The Living and the Dead in Winsford

by Håkan Nesser

  Dear Maria. I have the feeling that all is not well. I’ve dreamt about you two nights in a row. Please get in touch and assure me that I don’t need to worry. Where are you? C.

  I wrote a reassuring reply to Christa. The journey through Europe had gone very well, we were renting a little house not far from Rabat and from it could see the sea in the distance – or at least could just about make it out. Both Martin and I were well and enjoying ourselves. But I noted how my spirits had been raised by Christa contacting me in this way: we presumably don’t dream about people unless they are important to us.

  Then I went over to Martin’s inbox. It was the first time I had ever read his e-mails, but he had been using the same password for ten years, so it was not difficult to open it. But I did have a sudden rush of guilt feelings – which gradually faded away – while I was reading the messages. Who would deal with his correspondence in future if I didn’t?

  Thirty-two messages. I opened all of them and was able to discard a third without more ado, but I read the rest carefully, every single one. Most were from colleagues about whom I knew a little, one was from Gunvald, one from Bergman – and one from somebody calling himself G: his address details didn’t provide any clues. The content of the message was also a bit cryptic, and when I checked back I could find no earlier messages from him. But as I was going via the internet no messages older than twenty days were preserved. Anyway, this G wrote:

  I fully understand your doubts. This is no ordinary cup of tea. Contact me so we can discuss the matter in closer detail. Have always felt an inkling that this would surface one day. Best, G.

  I read the text again – it was written in English, and I translated it into Swedish in my head.

  Your doubts? No ordinary cup of tea? Discuss in detail? A feeling that this would surface one day?

  What was all this about? I felt a clear stab of worry, and made a mental note to check up on Martin’s address book when I got back to Darne Lodge, in the hope of finding out more about this G. But I had no high hopes. Martin has never understood how to keep a register of that kind, and instead merely kept all messages for years on end. But that route was probably blocked now as well, since both of us – for one reason or another – had acquired new addresses during the summer.

  I clicked away the message from G and instead began writing a reply to Gunvald. I provided the same information as in my own messages to Christa and Synn, and decided to make a few notes about our fictive residence – for my own use and so as to make sure I was consistent in future.

  A house not far from Rabat. Self-contained and secure. Small swimming pool, the sea close by.

  I also explained that we were only going to read our e-mails once a week, so that a delay in responding wasn’t something they should worry about. We had found a little internet cafe only a few kilometres from our rented house, but one of the reasons for our journey was of course to keep some distance away from the madding crowd. So we would be grateful if Bergman, Gunvald, Synn, Christa and all the others would respect that.

  I spent a minute or so wondering whether I should write a reply to the message from G as well, but I couldn’t find a suitable way of expressing it and decided to postpone it. And I also decided to delay an answer to Bergman.

  When I had finished dealing with the e-mails I started reading some news from Sweden in the web versions of the biggest newspapers, but after only a couple of minutes I realized that it didn’t interest me in the slightest. In any case there were no reports about the missing wife of a professor who had been found dead in mysterious circumstances on the Polish Baltic coast; and although I hadn’t expected to find anything of that sort, I noticed that I found it a relief. I thanked the girl behind the counter, paid what I owed and said I would certainly be coming back again.

  I returned to the launderette, inserted several one-pound coins and pressed a few buttons to begin the drying process. I took Castor back to the car and let him lie under a blanket on the back seat while I wandered around the town, bought a few necessary provisions and eventually collected my clean and dry washing.

  I certainly felt pleased and satisfied after having sorted out these necessary chores, as if I were any respectable and hardworking middle-aged woman you care to name. With a dog.

  *

  We drove a different route back over the moor. We passed through the medieval town of Dunster, passed by Timberscombe and Wheddon Cross – all the time on the same narrow, winding road that sometimes even passed through tunnels. One has to drive very carefully, and occasionally it is necessary to stop and allow oncoming traffic to pass: but I have the feeling that I’m getting used to it.

  I’m getting used to everything, in fact. We arrived back at Darne Lodge at half past four as dusk was falling. The mist had persisted all day without lifting at all. Going out for walks at this time is simply unthinkable: both Castor and I could have done with some exercise, but instead the evening hours were spent ironing the washing and preparing a vegetable soup that ought to last for at least three days.

  They were all useful and necessary tasks, but I noticed that my thoughts had a tendency to return to the mysterious correspondent G, and his not really specific disquiet.

  12

  ‘We’ll go for a walk along the beach first. Castor needs some exercise.’

  It was half past ten in the morning. We had just taken our leave of Professor Soblewski and his Jelena, who were still standing on the terrace, waving. We were sitting in the car on the rough gravel road that led up to the house, about to set off.

  Martin was obviously hung-over, and admitted that it was a little too early for him to be sitting behind the wheel. I said I agreed. We had a long day on the roads ahead of us, and it wasn’t only our four-legged friend that needed some fresh air.

