The Darkest Day

by Håkan Nesser

  ‘No, I—’ he interrupted, but she interrupted him back.

  ‘Choosing whether to go down the path of truth or lies is an important decision. You’d better spend a few days thinking it over.’

  Then she got to her feet and left him sitting there.

  Nope, not a single touch, he thought. She didn’t even run her hand across my back.

  And a feeling of mute rigidity, as new as it was paralysing, spread rapidly through his body. He left it a moment and then rushed out of the kitchen, upstairs and into his room. He could hear that Henrik was awake on the other side of the thin wall, and threw himself on the bed with a silent prayer that his big brother would decide to have a shower before he came in to say hello.

  They’d swap me if they could, thought Kristoffer Grundt to himself. In fact, they would have swapped me for a different son long ago.

  Leif Grundt gave his son a rather half-hearted hug after the short conversation he had with him before they sat down to dinner, noting not for the first time how different he and his wife were.

  And that was putting it mildly. Ebba was a force to be reckoned with, but also a puzzle, that was exactly how he generally defined her, and what was more, a puzzle he had long since given up any prospect of solving. Ever. In the case of Kristoffer’s debut with alcohol and tobacco – assuming it really was his debut, as he steadfastly maintained – the important thing, as far as his wife was concerned, was the lie. The betrayal inherent in not telling the truth, the conscious breach of their agreement.

  For his part, Leif thought exactly the opposite. If the boy wanted to smoke and drink he sure as heck couldn’t go round telling his parents about it in advance, could he? In the long term, he ran the risk of cirrhosis of the liver from the booze and lung cancer from the fags, but surely no one had ever died of a little lie?

  Sooner a teetotal liar than a truthful alcoholic, in Leif Grundt’s view. If one were to choose a future for one’s children – not something that he imagined for a second would fall to his lot.

  He couldn’t deny that he did have a slightly dubious relationship with lies per se. If you really wanted to press the point – something else he would never contemplate doing, especially where his wife was concerned – you could say that the Grundt family’s entire existence rested on a lie. Well, yes, it was only as a result of a crude and blatant bluff that the boys had been born at all.

  If Leif Grundt had stuck to the truth, getting intimate with their mother would have been out of the question. Naturally. The idea of Ebba Hermansson allowing a butcher at the Co-op to pluck her cherished virginity was as unthinkable as . . . as the idea of Leif’s stuttering half-brother Henry pulling off marriage to Pamela Anderson. Leif knew it and Ebba knew it, and Leif knew she would never admit this psychological fact even if faced with a firing squad. When he decided to pose as law student Leif von Grundt at the spring ball at the Östgöta student club in Uppsala in 1985 (having gatecrashed with a fake student ID), it was precisely that upgraded identity – not his utterly prosaic Co-op cock – that gained him access in her student lodgings at two the next morning to the wetlands of her virginity. Precisely that.

  ‘You lied,’ she observed two months later, when the resulting pregnancy could no longer be ignored.

  ‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘I wanted you and it was the only way to get you.’

  ‘You’re so prejudiced,’ she said. ‘I would have appreciated your honesty.’

  ‘Quite possibly,’ he said, ‘but it wasn’t your appreciation I was after.’

  ‘I would have given myself to you anyway.’

  ‘I doubt that,’ said Leif Grundt. ‘I doubt that very much indeed. So what are you going to do now?’

  ‘Do?’ said Ebba Hermansson. ‘I’m going to marry you and have the baby, of course.’

  And so she did.

  It had cost her a year’s interruption to her medical studies, but that was all. Pushing the limits of your paternity leave entitlement was pretty much obligatory if you were a Co-op employee in the mid-1980s, and when Kristoffer came into the world five years later it was a carefully planned step, just before Ebba embarked on her compulsory period as a junior doctor. Right on cue, their expected jackpot arrived: at Sundsvall Hospital further north, along with a tailor-made post as the manager of the Co-op store in Ymergatan in the same town. In due course, she was also able to complete her specialist training – and Ebba Hermansson Grundt became the living embodiment of having your cake and eating it when, as a thirty-eight-year-old mother of two, she took up her post as senior consultant in vascular surgery at the same hospital. The devil looks after his own, and in two days’ time she would turn forty.

