As a young boy Gregor had in an unconscious way shared their joy and faith in the future, as a kind of extension of the warmth and goodness he felt in his childhood home. But equality and equal worth, Gregor Johansson had never believed in that, neither then nor later. He would have liked to, but distrust was set so deep in him that he never let himself be engaged to participate in a political discussion or even vote in an election.
On one point, however, he had a definite opinion: He was a republican and despised everything that had to do with the royal family. The newspapers’ writings about the princesses, the queen’s plastic surgeries, and the blunders that every now and then popped out of the king’s mouth, or whatever it was that concerned the court, tired him out.
Once he had even written a letter to the editor with a republican angle. It was not published, however. Since then he did not subscribe to the local newspaper.
On the other hand he listened to the radio, always P1, and so too this morning. It was a news broadcast and in the first segment the associate professor already got wind for his antiroyalist sails. The monarch let it be known, in one of his attacks of inarticulate outspokenness, that wolves were copulating and thereby there were more of them in the Swedish forests. The king thought this was a problem, that is, he really wanted to shoot some. Or, well, what did he really want to say?
That he was some kind of honorary member of the World Wide Fund for Nature, whose mission was to protect endangered species, did not seem to worry him.
Gregor Johansson sneered to himself at the breakfast table. Sometimes it was easy to be a republican. But the sneer froze on his lips when, through some kind of unconscious and highly undesired association, he happened to connect the king with Ohler. From whose hand would the professor receive the Nobel Prize, if not Carl XVI Gustaf’s?
The associate professor moaned. He was reminded of Bubb’s exhortations that he should act and he felt tempted for a moment to immediately get to work, but then sank back in a kind of lethargic indifference, the defensive wall he had so laboriously constructed for his own peace of mind. He would not fight for a cause lost in advance. He was an old man, a wise old man, he convinced himself.
The coffee cup clattered against the saucer as he got up to clear the table and right then the doorbell rang. “Bunde” was his first thought, and strangely enough he became a little energized. Maybe it was the prospect of hearing a little gossip about the visit by the police that made him leave the kitchen with light steps to answer the door.
To his great surprise it was the gardener who was standing on the front stoop. He was smiling broadly, and his cheeks were rosy, which contributed to his active look. He began with an apology for disturbing.
“Absolutely no problem,” the associate professor assured him, becoming immediately favorably disposed toward the stranger.
“I couldn’t help noticing the beech tree,” said the man, making a vague gesture with one hand, “and now, you see, I’m laying an acid soil flower bed and—”
“So you need beech leaves,” the associate professor continued.
The man laughed and nodded.
“Beech leaves are first-rate goods, you know,” he said.
The associate professor smiled.
“One moment then, I’ll put on my … if you don’t … then we can…”
The associate professor suddenly became eager at the prospect of taking a turn in his garden with the enthusiastic and obviously experienced landscaper. The man seemed to read his mind and assured him that it would be interesting to look a little closer at the garden.
It took more than an hour to inspect the over fifteen hundred square meter lot. Every now and then they stopped, made comments, and exchanged experiences.
“Oh, a witch alder!” the visitor exclaimed, when they came to the back side of the house. “I saw it from a distance but didn’t realize what it was. What a magnificent specimen, what divine autumn color!”
The associate professor felt almost intoxicated. He caressed the deeply bloodred leaves with a loving motion, incapable of adding anything. He was filled with a deep gratitude that the man had pulled him from the kitchen table and his gloomy thoughts about the Nobel Prize and the royal family. He felt as if they were two good friends who had known each other for decades.
The visitor was very tactful besides. He generously overlooked a few less successful arrangements. To start with, the associate professor was ashamed of the obvious deficiencies, grateful that his yellow perennial bed was not in bloom and showing its peculiar mixture of pale and bright, but as he realized that the man’s opinions focused on the successful parts of the garden his discomfort subsided.
It was hard for the associate professor to handle this natural friendliness and rare feeling of affinity. How could he repay it? Could he invite him in for a cup of coffee? Or perhaps even better, dig up a plant as a present to the man?
“Perhaps you would be interested in a witch alder,” the associate professor suggested. “I mean, for the bed you’re working on. It thrives in a slightly acid soil.”
“Maybe so. Definitely a few white azaleas. I have a weakness for white.”
“Yes, you need something that brightens things up.”
So it continued a good while, a garden fanatic’s ping-pong, while they slowly wandered back to the entry side, where they remained standing.
“You didn’t by chance see the police earlier?” the associate professor broke the silence.
“Yes, and I meant to ask what they were doing here.”
“They were at Ohler’s,” said the associate professor. “They picked up something from the ground and left.”
“What was it?”
“An object,” the associate professor answered crossly, who despised imprecise information.
“A stone,” said the man, and his whole face was smiling.
“Stone?”
“Perhaps from an excavation,” said the man in a gentle tone. “So it’s okay if I fill a few trash bags with leaves?”
“Yes, sure … of course,” said the associate professor, surprised by the sudden shift in subject.
