STEVE SEM-SANDBERG
The Tempest
A STORY
Translated by Anna Paterson
I’ll show thee the best springs; I’ll pluck thee berries …
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, The Tempest, II 2
Contents
Title Page
Epigraph
I should not have gone back…
That something is closely remembered…
It was Ebba Simonsen who called to…
The island: it seemed as if it had always existed…
I am not sure what I expected…
After signing off, Johannes drove a…
When did the decay set in…
I often wondered what Minna remembered…
It is raining. I stand near the…
They meet up in the Simonsens’ house…
In the old days, it happened sometimes…
The Dead House: this was…
We ate oranges, crammed slivers…
We had our own inner spaces…
I have written that we went to school…
Inventory, after the first five days spent…
It is raining again. I stand at the edge…
Odd how the island landscape…
I spent days drifting along…
Mina spent most of her time…
For days afterwards, I behaved…
And predictably, what I feared most…
The attic is the only place in the house…
I must have fallen asleep om the sidecar…
Kaufmann died in January 1973…
Minna went to a foster home…
I make notes: this is the fifteenth…
A first for this visit to the island…
From now on, I take no risks.
After just a few hours’ sleep…
I stop in the hall. It is the place where…
As I found out long ago…
It was Johannes who transported the children…
It has surely been less than an hour…
Because I do not know when…
So Minna returned to us…
After the morning when the police…
After meeting in trams over…
I had asked Minna if she remembered…
After Minna’s move away from the…
She had been found floating lifeless…
They would not let me see her for a long…
I am not sure how long I can hold out here…
But of course, you went anyway…
And perhaps that is your big mistake:…
You did not come home again…
All those nights when Minna had gone…
Dawn. The sirens of fire engines…
About the Author
Also by the Author
Copyright
I should not have gone back to the island but did it all the same.
It is April. It has rained and, as always at this time of the year, strands of mist cling to the ground, enveloping the two sentry boxes at the bridge head and what remains of the iron post for the old barrier across the road. The mist reminds me of the white net curtains that Johannes used to drape over the Morello cherry trees to stop the birds from getting at the fruit; now, behind the filmy haze, the trees are bare of leaves and fruit. The surface of the water reflects only rocks and gnarled branches. Johannes always boasted that he had helped to build the bridge, as a navvy who worked with his bare hands. Before it was built, a cable ferry came and went from a ramp a few hundred metres further along. The ferry could carry vehicles, not that the roads on the island were up to much in those days. When Johannes first came to the island, he brought his motorbike across. Later, he toured the island on the bike and often took Kaufmann along in the sidecar, both wearing goggles and lined, belted leather coats with high fur collars. To cross the strait in the ferry could be hard work. The cables threatened to break in strong winds and two men on land were needed to secure the ferry to the jetty while the ferryman hauled at the cable. Everyone expected that, in the end, Kaufmann would have to agree to build a permanent connection to the mainland, though many were taken by surprise when his decision was actually announced. He and his family had for a long time treated the group of islands as their private fiefdom, to be entered only on Kaufmann’s say-so: he tolerated the few other owners of private property, the patients in the Sanatorium on West Island, and the doctors and nurses who worked there. As soon as the bridge was ready, Kaufmann ordered the construction of two bricks-and-mortar sentry boxes on each side of the bridge head on the island and hired the ferry workers as guards. In the beginning, the road barrier was in use but it grew increasingly pointless and, once Kaufmann had begun to sell off more and more land, it was simply kept upright. Roughly six years later, it was removed, leaving only the posts behind. How long ago was that, from now? I can no longer remember. Or, rather: my memory is no longer a useful measure of island time. As I walk the five hundred-odd paces it takes to cross the bridge, I have a curiously familiar sensation of being transported centuries into the past. It is as if, all around me, the landscape is taking on greater depth and breadth and colour, yes, as if even the air is becoming denser. Johannes, with the overdone pedantry of his later years, would explain that the climate is different out here on the islands. It has to do with warm sea currents: you must have noticed how jellyfish flock into the strait? Jellyfish always seek out warmer waters. On dark August nights, he often spread the star maps out on the kitchen floor to instruct me and Minna about the positions of the constellations: Andromeda, Pegasus, Cassiopeia, and, if I could make out the seventh star in the Pleiades cluster, my eyesight was unimpaired and would stay that way. By then, Johannes was already half blind but did not care to admit it and instead led us, torch in hand, out into the garden so that we could see the stars in reality and I remember thinking that if all that crumbled around us, and grew mucky and stained – like Johannes, who drank all day long until he was senseless and fell asleep wrapped in his piss-smelling blankets, or like the overgrown garden, the mouldy, decaying house or the way Minna’s raucous teenage voice terrorised the whole neighbourhood – if everything about our messed-up life together could be swapped for one single moment of peace and stillness, then this would be it. A moment when the silent darkness surrounded us and the stars shone impassively. And things would simply continue to be as they were, up there in the warm black sky. Night after night. As comfortingly safe every time, under the same fixed and always recognisable constellations. This was how I thought.