  Thus ran Leif’s thoughts, and he gave a wry inner smile. And the little matter of honesty versus dishonesty being a far more complicated story than people generally imagined, well, that was a truth he made sure to keep deep within himself. In a special store of worldly wisdom, you could say, into which he admittedly took a peek from time to time, but which he increasingly seldom invited his wife to visit. There was no reason to, somehow.

  But the bloody boy had started smoking and drinking, and of course he would have to be rebuked. He needed to be shamed, to be made to feel wretched and worthless, that was the basic fact of the matter.

  Content with his simple conclusion, Leif Grundt sat down at the table with his sons and wife. It was Sunday evening, and on the whole, the world was treating him well. Tomorrow they were off on their trip to Kymlinge and three days of real hell, he knew that, but tomorrow was tomorrow, and sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

  3

  At their very first, somewhat bewildered meeting a week after the scandal broke, Robert Hermansson had explained to his therapist that he felt suicidal.

  But that was in answer to a direct question; he sensed it was the answer expected of him by the timid, slightly mouse-like man with the tinted glasses. He was expected to be suicidal and had therefore answered yes, and indeed, after what happened, he had found himself thinking along those lines several times.

  Even to himself he could admit it would be a pretty logical conclusion to the whole sorry mess, and it would be lovely not to lie tossing and turning in his bed every single night, remembering his pathetic, wasted life. Lovely not to wake up in broad, mid-morning daylight in a cold sweat of anguish to face yet another meaningless day.

  To finally give his self-contempt a kick up the arse, he thought, to step over the edge and vanish. Nobody, not one single person, would think it remotely strange for Robert Hermansson to take his own life.

  And yet he sensed it wasn’t going to happen. As per usual, he would lack the right resilience and resolve. As for how he would spend the remaining years of his life, he had no idea, but presumably it was a matter of getting through the next month and then moving abroad. He was signed off sick until the 26th; his temporary job at the newspaper ran until the end of the year and he was under no illusion that they would want him back in January.

  A publishing company of the less serious kind had been in touch and offered to publish ‘his version of events’ as a book, promising an advance of 50,000 and a well-qualified ghostwriter. He told them he was not in need of a ghostwriter in any circumstances, and said he’d get back to them. Perhaps he should accept the offer? Why not? He could take the money, go to the Canaries or Thailand or any damn place he wanted. No, not Thailand again. Relax in a deckchair for two months, at any rate, with the typescript of his old novel, and give it a final tidy-up. Man Without Dog. Perhaps they’d take it on? Maybe it wasn’t strictly speaking his version of events on the island that the shitty little publishing house was after, but just his name. Wanker Rob Hermansson.

  And even if they then said no, wasn’t it exactly what he needed, an escape? Concentrated work. Isolation and good weather. It was seven years since the last time he went through Man Without Dog, and maybe that period of time and his present situation were exactly what were needed for him to put a careful finishin
g touch to the text and get the novel published? Finally. The four biggest publishers in the country had had it for consideration – Bonniers twice – he had read three different readers’ reports and had discussions with two editors. The man from Albert Bonniers Förlag had given grounds for hope. He had asked him almost insistently to go through the final six hundred and fifty pages one more time, try to cut out at least a hundred and fifty and then get back to them. In principle, they were willing to publish the book, there was no question about it.

  But then, in September 1999, just when Seikka had clarified her intentions with regard to him, he had run out of steam. Run out of the steam to apply himself to his metaphors all over again, and who wouldn’t have? He had two published volumes of poetry behind him. The Stone Tree, 1991, and The Fruiterer’s Example, 1993. Both had had decent reviews; he was considered to be on a quest to find his own voice, and had taken part in a total of four readings and one poetry festival.