The man extended his hand.
“Very nice,” he said in a hearty voice.
The associate professor took his hand, but the thought that he wanted to offer the visitor something meant that he could not get out even the most trivial phrase. It was only when the man was standing by the gate that he found his tongue.
“Excuse me, but what’s your name?”
“Karsten Haller.”
“Gregor Johansson,” said the associate professor, smiling too.
When Haller left the associate professor decided to dig up part of the witch alder later in the day. It had spread well and it would not entail any exertion at all to separate a powerful side shoot.
Then he happened to think about the strangely certain statement that it was a stone that the policeman found, and that perhaps it came from an excavation, and how Karsten then quickly started talking about leaves.
He leaned over the gate and looked but could not discover anything in particular, other than a car that drove up and parked outside Ohler’s.
The associate professor decided not to be curious, mostly out of pure instinct for self-preservation; he did not want to think about the professor anymore. Today he would be happy about his new acquaintance. He sensed that they would soon see each other again.
Eleven
“A swine, a damned Prussian swine!” the professor shouted.
Agnes backed away a step from the table.
“He visited me at the lab, do you remember that? Then he was a young, promising talent. Now he’s sticking the knife in me. I even invited him to lunch here at the house! Do you remember that? Now that infantile swine is sitting there sneering in his bunker. German bastards should never be trusted!”
How could I remember every lunch? Agnes thought quietly. It wasn’t her fault that some jealous German wrote something in the newspaper.
> All morning he had been bossing her around, yelled at her, and to top it off now he refused to concern himself with the lunch she had carried in.
“The food will get—” Agnes tried to interject, but the professor was not to be stopped.
“What!” he shouted. “How … Scrambled eggs, what kind of food is that? You know I can’t stand eggs.”
“Professor, you have eaten eggs without difficulty your whole life.”
“Nonsense! Take that goo away!”
Agnes chose to leave the dining room. A hellish day, which started with a visit by the police—cretins and bunglers, he had called the two constables—and then that devastating phone call, God knows from whom, about that German Svimmel, or whatever his name was.
She stared at the golden-yellow scrambled eggs and the sausage from Tuscany. A salad of arugula, tomato, and cucumber in a bowl, with a few splashes of olive oil. A bottle of mineral water. Linen napkin. Knife and fork.
She sat down at the kitchen table and ate her own food. He can sit there and shout at himself in the dining room, she thought.
Soon he would get dizzy and need help getting up and making his way to the library. As a substitute for lunch she would fix tea, toast a few slices of bread, one with salami and one with soft cheese, which he would put away muttering, and then take a nap on the couch, even if he stubbornly insisted that he didn’t sleep, only “closed his eyes to think better.”
Although his fury unjustly affected her she felt a certain satisfaction. Or downright schadenfreude.
The last few days he had been wakened out of the increasingly gentle rut that had come to mark both him and the house in recent years. The gradual winding down of the pace had occured, without her actually reflecting on it that much. The time of big gestures was over. Then came the news about the prize and everything changed. The professor was altered beyond recognition or, rather, he resumed his old form, but without the potency and energy of middle age. He became a whining, sometimes shaky old bag of bones that stamped around the house. It seemed as if he was searching for something, rummaging about, moving things that had stood unmoved for decades, except during her own intermittent dusting. He picked up and inspected objects as if he had never seen them before. In the study he took out papers whose print had faded long ago. He had even gone down into the cellar on his own, God knows why.
Every now and then he shouted for her and wanted her to help him, most recently with some boxes that had been shoved in under a table in a room on the top floor, a room that no one had set foot in for years.
“Pull them out,” he ordered.
He was sitting on a piano bench, breathing heavily through his nose. His skinny, veined hands rested on the edge of the table.
“Why is that?” she ventured to ask.
“There are papers,” he said curtly. “Don’t babble so much, just pull out the boxes.”
When an hour or so later she went up to check that everything was fine he was sitting leaned over quantities of letters spread out all over the table. He had pulled up a floor lamp whose sharp glow lit up the scene: an old man who when she peeked into the room twisted his body and set his arms on the table, as if to conceal what he was occupied with.
He wanted afternoon tea, but after to be left in peace. “Not a lot of running around,” he said. A few envelopes had fallen on the floor and when she bent down to pick them up he had shoved her and shouted, “Leave it be.”
* * *
“Leave it be,” she thought at the kitchen table, observing the congealed scrambled eggs. If I were to “leave it be” now … That was something Greta had returned to upon Agnes’s latest visit to Gräsön—what would happen to the professor then? Who would take care of him? Hiring a successor was impossible, times were different now, no one would accept the conditions that prevailed in the house. Birgitta could step in but not full-time. If nothing else the Finnish woman would never accept that.
And what would happen to her? Could she return to that island and the house she left in the fall of 1953? How would she and Greta manage? Neither of them were young, even if Greta seemed spryer than she’d been in a very long time.
