The Tempest

by Steve Sem-Sandberg

  I often wondered what Minna remembered about our real parents, who are almost blanks in my memory, reasonably enough, since I was the younger child. It is a source of deep regret that I never got round to asking her while there was still time. The fragments that stay with me are sequences of sights or sensations that could belong to anyone. A hint of a warm, rough and somehow oily taste on my tongue that I now tell myself might be the leather seats in the Studebaker, warm after a long day in hot sunshine. I imagine that I can also remember, with my sense of touch as much as sight, the tight pleats in a wide, white skirt (my mother’s, perhaps?), a steady, bluish light from a table lamp that someone has covered with a cloth (to soothe us children to sleep?) and a threshold with a varnished surface so shiny that it reflects the much larger room on the other side of it, a room I can only guess at. Sounds of voices come from the far end of that room or perhaps from somewhere near it, where many grown-ups have gathered, and whose elegant hairdos and black-suited backs I can see mirrored in tall, dark windows. Johannes always said that our parents had never wanted to leave us for good, that they had every intention of coming back as soon as my mother was well again or as soon as circumstances permitted. He never said anything about what these circumstances might be. The content of the stories Johannes told us would change with his moods. Quite often, he said that our parents had been on board the Vickers Viscount plane that crashed when descending to land at the airport on the other side of the strait. It was late in the winter of 1963, a disaster that eye witnesses, like Simonsen and Brekke, will reminisce about to this day. Frank and Elizabeth Lehman were supposed to have been on a plane flying via the North Pole, a common route for flights from America at the time, or so Johannes said (it sounded as extraordinary every time he used the words: they flew over the Pole), landed briefly at Søndre Strømfjord on Greenland and went on to Copenhagen, where they boarded another plane to come here. It was in February, an evening of grey mists and hard snow showers rushing inland from the fjord, reducing the visibility to practically nil. The plane from Copenhagen came in too low, Johannes told us, and would make his flattened hand dive menacingly close to the edge of the table, then draw his shoulders up to mimic the tight gap between the low cloud cover and the island forests as the Vickers Viscount with a rough, roaring noise broke through the snowy mist but, Johannes went on, I don’t know if there was something wrong with the plane or if the bad weather had led to a navigational error, still, it didn’t manage to climb again and instead reared up like this, and he put his hand up straight from the table top, and then it slammed into Bird Hill, like this, he said, and slapped the table so hard the glass of brandy fell onto the floor and spilled its contents, and since he had just filled it up to the brim, he had to go down on his knees to rescue the newspaper cutting he had extracted from the pile on the kitchen table. The report of the air accident had been given a big black headline and was illustrated by pictures of firemen in helmets pulling hoses across a field that was presumably the impact site, snow-covered by then. It was a terrible accident, Johannes said when he had got up from the floor, and tears were glistening in the reddish folds at the corners of his eyes, though maybe that was just the booze. But you were little at the time, you won’t remember anything, thank goodness. Then what happened? Minna asked. With what? Johannes was so drunk he had to prop his body up by placing his elbow on the table before he could refill his glass. With our mum and dad? Surely they must have been buried somewhere? (Minna could be very persistent when she felt like it.) Or are they still lying up there? Instead of answering, Johannes only smiled. So, of course, we realised straight away that he had not told us the whole truth. But, if he lied to us, it was not because he wanted above all to protect us from feeling that our parents had abandoned us; rather, it was a way of dealing with a painful memory of his own that he could not handle except in this kind of overdramatised, drink-fuelled tale. Meanwhile, the NATO villa, the house we believed had once been our home, stood high up on the ridge and easily visible to all, the broad sweep of its terrace finished with an ‘American’ railing, its steep, low roof and, on the facade facing the farm, windows so tall that all of the sky was mirrored in them. I can’t remember if I ever met the new people who moved in; I don’t know where they came from or if they, too, had children. Back then, if I took notice of anything at all, it was only what Minna wanted me to notice. I walked in her shadow. Even early on, she had begun to talk to strangers and tell them about how she and her little brother were kept in captivity by a drunken seaman and how her real parents tried to free us and secretly got in touch with her at night. They used a special code language that they tapped out in rain-letters against the roof tiles of the house and against the tin window ledges. The bit about the rain-letters she told me about when she crawled into bed with me and pressed her heavy, sticky body against mine and said, can’t you hear it? Tap-tap-tap, that’s Mum who’s whispering to us. Mum had told Minna what had really happened that had forced them to escape from the island. That Mrs Kaufmann was behind it and had been plotting to get rid of the intruders. Yes, that was what they called us, the whole family, not just Mr and Mrs Lehman but us children as well. The intruders and their bastard offspring. Mr Carsten had apparently placed traps all over the forest, hoping that we would get caught in them. And the old one, Mr Kaufmann, he was behind it all. He was out from prison by then and installed in the Mains Farm, almighty and powerful even though nobody saw him. His