H01 - The Gingerbread House

by Carin Gerhardsen

  There everything changed. His mother moved again soon after he started high school, but he decided not to go with her, so he lived alone in a studio apartment and had to take care of himself. On weekends he worked at a gas station and evenings he devoted to studies, soccer, and household chores. He matured during this time and graduated from high school with excellent grades. In fact, he did well enough in high school that he was admitted to the economics program at the university.

  And here he was now. En route from his well-paid job at the firm he had built up himself along with his partner, and en route to his dear wife and beloved children at home in a cozy townhouse. He indulged himself in thinking that way, and the feeling of contentment was further reinforced when he looked at all the drab and dreary fellow passengers seated around him, with noses deep in some vapid free newspaper or vacantly staring out the snow-blurred window. In the window he saw the reflection of some poor soul who was actually staring at him. Was his happiness that obvious? Was that a problem? Whatever, he could live with that.

  * * *

  Thomas sat down a little in front of the man—none other than “King Hans”—in the coach, but with his back to the direction of travel so he could watch him. Not directly—he sat strategically placed, with people between him and the object of his interest—but he saw his reflection very well in the window at an angle in front of him.

  He looked relaxed and self-confident, tall as he was. Submerged in his own thoughts, with the newspaper folded on his lap, he looked distractedly out the window. It almost appeared as if a little smile crossed his face from time to time. Thomas stared in fascination and wondered in the stillness of his mind what it was that made him happy. Was there someone waiting for him? Someone who was happy when he came home? Maybe he had curtains in the window and pillows on the couch?

  The man swept his gaze across the people in the coach and for a moment their eyes met in the window reflection. Was it contempt he saw in Hans’s blue eyes? If so, it was not surprising, considering Thomas’s hunched posture, unkempt hair, and frightened eyes. He was a wretch, who looked furtively at the people he met, if he dared look at them at all.

  The light in the coach suddenly blinked and it was completely dark for a few seconds. When the light came back on the man had returned to investigating the water drops flowing together on the window. Thomas could continue studying the ghost from his childhood undisturbed.

  He thought about all the caps that had disappeared on the way home from preschool, tossed onto roofs and passing truck beds. He thought about the drawings he would take home to show at the end of the semester, but which, to the amusement of all the children, disappeared one by one down a storm drain. He thought about torn pants, muddy jackets, and scraped knees, and he thought about Carina Ahonen, who always got to sit on the teacher’s lap and sing lead at song assembly when the other children would sing along. She was the one who decided that they would draw horses and then all the children drew horses, horses, horses—it was the only thing you were allowed to draw. His were so bad they just had to be displayed, to everyone's great amusement.

  He thought about the big green car out on the playground, which held at least six children. Two had to push, and he and Katarina pushed, every single day, in the pious hope that they too would get to sit in that car some time. The teacher was very particular that everyone should get a turn, but for some reason she always forgot Thomas and Katarina. A few times Thomas managed to be first in the car, but then they threw him out and he had to push again and this was clearly the way it should be, for the teacher only smiled her usual, sweet preschool teacher’s smile.

  One time, he remembered, Hans and Ann-Kristin took his cap and threw it to each other, back and forth over his head. Thomas could not get hold of it, but a momentary impulse suddenly gave him the courage to grab Hans’s cap and run away with it. Of course they caught up with him, beat him black and blue, and tore the cap out of his hands. When he got home later, without his cap (as usual), Hans’s mother had already phoned Thomas’s father and vented her feelings over the fact that Thomas had torn her little Hans’s cap, whereupon Thomas was sent off to Hans and his mother with ten kronor to beg for forgiveness. For some reason his own missing cap never came up during the conversation.

  He was torn out of his musings when the train stopped and the man he was watching stood up to get off. Thomas, too, got up to follow this shadow from the past.

  * * *

  The townhouse was only a few minutes walk from the Enskede Gård subway station. He jogged across the street, turned left at the school, and turned in among the houses in Trädskolan. Soon he reached the park with the unusual bushes and trees, the only memory of the old nursery since it was replaced by new homes in the late 1980s. He turned onto a walking path leading past some shrubbery and up to the play area that was part of the townhouse complex. In the sandbox sat two muddy children in rain pants, and a third one—a one-and-a-half-year-old—stood perched on the top step of a slide.

  “Please Moa, hold on so you don’t fall down and hurt yourself,” he called before he made it over to the slide.

  The little girl’s face cracked a big smile and she immediately started to climb down. The two bigger children rushed over to their father and he tried as best he could to hug them and keep them at a distance at the same time.

  “Hi there!” he said. “Be careful, I have my work clothes on. Just hug with your face. Come, let’s go find Mom!”

  Just then Moa threw herself headlong toward him from the ladder and he was forced to sacrifice his clean jacket, but in return got a big, wet kiss on the chin. In a desperate attempt to spare his jacket, he carried her with arms outstretched in front of him, and with the two bigger children at his heels, walked up to their own front door where he set her down.

