Or perhaps pass over all of it with silence? And when some acquaintance brought it up he could smile, tip his head, and mutter something indulgent that could be interpreted any number of ways.
By not showing so much as an ounce of desire to bask in the radiance that now fell on the whole street he could reject the selection of prize winners in an elegant way, while he high-mindedly did not utter anything obviously unfavorable. Perhaps he could simply let slip something about the professor’s failing health.
There were several possibilities and from his lookout point the associate professor sensed that internally Bunde was in uproar. After the initial shock the neighbor had raised his eyes toward Ohler’s house, and his look had expressed unfeigned astonishment, as if he had never noticed the building before.
The associate professor lingered in his tower. This morning the otherwise rather sleepy street would surely be somewhat livelier than usual. Already a number of couriers had delivered flower arrangements, curiosity seekers had cruised past in their cars. The professor’s housekeeper, who had been there as long as the associate professor could recall, was no doubt hard at work arranging vases. The associate professor had seen glimpses of her in the windows on several occasions.
She would stop on the sidewalk outside his house, praise his plantings, perhaps comment on the weather or some everyday incident. Once, perhaps ten years ago, he had received a compliment. That was after he had given her a few violet tulips, which she had admired during the spring.
“You are a good person, associate professor,” she had said when, embarrassed but very pleased, she received the package of bulbs.
He understood that it was an uncommonly generous statement coming from Agnes Andersson. Perhaps also a veiled criticism of the professor; hadn’t she emphasized “associate” a little? He would like to believe that.
Now he glimpsed her in the professor’s study on the second floor, as she drew back the dark-brown curtains, opened the windows, and fastened them wide open. The associate professor tried to smile sarcastically at the futility of trying to air out all that was old in the Ohler house, but it was not a convincing smile, more a grimace that illustrated the distress he felt.
He ought to be proud; as someone involved in the breakthrough in the IDD project he could claim a share of the credit for the prize. But the proper delight would not appear. Twenty-two years ago—he remembered it was a Thursday in May, as usual pea soup was served for lunch—he read the thirty-page summary in The Lancet, an article that landed as a sensation, and he saw that his own name was missing.
Decades of toil and his name was omitted. An inconceivable ignominy. As if there was room for only one. The one who got to shine, receive congratulatory telegrams and telephone calls from near and far, and now the Nobel Prize.
Associate Professor Johansson’s entire worldview took a serious blow that spring day. In principle he had long been aware of the academic machinations, backbiting to maneuver colleagues out, fighting for funding, where no means were shunned. But now it struck him personally and with such force that he questioned his own research achievements, his entire career. The insult of being ignored he also read as a sign of a kind of general societal rottenness.
After that day he started to distrust everything and everyone. He never ate pea soup again. That, and the associated Swedish pancakes, came to symbolize the mendacity in the world.
The years up to retirement were marked by great indifference. The excitement and enthusiasm had disappeared. He was running on idle.
A lecture trip to Göttingen, Hamburg, and Berlin was the only occasion when he got to experience some of the sweetness of victory. It was intended for Ohler to travel to Germany, but his wife’s death came very conveniently for the associate professor. He was sent as a replacement and got to receive much personal evidence of his German colleagues’ appreciation. One of them he still kept in contact with. To him he could be completely frank. The conversations and correspondence with Horst Bubb were the valve where the excess steam, when the pressure got too high, could be let out.
Horst had also called early in the morning, something which nowadays otherwise happened only on the associate professor’s birthday, and tried to cheer him up. The German, who had worked with Ferguson for fifteen years at the Max Planck Institute, understood the associate professor’s feelings very well.
They happened to talk about Ferguson in particular, now retired and living in Vermont, according to Horst very aggrieved. The associate professor got the idea that his friend, by apportioning the bitterness to several researchers involved and in that way diluting it, wanted to alleviate the associate professor’s disappointment.
His colleague had also mentioned something about an article that might possibly appear in an influential newspaper with a quiet but very clear criticism of the selection of prize winners. According to Horst this was being initiated by a certain Wolfgang Schimmel, an influential doctor from Munich, who intended to gather a number of significant names behind him.
The associate professor, despite his own frustration, strangely enough remained unresponsive to all this talk about the injustice that was now being committed. He was already tired of it all and wished that the festivities on the tenth of December would be over, the articles cease, and Ohler become a name, not for the day, but instead one in the line of prize winners, who after a few years only the chief mourners would remember.
Ohler was no Einstein, Bohr, or Curie, who would write themselves into scientific history, so let all this go away, he thought in his tower.
“Let it go away, let us die,” he mumbled.
The lemon tree in front of him responded at that very moment by dropping a leaf.
Four
Right before twelve the associate professor’s doorbell rang, an event if not sensational, then still very unusual. Most recently it concerned a security alarm salesman.
