by Håkan Nesser
But this time, he double-locked it. He had his reasons. The flat would be standing empty for ten days. Neither he nor his daughter would set foot there. Not that Sara had done so for over a month; with her school-leaving exams out of the way at the start of June, she had taken herself off to London and started a job in a boutique – or possibly a pub, but if so she was keeping it quiet so as not to worry her dad needlessly – and that was the way it was.
She was nineteen, and the sense of losing a limb when she departed was slowly starting to fade. Extremely slowly. The thought that in all likelihood they would never live under the same roof again was boring its way into his paternal heart at about the same pace.
But to everything there is a season, thought Gunnar Barbarotti stoically, shoving his keys into the pocket of his jeans. And a time for every purpose under the sun.
A time to live together, a time to part and a time to die.
He had started reading the Bible about six months before, on the advice of God the Father himself, and it was striking how often words and verses popped into his head. Even if You don’t actually exist, dear Lord, he would think, one has to admit that the Holy Scriptures make a damn good read. Parts of them, at any rate.
And our Lord would agree with him.
Barbarotti took his soft-sided suitcase in one hand and a bin bag in the other and started down the stairs. He felt a sudden happiness spreading through him. There was something about walking downstairs, he had often thought, making your way at a decent pace down a pleasantly curved staircase – on your way out into the swarming diversity of the world. The true core of life was movement, wasn’t that so? Just this sort of sweeping, effortless movement? Adventure waiting round the corner? And on this particular day, the windows on the stairs were open, high summer was streaming in, the scent of newly mown grass tickled his nostrils and the happy laughter of children could be heard from down in the courtyard.
A girl screaming like a stuck pig, too, but there was no need to listen to everything you heard.
The postman must have been a tango dancer in his spare time, for it was only an elegantly executed back step that preserved him from the swipe of the suitcase.
‘Oops. Off on your travels?’
‘Sorry,’ said Gunnar Barbarotti. ‘Going a bit too fast . . . yes I am, as it happens.’
‘Abroad?’
‘No, I’m making do with Gotland this time.’
‘No point leaving Sweden at this time of year,’ declared the unexpectedly chatty postman, waving towards the open window. ‘Do you want today’s haul or shall I put it through your door so you don’t have to worry about it for a while?’
Gunnar Barbarotti thought for a moment.
‘Let’s have it. But no junk mail.’
The postman nodded, leafed through his pile and handed over three letters. Barbarotti took them and jammed them into the outside pocket of his case. Wished the postman a good summer and carried on at a rather more sedate pace down to ground level.
‘Gotland’s a real gem,’ the postman called after him. ‘More hours of sunshine than anywhere in Sweden.’
Hours of sunshine, thought Gunnar Barbarotti once he had left Kymlinge behind him and got the temperature in the car down to twenty-five degrees. Well, I’ve nothing against sunshine, but if it rains for ten days solid, I shan’t be too upset about that, either.
Because it was a different kind of warmth he had in prospect, but the postman couldn’t know that of course . . . If two lie together, then they have heat: but how can one be warm alone?
Lots of Ecclesiastes today, noted Gunnar Barbarotti with a quick glance at the time. It was only twenty to eleven; the postman had come unusually early, so perhaps he was off for a dip that afternoon. Barbarotti liked the idea of him doing that. At Kymmen or Borgasjön. In fact, he wanted everybody to do whatever they felt like today. He really did. A sigh of pleasure escaped him. That was how sighs ought to be, he suddenly realized. No need to give them actively, they should simply escape. That ought to be in Ecclesiastes, too.
He looked at his face in the rear-view mirror and saw he was smiling. He looked unshaven and a bit tousled, but the smile split his face virtually from ear to ear.
And why shouldn’t he smile? The ferry from Nynäshamn was due to leave at five, the roads seemed as empty of cars as the sky was empty of clouds, and it was the first day of a long-anticipated trip. He put his foot on the gas, slotted a Lucilia do Carmo album into the CD player and thought what a joy it was to be alive.
