by Håkan Nesser
The day after E-Day (E as in Ewa Kaludis) we rowed through the creek to get provisions from Laxman’s, and I asked Edmund where he thought the soul lived in the body. And about right and wrong.
It didn’t seem as if Edmund had ever thought about it, because he missed a stroke and we glided right into the reeds. It was easily done, really: the creek seemed to be getting narrower and narrower with each passing day; the cottage owners usually got together and cleared it out once every summer, but it hadn’t happened yet this year.
‘Your mum has a handle on right and wrong,’ said Edmund when we had got ourselves back on course. ‘Of course you know when you’re doing something bad. When you’re mean to someone or whatever …’
‘Or you’ve ripped off a gum dispenser?’ I said.
Edmund mulled that over for a moment.
‘Chewing gum is one of the ills of youth, I’m sure of it. So, ripping off a gum dispenser can never be completely wrong,’ he said.
‘But it must be a bit wrong?’ I suggested. ‘As is stealing planks.’
‘Hardly,’ said Edmund. ‘It’s peanuts compared with … well, if you compare it.’
He looked solemn, and I understood what he was comparing it to. Neither of us said anything for a while, but then he feathered the blades of the oars, placed them on the gunwales of the boat and started to grab at his body.
‘But where the soul is, devil knows. I think it moves around. When I eat, it’s in my stomach. When I read, it’s in my head. When I think about Britt Laxman—’
‘Enough,’ I interrupted. ‘I get it. You have a nomadic soul; that’s probably because you’ve spent so much of your life moving around.’
‘Maybe,’ said Edmund, taking hold of the oars again. ‘Have you told your brother about the fight in Lackaparken, how it escalated?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘Because my gypsy-soul tells me that it would be right to let him know.’
I sat in silence for a few seconds.
‘Henry always comes out on top,’ I said. ‘He’s been to sea twice.’
‘Well, then,’ said Edmund. ‘I was just thinking. Damn, it’s hot.’
‘Long, hot summer,’ I said.
‘That’s a cracking song,’ said Edmund. ‘It can’t hurt for us to be on the alert, both you and me. About Henry and Ewa and what they’re up to. What do you think?’
‘White man speak with forked tongue,’ I said.
It was one of the best lines I knew. It could be used in any situation, except when you were talking to a Red Indian, and Edmund didn’t have anything to add.
‘No further questions,’ is all he said and continued rowing along the channel of reeds.
A few nights later I woke when Edmund sat up in his bed, panting.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ I asked.
‘He must have picked her up in the car,’ said Edmund. ‘In Killer. I didn’t hear a moped.’
‘What are you on about?’
‘Listen,’ said Edmund and now I heard it, too.
Two distinct sounds.
One was Henry’s bed creaking and groaning. Rhythmically and calmly. The other was Ewa Kaludis whining. Or moaning. Or gurgling. I didn’t know which because I’d never heard a woman make noises like that before.
‘My, my, my,’ whispered Edmund. ‘They’re going at it so hard the whole house is shaking. I think I’m going to blow.’
His childish nonsense upset me.
‘Shut up, Edmund,’ I said. ‘You shouldn’t talk about it like that.’
Edmund fell silent. Leaving only the sound of Henry’s bed, rhythmically, insistently reverberating through the night. Throughout the house.
‘Sorry,’ said Edmund after a while. ‘You’re right, of course. But I’m going to sneak down and check it out anyway.’
‘Check it out?’ I said.
‘Sure,’ said Edmund. ‘We can spy on them from the stairs. They don’t have a blind down there. It’ll be educational. Come on, don’t hang about.’
For the first time in my fourteen-year-old life I had an erection that was so hard it hurt.
Edmund had probably thought we could each sit on a step and eyeball them, but that didn’t work. The ramshackle stairs ran up to our room along the gable wall, but were a bit above the window in Henry’s room. If we were going to see anything, we’d have to stand in the flower bed near the wall with peonies, mignonettes and a hundred different types of weeds. As stealthily as Indians, we sneaked there, and twice as stealthily as Indians we popped our heads up above the window ledge.
