The Swede: A Novel

by Robert Karjel

  N. wasn’t sure where he was going. He walked around slowly after the sea finally withdrew. He didn’t see many other people; the few he encountered were wandering as aimlessly as himself. At one point, he heard screams. It could have been a human being, or an animal in trouble.

  Then came the itching. Not that it was overwhelming in any way, but it was there, vaguely annoying. He waved his hands over his arms and legs, shooing away the flies that were drawn to his wounds. His mouth was dry, but he couldn’t bring himself to drink from any of the hundreds of water bottles that had spilled from their crates, in the mess outside a shop.

  Some villagers found N. and pulled him up onto a flatbed truck that took him away from the sea. Packed in close to other people, he sensed their fear. In the back of the truck, people talked too fast, calming down only after the tractor pulling them began to struggle into the hills beyond the village. Up there by the trees, lots of people had gathered. Someone gave him water; he drank and returned the bottle empty. A man, seeing his bloody arms and knees, led him to a paved spot where the wounded were being treated. Most were lying on the ground. A nurse came up to him. She looked concerned, but couldn’t do much beyond wash out the deepest wounds with water. She apologized several times for not having brought more supplies from the infirmary in the village. Then N. sat down. Stayed put. Someone tried to make small talk, but he didn’t answer. Another held up a pot of rice—he waved it away.

  In the evening they heard the sound of a helicopter. People got excited and started shouting, but the noise faded. An evening breeze stirred the trees. The rumors died away.

  Night fell among the groves on the mountain. N. moved from the pavement onto the bare ground, which felt less cold. He curled up but soon froze anyway, and the cuts on his knees began to ache. It was impossible to find a comfortable position, and in the end he sat leaning against a tree. There, he managed to nod off a few times, but in half-sleep he began to think of the fish again, their bright colors. Other images rose up as well. He saw the little girls, their faces, and a woman. Heard their voices. A woman and two children. He wasn’t at all sure that they were his, but it had been morning and they had sat and eaten something. They had eaten together. . . . Then there was once again only the memory of the fish.

  Someone crouched down next to N., he felt an arm hold him. He did not hear the sounds of his own moaning. People near him thought he was crying.

  The sun went up and then down again. Yet another night spent on the mountain. The next morning he was seized with such thirst that he grabbed and emptied the bottle of water that stood near the little boy who slept next to him. On the third day, a group of soldiers in a jeep said that everyone could return to the village, the danger was past. N.’s wounds were swollen and festering, and the nurse washed them one last time and said that he must get to a hospital. Said he had a fever, he needed help. And so he joined the thin line of people returning down from the mountain.

  At first he had trouble orienting himself in the village because of all the destruction and debris. The sun was torture. But then he recognized the car he’d been standing beside when he saw the fish, and the mess of water bottles in the street outside the shop. He opened one and drank. In the distance he saw the gable of a house he thought he recognized. Then he approached and wasn’t sure. White walls stood without a roof, most of the building had collapsed. All signs of the small hotel were gone. There was no trace of the inner courtyard he remembered, only rubble: planks, piles of plaster, palm leaves. Pool chairs lay like wrecked boats on top of the mess. They had steel frames, with slats made of thick plastic strips in black and white. N. remembered how they always stuck to your skin, he remembered that not too long ago he had been sitting right there. Suddenly his heart began to pound and he felt that something terrible was at stake. He grabbed at whatever he could reach and threw the broken planks to the side. But the power flowed out of him almost immediately, and he grew clumsy when he tried to push himself farther. Unsteady on his legs, and seeing all the sharp pieces around him, he sat down. The sun burned intensely, his head throbbed. It wouldn’t get better. He looked around, stood up with a moan, and tried again.

  What he first thought was a branch turned out to be a blue arm sticking out of the mess. A hunk of fallen wall covered the body, but he saw a ruined face: too swollen to reveal anything. Gently, he covered it with a piece of foam. Then he looked again, this time with new eyes, and realized that he was surrounded by sticking-out limbs and bulging, half-naked bodies. He sank down exhausted and overcome, crying in despair.

