“Have you got a minute?” he said.
“What happened?”
Svedberg looked uneasy, and Wallander could feel the last of his patience dwindling away.
“I assume there’s something you want to say since you’ve come here,” he said. “I was just going home.”
“I’m afraid you’ll have to go to Simrishamn,” Svedberg said.
“Why?”
“They phoned.”
“Who did?”
“Our colleagues.”
“The police in Simrishamn? What did they want?”
Svedberg seemed to make sure both feet were planted firmly on the ground before replying.
“They’ve had to arrest your father,” he said.
“The Simrishamn police have arrested my father? What for?”
“Apparently he’s been involved in a violent fight,” Svedberg said.
Wallander stared at him for quite a while without speaking. Then he sat down at his desk.
“Tell me again,” he said. “Slowly.”
“They called about an hour ago,” Svedberg said. “Since you were out they spoke to me. A few hours ago they arrested your father. He had started fighting in the liquor store in Simrishamn. It was apparently pretty violent. Then they discovered he was your father. So they called here.”
Wallander sighed, but said nothing. He got slowly to his feet.
“I’ll drive over then,” he said.
“Would you like me to come with you?”
“No thanks.”
Wallander left the station. He didn’t know whether he was coming or going.
An hour later he walked into the police station in Simrishamn.
9
On the way to Simrishamn Wallander had thought about the Silk Knights. It was many years since he had needed to remind himself that they had once been real.
The last time his father had been arrested by the police was when Wallander was eleven. He could remember it very clearly. They were still living in Malmö, and his reaction to his father’s arrest had been a strange mixture of shame and pride.
That time, however, his father had not been arrested in a liquor store, but in a public park in the center of town. It was a Saturday in the early summer of 1956, and Wallander had been allowed to accompany his father and some of his friends on a night out.
His father’s friends, who came to their house at irregular intervals and always unexpectedly, were great adventurers in his young eyes. They rolled up in shiny American cars, always wore silk suits, and they often had broad-brimmed hats and heavy gold rings on their fingers. They came to visit the little studio that smelled of turpentine and oil paint, to view and perhaps to buy some of the pictures his father had painted. Sometimes he ventured into the studio himself and hid behind the pile of junk in the darkest corner, old canvases that mice had been nibbling, and he would shudder as he listened to the bargaining that always ended with a couple of swigs from a bottle of brandy. He had realized that it was thanks to these great adventurers—the Silk Knights, as he used to call them in his secret diaries—that the Wallanders had food on the table. It was one of those supreme moments in life when he witnessed a bargain being struck, and the unknown men peeling money from enormous bundles with their ring-adorned fingers and handing over rather smaller bundles which his father would stuff into his pocket before giving a little bow.
He could still recall the conversations, the terse, almost stuttering repartee, often followed by lame protests from his father and chuck-ling noises from the visitors.
“Seven landscapes without grouse and two with,” one of them would say. His father rummaged among the piles of finished paintings, had them approved, and then the money would land on the table with a gentle thud. Wallander was eleven years old, standing in his dark corner, almost overcome by the turpentine fumes, and thinking that what he was observing was the grown-up life that also lay in store for him, once he had crossed the river formed by Class Seven—or was it Class Nine in those days? He was surprised to find that he could not remember. Then he would emerge from the shadows when it was time to carry the canvases out to the shiny cars, where they were to be loaded into the trunk or onto the backseat. This was a moment of great significance, because now and then one of the Knights would notice the boy helping with the carrying and covertly slip him a five-kronor note. Then he and his father would stand at the gate and watch the car roll away, and once it was gone his father would go through a metamorphosis: the obsequious manner would be gone in a flash, and he would spit after the man who had just driven off and say, with contempt in his voice, that once again he had been swindled.
This was one of the great childhood mysteries. How could his father think he had been swindled when every time he had collected a wad of money in exchange for those boring paintings, all identical, with a landscape illuminated by a sun that was never allowed to set?
Just once he had been present at a visit of these unknown men when the ending turned out otherwise. There were two of them, and he had never seen them before—as he skulked in the shadows behind the remains of an old laundry mangle, he gathered from the conversation that they were new business contacts. It was an important moment, for it was not a foregone conclusion that they would approve of the paintings. He had helped to carry the canvases to the car, a Dodge on this occasion (he had learned how to open the trunk on all different kinds of cars). Then the two men had suggested they should all go out for something to eat. He remembered that one of them was called Anton and the other something foreign, possibly Polish. He and his father had squeezed in among the canvases on the backseat; the fantastic men even had a record player in the car, and they had listened to Johnny Bohde as they drove to the park. His father had gone to one of the restaurants with the two men, and Wallander had been given a handful of one-krona pieces and sent to play on the merry-go-rounds. It was a warm day in early summer, a gentle breeze was blowing in from the Sound, and he planned out in great detail what he would be able to buy for his money. It would have been unfair to save the money, it had been given to him for spending, to help him enjoy that afternoon and evening in the park. He had been on the merry-go-rounds and taken two rides on the big wheel, which took you so high you could see as far as Copenhagen. Occasionally he checked to make sure that his father, Anton, and the Pole were still there. He could see even from a distance that lots of glasses and bottles were being carried to their table, and plates of food and white napkins that the men tucked into their shirt collars. He remembered thinking how, when he had crossed that river after Class Seven or Nine or whatever, he would be like one of those men who drove in a shiny car and rewarded artists by peeling off bills and dropping them on a table in a dirty studio.
