‘Let’s do that,’ she said.
She walked over to him, standing quite close, and leant her head on his shoulder. Suddenly it was as if he was the stronger of the two.
‘Maybe he did the right thing in taking off to India,’ Berglund said. ‘Do you know how much I’ve come to hate snow and cold? I used to love winter, we would go cross-country skating, long before it became popular. We would pack our backpacks and set out, to Tämnaren or Funbo Lake, or to the coast during frigid winters. We would park the car on Blid Island or Yxlan and then we could skate all the way to Rödlöga, once even all the way to Fredlarna. We could just make out the Swedish Högar. It feels so long ago. Now I hate winter.’
‘You’ve never told me. I thought you were a snow man.’
Berglund put his arm around her. They stood quietly, watching the snow.
‘At this time of year in Ödeshög there’s just a lot of wind,’ Lindell went on. ‘I don’t remember any good snow winters. My father never ventured out to do more than brush off the front steps.’
‘Was he sick?’
‘No, superfluous maybe. He drove a beverage lorry and became superfluous. He missed the boxes, the clatter of glass, and talking with the shop owners and the kiosk keepers.’
‘Superfluous,’ Berglund said.
‘That’s how he felt. My mother was the one who suffered. Dad got more quiet over the years. And now he is getting senile and you know …’
Lindell felt Berglund stiffen. He let go of her and leant his head against the windowpane.
‘I used to believe in God,’ he blurted out with such sharpness in his voice that Lindell jumped.
‘And you don’t anymore?’
Berglund shook his head. It looked like he was rubbing his head against the glass.
‘What do you believe in?’
‘I don’t know,’ Berglund said. ‘Maybe I just need some fresh air. Yesterday a fellow from my congregation stopped by. We’ve been friends since childhood. He is a good man, a good person, but listening to him I felt wrapped in a haze of indifference. I felt nothing, no joy, you know that sweet feeling of friendship.’
‘And then I barge in.’
Berglund turned his head and looked at her.
‘I didn’t mean it like that. I am happy you’re the one who’s here. I wouldn’t be able to take Ottosson. He would just get chipper. Allan would look sad, Sammy nervous, and Haver even shakier.’
‘Do you want to be left in peace?’
‘I guess death is breathing down my neck.’
‘Did these thoughts start with your health problems?’
‘You’re an investigator,’ Berglund said, but did not answer the question.
Lindell started to sense that his misgivings had their root farther back and that the discovery of the brain tumour had forced everything to the surface.
‘Do you want to take a peek at the file?’
‘Which file?’
‘The one on the county commissioner who disappeared?’
‘You want to put me to work? Yes, maybe it would …’
‘Can I do anything?’
Berglund left the window and sat down on the bed. His cheeks were sunken and the dark circles under his eyes made him look somewhat demonic.
‘You could talk to the widow, well, if there is a widow.’
‘Want to go get a cup now?’
‘Another time,’ Berglund said. ‘I’m a little …’
‘You should rest. I’ll talk to Elsa and then I’ll make sure the file is sent to you.’
He nodded absently. Lindell hesitated for a moment before she went over to her colleague and stroked his cheek.
Lindell paused in the hallway. She felt uncomfortable, as if she had done something she was going to regret in the future, as if she had intruded on a private area. She had expected a tired and haggard Berglund, but not this, a man questioning the faith he had followed his entire life.
He reminded her too much of her father, bent before his time, his life juice dried up, casting a frightened glance at death.
In a way she did not accept Berglund’s sadness and doubt. He had made it through brain surgery and should be praising the God he had worshipped. Instead he was drawing the completely opposite conclusion: His God no longer existed. Lindell was not a believer, had never been, but found it sloppy and unfair to treat one’s faith in this way. If it could not stand up to an illness, it was not worth much.
It occurred to her that she should perhaps contact the hospital minister and ask him to pay a visit to Berglund. Clearly he needed someone to talk to. But maybe the best medicine would be to dig into an investigation.
