A summer with Kim Novak

by Håkan Nesser

  And I wasn’t alone. Benny was there, along with Snukke, Balthazar Lindblom, Veikko, Arse-Enok, and a few others.

  And Edmund.

  After my father had suggested that we might spend the summer together, I realized I didn’t actually know anything about him.

  I knew what everyone knew: his father read girlie mags, and he was born with six toes on each foot.

  Otherwise, he was a blank page. He was tall and hefty. His glasses always seemed to be missing a lens or a side piece. We’d only been in the same class this past year, and there were rumours that he had a great big model train set and a great big collection of Wild West magazines, but I didn’t know if either was true.

  His father was also a screw; that was the connection. He and my father had been working together for the past year, and that’s probably how they had come to discuss their plans for the summer, and one thing must have led to another.

  I didn’t exactly have any commitments—except perhaps with Benny, who was out of the picture the whole summer anyway—so after circling each other warily over the course of a few breaktimes, I tested the waters.

  ‘Hi, Edmund,’ I said.

  ‘Hi,’ said Edmund.

  We were standing by the bike racks under the corrugated metal roof, casually kicking gravel at the girls’ bikes.

  ‘My dad mentioned something,’ I said.

  ‘I heard,’ said Edmund.

  ‘Oh yeah?’ I said.

  ‘Yep,’ said Edmund.

  Then the bell rang. And that was it for a few days. It was a promising start.

  Gennesaret wasn’t the name of the lake. It was the name of a house by a lake called Möckeln. It’s still called Möckeln, incidentally.

  It was twenty-five kilometres from town and it took more than two hours to get there by bike, but only an hour and a half back. The journey times varied because of Kleva, a punishing hill that rose to 1,300 metres about halfway there.

  Möckeln—a large, almost circular brown lake—was surrounded by a number of villages, but it was dominated by forest-fringed beaches. Gennesaret sat in solitary splendour on a pine-clad point and was part of my mother’s inheritance. A two-storey tumbledown wooden shack with no comforts other than a roof over your head and fresh lake water ten metres away. The ice usually took the jetty out every winter, and there was an outboard motor for the rowing boat that had lain in pieces in a shed since I was born.

  My dying mother wasn’t the sole owner of this house. There was an Aunt Rigmor who had inherited half of it, but she wasn’t of sound mind and therefore couldn’t lay claim to it.

  Rigmor’s tragic condition was the result of an accident that took place during one of the first summers of the war. The story had as firm a place in our family history as the Fall does in the Bible: she had collided with an elk; but what gave the story its mythological air was the fact that she was riding a bicycle at the time. Aunt Rigmor, that is, not the elk. She and a friend had been on a cycling holiday in Småland, and while freewheeling down one of the hills in the uplands she’d charged right into a magnificent twelve-pointer and then straight through the doors of the notorious Dingle asylum on the West Coast.

  Never to be discharged, it seemed. I had only seen pictures of her and she didn’t resemble Mum in the slightest. She looked more like a seal, actually, but with glasses and no moustache. Fitting for someone in Dingle.

  If my tragic aunt hadn’t been in the picture in the first place, it’s likely that my parents wouldn’t have held on to Gennesaret. For some reason, they never seemed to like it out there.

  It wasn’t cosy. Maybe that was it. Or maybe it was because my mother never learned how to swim. The lake was deep. In parts. Certainly beyond our neck of land.

  Whatever the case, that May I had a hard time picturing how the summer would unfold. Or how things would be with Henry and Emmy. I couldn’t think about Emmy without picturing her breasts. Covered by clothing, but still. And I couldn’t picture her breasts without getting a boner. It was what it was.

  The thought of what my brother would get up to with Emmy Kaskel wasn’t easy to cope with either. Gennesaret wasn’t a big house.

  And on top of all that, there was Edmund. I had no idea how things would play out.

  But sod it, I thought. Only time will tell.

  Ewa Kaludis began work at Stava School on a Thursday. We’d just had double woodwork and I’d comprehensively ruined the magazine rack I’d been working on for the past seven months. Our carpentry teacher Gustav wasn’t happy about it, but it felt good. Whether it was sewing or woodwork, I didn’t like arts and crafts; they never turned out quite the way you thought they would, and they always took bloody ages.