Then he started thinking about Marianne.
Then he thought that really, these were one and the same thing.
They had known each other for almost a year. With a vague sense that time must be out of kilter, he reminded himself it really was no longer than that. They had met on the Greek island of Thasos last summer in optimally favourable circumstances – freedom, no responsibilities, an unfamiliar setting, velvet nights, the convenient time of the menstrual cycle, and a warm Mediterranean Sea – but it had gone further than a mere holiday romance. I’m not the type for holiday romances, Marianne had declared after their first evening. Nor me, he had admitted. Don’t even know how they work, because when I stare into a woman’s eyes I generally want to marry her, as well.
Marianne thought that sounded extremely solid and dependable. So they had carried on seeing each other once they were back on home ground. At regular intervals; two middle-aged, single-parent planets, that was how he visualized them, slowly and inexorably gravitating towards one another. Perhaps that was the way it had to look. The way you had to proceed, delicately but relentlessly building a bridge that was equal parts bravery and caution. Marianne lived in Helsingborg and had two teenage children, while he lived about 250 kilometres north of there – in Kymlinge – and had a daughter who had just flown the nest, plus two sons living beyond the borders of Sweden. So it could be contended that this was going to be quite a long bridge.
He felt suddenly downcast at the thought of Lars and Martin. His boys. They lived with their mother outside Copenhagen these days. He had spent two weeks with them at the start of the summer and possibly had one more to look forward to in August – but he could not escape his sense of gradually losing them. Their second replacement father was called Torben or something like that and he ran a yoga institute on Vesterbro; Barbarotti had never met him, but the indications were that he was a slight improvement on his predecessor. The latter had been a paragon of manly virtues until the day he became seriously unhinged and made off with a belly-dancing bombshell from the Ivory Coast.
What did I tell you, Barbarotti had thought at the time, but even then it had felt like a stale sort of satisfaction, well past its sell-by date.
And Lars and Martin had not seemed particularly upset by the prospect of living in Denmark, with the best will in the world he couldn’t claim that. The question was, rather, why occasionally – in one of the most sordid recesses of his brain – he even wanted them to be unhappy there. Would his Cold War with Helena never end? Would he be hoisting faded, deranged ‘I told you so’ banners for all eternity?
It’s my responsibility to make them happy, she was always insisting, not you. That’s a thing of the past.
In another recess of his mind, he knew she was right. After the divorce, Sara had elected to live with him, and she was the one he was missing now. Not his ex-wife, nor his sons, either, if he was honest. Sara had saved him from the demons of loneliness for five years; it made it all the harder now, when she had left him and launched herself out into the world.
Instead, Marianne had come along. Gunnar Barbarotti was well aware that he had his lucky stars to thank for this – or possibly the potentially existent God, with whom he was in the habit of striking gentlemanly bargains.
I hope she understands what a void she’s got to fill, he thought. Or maybe it would be best for her not to understand, he corrected himself a few moments later. Not all women were wildly enthusiastic about pandering to needy middle-
aged men. Not in the long term, at any rate.
He realized his spirits were sinking – and that it was going to be bloody hard to keep his nose above water – and so, seeing a red light start to wink on the dashboard at that moment, he turned into the Statoil garage which presented itself so opportunely.
Petrol and coffee. To everything there is a season.
The ferry to Gotland was not as packed as he had feared.
Perhaps it was because it was Tuesday. Midweek. The wretched summer holiday invasion from the capital was concentrated at the weekends, presumably. Gunnar Barbarotti was grateful not to be spending his ten days with Marianne in Visby itself. He remembered with some distaste a week at the end of his marriage, when he and Helena had rented a shockingly expensive holiday apartment within the old town walls, at about this time of year. It had felt like staying in the middle of a malfunctioning amusement park. Yelling and puking and copulating young people in every little alleyway, impossible to get a wink of sleep before three in the morning. Christ Almighty, had been Gunnar Barbarotti’s reaction at the time, if this is what they call vital tourist business they might just as well convert the royal palace in Stockholm into a bierkeller and brothel. Then they won’t have to bother catching the ferry.