  N. wasn’t quite clear on how he got there, but at the hospital, he was assigned to a bed. By that time the fever had overtaken him, and for a few days he mostly slept. The staff was very friendly, but they called him by a name he did not recognize and asked him about things he couldn’t remember. Wounds were washed, scraped out, and sutured. It took a week before the fever went down.

  One morning when N. returned from the bathroom, he discovered a cloth bag hanging at the foot of his bed. Green, with a worn-out shoulder strap, the kind tourists get from an army surplus store. He took it off the bed and looked around. The three people who shared the small room took no notice—apparently the bag did not belong to any of them. He opened the zipper and examined the interior. Sure enough, he found a few guidebooks, a dive log, and various travel receipts. In an inside pocket he found a fat envelope of dollars, and in an outside pocket he found a passport.

  That must have been where the nurses got the name. There was some kind of mix-up, right? Could . . . He didn’t know. Looking at the passport picture, N. paused at finding familiar features: the same irregular bangs he saw in the mirror, the same crease between forehead and nose. Most of all, the same gaze. He turned the bag over and found a jagged arc of salt stain. He couldn’t tell if it had been left there by the sea, or by a sweaty back. He flipped through the passport stamps and returned to the picture. He could only sit there on the bed.

  During the rounds, they called that name again.

  “Yes,” said N.

  “The fever has broken,” said a short doctor with beads of sweat on his forehead, “and the wounds seemed to heal fine.” He cast an anxious glance toward the corridor.

  “I understand,” said N.

  The doctor excused himself: “We need the bed. People keep pouring in.”

  “Of course.” He looked down at his short hospital gown.

  “We had to throw out your clothes,” said the nurse. “Take this.” She held out a plastic bag. N. saw a pair of faded but clean jeans, a short-sleeved shirt, and a pair of sandals.

  “You’ll have to look for someone who can remove the stitches,” the doctor said, “in about a week or so. That shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “No.”

  “Where will you go now?”

  “I need to look for someone.”

  The doctor nodded. Left the room to continue his rounds.

  N. got dressed, slung the bag over his shoulder, and left.

  The buses had begun to run again. The roads were clogged with trucks, bulldozers, and groups of men in every imaginable uniform. It took time, but he could still make it back to the village.

  By the sea, all the old signs of devastation were still there, along with some new ones. The village was plastered with bad photocopies of missing people, taped up wherever there was space. Utility poles fluttered with white paper as high as a man could reach. In another world, they’d be for a political race with hundreds of candidates. Near a temple on the outskirts of the village, people wore thick gloves and masks over their noses and mouths. In other spots the authorities had set up small offices—often just a large tent—where people cried or barked senselessly at one another. N. was constantly harassed by people wanting to know if he had seen this one or that one. Disgusted, he withdrew.

  He felt a strange sense of distance. The village he saw was not his, never had been. Only a few weeks before, he hadn’t known a thing about it. He’d come there as
a visitor—a tourist’s random choice. He could have ended up on any beach, on any day, in any village, anywhere. It was just a roll of the dice.

  He kept going. There was a place he had to get to. Then he saw that they’d cleaned up the shop where all the bottles had been scattered on the street. And N. remembered the fish again. And then the breakfast. That they had eaten fruit, and that the little girls had worn new bathing suits and squinted at the sun. So they were, they were his children. And that woman, who must have been his wife, she had smeared their arms with sunscreen while they ate. The silent memory, how they let her do it but whined between mouthfuls.

  Then they stopped, the pictures.

  Again, N. found the hotel’s gable, but the garden and surroundings were gone. The few walls that remained formed a kind of whitewashed monument; the rest was only brownish-red sand and soil. The bulldozer had left no trace, not even a plant.

