A summer with Kim Novak

by Håkan Nesser

  I didn’t really know what the girls thought of Ewa Kaludis, because I never talked to them, but I reckoned that they benefited from her presence as well. In their own female way. But I could be wrong. Maybe they were green with envy.

  Once when I raised my hand and she came over to help, I felt her breast brush against both my shoulder and my cheek and I almost fainted. I began to black out, and I thought that if I died right then, it would be a happy death.

  She noticed, I think, because she put her hand on my arm and asked me how I was feeling. Of course, that only made matters worse, but then I bit my tongue and things became clearer.

  ‘I’m not feeling very well,’ I said. ‘I think I’m getting my period.’

  I have no idea why I said that, but Ewa Kaludis just laughed. Benny, who was sitting next to me and was the only other person who heard my brilliant remark, said he’d never bloody heard anything like it.

  ‘Fucking hell, Erik. You’ll be sitting pretty after that. You can count on it.’

  I wasn’t sure that he was right, but mostly I was relieved that she didn’t get angry.

  ‘Let’s wait a moment,’ my father said. ‘They’re not quite done with their rounds.’

  I nodded, hugging the bag filled with grapes from Pressbyrån, the corner shop, wrinkling it even more.

  ‘Don’t crush the grapes,’ my father said.

  ‘I won’t,’ I said.

  We sat in silence on the green benches. Nurses whizzed by and smiled benignly at us.

  ‘The rounds always take time,’ said my father. ‘They have a lot on.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You have time to go comb your hair. There’s a loo over there in the corner.’

  I went and combed my hair with my new steel comb. I had broken off five of the teeth from the slim end so I could pick the locks on the loos at the railway station. It didn’t work, but that wasn’t the point. The important thing was that I had a steel comb and it had those teeth missing. If you were a girls-sider and didn’t have a steel comb, you were worth less than a burst bicycle tube. It was what it was.

  ‘We can go in soon,’ said my father when I came back out.

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘But there’s no rush.’

  ‘You’re right about that,’ said my father.

  She tried to hug me, but I caressed her arm instead, which was just as good. My father sat to her right, and I to her left.

  ‘We brought some grapes,’ said my father.

  ‘Lovely,’ said my mother.

  I put the Pressbyrån bag on top of the yellow hospital blanket.

  ‘How’s school?’ asked my mother.

  ‘Good,’ I said.

  ‘You’re taking the day off?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She peered into the bag and then closed it again.

  ‘And how are things at home?’

  ‘No problems there,’ I said. ‘Dad burns the gravy sometimes, but he’s getting better every day.’

  My mother smiled and, as if that were very taxing, she closed her eyes. I looked at her. Her face was greyish-blue and her hair looked like wan grass.

  ‘No problems,’ I repeated. ‘Is there a loo here?’

  ‘Of course,’ said my mother in a tired voice. ‘It’s out in the corridor.’

  I nodded and walked out. I tried to shit to no avail for twenty-five minutes, and then I went back in.

  My mother and father were sitting very close to each other, whispering. They fell silent when they noticed me come in. I sat on the chair to her left.

  ‘Are you going to Gennesaret soon?’ my mother asked.

  ‘Yes, we are,’ I said. ‘Henry and I have already been over and put things in order.’

  ‘I’m glad that Emmy and Henry are taking care of you.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Henry’s getting along well,’ my father said.

  There was a pause.

  ‘It was nice of you to visit,’ said my mother.

  ‘Oh, it’s no bother,’ I said.

  ‘I think we’ll get going now,’ said my father. ‘So we can catch the quarter-past bus.’

  ‘Do,’ said my mother. ‘I don’t need anything here.’

  ‘I’ll come by tomorrow after work,’ said my father.

  ‘No need,’ said my mother.

  I got up and patted her on the forearm and left.

  I took out the Colonel Darkin books and counted them. Yes, right. Six of them. Six black waxed-paper notebooks with forty-eight pages in each. Five of the notebooks were finished; the sixth was almost done and dusted.

