A thud against her ear, like an ache.
“Why?”
“Martina is going to take pictures of them. Jeda and I are going, too.”
“Who’s Jeda?”
“He’s the one in the green shirt.”
He had gotten up, the golden hair on his legs. He said,
“Martina and I are going with Jeda. He’s going to show us the elephants. We can’t all go, or we’ll scare them away.” The words pierced her, exploded.
Martina was ready to go, her camera hanging over her shoulder.
They were gone until the middle of the afternoon. When she saw them appear again from between the trees, she knew everything was over.
A blast of cold went from the roundness of her heels, through the bones of her pelvis, her chest and right into her heart.
She could no longer speak.
She waited. Something was going on with her skin, as if it were shrinking. A throbbing pain in her head, as if something was clamped too tightly.
Nathan was walking along the riverbank in order to find a spot to piss.
No one saw her take Madh’s blow pipe. No one saw her follow him, follow Nathan.
He stood and contemplated the water and the rapids. He stood and rolled a cigarette. He had formed his mouth to whistle, but she didn’t hear anything but the thunder of the waterfall.
The dart hit him right between the shoulder blades. He fell straight into the whirling, yellow water.
Chapter FIVE
Someone asked where Nathan was. Someone was asking with a whiny voice, Nathan, has anyone seen Nathan?
Maybe she was asking.
Maybe she herself.
She remembered voices, sounds.
And Nathan’s backpack in the middle of everything.
Eventually, they had to decamp. She remembered the way the grass caught her shoes and undid the knots. How she had to stop again and again to tie them, how much effort it took to bend down, how the dizziness gripped her, and the heat. They had left the jungle. They walked over a steaming hot field; she broke a leaf, as big as the ear of an elephant. She held it over her head like a shield.
They had searched for a long time, even she did. Madh searched with her, his eyes were black, his blow pipe hanging on his hip.
Early the next morning, Ben came up to her. She saw him come. She stood straight and silent.
“I know you don’t want to, but we have to go. We can’t search any longer.”
She started between the trees, as if she heard a sound.
She said, “The elephants.”
“The elephants?” he repeated.
“The elephants can go crazy if you get too close.”
He closed his eyes tightly.
“Poor little friend,” he said flatly.
She was put on board a train.
Maybe she was alone.
Someone came with coffee in a mug, someone came with water.
“Drink,” said a light, Swedish voice.
Martina’s.
The windows were open; the heat swept in; a swaddled infant screamed. The mother’s headscarf, held to her hair by two red pins. It looked like they went right into her temples. Martina’s fingers had white, clean nails.
The camera was no longer there.
She smelled her own body odor. A man came down the aisle, tottering. When he came closer, she saw it was Ben.
The train stopped for a moment. A village was out there. Two girls on a scooter; they smiled and waved.
The toilet was a hole in the floor. She got on her knees and threw up.
Then the city.
Ben said:
“I’ll take care of the tickets. There’s a plane tomorrow afternoon.”
He had found a hotel. He put her in the same room with Martina.
“It’s good that you’re not alone. At least you can speak Swedish to each other.”
He was extremely kind.
“Do you have a wife?” she asked.
He nodded.
“Yes, I do.”
“What’s her name?”
“Tam.”
“Tam.”
“Yes.”
“Do you love your wife Tam?”
“I love her and respect her.”
“Nathan!” she screamed, and then was quickly silent.
She got out of the shower; she was clean. She had showered for so long that the water finally ran cold.
Martina stood in the room, her thin back, her sarong like a skirt. She was holding something in her hand; it was the mascot. She had untied it from Justine’s backpack.
“What are you doing?” said Justine, her words coming like gravel and spikes.
“Nothing, just looking.”
Justine bent over her luggage, unhooked her parang.
The pain in her head returned.
She remembered the strength of the blood as it hit her arms; she remembered it burned.
They brought her in to talk, again and again. Her head cramped. Some policemen and a woman named Nancy Fors. She was light-skinned; she was a Swede. She had been sent from the embassy.
The windows in the room had bars.
She repeated.
“I came out of the shower, and there was someone there, a man. She lay on the floor. Martina lay on the floor and I screamed, and he turned toward me. No, I don’t remember his face, dark, thin. I ran into the bathroom. I slid and hit myself and the towel got wet. I heard him close the door. Then I went out. She was lying there, already dead.”
“Where did you hit yourself, Miss Dalvik?”
She drew up her skirt and showed them, here, here on my thigh. She was full of scratches and strange bites.
There was a doctor in the room. He touched her leg and made her scream.
She remembered a syringe and the smell of ether. Or was that later?
Maybe that was later.
“That man?”
“Yes.”
“How old do you think he was?”
“I don’t remember, I told you already.”
“Was he thirty? Or just twenty?”
“He was dark and thin.”
“Tell us everything again.”
“She lay on the floor, and the parang was in her back.” “Did he threaten you, Miss Dalvik?”