This is how a child thinks.
That something is closely remembered does not always mean you recognise the reality of it, and, least of all, the geography. Because I had decided to walk rather than take a taxi, I had to carry a heavy backpack for more than a kilometre. And because I had no idea what shape the Yellow Villa would be in, I had brought enough kit to deal with the worst possible conditions. The rucksack contained a sleeping bag and mat and, in case nothing edible was left in the house, tinned food and even a small gas stove. Still, walking had the advantage that I would be able to observe at close range all those posh newly built villas that Johannes had found so hateful, the kind of house that invariably turned its back to the road because the conservatory and the overwrought bay windows had to face the sea, a layout that once upon a time would have been unthinkable. As Johannes would have said, they are all graves, complete with carports and parabolic aerials, shrines to new money spent without restraint. The road, too, seems to follow a different route, or maybe that is how it looks to me, now that it has been widened and asphalted. It follows the rocky shoreline in long shallow curves, down to the narrowest part of the island, an isthmus like the waist of an hourglass, where the eastern and western coasts alm
ost meet, and then the road begins its rise to the top of the slope and the Kiwi supermarket. Opposite Kiwi stands the old wooden barn of a building which once upon a time housed both Brekke’s colonial grocery store and the ironmonger’s where Johannes used to buy nails and gas canisters. The building is still there but has been extended and refurbished in what is intended to be fashionable farmhouse style and its windows display an estate agent’s glossy ads, though the supermarket chain of course runs the trading side of things. It is Sunday and the parking lot is almost empty apart from scattered shopping trolleys, as if people had shuffled them about at random and then suddenly left. A road called King’s Road starts at the supermarket. It got its name from the way it encircles the whole island on that side of the isthmus. What was once a humble path off King’s Road leads to the Mains Farm Road and, if you follow the path past the Private Road sign, it ends at the Kaufmanns’ farm. The family villa, with its tall, pointed and turreted roof and long veranda, still stands on one side of the yard opposite the barns and outbuildings. The old pump house is further away, where the drive merges with the meadows and woods, and to the right are the paddock and the horse exercise arena that Mr Carsten built, regardless of Kaufmann’s approval. When I was a child, a white horse used to stand beside the enamelled tub used for his drinking water, in the meadow with closely cropped grass over where the woods proper began. I remember being in bed during the short, light summer nights when I could watch the horse through my bedroom window, fascinated by its ability to stand there, absolutely still, hour after hour. It might have been sleeping while standing up, as animals often do; or perhaps the horse was the only creature awake while everyone else was deep asleep. I see Minna, half-naked, running across the field below the white horse’s paddock. Once again, the summer is burning hot and the taste of sun-baked soil is in my mouth just as it is in hers. I share the stinging sensation when ears of the wheat scrape her bare arms and legs. We run, with me a pace behind her as always, or it could be that I am in the attic, watching her through Johannes’s binoculars, seeing her run and then fall. A small hollow has formed in the surface of the field but the stalks close in tightly around her body. From up here, I can still see her: she is lying on her back and looking straight up into the sky, her face twisted into an inaudible howl, and then I see the old man come from the farm and walk down the road, dark stains of sweat have formed where his braces press against his body; or is he actually Mr Carsten? The whole scene is like a freeze-frame. Minna is on her back in the field, her body is still, and he is closing in on her, a dark shadow that hovers at the edge of the image. That is all. A dream or a memory: I can’t tell. Now I have reached the Yellow Villa. I go to stand at the back door. Beyond the trees, Johannes’s beehives look like square skulls just showing above the tall grasses and the air carries the sour smell of stale soil, as it always does here: it smells of things that have been in the shade for too long. The mist is growing denser again and, through it, I hear a plane approaching slowly, then see it passing in and out of capricious clouds while the roar of the engines turns into a high-pitched wail and ends in an almighty bang. Then it is over, the blinking wing-tip lights disappear at Bird Hill, behind Kaufmann’s farm. The key jams in the lock. I put my shoulder to the door until the top panel gives way with a noise of splintering wood and I tumble into the dustladen darkness with its familiar smells of mouldy cellar and kerosene. I am home.
