A Fairy Tale

by Jonas Bengtsson

  I go out to the coffee and juice trolley in the corridor, put a couple of kroner in the jar for coins, and return with two cups of coffee. I walk as slowly as I can. I’m just about to push open the door with my shoulder when I see a junior doctor coming towards me. He takes the last couple of steps running, touches my elbow, and smiles.

  “You’re his grandson?”

  I can tell from his accent that he’s from Copenhagen. He’s in his early thirties; he must have been posted here.

  “I don’t know if you could have a word with her. There’s absolutely no chance that he’ll wake up.”

  “Not today?”

  “Not today. Not in five days. I don’t wish to sound harsh.”

  The T-shirt under his coat is faded. I feel the hot coffee start to burn through the cups.

  “I feel sorry for your grandmother,” the doctor says. “And I feel sorry for him because he has to just lie there.”

  He looks at me, hoping I’ll say something, a small nod of the head. A sign.

  “Obviously you’re not the one who has to make the decision, but perhaps you could talk to her?”

  When I enter the room, my grandmother is standing at the foot of the bed, again resting her hands on its metal frame.

  “The doctors are wrong,” she says, as though she heard us in the corridor. “He’ll wake up.”

  I put down the cups on the table next to a cardboard box of pale yellow latex gloves.

  “Your father should be here.” She wipes her eyes with the back of her hand.

  “What happened to him?”

  “Nothing.” She keeps her gaze on the man in the bed. “Old age. That’s all.”

  The nurse is gentle the first time she tells us that visiting hours are over. The second time less so. My grandmother takes her coat from the chair, we follow the arrows.

  The parking lot is empty. We walk across to the old Opel.

  “What happened to my dad?” I ask, as we drive down the motorway.

  She straightens slightly in her seat; the lines around her mouth grow deeper.

  “People say he got ill,” she replies.

  “Yes . . . Do you know what happened?”

  “No.” She keeps her eyes firmly on the road ahead of us.

  We catch the ferry back and stop at the island’s only shop. A general store selling rope, engine oil, and alcohol. There’s also a small selection of groceries and paperbacks with faded covers.

  The man behind the counter has a full beard and weighs at least 150 kilos. He smells strongly of tobacco. My grandmother buys milk and cheroots.

  “Any news about the storm?” she asks, and puts some coins on the counter.

  “It’ll be a bad one this time.”

  The prices the man rings up on the till are lower than the prices on the labels.

  “My dogs are running around in circles, they keep snapping at each other. Perhaps the storm will come tonight. Perhaps it’ll come tomorrow, but it’ll come, all right. It’s going to be a bad one this time.”

  My watch is lying on the bedside table. Children will be born and learn to play the piano before the minute hand ticks again.

  Then the watch stops completely. I have to shake it to set time back in motion.

  I’ve been smoking every day for a year and a half.

  It makes the square pegs fit into the triangular holes. My mouth is dry; I can feel the touch of Rizla paper between my index and middle finger. I get dressed. The house is quiet. I walk down to the ground floor, opening doors. I know my grandmother’s asleep in one of the rooms, so I’m careful, I make no noise, I sneak a peek into every room before I close the door again. My grandfather’s study looks almost exactly as I’d imagined. There’s a desk made from dark wood. I’d imagined an old-fashioned typewriter, but instead there’s a pen on the desk next to a stack of papers, yellower and heavier than the sort that goes in a photocopier.

  The bookcases are of the same dark wood as the desk. There are a few leather-bound classics, the rest are theological works. Three volumes are standing slightly askew from the others, their spines don’t line up. I take them out; behind them I find a half-full bottle of schnapps. I twist off the cap and raise it to my mouth. The clear liquid tastes of alcohol; a few mouthfuls later the warmth starts to spread.

  I walk across to the desk, drinking from the bottle while I go through the drawers.

