Open Grave: A Mystery

by Kjell Eriksson

  “Sometimes,” said Birgitta, who was relieved that she got off so easy.

  “I’ll stick to mine.”

  Agnes turned down the heat on the stove.

  “And one day perhaps you will find out why your father wanted to drive me out onto the street.”

  “He wanted to save on the household,” said Birgitta.

  “That’s the silliest thing I’ve heard.”

  Agnes made a smacking sound with her tongue as if to underscore what she thought about Birgitta’s understanding.

  “Now you’ll have to excuse me,” she said, “but I have to prepare the roast.”

  “How should I find out the truth? Daddy’s not likely to say anything.”

  “You’ll have to wait until I die,” said Agnes. “And that can be at any time.”

  “Don’t say that!”

  “What do I know?”

  “Ridiculous!” Birgitta hissed.

  “That may be, but you’ll have to wait.”

  Birgitta left the kitchen without a word, pulled off her stockings on the stairs, and took a few easy, girlish barefoot steps out on the lawn, with a flightiness that in no way corresponded to what was going on inside her. She needed to get away from Agnes and her evasiveness. Bitterness was the worst thing she knew, when people dug down into old injustices, many times imagined, and dwelled on them over and over again.

  What did Agnes really have to complain about? She had been free to leave the house at any moment whatsoever but had chosen to stay for over fifty years. She had reasonable pay and free food and lodging, had never needed to suffer want, after only six years of elementary school and a couple of courses at some kind of housekeeping school as her only asset.

  She wanted to scream out this simple fact in the kitchen, but realized that it would not lead to anything good. Birgitta was aware that it was crucial to keep Agnes in a good mood, because after all she was the one who kept the household running. Her father, Nobel Prize winner or not, would be in a bad way without her, and Birgitta was the one who would have to step in. Bertram would never accept any kind of municipal home assistance, he would rather die of neglect.

  Behind her restraint was also a lingering respect for Agnes from her childhood. It would never disappear, she realized that. Agnes was unapproachable, always had been, with a kind of lower-class sovereignty that, without putting it into words, Birgitta still felt if not fear then a certain discomfort about. Birgitta had always felt as if the servants saw through her, they could look into every corner where the family dirt accumulated, and their expressions never revealed what they were thinking, what conclusions they made.

  Their relationship to the servants was based on a contract where the foundation was obedience and silence. Agnes, and others in her position, were assumed to be loyal, but no one could take that for granted. The threat of a Trojan horse by the pans in the kitchen, serving in the dining room or cleaning the bedroom with the most intimate garments and stenches, always awakened an apprehension of a conceivable fifth column, a worrying factor and a source of irritation that never left the upper class.

  Liisa was the one who, in her efficient Finland-Swedish—it was as if the tone in the language underscored the thought—put Birgitta on track, draped the unspoken discomfort into words. It was only in recent years that Birgitta could fairly confidently look back on her childhood and adolescence. With her calm and her coolness, certainly acquired during many long training sessions at the firing range, Liisa served as a factual corrective when Birgitta digressed in metaphysical explanatory models about how and why things developed as they did in the Ohler family.

  To the general picture could be added the peculiarity that Agnes’s background offered. Not because she preached—Birgitta had never heard her resort to religion in the form of an apt Bible quotation, never seen her pray. But God was present, or rather the sense that God was greater than everything, more significant than Ohler’s combined prestige and worth, and that He thereby had priority when paltry earthly matters were to be organized or interpreted. Agnes had always viewed the family tree with a certain skepticism, always listened to the tales of the family’s achievements with an absent expression.

  * * *

  The damp grass did Birgitta good. She looked around, studied the wobbly prints she produced and then let her eyes travel around the surroundings. From the neighbor’s house organ music was heard. Hyllenius had hoisted the flag, perhaps it was someone’s birthday in the house, but she then discovered that it was hanging soaked at half mast and realized that someone had died. In the tower Gregor was visible among his plants. Somewhere the sound of some kind of machine was heard, a power saw Birgitta thought, perhaps it was at the publisher, the most anonymous neighbor.

  She sensed that Agnes was keeping an eye on her through the kitchen window, just like when she was a child, and that produced mixed emotions in her, like so much else that concerned the house. And not just the house, it struck her, the whole neighborhood called forth a claustrophobic feeling, as if the whole area was enclosed in a fog, an unhealthy haze, where the same shadow figures schematically moved year after year. Who was directing this mechanical dance of death? Perhaps Liisa’s words about headshrinkers applied to all of Kåbo?

  She raised her eyes and observed Gregor Johansson in his tower. Perhaps he was heading for confusion and dementia, their encounter on the sidewalk had suggested something along those lines. And then this Torben Bunde, who staggered around in an organ rumble, a comic Bach poisoning, which made him write such peculiar things. Farther away Hyllenius, now in mourning, who was trying to maintain a kind of respectability with his purchased titles and poorly imitated mannerisms. In mourning? Perhaps it was just the opposite? Perhaps they were celebrating an inheritance.

