by Håkan Nesser
My head was naturally full of Mariam Kadhar, would have been no matter what the weather, but there was also something about these snowflakes that seemed to say something about her. Far beyond the words, I tell myself, where so many connections are hidden.
Yes, in the big, fresh silence beyond language and signs and other glitter. To speak like Rein.
If I remember right, it was only two days after my visit to Mariam Kadhar that I discovered that someone was watching me.
The first sensation came one morning when I was on my feet unusually early – I took a walk over to the grocery at Waterloo Markt – and the impression was registered by my brain without my knowing it. Not until the same afternoon, when the pursuer came in and sat down at one of the rear tables in the reference department where I spent my time, was the first image developed, and I knew that it was the same person who had been waiting for me outside the tobacco shop on Utrechtstraat while I bought cigarettes. A tall, slightly stooped man roughly my own age, with dark, thinning hair and brown-tinted glasses. Inside the library he had hung his coat over the back of the chair and when I noticed him, he was browsing in a book that he appeared to have taken from a shelf more or less at random. Naturally I could not turn around to observe him, but when I went out to the toilet a little later with my folder under my arm, I passed him at a distance of only one metre and had time to study his appearance rather carefully. Thoroughly enough, in any case, that I would surely recognize him if he showed up another time.
Obviously I was still not a hundred per cent convinced that it was as I suspected – that he was actually following me. However, I became so that same evening; when I stopped for the day I walked over towards Maertens’ office on Prohaskaplein, because it was a Thursday, and after only a hundred or so metres I had a feeling that there was someone moving in my tracks. I picked up the pace, took a short cut across Megse Plein and Verdamm Park, made my way around the same block on the north side of the park a couple of times and at last slipped into a narrow alley, where I waited, crouched behind some bicycles. After only ten seconds he passed by on the street.
I stayed behind in the alley another few minutes before I continued the two blocks over to Maertens’ office. The whole thing seemed bizarre to me. Whoever it was who was assigned to shadow me and watch my doings, and whatever purpose there was behind it, the whole thing mostly left an amateurish impression. I had a little difficulty seeing any point to it either; what seemed most probable – in any event it was what first popped up in my head – was that it had something to do with my visit to Mariam Kadhar. Or that something about Rein’s manuscript had leaked out somehow.
At this stage no other alternatives occurred to me.
As I stepped into Maertens’ office, it also struck me that the simplest explanation for the shadow’s clumsiness must be that it was intentional. Their idea was that I would become aware that someone was watching me, but there was no time to brood over what design might lie behind such a thing.
In any event, there wasn’t time right then. You see, for the first time since I engaged him, Maertens had something to present. True, he stressed that it might very well be a wrong track, and he warned me not to get my hopes up too much.
Then he shoved a little brown envelope across the desk. I opened it and read a street address that I didn’t recognize.
‘One of the suburbs,’ Maertens explained. ‘You get there by train in half an hour.’
‘So, have you seen her there?’
He executed his usual shoulder shrug.
‘Not me personally. Just one of my employees.’
‘When?’
‘Yesterday. Saw her go into one of the high-rises, but she took the lift up and he wasn’t able to see what floor she got off on. He’s a bit lame and has problems with stairs . . . well, we’ve been watching the front door today, of course, but she hasn’t been seen.’
‘Are you sure that it’s her?’
‘Not at all,’ he said with a smile. ‘The birthmark matches, but who can say what a woman looks like three years later?’
I stuffed the envelope in my inside pocket and left him. When I came out on the street the bells in Keymer Church were just starting to strike nine and I understood that I might as well delay my visit out to the suburbs until the following day.
We had dinner at our hotel the second day, and it was while we were drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette afterwards that she explained that she was going to leave and meet Mauritz Winckler the next morning.
It happened that way too. I stood out on the balcony and watched her drive away in the car up the winding road that went over the mountains to the valley and the villages on the other side. Could follow her progress all the way up to the pass between two dark massifs, where the white Audi suddenly dissolved and disappeared as quickly as a snowflake in water.
