by Håkan Nesser
“I’m Mr. Mitter’s lawyer. You must surely agree that it’s in the best interests of the school for him to be found not guilty?”
Suurna gave a start.
“Naturally, without a shadow of doubt, but. .”
“But what?”
“Don’t get me wrong. . But what do you think yourself?”
“I’m the one who ought to be asking that question. Of you, that is.”
The headmaster stirred his coffee. Adjusted his tie. Looked out of the window and moved the pens in his desk caddy around.
“Mitter has always been a loyal member of the staff, a much admired teacher. He’s been at the school longer than I have myself. Very knowledgeable and. . independent. I have difficulty in believing. . Real difficulty.”
“And Eva Ringmar?”
The pens were slowly starting to return to their original positions.
“I don’t really have much of an idea about her, I’m afraid.
She’s only been with us for a short time, two years, or thereabouts. But of course, she was a very well-qualified teacher.
May I ask you something? What kind of a stand is Mitter making?”
“What do you mean?”
Suurna shuffled in his chair.
“Well, er, what kind of a stand is he making?”
“Not guilty.”
“I see. . Yes, of course. He’s not pleading without pre-meditation, nothing like that?”
“No. Nothing like that.”
Suurna nodded.
“And what you are looking for now is. .?”
“I’m looking for two or three witnesses.”
“Witnesses? But surely that’s impossible?”
“Character witnesses, Mr. Suurna, people who are willing to stand up in court and speak in support of Mitter. People who know him, as a person and as a colleague, who can give a positive picture of him. And a true one, of course.”
“I’m with you. The man behind the name?”
“Something like that. Perhaps a pupil as well. And preferably you yourself, Mr. Suurna.”
“Oh, I don’t really think. .”
“Or somebody you can suggest. If you give me four or five names, I can choose from among them.”
“Who would he prefer to have? Wouldn’t it be more appropriate for him to say who he’d like to have?”
“Hmm, that’s the tricky thing. . ” Ruger took a sip of coffee. It was weak and had a faint taste of disinfectant. He gave thanks for his bad cold. “Mitter has, er, how should I put it? On principle he declines to speak in his own favor. It goes against the grain for him to. . proselytize. I must say that I can sym-pathize with him. Sigurdsen and Weiss seem to have been the members of staff closest to him, but I don’t know. .?”
“Weiss and Sigurdsen? Yes, that’s probably correct. Yes, I’ve nothing against them.”
“Even so, it might also be good to have somebody who wasn’t all that close to him. Good friends naturally only have good things to say about one another. Nobody expects anything different.”
“I understand.”
Ruger closed his eyes and forced down the rest of the coffee.
“To be precise, what I am asking you to provide is a colleague, one of his pupils, and, er, shall we say a representative of the school management-you yourself, or somebody you think would be suitable.”
“I’ll have a word with Eger, he’s our deputy head. I’ve no doubt he’ll be happy to oblige. As for the pupils, I have no idea. I must ask you to be extremely discreet. Perhaps you could get some help from Sigurdsen and Weiss, if you speak to them.”
“I’m most grateful.”
“You ought to know that I’m. . er, we all are, of course. .
very upset about what has happened. Some have taken it harder than others, and it’s obvious that everybody on the staff has been on edge. But even so, we have managed to carry on working. I’d like you to bear that in mind. It has been. . and still is. . a very difficult time for all of us at this school. However, I think we’ve succeeded in showing the pupils that we don’t let them down even when we’re under this kind of pressure.”
“I understand, Headmaster. I’m very well aware of what you must have been going through. When do you think I’ll be able to meet my witnesses?”
“When would suit you? You must give me a little time, and obviously it must take place after school is finished for the day.
We must not disrupt teaching any more than has happened already.”
“The trial starts on Thursday. Witnesses for the defense are unlikely to be called before Tuesday or Wednesday next week.”
“I shall make appropriate arrangements, Mr. Ruger. Tomorrow afternoon, perhaps?”
“Excellent.”
“I’ll be in touch.”
He slid back his desk chair. Ruger handed him his business card and started wriggling his way up from the armchair.
“Edwin Ruger. . Yes, I do believe I recall him. A promising young man. What’s he doing now?”
“Unemployed.”
“Ah, I see. . So, good-bye, Mr. Ruger. Is there anything else I can do for you?”
Hardly, Ruger thought. He shook his head and wiped his nose. Headmaster Suurna leaned over his intercom and summoned the mauve woman.
“Haven’t you got an umbrella?” she asked as she guided him through the corridors.
“No,” said Ruger, “but I’ve been thinking about buying one.”
He couldn’t be bothered to explain that in fact, he owned two: one was at home, the other was in his car. As he hastened across the wet schoolyard, he wondered who on earth it was the headmaster reminded him of. Some politician or other involved in a scandal many years ago, he suspected. Surely they couldn’t be one and the same person?
For Mitter’s sake he hoped that Suurna would not change his mind and volunteer to be a witness himself. Nobody but the opposition would relish the prospect of evidence given by a witness like that, so much was obvious. And he doubted if he would have the courage to put a muzzle on the man.