  It didn’t take long for us to find our way down to the seashore. We drove along the coast for five or six kilometres, and stopped at a little lay-by in the beech woods, next to a cafe that was closed for the winter. A walking and cycle track continued over the steep hill down to a pale grey sandy beach that could just be glimpsed through the trees. We followed it, and concluded that the beach continued for ever in both directions. There were no people to be seen, it was misty and quite a strong wind was blowing – from the north-west, as far as I could judge. Without even needing to discuss the matter, we set off in an easterly direction. Castor has always liked sandy beaches, and for once he ran ahead of us with his tail held high. Martin was much more subdued, held his hands dug deep down into his trouser pockets, with his shoulders hunched. He also preferred to walk a pace or two ahead of me, and it was obvious that he wasn’t in the mood for chit-chat. I assumed that it was yesterday’s vodka that still had him in its grip: I was not unacquainted with the situation.

  Perhaps also the conversation with Professor Soblewski, but I wasn’t acquainted with that.

  After a while, when we had walked five hundred metres or so without having seen another soul, it dawned on Martin that he had left both his wallet and his mobile in the car. I asked if he wanted to go back, but he just shook his head in irritation.

  ‘You can’t blame me for that,’ I said.

  ‘Have I tried to?’ said Martin.

  I didn’t bother to answer. I found a piece of wood instead and started playing with Castor. He is not usually interested in chasing sticks, but he was in that mood today. I threw the stick, he ran and kicked up clouds of sand, then came back with the imagined prey in his mouth.

  ‘Make sure he doesn’t get wet,’ shouted Martin. ‘Remember that he’ll be lying in the car in a smelly state for the rest of the day.’

  I made no comment on that either. But despite the sea and the beach and the wind, my will to live started sinking to a dangerously low level. I don’t really know what I mean by that expression – a dangerously low level – but they were words that came into my head there and then, not something I fished up afterwards when I tried to analyse and understand what happened later. The mo
od from the previous day’s ferry crossing returned immediately, and the sleepless hours during the night before Martin came to bed – no sooner had he lain down than he started snoring, which meant that it was nearly four o’clock before I got to sleep; and as we continued along that beach, being careful to stay ten to fifteen metres from the water’s edge, where there was a wide strip of tightly packed sand that was pleasantly easy to walk on, it dawned on me that despite everything, it had nothing to do with angst.

  More to do with futility. A feeling without feelings, a nonchalance that surprised me because I couldn’t remember ever having experienced it before. Even if it might have been what Gudrun Ewerts was trying to track down during our conversations. Or is it typical of futility that one doesn’t experience it? It sounds as if that might be the case. I wondered if in fact it might have been some quite different person walking along this beach with her husband and her dog – or that some cynical supernatural power was amusing itself by substituting a different brain and a different memory bank in my poor head, and that was why I was unable to get my bearings. I had gone astray in my inner landscape, and that was due quite simply to the fact that it had been changed. Or erased. It seemed to me that a person of my age ought not to be exposed to emotions and moods that can’t be weighed up and identified: but that was exactly what seemed to be happening. I was a newly born fifty-five-year-old baby.

  I am trying to put into words my state of mind that day, and I’m doing that almost three weeks later. It might seem that by doing so I am trying to express a need to understand and justify what happened, but I’m afraid that might also be false. I’m writing in order to avoid going mad – the gradual eroding madness of solitude – and in order to outlive my dog. Nothing else.

  We continued walking. A kilometre, maybe one-and-a-half. Without a word. Without a trace of any other people, it was quite remarkable. Just me, Martin and Castor, at reassuring distances away from one another. Each one of us evidently in a world of our own. Three living creatures on a beach, in late October. Castor had stopped chasing after sticks, but was in the lead. It struck me that there was nothing I craved. I wasn’t hungry, wasn’t thirsty.

  And then we came to the bunker.

  It was half-buried in the sand quite some way from the water’s edge, just below the steep slope up to the edge of the beech woods.

  Martin stopped.

  ‘Just look at that, for Christ’s sake!’

  It was the first time either of us had uttered a word since he instructed me to keep the dog under control. I looked at the bunker – there was nothing else he could have been referring to – and asked what he meant.

  He burst out laughing, somewhat unexpectedly, and I thought that the wind and fresh air might in fact be having a positive effect on the vodka.

  ‘I’d like to take a look inside there,’ he said, his voice filled with all the boy-scout enthusiasm I have so valiantly coped with for thirty years. ‘It must be a left-over from World War Two, I reckon. But I remember . . .’

  And as we trudged through the somewhat looser and more difficult to cope with sand – and as he began kicking away the heavier sand that had piled up against the rusty iron door at the back of the bunker – he went on about a novel by quite a well-known Swedish writer in which a concrete bunker just like this one played an important part. I was familiar with the author but hadn’t read the book, which Martin evidently had done. And thought highly of it, it seemed, because it was suddenly very important to take a look at the inside as well. He removed even more sand, now using both his hands and his feet, and as he panted heavily he tried to explain to me the precise role played by the bunker in the story. A crucial meeting between two rivals, it seemed, but I was only listening with half an ear at most, and thinking back now I can’t recall any details at all. But eventually he had removed so much sand that we were able to remove the bolt from its moorings, and by using all our combined strength managed to begin moving the heavy, awkward door. It squeaked and squealed on its rusty hinges, and opened no more than thirty or forty centimetres – but that was sufficient for us to squeeze in.

