Shadow

by Karin Alvtegen

‘I got one response to the death notice in the paper, a Torgny Wennberg who said he would come to the funeral.’

  ‘Torgny Wennberg?’

  His mother’s voice was marked by suspicion.

  ‘Yes. Did you know him?’

  Alice snorted. ‘I wouldn’t say I know him. He was a detestable man who constantly came to visit Axel to bask in his glory. He had managed to get a few novels published that no one read, but he thrived on hobnobbing with more successful authors. Although what he should have to do with Gerda I have no idea; I didn’t even know they knew each other. Of course they probably ran into each other when he came to the house, but that was more than thirty years ago.’

  Jan-Erik remembered him. A reddish-brown beard and a big horsey laugh that didn’t sound natural. Muttered voices behind the closed door of his father’s office and from time to time that laugh. And oddly enough, sometimes laughter even from his father who seldom participated in that kind of manifestation of joy. The laughter always came more often as the evening wore on.

  ‘He wants to come to the funeral at least.’

  Alice snorted again. ‘Yes, he probably thinks that Axel will be there so he can ingratiate himself again.’

  ‘Mamma,’ he said, trying to appeal tactfully. Before, he had only needed to worry when she wasn’t sober. Nowadays he was never sure. Inappropriate behaviour that previously had remained within the family now came out more and more often when they were with other people. He considered taking Axel along to the funeral. Get him into the wheelchair and take him there, no matter how much he waved his little finger, which was now his only means of communication. But he had no intention of having this discussion with his mother while estate administrator Marianne Folkesson was watching.

  ‘If there’s anything you need assistance with before the funeral, we’d be only too happy to help,’ Jan-Erik said, with a kindly smile for Marianne.

  ‘If you could think of some suitable music, I’d be very grateful, if you know the sort of music she liked. Or if there’s anything else you think might make the funeral service more personal. Do you know, for instance, what kind of flowers she liked?’

  ‘Roses.’

  Alice shot him an astonished look. He had said that to beat her to the punch. He said the name of the first flower that popped into his head. He suddenly recalled an argument one afternoon over forty years ago. His mother out on the lawn, dressed as usual in her dressing gown, and Gerda standing silent with her head bowed. The shouting about the dandelions that he was afraid would be heard all the way to the neighbours’. His mother’s rage that Gerda hadn’t weeded them.

  ‘Roses?’ Drawn out and suspicious. ‘Where in God’s name did you get that from?’

  ‘I remember her mentioning it once.’

  His mother let the subject drop but gave him a look that said it was the stupidest thing she’d ever heard. Jan-Erik felt an increasing need to bring the meeting to a close. Something told him that his mother must have had a drink or two just before he arrived, and the effect was kicking in now.

  Marianne was writing in her notebook. Then she leafed forward a few pages. Unaware of what was going on in the room, she was in no hurry to ask her next question.

  ‘Do you know a Kristoffer Sandeblom?’ she asked.

  Alice gave a heavy sigh and braced herself to get up.

  ‘Never heard of him.’

  She headed for the kitchen and Jan-Erik watched her go.

  ‘No, I don’t believe so. Why?’

  He knew what his mother was after, and he felt more and more anxious to get Marianne Folkesson out of the flat. She raised her cup and took a sip of coffee.

  ‘He’s listed as beneficiary in her will.’

  He glanced at the doorway through which his mother had just vanished.

  ‘I shouldn’t think he’d get very rich on that,’ his mother called.

  Jan-Erik laughed to cover up the comment from the kitchen and wondered whether Marianne also recognised the sound of a metal top being unscrewed from a bottle.

  ‘She stipulated expressly that all bills be paid first, but that what remained, including the proceeds from the sale of her possessions, should go to him. I was wondering if any of you might know who he is.’

  ‘No idea. How old is he, approximately?’

  Marianne checked her book. ‘Born in 1972.’

  Alice appeared in the doorway, standing with her arms crossed.