The afternoon had turned into evening, and rain threatened. He decided to have one more ride on the big wheel, but he never did. Something had happened. The big wheel and the merry-go-rounds and the rifle range suddenly lost all their attraction, and people started hurrying toward the restaurant. He had gone along with the tide, elbowed his way to the front, and seen something he could never forget. It had been a rite of passage, something he had not realized existed, but it taught him that life is made up of a series of rites of passage of whose existence we are unaware until we find ourselves in the midst of them.
When he pushed and shoved his way to the front he found his own father in a violent fight with one of the Silk Knights and several security guards, waiters, and other complete strangers. The dining table had been overturned, glasses and bottles were broken, a beefsteak dripping with gravy and dark brown onion rings were dangling from his father’s arm, his nose was bleeding, and he was throwing punches left, right, and center. It had all happened so quickly. Wallander shouted his father’s name, in a mixture of fear and panic—but then it was all over. Burly, red-faced bouncers intervened; police officers appeared from nowhere, and his father was dragged away along with Anton and the Pole. All that was left was a battered broad-brimmed hat. He tried t
o run after them and grab hold of his father, but he was pulled back. He stumbled to the gate, and burst into tears as he watched his father being driven away in a police car.
He walked all the way home, and it started raining before he got there. Everything was in turmoil, his universe had crumbled away, and he only wished he could have erased everything that had happened. But you cannot erase reality. He hurried on through the downpour and wondered whether he would ever see his father again. He sat all night in the studio, waiting for him. The smell of turpentine almost choked him, and every time he heard a car he would run out to the gate. He fell asleep in the end, curled up on the floor.
He woke up to find his father bending over him. He had a piece of cotton wool in one of his nostrils, and his left eye was swollen and discolored. He stank of drink, a sort of stale oil smell, but the boy sat up and flung his arms around his father.
“They wouldn’t listen to me,” his father said. “They wouldn’t listen. I told them my boy was with us, but they wouldn’t listen. How did you get home?”
Wallander told him that he had walked all the way home through the rain.
“I’m sorry it turned out like that,” his father said. “But I got so angry. They were saying something that just wasn’t true.”
His father picked up one of the paintings and studied it with his good eye. It was one with a grouse in the foreground.
“I got so angry,” he said again. “Those bastards maintained it was a partridge. They said I had painted the bird so badly, you couldn’t tell if it was a grouse or a partridge. What else can you do but get angry? I won’t have them put my honor and competence in doubt.”
“Of course it’s a grouse,” Wallander had said. “Anybody can see it isn’t a partridge.”
His father regarded him with a smile. Two of his front teeth were missing. His smile’s broken, Wallander thought. My father’s smile’s broken.
Then they had a cup of coffee. It was still raining, and his father slowly calmed down.
“Imagine not being able to tell the difference between a grouse and a partridge,” he kept protesting, half incantation, half prayer. “Claiming I can’t paint a bird the way it looks.”
All this went through Wallander’s mind as he drove to Simrishamn. He also recalled that the two men, the one called Anton and the Pole, kept coming back every year to buy paintings. The fight, the sudden anger, the excessive tipples of brandy, everything had turned into a hilarious episode they could now remember and laugh about. Anton had even paid the dentist’s bills. That’s friendship, he thought. Behind the fight there was something more important, friendship between the art dealers and the man who kept making his never-changing pictures so that they had something to sell.
He thought about the painting in the apartment in Helsingborg, and about all the other apartments he had not seen but where nevertheless the grouse was portrayed against a landscape over which the sun never set.
For the first time he thought he had gained an insight. Throughout his life his father had prevented the sun from setting. That had been his livelihood, his message. He had painted pictures so that people who bought them to hang on their walls could see it was possible to hold the sun captive.
He arrived in Simrishamn, parked outside the police station, and went in. Torsten Lundström was at his desk. He was due to retire and Wallander knew him to be a kind man, a police officer of the old school who wanted nothing but good for his fellow men. He nodded at Wallander and put down the newspaper he was reading. Wallander sat on a chair in front of his desk and looked at him.
“Can you tell me what happened?” he said. “I know my father got mixed up in a fight at the liquor store, but that’s about all I know.”
“Well, it was like this,” Lundström said with a friendly smile. “Your father drove up to the liquor store in a taxi at about four in the afternoon, went inside, took the ticket with his number from the machine, and sat down to wait. It seems he didn’t notice when his number came up. After a while he went up to the counter and demanded to be served even though he had missed his turn. The clerk handled the whole thing really badly, apparently insisting that your father get a new number and start at the end of the line. Your father refused, another customer whose number had come up pushed his way past and told your father to get lost. To everybody’s surprise your father was so angry he turned and thumped this man. The clerk intervened, so your father started fighting with him as well. You can imagine what happened next. But at least nobody got hurt. Your father might have some pain in his right hand, though. He seems to be pretty strong, despite his age.”