health was not the best, Johannes said, but Minna was not to be shaken. She was convinced that Kaufmann was evil and whispered it into the back of my neck and my scalp: evil evil evil! Then, one day, she made up her mind: we were to walk up to the NATO villa. To find the clues and make them safe, that was how Minna put it. She must have really frightened me because my only memory of getting there was of how scared I was to lose touch with her. Minna always walked four or five long, determined paces ahead of me. The garden had grown wild and the thorny raspberry bushes made long scratches in our arms and legs. Minna clambered up to one of the windows and tried to cling to it, but it was too high on the wall, so we could only look inside if one of us stood on the other’s shoulders. Now, I have no memory of what we saw except for some furniture I did not recognise, and that’s all; the homes of strangers always look the same. But I do remember how worried I was that someone inside the house would catch sight of us, or maybe someone walking along the road would come to find out what we were up to or, even worse, someone from the Mains Farm would spot us. What really stuck in my memory afterwards was how different all that was familiar and trustworthy looked from here, high up on the hillside. The old dusty country road followed the outlines of the cultivated land as usual; the farm was the same and the fields and the dark forest. But because all of it had been displaced through 180 degrees from my usual perspective, it seemed to belong to another world. I also saw things I had never noticed before: the Mains Farm, with its apparently solid frontage (interrupted just once where the road entered), was in fact made up of several small, quite widely scattered buildings, stables and hay barns and, a little further away, the pump house and the farm manager’s house, a smaller copy of the family villa, with a tiled roof and front steps leading to a veranda. Mr Carsten’s car and old horse trailer looked harmless where they were parked on the shady side of the house. A large, probably ancient oak that I had not seen before grew on the far side of the farm, its tall canopy overshadowing half of the yard. Black birds perched on the oak tree’s branches. So this was where they came from, all the crows I watched as they swarmed across the sky at dusk.

  It is raining. I stand near the garden plots, next to the old incinerator bin, listening to the whiplash sounds of raindrops hitting the leaves. The tart scent of wet grass is sucked up into the smoke belching out of the bin. The smoke stings my eyes, making them water. In Johannes’s large garden, this is the most sheltered corner and also, as it happens, the part closest to the road. Beyond the damp wall of the trees massed along the boundary, I hear the sounds o
f children’s voices calling to each other, tough plastic rain-proof trousers rubbing against saddles and cycle frames and the unmistakable pings of bicycle bells. I can’t make out their faces but the voices bring back the past, memories of how Minna and I set out for school together every day, and some of the boys cycled past close enough to hit my head with their satchels and then they would call out over their shoulders while pedalling hard towards the school: hey, when’s your daddy back? This afternoon, I am wearing Johannes’s old sheepskin-lined winter coat that smells of oil and mouldy cellar, and in the tall grass around me I have dumped stuff brought out from the house, things like beer crates, broken kitchen chairs, threadbare old rugs and stacks of cardboard boxes and newspapers. The fire burns with searing intensity and throws cascades of sparks up into the billowing black smoke. The boards crack loudly when I break them across my knee, a bird erupts from the silent mass of leaves and then, as I turn, there is Mrs Simonsen’s pale face, outlined against the curtain of greenery on the other side of the raspberry hedge that marks the boundary between Johannes’s site and theirs. She has aged since I last saw her. Her blond hair is white now and cut austerely short. The Cottage, a tiny house where we children used to play, still stands in the middle of the lawn but a glasshouse has been built next to it. Its glazed walls look lighter than the sky but are dappled with rain just now. Further away, by the front steps to the house, I catch a glimpse of Simonsen. For a moment, all three of us are immobile, like statues in a park. I fancy the Simonsens are looking at me with a kind of mournful sympathy, the way you look at the one child who never got anywhere, who was always pushed out of the way or left behind … and look, now he’s back again! Which is probably how they felt. The electricity is off, I explain, just to say something. No water, either, I add after a short silence. A plane is flying overhead in the low clouds, slowly on its way in to land. It suddenly becomes visible above the edge of the forest, as if catching up with the roar of its engines. A Lufthansa flight. Andreas, have you had anything to eat? Simonsen abruptly asks from his front step, where he has stayed as if glued to it and where he stays while he listens to what Ebba and I are saying, or tries to. Now and then he speaks loudly to us, as if he neither dares to come any closer nor wants to go inside in case he misses out on something important we might say. Sigrid Kaufmann is dead, you know, Ebba Simonsen tells me. Maybe you didn’t know? Actually, I did know. Her death was referred to in an article I had seen, more of an obituary of her husband and written well after the loathing of the old man had finally come to seem meaningless: twenty, even thirty years too late. I would have liked to ask about Mr Carsten, if he has finally managed to die by now, but I don’t dare to. Something about the farm on the far side of the field makes it still out of bounds for words. I’ll phone the electricity people for you, Simonsen shouts from his post by the front door. Straight away, he adds and, relieved at having hit on the reason to get away that he has been