  Castor thought it was sensible to stand ten metres away, and watch what we were up to with grave suspicion. If we wanted to force our way into a filthy old bunker, that was our business, not his.

  It was dark inside, the only light came from the door we had just opened slightly and two small apertures facing the sea. They were located right under the roof, and the size of two small shoeboxes on end: I assumed they were intended for observation duties, and for shooting through.

  So there was just one room, about five metres by five. Running along three of the walls was a bench almost a metre wide, also made of rough concrete. Wide enough to lie and sleep on, but also at a height suitable for standing on and keeping a look-out for any signs of enemy soldiers advancing from the sea. And shooting them dead.

  The walls were covered in graffiti – names and dates and slogans of various kinds – and the smell of stuffiness and damp concrete was pervasive and stomach-turning. Traces of oil or petrol and cold soot also stuck in our nasal passages, and Martin pointed at the remains of a burnt-out fire more or less in the middle of the floor. These lumps of charred wood plus two tin drums with unknown contents and a few iron hooks in the ceiling were the only objects in the room.

  Or at least that was what I had thought until two large rats emerged from underneath the bench, scampered over the floor just in front of our feet and disappeared in a dark corner. But then, perhaps rats don’t count as objects. I screamed and Martin swore.

  ‘Bloody hell!’

  ‘Huh, what on earth are we doing in here?’

  That seemed to be a very good question indeed, totally justified, and I hurried back to the door. But Martin stayed behind. Climbed up onto the bench and looked out through one of the apertures. His head covered the whole of the opening, and it became even darker inside the room.

  ‘I’ll be damned if this isn’t almost exactly the same as in the book . . .’

  There was a distinct tone of excitement in his voice, and I was overwhelmed by disgust. My field of vision seemed to shrink, and before I knew what was happening I had backed out through the door, summoned up reserves of strength I didn’t know I possessed and closed it behind me, then lifted the heavy bolt into place.

  Castor was still sitting at exactly the same spot. I hadn’t been inside the bunker for more than a minute. I could hear Martin shouting something from inside.

  My field of vision regained its normal dimensions, but my disgust remained.

  ‘Come on, Castor,’ I said, and we started walking back along the beach, retracing our steps. I assumed that Martin was shouting again, but the strong wind effectively drowned out all sounds.

  I checked that I had my car keys in my jacket pocket. And thought about that sticky substance on Magdalena Svensson’s stomach.

  TWO

  13

  For the first hundred kilometres or so I was unable to get the rats out of my mind.

  Not the rats in the bunker, but those fat creatures the Swedish author E writes about in one of his novels. It’s only an episode, but Martin wrote his thesis on that very author and I know that he was always fascinated by the story about a man who secretly breeds a veritable army of large rats in his cellar. When they have become sufficiently fat and bloodthirsty – I don’t remember the details, but I seem to recall there were a dozen or more of them – he starves them for several days, then sets up a sort of trap based on his wife needing to go down into the cellar (as he was ill in bed): she slips on the ice on the steps and slides down into the darkness where the rats are lurking, through a door that automatically opens up and then closes behind her.

  And those rats are a bit on the hungry side . . .

  Readers assume that everything went according to plan, because one day the wife suddenly disappears out of the story. It is an episode I find it hard to imagine a female author writing.

  As I drove southwa
rds – heading for Szczecin and Berlin – I wondered if right now Martin was remembering that episode in E’s novel.

  And if he himself might be on his way to disappearing out of the story.

  But before we got as far as the car and the journey along the E65, Castor and I had to tackle a strenuous walk along the beach, into a headwind, and I can’t simply jump over it. That remarkable walk; and no matter what we thought about and what we felt during that crucial part of our lives, we didn’t turn back. We didn’t even stop to think things over, not once. Neither I nor Castor, we didn’t look back. I could blame that on the fact that after a very short time it would have been too late anyway. What would I have said to Martin?

  But nevertheless – and once again – it was as if my perceptions and sensations were in the control of somebody else. As if I were seeing and experiencing the world for the first time. Words seem inadequate when I try to describe it as I look back on the situation, more inadequate than ever; but it was the sand, it was the sea, it was my footsteps – yes, every single one of them – it was the wind in my face, the cries of solitary seagulls, my breathing, and the fact that my dog glued himself to my side – yes, he really did. These external and internal factors seemed to be unprecedentedly clear and sharp, and at the same time they seemed to be in harmony, to be significant and very much relevant: all these qualities were increasing in strength all the time, and I felt myself growing hotter and hotter, as if in the late stages of a fever attack.