The day was tuned in the same key; overcast, with threatening cloud formations that hung over the mountaintops. I decided on a hike up the mountain in the very same direction. Had no desire to be out among people and buildings, actually had no desire for anything at all except for my wife, but I recognize these occasions when it is necessary to get away. I always have. When the disquiet of the soul is too strong and must be converted and watered down in something physical, and right after twelve o’clock I set off with a few bottles of beer and a sack of sandwiches that had been prepared for me down in the kitchen.
After an hour, the rain was over me. I soon found a grotto however, and I spent the whole afternoon there sitting on a stone and gazing out through the curtain of water towards the landscape, which had lost all outlines and much of its beauty that day.
Sat there and finished my bottles of beer and slowly chewed the sandwiches, while I rejected one plan after the other. Also thought a bit about the strangely smooth skin on the inside of my wife’s thigh; other women’s too, of course, but mostly about Ewa’s. It seemed to me, in any event right then, so paradoxically innocent, this soft flesh, and I wondered whether it was possible by means of sensation alone, with the light touch of the fingertips, to decide where on the body a certain section of skin is located.
These thoughts naturally distracted me a bit, and the ultimate solution did not appear until I was on my way down again but even so, by the time I stepped into the hotel reception again it was clear to me. Not in the slightest detail with every step worked out, but in broad strokes, and it was with a feeling of grim satisfaction that I got into the shower and let hot water replace the cold sprinkle that had soaked me during the entire hour-long return hike.
I think I got the idea from an old movie that I had seen in my youth, probably on TV, but I never remembered the title, either then or later; although perhaps my plan only derived from one of the many archetypes of crime, with an origin as unclear as the soup the innkeeper chose to offer me in my solitude that same evening.
It was a great solitude and a hopeless soup.
When Ewa returned it was past three o’clock in the morning and I pretended to be asleep. I am quite certain that she understood that I was only pretending, but she played her role anyway and padded carefully around in the dark room, exactly as I used to do myself, six months earlier.
I have forgotten the name of that woman.
The suburb was called Wassingen and consisted of two dozen high-rises and a shopping centre. I didn’t see any older construction and I assumed that it all originated from the late sixties or early seventies.
From the station I followed the winding snake of people who, via some foul-smelling pedestrian tunnels covered with graffiti, emerged into the reluctant light of day on a grey, heartless square. Shops and various service establishments fenced the square in from three directions and from the fourth a relentless wind was blowing in from the sea. I remember thinking that if Hell had been built in our day, they might well have used this architecture.
I found my way to the relevant building. It was a greyish-brown, damp-stained concrete affair with sixteen storeys.
I made a quick estimate and calculated that it ought to house somewhere between a thousand and twelve hundred people. On the directory inside the front door where Private Detective Maertens’ emissary supposedly saw my wife go in, there were seventy-two different names. I left the building and sat in a cafe in the shopping centre. Thought about several alternative strategies while I tried to keep an eye on all the women walking past in one direction or the other.
No acceptable plans of action showed up in my head, only a growing feeling of despair and futility, but then my gaze fell on the newsstand that was across from the cafe. I finished my coffee, went over and browsed the selection for a while, and finally bought six copies of a Christian weekly magazine called Wake Up. After that I made my way back to the building and got started.
Just over an hour later I had rung sixty-four doorbells. Because it was getting to be rather late on a Friday afternoon, I had also got answers at the majority, forty-six of them; I had sold two copies of Wake Up and not had so much as a glimpse of Ewa.
I threw the remaining copies of the magazine in a rubbish bin and returned through the tunnels to the station. Twilight had now descended; the feeling of alienation was starting to sink its claws into me in earnest, and while waiting for the train I had three glasses of whisky in the bar. Tried to initiate a conversation with the bartender too, an almost gigantic bodybuilder type with tattoos both high and low, but he only muttered dismissively and never raised his eyes from the computer game in front of him on the bar. I noted that he moved his lips a little while he read.