“He didn’t have time. I ran into the bathroom and locked the door. He had killed Martina.”
And it turned heavy and hard to breathe. The air didn’t make its way to her lungs. She tried to find oxygen and finally screamed right out loud.
Then there was a hospital, because everything was white: the sheets, the walls. Nancy Fors had a pleasant, long face. She sat next to the bed every time Justine opened her eyes.
“Ben, the man who was in the jungle with you, asked me to say hi.”
She cried when she heard his name.
But mostly she slept.
Nancy Fors said:
“They’ve caught a man who specialized in hotel burglary.” “They have?”
“Yes, they wonder if you can come by and identify him,” She had been sleeping for many days. Now she put on the clothes that Nancy Fors chose for her, wide long trousers and a patterned tunic with long arms.
“They’re my clothes. I think we wear the same size. You can keep them.”
She looked through a peephole. A man was sitting there; he was thin with a hollow-cheeked face.
“They’re wondering if he is the one,” Nancy Fors said.
She said she didn’t know.
She would have liked to say goodbye to Ben, but she wasn’t going to get the chance.
She would never see him again.
Nancy Fors went with her on the plane, to be either her support or her guard. They went together all the way back to Stockholm.
part three
Chapter ONE
There were a number of interrogations back in Stockholm, too. Two Swedish citizens had lost their lives in Southeast Asia. Justine had been in contact with both of them.
<
br /> The first day, the telephone rang so much that she pulled the jack out of the socket. The police lent her a cell phone. We have to be able to reach you, they said. Make sure that the batteries don’t run down.
But every time they mentioned Nathan Gendser’s name something happened to her breathing; she had to loosen the clothes around her neck and she began to hyperventilate. She cried and ripped wounds into her arms.
She had been exposed to trauma. They gave her the name of a psychologist, but she didn’t bother to contact her.
She did not dare refuse to answer the cell phone. One of the first days, Nathan’s son Micke called. She let him come by the house.
There was a certain similarity between them, and as soon as she saw it, she had to start crying again. She rushed up from her chair in the blue room and left him by himself. Sitting on the bed in her room, she heard him wander about the house calling for her. Finally, she stepped back into the hall.
He was standing on the stairs, gripping the railing tightly. The bird was flying around the ceiling; he had been alone for so long now that unfamiliar voices made him excited. Justine called to him, but it took a while until he flew to her.
“Don’t be afraid,” she called down the stairs. “The bird is more afraid than you are.”
Then she thought of the tigers and how Ben used the exact words: “He’s far away from here; he’s much more afraid of you.”
She sat down on the top step, sit down, she told the boy, did you know that we saw a tiger’s spoor?
“Do you think a tiger could have killed him?” he said thickly.
“More likely it was an elephant.”
“An elephant…”
“Yes, there were elephants near the camp.”
“Jesus Christ!… Did you see them?”
“Not me. One of the guys with us in the jungle, Ben, said that he had never had experienced an animal attacking.”
“Maybe he annoyed them?”
“Your father?”
“Yes.”
“No, he didn’t bother them. But maybe there was a sick or injured animal… you never know what could happen… the jungle is so… well, unpredictable.”
“He was so into this job. I’ve never seen him like that. He thought he’d found his niche, we talked about me… eventually…”
“How old are you, Micke?”
“Soon I’ll be sixteen.”
“Almost grown up.”
He shrugged.
Suddenly, it all seemed to her a scene from the theater. She got up and went to him, next to him on the stair. The bird flew away to her room.
She placed her hand on the boy’s head. The lines came just as they were supposed to.
“Go home and comfort your sisters. We can believe that your pappa is doing fine wherever he is. He was a man of adventure; he died with his boots on, as they say. He died when he was most happy. Out in nature, in the middle of a great adventure. How many people get to do that?”
And as she spoke, she realized that what she was saying was the truth. By sacrificing the one person she loved and valued more than any other, she had let him escape from trivial everyday life which sooner or later would overcome him, as it overcomes all of humanity. He would never be forced to return home, never need to grow old, never need to experience how his body broke down bit by bit, so that he finally would be sitting crippled and distorted by arthritis, forgotten and alone in a nursing home somewhere. She had helped him escape all that.
But the sacrifice was enormous.
The awkward boy fell to pieces; he cried loudly and violently.
She embraced him, as she had once embraced his father, felt his jacket and skin.
“He was so wonderful, Nathan, so strong and fine and courageous. I have never loved anyone as much as I loved your pappa.”
She pushed him carefully away.
“Sometimes I used to play for him. I have a horn… Maybe I could play a melody or two for you, if you want.”
“What kind of horn?” he said, suspiciously.
“An old post horn which I received when I was a little girl.”
“I don’t know… Can someone really play those things?”
“Oh, yes.”
She got up and took down the instrument. It was covered by a thin layer of dust. She rubbed it with a fold of her skirt.