  As usual, I was hanging out around the bike shed together with Benny and Arse-Enok, waiting for the end of break, when she appeared on the street.

  I’d like to say that I saw her first, but both Benny and Arse-Enok are equally sure that they did. It doesn’t really matter; the point is that she arrived. I realized she must have passed the football pitch first, because within a few seconds the girls’ side was chock-a-block with people gawking. Swarms of filthy football players.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said Benny. His mouth was so wide open that it looked as if he was at the dentist waiting for Dr. Slaktarsson to start drilling.

  ‘It’s Kim Novak,’ said Arse-Enok.

  As for me, I said nothing. Under normal circumstances, I wasn’t one to comment for the sake of it, but at this moment I was dumbstruck. It was like in a film. But better. The woman who came roaring in on her moped really did look like Kim Novak. Big wheat-blond hair, tied back with a foxy red hairband. Dark, foxy sunglasses and a full, foxy mouth that made me weak in the knees. She wore slim black slacks, a thin black top that hugged her breasts and a red-and-black-checked Swanson shirt, unbuttoned and billowing in the wind.

  ‘Holy bloody hell, what a fox,’ said Balthazar Lindblom.

  ‘It’s a Puch,’ said Arse-Enok. ‘Bloody hell, Kim Novak is rolling in to our schoolyard on a Puch. Kiss me, stupid.’

  With that, Arse-Enok fainted. He suffered from some sort of mild epilepsy that knocked him out on occasion. It came as no surprise that this proved to be too much for him.

  Kim Novak switched off the Puch. She straddled it for a moment with her feet on the gravel, smiling and taking in the 108 students standing as still as statues in the playground. Then she climbed off, elegantly flipped out the kick-stand, took a flat briefcase from the rack, and marched right through the petrified crowd and into the school.

  When she was out of sight, I noticed Edmund was standing beside me. Nearly shoulder to shoulder, though he was a bit taller.

  When he spoke, his voice was thick with emotion.

  ‘That’s what I call a mature woman.’

  I nodded, thinking of his dad’s girlie mags. I reckoned he knew what he was talking about.

  Within two hours, we’d got to the bottom of it. Those who kept to the football-side of the school had long known that Bertil ‘Berra’ Albertsson was moving to town; we might have worked it out as well if we’d given some thought to what we’d read in the local news. Berra was a handball legend who had competed in over 150 international matches. It was said that his shots were so hard that goalies died when they were hit in the head. After twelve seasons in the All-Swedish and national teams, he was going to wind things down by becoming a player-coach for our town’s handball team, with the aim of taking it to the top of the league. Even someone like Veikko knew what this meant, and we’d all read about it in Kurren a few weeks ago. Super-Berra was going to move into one of the newly built houses over in Ångermanland, and he was taking up his post as vice president of parks on the first of July.

  What wasn’t in the papers was that he was engaged to Kim Novak, and that her name was actually Ewa Kaludis.

  And that she’d be standing in for hopeless old Eleonora Sintring, who had broken her femur while spring-boarding over a plinth during Housewives’ Gymnastics earlie
r that month.

  The day after Ewa Kaludis arrived, several football players passed around a volunteer sign-up sheet that you could add your name to if you were willing to break Sintring’s other leg when she came back to work. The idea was that all the willing participants would then draw straws to see who would do the deed.

  By the time Benny and I wrote our names down, the list was already several pages long.

  The next Saturday I bumped into Edmund in the library.

  ‘Do you come here often?’ I asked.

  ‘Sometimes,’ said Edmund. ‘Quite often, actually. I read a lot.’

  It might have been true. I came here once a month at most, so I wasn’t surprised that we hadn’t run into each other here before. After all, Edmund was relatively new in town.

  ‘What do you like to read?’ I asked.

  ‘Crime,’ he answered without hesitation. ‘Stagge and Quentin and Carter Dickson.’

  I nodded. I hadn’t heard of any of them.