  “Hello!” he called as he opened the front door. “Here I come with three dirty pigs, you have to help me! Take off your boots before you go in,” he said to the bigger children as he squatted down and started to undress the smallest.

  Pia appeared smiling in the doorway, dressed in jeans and a white blouse tied in the middle, and with her thick, dark hair pulled into a ponytail.

  “Hi, honey,” she said, bending down and kissing him on the neck. “How was your day?”

  “Good, but I have to take off in a little while and look at a house. It’s here in the neighborhood, so I'll only be gone an hour or so. Should we feed the kids now, so we can eat when they’ve gone to bed?”

  “Sure. What time are you leaving?”

  “In about half an hour. I’ll help you with the kids first.”

  He finally managed to wriggle the rain pants off the girl and she rushed in through the door making happy sounds. The other children had taken off their own clothes, and with clothes now spread all over the vestibule, they ran off into the house. He got up and made a resigned attempt to brush the dirt off his jacket. This produced no visible results. Pia gathered up the boots and outdoor clothes and went in. Hans pulled the door shut after him with a bang that caused the doorknocker to strike.

  None of them noticed the man attentively observing them through the branches of the bare lilac arbor on the other side of the play area.

  * * *

  Thomas did not know how long he stood there in the darkness, spying, but in his imagination he was inside, in the warm, cozy kitchen. It smelled of browned butter and frying meat, and at first they all ran back and forth between various rooms doing various things, but after a while, things calmed down and one by one they sat down at the dinner table.

  Thomas could not remember when he had last had a meal with other people. At work he ate in the big cafeteria, with other people around to be sure, but always alone. He had no living parents, no siblings, no other relatives that he ever saw, and no friends. It must be nice to have someone to come home to! How marvelous it would be simply to have a friend, just one person to talk with about matters great or small, someone to eat with occasionally. And think how much mor
e fun it would be to cook if you were doing it for someone other than yourself.

  Dinner was finished and the kitchen was suddenly just as empty as it had been full of life and motion. The outside door opened and an appreciated and beloved father stepped out of his house and closed the door behind him for the very last time.

  * * *

  With his hands shoved into his jacket pockets and collar turned up as protection against the autumn winds, he walked quickly through the neighborhood. Withered leaves whirled in the light under the streetlamps, and with every step he took, a squishing sound was heard as his shoe lost contact with the sidewalk. One shoe had a hole in it, and his sock was already damp. He should have changed into winter shoes, but he didn’t have time to turn back now. It shouldn't take more than fifteen minutes to get to the house he was to inspect, and perhaps he would treat himself to a taxi home in this weather.

  He angled across a somewhat bigger road and turned onto the street where the house should be. The single-family houses in this neighborhood were older—most were built in the 1920s and ‘30s and had mature gardens with fruit trees and arbors. This must be it: an old, pink wooden house with beautiful bay windows. The lot, much larger than the other lots in the area, sloped from the house down toward the street and was surrounded by a well-tended, but overly tall, hedge, which did not go well with the small house and the yard in general. In the hedge there was an even more out-of-place black iron gate, beyond which a gravel walkway led up to the house itself. He glanced at the mailbox and confirmed that this was the correct address, Åkerbärsvägen 31, after which he pushed open the stubborn gate enough to slip in through the opening. The gate closed heavily behind him with a metallic clang.

  He hurried up the walkway without noticing the full-bodied aroma of soft windfall fruit. Nor did he notice the shadow that, without making a sound, lithely clambered over the large gate behind him and jumped down onto the wet lawn at the side of the gravel walkway. He stepped up onto the porch and rang the doorbell. An echoing ding-dong sounded from inside the house, but that was all he heard. He waited a minute or two before he rang again. After a glance at his watch, which confirmed that he was only a few minutes late, he went around back. Apart from the outside lights, it appeared that there were lights on in only one room of the old house. It was the kitchen whose windows faced toward the back and the part of the hedge that marked the boundary of the lot behind it. He couldn’t reach all the way to the kitchen window, but he bent over and picked up a small stick, which he threw at the windowpane, still without any reaction from anyone inside the house. He decided to go back to the front and check whether the outside door was unlocked. To his surprise, he found that it was. Perhaps the person who lived here was old and hard of hearing?

  “Hello, anybody home?” he called in a loud voice, but got no answer. “Hello!” he tried again, this time even louder.

  Then he made his decision: he went into the house, carefully drying his shoes on the doormat in the hall, then closed the door behind him.

  TUESDAY EVENING

  AFTER SEVERAL WEEKS IN THE HOSPITAL, she could finally go home again. Finally, because she longed to sleep in her own bed, sit alone in front of her own TV, and decide for herself what program to watch, with her own home-brewed coffee steaming from a cup on the end table. She also missed the smell of home, the aroma of her own soap and her own detergent, and the pleasant odor of old preserves that adhered to the walls.

