by Lars Sund
She plucked up courage and said: “I brought some really fresh salmon and a couple of bottles of white wine to wash it down. If I can take over your kitchen, I’ll see what I can put together.”
When he came back downstairs dressed in a light short-sleeved shirt and beige trousers she was busy tearing up iceberg lettuce. There was a saucepan on the stove and pale red salmon steaks on the cutting board. She noticed that his short dark hair was damp and it looked as if he had given himself a quick shave. He gave off a faint smell of aftershave.
“Oven-baked salmon with a sprinkling of pink pepper and sea salt, new potatoes and salad. How does that sound?” she said in a cheerful voice. “Have you got an ovenproof dish, and I couldn’t find dill on the shelf – do you have any?”
She sliced tomatoes, mixed a salad dressing and put the salmon in the oven once the temperature read 200 degrees. She was wearing an apron she had found and had a tea towel tucked into the apron strings which were wound twice around her waist. He watched her working, obviously used to doing what she was doing. Her face was slightly flushed and he thought, “It suits her.”
“You look like a real TV cook. You could certainly give me some tips,” he said.
She laughed.
They ate on the glass veranda. The salmon was moist and the fish flaked easily at the touch of the fork. To go with the salmon she had prepared a cold sauce of oil and egg yolk blended with mustard and spices. He praised her cooking.
“Would have been better if I’d had some dill,” she said with a laugh.
I like her laugh, he thought. He raised his glass and she raised hers.
He opened a second bottle of wine and she began telling him about her trip down south. What little there was to tell.
As a radio reporter she had learnt to go straight to the essentials, to exclude what was unnecessary and to summarise the picture. He listened attentively. He was a careful listener, one who used his eyes as well as his ears. And he did not interrupt. She told him what she knew and what she believed to be the reasons for almost a hundred bodies being washed up on Fagerö during the early summer.
She reported everything as factually and objectively as she could, careful not to paint her own contribution as investigative reporter in a better light than it deserved, though she did think it sounded rather good.
“I’m still angry about the loss of the laptop,” she said, shaking her head. “I had everything on it. I don’t know how I could have been so stupid as not to make copies of my files and send them to you.”
Two people, a man and a woman, were sitting opposite one another on the glass veranda of a renovated house on an island in the archipelago. Once the woman had finished her account the veranda was silent. Clouds, dense and grey as wood pulp, moved across the sky, sucking up the daylight. The wind was rising and the birch trees around the house were beginning to sway and twist uneasily.
An owlet moth flew unsteadily round in circles, its speckled brown wings fluttering so rapidly that they made a blur. It landed on the strip between two of the windows and became a motionless dark triangle against the white-painted wood. Ghita Saarinen watched the moth in silence, waiting to hear what Riggert von Haartman had to say.
“So, let me try to summarise what you’ve said,” he started. “Forgive me, those of us involved with the law always feel the need to summarise! What you’re saying is that there are rumours of people disappearing down there. Homeless people, the unemployed, drug addicts, the sick who can’t afford to pay for care, orphans. Hundreds of people have been taken away in the last six months.”
“Yes,” she said. “I’m quite convinced of that. And some of them have been killed.”
The wickerwork chair creaked as he changed position. “He doesn’t like being interrupted,” she thought, biting her bottom lip. There was a short pause. The poor moth renewed its efforts to get through the windowpane.
“The dead were thrown in the sea and some of them drifted ashore here, on Fagerö.”
She just nodded this time.
“When you were down there you talked to a human rights activist who considered that local authorities and private companies were both responsible. They wanted to sweep away undesirable elements. But he lacks binding proof and no one will listen to him.”
“Her,” Ghita said. “Her name is Anna Miller and she told me she is part of a small group that is trying to uncover what really lies behind all the disappearances.”
“But when you tried to ring her again it turned out that the phone number she had given you was wrong.”
“Well, I was informed that the number in question was out of use,” Ghita sighed wearily. “You don’t believe all this, do you?”
She looked Riggert von Haartman in the eye and she saw doubt there. But she also saw something else, something she couldn’t put a name to: he did not want to dismiss what she had told him without at least trying to put it to the test.
“I’ve had a legal training,” he said, “and it teaches you to stick to the facts. Let us suppose that what you are telling me actually is happening, that people are disappearing. But they do have a government and local authorities and a national registration system down there too, you know, and if people disappear it would certainly be reported to the police. There would be an investigation, and the media would quickly be on to the case.”
“But what if these are people who don’t have families to report their disappearance? Or have families that don’t bother to do so? Even here we have cases of people lying dead in their homes for months without anyone sounding an alarm.”
“That can certainly happen. But hundreds of disappearances? It’s pretty bloody difficult to imagine that happening without it causing a massive stir.”
“Not necessarily,” Ghita said.
The air outside was moving. The roar of the wind in the tops of the birch trees around the house penetrated the single glazing of the veranda and emphasised the silence that had again fallen between them. Riggert von Haartman stood up, fetched an oil lamp and struck a match to light it. The small flame at the end of the wick fluttered reluctantly at first, but then it caught its breath and a steady yellow flame grew taller.