And then we saw everything.
It was like a film, but there weren’t any films like that at that time, way back at the start of the sixties. But I had the vague notion that they’d exist in twenty years’ time. Or thirty. Or a hundred; never mind, at some point there’d be films like this, if only for the simple reason that they were necessary.
I had that vague notion. The rest wasn’t so vague.
Ewa Kaludis was sitting astride my brother. She was naked and her breasts were dancing as she moved up and down on top of him. They were partly turned in our direction—well, she was, and that was the main thing. They’d lit a few candles in empty bottles; the flames flickered every now and then and cast patterns of shadows on her body.
Across her bare face and bare shoulders and bare breasts. Her slender, curvy, shining belly heaving and rolling and the glimpses of her dark sex, which was sometimes hidden by one of her thighs and Henry’s hands.
I think we held our breath for five minutes, both Edmund and I.
Inside the dimly lit room Ewa Kaludis was making love to my brother; calmly and intently, it seemed; we could only see that he was inside her for the fractions of a second when we caught sight of her whole sex, but that was enough. It was so beautiful. So bloody fucking beautiful; I imagined that in my pathetic life I’d never see anything else like it. Never again. Even though my slim, erect fourteen-year-old dick ached like a broken bone, I started to cry. As calmly and silently as when we cycled through the summer night from Lackaparken, I just let the tears flow. Standing there in the weeds and staring and crying. Crying and staring. After a while I noticed that Edmund was wanking off. He had started to breathe with his mouth open, and his right hand shot up and down like a piston in his pyjama bottoms.
I took a deep breath and started to do the same.
Afterward, we crept away. Without a word, we walked over the dewy grass down to the lake. Sauntered out on the floating dock and dived in as quietly as we could, so they wouldn’t hear back at the house. Pyjama bottoms and all.
The water still as a mirror, mild and soft; I backstroked far, far out and floated for a long while. Edmund had also swum out, but he kept his distance. It was clear that we both needed space: two lonely fourteen-year-old boys in the middle of a summer night in a lake warmed by the July heat.
Edmund and I.
We hadn’t exactly lost our virginities, but it was something like that. Something large and mysterious. I’d opened a door and witnessed something that I had been longing to see. Something like another country.
And it had been beautiful.
So fucking beautiful. Floating in a lake afterward was practically a requirement.
Yes, that’s what I remember thinking.
12
We were on our feet first thing the next day even though we’d been awake for most of the night. Both Henry and Ewa were gone when we came down, so we assumed that he’d given her a lift in the early hours of the morning. It was understandable that she couldn’t stay away for too long when she visited my brother.
Or so we assumed. More precisely, that was what we each concluded in our fourteen-year-old heads. We didn’t say much that morning. Edmund stirred his cereal around the soured milk for five minutes before he took a bite. As usual. He spread whey butter on his toast with typical ceremonious fussiness. As if it were a very important task, as if it were some sort of ground-breakin
g scientific experiment on which depended the future of mankind. As if spreading any over the edges or leaving a square centimetre unbuttered would cause the universe to explode.
I still remember thinking that it might mean something: the difference in how we ate breakfast. Me, I usually polished off my toast and chocolate milk in under four minutes. For Edmund, breakfast was a kind of ritual, handled like the priest officiating at a communion service. Not that I had much experience of communion, but I had seen it once—when Henry was confirmed many years ago—and I’d never taken part in anything so slow or dull.
So maybe this difference in our breakfast rhythms meant something. Maybe it was one of those things that revealed our differences in character, and if one of us had been female instead of male, it would have been impossible for us to live together as man and wife. Completely out of the question.