  I stuffed the completed adventures back into the plastic bag and pushed them far inside my underwear drawer. It wasn’t an ideal hiding place; I had often thought of finding something better—maybe I could bury them in a bag out in the forest. Further along in the dry ditch: they would be as safe as houses there.

  But I hadn’t got around to it. Of course, the underwear drawer was much safer now that my mother was in hospital. My father wasn’t the one who rooted around in my things. He hardly ever came into my room at all.

  I’d created Colonel Darkin about two years ago. Linda-Britt, my fat buck-toothed cousin, had given me one of those notebooks as a birthday present because she thought I should keep a diary. She told me she kept one herself and found it very enriching.

  There weren’t even any lines in the book, which was strange since she wanted me to write in it. So I used a ruler and divided each page up like a comic book, four panels per side, all on the right hand side of the page, forty-eight parts; and with that I was on my way with Colonel Darkin and the Golden Gang. It was an adventure story set between London, Askersund and the Wild West, and it contained everything you could ask for from double-crossing and incorruptible honour to razor-sharp dialogue.

  ‘You have exactly one second to give me an answer, Mr. Frege, my time is valuable.’

  ‘That’s a mighty fine body you have there, Miss Carlson. Do you want to keep it?’

  ‘By the antlers of a moose, Nessie, you forgot to spike the tea with rum.’

  Colonel Darkin himself was a scarred sleuth who’d retreated to his log cabin in the mountains, and only poked his head out when the world needed him. His busty blonde niece was his sidekick, and she held sway over the opposite sex. I named her Vera Lane, and from her very first panel, I was in love.

  At the moment, she was locked away in an attic tower belonging to a mad scientist called Finckelberg. He had just roared off into town in his Ferrari to buy petrol so he could set her on fire. One hundred kilometres in the distance, Darkin was speeding toward the tower on his motorcycle, a BSA 300 LT with diamond spokes. I had to make sure he reached her before the flames began to lap at her lovely body; but I only had eight pages left in the notebook, and I was rubbish at drawing fire.

  I knew perfectly well that I wasn’t a particularly talented comic-book artist, but I felt a certain responsibility to the characters I’d created. If I didn’t write about them and keep drawing them, they would just sit there in the underwear drawer like forgotten marionettes.

  Sometimes it felt like a chore. But for the most part—especially when I was on a roll—it was one of the most meaningful things that I did during my entire childhood. Perhaps it felt that way because those were the only times that I managed to leave the troubles of the world behind.

  I’d never shown them to another living soul. And I’d never told anyone about Colonel Darkin.

  It was that kind of hobby.

  I opened an apple juice, took two large gulps. I thought for a while.

  ‘Goddammit!’ I wrote in Colonel Darkin’s speech bubble. ‘I should’ve known there’d be a catch.’

  4

  Henry, my brother, wrote about everything in Kurren.

  About city-council meetings, speedway contests, and suspected arson. About two-headed calves and siblings meeting for the first time after fifty-seven years. What he didn’t glean from the news desk or from the local area, h
e found in other newspapers, both Swedish and international. He spent at least an hour a day in the Örebro library skimming the news and sensational headlines from all over the world, looking for leads for his own stories.

  He cut out everything he’d written that had made it to print and glued the clippings into large scrapbooks. At this point, during the summer that our mother was going to die, he already had half a dozen he sometimes let me leaf through when I visited his bedsit on Grevgatan. I liked curling up in his sagging bed, which had iron bars on the short ends of the frame, and perusing the headlines. I rarely read the articles, but the headlines spoke to me; at that time I didn’t know that it was usually someone other than Henry who came up with these beauties: ‘Sly Stowaway Sow Travels 200 Km’; ‘Schnapps: Good for Your Blood Pressure’; ‘German Ministers on French Leave in Arboga’.

  After I read a great headline, I would close my eyes and try to picture the complicated reality hidden behind it.

  Sometimes I could, sometimes not.

  ‘One thing,’ said Henry, my brother, one day when there was less than a week left of spring semester.

  I looked up from a cutting about a fireman from Flen who had fractured both femurs in Frövi.

