The Viper

by Hakan Ostlundh

  The waiter came rushing up toward the row of tables where Arvid was sitting, and he took the opportunity to hold out his card to pay. The waiter stopped him by holding his palm out in front of him like a traffic cop.

  “I’m sorry, sir, fire alarm. You’ve got to leave immediately.”

  “Fire alarm?”

  “Yes, you’ve got to leave.”

  Arvid slipped his card back into his wallet and stood up holding his black leather briefcase.

  Fire alarm? Strange, he hadn’t heard any alarm. All around him businessmen as well as the odd backpacker stood up and moved slowly toward the exit exchanging quick glances, more confused than anxious.

  “This way please, this way.”

  The airport staff, dressed in neon-yellow vests, tried to hurry the slow-moving air travelers along and pointed in a rather vague direction toward the far end of the hall’s gray luminescence. Refreshment areas, tax-free outlets, and other shops chased out their customers, closed gates, and pulled down shutters.

  He quickened his pace somewhat, without overdoing it. He hadn’t amassed a fortune just to die at Heathrow, either. A fire alarm? What could it be? A terrorist bomb, an outbreak of fire, someone who’d lit their cigar beneath a smoke detector?

  He shuffled along with the other passengers until they’d reached a distant wing of the terminal that seemed to be a dead end. One by one they slowed down and stopped. No vest-clad personnel anywhere to be seen anymore.

  A man about his age in a suit, leather briefcase, and designer glasses, gave him a look of resignation and threw out his arms. Arvid responded with a shrug of the shoulders.

  The evacuation seemed to have petered out and now there was nobody with enough sense to inform them whether they were hovering in imminent danger of their lives, or if it had just been a false alarm.

  Arvid spotted an empty seat on a bench and sat down. He was filled with an absurd sensation that nothing mattered. It was a feeling that was completely alien to him. For him, usually everything mattered. Naturally things were of varying importance and had to be prioritized accordingly, but when you began to think that nothing mattered, then you were in trouble.

  He wasn’t getting the information he needed to make a decision. Should he run toward the emergency exit or could he return to the eternal gloom of the transit hall and order another beer to replace the one he had not been allowed to finish? Or should he just remain sitting there on the bench in some kind of limbo?

  In order to pass the time, he tried to sort through his still very sketchy plans of setting up his own consulting firm. All that talk about never having to work again was of course just a ploy for talking about money without having to mention a concrete sum. He had no intention of retiring. People who strived for economic independence just to devote the rest of their lives to playing golf and lying on beaches baffled him.

  The plan was to start out with a core management group of ten senior consultants and then bring in other professionals and support staff as necessary on a project-to-project basis. He counted on a planning and build-up phase of one year, during which time he would fine-tune his ideas and establish the appropriate contacts. It would be something completely different from the solo projects he had heretofore handled; not unsuccessfully, it had to be said, but having his own company would open up a whole new range of possibilities. It would probably be difficult to remain in Sweden, but he had nothing against the idea of moving to London or possibly Zurich. And this time he would take Kristina with him.

  Two Asians, a man and a woman, were engaged in an intense, hushed discussion on the bench along the opposite wall. He could hear that they were Japanese and was able to place them, with 95 percent certainty, in high positions within the business community.

  One of Pricom’s board members had committed suicide, after first having shot his wife and their seven-year-old daughter. It was so typically Japanese—assuming the information was correct that is—they could never handle a setback. It was so feudal somehow, as if they couldn’t reconcile themselves to the fact that people in a modern society climbed and fell, got up and continued climbing, constantly taking up new positions depending on choice and performance and sometimes as a result of events that lay outside an individual’s control. There was no place for honor and shame in that world.

  Arvid concealed an involuntary yawn behind his hand.

  * * *

  KRISTINA HAD RUSHED up from the kitchen table and into the living room to watch the morning show that was on the TV. The woman with the warm ginger hair, the friendly smile, and the slightly sad eyes was speaking about London. A fire had broken out at Heathrow International Airport just outside London.

  Kristina felt a warm surge spread through her. There was a fire at the airport. Misfortune, terror, bombs, twists of fate, death, destruction.

  Hope rekindled.

  The warmth stayed with her. She embraced it, tried to hold on to it, felt how it comforted her heart, settled her soul. Images started to flash before her, images of the future. It would look much the same. She would continue to live as she had done for most of the past two years. Only she would be able to continue living that way for the rest of her life. And better still: there would be no more chilling apprehension, no more visits on short notice, no more 2 p.m. phone calls every afternoon, no more days where she counted the seconds and expected that any minute he’d scent something out, expose her with his sensitive nose and destroy everything she had come to live for. There would only be now.

  “Emergency crews quickly brought the fire under control. There was no report of any casualties, but an airport representative said that passengers should count on delays of between two and nine hours.”

  The redhead took back the warmth. Kristina went all cold.

  Hope extinguished.