  No, why should Robert Hermansson go hang himself? There was still hope.

  Or at any rate, there were escape routes. The aforementioned. He asked no more.

  He had never asked much of life, when he thought about it more intently. Life demanded more of him than he did of life, wasn’t that right? By noon on Sunday 18 December he still had not got out of bed, but he had completed half the crossword in Friday’s Svenska Dagbladet and gone back to sleep three times. The escape route, he thought. The symbol of my entire life?

  That was certainly one way of seeing it. He had never been any good at sticking with anything, and anything he might possibly have learnt to stick with had not stuck with him. He was thirty-five years old and the only real activity in his life to date had been the search for something else. No bloody surprise, he thought, turning his pillow, that if you’ve grown up in the shadow of Ebba, you long to get out into the sunlight.

  He had repeatedly chewed over that thought and it had long since lost its sweetness. There were certain things you could blame your family and big sister for, but not forever. You could be a victim of external circumstances, but scarcely for all eternity. Not in the Swedish middle class of the late twentieth century. However much you delved into history and geography, it was hard to find people with prospects as good as Ebba, Robert and Kristina Hermansson. That was – as their father Karl-Erik would have put it – an incontrovertible fact.

  And strictly speaking, it was only after he branched out on his own that things started to go awry. Robert had duly taken his final exams at his upper-secondary school back home in Kymlinge. It was 1988, and although he did not come top of the class, his marks were indisputably creditable. Not on a par with those achieved by Ebba a few years earlier, but then nobody had expected that. He was called up for his military service the same autumn, to be forged and hammered into a man over the course of ten months as a squad leader in the armoured infantry at Strängnäs. He detested every single day. Every single minute. In 1989, he moved to Lund and started his university course.

  Humanities. His father advised against it and his big sister did the same, but he held his ground. He met Madeleine, who was beautiful and brave and on his side. They read philosophy and fucked. They read history of science and ideas and fucked. They drank red wine, smoked a bit of hash, read literary history and fucked. Sampled amphetamines, but stopped in time, read art history, fucked, published two collections of poetry (Robert) and had one refused (Madeleine). Read film studies, had a 650-page novel refused (Robert), fucked, got pregnant (Madeleine), gave up the hash but still had a miscarriage before twelve weeks, started getting a) panic attacks (Madeleine) and b) sick of Robert (Madeleine), and wasted no time moving back to her parents’ in Växjö (Madeleine). Just sat there watching everything collapse around him (Robert).

  Somehow, he had been able to maintain the illusion that he was taking his studies seriously, convincing both the student finance board and his family. But Madeleine’s departure meant finito. He was twenty-four, miles from taking any exam, had an accumulated student debt of 350,000 kronor and some very bad drinking habits. His brave and beautiful fiancée had deserted him and his two well-received poetry collections had sold one hundred and twelve copies combined. It was high time for his family to intervene.

  By the autumn of 1994, it was all sorted (except for the study debts that would presumably pursue him to the grave). With the help of his big sister’s dry stick of a Co-operative husband up in the northern county of Medelpad, a relatively well-paid job at a district office in Jönköping was conjured up for him. Office work and three to four trips a month to Co-op stores in the region, i.e. northern Småland and Västergötland. Robert submitted to his fate and accepted. Make the best of a bad job, inner exile for his artist’s soul, he simply had no choice. In the first week of September, he moved into a smallish flat with a bit of a view over Lake Vättern, and on his third Saturday night at the third (and last) pub in town, he met Seikka. She worked at a day nursery and was taking evening classes in creativity at assorted adult education centres. Various sorts of creativity, from aromatherapy to feminist life drawing classes and transcendental self-defence. They moved in together in December and in November 1995 their daughter, Lena-Sofie, was born. Robert took up running at much the same time, in an attempt not to be blown apart by the pressure building up inside him. Initially ten to twelve kilometres every other evening, then working up to longer distances. In the course of 1996 he ran three marathons with times sub 2.50 (except the last one, which he had to abandon less than two kilometres from the finish because of acute stomach problems, but everything pointed to somewhere in the region of 2.46 and a half). He joined Vindarnas IF athletics club and found he had a real talent for track running. He ran his first 5K in an internal club competition and won with a 300-metre lead over the second-place runner. He then wrote to a well-known sports physiologist, who told him that long-distance runners often peaked after thirty and could benefit from postponing formal training until they were about twenty-five. Robert was then twenty-six, and could remember long-distance runner Evy Palm competing for Sweden when she was forty-six.