I returned home to Ferdinand Bol and called Maertens from down in the cafe, but as I said it was Friday evening and I got no answer. Thus it had to wait until Monday to settle the bill and decline future use of his services.
I continued drinking whisky the whole evening. Remember that I almost got into a row with a ruddy Norwegian at a bar in the vicinity of Leidse Plein, and on the way home stumbled over a bicycle on the pavement and got a couple of sizeable scrapes across the knuckles.
The most lasting negative from this evening, however, was that I managed to lose the list where I had checked off all the apartments I peeped into out in Wassingen, and when I look back I understand that this alone was probably what made me wait so long to pay my next visit.
In any event, I know that at this stage I had in no way given up the idea of actually finding Ewa; my evident depression that afternoon and evening was only a temporary resignation prior to the task.
Temporary and, as I see it, understandable in some ways.
On Monday I settled my bill with Maertens. I visited him before I went to the library; there was a little dispute about whether the Wassingen lead should count as a substantial result or not, but at last he gave in and we went by the lower rate.
He did not wish me good luck when we shook hands, and I understood that he was still of the opinion that I would do best to forget the whole thing and devote myself to something more meaningful. I had a few critical viewpoints on the tip of my tongue concerning lack of interest and engagement, but I held back and left him without further comment.
During the whole weekend, ever since the Wassingen lead was on the table, I had more or less managed to repress the question of the person who was tailing me, but just as I stepped through the doors to the library, I happened to think about him again. He showed up in my awareness like a will-o’-the-wisp without warning, and I remember that it felt as if I could conjure up his presence in the reference room.
For that reason it was almost with a feeling of disappointment that I found the premises completely empty. During the whole afternoon, as I continued working with Rein’s manuscript, I only had company for half an hour, when two students sat and whispered about some common assignment at one of the tables in the very back.
I never saw a glimpse of any pursuer.
None of this will amount to anything, I thought several times this Monday. It will all fizzle out, as usual with all intentions and purposes in this accursed life.
And nevertheless I knew it was not that way. Nevertheless I knew that sooner or later everything would yield, and it was only a question of showing a bit of patience and persistence. There are signs and there are signs.
Rein’s text was not particularly sensational either, at least for the first days of that week. If I remember correctly it was not until Thursday that I encountered something that forced me to start speculating anew: after a number of pages of rather unclear flashbacks of someone’s childhood – probably R’s own – suddenly the text opened up, and while the tea was cooling in my yellow plastic mug I translated the following paragraph:
Documentation. During those fleeting moments when the anguish let go R started thinking about documentation. When all is over the wound must not simply close up like a footstep in water, from the dictatorship of oblivion and the continuous present. One morning she is on the square shopping for vegetables, always these vegetables that must not be a day old, her memento mori, he searches through her belongings, she knows that he would never do this and has not bothered to hide. Finds letters, four letters, three are clear enough, the fourth a conspiracy. They are conspiring, they are actually doing that, he feels drops of sweat break out on his forehead when he understands this, they are conspiring against his life. R goes out on the beach, fills his lungs with uncontaminated sea air, continues out into the water, all the way to his waist he continues, stands there in the indolent swells and sees his life just as fleeting and just as vainly struggling as the slimy blue jellyfish who have drifted too far in and are never going to escape again. Returns to the house, she is still there among the vegetables at the square, it takes time, perhaps she is in bed fucking G too, he puts the letters in a folder, drives into the city and copies them, she is still gone when he returns. R hesitates. Copies for posterity? Goes halfway and replaces two among the panties in the bureau, places two originals plus two copies in a plastic bag, wraps it in canvas, very deliberate and very meticulously he goes about these assurances for posterity. Goes out to the shed, gets a spade, looks around and chooses. Out in the middle of the soft, pitted lawn stands this monstrously ugly sundial, and in the loose earth on its north side he buries his treasure and his will. Drinks several glasses of whisky. M not back yet, she is in bed fucking G, he knows that now, between wildly parted thighs she receives G’s viscous semen, two sweaty animals in a hotel room in the city. Belvedere, presumably, or at Kraus in the neighbouring city further away, because they are so damned careful, M and G; but R drinks more whisky and he can picture them anyway. How they are fucking and batting around his life, raised above all doubt now, he sits down to write, his countermove becomes these words as always, these thin and bloodless abstractions in order to ensnare the sweaty homicidal bodies, an implacably growing cocoon of words around the stinking flesh. R fears and R knows, but R writes.