  The first one is filled with sheets of paper of the same pale yellow as those lying on top of the desk. There are hundreds of them, all dated. Each sheet contains only a few words, cues in a handwriting I can’t read, and then some numbers. I start looking them up in a Bible from the bookcase, but there are too many for me to find a pattern.

  There’s an old cigar box in the next drawer; the label is peeling off. It’s filled with banknotes in large and small denominations. A bank on an island where nobody takes credit cards.

  The last desk drawer is practically empty; all I find inside it is a small stack of photographs, pushed into a corner, and a key.

  I look through the photographs. The first is of the vicarage, another of the outside of the church. Then a photo of my dad in his cassock, shorthaired and clean-shaven. He’s standing in front of the church, smiling. Again I have to remind myself that this must be my grandfather. Perhaps his first day as a priest, a young man who has promised himself to be serious and doesn’t quite know what to do with his hands.

  The remaining photographs are all of a small boy. They’re black and white, but I think that his blond hair must be reddish. The boy is building a sandcastle. The boy is pulling a sled down a country lane white with snow. My dad as a little boy: this time, I’m sure it’s him. I put the photographs back and take the key from the drawer. It’s big and attached by a short string to a piece of polished wood. I take another sip from the bottle and put it back in the bookcase. I return the books.

  The door is ajar when I hear my aunt’s voice. She’s talking on the telephone in the hallway. I switch off the lights behind me and remain in the doorway.

  “I hope it’s over soon,” she says in a low voice into the handset. “I can’t stand it any longer. Please come?”

  She listens to the voice on the other end.

  “I know,” she says. “No, I know. I’ll be back soon. I can’t do this any more. It’s got to end soon.”

  I find it hard to tell the days in the vicarage apart. Every day we rise early and catch the first ferry.

  Some days my aunt comes with us. She drives her own car. She looks down at the man in the bed, seeing him as a nuisance, a puppy that has soiled the rug right before the guests are due to arrive. I never leave her alone with the doctors. Only when she goes to the bathroom do I fetch coffee from the trolley.

  After lunch I go out. Every day I hear my cousin’s footsteps behind me. He asks me if I’m sure that I don’t have any more cannabis. Just a little bit. He looks at me as though I might be smoking in secret, taking a big drag of an invisible joint when he’s not watching.

  Most of the rooms in the vicarage are freezing cold, so we sit in the drawing room or the kitchen. Frederik turns over the tape in his Walkman, Louise fills page after page with arabesques. My aunt reads the same newspaper or she goes out, running errands, she claims, and is gone for hours.

  Every now and then there’s a knock on the kitchen door; fishermen arrive, big men in filthy clothes with ruddy skin. I think I recognize the man who stood swaying in the middle of the road.

  They speak softly inside the kitchen; every movement is cautious and exaggeratedly slow, as if they’re scared they might break the table in half or pull off the door handles. They bring crates of fresh fish, boxes of eggs. They bring a leg of lamb and my grandmother welcomes them with small nods and instructions about where they can put down the food.

  Every day I leave the table early. I leave while there are sti
ll potatoes and fish on my plate and I thank my grandmother for the meal. My boots and my thick jacket are waiting for me in the hallway. Every day I try to make it out the door before Frederik has a chance to follow me.

  Today I hear not one, but two sets of footsteps behind me.

  “Don’t you have to cover paper with your crappy patterns?” I hear Frederik say.

  I carry on walking.

  “Are you going out to smoke?” Louise asks. “Next time we’ll throw you in a ditch.”

  “Go away.”

  “We can’t, there aren’t enough roads on this island.”

  “Why don’t you go into town and chat up a fisherman?”

  I turn around and they both stop. Neither of them meets my eye. “Fuck off, both of you.”

  They make no reply.

  When I walk on, I can hear two sets of footsteps behind me again.

