Death of a Carpet Dealer

by Neil Betteridge

  Once she’d thrown the stick into the trash can, she grew bored and wondered whether she should saunter off to the carpet shop to ask if the rug she’d brought in for repair had been returned. They’d probably have called or texted her, but you never knew. It would be nice to have everything ready before the baby arrived.

  But no. She couldn’t summon the energy to get up. It wasn’t a big rug, but rather a prayer mat that even she, with her heavy body, could carry without difficulty. It came from Claes’s family home. She’d found it rolled up amongst his moving boxes when they’d move in together. He hadn’t wanted it on the floor of his ultra-modernly furnished bachelor pad, but she fell for it immediately – there was something poignant about its threadbare pile and faded colors, so she rolled it out onto the upstairs hallway. Where it had lain until the edge started to fray so badly that she caught her toe in the warp and almost fell flat on her face.

  “It’s a shame it’s so shabby,” she said.

  “Chuck the horrible old thing,” said Claes without hesitation.

  It wasn’t that she knew anything about rugs, but she couldn’t bring herself to throw it out. It had come a long way and had a long history, perhaps it was worth having it valued just for the sake of it? She asked Birgitta Olsson, a nurse at the clinic, what she thought. And she didn’t think anything. Rugs were her husband’s province, not hers: “But it wouldn’t hurt to take it to the shop and let Carl-Ivar have a look at it.”

  Carpet dealer Carl-Ivar Olsson was a genial fellow, one of those older gentlemen that she so readily fell for. Perhaps because he reminded her of her father.

  Olsson’s eyes had lit up when he saw the rug. It was an antique, he said, and that meant it was over a hundred years old. “No way!” she blurted out. He asked where she’d got it from, and she told him what she knew of the rug’s provenance, and that went no further back than her husband’s family. There were many fine mats in Sweden, he said then, owing to our early contacts with the Orient. At the end of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, Swedes helped to build railways and bridges, or started industries and erected public administrations in many countries to the east. It wasn’t always possible for them to take out the money they’d earned, and so they invested in rugs and carpets that they brought home to Sweden. It therefore became fashionable in the better class of home to cover the floor in huge, expensive Oriental carpets or to dress the walls of the gentlemen’s studies with Turkish kilims.

  The carpet dealer seemed to have oceans of time, and Veronika was in no hurry either on that day when she’d handed in her prayer mat for repair. She’d sat down in the cozy little shop that stood on a corner with windows facing two directions, while he’d told her that the rug was a typical prayer mat – that was obvious by the large central section, called the prayer niche, which in this case was so worn from use that the pile had almost been rubbed away. This was definitely not to be remedied. The prayer section was of a beautiful turquoise, and if she stroked the side gently with her fingertips where there was a little pile left, she’d feel that it was angled from the feet up to the head. This indicated that it was a Turkish rug, said the carpet dealer. Persian prayer mats had the pile facing the other direction. He guessed that the rug came from a village somewhere near Sivas, a town in central Anatolia. Turkey, that is. He had a large map on the wall, and pointed obligingly to the location, and Veronika tried to make a mental note of it. It was as if the rug had acquired even more life than it already had. The carpet dealer stroked the pile with the same soft hands as a cat lover stokes fur, the only difference being that the rug didn’t start purring. Surrounding the prayer niche were rows of borders in yellow, warm red, and lime green. The colors harmonized exquisitely, he wanted to say.

  “Repairing the damaged section won’t be a problem at all,” Olsson explained. “Repairs will lend the rug character and this little beauty is definitely worth spending some money on… Not necessarily because it’s valuable in monetary terms, which, incidentally, I believe it is, but mainly because of its splendor.”

  For a moment, Veronika had felt like someone on Antiques Roadshow. Naturally it was on the tip of her tongue to ask just how much the rug might be worth. But she didn’t, and so didn’t get the chance to sputter an astonished, “Wow, that much! Who would’ve guessed?”