She turned her wine glass, catching a reflection of the yellow flame in the bowl of the glass. She noticed that her lips had left an imprint on the rim of the glass and for some reason she found it irritating.
Ghita said, thinking aloud: “If you can find a simple way of disposing of people who become unnecessary, no longer useful as producers or as consumers, people who are said to be a burden on society, it would be cheaper than paying out welfare payments or income support or pensions. Plenty of well-off people would see it as an excellent solution.”
He gave her a long look.
“Are you being serious?”
“I don’t know,” she sighed. “I really don’t know. But it wouldn’t be the first time social problems have been solved that way, would it? It’s no secret that shopkeepers in some major cities in the third world pay death squads to get rid of any street children occupying the pavement outside their shops. Banana workers are regularly murdered in Central America for protesting against the company. Tens of thousands of Indian peasants have committed suicide because they cannot afford to buy genetically modified seed and consequently cannot support their families. And there’s been no great outcry about that. What did the Americans do when they wanted Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean as an airbase? Forcibly evicted the population and then lied about it for twenty years! And it strikes me that … these people we’re talking about now, the ones who ended up on Fagerö … maybe the intention wasn’t to kill them, maybe they were being forcibly relocated for some reason, just like the people of Diego Garcia. But something went wrong. Maybe they were being transported on a boat that sank and they drowned. Then the whole business had to be hushed up otherwise the image of the government and, indeed, of the whole country would be ruined. So it all had to be denied. It might have happened like that …”
She heard her own voice and it sounded too shrill. Distraught, she stopped talking, leaving the rest hanging unsaid in the air.
Raindrops driven by the gale rattled on the glass of the veranda. The owlet moth still sat there motionless on the post between the panes. Ghita had an urge to reach out and prod it with her finger to make it fly away.
After a long silence Riggert von Haartman said: “In your last email you said you thought the theft of your laptop was no accident.”
His question surprised her. His elbows were resting on the table, his fingers were interlaced and he was rubbing the palms of his hands together. She was too upset to answer, so she just nodded.
“Was it stolen before or after you talked to the human rights activist Anna Miller?”
“After,” she managed to say.
He was silent again for a moment, studying the table.
“You know, Ghita,” he said, “I agree. I don’t think it was chance that your laptop was stolen.”
A Last Visit to the American Bar
The scribe and the reader enter the American Bar for the last time. We go up to the bar and each of us orders a beer at the happy hour price of three euros. You can, of course, have lemonade or some other soft drink if Kangarn’s draught beer is not to your taste. We take our glasses and go and sit in one of the booths. Someone has put a coin in the jukebox – the famous Wurlitzer – and it’s playing “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones.
Heavy rain, driven by the gusting north wind, is falling on Fagerö and hammering on the tin roof of the American Bar like a drum solo. The water runs down over the edge of the roof and forms a pearl necklace of droplets hanging in front of the windows out to the terrace. Out there the closed advertising umbrellas are flapping and spraying water out of their folds as the squalls hit them. It is early afternoon and the American Bar is still quiet. There are several people we don’t know settling down to their first beer of the day in one of the booths – they are talking quietly, with grey-blue tobacco smoke curling up around their heads. A couple of youngsters wearing baggy jeans and unlaced trainers are playing one of the pinball machines inside the door. They are away in a world of their own, a world of rattling, pinging and flashing lights. These are the only customers Kangarn has at the moment.
No, that’s not quite true. There is someone by the jukebox, a slightly bent figure facing away from us. He – or she – is wearing a dark windcheater and what looks like a peaked cap. It’s impossible to see who it is.
The door of the American Bar opens, letting in wind and rain and Abrahamsson from Busö.
Abrahamsson from Busö is virtually identical to the painting entitled “The Old Fisherman”, a well-known piece of kitsch, prints of which turn up everywhere. He is wearing a sou’wester and raincoat, and his beard is full and white – only the hooked pipe is missing. Abrahamsson pulls the sou’wester off his head and slaps it against the door frame before closing the door behind him. He unbuttons his dripping raincoat. His boots leave dark damp marks on the floorboards as he walks across to the bar.
“Hello there,” Abrahamsson says. “Thought I’d poke my head around the door since I was passing anyway.”
Kangarn, who is hanging up clean glasses on the rack above the bar, nods to him with an almost impercible movement of the head.
“Bloody awful weather. A wee brandy wouldn’t do too much damage even though it’s a tad early,” Abrahamsson says.
Kangarn’s expression doesn’t change: the man is like a stove with the doors closed – it’s impossible to tell whether there is a fire within or just cold ash. He pours a brandy and pushes the glass across the bar. Abrahamsson hoists himself up on one of the bar stools and digs for money in his trouser pocket. Kangarn shakes his head. Always the same ritual when Abrahamsson comes in. Kangarn stands him his first brandy. Abrahamsson rarely drinks more than one.
