by Håkan Nesser
A short while later we came round the point at Mousterlin; the beach to the west lay in complete darkness, and we all helped to lug the bags, carriers and empty bottles ashore. Last of all, Gunnar and Henrik heaved the dead Troaë over the side, and I slowly towed the floating body the remaining thirty metres to land. Gunnar and Henrik waved goodbye and turned east to return the boat to the marina in Beg-Meil. I have no idea whether they were also intending to rouse the owner in the middle of the night and tell him about the engine problems. Perhaps they had arranged to hand over the key the next day.
Up on the beach, the rest of us gathered for a moment around the body. The darkness was intense, and felt almost like a piece of clothing against the skin; the wind had died down entirely and there was no moon to be seen. The only light came from a couple of pinpricks between the trees a bit further east; I calculated it must be the hotel just inland from the sea at Pointe de Mousterlin.
‘What are you planning to do?’ asked Katarina Malmgren.
I answered that my idea was to hide her in the dunes temporarily while I made my way back to Erik’s house for a spade.
‘You could borrow one from us, I suppose,’ offered Katarina. ‘But I don’t know if there is one and it might be foolish to get us involved.’
‘Very foolish,’ I said.
Erik said nothing. Anna said nothing.
‘Right then,’ I said, hoisting the girl into my arms. She wasn’t heavy – somewhere between forty and forty-five kilos at a guess – and although my injured foot was still rather troublesome, I was able to carry her without too much difficulty.
‘I’ll go on ahead,’ said Erik after another short silence.
Katarina asked Anna if she wanted to come to their house and wait for Gunnar there. Anna hesitated for a moment, but then said yes.
Yet still the three of them lingered there indecisively. I shifted my hold on the girl so she was hanging over my right shoulder. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I’ll take care of this now.’
At that they nodded and left me alone with Troaë.
An extraordinary walk and some extraordinary hours lay ahead of me. I started to feel as though I was performing some kind of ancient ritual. There were no witnesses, only the night, the earth, the heavens and eternity; despite what I had told the others, I carried the girl almost all the way to our house; the risk of simply not being able to find her again if I hid her somewhere in the dunes seemed too great, and I did not want to expose us to that sort of unforced error. When I say us, I don’t mean me and the other Swedes, but me and the girl; I had not gone many steps with her over my shoulder before I started to feel a strong sense of affinity with her. I was alive, she was dead, yet in some way she still represented youth, a youth that by force of unfortunate circumstances had experienced something I had never come close to. She had crossed the boundary, the ultimate boundary, and perhaps her soul was already somewhere else; perhaps in actual fact it was keeping a watchful eye on us, as we slowly and cautiously picked our way through the marshy terrain. From all around us came the unobtrusive sound of the discreet processes of decay and birth. Bubbling, whirring, gurgling, croaking and pattering. I was entirely taken up by my task; I soon began to feel as though I was fulfilling some kind of duty, a deep, imperative duty of which no one else in the group could have any conception, and I also felt a bitter gratitude that I was the one entrusted with the privilege of arranging the girl’s burial, I truly did. But at the same time, madness was lurking, creeping behind us on the lightest of feet through the living darkness, and in front of us and all around; none of this frightened me in any way, but it was a reality, a possible outcome of this walk, I realized that. The possibility that the girl and I might simply lie down and let ourselves be persuaded by this all-consuming, vigorous growth, and that I would accompany her on her final journey; we were in the polder itself now, pungent smells of stagnant water and impenetrable foliage surrounded us on all sides and I thought that maybe, maybe it would be a sort of loving act to just sink with her into the warm, muddy water and yield to forces so much stronger and more primordial than our own.
But I didn’t stop. It didn’t happen after all, and instead I continued my stately progress, step by step and breath by breath; my walks of recent days had taught me to find my way, more or less, around the network of little paths, and within a time that I afterwards estimated to be something under an hour I had reached the place where two paths crossed, and from which Erik’s house was just about visible. He had switched on an outside light at the corner of the house but otherwise all was in darkness. I carefully lowered the dead girl into a sort of sitting position, propped against a tree trunk about twenty metres from the house. I went through the gate, found my way to the tool shed in the darkest corner of the garden and opened the door.
I didn’t even need to put a light on, because I almost instantly came across a spade propped against the wall, and returned past the silent house to where I had left the girl.
I had already decided where her grave was to be, and it took me twenty to twenty-five minutes to get there. It was an open area that I had previously tried to walk through, but the bogginess of the ground had forced me to turn back. This time I stepped carefully from one firm tussock to the next. It wasn’t easy in the dark, with the girl hanging over my shoulder, but the moon showed itself again for a second, a waning moon, big and pale, and that helped me get my bearings. I picked my way through the waist-high grass to about ten metres from the path and then stopped, laying down the body before thrusting the spade experimentally into the bog.