trying to think of all the time, he raises his arm in a jolly wave before disappearing inside. He shuts the door behind him. Ebba looks at me and smiles. It could be that she, too, is struck by the distances in space and time, which might be why she can see through the grown man by the fire bin and recognise inside him the little boy wearing nothing but worn underpants who was sent out to pick raspberries from his side of the hedge while she was picking on her side. The boy’s bare shoulder blades fold back like the wings of a bird when he lifts the empty bowl with both hands, as if to offer up fruit that is not there. She puts three of her raspberries in the bowl and then, jokingly, pops a fourth into his mouth. He does not move and, wide-eyed and silent, he still holds out the bowl, and she carries on picking for him until it is full, and he turns to walk back through the shoulder-high grass with the brimming bowl raised above his head to bring the raspberries to Johannes, who is up on the roof nailing something down. What separates the two of us, the inscrutable adult burning his past in the garden incinerator and the shy four-year-old, walking so carefully and uncertainly, his whole life ahead of him? On the outside, nothing much. There is something similar about the way they hold themselves when they walk, shoulders back so that the spine gets a sway curve all the way down to the tailbone. Later, when I was diagnosed with a sideways curvature of the spine, Johannes always said it was inherited and that my father had also had a problematic back.

  They meet up in the Simonsens’ house, all the past and present neighbours, some of whom even claim to have been Johannes’s close friends. That they happened to turn up here at the same time is just coincidence, they tell me, but of course I realise that they have come to inspect me. They simply want to find out what kind of man I am. But despite the mutual wariness, the crowded kitchen is full of good cheer and Mrs Simonsen is kept busy brewing coffee while laying the table in the large sitting room. The talk is about the island old-timers, the original site owners who still cling tightly on to life. Take Skakland, for instance, the old chap who used to deliver the papers. In the seventies, he drove a battered yellow Swedish post-office van. Skakland’s son delivers the papers nowadays and does the entire round, east and west of the neck of land, in one hour and eighteen minutes, or so they say. In a record time anyway, so they call him the Speedfreak. The current owner of the NATO villa, van Diesen, has also come along. He had finally decided to buy it, and then had an extension built, a tasteless monstrosity with bay windows and sliding glass doors in the style its detractors call builder’s baroque. Sure enough, it was Klamm, boss of the construction firm, who organised the job for van Diesen. By now, Klamm seems to be at work everywhere in this country … it says KLAMM BUILDS in giant red capitals on the big hoardings along the drive to the airport because they are building a brand-new shopping centre with four floors of underground parking. Ads with the same text have pride of place on the cranes and on the piles of concrete blocks with protruding steel bars turning up all over the country, which these days seems to be close to suffocating on its obscene wealth. As for Master Builder Klamm, his whereabouts are unknown to everyone here. One of the rumours on the island is that Klamm has carried off his young mistress and all his financial assets to Switzerland or, alternatively, the Cayman Islands. A lead-in for someone to ask if Johannes perhaps had left something? It is Brekke junior, I think. My head is full of the letters, notebooks and newspaper cuttings that actually are Johannes’s only gift to posterity, but the oddly expectant smile on Per-Ulrik Brekke’s round face tells me that he is after something more substantial. Johannes was destitute when he died, I reply. What about the house? The question comes instantly. And: what do I plan to do with the house? The land alone must be worth a fortune. Joking aside, are there really any doubts about my inheriting the lot? Anything in writing? Didn’t Johannes have other relatives, somewhere on the mainland? People ask questions that are genuinely well-meaning and I am not offended. I know as well as they do that Johannes never formally adopted me and that I cannot lay claim to anything. Nothing here is worth a penny, I say. Just crap, the best idea would be to torch the lot. This makes the whole congregation burst into hearty laughter and then, urged on by Ebba Simonsen, everyone moves into the sitting room, with its wide window that offers a full view of the Mains Farm, stables, outbuildings and all. The view makes it feel natural to start talking about the people up there: even about the once untouchable one – Helga, the daughter. She died last spring, Brekke says, though no one got to know until several months later. She was cared for at home to the end. I think it was arranged for a nurse to live in, Mrs Simonsen says. She was the one who made it known that Helga had passed on. Well, indirectly: we knew because the nurse simply wasn’t around any more. So, Mr Carsten is the only one left up there now. Remember the time we got the old sod well boozed up? van Diesen reminisces suddenly, and gives Brekke a shove. Gave him half a litre of home brew and talked him into believing it was Stolichnaya. So what happened with the farm? I ask. Executor’s sale, Brekke replies. There’s no one left who can take the place over and run it as a farm, and it’s good fo
r nothing else because of the nature reserve that is all around it. Then the talk returns to where it began. Prices, money. How much might the farm be worth? What could be done with the land? And, inevitably (as a thousand times before), stories are told of Mr Carsten’s grandiose plans, like constructing a horse-racing track around the entire lake, for harness racing. He’s a right one, Brekke says, no legs fit to stand on, let alone any good for sitting on a horse.