“Where is he?”
Lundström pointed to a door in the background.
“What’ll happen now?” Wallander asked.
“You can take him home. I’m afraid he’ll be charged with assault. Unless you can work it out with the man he punched and the clerk. I’ll have a word with the prosecutor and do what I can.”
He handed Wallander a piece of paper with two names and addresses on it.
“I don’t think the fellow from the store will give you any difficulty,” he said. “I know him. The other man, Sten Wickberg, could be a bit of a problem. He owns a firm of haulage contractors. Lives in Kivik. He seems to have made up his mind to come down hard on your poor father. You could try calling him. The number’s there. And Simrishamn Taxis are owed 230 kronor. In all the confusion, he never got around to paying. The driver’s name is Waldemar Kåge. I’ve talked to him. He knows he’ll get his money.”
Wallander took the sheet of paper and put it in his pocket. Then he motioned toward the door behind him.
“How is he?”
“I think he’s simmered down. But he still insists he had every right to defend himself.”
“Defend himself?” Wallander said. “But he was the one who started it all.”
“Well, he feels he had a right to defend his place in line,” Lundström said.
“For Christ’s sake!”
Lundström stood up. “You can take him home now,” he said. “By the way, what’s this I hear about your car going up in flames?”
“There could have been something wrong with the wiring,” Wallander said. “Anyway, it was an old piece of junk.”
“I’ll disappear for a few minutes,” Lundström said. “The door locks itself when you close it.”
“Thanks for your help,” Wallander said.
“What help?” Lundström said, putting on his cap and going out.
Wallander knocked and opened the door. His father was sitting on a bench in the bare room, cleaning his fingernails with a nail. When he saw who it was, he rose to his feet and was clearly annoyed.
“You took your time,” he said. “How long did you intend to make me wait here?”
“I came as quickly as I could,” Wallander said. “Let’s go home now.”
“Not until I’ve paid for the taxi,” his father said. “I want to do the right thing.”
“We’ll take care of that later.”
They left the police station and drove home in silence. Wallander could see that his father had already forgotten what had happened. It wasn’t until they reached the turnoff to Glimmingehus that Wallander turned to him.
“What happened to Anton and the Pole?” he asked.
“Do you remember them?” his father asked in surprise.
“There was a fight on that occasion as well,” Wallander said with a sigh.
“I thought you would have forgotten about that,” his father said. “I don’t know what became of the Pole. It’s almost twenty years since I last heard of him. He had gone over to something he thought would be more profitable. Pornographic magazines. I don’t know how he did. But Anton’s dead. Drank himself to death. That must be nearly twenty-five years ago.”
“What were you doing at the liquor store?” Wallander asked.
“What you normally do there,” his father said. “I wanted to buy some brandy.”
“I though
t you didn’t like brandy.”
“My wife enjoys a glass in the evening.”
“Gertrud drinks brandy?”
“Why shouldn’t she? Don’t start thinking you can tell her what to do and what not to do, like you’ve been trying to do to me.”
Wallander could not believe his ears. “I’ve never tried to tell you what to do,” he said angrily. “If anybody’s been trying to tell somebody else what to do, it’s been you telling me.”
“If you’d listened to me you’d never have joined the police force,” his father said. “And looking at what’s happened these last few years, that would have been to your advantage, of course.”
Wallander realized the best he could do was to change the subject. “It was a good thing you weren’t injured,” he said.
“You have to preserve your dignity,” his father said. “And your place in line. Otherwise they walk all over you.”
“I am afraid you might be charged.”
“I shall deny it.”
“Deny what? Everybody knows it was you who started the fight. There’s no way you can deny it.”
“All I did was preserve my dignity,” his father said. “Do they put you in prison for that nowadays?”
“You won’t go to prison,” Wallander said. “You might have to pay damages, though.”
“I shall refuse,” his father said.
“I’ll pay them,” Wallander said. “You punched another customer on the nose. That sort of thing gets punished.”
“You have to preserve your dignity.”
Wallander gave up. Shortly afterward they turned into his father’s drive.
“Don’t mention this to Gertrud,” his father said as he got out of the car. Wallander was surprised by his insistent tone.
“I won’t say a word.”
Gertrud and his father had married the year before. She had started to work for him when he had begun to show signs of senility. She introduced a new dimension into his solitary life—she had visited him three days a week—and there had been a big change in his father, who no longer seemed to be senile. She was thirty years his junior, but that apparently did not matter to either of them. Wallander was aghast at the thought of their marrying, but he had discovered that she was good-hearted and determined to go through with it. He did not know much about her, beyond the fact that she was local, had two grown-up children, and had been divorced for years. They seemed to have found happiness together, and Wallander often felt a degree of jealousy. His own life seemed to be so miserable and was getting worse all the time so that what he needed was a home help for himself.
The Man Who Smiled Page 18