  Then she felt ashamed, lowered her gaze from the TV screen. First she had cheated on him, then she had wished him dead. Wished another human being dead. She felt ashamed, though she didn’t think she ought to. The feeling of shame filled her once the warmth had disappeared, and all the rationalizing in the world could not stop her from feeling that she was bad. Who was she? Did she have no solid foundation?

  “Am I not allowed to have any hopes, am I not permitted to wish for something better?” she said trying to defend herself. Who am I after all, sitting here on the sofa in front of the TV, nurturing some ridiculous dream, instead of sitting on a train halfway to Bergen with that Kosta Boda vase packed in my bag and the car sold? Who the hell am I?

  She got up from the sofa, went over to Arvid’s study and roused the computer from sleep mode by giving the mouse a push. Once the screen had faded up she opened Flight Tracker where she had already typed in Arvid’s flight number. It was true what the red-haired lady on the TV screen had announced. Three-hour delay. He wouldn’t be back in Visby until four at the earliest, later if the connecting flights from Stockholm were fully booked.

  5.

  The floor creaked beneath Anders Traneus as he stepped out onto the glass veranda. He didn’t want to blame her, but his thoughts were going around in circles and with every lap they came back to the same place. To her. Kristina. That she really couldn’t be trusted. Then he quickly stumbled on again. It was difficult to accuse someone you loved.

  But he blamed himself more than anyone. He had shoved his head inside a hornet’s nest for the second time. How stupid could he be? And then, inevitably, that’s where he ended up: Was it stupidity or would he have done it anyway, even if he’d known how things would turn out?

  Forty-seven years old. Life tapered off. Sometimes he thought he was still young. He felt young. His body was strong, showed no signs of the onset of old age, and over the last few years, he had to admit, his rather restricted life had opened up and become more filled with happiness. When he thought about how this happiness would soon be taken away from him, he felt that life did not offer much room for maneuver anymore. It was no longer very easy to change directions and start afresh. I
t was at moments like this that he really felt ancient.

  On the other hand, he hadn’t been very good at starting afresh back when he was eighteen, either. How long can someone who cast you off continue to haunt you?

  Far too long.

  Was that how it would end this time: a Monday at the beginning of October, while he, paralyzed, stared out uselessly across the gray-brown stubble field from the glass veranda he’d built himself.

  The sun hung low in the sky and the light shone straight toward him. He saw that the entire field was covered in delicate webs of gossamer. An entire field. An unbelievable effort.

  Paralyzed? Well, what was he supposed to do? Take her by force? He wasn’t like that, that was more Arvid’s style. Maybe that was how she wanted it. Maybe there was something wrong in her head that made her choose the one who treated her the worst? Or was that what a real man was to her: strong, ruthless?

  He tried to suppress those thoughts. Idiotic reasoning. Bitterness.

  He opened a window, brushed away a few dead flies from the sill with the back of his hand. The monotonous humming of the fan from Hedberg’s feed silo was clearly audible today. The air stood still, as stuffy outside as it was inside.

  When Inger left him he had become bitter. He had dwelled on it for a number of years. To think of all the things he had done for her. Even the glass veranda—it had been her idea, but he was the one who had built it. For her. It may not have gone so well with the rest of the house—it looked more like a modern birdhouse that had been stuck onto the big house from the twenties, but it was solidly built.

  Then eventually it had lifted. Now he had to admit that she was right. She had been right to leave him. He had been fond of Inger, but hadn’t been ready for her. He hadn’t been able to get Kristina out of his mind, even though she had been unfaithful, even though she had jilted him. Inger never stood a chance against the memory of Kristina. And yet … for most of her adult life he had let her believe that he loved her. And perhaps he had done at times, for brief moments. There had been a lot of good things in their relationship … the children. But the feelings between them had always been lukewarm. His feelings toward her had been lukewarm.

  Wasn’t that also a kind of abuse, or at least an act of fraud?

  Now it looked as if he’d be on his own again, in a quiet house out among the fields between Klintebys and Sanda. The children had all left home, busy with their own lives. That was as it should be. He couldn’t burden them. But he felt so goddamn old.

  For far too much of his adult life he had been under the impression that life would just continue. Now he had realized that that was not the case. It wasn’t just that life was shorter than he had imagined. It also ended so much earlier.

  * * *

  WHAT WAS HAPPENING to her? It was dark. A pleasurable tickling sensation moved slowly up the length of her inner thigh, brushing gently against her vulva in two counterrotating motions, then up through her stomach, building into an intense feeling of arousal that spread through her entire body and made her start breathing more quickly.

  What was going on with her? Was someone there with her? Anders? No, there was no one there. Was she touching herself? She almost became a bit embarrassed, as if she had caught herself in the act.

  Where did she have her hands? Between her legs? No, one sticking straight out from her body, her forearm underneath the pillow where nobody slept, the other wedged uncomfortably behind her back. No, she was not touching herself. She had an invisible lover. She felt him moving inside her, gently and exquisitely slowly. And the tiniest movement sent jolts of pleasure surging through her entire body. It was like rapidly alternating showers of ice cold and scalding hot water, dangerous extremes constantly cutting each other off on the edge of pain, transforming torture into ecstasy.