  ‘Then perhaps it would be better to contact him instead of us, since he seems to have been on such close terms with her.’

  ‘I’ve tried. I left a message on his answer machine but unfortunately he hasn’t called back yet.’

  Jan-Erik raised his arm and looked at his wristwatch.

  ‘If that’s all for now, I’m afraid I really must be going.’

  Marianne scanned a page in her notebook.

  ‘There isn’t anything else. Just the music, if you could think of something that would be suitable. Oh yes, I need a photograph of Gerda if you have one. I usually make an enlargement and frame it to put on the casket. We found one in her flat, but it’s too blurry to blow up. If you have one I’d very much like to borrow it.’

  Jan-Erik stood up. ‘Of course. I’ll see what I can find.’

  They shook hands and Marianne thanked him. Alice said goodbye when they met at the doorway, then went back to sit on the sofa. Jan-Erik accompanied Marianne out to the hall.

  ‘I’ll be calling you soon. I’ll see if I can find a picture.’

  ‘Thank you, and if you think of anything else that might help, please give me a ring.’

  Jan-Erik assured her that he would, and then she was out of the flat. He stood in the hall for a moment and looked longingly at his shoes. Just to walk. Walk somewhere far away from here. But the day was not over yet. There was one more filial visit remaining. It was important that his father’s rehabilitation take place in close co-operation with the family, the doctor had said, and today it was time for another such encounter. Like pearls on a string the times kept cropping up in his diary, and he was the one who was family. His mother wasn’t particularly interested, even though she’d gone with him once for appearance’s sake.

  He heard her calling from the living room.

  ‘Darling, come and sit on the sofa a while with your old mamma, you can surely spare that much time. It would be so nice to talk with you a little. It’s so lonely here in the daytime.’

  He closed his eyes.

  Tomorrow he would be able to leave on a trip.

  He was counting the hours.

  8

  Kristoffer got up from his desk and went over to the window. A steady rain was veining the glass and obscuring the view over the cemetery at Katarina Church. He pressed his forehead against the cool window and closed his eyes, not moving until he found the words he was groping for. Then he hurried back to the computer and typed them out standing up. After that he sat down again at the desk, took a deep breath and began to read the words on the screen.

  ACT 2

  (The MOTHER and FATHER are sitting at a kitchen table set for breakfast. Around the table are four chairs. The mother is dressed in high-heeled red patent-leather boots, a micro-miniskirt and a tiny glitzy top. The father is wearing a pin-striped suit. The room is dark except for a number of TV sets of varying sizes, all showing different programmes. News, adverts, porno, action, music videos.

  The mother is knitting. The father is reading from a computer screen.)

  (They sit in total silence for a minute.)

  FATHER: What are you doing?

  MOTHER: Knitting.

  (They sit in silence for another minute.)

  FATHER: What are you knitting?

  MOTHER: Mittens.

  FATHER: Why are you knitting mittens?

  MOTHER: I’m going to give them to the collection for Rescue Africa.

  FATHER: What do they need mittens for?

  MOTHER: So they won’t freeze.

  (The SON, 13 year
s old, comes onstage. He is dressed in a Guantánamo-orange jump-suit, a black blindfold and a wide rubber shackle connecting his ankles so that he can only take short steps. From his ankles, chains connect to his hands, which are handcuffed.)

  SON: Could you lock me up?

  (The mother locks the handcuffs.)

  MOTHER: Do you really have to wear those today?

  SON: Give me a break.

  MOTHER: It’s below freezing outside. I don’t want you to catch a cold.

  FATHER: Just make sure that outfit is clean on Saturday when we go to the Svenssons’ wedding.

  MOTHER: You know what it cost? Four thousand kronor.

  SON: I paid for it myself. With the money I got for Christmas.

  MOTHER: Can you see anything at all?

  SON: There are holes here, you know that.