The associate professor was in the kitchen making his usual lunch: a couple of fried eggs, a few slices of pickle, and an open-faced cheese sandwich. The menu had looked like this ever since retirement.
The first ring was followed by another, more drawn out and sharper in tone.
The associate professor was in a quandary: should he finish frying the eggs or move the pan to the side to go and answer the door? In his confusion he did neither. He remained standing with the spatula in his hand, while the eggs were transformed into inedible, dry flakes in the pan.
He thought later, as he disposed of the scraps, that it was like an illustration of municipal politics in Uppsala: While those in charge in other municipalities held discussions, made decisions and then implemented them, Uppsala’s politicians remained standing with spatula in hand, year after year.
When the frying pan started to smoke he came to his senses, turned off the burner, took off his apron, and hurried out to the hall.
The associate professor peeked out through the peephole: Torben Bunde. He looked impatient, staring intensely at the door. The associate professor felt as if he was the one being looked at, not the other way around. His neighbor raised his hand and another ring resounded through the house. Now that he knew who the visitor was, he experienced it as even more insistent.
He knows I’m home, the associate professor thought, it’s just as well to take the bull by the horns. He unhooked the security chain and opened the door.
“Is this how it’s going to be now?”
Torben Bunde, Ph.D. was dressed in something that the associate professor thought was called a smoking jacket, at least back in the day when smoking was done in a fashionable manner.
His face bright red, he pointed with a diffuse motion in the direction of his own house and stamped one foot on the stone paving.
“What do you mean?”
Bunde waved his arm.
“A man,” he panted, “a man sneaking around with an ax in his hand.”
“On your lot?”
It was a strange feeling, talking to Bunde like this. Not becau
se the associate professor had problems setting aside formalities with people, but it felt wrong somehow.
“I didn’t see that well, if it was on mine or yours, or”—Bunde clearly experienced this unexpected neighborly contact and extended conversation as equally strange, because he hesitated suddenly—“or if it was on Lundström’s, or whatever his name is, the new person.”
Alexander Lundquist had moved in five years ago and was therefore observed with a certain skepticism. No one knew exactly what he did for a living, but there was talk about some kind of publishing activity. Bunde, whose property bordered the newcomer’s, had cautiously let the surroundings know that it probably concerned pornography.
“I see,” said the associate professor, uncertain how he should tackle the situation.
“Is this how it’s going to be now,” Bunde repeated, “with a lot of running around in the bushes, photographers and other riffraff, those kinds of paparazzi?”
“Photographers don’t usually carry axes. Perhaps it was someone working on Lundquist’s yard?”
“That! His yard mostly looks like a communal garbage dump.”
Everything that had to do with municipal operations, including recycling stations, Bunde called “communal.”
“All the more reason to hire someone,” the associate professor replied.
He was finding an unexpected enjoyment in the conversation.
“I definitely think he mentioned something about that.”
“Have the two of you talked?”
“Just in passing,” said the associate professor.
“Yes?”
“Perhaps it was Lundquist himself you saw?”
“Very unlikely,” Bunde said with a sneer. “He’s never appeared in the yard before.”
The associate professor had to agree.
“This man, you didn’t go up and ask what he was doing?”
Bunde shook his head.
“I don’t believe there will be ‘running around’ as you say. Have you gone over to congratulate?”
“No, I want to wait,” said Bunde doggedly.
“Perhaps we should take up a collection for a little flower arrangement? I mean, those of us here on the street.”
Bunde stared at the associate professor.
“I think I smell something burning,” he said.
“I’ll never be a cook,” the associate professor said, smiling.
Bunde turned on his heels and almost ran toward the gate, which he had left open. It was such an unusual sight for the associate professor that he did not catch the neighbor’s parting words.
“Close the gate behind you!” he shouted.
He observed the neighbor striding away. Bunde’s hair was sticking out like a scraggly white broom from the back of his head. The sight reminded the associate professor of the only children’s book he owned. In it a magician was depicted who at the end of the tale was put to flight by angry people. He wanted to recall that the magician had conjured away something valuable to a poor man in the village. Could it be a cow?
It must have been a cow. Otherwise he probably would not have gotten the book as a Christmas present. His father had been called the “Indian” at home in Rasbo.
The associate professor walked along the stone-paved walk, and to push away the memories flaring up from childhood and youth he let his eyes sweep over the yard, observed that the Öland stone ought to be reset, noted that the moss in the lawn had conquered even more ground, especially in the shadow of the privet hedge, and that the autumn crocus had never been so abundant and beautiful.
While he slowly shut the gate he thought again about the conversation with Ohler. Had the professor been sincere in his intentions when he came over? Perhaps he truly wanted to share the honor? Could it be the case that he had let his many years of disappointment cloud his judgment, that he had not understood that the professor had gradually changed character?