I had to smile at that last thought. I was only speculating while I waited for Edmund to finish up that morning. Casual, daft speculation. Of course I’d never marry Edmund, however much of a woman I became; these thoughts took shape because I was tired of keeping my mind on track. That’s what it was like inside my head those days. When I was alert and awake, all was well, but when I hadn’t had enough sleep, anything could pop up. Cancer-Treblinka-Love …
In any case, the weather was beautiful on this day too. We lay on the dock reading until mid-morning, and then we went out on the boat. We rowed to Fläskhällen first and played a few rounds on the new pinball machine. We didn’t win a free go; it was a stingy game on the whole and slightly tilted. When we’d had enough we ate ice cream and rowed out to Seagull Shit Island. We had a rucksack filled with apple juice, a few books and Colonel Darkin. While Edmund ploughed through Journey to the Centre of the Earth for the fifth or sixth time, I tried my hand at some rather intricate panels. The image of Ewa Kaludis’s swinging breasts from last night danced before my eyes, but however hard I tried, I couldn’t capture it as it was in real life. I couldn’t even get close. So I decided that there would be no scenes of lovemaking in Colonel Darkin. Now or ever. It wasn’t my style, and it wasn’t the Colonel’s either.
When we’d taken our thirteenth dip and had opened the last apple juice Edmund put on his glasses and said: ‘I have a feeling.’
It sounded serious and his expression was uncommonly earnest.
‘You do?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ said Edmund.
‘What kind of feeling?’
Edmund hesitated.
‘That it’s all going to hell soon.’
I took a gulp of juice.
‘What’s going to hell?’ I asked.
Edmund sighed and said that he didn’t know. I waited and then asked if maybe he meant the thing between my brother and Ewa Kaludis. And Berra Albertsson.
Edmund nodded.
‘I think so,’ he said. ‘Something is bound to happen. It can’t go on like this. It’s like … it’s like waiting for a storm. Don’t you feel it?’
I didn’t answer. What my father had said that May evening at home in the kitchen on Idrottsgatan suddenly came into my mind.
A difficult summer. It’s going to be a difficult summer.
Then I thought of Ewa Kaludis again. And about Mulle, unconscious. About Edmund’s real father. About my mother’s grey hands on top of the hospital blanket. As sombre as the colour of oatmeal streaked with blueberries.
‘We’ll see,’ I said in the end. ‘Only time will tell.’
A couple of days passed. The heat held. We swam, lay on the dock and read, rowed to Laxman’s and to Fläskhällen. Everything seemed back to normal again. Henry sat in the shade and wrote and smoked his Luckys and we took care of the meals in exchange for fair compensation. Five or ten kronor. In the evenings Henry left in Killer and often didn’t come home until late at night. He never said a word about Ewa Kaludis and we didn’t ask either. We held our tongues and kept up a gentlemanly façade. Like Arsène Lupin. Or the Scarlet Pimpernel.
Or Colonel Darkin.
‘If nothing else, be a gentleman,’ went one of Edmund’s sayings from Ångermanland, and I agreed with him, full stop.
The next time she appeared at Gennesaret, it was 4 July. I remember the date well because Edmund and I had been talking about George Washington and the Declaration of Independence. And about President Kennedy and Jackie. It was just past ten in the evening; we’d just drunk chocolate milk and eaten a buttered rusk, as we did before bedtime; it was a bright evening and Henry was smoking constantly to keep the midges away.
I think the three of us heard the moped at the same time. Edmund and I looked at each other across the kitchen table and the clatter of the typewriter stopped. A half-minute passed until she reached the parking spot. She revved the engine and then switched it off.
‘Hmm,’ said Edmund. ‘I think I need to take a slash.’
‘Well, when you put it that way,’ I said.
At first I didn’t recognize her. For one flashing second, I couldn’t imagine that the woman who emerged from the lilacs and ran those few steps over the grass and threw her arms around my brother was in fact Ewa Kaludis.
Ewa Kaludis/Kim Novak on the red Puch. Ewa Kaludis with the glittering eyes and the ripe, bouncing breasts. With the black slacks and the red hairband in her hair and the open Swanson shirt that fluttered in the wind.