  A couple of kilometres later they come up alongside me. They argue over which way we should go. I decide to follow Louise; Frederik comes with us reluctantly. We walk through what was once an apple orchard. Now all the trees are dead or dying. You only have to look at them to see why, to see the white salt that’s covering their leaves.

  We continue towards the sea. I hear the waves before we reach the cliff: large, black, crested waves. There are abandoned bird’s nests along the cliff. My cousins start kicking them; twigs and feathers whirl up in the air.

  “We’re outside the nesting season, obviously,” Louise says. “It’s more fun when there are eggs in the nests.”

  Tiny tufts of down stick to her boots. My cousins jump up and down and they laugh.

  “We’ve been doing this since we were kids,” Frederik says.

  “Shitty little island,” Louise says. “Shitty little island.”

  They fall down beside me, gasping for breath. Their faces are red.

  I follow my aunt outside the vicarage.

  “The key should fit here,” she says and inserts it into the lock.

  The door to the shed sticks; it’s dusty inside and covered with cobwebs. I have to move rakes and spades before I can get to the racing bike, the one my dad kept drawing. I carry it outside and lean it up against the wall.

  “Your dad loved that bicycle,” my aunt says. “It’s a genuine Monark.”

  The bicycle is dark blue with white leather around the handlebars.

  “He saved up for it for years. I used to make fun of him; I said, ‘You won’t even be able to ride it here!’ There are cobblestones in town and the roads on the rest of the island are uneven, beaten earth.”

  It’s not until now that I notice the front wheel is warped.

  “He was so proud,” my aunt says. “He spent more time pushing it around than riding it. A man on a tractor found him. He was unconscious, he’d suffered a concussion. He lay in bed and wasn’t allowed to read. That’s when Dad locked the bicycle in the shed. I haven’t seen it since.”

  I return the bicycle to the shed. My aunt locks the door after us. Again I follow her. She sits down on the bench opposite the vicarage and pats the space next to her.

  She lights one of her long, thin cigarettes, offers me one. I can smell schnapps or possibly vodka on her breath.

  I follow her gaze across the bleak landscape, directed at some point far beyond the pale grey horizon.

  Her makeup has become heavier in the past few days. She leaves the drawing room and returns with a new layer. Her language has also changed. At lunch she articulates every word as clearly as possible. In the evening her dialect is just as pronounced as my grandmother’s.

  “You look like your dad,” she says. “Your hair’s darker than his. But you have his eyes. The same eyes as your grandfather. And I don’t mean the colour.”

  “What happened to my dad?”

  “He got ill. Surely your mum has . . .”

  “But why did he get ill?”

  I think she’s about to say something, then she takes a drag of the thin cigarette.

  “He’s probably not the first to go a little peculiar from spending too much time with his head stuck in a book.”

  She gets up and goes inside.

  The house behind me is dark. I stayed in my bedroom until I was sure everyone was asleep. I follow the lane up to the church. In my pocket I have the key from my grandfather’s study. The gate squeaks on its hinges; I hear the gravel crunch under my feet.

  The key doesn’t fit the church’s large double doors, so I walk around to the back. I take a couple of steps down to a dark-red wooden door and here the key goes in without any problem. The room inside is cold and dark; the light flashes a couple of times before it comes on. There’s a coffeemaker on the table by the wall, his cassock hangs in a cupboard; apart from that, the room is empty. I walk up the steps to the nave. After fumbling around for a few minutes I find the switch and a couple of sleepy bulbs light up the inside of the church.

  The walls are whitewashed. I’ve yet to see enough people on the island to fill even half the worn wooden pews. I walk down the aisle.

  Jesus on the cross looks like the crucifix in my room. The same eyes follow me around, like surveillance cameras in a clothing store.

  I stand on the pulpit and look out over the empty pews; I stand where my grandfather and great-grandfather have stood before me, Sunday after Sunday.

  “Hey!” I shout out into the room.

  “Bloody hell,” I shout, but there’s no response.