“I played for him a few times. He liked to hear me play.”
She stood by the window and placed the horn to her lips.
While she played, she saw the boy clench his fists.
When he had left, she broke down. A shrieking and cackling laugh rose from her throat. She wasn’t able to stop it. It gushed out of her, forced her to cramp up. She pressed her tongue to the wall, the taste of stone, the taste of dust and stone. But the laugh kept coming.
Until it finally hacked itself to pieces, until it transformed into crying.
Then there was Martina’s parents. A very absurd story in itself.
Hans Nästman, a policeman who had spoken to her quite a bit, insisted on this.
“Of course I want to meet with them,” she said. “It’s just been so difficult. I’ve been so tired.”
She did not want them in her house. She didn’t say that to Hans Nästman, though. She said, “Can we meet in a room at the police station?”
“I’ll take care of it,” he promised.
He even came to pick her up. It was a normal, neutral car and he was wearing normal clothes.
“You have a nice place here,” he said, and looked out over the lake. “And the boat down there; it’s not exactly small.”
“It was my father’s.”
“Not bad at all. Can you drive it?”
“I haven’t driven it very far. Just around and about on the lake. But maybe I’ll take a longer trip someday, maybe to Gotland or Åland.”
“Well, you’ll have to get more practice in. Have you taken a skipper’s examination?”
He was speaking with a trace of dialect; it seemed like the Värmland one.
The bird was in the attic. For some reason she didn’t want Hans Nästman to see him. She locked the door and followed him.
The car smelled new, a good smell. She thought about her old Opel and maybe it was just this moment that she decided to buy a new car.
Too late, she noticed they weren’t heading to the police station on Kungsholmen.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“They live in Djursholm. They wanted to have you visit them in their home.”
A pain in her head, as if her head were shrinking.
“What’s wrong? Do you have something against it?”
“Not at all. It’s just the smell in the car… I just feel a little carsick. Maybe we could roll down the window just a little bit?”
Their last name was Andersson. She realized that she had never known what Martina’s last name had been. Their house was as gray as a bunker with high narrow windows.
“I wonder if this is a Ralph Erskine,” said Hans Nästman. “What?”
“The guy who designed the place, I mean.”
“No idea.”
He walked closely behind her, so closely that he almost stepped on her heels.
“Nice area,” she said, to have something to say. “Yes, indeed. I wouldn’t have anything against living here.
But you can’t complain. Where you live is just as nice.”
The door was made from a massive piece of wood. There was a door knocker in the shape of a lion’s head. Hans Nästman was about to use it when the door opened. A man wearing a dark suit was standing in the doorway.
“Not to bother with that,” he said. “You can’t hear it from the inside anyway. It’s mostly there as a decoration.”
He was thin and tanned; he wore his hair in a ponytail. He gripped her hand.
“Mats Andersson. Welcome.”
Hans Nästman held onto her elbow, guided her into the house. She could sense movement in the house.
�
�Come in, my wife will be joining us soon.”
He lowered his voice.
“This has been… how should I put it… difficult for her, naturally, for both of us.”
They entered a large, longish room, decorated totally in black and white. There was a grand piano in the middle of the room. The sun burst into the room through narrow windows making a staff-like pattern. A row of black leather armchairs stood against one wall. Next to them, some kind of altar had been placed, with candles in silver candlesticks and a photo of Martina, happy and smiling, wearing a dress of lilac linen. One could see her nipples through the fabric.
The policeman went up to the photo.
“Yes,” said her father. “That’s her.”
“I thought so. When was it taken?”
“Last summer, during one of those really hot days. She loved the heat; she never should have been born in a country like ours.”
“So she was twenty-four when it was taken?”
Her father said, “Yes, she should have been. Excuse me for a moment; I need to…”
And he disappeared from the room, and everything was silent.
They sat down beside each other on the armchairs. The grand piano’s lid was lifted; it was a Steinway.
“Maybe you’ve heard of Mats H. Andersson?” the policeman asked. “He’s a famous concert pianist. Or maybe you don’t know much about classical music?”
Her eyes rested on the piano’s emblem, it was embellished with gold and looked like a cognac cup. She suddenly had a longing for a glass of port or sherry.
They heard Martina’s pappa talking out there, exhorting, like talking to a puppy. Then he stood in the doorway with a tray and some coffee cups.
“My wife will come in just a minute,” he said, almost shrilly.
She entered, her head cast down. She was younger than Justine had imagined. She had Martina’s dark hair and somewhat squinting eyes. There was something sluggish and slow about her.
“Marianne,” she said and reached out her hand. “I’m taking Sobril right now. I assume it’s not something I can hide.”
Her husband entered with a coffee pot. When he began to pour, the lid fell off and knocked over one of the cups. Her face looked like a polecat.
“I can’t stand that noise, I’ve said,” she exclaimed. His earlobes turned red.
Good Night, My Darling Page 23
