The Darkest Day

by Håkan Nesser

  The town of Kymlinge does not exist in real life and Albert Bonniers Förlag has never published a volume of poetry entitled The Fruiterer’s Example. Other than that, the contents of this book accord in all essentials with the known state of affairs.

  CONTENTS

  ONE: DECEMBER

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  TWO: JANUARY

  22

  23

  24

  THREE: AUGUST

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  FOUR: NOVEMBER

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  FIVE: DECEMBER

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  ONE

  DECEMBER

  1

  When Rosemarie Wunderlich Hermansson awoke on Sunday 18 December it was a few minutes to six and she had a very vivid image in her head.

  She was standing in a doorway, looking out over an unfamiliar garden. It was summer, or early autumn. In particular, she was looking at two fat little birds; yellowy-green in colour, they were perched on a telephone wire ten to fifteen metres away and each had a speech bubble coming from its beak.

  You’ve got to kill yourself, she read in one bubble.

  You’ve got to kill Karl-Erik, she read in the other.

  The messages were for her. She, Rosemarie Wunderlich Hermansson, was the one who had to kill herself. Or kill Karl-Erik. There was absolutely no doubt on that score.

  Karl-Erik was her husband, and it took a few seconds for her to register that both of these absurd stipulations must of course have arisen from something she had dreamt – but it was a dream that swiftly faded, leaving only these two bizarre birds on a wire. Most peculiar.

  For a little while she lay quite still on her right-hand side, stared out into the surrounding darkness in the direction of a fictitious dawn, which at that point had presumably progressed no further than the Urals, listened to Karl-Erik’s invariably calm breathing and realized that the analysis in the vision was entirely correct. The birds had spread their stubby wings and flown off, but their statements still hung there, impossible to misinterpret.

  Her or Karl-Erik. That was how it had to be. There had been an or between the speech bubbles, not an and. One precluded the other, and it also felt like a . . . like an absolutely imperative necessity for her to choose one or the other of these alternatives. Jesus Christ, she thought, swinging her legs over the side of the bed and sitting up. How could it have come to this? As if this family hasn’t already had its fair share.

  But as she straightened her back and felt the familiar morning aches around her third and fourth lumbar vertebrae, everyday thoughts came creeping in as well. A safe but rather tedious balm for the soul. She accepted them with a sort of listless gratitude, thrust her hands under her armpits and padded out to the bathroom. We’re so defenceless first thing in the morning, she thought. So thin-skinned and vulnerable. A sixty-three-year-old needlework teacher doesn’t murder her husband, it’s completely out of the question.

  Admittedly she had taught German as well, but that didn’t appreciably alter their respective positions. Didn’t make it more acceptable in any way; what on earth was the distinction between needlework and German in that context?

  So presumably it is my own time in this vale of tears I will have to cut short, thought Rosemarie Wunderlich Hermansson. She switched on the light, regarded her large, smooth face in the mirror and noted that someone had stuck a smile on it.

  Why am I smiling, she thought. There’s nothing to smile about, is there? I’ve never felt worse in my life and Karl-Erik will be awake in half an hour. What was it the headmaster said? The deeply resonant ore that . . . that what? . . . that provided the rising generation with its moral and intellectual sounding board? Where the hell had he dredged that up from? What a chump. Age group after age group, generation after generation, for forty years. Amassing growth rings like a pedagogical pine tree.

  Yes, Porky Bergson really had called Karl-Erik a pedagogical pine tree. Could there conceivably have been a hint of irony there?

  Probably not, thought Rosemarie Wunderlich Hermansson, jabbing her electric toothbrush deep into her right cheek. Vera Ragnebjörk, her only teaching colleague in the almost extinct German language at Kymlingevik School, always used to say that Porky Bergson lacked the ironic dimension. That was why you could never talk to him as you did to other people, and it was presumably thanks to this unique deficiency that he had managed to remain the head of that school for more than thirty years.