It was Ebba Simonsen who called to let me know that Johannes had died. She and her husband had been Johannes’s neighbours ever since the pre-war days when Kaufmann, generally speaking, owned the island. The Simonsens were childless at first but then children came along, one after the other, so that I still remember Mrs Simonsen, even from when I was a small child, with her deep dimples and tired eyes, always surrounded by noisy children while she, her blond hair falling around her face in untidy, damp strands, bent over whatever she was busy with, like baking or laundry. Her husband – I simply didn’t know his first name and never called him anything except Simonsen – was a radio sound technician and used to be at work all day long. He eventually retired but was no more present in the home than before. Simonsen had joined actively in the fighting against the Germans (once historians began to write about the resistance movement, their books would always include at least one chapter about Simonsen’s work on encrypting radio messages and cracking coded transmissions), but even so, there was no enmity between him and Johannes. After the war, when Kaufmann was in prison and his wife Sigrid and their daughter Helga lived on the farm under a kind of semi-official house arrest, there were many who thought and also said aloud that justice should have been done to the old Nazi’s former associates as well, and told Johannes so in no uncertain terms, because he had worked for all those years as Kaufmann’s chauffeur. A crowd of several hundred outraged men had gathered outside the Yellow Villa to demand precisely this, when Simonsen had stepped forward to warn them not to do anything they would regret later and instead walk home quietly, each to his own, and leave justice to take its course. Ever since, a spare key to the Yellow Villa had a permanent place on a hook next to the fuse-box in the hall outside Simonsen’s workshop. When we were children, Minna and I used to love being allowed to visit Simonsen in his cellar studio, where his remarkable store of sounds, thousands of tapes in tin cans, was housed on wide shelves that covered the wall behind his desk. You could listen to the scraping and grinding of glaciers calving, the astonishing snap of a crocodile’s jaws closing around its prey or to long tropical rainstorms, so fierce that they seemed not even to make distinct noises but sounded like a loud hum, as when you have stuffed your ears with cotton wool. If Minna and I were bored in the evenings or during weekends, we often went along to plead with Simonsen to play us some of his sounds. The live voices he had managed to capture made the best listening. He used to say that the pheasants’ hoarse double call was like a death-cry – there were lots of pheasants on the island, so many you would see them out on evening strolls like gentlefolk (the cocks anyway, the hens were often cowering in the verges) – and that the noise of Brekke’s dog barking was as if it were strangling itself as it tugged at its long leash. We could hear Mr Kaufmann coughing and clearing his throat, and listened to Mr Norvig, the school teacher, giving a complicated lecture on how to fold and unfold the national flag, and Mr Carsten boasting about something in his heavily accented almost-Danish. All the time, while the island was paraded, as it were, in front of our ears, the key hung on its hook by the fuse-box. If we were locked out for some reason, perhaps because Johannes had gone off in the car on an unexpected errand, we could always borrow the Simonsens’ key, although Minna preferred to try to enter our house through any unlocked window. So much more fun to climb on downpipes and roof edges than getting the key. But the key’s existence meant that Ebba could get into the Yellow Villa after Epiphany this year. In the normal order of things, Johannes always dropped in to wish them Merry Christmas but this year he had not called, not even for the New Year, and his letterbox by the gate had been filling up for a long time with uncollected bills and advertising leaflets. He must have been dead for a couple of weeks by the time Ebba found him, and only the chill in the unheated house had prevented the stench of the corpse from being any worse than it was. He had been sitting in the kitchen to ‘rest awhile’ after the midday meal, as was his habit, squeezed into the nook, as he called the narrow space between the larder door and the small drop-leaf table he ate at. His arm was twisted into an unnatural angle against the table top as his head, like the rest of his body, tilted backwards against the wall. It was in the nook where he would sit down to write to me, year after year. His letters were long, as many as ten or fifteen pages, and must have taken many evenings to write. I had received a letter like that last year, as late as the middle of December, and apart from the stomach pains he always complained about – caused, so I believed, by him not eating properly, only bread and tinned food – it had not suggested that there was anything wrong with him. Jo