Speaking of which, how many witnesses had the prosecution managed to winkle out of these walls? He had the distinct impression that there were two or three to be found, if anybody made the effort.
But as he sat in his car again and watched the gloomy outline of the Bunge High School fade away in his rearview mirror, what filled his mind above all else was a hot bath and an extra-large and well-deserved cognac.
It was true that his wife maintained that nobody cured a cold with hot baths and cognac nowadays, but he had decided to pay no more attention to her. For three whole days his breakfast had comprised a nasty-tasting little vitamin pill, and that had failed to shift him even an inch closer to good health.
8
Why didn’t they come?
That question cropped up the day after, but not until nearly evening. The day had passed, hour after hour, in a sort of glassy trance, a state of utter confusion; but as soon as thoughts had succeeded in breaking through, that was the question that registered first.
Why had he heard nothing from them?
Another night passed. And another day.
Nothing happened. He went to work, did what he had to do, went back home in the evening. His strength was returning fast and problem-free, and he knew that a confrontation wouldn’t cause him any bother at all.
But nothing happened.
After a week the ridiculous question was still nagging him. He thought there must be some kind of mistake-perhaps they had come looking for him but failed to find him.
Neither at home nor at work.
This was just as ridiculous, of course, but nevertheless he stayed at home for a few days during the second week. Told his employers that he had a stomach upset, and stayed in all the time.
To make certain that they could find him.
In any case, he needed the rest. He sat in his apartment day after day, and let all the circumstances tick over in his mind.
And suddenly, everything
fell into place. He realized how the whole of his life had been leading up to exactly this. Realized that he ought to have caught on much sooner. It would have saved him a lot of trouble. He realized that this was his escape route, and that there was no other possibility. It was now so obvious that he was forced to give his head a good shaking to make up for his blindness.
She was dead. Now he could live.
And nothing happened.
No unknown voice telephoned and asked him to answer some questions. No stern-looking men in damp trench coats knocked on his door. Nothing.
What were they waiting for?
He occasionally stood behind the curtains and peered down at the street, looking for mysterious parked cars. He listened for the telltale little click confirming that his phone was being tapped. He read all the newspapers he could get hold of, but nowhere. . nowhere could he find even a hint of an explanation.
It was incomprehensible.
After three weeks it was still just as incomprehensible, but he had grown used to it. The situation wasn’t entirely unpleasant.
The uncertainty brought with it a little tingling feeling.
That tingling.
The morning the trial was due to start he got up early.
Stood for ages in front of the bathroom mirror, smiling at his own reflection. Toyed with the idea of going there. Sitting in the public gallery, gaping at all the goings-on.
But he knew that would be going too far. Tempting fate.
Why tempt something that had treated him so favorably?
In the car, on the way to work, he suddenly found himself singing.
It wasn’t yesterday. He looked at his eyes in the rearview mirror. There was a sparkle in them.
And as he waited at a red light, he saw out of the corner of his eye the woman in the Volvo alongside him turning her head to smile at him.
He swallowed, and felt his passions rising.
9
The dream came in the early hours of the morning; when the first gray light slowly started to squeeze out the darkness in his cell. The breakfast carts might even have started to rattle in the corridors.
And he remembered it in detail; it might have happened just as he was waking up, and perhaps a lot of things might have been explained if only he’d been granted a few more minutes’ sleep. Even a few more seconds might have been enough.
At first he was out walking. A dreary march over a never-ending, barren plain. A desolate landscape with no villages, no trees, no watercourses. Nothing but this dried-out, cracked earth. Apart from the little greenish black lizards darting back and forth between stones and fissures, he was the only living being. He was alone, lugging a shapeless rucksack, its straps chafing against his shoulders and digging into his waist. He had little idea of his destination or purpose, only knew that it was important. Perhaps he’d known more at the beginning, but it had fallen by the wayside.
But he must not give up, must not pause, must not sit down; only keep plodding on, yard after yard, step after step.
And the wind was getting stronger, forcing him to lean forward into it; it was blowing more and more strongly at him, hurling sand and dry twigs into his face, and he leaned farther and farther forward, closing his eyes in order to protect them.
And then he was there, in front of that house, large and battered, so alien and yet at the same time so familiar. And people were standing in long rows to welcome him, pressed against the walls in the corridors; all kinds of people imagina-ble, but he knew them all and nobody escaped his memory.
Many of his friends, Bendiksen and Weiss and Jurg, his own son, but others as well; people from the great wide world, and from history: the Dalai Lama and Winston Churchill and Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev read a poem in fluent Latin about the transience of all things, and shook him by the hand.
Everybody shook him by the hand and passed him on to the next one; led him gently but firmly further into the house, up winding staircases and through long, dimly lit corridors.
He finally came to a room, darker than any of the others, and he realized he had reached his destination. The man sitting on the other side of the low table. . he recognized the table, it was his own. . and it was definitely a man, it was. .
it must have been. . it was surely?
