The Tempest

by Steve Sem-Sandberg

  I must have fallen asleep in the sidecar when someone, a man, shouts my name at the top of his voice. The rough call is followed by the sound of breaking glass and a loud thump on the ground floor, as if a heavy object has fallen over. On my way downstairs, lit by the Brennenstuhl lamp, I hear more window panes break, then the crunching of gravel underfoot and stamping footsteps of someone running outside near the house. The gun: odd that I did not think about it sooner. It is an old hunting rifle with a revolving cylinder. I know Johannes used to keep it somewhere on the first floor. I put the lamp down, fumble across the dark landing into the bedroom and, in the end, find the worn leather case with the gun in a corner of the further of Johannes’s two wardrobes. There is a telescopic sight in the case and a magazine with cartridges in a zipped pocket. I feed a cartridge into the cylinder and walk downstairs without putting on any lights. The window next to the front door is broken and there is a stone on the floor in the hall, and plenty of splintered glass. In the cellar, the boiler-room window has been smashed by someone using the wooden table and the paint-splashed stool that used to stand along the garage wall. I stop, gun in hand, and try to work out where the intruders are hiding outside. Now, all is quiet apart from the clock on the wall, slowly ticking off the seconds. Even the noises of rain and wind whipping against the house have ceased. After waiting a few minutes, I unlock the cellar door and step outside. The rain is drifting away and the darkness of the night is about to dissolve, but it is still dark under the trees. Rainwater running off leaves and branches drips into the soft moss below. The two front windows, which face the road, have lights in them: the lamps in the sitting room and in Johannes’s old room are on, an easy-to-read sign, for all to see, that the house is lived in again. The light is enough to show that the vandals collected quite a few objects heavy enough to break windows and pulled out several of the edging stones along the drive, and also took the lid off the waste bin by the gate. But I cannot find the energy to walk all around the house to inspect the damage, not now. With rainwater trickling down the back of my neck, I make my way to the fence to look for any tracks that my night-time visitors might have made in the sodden mud along the road. At the raspberry hedge, I stumble over the incinerator bin. It, too, has been knocked over. I am not sure if this is yet another example of their meaningless destructiveness or if they went through the contents to check whatever was left of what I tried to burn. Down by King’s Road, a car can be heard changing down through the gears and then quickly back up again. Next, the same car is driven full throttle on skidding tyres up the Back Lane. At this time of the day, it cannot be anyone except the newspaper delivery man, Skakland’s son – the Speedfreak, as they call him. I walk down to the gate to wait for him. A letterbox snaps shut a little further along the road, then the car revs up again. Brakes are suddenly slammed on. Next, the engine is revved up again. The beams of the headlamps sweep over the fruit trees, where I stand, gun in hand. The car stops at my gate. Skakland is rooting about among the piles of newspaper inside the lit car, then looks up and shows me the finger. I watch as the rear lights gleam when he brakes abruptly over by the crossroads, where the road turns off towards the Mains Farm. But Skakland does not drive up there.

  Kaufmann died in January 1973, just over half a year after the incident down by the lake. The islanders spoke for a long time about the severe illness that tormented him during the last few years of his life. It was cancer and was said to have caused such awful pain that he could hardly bear to move during the final months. So this was the man I had encountered on the lakeside paths: someone tired and ageing, who unmistakably found it difficult to make out the ground in front of him but who defied his pain because of his deep realisation that no part of all that he regarded as sacrosanct would ever be lost. Not a day too soon, people were saying, inevitably, when the announcement of his death was finally made. As for me, I spent the autumn after my bumbling attack in a haze of guilt and fear. I was frightened that Minna would tell the lads what I had done. Or that someone, Mr Carsten, for instance, had seen me do the deed with his own eyes. Or that Kaufmann had put some kind of curse on me. Meanwhile, I was seen as a good, reliable boy, my sister’s opposite in every way. I helped Johannes sterilise jam jars and juice bottles and prepare jam and pickles. I walked on my own all the way to Langmark’s timber yard with the measurements for the boards Johannes needed for the shelving that was part of his refurbishment of the kitchen in the Yellow Villa. He had been measuring and pondering all summer long, and had finally decided to tear down the clumsy old kitchen cupboards left from the days of the fur farmer, and instead build new ones: modern, wall-mounted cupboards with sliding doors. They would be wider at the top and narrow towards the base so that one at last could stand straight in here. When he turned his hand to carpentry, Johannes proved capable of much greater concentration than usual. He was fast and efficient, and the tools seemed made to fit his hands, which never wavered. I helped him estimate and measure and then position the boards and hold them in place. But all I could think about meanwhile was that phone call, which I knew had to come one day and would mean Johannes turning to me with that special, quiet but reproachful expression of his, which also made him look troubled, almost sad. I would never have believed this, not from you, he would say. An old, ill, defenceless man! And then, one day, it finally happened: that much-feared telephone call from the Mains Farm. It was on a Sunday in early January, the first mild day since Christmas. Above the forest, which overnight had shed its coat of frost for the first time in months, the sky hung black and as heavy as lead. Johannes left to walk to the farm without a word to me. I do not know if he knew, but it seemed as if he did. I watched his back from my window. The car from the funeral directors overtook him as it slowly drove up the Mains Farm Road. Several hours passed when nothing happened up there as far as I could see, but I did not dare leave my vantage point. Eventually, a small group of dark figures gathered around the parked hearse. Johannes must have been among them but the distance was too great for me to make out individuals. Mr Carsten’s limp I did recognise, though. After a while, the black hearse detached itself from the tight cluster of people and slowly started off down the road. It crawled along but no one followed it. Everyone must have seen it but no one opened a window or stepped outside or stopped to watch it at the end of their drive. Such was the end of Kaufmann’s reign on the island: the sky over the forest was darkened by big, black clouds, heavy with unreleased rain, and not one human in sight, as if the islanders to a man and woman had decided by common agreement to turn their backs on him.