hannes’s letters were unmistakably his, written in small, tightly packed capitals (he wrote everything in capitals) on coarse squared paper pulled from the poor-quality pads that he bought from Brekke and, before that, from Brekke’s father. He pulled each page off once he had filled it, until nothing was left except the glued strip that had held them together, and then he burnt the strip in the ashtray before starting on a new pad. (It has stuck in my mind from when I was little, the distinctive smell of the writing-pad strip as it caught fire and the glue began to smoulder: acrid and nasty.) As the years passed, the tone of his letters grew more and more querulous. The older he became, the more convinced he was that others were ganging up against him. And it was always me whom he felt he must provide with all the evidence he had gathered about local conspiracies. Johannes saved the details of everything and everyone he had dealt with over the years: the records were kept in a large, black, bulging ring binder that he called Carthage. Carthage contained private letters, cuttings of ‘Letters to the Editor’ in the local paper (penned by himself and others), receipts of bank transactions, letters to the tax authority, the heating oil suppliers, the electricity and water boards and to the island community trust; never-ending disputes about things like where site boundaries went, how to pay for snow clearance, how the volunteering would be distributed over the year, how to manage the permanent jetty moorings that belonged to Johannes and the others in the group known as the twenty site owners. Et cetera, et cetera. The twenty site owners were the original island residents to whom Kaufmann had partitioned off plots of land. They were always at each other’s throats, and the moorings in particular caused endless conflict because some owners wanted to free them up while others – van Diesen was one of them – were intent on buying as many as possible so that, come time, the entire jetty could be turned into a private marina. This is something I’ll have to write up for Carthage, Johannes used to say when something had happened to upset him, like this latest issue about van Diesen’s plans. Or he could say: I think you’ll be interested in something I’ve got in Carthage. He mostly said this on the phone, and I must confess that, more often than not, the prospect of being subjected to hour-long readings from Carthage was why I produced one feeble excuse after another to avoid going to the island. With passing years, Johannes grew more and more absorbed by these local disputes. I would have a vision of him going through drawers and cardboard boxes, taking days to look for a piece of paper that would set him free from whatever it was he wanted to be free of. Actually, it was remarkable that Johannes wrote anything at all. His sight was growing poor, and his reading glasses often went missing and stayed lost for days, even weeks. His back troubled him and his right leg was nearly paralysed after a fall that fractured the femur, which had left him shuffling about on a pair of crutches. Because he couldn’t be bothered with washing properly, he gave off a sour odour of stale urine and sweat, tinged with acetic acid. He claimed to be afraid of falling over if he tried to climb into the bathtub on his own. Not that climbing into the tub would have been of any use: the local council had become fed up with the pile of unpaid bills and shut the water off, once and for all. It was just as well that the rainwater butt under the downpipe was almost always full. I used to go outside, scoop up enough to fill several buckets, pour the water into the big pan to heat on the cooker, and leave some warm water to do the dishes, should he, against all expectation, feel the urge to wash up. I would then carry the buckets to the bathroom and help him get into the tub. There’s no telling what comes out of the taps, you have no control, he said as I unbuttoned his shirt and pulled off his trousers. Nonsense, I said. Surely it was you who told me of how the folk