Pages 122–23. That evening I finally violated Darke’s rule. Without bothering to translate I simply read the rest of the manuscript.
Yes, in the glow of the heavy cast-iron floor lamp and with Beatrice resting across my feet, I read the last forty pages of Germund Rein’s writings. The very last lines were a quotation from one of his first books, The Legend of the Truth:
When one day we no longer understand our lives, we must still continue as if we were a book or a film. There are no other instructions.
I set aside the papers. The time is a few minutes past eleven and I notice that my body is tense as a spring. I stand up and try to relax, pace back and forth in the apartment awhile and finally stand at the window with a cigarette. Turn off the lamp too and observe, like on so many evenings, the sparse movements out there in the darkness. Thoughts get stuck in me, glide in and out of each other and remove the words at a safe distance. Even so, I understand that I must do something. I have come to a point where all defences are cut off. I cannot understand why he turned it over to me, but as of now it is too late to buy your way out of taking action. It does not fall on Horatio to
harbour doubt.
After a while the tension eases. I go down to the cafe, but I only have a couple of beers and it is with a fairly clear head that I decide what strategies I must adopt.
These are, of course, nothing remarkable. I see no alternative solutions now, and I won’t later either.
I had not seen Janis Hoorne in two and a half years, but he was in the phone book, and when I called he had no difficulty recalling our most recent meeting.
It had taken place in connection with a little book fair up in Kiel and we had spent a few evenings together at the bars. He was the same type of lone wolf as me, it turned out, and there had been a lot to talk about, even if his rather considerable alcohol consumption of course placed a few obstacles in the way.
Obstacles to the kinds of things that perhaps could have been said. From other quarters I knew that now and then he would spend time at various clinics, but when he answered now – it was around lunchtime the first Sunday in March – he sounded both articulate and energetic. He was busy right then with a project for television about various extreme right-wing movements, he explained; found himself in the middle of an intensive work period, but even so seemed almost enthusiastic that I had called.
It was actually just a simple piece of information that I wanted from him – I had not managed to find the address to Rein’s summer house through open channels, and because I knew that Hoorne had been there – he had talked about it during that week in Kiel – that was the first possibility that came to mind.
Anyway, he insisted on getting together and we decided to meet at Suuryajja, a little Indonesian restaurant in the Greijpstraak neighbourhood, on Monday evening.
It was a long session with both food and drink and conversation about existential matters in that particular, slightly sarcastic tone that I remembered from those evenings two and a half years ago. Hoorne expressed no surprise whatsoever at the fact that I planned to go out to Rein’s house by the sea – my cover was that I was working on a number of personal notes that might perhaps result in a biography at some point – and when we parted well into the wee hours, I had both the address and a meticulously drawn route map in my inside pocket. The house often went under the designation ‘The Cherry Orchard’, I had also been told, but he did not know why. Something to do with Chekhov, naturally, but exactly what the connection was neither of us could establish, despite certain speculations. Cautiously I had also tried to pump him a bit concerning Rein and his marriage – after all, Hoorne had known him a little – but I had not produced any information that might indicate that there were suspicions about the death. On the contrary; for Hoorne the suicide had not come as a surprise at all. Rein had been in the right stage, he thought – in one of those low points in life, when it is actually only a question of whether the pendulum will swing back or not.
