The Tempest

by Steve Sem-Sandberg

  You did not come home again after that evening. I remember that I went outside at dawn to look for you. Mornings at this time of the year are usually still light and mild, rich with the smells of freshly mown grass and damp soil. But the whitey had rolled in over the island during the later part of the night and was now lying, heavy and clammy, over everything, and in that bitterly chilly air nothing can be heard or seen, not even the sound of the grasshoppers who usually sing in the field verges until late September; there is no light to see, no starry sky, nothing. Now I wonder of course if, even as you agreed to go with him into the basement, you had already realised that his bad leg meant he would never be able to climb back up the stairs without your help. But it might have struck you first when you had been down there for a while and he had become, as he used to say, well oiled and what had begun with big talk and flattery ended as such things usually do: with reproaches and accusations. He said that you never bothered to come and see him up at the farm, never admitted to knowing him in front of others and always took the side of those on the island who spoke ill about him behind his back. But in your heart of hearts, you’ll have known the truth, right, Minna? You knew who your real father was, even though you didn’t want to say anything or want anybody else to know? But you stood your ground. How did you do it? was all you said. And so he tells you, speaks of the years that followed Kaufmann’s release from prison and his decision to refurbish the old basement apartments into a ‘cottage hospital’ for the farm workers who later became his patients and whom he insisted that he could treat and cure, even though many were already so severely ill they were beyond all help. Their beds were down here, Mr Carsten explains, pointing at the hospital cots, which twenty years later are still lined up in the corridors and in the narrow wooden pens. He stored an entire pharmacy down here as well! Mr Carsten selects a key from his bunch, unlocks a metal cupboard, more than a metre in height and fixed to the wall next to the wash basin, and shines his torch on the shelves: brown medicine bottles, packs of bandaging and containers of disinfectant. He hands you a small pharmacist’s vial to look at and you ask: what is this? Arsenic, he says, tasteless and odourless, and easy to give to people in doses that can’t be traced. So it was you! This you say in almost the same triumphant tone of voice as earlier, upstairs in the drawing room, when you shouted (then, together with him): we are here! And perhaps he smiles but, by then, he might also feel that he has said too much, and that you are going to slip out of his grasp. Perhaps he even gets angry. Or not: maybe he becomes ingratiating, his voice honeyed as he begins to plead. Minna, he says. He takes a step closer to you, he wants to touch you, hug you. You used to let me in the old days, he says, when you were little! Actually, I’m not sure I can hear him say this, but his expression is easy to imagine: his grotesque face is distorted by his intention to look trusting and tender-hearted, which only makes him appear even more loathsome and ugly. But, all the same, you might let him touch you because you already know what you will do next. Perhaps you even let him undress you, remove these borrowed things, since that is what his shaking hands insist on doing. He knew he could take them off you any time, was that not the reason why he had made you put them on in the first place? And perhaps he takes his own things off, too, and stands there with his pathetic hard-on, snivelling in the shadowy light. I couldn’t stand seeing you leave, he says, I just couldn’t bear it, and he staggers towards you as if to put his arms around you. Perhaps you let him do it, allow yourself to be hugged close to his woeful, trembling body, limping and unbalanced now on its shrivelled stump of a leg, until all that is left to you is the certainty that this is what he wanted, always: to drag you down into the same stench and darkness from which he comes himself. I push him – and you – out of my mind just as I imagine you must push him away, very forcefully now, because his heavy body is almost suffocating you as he tries to wrestle you down onto the floor. You have picked up what remains of your clothes, grabbed his boots and prosthesis in passing and you are already halfway up the steps when he realises what is happening. Before he has managed to stumble to the bottom step, you are in the hall and have slammed the trapdoor shut. Up here, above ground, dawn is breaking and the fog has caused a faintly rippling, coppery mist to form everywhere, making the outlines of the farmhouses and outbuildings look as if drawn in black ink on almost still water. You walk through the damp grass towards the paddock and Boxer, who stands at the far end, unmoving, as if listening for something in the vague, somehow metallic shadows. He snorts loudly and comes to you slowly while you pour the contents of the pharmacist’s vial into his water trough. Then you leave. I do not know how long it takes you to leave the island, or which route you follow: you might take your usual shortcut across the meadows, or prefer to go around the back of Brekke’s place to avoid being seen by any of the neighbours. When the first planes are coming in to land, screams and angry voices are heard from up on the farm. But by then, it is daylight and I am awake. So is Johannes, though he may not have had any sleep that night. We stand together under the trees in the garden and watch as a police car comes up the road, turns right at the crossroads and continues towards the farm. Seeing it reminds me of the day in late winter when Kaufmann died. Then the convoy of cars also drove slowly and without lights. I wonder if anyone ever saw you leave, walking along in your dirty dress, torn at its low neck, with those high-heeled shoes in your hand. You followed King’s Road all the way to the bridge and crossed to the other side, to what had so far been the mainland, a place neither of us had ever believed was truly real.

  All those nights when Minna had gone out I lay awake in my upstairs room in the Yellow Villa, sometimes asleep, sometimes not. I must have slept now and then because I remember dreaming that I was lying awake in another room, exactly like mine except that there was no axolotl on the ceiling. It was only when I realised it was not there that I understood I must really be asleep and only dreaming that I was awake. But when I tried to wake up from the dream, my eyelids would not open, though it could have been that my eyes were already wide open and looking into darkness much greater and deeper than the darkness I usually fell asleep in and woke up from. This was the moment when I understood that the other darkness was the real one. All that I felt or heard, all the ordinary, safe sounds around me – planes in their banking turns over the island, Brekke’s dog barking at the end of its long lead, Johannes’s footsteps as he crossed the landing outside my room, the mumbled weather report from the radio in the kitchen and the grinding noise of the larder door hinges when it was opened, the smell of butter sizzling in the frying pan as Johannes was preparing the midday meal – all this belonged to a world that was most certainly real and true but which did not exist in the place where I was. Not then, and not now, either. But what was this other world where I was when I slept, dreaming that I was awake? Was it not the same place that the old historians referred to as the world of the monstrous ones, godless beings with no name and no family? I wake with stiffened joints and the tendons in my neck are taut and hard, as if in cramp all night; I struggle to haul myself out of the cot, fumble in the dark through the narrow cellar passage until I finally get back to the kitchen alcove and stand there, holding on to the enamelled sink with its ruined, rusty tap that has not had water flowing through it for decades. I listen upwards, into the house, to try to make out if Mr Carsten is still about.