probably out of fear of losing their positions.