But it was her. And she was wearing the Swanson shirt and the slacks. Or a similar pair. But no red hairband. No glittering eyes and no wide smile. Just one eye, to be precise. The other, the right, looked as though it had been replaced by two plums. Or rather as though someone had smashed two plums where her eye was supposed to be. Her lips had changed, too. The upper lip had sort of been flattened and seemed to reach all the way up to her nose. The lower lip was large and swollen and had a wide dark line in the centre. One of her cheeks bore a large bluish stain. She looked awful and it took me a few more seconds to realize what must have happened. Someone must’ve done this to her. Someone had used their fists on Ewa Kaludis’s face. Someone had … that someone …
I think I blacked out as soon as I pieced it together. I closed my eyes and heard Edmund hiss a curse by my side. When I looked up again Ewa Kaludis was wrapped in my brother’s embrace; he held her with both arms, stroking her back, and you could see that she was crying. Henry’s head was bowed down, and he was mumbling something into her hair. Her shoulders juddered as she sobbed.
Other than Edmund letting out another quivering curse, nothing happened for a while. Henry helped Ewa sit down at the table where he’d been writing, and then he turned to us.
‘Listen,’ he said and his eyes darted between us a few times. ‘I don’t care what you do, but make sure you bloody well leave us alone. Go to bed, or go row on the lake, anything, but Ewa and I have to be by ourselves now. Understood?’
I nodded. Edmund nodded.
‘Good,’ said Henry. ‘Now, leave.’
I cast a glance at Edmund. Then we went for a piss. Then we went to bed.
She was still there the next morning.
Edmund and I had discussed the situation for the better part of the night and we both slept in. When I staggered down the stairs to get to the loo before it was too late, Ewa was sitting on one of the chairs under the ash tree wearing Henry’s worn terry-towelling robe. She seemed to be freezing cold and when she hesitantly raised her hand in greeting, a lump formed in my throat that took several swallows to get rid of.
‘Hi,’ I said. ‘I’m just going to do my morning ablutions. I’ll be back in a flash.’
She did something with her face. Maybe she was trying to smile.
I peed, took a swim and returned. Edmund was still snoozing. Henry was nowhere to be seen. I took the other chair and sat down with Ewa. Across from her and to the side, quite close.
‘Does it hurt?’ I asked.
She shook her head carefully.
‘Not so bad.’
I swallowed and tried not to look at her.
‘It’ll
pass,’ I stated. ‘In a few days you’ll be the most beautiful person in the world again.’
She tried to smile again. It wasn’t any more successful than her previous attempt. Her lips were evidently causing her pain because she flinched and put her hand in front of her mouth.
‘I look terrible,’ she said. ‘Please don’t look at me.’
I turned my head away and studied the tree trunk instead. It was grey and rough and not particularly interesting.
‘Where’s Henry?’ I asked.
‘He went to town to buy some plasters. He’ll be back soon.’
‘Oh.’
We sat in silence.
‘It’s terrible,’ I said. ‘I mean, that someone would do this to you.’
She didn’t answer. Just straightened up in the chair, and cleared her throat several times. I guessed that she had blood in her throat, like the victims in some of the books I’d read. It sounded like it.
‘Can I get you anything?’ I asked. ‘Something to drink?’
She blinked a few times with her good eye.
‘No, thank you,’ she said. ‘You’re sweet, Erik.’
‘Oh, it’s no bother,’ I said.
She cleared her throat again and wiped her forehead with the sleeve of the robe.
‘You have to learn to weather the blows,’ she said. ‘You have to.’
‘Yeah?’ I said.
‘Don’t worry about me. I’ve had worse.’
‘Worse?’ I said.
‘When I was your age,’ she continued. ‘And younger. I come from another country, as you may know. Just me and my sister. My parents stayed behind. We travelled across the sea in a boat, not much bigger than your rowing boat … I don’t know why I’m telling you this.’
‘Neither do I,’ I admitted.
‘Maybe it’s because Henry told me about your mother,’ she said after a pause. ‘I know you’re not having an easy time of it, Erik. I didn’t know before, but I know now.’