It was as easy to dig as I had imagined and – to cut a long and painful story a little shorter – I soon had the girl in the ground. The remarkable thing was that I scarcely even needed to shovel any soil into the grave on top of her; it was as if the ground sucked her body down, the wet, fragrant earth enveloping her as if in an embrace, and in some strange way I understood that this was where she belonged. Here and nowhere else.
I went back up to the path. Checking the time, I saw it was twenty past two. I suddenly felt overwhelming fatigue descend on me and, as an owl hooted just a few metres away from me, I had no idea where I would find the energy to get back to the house.
But I somehow managed that, too. Erik must have been awake at some point after I took the spade from the tool shed, because the outside light had been switched off. I put the spade back in its place and had a shower, standing under the steady stream of water for a long time in an attempt to wash away every trace and every memory of that terrible day, and by the time I finally got to bed it was almost 4 a.m.
Then I slept for four hours, showered again and started writing.
No sign of Erik, he must have gone out first thing in the morning. I’m sure he’s conferring with the others. It’s Monday, two in the afternoon, and I feel a strong impulse to go back and find the place where I buried the girl, but I realize I have to restrain myself.
I feel other impulses, too, telling me to pack my things and get away from here, but I feel paralysed by exhaustion.
My foot is quite painful, too, it’s swollen now and a dark half-moon has appeared on the outside of the ankle; I’m sure it’s nothing serious, but a few days’ rest is too tempting an option for me to pass up.
Naturally it could well be important for me to know what plans they’ve been hatching during their conference, too. I lie down in one of the loungers on the terrace under the sunshade and wait for Erik.
I feel as though I am a different person from the one I was twenty-four hours ago.
Commentary, August 2007
Yet it isn’t the case. When we shed our skin and become another person, that’s all that happens. The shedding of skin. What’s inside it, our core and our true identity, we always carry with us.
We can’t escape it, any more than I can escape those days and what happened. Those people stayed inside me like ticks, sucking the blood and the reason out of me, and what is now happening is of course nothing ot
her than a logical consequence. Actions have consequences, and sooner or later everyone must take his or her rightful responsibility, just as I am shouldering my responsibility by carrying out these bloody but inescapable deeds I am now engaged in.
As the years have passed, the girl has occasionally recurred in my dreams, often bringing me out in a cold sweat as I experience anguished flashbacks of those minutes in the waves – and that nocturnal walk through the marshes, one of us living and the other dead – but since I finally made up my mind, the character of the dreams has changed. All at once there is light, and a very clear element of reconciliation; when I encountered the girl in my bedroom the other morning in the soft light of dawn, we were on a long stretch of beach, perhaps that one between Mousterlin and Bénodet, though I can’t be sure; we recognized one another from a long way off, and I could see even from that distance that she was wearing not only her rucksack with the easel sticking out, but also her characteristic, slightly crooked smile, and as we met we only stopped for a brief moment, exchanged a few encouraging phrases, and she brushed my cheek in a light, even fleeting movement before we each continued walking in opposite directions.
She never put it into words, but I could see in her face that she was grateful to me for having finally started taking on those people. I could see she was on her way into womanhood.
Cause and effect, then, and once I have finished my work, everyone will realize it was all about that, and nothing else.
Sometimes I dream about Dr L as well, always the same short sequence, and every time I wake up and remember it, I feel my need for solace momentarily satisfied. He is seated behind his big, dark desk, I enter the room, he looks up from the papers he has been reading, pushes his glasses up onto his forehead and nods to me in that thoughtful way of his.
I understand, he says. There’s no need to sit down and explain, just carry on.
Carry on.
14–16 AUGUST 2007
19
In his dream, he was jostling for space with some fat angels.
A sort of semi-organized queue had formed; he was at the foot of a winding staircase, surmounted some fifty metres above by a gate in a crumbling limestone wall. That was where they were all to enter. Some of the angels looked more familiar than others, and amongst those he identified first was his ex-wife Helena, whom he glimpsed a few steps above him. It seemed a little odd to him that she had been given such elevated status. In the twenty-five years he had known her she had never been an angel, far from it, but just beside her he could see the Digerman brothers, a couple of old lags he had put away a few years ago for armed robbery and other violent crimes, so maybe moral conduct was not a top priority here after all – and at that moment he caught sight of Axel Wallman and Superintendent Jonnerblad. They stood there, arms around each other’s winged shoulders, apparently deep in conversation on some vital issue. How best to advance through the crowd, perhaps; it was just a matter of getting up the stairs and in through the gate, as far as Barbarotti could see, and before he knew it he had gone swishing past the lot of them and was at the head of the queue.
St Peter was waiting there, who else? He should have realized, of course, but he was completely floored by the simple question he was asked by the white-bearded and, he had to admit it, slightly cross-eyed gatekeeper.