  (Lifts his cuffed hands as far as he can and points to tiny holes in the blindfold)

  SON: Besides, it’s sewn from organic material. Certified.

  (The mother makes an open sandwich and feeds the SON. Helps him drink from a glass. Suddenly she turns to face the audience.)

  MOTHER: Can anyone help me?

  (The mother goes back to her knitting as if nothing has happened.)

  FATHER: Our stocks in African Fishing Trade have gone up.

  SON: I’m out of here.

  MOTHER: Don’t you have a late morning today?

  SON: I won’t make it if I don’t leave now. (Points at the rubber shackle between his ankles)

  FATHER: Watch out for cars and paedophiles.

  (The son hurries off, taking little shuffling steps, and vanishes offstage.)

  MOTHER: What stocks?

  FATHER: The business concept is brilliant. Five hundred tons of filleted Nile perch per day are exported to Europe. They’ve managed to lower costs by using cheap Russian pilots and old freight aeroplanes. And the offal and fish-heads are left over for the local population, so those who say that the introduced Nile perch has killed off all the other fish in Lake Victoria will just have to shut up. Nobody’s going to come and say that African Fishing Trade aren’t doing their share. Besides, the young people can heat up the glue in the fish-crates and sniff it, so they’ll sleep better in the alleys at night. Their parents have all died of AIDS anyway. It’s a win-win situation for all concerned. We can thank our lucky stars we were in on it from the beginning and bought shares.

  (They sit in silence. Suddenly the father turns to the audience.)

  FATHER: Can anyone help me?

  Kristoffer leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head. He wasn’t completely satisfied. Something in the play didn’t sound quite right, and there were only four weeks left till the deadline. His eyes left the screen and sought out the mobile phone, which was turned off. He picked it up and weighed it in his hand. For a week he’d been cut off from the outside world, but the number of pages he’d been able to produce was still alarmingly small. It just wasn’t flowing. There was so much he wanted to say, but the words seemed stuck, as if screwed down in a space he couldn’t access. Isolation was usually the key. The freedom that opened up after he shut off his telephones and stopped checking his e-mail. The feeling of independence. An inviolable wild man with the right to spew his bile over the societal structure from which he had chosen to remove himself. This time it hadn’t worked. Instead he had felt lonely and cooped-up. And detached. Not detached the way he usually felt, when as an observer he registered what was happening though he wasn’t taking part; and with his moral irreproachability of the past three years, he had a right to criticise.

  Instead he felt detached, as in lonely.

  He wondered whether it had to do with the money. Each month a varying amount was sent to him from an anonymous giver, but this month it hadn’t come.

  He closed the screen on his laptop and went into the kitchen. Opened the fridge, then the freezer. The number of frozen meals had run low, and he needed to go shopping. Maybe he should give Jesper a ring. Grab a quick bite and talk for a while. Jesper, who at the risk of coming down with scurvy was struggling with his novel the way Kristoffer was struggling with his new script.

  A year had passed since the little theatre had produced his first play. Provocative, some critics had called it. Others had claimed that it was insistent. He took that as a good sign. Several of the performances had sold out. He had sat there in the dark and mouthed the words spoken on the stage. No one could hear him, but in his head his voice had been exultant. And when the applause came he was always filled with the same wish.

  Imagine if my parents could see me.

  Now the theatre wanted a new play, and he had promised to deliver it in a month. It was a matter of producing something new yet retaining his distinct style. To attack, yet soften the blows so that only after a while would a hole open up and the criticism could slyly slink in. Human nature went on the defensive if it was ambushed. That was something in the genes. But the rage and frustration he felt about the state of everything made it hard to hold back.

  He picked up the cordless phone from the kitchen worktop and punched in Jesper’s number. He wasn’t ready yet to turn on his mobile. Then the spell would be broken for good, and he needed to get down another few pages before he gave up for the day.

  ‘Hey, it’s me. Where are you?’

  ‘I’m down at Café Neo. How about hanging out for a few?’