At this point in the story the scribe had been intending to offer an account of a conversation between Abrahamsson and Kangarn. They were supposed to talk about Beda Gustavsson, but their conversation wouldn’t have been about her involvement in the issue of the dead foreigners washed up on Fagerö. It would have been on an altogether spicier topic: Beda Gustavsson has an admirer. Yes, it really is true, and a number of well-informed sources, Elna included, can confirm it. Elis from Nagelskär invited Beda to a dinner dance at the Segel Pavilion in Örsund and even, according to Elna, acquired a large bouquet of roses for her.
Abrahamsson was supposed to tell Kangarn all this and Abrahamsson was to have shaken his head and said: “That’s Elis for you. Ever since his wife died he has chased every unattached bit of skirt that crosses his path.”
Kangarn would have pretended to be surprised because he knows that a publican should not appear to be better informed than his customers. In fact, however, Elis himself had been in the bar the night before. Dressed in a brand new blazer and white polo neck, he threw back eight whiskies in succession, all the time uttering imprecations against the fair sex in general and Beda Gustavsson in particular. Kangarn had to help Elis out to Lenni’s taxi, which was waiting for him, and Kangarn was left in possession of the roses Elis had thrown down on the bar when he came in.
But this projected conversation never actually takes place.
Something happens which completely changes the projected course of the narrative.
It is impossible to describe what it is. In external terms virtually nothing happens.
There are two men, one on each side of the bar. One of them – Abrahamsson – seems to be saying something. It’s impossible to hear what it is, however, since the mechanical arm in the jukebox chooses that moment to pick out a new record and place it on the turntable, which begins to spin at forty-five revs per minute while the pickup arm moves over and the stylus is lowered on to the disk. The sixties song “Stand by Me” then roars out through the loudspeakers.
It seems reasonable to assume, however, that Abrahamsson starts to give an account of Elis’s less than successful love affair. He possibly mentions Beda Gustavsson’s name.
Then something happens with Kangarn. It shows in his face, which suddenly takes on a strangely fixed look. The muscles around the jaw and up by the temples tense up as if he is clenching his teeth and he presses his lips together.
Kangarn has been standing leaning forward across the bar as you do when you are talking in a noisy place, but now he straightens up as if he wants to put a distance between them. But that movement, too, is almost imperceptible.
He turns his head slightly to one side, away from Abrahamsson.
That’s all that happens in external terms.
Now one of the men from the group of people drinking beer in the booth comes up to the bar and Kangarn has a valid reason to turn away from Abrahamsson. Kangarn pours the beer, takes the money and exchanges a few words with the man. He’s in no hurry.
Abrahamsson has been left sitting at the bar with a half-finished sentence still on his lips. He is confused.
Kangarn goes over to the booth with a tray, still not hurrying, collects the empty glasses, empties the ashtray and chats to the men in their own language. He disappears into the kitchen with the tray and the door swings back and forth on its hinges behind him.
Abrahamsson remains sitting at the bar for a short while. The kitchen door has stopped swinging.
He goes out of the bar, leaving his brandy glass still half-full. “Stand by Me” has finished. The person standing by the jukebox turns round. At last we see who it is: it’s Judit.
K-D Mattsson Holds a Meeting
The evangelist St Matthew says: “Your Father which is in Heaven, he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.”
Indeed, our Heavenly Father apportions sunshine and rain according to democratic principles, an equal share to everyone. Though anyone might, of course, think that the evil and the unjust are deserving of less sunshine and more rain.
That is the view of K-D Mattsson as he listens to the rain.
If only it would rain for forty days and forty nights and all the waters gather into a new Flood that inundated the world, then everything could begin anew!
K-D Mattsson, chairman of the Fagerö District Council and holder of a long string of other responsible positions, is holding a meeting in the processing hall of the salmon farm at Möröviken. K-D has just opened the meeting. There is only one name on the list of those present – his own.
K-D is here in a proper democratic spirit to hold himself to account.
A gust of wind booms noisily along the corrugated iron walls of the fish processing hall and the rain rattles like grain pouring into an empty corn trailer. It’s cold in the hall, and there is a raw smell. The strip lighting on the ceiling is on, its whitish-yellow light illuminating the marble surface of the gutting table, the offal trolleys, the scales, sinks, taps and concrete floor. Silvery fish scales glitter on the grey concrete of the floor. The hose, like a venomous green snake, lies in thick coils on its reel and the last drops of water drip from its spout and splash on the floor. Empty new fish boxes are lined up along one wall, their sides stamped with Fagerö Salmon, the name of the company – not very imaginative, it must be admitted, but reliable and straight to the point. Everything about the processing hall is still quite new – no wear, no tear. No more than a few tons of fish have been processed here as yet.
K-D runs his hand over the surface of the gutting table, feeling the chill of the marble against his fingers. He stands there, looking down at his hand with its short thick fingers and its veins spreading out like roots under the wrinkly speckled skin of the back of his hand. Hands, he thinks. All of this will end up in other hands, in the hands of strangers.