  On the other hand it was actually not “finally” at all, because she had difficulty walking after breaking her hip, and it would be hard to manage properly by herself. Her interest in food had subsided over the years; it almost had no taste any more. But she did have to eat something, and being in the hospital was rather practical, where everything was served to you and you didn’t have to worry about shopping, cooking, or doing dishes.

  The man from the transport service set down her small suitcase outside the door and waited patiently until she got her key-ring out of her handbag. She carefully put the key into the lock, which yielded with a click, whereupon the door opened by itself.

  “Should I help you in?” he asked kindly.

  “No, that’s not necessary. Now I’ll be all right. Thanks very much,” she said, raising her hand in a farewell gesture.

  “Be careful now and get well soon!” the driver waved, walking backwards down the steps to see that she really did manage to get into the house by herself.

  After turning on the ceiling light, Ingrid wiped her shoes on the doormat, set her crutch in the corner inside the door, and took a step over to the coat rack where she wriggled out of her coat as she balanced on her good leg. She reached for a red, velvet-clad hanger with gold-colored fringe and hung up her coat. Then she took a few more steps to a small stool where she sank down. She pulled off her leather boots and set them symmetrically under the coat rack, reached for her small suitcase, and pulled up the zipper that ran around the entire edge. She took a pair of comfortable indoor shoes from the suitcase and let her feet glide down into them. By pushing against the wall she managed to get up again.

  Supported by the crutch, she limped through the hall, took a quick, displeased glance at herself in the hallway mirror, and continued toward the kitchen. She stopped before the threshold and leaned over to get at the light switch on the wall inside the kitchen door.

  In the midst of this motion it suddenly struck her that something smelled strange. The old, usual smells were there, but something unknown was forcing its way into her nostrils through all that was familiar. It smelled of leather. Leather and...excrement? Then she turned on the light.

  First she lost her breath and stood as if petrified, not understanding what she was seeing. After a few seconds her brain managed to take in the image of the dead man on the floor and she started to hyperventilate instead. She staggered over to one of the chairs at the dinner table, pulled it out, and sat down abruptly. She could not tear her gaze from the bloody mass that had been a face, and she sat there a long while without thinking anything other than: breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out… It took several minutes before she was able to calm down. When she finally did, she noticed that everything else was in order, nothing was touched on the kitchen counter and the kitchen chairs were symmetrically placed around the circular table. Not a trace of a scuffle or drama, only a battered person on the floor. A dead man. Good Lord, who could it be? And why in the world was he there, on her kitchen floor?

  With much effort, she got up again and made her way out to the wall-mounted telephone in the hallway. She took the receiver and pondered a moment before she dialed the number for the taxi. After ordering a taxi, which according to the dispatcher would arrive in ten to twelve minutes, she un-did everything: off with her shoes, back into the suitcase, back with the zipper, on with the boots, up and on with her coat, lights off and out, and lock. After that, she made her way down the path, with her handbag over her shoulder, suitcase in one hand and crutch in the other, and waited on the sidewalk until the taxi arrived.

  “Ingrid!” exclaimed Nurse Margit with surprise. “I thought you were looking forward to going home!”

  Margit Olofsson was a middle-aged woman, tall with ample curves and thick dark-red hair. She was the type of person who radiated motherliness and human concern.

  “Nurse Margit, there’s something terrible...”

  “But Ingrid, dear, sit down, you look completely worn out! Has something happened? Are you feeling unwell?”

  Margit Olofsson took the older woman under the arm and led her to one of the armchairs in the hospital reception area. Under the white coat a pair of washed-out blue jeans could be seen.

  “I didn’t know what to do,” said Ingrid imploringly. “I guess I’m confused, but I couldn’t think of anyone other than you... It... Don’t laugh at me now, but...there’s a dead man lying in my kitchen.”

  “Good God! Who is it?”

  “I don’t know. I've never seen him before. It’s not burglars
or anything, nothing was touched or taken. He’s just lying there. And he’s dead.”

  “That doesn't make sense. Are you sure he’s dead?”

  “Absolutely. You can tell. It’s...completely still.”

  “You must have been very frightened.”

  “That’s true, that’s why I came back here.”

  “Of course, my dear,” Nurse Margit consoled her, placing her arm around her shoulders. “You did call the police, didn’t you?”

  “I... No,” admitted Ingrid. “It seemed so unreal. I couldn’t...”

  Nurse Margit’s initial thought was to call the police and social services, but she was suddenly struck by the suspicion that Ingrid Olsson was possibly not completely lucid. She studied her thoughtfully for a few moments and then took a look at her watch.

  “Let’s do it this way. I get off in two and a half hours. Then we’ll go to your house together and decide what to do. Okay?”

  “That will be fine.”

  “Do you mind waiting so long?”

  “Oh no, that’s not a problem.”

  “I’ll arrange something for you to eat in the meantime. And a magazine.”

  Then she hurried off, her clogs clip-clopping against the stone floor. She was back again just as quickly, with coffee, Danish pastry, some cookies, and a stack of Ladies Home Journal.