  N. stopped, squatted down, and felt the damp earth with his hand. Smooth earth and deserted white walls. No trace. He felt that he ought to cry, but nothing came. He got up and walked away.

  He took the white envelope filled with dollars from the bag, though he wasn’t exactly sure the money was his, and paid for transport into town. They had told N. he must register; he had to go register at the consulate. To have something to do, that was the only reason he left. He arrived just as the sun went down, found a simple room for the night, and then went out on the streets again. It was strange to see all the lights, to see people relaxed and strolling, even to hear someone let out a laugh. The smell of food in the evening was overwhelming. No longer did he have to endure the silence of the beach village, with its paper faces staring down from billboards and utility poles. Here there were no hopeless pilgrims clutching at straws. For a time he was released from the torment of his own survival.

  He bought small skewers with chicken and mango and headed late in the day toward the consulate—someone had said they were open all the time now. He found his way with the help of a guidebook from the bag. The row of consulates would be, according to the map, a little outside the town center. The crowds thinned out around him, and the lights as well. He had to stop beneath them, to read the map. A half-dozen police officers came walking toward him in a narrow street. They walked slowly, talking in pairs or smoking. All of them wore helmets with visors and carried long, thin sticks that swayed casually. The sticks drew his gaze, their worn ends suggesting that someone had just had a taste of them.

  The police passed without noticing N. He reached the park where, at the far end, the consulates were supposed to be. The asphalt was wet; leaflets were floating in the puddles. He kept walking.

  “Filthy pigs!” someone shouted from far away. The cry’s echo died away between the houses. N. didn’t see a soul. The park next door was dark and uninviting. He stayed on the sidewalk, but moved nearer to the street and the lights from the few windows on the other side. A block farther down, he passed a couple who looked Western. They were walking quickly.

  “Wishing that even more people had died,” the woman said indignantly as they passed.

  “Idiots,” replied the man. Their steps faded away.

  N. heard someone yell: “Death to America!” It came from the direction he was heading.

  He stopped for a moment, feeling watched. The park was quiet. When he heard a car, he started walking again, trying to figure out what was happening down the street. He saw lights and made out a group of figures on the move. The loud voices came from a demonstration outside one of the consulates, now over. He thought back to the police he’d passed in riot gear, and then a car came up the street. As it sped up, someone rolled down a window. An arm stuck out, and as the car passed N., out flew masses of leaflets. The car swerved across the wet pavement and disappeared up a side street. A leaflet fluttered past him, and N., sensing something vaguely familiar about it, followed a few steps. He caught it just as it landed upside down in a puddle. He shook off the drops, holding it by a corner, and then turned it over.

  It was the photograph of a dead man that he’d seen before, without really looking. Now he looked. A corpse, surrounded by dirt and grass, a gaping mouth and sunken eyes. Arms twisted unnaturally along the body. There were several similar images along the leaflet’s edge. “Thank God!” he read. The text that followed looked like a press release. He stumbled to grasp the context, but after a few lines, he understood. The leaflet was a copy of an Internet posting from the United States, reprinted by protesters. A group of religious fanatics in America had hailed the tsunami, seeing God’s punishment in the sea’s wrath. They found divine justice in the fact that thousands of people were rotting in unmarked graves. They described in rich detail how all the missing people would float away with bloated bellies and never be found. Their biblical quotes were carefully chosen. A picture of the minister they called “Beloved Father” smiled out at N. All the dead children particularly pleased him. God was sweeping the earth clean, punishing all sinners.

  N. looked out at the street again, toward the lights, the figures. His gaze returned to the flyer, the pastor’s world seen through his words: sodomites, bastards, and rapists. Everyone tainted by the devil’s sex. The world crawled and swarmed with sinners.

  The only memory N. had of anything was of his two girls. It was the only image he’d ever see, even if someone held a gun to his head. They were dead, and people were rejoicing?

  N. stood looking at the minister’s smile, trying to see something more than lips and teeth. Then he slowly crushed the flyer, as if he had lost all feeling in his hands.

