by Håkan Nesser
‘What are you doing in A.?’ she asked.
‘Working,’ I said.
‘On what?’
‘A translation.’
‘Rein?’
‘Yes.’
‘I almost thought as much.’
Mauritz Winckler coughed and came and sat down at the table. Ewa started serving tea from a large clay pitcher.
‘Have you been living here long?’ I asked.
‘Three years.’
‘Three years. Ever since . . .?’
‘Yes,’ Mauritz Winckler answered. ‘Ever since.’
We drank a little tea. I looked at Ewa’s birthmark on her cheek and remembered how we counted each other’s marks at a hotel in Nice once during one of the very first years.
‘How long are you staying?’ she asked.
I shrugged my shoulders.
‘Not much longer, I think. My assignment is about to end.’
‘I understand,’ said Mauritz Winckler, and I know that I wondered what it was he understood.
We sat in silence again. Avoided each other’s gazes. Mauritz Winckler had a biscuit.
‘What was it that happened in Graues?’ I asked at last.
I had thought that they would at least exchange a glance with each other, but they did not. Instead both raised their eyes and looked at me with a . . .
. . . with a seriousness that I at once found to be bordering on rude; I had come as a guest with good intentions. I quickly emptied my teacup, set it down on the saucer with an emphatic bang and straightened up.
‘What happened in Graues?’ I repeated in a slightly louder voice.
Mauritz Winckler slowly shook his head. Ewa stood up.
‘I think it’s best that you leave now,’ she said.
I sat there for a moment and deliberated with myself, then I got up from the chair. Ewa went ahead out into the hall again, and as she stood with her hand on the door handle to let me out I asked for the third time, now in a low voice, so that Mauritz Winckler would not hear it.
‘What happened in Graues?’
She opened the door.
‘I don’t intend to explain that to you, David,’ she said.
‘What do you mean?’
She looked at me with the same, almost nauseating seriousness.
‘You ask what happened in Graues. Yet you must very well understand that you have no right.’
‘No right?’
‘You have no right to find out what happened.’
I did not reply.
‘Perhaps that is what is most distressing about it all,’ she added, taking her eyes off me. ‘That you don’t understand that.’
Two completely contradictory thoughts showed up in my head; I weighed them hastily against each other, then I gave up.
‘Farewell, Ewa.’
I left without looking at her any more.
Ten minutes later I had turned onto Windemeerstraat. On the broad pavement I wandered in a south-westerly direction towards the centre with the setting, but still warming, sun in my face. There were quite a few people moving about, now and then I closed my eyes for a few seconds and bumped against a shoulder or two in the throng – I remember that I thought it gave me a peculiar sense of belonging – but in general I did not behave particularly different compared with anyone else in the crowd.
I let three trams pass by before I seized the opportunity. In reality it was a very simple procedure; two steps diagonally out into the street and then suddenly everything ceased.
Everything.
THREE
Even so there was still a time to come, and I did not understand what that would serve.
A time, thinner than vacuum, more deserted than an open sea, but then one day Henderson showed up with his absurd assertions and his pictures.
A point wandered anew in the emptiness, it lingered and grew, and I had already started to follow it with my gaze.
‘And you left her and slunk away like a whipped dog?’
I do not reply. Put a couple of the oily olives in my mouth and look out over the water. The sun has gone down in the usual orange haze a hand’s breadth above the horizon and the stillness is almost complete. We are sitting out on the terrace, each in a rope chair that – according to what he maintains – he designed himself and had some craftsman in one of the villages on the east side make. He has also added on to the house a bit; the little core of thirty or forty square metres has, with time, grown to twice that. Modernized too: water pipe from the springs up in the mountain, electric power in a cable from the village. Terraces and grapevines on the slope on the back side and a pair of stately cypresses that he moved here from the settlement on the other side of the bay and got rooted against all odds. Two dozen of his own olive trees, which, he asserts, are over five hundred years old. Up the mountain a winding donkey trail leads to a chapel, which was also included in the acquisition; an eccentric Frenchman lived there before him, lived here for more than fifty years together with a horde of cats and a cembalo, but moved home to Rouen in the autumn of old age and died within two months. The cats are gone, but the cembalo is still there.
On the whole he does not neglect many details when he tells, perhaps it is all pure confabulation, I understand in any event that it grants him a grim pleasure to have an audience again. Albeit just one. Albeit me. It is obvious that nowadays he does not associate with people. Takes the boat around the point to the main town every other or every third week to get provisions, but otherwise lives in sublime seclusion . . . an isolation that has made him considerably more talkative than I remember him. An acute and transitory loquaciousness, true, and the features of self-absorption and egoism have hardly been reduced. Conserved and refined a bit, possibly. His primary occupation in the solitude seems to be carrying stone: improving the terraces or adding on to the high, metre-thick wall that at the moment surrounds the house from two and a half directions.
‘You do agree,’ he continues, ‘that it is unforgivable to fritter away a story in that way? A story that starts with a sneeze on the radio . . .’
‘A cough.’