  Rugs are personal, and one should own them out of affection. Also, Oriental rugs make a great pairing with Nordic pine furniture, said Olsson, and she agreed and recalled suddenly how Claes’s greedy little brother had tried to lay his hands on the rug a while ago, claiming that it was a waste to have it lying in the upstairs hall where no one could see it. It would go better on the floor of his study at home, he said.

  Ha!

  But that time even Claes had become wary and refused. Not least to put his little brother in his place. He didn’t want Markus to think that he could wrap everyone around his little finger. And of course there was also Liljan standing yapping in the background. The sister-in-law, who was always sniffing around for a freebie.

  Veronika arched her back and adjusted her waistband, which was cutting into her. She was disgustingly full, verging on nauseous. Damn ice cream! Everything was too big these days. Cinnamon buns, muffins, and tubs of popcorn at the movies. They were living in the era of surplus, surfeit, and obesity. She could find many perfect examples, herself excluded, without difficulty, just by looking around. They often talked about it at work. About how fat caused problems. It was much trickier, technically speaking, to operate on fat people, and anesthetizing them was not without its risks. There were more short and long-term complications. And it was nothing to shrug off. It was serious.

  And really sad to think about. So instead she stared straight into a shop window, yearning for her skinny jeans.

  At that moment she noticed the reflection of someone she knew. He all but crept past her behind the bench, clearly trying to make himself as invisible as he could. She turned her head unmercifully. Narrow but heavy purple plastic bags hung from each hand. The telltale clinking of bottle against bottle.

  Göran Bladh. He knew that she’d spotted him, she could tell by the way he walked. He hurried his steps, which he was able to without looking as though he was fleeing.

  But it wasn’t her life he was ruining, Veronika thought. What he was doing was just so unnecessary and tragic. Well-dressed, good job, nice-looking, and interesting to talk to. Well, up till now at least. And that was exactly what she had said to him the last time he was in for pancreatitis.

  “Someone has to say it. Your inflamed pancreas can’t take any more. I know you know that. But you have a life to live,” she told him, holding his gaze.

  It was so worthless and pointless and demoralizing talking to alcoholics. Like talking to deaf ears, she knew that. But still, she wanted it said. For her own sake, perhaps. Because trying to save a person made her fingers itch.

  “The life I have to live is not yours,” he retorted dryly. “Maybe it’ll be shorter. Can you respect that?”

  Sure, she thought. No problem. She was only a doctor – as, incidentally, was he – not a savior. But she didn’t say that. Antabuse, the twelve-step program, and alcohol rehab had no effect on him, he said. So there, now she knew! Poor thing.

  And his job was obviously swimming along. Many days off sick, but according to the rumors not as many as one would have thought. He not only had numerous lives, like a cat, but also several overdrive gears. They probably turned a blind eye at the clinic, good radiologists were few and far between. He was skilled and engaged when on the right side of life and held himself erect. This was the upper-class alcoholic’s suicide precipice. The polished façade.

  She watched him as he hurried off to Besväret, the pretty area of old houses overlooking the harbor. He lived enviably well, not exactly under a damp tarp in the harbor. The question was how long he’d be able to hold down his job without making any serious blunders. He was not the only one he was responsible for.

  N
o, she had to get up and move around, the small of her back ached. She rose laboriously and decided to visit the carpet dealer’s shop after all.

  CHAPTER 3

  ANNELIE DAUN SAT BEHIND the plush walnut table with its gracefully carved legs that served as both counter and writing desk. She was reading, a language course in Italian. Barely audibly she mumbled phrases to herself, over and over again, as if unwilling to break the silence. The traffic outside wasn’t noisy. Hardly a car drove past.

  She’d put on some tight, small-checkered trousers in old pink and pistachio green, and a short-sleeved cotton blouse in a matching coral tone. She’d even ironed it this morning, and its cotton was soft and smooth. She felt pretty, yet smart. She made an effort, even though customers wouldn’t be flooding into the shop. If, that is, anyone came at all. She dressed up mainly for her own sake.