Their feeling of powerlessness had naturally been compounded by having three children to look after, and by the fact that the marriage was on its last legs. He remembered they had each given the other an evening to go out and do their own thing; Helena had gone first and come back at four in the morning, looking pretty pleased with herself. Not wanting to be outdone, he had spent the following night sitting alone on the beach down at Norderstrand with a carrier bag of beer, staying out until half past four.
But to be fair, as he walked home through the ruins and roses that morning, the town had looked beautiful, even he could see that. Bloody beautiful.
When Marianne had asked if he knew Gotland, he had limited himself to telling her about a couple of visits in his youth – Fårö island and Katthammarsvik – and not mentioned that awful week in Visby.
But this time he was going to Hogrän. The name meant ‘tall fir tree’, she had told him; it was a tiny village in the middle of Gotland, not much more than a crossroads and a church, but that was where Marianne and her sisters had a house. They had inherited it from the previous generation; a rather difficult brother had been bought out and the place was guaranteed to be free of any kind of troublesome tourism.
Because it was over ten kilometres from the sea, she had explained, the nearest bathing beach was at Tofta; the children generally cycled there a couple of times a week, but she didn’t often go with them. And for the next few days, he was guaranteed an entirely child-free zone.
Peaceful is such an over-used expression, she said. That’s a shame, because peacefulness is the very essence of Gustabo.
Gustaf, after whom the place was named, had built the whitewashed house some time in the mid-nineteenth century – and when Marianne’s father bought it in the early fifties, the thing that apparently appealed to him most of all was its name. He had been a Gustaf, too, and the last five years of his life – after his wife died – had largely been spent there. Gustaf at Gustabo, Gustaf’s Rest.
The bare necessities of life were all provided. Water, electricity and radio. But no TV and no telephone. You’re not to bring your mobile, Marianne had instructed him. Give your children my neighbour’s number, the farmer next door, that’ll do fine. You’re not meant to have the roar of the world in your ears when you’re at Gustabo. Even my kids have learnt to accept that.
We usually listen to the shipping forecast and Poem of the Day, she added, they like that. Johan even drew his own map of Sweden with all the lighthouses marked on it.
He had done as she asked. Switched off his mobile phone and left it under a pile of papers in the glove compartment. If they were going to steal the car they might just as well have the phone too, he thought, and there was no seven-lever lock on either of them.
As the ferry drew close to the island, he went up on deck and watched the well-known silhouette of the historic town glowing in the final rays of the setting sun. Roofs, turrets and towers. It was so beautiful it almost hurt. He thought of something a good friend had once said: Gotland isn’t just an island, it’s another country.
I hope she’s waiting there like she promised, he thought next. Wouldn’t be much fun having to hunt for a telephone box and ring that farmer.
Did telephone boxes still exist?
She was waiting.
Suntanned and gorgeous. A woman like that can’t be waiting for a man like me, he thought. There must be some mistake.
But she threw her arms round his neck and kissed him, so presumably he was part of the plan, after all.
‘God, you’re beautiful,’ he said. ‘You mustn’t kiss me again or I might faint.’
‘I’ll have to see if I can restrain myself,’ she replied with a laugh. ‘There’s a kind of . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘A kind of . . . grandeur to all this. Coming to meet a man you love on a glorious summer evening. A man arriving by boat.’
‘Mmm,’ mumbled Gunnar Barbarotti. ‘Though I know something even better.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘Coming by boat and being met by a woman I love. Yes, you’re right, it’s pretty grand. We ought to do it every evening.’
‘And how nice to have reached an age where one has time to stop and appreciate it, too.’
‘Exactly.’