In yesterday evening’s news broadcasts, which the associate professor followed on a couple of channels, the professor had repeated his preaching that the honor was not his alone. He had even mentioned Ferguson, which before, during his active period, would have been completely inconceivable.
It was during the last years before retirement that the associate professor’s bitterness had grown; it was when forty years of work suddenly was perceived as worthless. To now come up with flattering remarks changed nothing.
* * *
He went up the stairs to the tower. The last bit, very steep, was becoming increasingly troublesome.
A pale October sun bathed the plants in a conciliatory glow. He let his hand run across the two-meter-long leaves of the multistemmed dracaena in a careful caress. Against all the green in the tower it shone bloodred. He dampened a rag and wiped off all the old dust so that the contrast stood out even stronger.
In the corner of his eye he thought he perceived a movement between the apple trees on Lundquist’s lot. A branch swayed. The Katja tree’s fruits shone like little lanterns.
The associate professor removed his glasses and wiped off the lenses with the rag, put the glasses on again and scanned the neighbor’s lot. But now everything was quiet.
Must have been a blackbird, he thought. Lundquist never bothered to harvest fruit and berries, so the birds would feast far into autumn. At Christmas the waxwings came and pecked their way into Ribstons.
After pottering with the plants for a while it occurred to him that he hadn’t had lunch. The Nobel Prize had certainly made a mess of life on the street, and he set aside the rag and started the descent to the kitchen.
“This stairway will be the death of me,” he mumbled.
Five
“Agnes, would you please get the medicine.”
He had called several times before she heard his voice. Before they had a functioning bell system from the library too. That was when the male guests gathered there to have a cognac after dinner. Then sometimes the housekeeper’s attention might be called for.
She was standing a couple of steps inside the room, looking at him with that inscrutable expression he had such a hard time with. It might entail willingness just as well as total repudiation and contempt.
Needing to involve Agnes in this was not something he was happy about, but now he was feeling so dizzy that he did not dare try to get up from the chaise longue.
Agnes organized most everything in the house but he wanted to take care of the heart medicine himself. He knew that she kept track of how many pills he took, because several times she had pointed out that he had to renew the prescription.
“Shall I call Birgitta?”
Agnes twisted her head slightly, her lips pressed together, the eyes somewhat clouded by cataracts, expressionlessly observing an oil painting that was hanging above the fireplace, a portrait of a woman attributed to Arvid Lagerstedt.
The professor had the feeling of being a very obstinate patient, who for the hundredth time was trying his caregiver’s patience, and where conventional surface politeness alone kept the caregiver from slapping the patient across the mouth and then leaving him to his fate.
He chose not to answer the question, the customary tactic. It was theater, their single combat tested over decades. A theater where he always got the last line.
“Thanks, that’s fine, Agnes, the medicine.”
She disappeared without a word but returned immediately. While he rinsed down the pill he observed how Agnes circled the library, while she waited for him to set down the glass. He got the impression that there was something she wanted to say, but knew there was no point in asking.
“Do you remember, Agnes—”
She turned around.
“How long have you worked here, Agnes?”
“Fifty-five years.”
“That’s a long time,” the professor observed.
She nodded. He wanted so much to hear her say something, make some kind of judgment, or at least make a comment, about the fifty-five years she had served three gener
ations of Ohlers.
Agnes Andersson had never, as far as he could recall, let slip any appraisal of either the family or her position. She had always been there, like the so-called Stockholm bureau in the hall, the table service from France, the framed sketch of a bladdernut, signed Linnaeus, the oil painting by Roslin, the swords from the time of Charles XII that hung crossed over the fireplace in the library, the spear from the parts around Lake Tanganyika, and everything else that filled the house.
It was as if the news about the Nobel Prize, a kind of receipt for his achievement but also an endpoint, made him want to sum up, and Agnes was the only one he could talk with. It was the two of them, no one else, who could confirm each other’s stories.
He was still holding the glass. She was waiting by the window, fussing with something on the windowsill. He got the impression that she experienced the tension in the room the same way he did. Wasn’t there something unusually tense about her shoulders and the somewhat crooked back, perhaps an expression of a suppressed desire to speak?
While his story was public property hers was mute, and trying to coax it out of her was pointless, he knew that. That after a whole life of distance they could come together and write a common story was a vain hope.
I’m looking for affirmation from a domestic servant, he thought indignantly, a woman who can barely read a newspaper, who never in her entire life lifted a finger to improve herself and considered learning as something sickly. I, a von Ohler who has received the Nobel Prize, am fawning on an illiterate fisherman’s daughter from an inbred island. As if I needed her approval!
He set aside the glass. Agnes turned immediately and gave him a quick glance. Once again he thought he glimpsed that desire in her to say something, before she hurried over, picked up the glass, left the room, and closed the door behind her.
Open Grave: A Mystery (Ann Lindell Mysteries) Page 3