  The Italian phrases were starting to bore her. She broke off her studies, took a mirror out of her natural leather Mulberry bag, and applied her shocking pink lip gloss. She also managed a quick glance at her freckly nose, peaking out from under her blonde fringe. The sun had done its job, as Carl-Ivar would have said if he hadn’t been in Turkey. He said things like that without sounding at all flirty or dirty-old-mannish. She looked fresh and healthy, she confirmed to herself with self-content, but that expression would never pass the lips of Carl-Ivar. In his world, fresh might refer to lettuce leaves or cut flowers. She’d been to the hairdresser’s earlier in the week, and her hair was soft and shoulder-length, and cut in layers. She ran her finger through it so that it fell back a little less flat.

  It was a Saturday, so she’d not be staying in the shop all day. Her neighbor had promised to pick her up at just after two. “Us country folk help each other out, of course I can give you a lift,” Birthe had said when she’d called last night. If she locked up at one o’clock even, she’d have time to do a bit of window shopping until Birthe turned up. Her own car was at the mechanic’s with a dead engine. Luckily it had managed to cough and splutter all the way there, sparing her the inconvenience of calling a tow truck.

  The carpet shop was on a corner, and so the daylight fell agreeably in from two directions. The building was from the last century and had atmosphere, a pleasant feel that put her in a good mood every morning when she unlocked the door and stepped inside.

  The table where Annelie sat was turned toward the door and the two windows. Behind her was a wall decorated with rugs, and on the floor was a low shelving unit containing heavy volumes, most in English, with gorgeous pictures of flat-woven and knotted rugs and carpets from all four corners of the globe. She could lose herself for hours thumbing through these magnificent tomes. What the human hand – and when it came to rugs and carpets primarily the female human hand – had managed to achieve was nothing short of miraculous.

  Where the bookshelf ended, a spiral staircase descended to the storeroom. The premises were not that large, but altogether surveyable and cozy.

  Annelie raised her head and looked out. The street corner was partly shaded, but the sun still managed to poke a bright finger of light through half of one of the shop windows, so she’d laid out some protective paper over the rugs to prevent them bleaching. She left her desk and walked over to adjust the brown paper, wondering whether she should switch the radio on, but the silence was addictive. She almost ate silence as her favorite dish. It was her years of failure as a substitute teacher in boisterous classrooms that more or less had made her nauseous and that had made her a little more careful about what she subjected herself to.

  She stood now a little indecisive, her arms folded over her chest, gazing out the window. People in light shoes, their coats off. She smiled and turned back into the shop while trying to memorize some Italian. The phrases had completely slipped out of her mind. This happened only too frequently. She made an effort to retrieve a few words and join them together into a sentence, but pretty much all she got was a verbal risotto. She realized that she’d never learn to speak Italian with any real success. And yet on she struggled. Some projects, stupidly enough, were harder to let go of, she thought and watched as some specks of dust danced in the illuminated air.

  Should she get the duster out? No, the cleaning was quickly done and could wait until Monday so that everything would be nice for Carl-Ivar’s return on the Tuesday. Even though he didn’t happen to be the kind to notice if the place was freshly cleaned or not, it would feel good to have it newly done.

  The shop’s décor was simple, in order to help bring out the rugs and carpets. A terracotta tiled floor and white walls, that was all. The exhaust fumes that percolated through were moderate. It wasn’t the most heavily trafficked street in town that Carl-Ivar’s shop lay on, but everyone knew where it was. At least everyone who needed a beautiful floor covering of top quality, or who wanted to bring in a worn beloved one for repairs.

  It wasn’t as if the shop was packed floor-to-ceiling with rugs. Nor were there any stacked in large piles down in the basement, even though there were quite a few there. Instead, the rugs were hung with discrimination on the white walls or draped over the staircase banister. So there weren’t that many, but what there was, was of high quality. No rubbish had ever found its way in.