  Minna went to a foster home in the autumn of the year Kaufmann died. The official version was that she had been accepted at a special school on the mainland and the new lodgings would make it easier for her to attend. Everyone knew that it was some kind of punishment and that, when all was said and done, it was Johannes who was being punished. He had been made responsible for a task and had failed to bring her up properly. (Later, I realised that handing me over to the authorities had also been considered but, at the last minute, it was agreed that I was too young, so I was allowed to stay with Johannes.) Afterwards, my longing for Minna was like a fever or a shameful itch that would not go away, not ever. I could not sleep in my own bed at night and instead went to lie down in hers, breathing in what was left of her scent in the sheets until Johannes came and hauled me out of bed in the morning. For the first time in my life, I went to school alone. On the way, I avoided splashing in the puddles, just because it was something we had done together. Or, at least, this was how I felt then. There were places in the interior of the island where I longed to be, our places, but which were now forbidden territory after what she had made me do to the old man. This was how Kaufmann’s power continued to grow after his death, as a direct outcome of Minna’s absence. The winter, when it arrived, helped a little. There is always something special about the winters on the island. The snow obscures the usual boundaries between the islanders and the grounds they own. Peopl
e who usually would take no notice of each other can be seen walking together out on the ice or chatting on the seashore. In the ice-free channels, the water steams and smokes in the wake of the ferries. Sometimes, a dense, damp fog drifts in from the outer reaches of the fjord and all flights are cancelled. They have a special word for that pale, thick sea mist, the whitey, which at worst could stay put for weeks. After a few days of the whitey, the trees are glazed with frost and, with no aeroplanes overhead, the silence is so intense that space seems about to explode. At night, the damp cold casts a sheen over the sky and the snow, a matte, reddish glow as if a fire were burning somewhere in the interior of the island. During whitey nights, Johannes kept wandering restlessly from room to room. He did not say anything but it was obvious that Minna’s transfer to the foster home had made him feel ill at ease. He became almost manically dependent on his books and his bottles. Because it was too cold and draughty to sit in the attic, he carried the radiators down to the sitting room and holed up on the ox-leather sofa while the red heat from the radiator shone on his cheeks and forehead, making his skin look more than ever like the smooth, fine-textured skin of a child. Early that spring, something happened that no one could have predicted. Mr Carsten began to drop in at the Yellow Villa for some reason. Then, one day, Minna suddenly came back. At the time, it never occurred to me that these two things, Mr Carsten’s visits and Minna’s return, were related in any way. When Mr Carsten pressed the front doorbell, all Johannes said was that they did a bit of betting on the races together. But I would have noticed if they had done that, seen them bending over the racing papers or discussing odds going up or down the way folk did over at Brekke’s. And I did not see anything of the sort. Mr Carsten never stepped inside and the fact that he rang the bell down there was significant in itself. People who knew Johannes would call out their hellos from somewhere in the garden before coming in through the cellar door or across the terrace. The fateful ding-dong ring of the front doorbell was something I associated with Mr Carsten and him alone, with his staring gaze and stroke-affected half-smile. The times Mr Carsten came, I never dared to go downstairs. I shut myself in my room and kept an eye on the activities of the two unlikely chums from my window. Mostly, they wandered off into the garden, as if to be alone, unobserved while they spoke. After a quarter of an hour, maybe twenty minutes, Mr Carsten would leave without another word, dragging his stiff leg through the garden while Johannes stood and looked after him, as if Mr Carsten’s message had left him deep in thought. Do you think Johannes ran up gambling debts? I asked Simonsen the other day. It was the payments from Johannes to Mr Carsten that I had in mind. Simonsen said he didn’t know of any such thing, but he did not think so. On the other hand, he believed that, back then, Mr Carsten had a fifty per cent stake in a harness-racing horse, which he and the co-owner raced over on Bjerke from time to time, so he might well have tried to persuade Johannes to invest in that horse. Or in some other horse. Simonsen couldn’t say; after all, Mr Carsten wasn’t exactly the chatty type. However, he was pretty sure that Kaufmann had not taken kindly to Mr Carsten busying himself with sidelines that had nothing to do with his proper job, but that he had lacked the energy to confront his farm manager, whose interest in horses finally got the upper hand. Even so, it was only when Kaufmann was in his grave that Mrs Kaufmann called Mr Carsten to the house and told him that was that. What, Mr Carsten was sacked? I said. Yes, he was. Of course, then there was the other story as well, Simonsen said in a lower voice. He looked anxiously over his shoulder, as if he seriously suspected that somebody was lurking behind the raspberry hedge to eavesdrop on us. At one point, Mr Carsten and his partner were at daggers drawn about the horse, and Mr Carsten tried to push his mate down a staircase. It got to be a