  The sound of my voice reverberates between the walls and it takes a long time for the echo to fade away. I lie down on my back in the aisle. I can feel the cold stones against the back of my head and my neck. From here Jesus and I can look each other in the eye. He doesn’t blink, no matter how hard I stare at him.

  His eyes still follow me when I leave the church.

  I’ve just started walking down the lane when the first drops fall. The strength of the rain increases a few steps later; it becomes a thousand fingers tapping on my scalp and my shoulders, hitting the uppers of my boots hard. Then the wind arrives as if the rain has been merely a prelude.

  This is the storm the grocer talked about, the one the fishermen mentioned when they brought the food. I’m bent over as I walk the last few steps to the vicarage. I try not to fall over, my hand brushes the ground, I straighten up again.

  When I get back to my room, my clothes are soaked. I lie on the bed. Outside the storm is building: it has long ceased to be weather as in Nice weather today or What’s the weather going to be like tomorrow? The storm is now an uncontrollable fury that rattles the windows. It’s no longer fingers, but fists battering the roof.

  I find the plastic holster from Camilla’s joint in my jacket pocket. I unscrew the lid, pressing the tube to my nose. The sweet smell of cannabis brings me back to Camilla’s bed.

  Right now she’s sleeping in a faded black T-shirt with a skull on the front. In a couple of days I’ll go to the principal’s office. I won’t make the date he wrote down, but I’ll tell him about my grandfather’s milky eyes and he’ll love me because I haven’t forced him to become what he hates the most.

  Camilla’s bed will still be there. After the summer I’ll go to university, I’ll buy a record player. I’ll buy a stack of records and some good cannabis. It seems like a plan and I take it with me to sleep.

  My grandmother zigzags around the fallen trees.

  In town, tiles are missing from several roofs. Smashed windows have been boarded up with chipboard. I have my rucksack on my lap. I packed it before we drove off; I took my dad’s drawings of the bicycle. The catalogue with ladies in lingerie lies under my sweater.

  I’m leaving today.

  The car deck on the ferry fills quickly; my grandmother says everyone’s going to the mainland to buy materials and tools to repair their houses and boats.

  When we get up to the lounge, a
ll the tables are taken. People get up and offer us their seats, but my grandmother declines and we go back down to the car. We sit right next to the sign telling passengers to leave their cars during the crossing. No one knocks on the windscreen or tells us to get out.

  “Please, would you do an old lady a favour?” my grandmother asks me as we disembark. “Would you visit your grandfather one last time? Say goodbye?”

  I nod. We drive past the bus stop, through the town, and out onto the motorway.

  The man in the bed no longer looks like a human being. His skin is waxy. He has blue and purple spots on his face and on his arms. His body thinks he’s already dead. We sit there for twenty minutes; my grandmother looks expectantly at him. Then she gets up, puts her coat on.

  “Your grandson has been here,” she says. “I know you wanted to talk him. But he has been here and now he’s going.”

  We walk down the corridor.

  “You need something to eat,” she says. “You’ve a long journey ahead of you.”

  I follow her to the cafeteria. I get a cup of coffee and a liver pâté sandwich. Around us people with IV drips dangling from stands are eating. My grandmother takes tiny bites from her cake.

  The nurse comes running. Her eyes are so big we can see the white around her pupils.

  “He’s awake,” she says.

  We walk as quickly as my grandmother can manage. Out of the cafeteria, we take the elevator up, we hurry down the corridor.

  My grandfather’s eyes are open, but blurred. He lies very still. At first I think the nurse must have been mistaken. Or that perhaps he died while we were still in the elevator. Then he moves a tiny bit. My grandmother helps him up on the pillow, holds a glass of water to his mouth. He opens his lips, moistens them.

  “I’ll leave the two of you alone,” my grandmother says, and closes the door behind her.

  The man in the bed looks straight at me, fixing me with his gaze. A man who is nothing but eyes. I don’t think I could look away if I tried.