It was as if the shove both literally and figuratively put her off balance. The more she thought about it, the more inconceivable and offensive the action appeared. In reality he had not touched her in thirty-five years, other than involuntarily when he needed help getting dressed or to stand up when the dizziness struck him, and on those occasions he dared to lay hands on her.
That time, on June 20, 1973, the touch had been draped in alcohol-soaked talk and tears, but now it was with a kind of bitter irritation that bordered on loathing. She had done nothing to deserve this reception, this unprovoked rancor, this humiliating shove.
She stared at the increasingly unappetizing film over the scrambled eggs. So unnecessary, it struck her, for a hen’s work to now go to waste. It was a thought that made her smile. She pictured the hens of her childhood, how while strutting and clucking they eagerly followed her wherever she went in the hope that she would toss them a few crumbs.
The terrain of her childhood stood out increasingly often and ever clearer to her. She sensed that it was age. She had reached the crown and could only look back, and down, at the laborious uphill ascent that had been her life. In retrospect the early years, before the move to Uppsala, stood out as the happiest. Despite the scarcity and privation. Despite the isolation, the congregation was small and tightly knit and the island lacked a ferry connection to the mainland and the summer visitors were few—despite all that there was joy, a kind of faith in the future. Perhaps it was the landscape that created this will to live and confidence? Or was it simply because she was young?
Her father had said something to the effect that to behold God a person had to be able to see far. You could on the island, it was enough to go up on the cliff at Sigvard and Tall-Anna’s. There the whole sea was open. Glistening in the sunshine, or dark and threatening, with cloud banks towering up over the Åland Sea, or more often toward the inland. Because that’s how it was: the storm might lay its shadow over the island, but if you turned eastward the sea was bathed in sun, only weakly rippling from the breeze. Perhaps God was out there among the islets and skerries? In that case she had turned her back on Him.
In Kåbo there was no such perspective. Here villas were seen in every direction, all of which expressed the same thing: money and power. Power to command, power to shove. No God was there to see. The fact was that Agnes had gradually lost much of her faith. It was as if there was no room for Him with Ohler. Or rather, He became superfluous, all the glory she dreamed about as a child: heat—no more cold floors and shocking chill in the outhouse; richly set tables—no more scarcity and the melancholy of tastelessness; beautiful, soft clothes—no more of her sisters’ discarded rags and the roughness of the flour-sack towel; beauty—no more clumsily cobbled-together furniture and the flaking vase on the sideboard.
Everything was here. Everything was perfect. God was not needed.
During the first months she had wandered around the house and run her hand over the crystal, the foreign types of wood, the linen cloths, the decorated and gilded frames, marveled at all that was fragile, light, excellent, well worked.
Now she knew better. She would give a lot for a time with the roughness against her skin or for the sensation of drinking coffee from a chipped cup with a mended handle. But all the old things were long since thrown away or put away in a box in the attic or in some half-demolished shed.
The cliff at Sigvard and Tall-Anna’s remained, however, in unchanged condition. The last time she “went home” to the island she had made the now strenuous ascent and remained there until twilight. Afterwards she could not account, either for herself or for her sister, what made her stay so long or what was going on in her head.
To her great surprise Greta did not criticize, or even comment on her unexpected expedition. Perhaps she too tottered up on the rock sometimes?
* * *
Agnes stood up, cleared the kitchen table, tipped the professor’s lunch in the garbage pail, and did the dishes.
She happened to think about the policemen. One of them had a shrewd smile, the other mostly looked shy, while the professor was carrying on almost scared. Perhaps he was taken by the seriousness of the moment, being confronted with a Nobel Prize winner.
When the professor turned away the shrewd one said something in a low voice that it was probably not the last stone, but when she asked what he meant he just smiled. Did the police know something that she and the professor were not aware of?
The familiar buzz from the bell made her jump. She could picture him leaning over the dining room table with his finger prepared to repeat the ringing at any moment, if she did not show up quickly enough.
She went up to the window. There was movement in the bushes in the neighbor’s yard. She assumed it was the same man she had seen digging so industriously the day before.
The bell buzzed again. She twisted her head and observed the shaking metal box. Let it buzz, she thought, and at the same moment a trembling went through her too, as if the connection from the dining room was linked directly to her body. It was an alarm that went from her stomach and spread like a shooting pain up through her trunk and down into her legs. It reminded her of the inner agitation she experienced on the cliff at the island.
She could not identify what happened but sensed that it was the professor’s shove and the thoughts it awakened that affected her so strongly that she remained motionless when the bell rang. She heard but did not react. Fifty years ago this would have entailed a sharp reprimand, perhaps dismissal, and only a week ago an improbable defiance.
Just as it buzzed a third time she heard him call. She left the kitchen, took the long way, and entered the dining room from an unexpected direction. He stood, as she suspected, leaning over the table and the bell.
“Yes?”
He twirled around as if he had been struck by a blow to the back. The veins in his face were swollen and the forceful lower lip quivered.
Open Grave: A Mystery (Ann Lindell Mysteries) Page 9