Gunnar Barbarotti laughed. Marianne laughed. Then they lapsed into silence and just looked at each other for a while, and he felt a lump start to form at the back of his throat. He dispelled it with a cough and blinked a couple of times.
‘Bloody hell, I’m so glad I met you. Here, I’ve brought you a present.’
He fished out the little box that held the item of jewellery he had bought. Nothing special, a small orangey-red stone on a gold chain, that was all, but she immediately opened the clasp with eager fingers and put it round her neck.
‘Thank you. I’ve got something for you as well, but that can wait until we get home.’
Home, eh? thought Gunnar Barbarotti. She sounded as if she meant it.
‘Shall we go then?’
‘Where’s your car?’
‘Out here in the car park, of course.’
‘Right. Take me to the end of the world.’
And let me stay there until the end of time, he added silently to himself. Evenings like this could make poets out of pig dealers.
Gustabo was in the middle of nowhere. That was how it felt, at any rate, when you arrived as it began to get dark. Gunnar Barbarotti knew he would not have been able to find the way by himself. Possibly back to Visby, but not in this direction. As Marianne turned in through an opening in a stone wall after barely half an hour’s drive, he experienced the pleasant sensation of not having a clue where in the world he was. She stopped beside a hedge of lilacs and they got out of the car. An outdoor wall lamp lit up the gable end of the white stone house, translucent summer darkness had started to fall on the stretch of grass with its few gnarled fruit trees and cluster of currant bushes, and the silence was almost as tangible as a living creature.
‘Welcome to Gustabo,’ said Marianne. ‘Well, this is it.’
At that moment, a church bell struck, twice. Gunnar Barbarotti glanced at his watch. Half past nine. Then he turned his head in the direction in which Marianne was pointing.
‘The church in the middle of the village. And we’re next door to the churchyard. That doesn’t bother you, I hope?’
Gunnar Barbarotti put his arm round her shoulder.
‘And there are the cows.’
She pointed again and he noticed them, just a few metres away. Heavy, ruminating silhouettes on the other side of the garden wall.
‘They’re out in the field night and day at this time of year. The farmer goes out there to milk them rather than bringing
them in. We’ve got our four points of the compass here. The church is to the east and the cows graze to the north. To the west we’ve got the yellowest field of rape in the whole world, and to the south there’s the forest.
‘Forest?’ said Gunnar Barbarotti, looking round. ‘You call that a forest?’
‘Sixty-eight broadleaf trees,’ clarified Marianne. ‘Oak and beech and Norway maple. Finest hardwood, and most of them over a century old. Right, we’d better go in. I hope you kept your promise.’
‘What promise?’
‘Not to stuff yourself with food on the ferry. I’ve put something in the oven and opened a bottle of wine to let it breathe.’
‘I didn’t have so much as a jelly baby,’ Gunnar Barbarotti assured her.
He awoke to see soft dawn light filtering through the thin curtains. They were moving gently in a slight breeze and a concentrated scent of summer morning wafted in through the open window. He turned his head and looked at Marianne, who was fast asleep on her stomach at his side, her naked back bare and her mass of chestnut-brown hair spreading across the pillow as if a fan had been casually opened and thrown down. He felt around on the bedside table until he found his watch.
Half past four.
He remembered looking at it when they had finished making love. Quarter past three.
So it was hardly time to get up and tackle the new day.
But nor was it a moment for just closing his eyes again, he thought. He turned back the sheet, got carefully out of bed and made his way to the kitchen. Took a couple of gulps of water straight from the tap.
Might as well pee while he was up and about, he decided, and continued into the garden. He stopped for a moment and happily wiggled his toes in the dewy grass. So here I am now, he thought. Stark naked, here and now. In the summer night at Gustabo. Things will never be better than this.
It had that grandeur to it. Even more so than arriving on the boat, and he determined never to forget this moment. He watched the pink dawn over the churchyard for a while, then ambled over to the broadleaved woods to relieve himself. He ducked his head as a bat zipped past. He was surprised; surely bats only flew at dusk?