  He hesitated only a second, then gave in.

  ‘Okay, I’ll be there in ten.’

  He went out to the hall and pulled on his trainers and duffel coat. He left the umbrella after a glance out of the window; it had stopped raining. He locked the door and chose to walk down the stairs; he needed the exercise after sitting for a week. He let his hand glide along the banister. Let himself be filled by the ambivalent feeling at the thought that so many hands had glided there before his. That he was a part of the whole. That everything belonged together, but everyone had his own responsibility, and he had realised that he had to start carrying his own. It was the idea that had guided each step for the past three years.

  His new journey had begun then, when as a 32-year-old bartender he was standing behind a bar in Åre and felt that he could no longer breathe. He realised that he was about to go under. He had looked about among the drunken people and ascertained that the total IQ in the pub corresponded to that in the ape house at Kolmården Zoo. With the crushing difference that the inhabitants of the ape house behaved with more dignity. It was as though a cloudy lens had been removed. He had suddenly felt like an alien from outer space who wanted to know how we intelligent humans lived our lives here on Earth. Everything had all at once become inexplicable. He had seen all the fumbling attempts. All the bullshit that never led anywhere except possibly to people staggering home to a rented hotel room where they could screw in drunken abandon.

  The bunch of girls on the other side of the bar, the ones who had told him the night before that they were studying nursing together and were there on their annual trip; their shocking pink T-shirts with the slogan I’M HERE FOR THE GANGBANG; the conversation some of them were trying to have with three muscle-bound men who had a hard time standing up straight – all desperate padding, people who were trying to endure although something was missing. And he and his colleagues who facilitated the idiocy that was going on, dressed in uniforms emblazoned with distillers’ names, they kept serving more shots, beer and brightly coloured cocktails to people who were already so drunk they could barely lift the glass to their lips. Yet they had chosen this condition voluntarily.

  They were having fun.

  The revelation that he was definitely one of them.

  He stopped at a crossing and pressed the button. Across the street a van with a beer logo along its side had stopped to unload grey barrels outside a restaurant. Two men from the staff wrestled the heavy metal cylinders in through the door. In the next few days the contents would enter an unknown number of human brains in their hunt for peace of mind.

 
; For thirteen years this had been his life. Visby in the summertime and Åre in the winter. Après-beach and aprèsski parties were deceptively similar. Released on holiday, people had to make up for all the lost time; the caveman in them was set free for a while to get some air. After the workday was over he would join in the fun. Seasonal work was a lifestyle that possessed everything for maintaining a distance from a dull contemptible life, that of some faceless suit with a mundane routine. Parties that started at closing time and went on till morning, a few hours’ sleep so you could handle the evening shift that lasted till the next party started. A superficial life in which he let himself float away like a feather on the breeze. It all went so fast, so fast, and depended on the whim of a second. A constant search for kicks, a blissful mixture of sex, alcohol and other drugs. Just as long as it heightened his sense of being alive and raised him above mediocrity, silencing what was tearing at his soul because he didn’t want to acknowledge it. He was ready for anything, and if something did go wrong it was always possible to blame his blood alcohol level. He had taken the trouble to become a member of the ‘ski club’, the ones who had sex in the small gondola lift. He’d become a dangerous competitor in the beer-chugging contests and the riskiest off-piste runs. He’d stood in queues to hotel rooms where girls had set up a system with guys writing their names on condoms that were then placed in a cooler in the corridor while awaiting their turn. He’d taken penicillin for chlamydia and on one occasion was admitted to the hospital with kidney pains after weeks of hard partying. In countless places he’d woken up covered in his own vomit, yet he couldn’t remember how he’d got there. He’d done things that afterwards had filled him with shame. But nothing had made him question his behaviour. Life had been a closed cocoon unaffected by the world outside. There was nothing but the night’s escapades and the morning’s remorse. The hellish anxiety that came with the hangover, which nothing but the hair of the dog could remedy.