  ‘Jules Verne, too,’ he added after a pause.

  ‘Jules Verne is damn good,’ I said.

  ‘Damn good,’ said Edmund.

  We stood around avoiding each other’s eyes.

  ‘What about the summer?’ he then asked.

  ‘What about it?’ I said.

  ‘With that place,’ Edmund said. ‘Your house.’

  I couldn’t see where he was going with this.

  ‘Huh?’ I said.

  He removed his glasses and adjusted the tape that held them together. This time he seemed to have broken them at the bridge.

  ‘Shit,’ he said.

  I didn’t answer. There was a long silence.

  ‘Can I come or not?’ he finally said.

  ‘Can I?’ I said. ‘What do you mean?’

  He sighed.

  ‘Well, shit, you’re the one who gets to decide if I can come with you,’ he said.

  And then the penny dropped. Suddenly I felt ashamed. Goosebumps prickled my spine.

  ‘Too damn right you can,’ I said.

  Edmund put his glasses on.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course I am,’ I said. The goosebumps vanished. There was a pause.

  ‘Cool,’ he said then, with the same thick voice he’d used in the playground. ‘Umm, do you prefer Märklin or Fleischman trains?’

  3

  Henry, my brother, was a beanpole. Everyone said so.

  He was handsome, too; at least that’s what women said. Personally, I didn’t have an eye for men’s looks at the time, but he did remind me of Ricky Nelson, and I assumed that was a good thing.

  Or Rick, as he was called as of the previous year.

  Henry smoked Lucky Strikes. He pulled them out of the breast pocket of his white nylon shirt with a gesture that indicated he had been working hard, goddammit, and it was time to regroup with a smoke.

  The year before our mother ended up on her deathbed, he’d bought his first car—the family’s first car, in fact: a black VW Beetle that he drove around in when he was reporting from the countryside. He’d bought a camera, too, so he could take pictures of accidents and the ‘victims’ of his interviews. I was under the impression that things were going well with the freelancing.

  Our father used to say so: ‘He’s getting along well, our Henry.’

  I didn’t really know what was meant by the term ‘freelance’. Henry only seemed to be writing for Kurren, but that word was intertwined with the others. Lucky Strike. Beat. Freelance. He’d christened the VW Beetle ‘Killer’.

  The next Sunday morning, we were sitting in the kitchen.

  ‘Hey, Erik.’

  ‘Yes, Henry?’

  Killer was parked out on Idrottsgatan. He’d lit a Lucky and was slurping the lukewarm dregs of the coffee Dad had left behind before he took the bus to the hospital.

  ‘We’re mucking in together this summer.’

  ‘That’s what I hear.’

  He took a drag.

  ‘It’s probably the best thing for you.’

  I nodded and looked out of the window. The sun was shining brightly. On a day like this, you could swim in Möckeln.

  ‘This situation with Mum … it’s horrible,’ said Henry.

  ‘Definitely,’ I said.

  With his elbows still perched the table, he leaned back a bit and looked out at the sunshine.

  ‘Nice day.’

  I nodded.

  ‘We could go for a spin and check the place out.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said.

  ‘Are you up for it?’

  ‘I don’t have anything else to do,’ I said.

  Henry and I did some sorting out in Gennesaret that Sunday. We tidied up and prepared for the summer. We dragged all the mattresses and pillows and blankets on to the lawn so the sun could draw out the winter’s damp. We aired the house and swept the floors. Upstairs and down. There wasn’t really that much to do. On the ground floor there were two rooms and a small kitchen with a basin that drained into a dry well, a refrigerator and a stove. To get to the top floor you walked up a stairway on the gable wall. Two rooms in a row. A slanted roof. When the sun was out, it was scorching up there.

  We also had a swim. The jetty was in its usual spot at the southern end of the point. Henry said he’d turn it into a floating dock this year. I nodded and said that it was a damn good idea.

  But we’ll need better planks, Henry said.

  We sunbathed on the mattresses and chatted. Well, actually, we smoked. Henry gave me two Luckys and swore he’d wallop me if I told Dad.