The light hanging down from the ceiling had a flat shade made of tinplate, and it was hanging at such a ridiculously low level that all he could see was lower arms and hands resting on the table, but he thought he recognized them. They were, they were. . were they?
And on the table was Eva’s kimono; his first impulse was to grab hold of it and put it in the washing machine, but something held him back; he didn’t know what it was, because the man in there, in the darkness, was more scared than he was himself; that was why he couldn’t show his face, but it was surely. . And then he felt a sudden aversion, an irresistible urge, a horrific force compelling him to get out of that room before it was too late, and he woke up.
He woke up.
Yes, now that he looked back, he was certain that it wasn’t anything external that had dragged him out of his dream. It was the room itself that had thrown him out. Nothing else.
He was awake. Wide awake. His breath was heavy with the sleeping tablets Ruger had made him take. Perhaps he would have had the strength to remain in that room just a little longer but for the effect of those tablets. Long enough to get an inkling, at least?
The kimono on the table was not just a dream, he knew that; it was a memory, a fragment of that night. It wasn’t a real kimono, of course. Only an imitation. She had found it in one of the narrow alleys in Levkes last summer, and he’d bought it for her. One of those evenings when they’d sat outside the tavernas until closing time and then wandered back to their lodgings along the beach. Made love in the sand in the warm, black darkness, and then walked the rest of the way naked, and there had been people here and there, quite close to them, but the darkness had been so incredibly dense, they needed no other covering. Even so, the sky had teemed with stars, myriad stars, and shooting star after shooting star after shooting star.
They had stopped counting once they had wished for everything they could possibly want. .
This was, he reckoned, less than three months ago. It could just as well have been three million years ago. The irrevocable nature of the passage of time struck him with full force; the irrevocable and unalterable sequence of every second, every moment. The desperate inevitability of it all. We are closer to the end of the world than to that minute that has just passed by, because that is lost forever. There is no way Levkes will ever come back; nor will the retsina and the beggar with the blue eyes; they will never come back.
But there again, nor will all the rest.
Did it really matter?
Did life really matter?
Difficult to find the right balance now.
You will find out who you are when the difficult moment comes.
I am nobody, he thought. So I am nobody.
I find it more meaningful to lie here on my bed and observe a small patch of wall. Observe it and scrutinize it close up, pick out a stain, as big as a postage stamp, or a fingernail.
Concentrate on it with all my senses, smell it, feel it with my tongue, with my fingers, over and over again, listen to it, until I know it inside out. . more meaningful than to go back and remember what was, and what happened.
Those were his thoughts as he woke up out of that dream, and they were not new thoughts or thoughts he could banish.
Now the breakfast carts were getting closer. The hatch in his door opened and the breakfast tray was slid inside. The hatch closed again. It was seven o’clock; he had slept for nearly eight hours; for the first time in three weeks he had slept for a whole night. And today. .
What day was it today?
It took him several seconds to work it out.
His trial would begin today.
He took a bite of bread and contemplated his thoughts.
What were
his feelings?
A sort of apathetic expectation?
Get it over with?
Or perhaps simply. . nothing at all.
10
The courtroom was almost Gothic. A high, vertical style of architecture that reminded him of the anatomy lecture theater in Oosterbrugge. Steep galleries of seats on three sides; on the fourth side perched the judge and other court officials behind brownish black bars. The small amount of natural light allowed in came from a circle of stained-glass windows high up in the pointed roof, and without doubt reinforced the impression of a vertical, descending hierarchy, a vision of the world order that must have hovered in the mind’s eye of the building’s creator in the middle of the previous century.
This courtroom was crammed full, with not a single seat vacant.
The majority, getting on for two hundred people, was naturally seated in the public galleries. And the majority of those were pupils of Bunge High School. Mitter gathered that he was the direct cause of this year’s top-of-the-league score for truancy.
There were also journalists in the public galleries. They sat without exception in the front row, their legs crossed and with notebooks on their knees. Or sketchbooks-taking photographs was not permitted in court, he now remembered. He was surprised by the large number; there must have been a dozen of them. That surely had to indicate that this case was of national interest, not just a provincial happening.
Mitter’s place was below the galleries, in the arena itself.
There also sat Ruger, whose cold seemed to be getting better; Havel, the judge; prosecuting attorney Ferrati and his assistants; and a small number of other lawyers and ushers.
Plus a jury. This was comprised of four men and two women, sitting behind a partition to the right of the judge, all of them looking sympathetic. Apart from the one second from the right, who was an erect gentleman with an artificial arm and a furrowed brow.
Also present was a large bluebottle. It spent most of its time on the ceiling, directly above the prosecuting attorney’s desk; but occasionally it undertook tours of the room and almost always homed in on one of the two female members of the jury; sitting on the right of the furrowed brow. The fly launched an attack on her nose over and over again, and despite the fact that she brushed it aside every time, it kept on coming back with renewed energy and unfailing persistence.