  It came rolling over him, and he screamed. The first strong feeling since the Wave hit—burning hatred.

  CHAPTER 5

  WHERE WILL I BE SLEEPING?” asked Grip after shaking Shauna Friedman’s hand. “Have you—”

  “No,” she replied. “We haven’t booked a hotel. It’s not necessary, we won’t be staying in New York. We’ll leave”—she glanced at the clock—“as soon as we can.”

  Grip looked at her, questioning.

  She gazed back for a moment. “We need to make sure certain people end up where they belong—that is, on death row.” She lingered at some thought and added, “Yes, people who probably deserve it.” She got up from her desk. “Have you eaten?”

  “No.”

  “Good, then we’ll pick up something on the way. I have a car waiting. I’ll make sure your bags get loaded.”

  Grip followed Shauna Friedman out, where she handed her assistant a stack of papers. “For the final signatures,” she said, and then gave instructions about the luggage.

  “When will you—”

  “Don’t know,” Friedman said, cutting her off.

  The assistant arranged some papers on her desk, exposing for a moment a manila folder marked “Ernst Grip.” The folder vanished again, but Grip had seen it. He wasn’t sure if the assistant had made a mistake, or if she wanted to observe his reaction.

  “The name is Grip,” he said, reaching out his hand.

  “Norah,” replied the assistant uncomfortably.

  “Please, sit down,” said Grip, and continued: “I work for the Swedish security police. You must forgive me, Norah, but do you work for Ms. Friedman?” He released her hand.

  “Of course.” She was nervous, but Grip held her gaze.

  “May I ask who you are employed by?”

  “It’s—”

  “Justice Department,” Friedman shot in, from somewhere just behind Grip.

  He didn’t move, still looking at the assistant. “Justice Department, in the general sense, or . . .”

  “No need to be rude, Mr. Grip. I’m just doing my job.”

  “I don’t want to be rude, Norah, but since I landed in Newark hours ago, I have been . . . pushed around.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you. Maybe this isn’t important, but a few days ago I received a note saying ‘Topeka.’ Beyond that, I have no clue. Maybe you can tell me whether we’re headed to Top
eka. Do you even know?”

  Getting the expected reaction, Grip turned around with a “No, not again,” as soon as Friedman tried to speak. She said nothing, but didn’t look particularly disarmed.

  “Mr. Grip,” said the assistant acidly, “I know exactly where you’re going. But I have no intention of telling you. That is Agent Friedman’s job.”

  End of the road.

  “Finally an honest answer.” He smiled.

  Saber-rattling. Grip didn’t know if he had scored a point, or if his insolence had set him back.

  “Can we go now?” said Friedman, walking away without waiting for his reply.

  They rode the elevator down in silence, but by the time they reached the parking garage, Friedman seemed to have completely forgotten their little spat.

  “What do you think?” she said, twisting and turning a car key. “I asked for a full-size.”

  “Sorry?” said Grip, who was waiting for another shot.

  “What do you think we’ll get?” she repeated, pointing at the row of cars in front of them. One squeaked, and some lights started flashing.

  “White Cadillac, apparently.”

  She nodded at him. “A pimp car. I guess you get what you ask for. Do you have these too, in the security police? You said security police, right? Or do you just drive around in a Volvo?”

  “That’s the safest way.”

  “Safest way . . .” The trunk swung open when she pushed the key again. His bag was already there, next to the ones that were probably hers—two bags, both larger than his. “Believe it or not,” she said, “there’s more paper in them than clothes,” and slammed the trunk.

  They pulled out of the garage into the afternoon light. Again, rows of streets and highway ramps. The buildings shrank as they headed out of the city. Shauna Friedman snapped off her earrings and put them in her pocket, made a few attempts to find a radio station and eventually chose one playing solo guitar. Acoustic, old-fashioned, crackling—revealed by the announcer to be a recording of Django Reinhardt.