  In the old days, it happened sometimes that even Helga, the daughter, a girl who wasn’t at all well, would be seen outside, mixing with other children. Johannes caught sight of her once near the Yellow Villa. She was cycling. It was a couple of years before the war. Her being out and about must have had something to do with the National Day on 17 May. She had dressed up, wore a white hat with a red hatband tied into a bow and a white dress, and her strong, honey-blond hair had been combed into a long, lovely plait that emerged below the wide brim of the hat and reached well down her back. She was concentrating, cycling with sudden, hard tugs on the handlebars, as if cautiously trying to avoid all the puddles. At each rough twist, her head jerked and made her jaw muscles tense and her eyes widen strangely. It was her illness showing, Johannes said, it had already settled in her face. Beneath the hem of her dress, the pedalling legs were clad in some kind of shaped metal supports and, a few paces behind her, Mr Carsten was walking with his marked limp, his eyes not for one second leaving the rear wheel of the bicycle. Once the war had ended, for a while the word was that young Miss Helga would go to school with the other children, the same school that Minna and I would later join and the only school on the island. But her first day in a classroom had not even ended when her mother told Mr Carsten to go and fetch her back home. Since that day, many decades ago, she was rarely seen. Little was said about her disability while I grew up but all the more about how she, Kaufmann’s only child, had been too good to mingle with the island kids: an anxious, spoilt girl. The proof, plain for all to see, was the large black limousine that came to pick her up every day and took her to a private school on the mainland. For years, this was a familiar sight. The back seats of the limo were so wide and deep that nothing could be seen of the young woman inside. Naturally this was just the thing to pile up more distaste for her and the rest of the folk up on the Mains Farm. It was as if the gossip circled around two quite different people: one was an ill, vulnerable girl and another was the Princess, superior and untouchable. Mr Carsten, the farm manager, was also hated. Even though he was ugly and had a gammy leg, it still was somehow quite in order to detest him. Unlike Helga, he was always about, too much so, with his polio-damaged leg and partly paralysed face where half his mouth hung open in a permanent grin while, above it, a cold, grey eye stared at you. People would keep meeting him on the island roads, moving with his peculiar limp, a manner of walking that even his many dogs seemed to mimic, as if scared to be different from their master. On top of this, there was his bragging, superior way of speaking and his half-Danish accent, which was such an alien language it seemed almost archaic. One of Simonsen’s tapes had recorded him boasting about something or other to a group of people whose presence one could only guess at from the odd nervous cough and restless shuffling of feet. But it was unclear exactly what Mr Carsten was holding forth about. This could have been because of poor sound quality or else it could have been that his harangue consisted not so much of words as of noises, often a rasping, rather painful wheeze that I assume was a self-satisfied laugh but which sounded as if he was about to suffocate. There would be a few strings of words that somehow tightened into a long, heaving inhalation, then some guttural noises, followed again by hoarse, constricted breathing through an open mouth, as if gasping for breath and failing. Since we had not the faintest idea what he was saying, we laughed, but it was frightening, too, because the speaker was so unmistakably Mr Carsten: an entire human being reduced to a collection of obscene sounds. As far as I can remember, we felt much less hostile towards the lady at the Mains Farm, the widow, Mrs Sigrid Kaufmann, even though she had lived with her old man throughout the war and ought to have been as hated, if we had been consistent. When we spotted her occasionally out and about on the island, we would shout you old hag after her, but our hearts wouldn’t be in it. I do remember that. And also that she never turned to look at whoever was shouting. This was supposed to show that she was arrogant but was later explained by the fact that she was hard of hearing. And it seemed as if her partial deafness counteracted some of the resentment that we would otherwise have felt.