court case afterwards, Simonsen said, but there was no proof of anything. Apart from the actual embezzlement. And what about Kaufmann, I asked, did he have any knowledge of what Mr Carsten was up to? Who can tell what Kaufmann knew or didn’t? Simonsen said. Towards the end the old boy lived in a world of his own. And then there was this thing with Minna. That autumn, she had got a job in the supermarket where her boyfriend Morten used to work. Officially, this was why she came back to the island. First she worked in the store room, later at the tills. She detested all of it. On her very first day back, I went to see her in the shop, and she sat there as if caged, wearing some kind of green uniform and keying numbers into the till. She did not even look at me. There were highlights in her hair and dark shadow on her eyelids. The skin on her hands was dry and flaking, her nails chewed to bits. She had changed a lot during the months she had been away from us. Her cheeky chatter had gone, and so had her frenetic activity (her teacher had called it an attention deficit). She was glum and withdrawn most of the time, would not respond if you tried to make contact, only rejected you, with one corner of her mouth pulled down in an ugly grimace. I stood in the doorway to her room, watching as she unpacked her things. Nothing of what she had brought was from the past. There were lots of skirts and dresses, and rings, earrings and other jewellery kept in special boxes on her bedside table. She claimed that these things had been given to her by her foster parents but I felt quite sure they had been stolen and, besides, what was all this talk about foster parents supposed to mean? Had she been adopted again? Did I and Johannes not provide her with family enough? But she did not answer that question either, just nodded towards the door, which meant that I was to get out of her room. She dressed up and went out every evening. To me, it seemed unbelievable that Minna should wear a tight skirt and high-heeled shoes: Minna, who had been running barefoot wherever she went, not even putting on shoes to run along the seashore with its high drifts of sharp-edged seashells, or across the stubble on the fields. I watched her turn right, towards the school and the shop, and assumed that she was off to meet the lads again. Unless she was going to take the bus to the mainland. It was impossible to know. I followed, keeping about two hundred metres behind her, and saw her take the shortcut across the football field, walk down to the shop and then turn right to join King’s Road and right again onto the Mains Farm Road. She had walked in a circle in order to arrive unseen at the farm by the road on the other side of the house. I could hardly believe my eyes, seeing her in that weird outfit, strolling towards the Mains Farm. Later, I settled by my window, looking for her and waiting. At about six in the morning, I heard her open the front door and, carrying her shoes, tiptoe upstairs and into the bathroom. I went in and stood in the doorway. Through the window, the reddish light of dawn fell on her naked upper body as she bent over the edge of the wash-hand basin, her long spine protruding under her grey, somehow porous skin. She seemed frail and vulnerable, like a captive and utterly defenceless animal. Why did you go up there? I asked. She was splashing water over her face and did not look up. After all, he isn’t there any more, I tried. Who? she asked. Kaufmann! I shouted, because it was such an effort just to make his name pass my lips. But then it’s OK for me to go there, if he isn’t there, she said, and there was a hint of a smile around her lips in the mirror. You must have wanted to go there, I insisted, ’cause if you didn’t, you wouldn’t have. Her face disappeared from the mirror again. How’s one to know what one wants? she said, as she scooped water over the back of her neck. Things happen, she said. She fumbled for a towel. What is it that happens? I asked. And she: how do I know? What happens, happens. And that was all. I did not get a thing. She went to bed, but I stayed up. The next day, I tried a new strategy. I asked her if she would like to go to the lake with me. She looked reluctant but agreed after a while. Perhaps she had a bad conscience and felt that she had better humour me, at least once. I led the way, small and dying to talk with her, and she followed, plodding, absent-minded. In the end, we stand by the lake on precisely the spot where we have stood together so many times before, and Minna shows only too clearly that the situation makes her nervous. She lights one cigarette after another and laughs when I walk around slapping the bushes with a branch as if to call forth mem
ories of the dying Kaufmann. He created them himself, Minna says. Which them? I say. The butterflies, she says. I stare at her, with the broken-off branch dangling from my hand. What the fuck are you talking about? I ask. Butterflies are attracted by this scent that the females secrete. If you play tricks with these scents, you can make the males of one species seek out females from another one and, with a bit of luck, they could mate and produce a completely new butterfly species. He told me this. He said it was quite easy to do, Minna says and drags on her cigarette one last time before dropping it on the ground and pressing it down with her heel. And what about the foxes? I ask. Was it the same way with them? The foxes, now, she says, I made all that up. I stare at her. And then, without understanding why, I start to cry. I’m sorry, she says. It wasn’t him, it wasn’t Kaufmann. Then she turns and walks away, and a little further into the forest she starts running, as if she cannot get away from there quickly enough.