  ‘Yeah?’ I said.

  Henry studied his cigarette and then put it out in the wet sand inside the monkey’s skull that he kept next to his Facit Privat typewriter.

  ‘About the summer.’

  He’s backing out, I thought. What a tosser.

  ‘What about it?’ I said.

  ‘A couple of things, really,’ he said and looked more like Ricky Nelson than ever. Or Rick, rather. I closed the scrapbook.

  ‘I’m taking time off from Kurren.’

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘The whole summer.’

  ‘The whole summer?’

  ‘That’s right. I’m going to write a book.’

  It was as if he were talking about going to Karlesson’s to buy an ice lolly.

  ‘A book?’ I said.

  ‘Yep. It has to happen some time.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Some people have no choice in the matter. I’m one of those people.’

  I nodded. I was sure that he was. I didn’t really know what to say.

  ‘What’s it going to be about?’

  He didn’t answer right away. He put his feet up on his desk, took a gulp of Rio Club from the bottle on the floor and fished out a fresh Lucky Strike.

  ‘Life,’ he said. ‘The real thing. Existentially speaking.’

  ‘Aha,’ I said.

  He lit his cigarette and we sat in silence. Henry took a few long drags, his shoulder blades resting on the back of the chair. He stared up at the ceiling where the smoke was thinning out into nothing.

  ‘Good,’ I said finally. ‘It’s cool that you’re writing a book. I reckon it’ll be bloody great.’

  He didn’t seem to care what I had to say.

  ‘Was there anything else?’ I asked.

  ‘Like what?’ said Henry.

  ‘You said there were a couple of things. The book, that’s just one, right?’

  ‘Oh, you’re a devil with numbers, brother,’ said Henry. ‘A right bloody calculator.’

  ‘At least when it comes to counting to two,’ I said.

  Henry laughed. He had a short laugh that was sort of sharp. It sounded cool and I had tried to mimic it, too, but it didn’t really work. Laughs were hard to learn, I had found out.

  ‘Well, it’s about Emmy,’ said Henry and then he blew a ring of smoke that soared through the room like a sputnik.

  ‘Brill,’ I said when it hit the wall and dissipated. ‘What about Emmy?’

  ‘She’s not coming,’ said Henry.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘She’s not coming to Gennesaret.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I dumped her,’ said Henry.

  I wasn’t sure what that meant. Unless he meant that he had beaten her to death and thrown her into a canal with her feet encased in cement blocks, and that didn’t seem likely. Vera Lane had been close to getting this treatment in Darkin III, but I couldn’t imagine Henry doing something like that.

  ‘Oh no,’ I said, trying to sound neutral.

  ‘So it’s just going to be you and me and your mate. What’s his name?’

  ‘Edmund,’ I said.

  ‘Edmund?’ said Henry. ‘Bloody hell, what a name.’

  ‘He’s okay,’ I said.

  ‘Sure, sure,’ said Henry. ‘You can’t judge a person by their name. I banged a bird called Frida Arsel once. In Amsterdam. She wasn’t bad at all.’

  I nodded and sat a while, thinking about all the birds with strange names that I’d banged.

  And all the birds I’d dumped.

  ‘Let’s keep Dad and Mum in the dark,’ said Henry.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t want them to know that Emmy won’t be joining us. They’ll only worry about us not being able to feed ourselves and what not,’ said my brother Henry. ‘But we will. Three lads in their prime.’

  ‘You know it,’ I said. ‘No problem. I’m a wiz with omelettes.’

  And then Henry laughed his sharp laugh again. It felt good. It occurred to me that when my brother laughed, it was as comforting as being scratched on the back.

  One day during the last week of school we went on a class trip to Brumberga Wildlife Park. I stuck with Edmund, Benny and Arse-Enok the whole time, and even though an all-girls’ team beat us at the quiz by one single rotten point and we lost out on the litre of ice cream, we had a pretty rewarding afternoon. Arse-Enok had just had his birthday and had raked in a whole fifty-kronor note from his dim-witted uncle, so we were rolling in it. Arse-Enok wasn’t one to hold back. He wolfed down fifty-four Dixi caramels and had to sit in one of the sick-seats on the ride home.