  Porky Bergson was only a year or two younger than Karl-Erik himself, but a good forty kilos heavier, and until that sad day nearly eight years ago, when his wife Berit died after falling out of a ski lift in Kitzbühel and breaking her neck, they had socialized quite a lot. All four of them. Bridge and so on. A trip to the theatre in Stockholm. A disastrous week in Crete. Rosemarie thought she missed Berit a bit, but she didn’t miss Porky Bergson. Social contact with him, that is.

  Why am I wasting my precious morning minutes on thoughts of that dimensionally challenged nonentity? she asked herself. Why don’t I grab the chance of fifteen minutes’ peace and quiet with the morning paper instead? I’m definitely losing control.

  But no positive thoughts surfaced over her coffee and newspaper either. There were no bright spots. When she raised her eyes and looked at the kitchen clock – bought on impulse at the Kungens Kurva branch of IKEA for forty-nine kronor fifty as far back as autumn 1979 and presumably indestructible – it said twenty past six, so it would be at least seventeen hours until she was again granted clemency and allowed to snuggle up in her bed, putting another dismal day aside. To sleep, just sleep.

  Today was Sunday. It was her second day as a happy pensioner, the final significant rite of passage before death, as some kindly soul had pointed out, and she told herself that if only she’d had access to a gun she would have acted on that wakening thought without delay. Shot a bullet into her brain before Karl-Erik had time to get to the kitchen in his striped pyjamas, thrust out his chest and declare that he’d slept like a baby. If those near-death descriptions she’d read about were right, it would be interesting to perch up there by the ceiling and watch his face when he found her slumped over the table with her head in a big, warm pool of blood.

  But that’s something you just don’t do, either. Especially if you don’t possess a decent gun and do have the children to think of. She took a gulp of coffee, burnt the tip of her tongue and put her everyday brain into gear. What was on the programme on this, her second day after a whole working life?

  Clean the entire house. It was that simple. Children and grandchildren would be arriving in dribs and drabs tomorrow, and Tuesday was the big day.

  The day that should have been the Day with a capital ‘D’, but had in some peculiar fashion shrunk into a kind of pompous anti-event because of Robert. That was exactly it. All through the autumn there had been talk of between 100 and 120 people; the only real upper limit had been imposed by the seating capacity of the Svea restaurant, but Karl-Erik had discussed the matter eight or possibly twelve times with Brundin �
� the manager – and if they went a little over the hundred it would be no problem at all.

  Wouldn’t have been. Robert’s scandal had begun on 12 November. The venue had been booked for a very long time, but it hadn’t been too late to cancel. Seventy or so invitations had already gone out and a score of positive replies had come in, but people were very understanding when it was explained to them that circumstances had led to a change of plan and a smaller family occasion.

  Altogether very understanding. The programme had had almost two million viewers, and those who had not been watching had read all about it in the tabloids the next day.

  WANKER ROB. The headline on the news-stands was seared into Rosemarie’s maternal heart like the brand on a scabby sow, and she knew that ever after, for as long as she lived, she would never be able to think of Robert without adding that ghastly epithet. She had decided never again to read either Aftonbladet or Expressen, a promise she had not broken thus far, nor been remotely tempted to break.

  So, it was to be a smallish family occasion. And it had been the same at school. The same discreet, charitable curtain had descended there, too. When Mr and Mrs Hermansson, with their combined total of sixty-six years’ service, both retired from the bloodstained tiltyard of teaching at the very same moment, as some wit – it could scarcely have been Porky Bergson – had put it, their presentation and leaving party amounted to nothing more than an extended staff meeting with cake, the appropriate number of red roses and a set of hammered-copper mulled wine cups – and Rosemarie, opening the parcel and catching a glimpse, could not help wondering whether Elonsson’s hopeless Year 8s had been obliged to knock them together in the metalwork room in order to avoid a fail mark. Elonsson, unlike Porky Bergson, was possessed of a highly developed sense of irony.