round here went off their heads at a rumour that the old hag had poisoned the water? But that was when we at least had our own water, from here on the island, he replied, not realising that he contradicted himself. I used the phrase ‘the old hag’ about Mrs Sigrid Kaufmann because that is how she was traditionally referred to on the island. In past years, he would catch my eye as he corrected me: Mrs Kaufmann, if you please. This time, he didn’t look me in the eye but I noticed that he was upset. As I helped him into the dirty tub, he was trembling, and then he stood still, squeezing his arms between his knees, scrawny and grey with a swollen belly and greying hair in his armpits. Show respect, he said while I soaped him once, and then again, while he crouched under the water I washed him down with. Kaufmann let no Germans cross the bridge, he said. For as long as there was a war on, you’d see none of those bastards on the island. Just look at the people who live here now and what they are dragging in, riff-raff, all of them, nothing but scum, foreigners who think they’re somehow entitled to live here just because they have money! To shave him, I had to take off my own clothes and climb into the bathtub: two naked bodies, both past their best, facing each other in the frozen light. Don’t let your hand shake, he said. You’re the one who’s shaking, I told him. It must have been the last time I saw him alive. I grew concerned in the New Year, when he had not replied to my letters and Christmas greeting, so, when Ebba phoned me, I had just started to prepare for a trip to the island, packing food and water and a small coal-fired room heater I had picked up. Apart from the usual line about there being something wrong with his heart, no cause of death was recorded, though I am inclined to think that his proud victory over the authorities had also entailed his defeat. He simply froze to death. I did not have to travel to the island for the funeral, which took place a few weeks later, because he had seen to it, long ago, that his grave would be in the same cemetery as the Kaufmann family grave, at Vidarudden on the mainland. The Simonsens came but not many others: Jonas Brekke, the grocer’s son, and Peder Kolding, a Dane who lived up on the ridge above the Simonsens’ land, with his wife and one of their sons (the eldest), and Sigurd Hansen, who had taken over as chairman of the island community trust when van Diesen stood down. Hansen presumably attended in his official capacity, as it were, because he and Johannes never got on. Most of the letters in Carthage were actually addressed to Hansen. Many of the islanders, who insisted for years that Johannes was an old Quisling, had died before him and those who had not yet passed on shunned him out of long habit. And, of course, no one from the Mains Farm turned up. Who would have gone? Sigrid Kaufmann had died many years earlier. The Kaufmanns’ daughter was thought to be alive but it was uncertain, too, since no one had clapped eyes on her. And what of the manager at the Mains Farm, Mr Carsten? He still lived up there with his dog and his horses but, even if he had cared to come to the funeral, no one would have wanted his presence there. Ebba Simonsen often caught sight of him driving down the road with a trailer in tow. As for me, I would have preferred the funeral to have brought the entire sad business to a close, but the house and its contents had to be dealt with. Sure enough: only a couple of months later, I had another phone call from the island. This time, it was Simonsen himself. People come knocking on our door to ask about your house, he said. What sort of people? I said. What sort do you think? Well-heeled ones, obviously. Folk with money. They haven’t a hope, I said. That’s what I keep telling them, Simonsen replied, and continued: but if that’s how you see it, you had better come and make it clear because if people think there might be an opening, they’ll just get keener. The house is a ruin, I said. Always has been. That wasn’t exactly what I meant, Simonsen said. The silence between us might have been on one of Simonsen’s recordings. Just think it over. What would Johannes have wanted? Simonsen said in the end. And think of your sister. It was his mentioning my sister that finally made me overcome the distaste I felt. Or, rather, the certainty that if I only gave myself long enough in the house, Minna, too, would have to come back. In some shape or form, anyway. To help me rescue what little there was worth keeping, and then to get rid of the rest.
The Tempest Page 1