  I ate thirty-six Reval sweets myself and felt brilliant.

  The following night I had a dream. I was at the wildlife park again and the whole class was standing in front of a large green aquarium with dolphins, rays and seals. Sharks, too, I think. None of us moved a muscle or said a word, because Ewa Kaludis was speaking. Behind her, the large torpedo-like bodies continued their endless journey round and round in the green water.

  Then Benny swore. I saw at once what he was pointing at with his dirty index finger.

  My mother was floating by in the aquarium.

  Among the rays and seals. My mother.

  It made me feel awful. She was wearing her worn blue house dress, the one with the bleached-out roses, and she looked swollen and bug-eyed. I rushed toward the glass, gesturing at her to move to the other side, but she just hung there in the water and stared at us with her sad eyes. It seemed impossible to get her to move, so I turned around, pressed myself against the glass and spread out my arms, trying to hide her. Ewa Kaludis fell silent and gave me a curious look. She seemed disappointed, and I wanted to cry and wet myself and be swallowed up by the earth.

  When I woke up it was quarter to five in the morning and I was soaked through with a cold sweat. I thought it must have something to do with the Reval caramels. I got out of bed and sat on the toilet but it was pointless.

  As I sat there I thought about the dream. It was weird. Brumberga Wildlife Park didn’t have an aquarium, and Ewa Kaludis hadn’t even been on the trip with us.

  I didn’t get to sleep again that night.

  Just before I walked into the flat, Edmund said: ‘Do you know what the biggest difference in the world is between?’

  ‘The universe and Åsa Lenner’s brain?’ I said.

  ‘Nope,’ said Edmund. ‘It’s between my dad and my mum. Just so you know.’

  Over the course of the dinner they had invited me to, I saw that he wasn’t wrong. It was a sort of pre-thank you for letting Edmund stay at Gennesaret all summer, I think.

  Albin Wester, Edmund’s father, was short and stocky, with limp arms and a rolling gait. He looked like a silverback. A bit worn-out and
resigned, too; even though I was an anti-footballer, I was reminded of a football coach trying to come up with a strategy during half-time when the team was down 6–0. Upbeat, yet resigned. He talked throughout the meal, especially when his mouth was full.

  Mrs. Wester looked as severe as a longcase Mora clock draped in a mourning shroud. She didn’t say a word during dinner, but she tried to muster a smile every so often. And when she did, she seemed on the verge of cracking, and then she’d hiccup and squeeze her eyes shut.

  ‘Have more, boys,’ said Albin Wester. ‘You never know when you’ll get your next meal. Signe’s sausage bake is famous across northern Europe.’

  Both Edmund and I ate heartily, because it was extremely tasty. I thought of the domestic situation facing us that summer and told Edmund to ask his mum to give us the recipe.

  I knew that kind of gesture was considered the height of good manners, and as if on cue the Mora clock cracked open and hiccupped.

  ‘Sausage Bake à la Signe,’ said Albin Wester out of the corner of his mouth. ‘Food fit for the gods.’

  He smiled, too, and a few pieces of sausage fell in his lap.

  ‘She’s an alcoholic,’ Edmund explained afterward. ‘It takes every muscle in her body to get through a dinner like this.’

  I thought that sounded strange and said so. Edmund shrugged.

  ‘Eh,’ he said. ‘It’s not strange at all. She has three sisters. They’re all the same. They’re like Grandpa—that man drank like a fish—but the female body can’t seem to take it.’

  ‘Yeah?’ I said.

  ‘You shouldn’t give womenfolk schnapps. Or put gunpowder in their tobacco. It’s too much for them.’

  ‘You sound like Salasso,’ I said. ‘Do you read lots of Wild West magazines?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ said Edmund. ‘But lately I’ve been reading more books.’

  ‘I like to mix it up,’ I said diplomatically. ‘How long has she been like that, by the way? Can’t you make her better?’