  Sixty-five plus forty. That was December’s other big sum, and it came to 105. Rosemarie knew Karl-Erik was aggrieved that it hadn’t come to a round hundred, but there was no fiddling with facts of that kind. Karl-Erik never fiddled any kind of fact. She tentatively stretched her back a couple of times without getting up from her chair and thought back to that night, forty years before, when she had managed not to bear down through two contractions, and thus delayed things until after midnight. Karl-Erik’s poorly concealed joy had been unmistakable, and thank goodness, after all that effort. Their firstborn daughter had emerged from the womb on his own twenty-fifth birthday. There had always been an inordinately strong bond between Ebba and Karl-Erik, and Rosemarie knew that it had been forged at that moment. Right there in Örebro hospital at four minutes past midnight on 20 December 1965. The midwife was called Geraldine Tulpin, and that was a name that was hard to forget, too.

  The family’s Christmas celebrations had always suffered a certain distortion. Rosemarie had never put it into words – but a distortion was definitely the way to describe it. Ordinary people, Christian or otherwise, saw 24 December as the hub round which the winter darkness amassed, but for the Wunderlich Hermanssons, the twentieth was at least as important. Karl-Erik and Ebba’s birthday; the day after the shortest of the year, the heart of darkness, and in some strange way Karl-Erik – without fiddling the facts, though he had come pretty close – had succeeded in shifting things by a day, to achieve a sort of triumvirate. His own birthday. Ebba’s birthday. The return of light to the earth.

  Ebba had always been her father’s darling, the apple of his eye; from the very beginning, and ever since, he had invested his greatest hopes in her. He had never even tried to hide it: some children are of a higher carat than others, that’s just the way it is in the genetic melting pot of biology, he had explained on one occasion when, unusually for him, he had enjoyed one cognac too many. Whether we like it or not. Rosemarie poured a second cup of coffee – a reliable cornerstone in stabilizing the wakeful state she relished so little – and thought, grimly and cynically, that the way things looked at the moment, he had undeniably backed the right horse.

  Ebba was a rock. Robert had always been a black sheep and now he had put himself beyond the limits of acceptable behaviour; perhaps it came as less of a surprise than they were pretending. Kristina? Well, pretty much all you could say about Kristina was that she was the way she was; the baby had steadied her a bit and the last few years had brought slightly calmer sailing than those that went before, but Karl-Erik stubbornly insisted it was too soon to count their chickens, far too soon.

  When did you last count any chickens, my wooden prince, Rosemarie had thought every time he said it, and she thought it again now in her dawn-less kitchen.

  At that very moment, he came in.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘It’s odd. In spite of everything, I slept like a baby.’

  ‘It all feels rather panicky to me,’ she said.

  ‘What does?’ said Karl-Erik Hermansson, switching on the kettle. ‘Where did you put my new tea?’

  ‘Second shelf,’ said Rosemarie. ‘Selling the house and moving to that urbanization, of course. It feels . . . well, as though we’re panicking. Like I said. No, on the left.’

  He clattered about with cups and caddies. ‘Ur-ba-ni-za-ción,’ he articulated, with genuine Spanish phonemes. ‘I know you feel a bit dubious at the moment, but one day you’ll thank me.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Rosemarie Wunderlich Hermansson. ‘I doubt it to the tips of my toes. You need to trim your nose hairs.’

  ‘Rosemarie,’ said Karl-Erik, thrusting out his chest. ‘I can’t look people in the eye any more, here at home. A man has to be able to keep a straight back and hold his head high.’

  ‘You have to be able to bend, too,’ she retorted. ‘This will pass. People will forget and get things back into reasonable proport—’

  He interrupted her by slamming down his new tea caddy on the worktop. ‘I think we’ve discussed all this enough. Lundgren promised we’d be able to sign the papers on Wednesday. I’ve had it with this town. Basta. All that’s keeping us here is cowardice and inertia.’

  ‘We’ve lived here for thirty-eight years,’ said Rosemarie.

  ‘Long enough,’ said Karl-Erik. ‘Have you had two cups of coffee already? Remember what I told you.’