  Once upon a time, when Olsson’s carpet shop was housed in larger premises on Köpmannagatan, it was another story. But now that Carl-Ivar had retired and had a little something put aside in the bank, she suspected, he had the carpet shop mainly for the sheer pleasure of it. For fun, he once told Annelie, who was probably the only person who really understood him, he’d said. His wife wasn’t that crazy about rugs and his grown-up children preferred bare floors. It’s like the cobbler’s children. But since rugs hadn’t shaped her childhood, she could enjoy them even more.

  Rugs were undeniably more than just decorative. You built up a completely different relationship with a rug than you did with a… Windsor chair, for example. She’d thought about that many a time, despite being very partial to chairs herself, particularly old ones.

  She tried to read up about them, when she wasn’t at Carl-Ivar’s carpet school. He never lectured, preferring to portion out a little of his knowledge of rugs and carpets now and again when the moment took him, like when they had received a rug or carpet for repairs. But he was careful not to overdo it. It was a sensitive matter, especially with the customers, many of whom might easily feel that they were being lectured. They wanted to see themselves as specialists, particularly if they were collectors. And the collectors were more in number than one might imagine, and usually men. I guess that’s how it is when big bucks are involved, thought Annelie.

  The oldest known preserved knotted rug, the Pazyryk Rug, was 2,500 years old and had been found frozen in the Siberian ice – which is why it had survived for so long. Nomad women had been the ones to develop the art of knotting rugs to have something to hang on walls and lay on floors as protection against the cold. But they also could not help making the rugs pleasing to the eye. A sense of the attractive and beautiful must be an inherited human characteristic, thought Annelie. The women cut wool from sheep and goats, spun it and colored it with natural dyes, and then tied or wove it as they saw fit or in accordance with their tribe’s particular nomadic traditions. The patterns were handed down from generation to generation.

  Since the Oriental rugs originated from widely disparate areas, from the Balkan Peninsula all the way to China, their appearance, for obvious reasons, varied greatly. If nothing else, it was an adventure in itself to be able to look at a rug or a carpet and guess where it came from. This took as much knowledge as experience. These days, Annelie yearned to go out into the world to get to see rugs in their true settings.

  On the free floor space in front of her in the shop lay a typical medallion “tribal rug” of varying shades of madder red and indigo. It was a Hamadan rug, made in one of the countless villages around the city of Hamadan in northwest Iran, the country’s largest carpet-knotting district. These rugs were highly popula
r, and sturdy and hard-wearing to boot. Nowadays, synthetically colored yarns were often used instead of naturally dyed, said Carl-Ivar, who didn’t think it actually mattered that much. People started synthetically coloring the yarns back in the 1860s, and such a synthetic yarn could be just as beautiful as its vegetable counterpart. Both could run, or bleed as one said, depending on how they were made. The warp of modern Hamadan rugs was often cotton rather than wool, Annelie had also learned. It was also rare to find cotton warps in nomad rugs since the women had to make do with what was at hand, which was the wool from their own herds. They were self-subsistent or lived on barter; either way, they generally lacked the hard cash to buy cotton thread.

  Hamadan rugs were manufactured as a rule in only two sizes. On her tiled floor lay the smaller “Zaronum” variety. The larger “Dozar” carpets were big enough for a living room. The rug that she stepped on daily was robust and able to take a lot of wear and tear. She liked it. Better to have a sturdy, knotted Oriental rug in the hall, was her advice to customers who popped into the shop. She particularly recommended them to the parents of young children who needed something to trap gravel and mud. A better alternative was not to be found. Easy to look after, hardy and beautiful, too.

  The Oriental rugs could be divided into three categories depending on the circumstances of their manufacture: nomad rugs, tribal rugs, and urban or workshop rugs, which were also known as factory rugs. Unlike tribal rugs, which were often woven or knotted in the home, the workshop rugs were knotted in factories. The largest rug and carpet country was Iran, the former Persia. Annelie could still hear people say “Persian rug” when talking about Oriental rugs in general.