  I had no intention of saying anything anyway. We drove home in the middle of the afternoon, during the hottest part of the day. Henry had a football game to watch that night. We brought both propane tanks with us, the one for the stove and the one for the refrigerator, so we could get them refilled in time for the holidays.

  Overall, it was a good Sunday, and I thought it might turn out to be a bearable summer, after all.

  Difficult, but bearable.

  I was more interested in Edmund’s dad’s magazines than I was in Edmund’s Fleischmann, but I didn’t let on.

  Edmund’s room was around eight square metres in size and the fibreboard sheet holding the railway took up about six of them. All in all it was well organized. He slept on a bed under the sheet, where he also had a lamp, a bookshelf and a few drawers with clothes. I didn’t see any Wild West magazines.

  ‘Should we rebuild it?’ said Edmund.

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  We rearranged the whole landscape in two hours, drove the train around, and orchestrated some nifty crashes until we grew bored.

  ‘Building it up is the most fun,’ said Edmund. ‘After that, it just sits there.’

  ‘Agreed,’ I said.

  ‘One of my cousins gave it to me,’ said Edmund. ‘He got married and his wife wouldn’t let him keep it.’

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘That’s how the cookie crumbles.’

  ‘You have to choose your old lady carefully,’ said Edmund. ‘Should we go to the kitchen and have a Pommac?’

  We had a Pommac in Edmund’s kitchen and I wanted to ask him about the girlie mags and about him having twelve toes instead of ten, but I never quite found the right moment.

  Instead, we cycled home to Idrottsgatan and had an old apple juice. I took Edmund into the woods, too, and showed him the culvert. He thought it was dead cool—at least, that’s what he said. Then he realized that he was half an hour late for dinner, and we both went home.

  Stava School’s staffroom was on the girls’ end of the third floor. It featured a sizable balcony, the only one on the building, and as summer approached the teachers often sat up there under colourful parasols, drinking coffee and smoking. We never actually saw them from the playground, but we heard them arguing and laughing and we could see their clouds of smoke billowing.

  During Ewa Kaludis’s brief sojourn at the school, the behaviour on the balcony had changed quite a bit. People had started to
stand while smoking instead of sitting. They leaned over the railing and stared vacantly across the playground. She was the first to do that, and of course the studs crowded around her, puffing away and grinning.

  Stensjöö, the deputy head teacher, Håkansson the Horse. Brylle.

  ‘Check out bloody Brylle,’ said Benny. ‘He’s giving it to her from behind.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ said Balthazar Lindblom. ‘They wouldn’t dare. Look but don’t touch, right? If they even brushed up against her, Super-Berra would come down here and beat them up.’

  ‘Too right,’ said Veikko. ‘He’d just knock their heads off with a ball. What a geezer.’

  The girls’ side was unusually crowded during those days in late May. Quite a few football players seemed to have developed nobler interests, and the bike shed was packed. Ewa Kaludis only taught our class and one other, so most kids had to grab any opportunity they got to gawk at her.

  Like during breaks when she was up on the balcony. Kim Novak. Ewa Kaludis. Super-Berra’s super-girl.

  I was one of the lucky ones. We’d had the hopeless Sintring in English and Geography before she stumbled over the plinth. Håkansson the Horse had jumped in and covered for her for a few weeks, but now Ewa Kaludis had been inflicted on us. With only three weeks until the summer holidays. It was pure torment.

  Sweet torment.

  She didn’t have to teach us. It wasn’t necessary. We worked like dogs anyway. Whenever she entered the classroom, we sat in rapt silence. She would smile and her eyes twinkled. It gave us all the chills. Then she would sit down on the teacher’s desk, cross one leg over the other and tell us to keep working on one page or another. Her voice reminded me of a purring cat.

  We worked diligently. Ewa Kaludis either sat on her desk, sparkling, or walked around swivelling her hips as she moved between the desks. If you raised your hand, she’d almost always stand behind you, a little off to the side. When she leaned forward, her breasts would rest against your shoulder. Or, rather, one of her breasts would. It seemed that the boys were always in need of help, and the air in the classroom was heavy with her perfume and with youthful, suppressed desire.