  Better to have grown up in Salabackar or at Kvarngärdet in a family without ancestry and fortune, then I would not have anything to defend other than my right to live more or less respectably. That was a thought that constantly occurred to her, and more and more often, now as she approached the age for summation, fifty.

  She felt a kind of loss of something, of what she didn’t know, what it smelled or tasted like, but that obviously must be there.

  This something, which the Ohler family and the entire neighborhood despised, spoke badly of, and lived in fear of, enticed with words in a language that she had never mastered.

  It was a fear that sometimes took comical expressions. Birgitta had never seen it that way until her Liisa pointed out that the fear of others was completely unfounded and pathetic. The people from Kvarngärdet, whatever they smelled like, would never invade Kåbo. It was as if Agnes were to revolt, a completely absurd thought.

  Birgitta peered toward the kitchen window. Agnes was toiling away in there. Birgitta was filled with compassion but also anxiety that a person had been locked in so long. She herself, like her brothers, had fled.

  What she understood was that Agnes never had a man and was most likely a virgin. A married housekeeper was inconceivable, if she was not living together with a man employed by the family. Birgitta had seen that sort of thing during her childhood, apparently happily married servants, and been astonished, tried to imagine Agnes with a man. An impossible thought, not least considering what a contrast it would have made to her own parents’ embittered, and later downright hate-filled, coexistence.

  The organ music from Bunde was booming ever louder, clearly the piece was approaching its resolution, and Birgitta suddenly started laughing. It was as if the built-up tension was released in a violent paroxysm, which was only interrupted when an apple fell down with a dull thud in front of her. She leaned over, picked up the apple and stroked it against her face.

  Nine

  Karsten Haller had drawn the conclusion that the woman was Bertram von Ohler’s daughter. Who else would be stumbling around barefoot in his yard? There was something frightening about her, like when you observe a person unable to contain herself, control her movements or bodily fluids. She was a g
rown woman, not a child that could be excused, and it was a cold and damp October day. It all made him feel very ill at ease.

  Then when she broke out in hysterical laughter he got the impulse to call to her to stop, pull herself together.

  Then an apple dropped and she fell silent immediately. Despite the distance he could see with what a blissful look she rubbed the apple against her cheek. By no means did this make him calm; on the contrary, it underscored a kind of capriciousness in her that he sensed could lead anywhere.

  He knew nothing about her. Maybe she was crazy?

  For a few moments he toyed with the thought of calling her to him, exchanging a few words, perhaps coaxing a little information out of her. But her look made him give up on that idea.

  Now she was standing under the tree, lightheartedly leaning against the trunk, chewing on the apple she had previously handled so lovingly. He got the impression that like a female spider she devoured her lovers.

  It was a strange environment, so quiet, aside from the music from the neighboring house that he had noticed with surprise was playing almost all the time, and whose ominous organ rumble only underscored the desolation that rested over the neighborhood.

  The only one who generated any kind of activity was the man in the glassed-in, illuminated, and circular greenhouse on the roof of his house. The same man he had run into the evening before and who had given a somewhat confused but nevertheless sympathetic impression. It was not just the greenhouse and the gigantic climbing hydrangea that testified that he was interested in plants. On the lot were several interesting bushes, even one he could not identify at a distance, and whose deep red leaves caught your eye.

  He tried to imagine how it had looked here decades ago. Probably not much had changed, all the houses appeared to have been built eighty or ninety years ago, solid stone houses, on good-sized lots, which left room for fruit trees, lawns for croquet and sunbathing, and in a few cases pools.

  A nature reserve, it struck him, with protected species that were treated with the greatest respect and care and which in contrast to Etosha, where he had worked as a guide for several years, was not subjected to caravans of insolent tourists with binoculars and expensive photographic equipment.

  He was an intruder, carefully disguised and equipped with tools that gave him access to the domains of the elect, to the cream of Uppsala’s population, to the “educated and cultivated,” as his mother had called them.

  Those who owned at least a couple of expensive cars parked outside the house, who sailed in the Caribbean and skied in the Alps, shopped in London and New York, while they complained about the tax burden under the dictatorship of the social democrats. All this as his father had talked about and which during his youth often sounded like envious complaining.

  It was his experiences from Africa that first caused him to understand more of the context. It took a village in north Namibia to understand Uppsala.

  The cold crept up his leg. The woman had left the garden long ago. He did not understand why he was still standing there, what he could achieve by this insolence. He had no plan. Not even a sensible idea, other than the thought of the deep injustice that Bertram von Ohler was being honored in every conceivable way.

  Injustices exist to be fought against, his father had maintained, and he, if anyone, ought to have known. Yet in his attitude there was an indulgent aspect, in the midst of the rhetoric he might fall silent and laugh, at himself and his tirades, belittle what he had just asserted and with emphasis at that.

  Perhaps the weight he carried when he came ashore at Trelleborg, with his son pressed against his skinny chest under a stinking coat, was so great that it made everything else seem small?

  Shortcomings and everyday discord paled in light of the evil he had experienced during the war, turned into a temporary irritation like when a fly buzzes around your head. Was that how his father would have seen it? Was that how he himself should view Nobel Prize–winner Bertram von Ohler? Like a fly?