  ‘The idea of moving to a place that hasn’t even got a name. They could at least have called it something.’

  ‘It will get a name, as soon as the Spanish authorities decide on one. What’s wrong with Estepona?’

  ‘It’s seven kilometres to Estepona. Four kilometres to the sea.’

  He didn’t answer. He poured boiling water on his health-promoting green tea leaves and got the sunflower loaf out of the bread bin. She sighed. They had discussed her breakfast habits for twenty-five years. They had discussed selling the house and moving to Spain for twenty-five days. Though discussed was hardly the right word, thought Rosemarie. Karl-Erik had made up his mind and then used his well-oiled democratic disposition to get her onto his side. That was the way it had always been. He never gave up. On any matter of importance, he was prepared to talk and talk and talk until she threw in the towel out of pure boredom and exhaustion. Classic filibustering. It could be the purchase of a car. It could be the wildly expensive bookshelves in the library – as he liked to call their shared study, where he spent forty hours a week and she four. It could be holidays to Ireland, Belarus or the Ruhr: this was expected, if you were the head of department for social sciences and geography.

  And he had paid a deposit on that house between Estepona and Fuengirola without asking her. Entered into negotiations with Lundgren at the bank about selling their house without instituting the democratic process at home. He couldn’t deny it, nor did he try to.

  Though perhaps she ought to be grateful, really. It could just as well have been Finland or the Wuppertal. I’ve lived with that man all my adult life, she suddenly thought. I believed things might gradually mature between us, but it never happened. The thing was rotten from the word go and just got more rotten as the years passed.

  And why was she so hopelessly lacking in indep
endence that she had to blame her wasted life on him? Surely that was the ultimate sign of weakness?

  ‘What are you brooding about, sitting there all quiet like that?’ he said.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said.

  ‘Within six months we’ll have forgotten all this,’ he said.

  ‘Forgotten what? Our lives? Our children?’

  ‘Don’t talk rubbish. You know what I mean.’

  ‘No, I don’t. And incidentally, wouldn’t it be better if Ebba and Leif stayed at the hotel? There are four of them. Four adults, it’ll be a tight squeeze.’

  He glared at her as if she were a pupil who had forgotten to hand in her homework for the third lesson in a row, and she knew she had only suggested it to annoy him. Of course, she was right that Ebba and Leif and two teenage sons took up more space than they could provide here at home, but Ebba was Ebba and Karl-Erik would rather sell his last tie than accommodate his favourite daughter anywhere but in the house, and the room, where she had grown up. Especially as it was the last time, the last time ever.

  She felt a lump in her throat and swallowed down the rest of her lukewarm coffee. And Robert? Well, poor Robert would of course have to be hidden away from the eyes of the world as much as possible; they couldn’t have him lounging about the hotel, where anybody at all could goggle and jeer at him. Wanker Rob from Fucking Island. The last time she spoke to him, the night before last, he had sounded almost on the verge of tears.

  So it would be Kristina, Jakob and little Kelvin who had to check into the hotel. How could you christen a child Kelvin? The scientist associated with absolute zero, Karl-Erik had enlightened the new parents, but it had made no difference. Anyway, she was pretty sure they would see the hotel as a lucky draw; the emotional state Kristina had induced in Rosemarie ever since she grew up and left home was a triple-headed sensation of guilt, inferiority and failure. And for a brief but distinct moment, she became aware that the only one of her three children she really cared about and felt any compassion for was Robert. Was it because he was a boy? Was it that simple?

  Though perhaps there would be some kind of opening with Kristina, sooner or later; for her, that is, hardly for Karl-Erik. He had always been the primary target of the girl’s obstinance. Was there such a word? Obstinance? It had been like that ever since the day she reached puberty, but the pedagogical pine had remained unbending and bark-bound through an eternity of quarrels and arguments and disputes – displaying just the qualities one would expect from that sort of upright specimen. Stand your ground and never budge an inch.