  He enjoyed his heyday in the three seasons that followed. In 1997, he became district champion in both the 5K and the 10K, but it was when he decided, with no technical training, to enter a 3,000m steeplechase at Malmö stadium, that he found his true discipline. He came in third, after someone who ran for the national team and a renowned Polish athlete, in an impressive time of 8.58.6.

  Lena-Sofie grew, and started at day nursery, while Seikka found new courses to attend. He neglected them, and went down to part-time at work so he could focus on his training. They made love once a month. They went to Finland over Christmas, to visit her parents in Lappenranta. Robert got into a fight with a brother-in-law and was left with a four-centimetre scar below his left ear. In 1998, he took part in his first Finland–Sweden athletics international. Fourth place, and second out of all the Swedish runners with 8.42.5. He improved on his personal best at the national championships in Umeå with 8.33.2 and won a silver medal. Seikka and Robert made love once a quarter. His parents-in-law came to visit them in Jönköping for a week, while they were in Sweden on holiday. No fights or irregularities occurred. While they were spending Christmas with Rosemarie and Karl-Erik at Allvädersgatan in Kymlinge, Lena-Sofie bit her grandfather on the lip, so there was a little bloodshed on that occasion. The next year turned out to be Robert’s last in athletics. He found he couldn’t improve on his personal best, and had to contend with a dodgy Achilles tendon that flared up from time to time, but still managed a fourth place in the Finland–Sweden athletics international, this time an away fixture in the Helsinki Olympic Stadium. His parents-in-law came to watch. All the way round the last bend and along the finishing straight, Robert battled step for step with a Finnish runner for third place, but had to concede in the final few metres. The Finns took first, second and third place. The tournament was held in August; he and Seikka had not made love since April and when he got home to hi
s smallish flat with a bit of a view over Lake Vättern, she had emptied it of herself, her daughter and all their female possessions. On the kitchen table, he found a note in which she said that she didn’t love him any more, that he didn’t care in the slightest about either her or Lena-Sofie, and that she was now moving back to Finland and never wanted to see him again.

  Robert realized that every word was totally true and decided once again to concede. But he still dialled his parents-in-law’s number three times, though he hung up each time it started to ring.

  This occurred late one Sunday evening, on 29 August 1999, and it was on Monday, 30 August that the accommodating editor from Albert Bonniers called and encouraged him to really get to grips with Man Without Dog. Robert did indeed put in a few hours on the voluminous manuscript on the Monday and Tuesday evenings, but he became increasingly aware of an inner void paralysing all artistic endeavour. He thrust the 650 pages into the claret-coloured, metal-edged box file where they were to remain untouched until December 2005.

  Then he did another fortnight at the Co-op district office, and at the end of September he put his belongings into storage except for what he could fit into a rucksack, and moved to Australia.

  The telephone rang, interrupting Robert’s analysis of his life. It was his mother, informing him that his father wanted to know when to expect him.

  ‘Don’t you want to know?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course I do, Robert. Don’t split hairs,’ said Rosemarie Wunderlich Hermansson.

  ‘All right, Mum. Tomorrow evening. Got a few things to do first, but I’ll leave here between two and three.’

  ‘Robert?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How are you doing, honestly?’

  ‘It is what it is.’