‘A cough, same thing. You let it all run out in the sand like spilled milk. Donkey piss! Leave them there and . . .’
‘Take off like a whipped dog, of course.’
I wait while he lights a cigarette in that affected long holder – made of ivory if I’m not mistaken.
‘You are familiar with my little ideas about life scripts?’
‘Naturally. By the way, they are hardly yours. So you want to maintain that your story is so much better?’
He snorts.
‘The comparison is a pure insult.’
He does not even look at me. Smokes and keeps his gaze directed out over the sea. Presumably he is starting to get tired now.
‘Was all this tangled intrigue really necessary?’ I ask after a few seconds of silence.
‘Of course,’ he says with obvious irritation. ‘What the hell do you think? The suspicion has to grow slowly . . . surely you don’t think it would have worked if they had been exposed all at once. Don’t put on airs, you know just as well as I do that this was how it had to be arranged . . . you do have the result!’
‘Did you count on her death too?’
He shrugs his shoulders.
‘That has nothing to do with it. What are you trying to say? Your own wife is living in the best of health together with your rival! You haven’t come here to claim that you managed this as you intended, have you?’
He lets out a laugh.
‘Goddamned dilettante! You didn’t even manage to find out what happened!’
I observe him from the side while he sips the resinated wine . . . the heavy profile with the bushy hair that has whitened under the sun; sixty-one years old, I calculate, suntanned, hale and hearty; his reputed frailty during the final years seems to have left him completely – if nothing unforeseen happens, there is much that says he could live another quarter century here in this out-of-the-way para
dise. Among his stones, his olives and his sanitized recollections.
If nothing unforeseen happens, that is.
‘No, I don’t know what happened in Graues.’
I have told my story in very brief terms; am not sure if he really listened while I carried on, but it seems to have stuck in him anyway. Now, however, he has no more comments.
‘I was thinking about “Gilliam’s Temptation” the other day,’ I continue after a period of silence.
It is one of his earliest short stories: about a man who is obsessed about directing both his own life and those closest to him in accordance with certain images and signs that come to him in various ways, primarily by way of dreams. A rather bizarre story, which ends with him burning down the house with his wife and their two sons inside; the temptation in the title refers to the protagonist’s hesitation before this final action, the difficult enticement to not . . . to not follow the instructions and his inner voices.
But then, at last, he overcomes even this.
Rein laughs.
‘Oh, yes, that one!’ He thinks a moment. ‘Yes, one can probably say that it still holds.’
‘How did you manage it?’ I ask.
‘Manage what?’
‘Well, the escape.’
‘It was no escape. Just a new passport and a simple disguise . . . and the money, of course.’
‘You weren’t drunk that evening?’
‘A little, at most.’
‘I would still maintain that you were lucky.’
‘Nonsense.’
During our entire conversation I have waited for him to at least thank me for the help, show a bit of appreciation that I met his expectations and played my role as he intended, but now, when the sun has disappeared completely and the twilight quickly starts to fall, I understand that he has never even had that thought.
Should the master thank the puppet because she danced?
The marionette because she responded to the tug on the wire?
Of course not.
I look down at my boat, pulled up on the shore. It is still light enough to make my way down the uneven stone steps (which are left from the Frenchman’s time) without a lantern, but in half an hour it will be undoable. Rein has fallen silent again and I assume that his relative talkativeness is now over for good. I observe him for a few seconds, and although he must feel my gaze, he does not turn his head. It is obvious that he wants to be left alone; I empty my glass and heave myself out of the chair.
‘I think it’s time.’
He nods, but does not get up. Just sits there and rolls yet another cigarette on his unwieldy machine.
The question comes when I have turned my back to him.
‘You aren’t having any thoughts about going to the media, are you? My new identity is airtight, I want to emphasize that. There is simply no point.’
‘Of course not.’
‘It would not be particularly becoming if you chose to behave like a sore loser too, would it?’
‘I assure you.’
‘Rein is dead.’
‘Rein is dead. Farewell.’
‘Farewell.’
When I come down to the boat, it is already so dark that I cannot make him out up there on the terrace. I do not want to light a candle and am forced to grope for a few moments for the knife under the net that is rolled up on the floor. Then I find it.
Then I sit and weigh it in my hand and feel its sharpened edge for another twenty minutes, while the darkness gets denser. Think about this and that, but nothing that would be worth mentioning and nothing that sticks with me. When I see that he has lit a lantern up there, I start to make my way once again up the uneven steps.
DEAR AGNES
Translated from the Swedish by Paul Norlen
Adapted into the film Dear Agnes
All in all it was a successful funeral.
The morning had been grey-minded and windless, but when we came out to the grave the sun had broken through the cloud cover and cast crooked shafts of light through the yellowed foliage of the elm trees.
Erich would have liked it. Autumn. The sky that suddenly lifted, leaving sharpness in the air. Clear without being cold. The fields down towards Molnar harvested but not yet ploughed up. A farmer burning undergrowth in the distance.