  But you swat at flies by reflex, he thought. You don’t always think you’ll make a hit, it’s more a movement to give vent to the fury at the persistent presence. And then the ridiculous pride at your quickness when surprisingly enough the little carcass tumbles around and down, struggles with its shitty feet and pale wings, dies a painless, bloodless insect death, an insect’s kind of reasonableness. Blame yourself, you think a little carelessly, perhaps a trifle ashamed that you resorted to violence against such an insignificant and in most respects, strictly speaking, innocent creature.

  * * *

  No plan, no idea why he was still standing there. Only a growing anger.

  He should forget it all, for who was really served by dragging old rubbish out into the light? Perhaps his parents would not have approved? What has been cannot be made undone, they would surely reason in their heaven.

  But the anger was too great.

  His father would have taken action! The insight came traveling like a black projectile that struck his body with such force that he was forced to support himself against the wall. That’s the way it was! Ludwig Haller’s love for his family was greater than anything else, unashamedly unconditional. A love that cleared its own paths, ground down all resistance, overcame every obstacle, even his own history. Against the painful memories of a whole continent Ludwig Haller, who had lost everything and almost everyone, a refugee who had seen everything a human eye should never have to see, against all this he placed love for his only son and his wife.

  In that case revenge, when it concerned those near and dear, would also be just as obvious, categorical, and immediate as love. His father would not have hesitated a second.

  Vacillation was betrayal. His grandfather, Ludwig’s father, had vacillated and it had cost him and several in his family their lives.

  Were there perhaps other reasons he spent so much time staring at a house with an old man personally unknown to him, a man he had never met, only heard and now read about? And who by an unfathomable chance now found himself so near to.

  It felt as if he had pulled off a cistern cover and was now staring down into a deep, dark well, whose stone-lined sides were dripping with dampness and covered by spotted moss that resembled black, clotted blood.

  Down there in the depths were his parents, they spoke to him. His father with his slight accent and his mother with her gentle voice, two things he instinctively despised when he was a child.

  Down there Nouibiwi was also lurking, or Miss Elly as she preferred for him to call her before they got married, and which he continued to call her, despite her express disapproval. Otherwise she did not talk that much, neither then nor later, but what she said was often filled with wisdom.

  She did not say anything from the depths of the well either, only looked at him with her big eyes, the whites shining in the darkness, and encouraged him to do something for once!

  * * *

  He looked over toward the Ohler house, which had now assumed quite different proportions, been reduced. The plaster façade, with its dark patches after the rain, no longer looked as imposing. If you looked at it closer the cracks could be seen, perhaps depending on the seepage from the heavy clay that everything in the city rested on. The birches were simply too close to the house, he said to himself, they ought to be removed, if only to let more sun onto the lot.

  The windows, so inviting before with their neat candlesticks and potted plants, now in the dark of the afternoon resembled black eyes that malevolently stared out over the surroundings.

  From the wheelbarrow he picked up a trenching shovel, for its form and usability his favorite tool, and weighed it in his hand. On the shaft, at seventy and ninety centimeters, notches had been carved, like bowl hollows, to make planting easier. They were not really necessary, he had the measurements ingrained in him, but it was a habit to carve in these markings.

  He stared at the tools in the wheelbarrow: a sledgehammer, a string trimmer, a crowbar, and much more.

  I ought to
rough-hew a pillory, he thought, rough and scratchy, and erect it in the midst of this reserve of high culture. The organ music could rumble.

  “I ought to,” he mumbled, before he set aside the trenching shovel and instead reached for the concrete shovel and spade that were leaning against a tree.

  He continued his strenuous labor. The ground was hard and invaded by all kinds of roots; once again he muttered something about the birches. He had decided to excavate to a depth of forty centimeters. If he encountered large stones he would let them be. The planting depth should be at least sixty centimeters, but when he discovered how hard it was to dig, he decided to raise the beds somewhat. He had proposed that to start with but the homeowner rejected it, thought it would look unnatural. Now it had to be like that anyway. He could explain it such that in time the planting would settle somewhat.

  Normally he would have rented a small excavator and done the work in a jiffy, but on that issue too he was met with opposition. No machinery could be brought onto the property. So now he had to dig by hand, though actually he had nothing against that. It was hard work that tried your patience, but after a while the precisely weighed movements created a pleasant pace, an almost hypnotic rhythm, where the repetition gave him the time he needed for reflection, or rather a kind of meditative calm.

  The rain did not bother him—on the contrary, it made the ground softer. He toiled on as always, occupied by the monotony. Every shovelful demanded a similar thought and muscular effort, but with a little variation in every stroke, invisible to an outside observer, a kind of automated and polished finesse that amused him, granted him satisfaction. A visitor at the edge of the excavation would think, Nice that I don’t have to do this mechanical job.

  He had experienced so many times how the uninformed felt sympathy for him, that he should have to toil in this old-fashioned way, that he did not let it bother him. He saw it differently: Others were missing out on something valuable and were to be pitied. They saw only the sweat that appeared on his forehead and in his armpits and how his muscles were forced to work. Nothing else.