‘Give me three good deeds you have accomplished during your time on Earth.’
Only three, he thought happily, but then he started to tie himself in knots. His brain short-circuited, his tongue was tied, his armpits leaked sweat; he gaped like a goldfish a few times, and St Peter raised a quizzical eyebrow.
I loved my children, he thought, especially my daughter – but this felt a bit ponderous, and for good reason. Surely everyone loved their children, even mass murderers and madmen? He clearly needed something with a bit more oomph. But what . . . what on earth had he actually achieved? Could he produce any nuggets of gold that were soiled neither by self-interest nor . . . nor the dulling gloss of everyday banality?
Could he say that he had caught a few evildoers but let twice as many get away? It really wasn’t much to boast about. He sensed that St Peter had pretty unimpeded access to what was going on inside him, too, so there was no use offering anything he himself felt dubious about.
‘Well?’ said St Peter. ‘It says here that you are forty-seven years old. You ought to have been able to achieve something in that time.’
‘It’s just that I wasn’t really prepared,’ explained Barbarotti. ‘For standing here quite so soon, I mean.’
He became aware of the angels behind him starting to grumble about how long he was taking in the doorway, and he was also struck by how odd it was that they should already be kitted out in wings and white shifts, if they still hadn’t slipped through the pearly gates. Or had this lot just popped back outside for a bit of fun? Back down to Earth on some pretext or another? Had they already got the official seal of approval? They were fat, at any rate, some of them really bloated in shape; he identified a certain Conny, known as Tall Conny, who used to work behind the bar at the Elk with drooping eyelids and an unlit cigar stub in the corner of his mouth, and he had most definitely undergone a total physical transformation. He appeared to be about a metre sixty tall and to weigh 130 kilos.
St Peter glared at Barbarotti before entering a mark in the big ledger he had open on a table in front of him and waving his hand irritably.
‘Off with you,’ he said. ‘I’ll let you have a few more years. But I don’t want you giving me this sort of bother next time you come. I’ll send you to Hell if you do.’
Barbarotti nodded his gratitude and St Peter took up a little hammer and tapped a bell, the sort you used to find on reception desks at old-fashioned hotels, and then the whole scene dissolved like mist.
But the sound of the bell lingered and the dream swirled rapidly up to the arid surface of reality. He was lying in his bed, rolled up in his bottom sheet and his quilt, and that persistent sound was naturally not coming from some ancient porter’s lodge but from a mobile phone lying beside him on the bedside table, and before he really registered what he was doing, he answered it.
It was Helena.
For one moment he thought that he was still in the dream. For his ex-wife to feature both there and in real life – within such a short space of time – seemed pretty unlikely; but there was a genuine quality of vinegar and sandpaper in her voice that dispelled almost all of his doubts. This was the real her.
‘Gittan rang,’ she said. ‘She’s been reading Expressen. What the hell have you been up to?’
Gittan was an old friend of theirs, or rather, since the divorce, of his wife’s. She lived in Huddinge and preferred reptiles to men.
‘Eh?’ said Gunnar Barbarotti. ‘What time is it?’
‘Quarter to eight, but that’s irrelevant. It says in Expressen that you assaulted a journalist.’
‘What?’
‘You heard.’
‘Of course I did, but what are you saying?’ Barbarotti grumbled as he disentangled himself from the quilt. Quarter to eight? Hadn’t he set his alarm for quarter to seven?
‘Gittan saw the headline on the newsstands on her way to work. The evening papers come out early in this part of the world, and I want to know how I’m supposed to explain this to the kids?’
‘Oh, I see.’
Appreciation of the nature of the information that had been imparted to him seeped inexorably into his system, like the poison after a snake bite, and it came home to him that St Peter had committed a grave error in sending him back down to Earth.
‘I’ll call you later,’ he said. ‘I haven’t assaulted anybody, and you can tell Lars and Martin that from me.’
He got to his feet and went to hide in the shower.
The next call came at eight minutes past eight. It was Inspector Backman.
‘The shit’s going to hit the fan,’ she said. ‘I just wanted to warn you if you hadn’t heard.’
‘Thanks,
I’d heard,’ said Barbarotti.
‘An official complaint has been lodged, accusing you of assault.’
‘I suspected as much. We’ll have to talk later.’
He had no sooner hung up than Aftonbladet, the main evening paper, rang. They wondered if he had any comment. He told them he hadn’t, except that he hadn’t yet read what their highly esteemed competitor’s pages had said about him, and he most definitely hadn’t assaulted anybody.
Then he got dressed, and after that he rang Superintendent Jonnerblad.
‘You’re off the case until further notice,’ Jonnerblad informed him. He sounded as though he was biting down on an iron bar.
‘Thanks,’ said Barbarotti. ‘Anything else?’
‘Don’t come into work today. And stay away from the press. Is that clear?’