The minister’s name was Sildermack, a tall, skinny, pale man; we had met during the week, of course, and decided on the procedure. He’s new to the parish and suffers from some kind of deformity of the spine, which means he gets around with slightly clumsy, almost rolling movements. Makes him look older than he really is. But his face radiates light and he manages his duties without a hitch.
There were two dozen of us. The children of course. His mother with her retinue; the girlfriend and the gruff nurse.
Beatrice and Rudolf.
Justin.
Hendermaags, who had the poor judgement to drag the kids along. No older than ten or twelve; a shy boy and a girl with protruding teeth and nervous eyes, what good will it do to subject them? Neither of them had any relationship with Erich, probably haven’t seen him on more than two or three occasions, as far as I can recall.
Ebert Kenner obviously and some current colleagues that I had never seen. A quartet, to be precise; two women, two men. And Dr Monsen, who gave the eulogy inside the church and could not restrain himself from saying a few words out by the grave too.
About the clarity of autumn days and our time on earth. The analytical acuity that had been Erich’s hallmark and which the sun breaking through accompanied and bore witness to.
Words.
I got a little tired. Right there out in the dark-clad circle of mourners and semi-mourners and the sort who were there for quite general reasons, a wave of fatigue came over me. Maybe it was the actual grief that took hold of me. Not mourning for Erich primarily, but mourning for life.
Its unfairness and blind reflections. Falsifications that we sweep under the rug and keep at bay but that catch up with us anyway once we’ve turned our backs on them long enough. Haven’t been attentive enough.
I didn’t cry. Not a tear came out of my eyes during the whole ceremony; I don’t care how people interpret this, but the medications that make us dull and mute in the soul are legion in our times, so I assume that my behaviour hardly came as a surprise. I didn’t exchange a word with anyone. Tactful, confirming glances, that’s all. Handshakes. Light hugs and illusory nods.
The friends from youth, from the rowing club, carried the coffin. There were four, I recognized three of them but none by name, they all live here in Gobshejm and according to the minister they came up with that initiative themselves.
And then Henny.
It was not my idea to list everyone present, but now I see that’s what I’ve actually done.
Henny Delgado.
She was dressed in long-sleeved black inside the church, but when we came outdoors she had a dark-red poncho tossed over her shoulders. I remember that she always used to wear red, not necessarily completely, but always a splash. Something red and eye-catching. A crimson blouse or a scarf. Personally I’m blue and cold. Even when we were in high school we kept to these spheres: Henny red, yellow, ochre. Me blue and turquoise, cold colours. We could only meet in green, but at separate ends. Later, it must have been during the first autumn semester at university, we went to a colour analyst together, who also approved our intuitive choices. Held patches of fabric up against our surprised faces and expatiated on our different skin types. Pigmentation personalities, as if it were something spiritual almost.
She looked unexpectedly young, Henny. Fit and healthy somehow; I don’t really know why it surprised me, but it did. She had come alone, of course; husband and children live at home in Grothenburg, yes, I’ve never met either of the girls, but their baptism cards are duly pasted in some album.
It feels a little funny that we didn’t speak with each other, when meeting after so many years. I have a feeling, however, that she is going to be in touch. Wh
at motivates this diffuse sense I don’t know, but it would surprise me if I’m wrong. After all, we have been as close to each other as two people of the same sex can be, without being related or homosexual. A long time has passed, but there are signs and small hints that hit us on a deeper level than the cognitive and linguistic. Of course it’s like that.
Justin asked if he should stay overnight, but I declined. He is a good and understanding person, Justin, I’ve always liked him, despite his slightly uncultivated style, but I want to be alone. Just me and the dogs, a fire in the fireplace and the armchair pulled up to the window. A glass of port or two, the twilight that settles down over the garden, the gnarled, pruned-backed apple trees, the boxwood hedge and the boggy slope down towards Molnar; a few hours in absolute silence with the photo albums and the memories. Maybe I’ll have a cigarette too, it’s years since I smoked out of habit, but it is a special day and I have a couple of packs lying around.
I’m on sick leave next week too. Half of the classes are postponed, half were assigned to Bruun. As usual. It’s a shame to have to put Keats and Byron into his clumsy hands, but there was no choice. The oral exam period is only three weeks away and everything has to be covered before the fifteenth.
It feels nice that it’s over now, finally. I knew of course that one day I was going to be alone. Erich was eighteen years older than me; it wasn’t fire and passion I was looking for when I chose him, but the blue. Yet he was fifty-seven, there was never any sign that he would die so young, and Monsen also emphasized in his eulogy that he had much left to do. Researchers do not belong to the category of people whom the years consume, he maintained; not in their daily activity. I understood that in this case he was referring both to himself – he can’t be far from seventy – and one present colleague or another.
But Erich had to stop, as they say at home in Saarbrücken. Reached the finish line.
I’m sitting in the armchair with half an eye out towards the twilight and the garden, half in towards the room with the fire and the books. There have got to be a lot of volumes over the years. In the next few days I’m going to do some rearranging, I think. Move the heavy medical works up to the attic, and let literature take a more prominent place.