  He moved inside her and she could not resist moving toward him, close and closer …

  But what was he doing to her? The slow, undulating movement seemed to go on forever, never turning the reversing, as if it was coming from inside, as if something were on its way out of her. She threw off the covers and sat up in the bed, completely naked, and stared between her splayed legs.

  The glistening, jet-black snake eyes stared coldly into hers from the protrusions on the creature’s head. Ice cold and unable to move she saw the zigzag pattern of the viper slither out from her vagina; her arousal vanished in an instant. The only physical sensation that remained felt like the cold from rocks plucked from so deep beneath the earth that they have not been touched by any warmth for a thousand years.

  The scaly snakeskin glistened, greased by her vagina. It moved more quickly now that it was outside her, rustling softly as it coiled through her pubic hair, out over her stomach. She didn’t feel the snake’s movements, just that profound coldness rising up through her back from the depths of the earth.

  It came ever closer, its head swaying gently back and forth apace with the movements propelling it forward. It reached her right breast, its black eyes seeming to see everything and nothing. It opened its gaping maw, bared its long fangs, and in the next moment it lunged. The snake’s teeth sank deeply into her dark red areola and the pain …

  Kristina opened her eyes. A few quick, panicked glances around the room to orient herself in time and space. The sofa in the living room, the afternoon sun low in the sky outside the window.

  Her chest was heaving rapidly and convulsively. She sat up slowly, her left arm completely numb, her other hand reaching unconsciously for her breast beneath the sheer, white wool of her cardigan. Her mind was completely blank. Not a single thought except for the memory of the terror she had felt as the snake buried its fangs into her flesh.

  Slowly she regained her composure. It was a dream, just a dream, just a dream, she repeated to herself. But what a dream! Where did things like that come from? The viper on the footpath the other day, that she could understand, but …

  My God, what time was it? She struggled to raise her knitted left arm. Ten to four. She could just make it to the airport.

  6.

  Emrik Jansson stood with his back to the sun, both hands on the handlebars looking toward the main road. The main connecting road for the entire island. He was at the end of it. As far out as you could get, where the asphalt came to an end in front of a few heavy concrete blocks fitted with warning reflectors. Sure, he was way out there, but couldn’t quite be discounted yet. It was as if you were allowed to sit down there on one of those concrete blocks and catch your breath for a moment before they tipped you over the edge.

  Emrik usually went to sleep early and woke up early, often before night had become day. But last night he had hardly slept at all. His thoughts had kept him awake. It was silly for him to worry so much over something that, strictly speaking, wasn’t any of his business, but that was probably hard to avoid when whatever could be considered your business no longer managed to fill up your time.

  He was troubled and not without good reason, but what did he really expect to see or achieve by standing there like that? Kristina Traneus’s car speeding past, a quick wave through the window, and then nothing more? That was about all he could expect to get out of this. A glimpse of Arvid Traneus in the same car?

  Ridiculous old man, ought to go home and put myself to bed, went through his mind. He groped for his tobacco with yellowed fingers, but stopped himself. He felt weak from lack of sleep and wasn’t sure whether another cigarette would brace him up or knock him onto his arse by the edge of the ditch. And if he did end up on his arse, he wouldn’t be able to make it back onto his feet again without help. He knew that from experience and that was the last thing he wanted, for someone to have to come and pull him out of the ditch. Better to refrain altogether. He gripped the handlebars once more with both hands and shuffled forward a few yards. They should be popping up at any moment. Any moment now.

  * * *

  KRISTINA TRANEUS’S BIG SUV, a silver-gray Lexus, turned off the coast road at Klinte and continued on towar
d Hemse. If it was in fact her car, that is. She had gotten used to seeing it as her car having driven around in it for two years, but she was no longer the one behind the wheel.

  Nearly half an hour had passed since she’d picked Arvid up at Visby airport. He had hugged her as soon as he had emerged from the exit for arriving passengers. Had pressed her hard against his big, solid frame, had to bend down when he whispered into her ear; a hoarse, growling whisper:

  “Kristina, it’s just you and me now.”

  His broad smile stretched and tugged at the skin.

  She held on tightly to him, almost clung to him in order not to lose her footing. Felt how she became light headed.

  “Just you and me.” What did he mean by that? What did he see?

  “Don’t you have any more luggage?” she asked once she dared stand unsupported again and noticed his black leather briefcase and little carry-on bag on wheels.

  “They’re sending on the rest.”

  In the parking lot he held out his hand for the car keys.

  “Aren’t you tired?” she asked.

  He had been traveling for twenty hours straight, if one counted the delay in London.

  “Oh, no, I’m fine. I’ll drive.”

  She immediately started to search for the keys in her purse.

  Now he was sitting in the driver’s seat of the car she had come to consider her own. They had taken the desolate route through the forest between Klinte and Levide, turned off toward Gerum and now only had the final stretch up to the farm left to go before they would be home.