She could not claim that the missing politician intrigued her. The naked foot in the boot was far more compelling, but Ola Haver was leading that investigation and that was fine by her. Driving the ninety to one hundred kilometres out to Öregrund was difficult for Lindell, since she had to drop off and pick up Erik at day care. The town was so small that it would have been a high-risk project. She could bump into Edvard on any corner. It still hurt to think of him even though she had learnt to handle the feelings and thoughts that could so suddenly flare up. Just a couple of years ago the ground trembled at the very mention of his name or when her memories took a stranglehold. All too often it was wine that would deaden her unease, but since a couple of months back she had decided not to drink a single drop for a while. She convinced herself she was living a good life. She had finally produced order out of all the threads that went this way and that.
In the parking lot she had trouble remembering where she had parked, and at the same moment she spotted the car the mobile phone rang. She saw from the display that it was Ottosson, head of Violent Crimes. She considered ignoring the call but finally answered.
‘How is the old man?’
‘Fine,’ Lindell said. ‘He’s a little dazed but up and about.’
Ottosson talked on but Lindell picked up something in his tone of voice that put her on edge. Finally he reached the real reason for his call.
‘Ola isn’t feeling well.’
Ann Lindell realised immediately what this meant.
‘I won’t take it.’
‘He’s throwing up like a pig.’
‘Fredriksson will have to go to Öregrund.’
‘That’s not a good solution and you know it. It’ll be quick. Our colleagues out there just need a little attention and encouragement, and then you can go back home.’
Lindell sighed. She knew exactly how it would be. She would not be able to turn him down; her working relationship with Ottosson depended on cooperation. Even though he was a fantastic boss who had always supported her, she could not say no to him. Both of them knew how things looked in the division. Everyone was weighed down with work. Fredriksson had his battery cases, Riis was on disability, Sammy Nilsson was attending a course, and Beatrice Andersson was investigating a rape in Tunabackar.
She also knew that this was not simply a matter of driving out to Öregrund, chatting a little, and heading back home.
‘It’s a woman’s foot,’ Ottosson said.
She cast out her last card.
‘Erik has been a little under the weather this week.’
‘You know my wife likes to look after him,’ he said.
Asta Ottosson had jumped in as babysitter many times before, and even picked up Erik from day care. Ottosson’s statement was the nail in the coffin to her objections.
Ottosson may have realised the unfairness of his dealings, as he hurried to add that Sammy Nilsson would immediately take over once he returned from his course.
NINE
Once upon a time, Uncle Ante had been part of a mission to blow up a bridge over a river. Sven-Arne Persson could not remember what the river was called, but he could remember his excitement as Ante narrated – slowly at first, and then with increasing engagement – how they crawled between the boulders, how they approached the start of the bridge. Sven-Arne could feel the sharp st
ones cutting through his trousers, his breathing grew quick and yet controlled, and he scrutinised his uncle’s face in order not to miss a single detail.
It was cold and it was night-time. The decimated troop took advantage of the fact that there was a new moon. Above them there was an outpost, an old stone house with a tile roof. It was most likely just Moroccans, and they stayed inside. The smoke from the chimney blew down over Ante and his three comrades. They had been forced to leave the fifth man, a German, when he sprained his ankle and could not continue up and down the steep slopes.
‘We never saw him again,’ Ante said. ‘His name was Ernst.’
His uncle went silent for a while, and Sven-Arne knew he was thinking about the German. A thing like that, to have to leave someone behind, a trifling matter in a war that had cost hundreds of thousands of lives, brought Ante to silence, sometimes for days and weeks. He would refuse to continue his story, became grumpy and got something in his eyes that made Sven-Arne avoid him. The war inside Ante was thundering, a battle noise that seldom quietened. ‘The Africans were the worst,’ he said finally, ‘they fought like animals. They terrified us, as if they did not know what death was.’
The bridge operation, the in part failed mission to cut the supply chain to the Fascist armies gathered just outside Teruel, was something that returned again and again in Sven-Arne’s mind. It symbolised something more than the targeting of a poorly constructed wooden bridge.
‘The timber was popping in the cold, kind of whiny. It was around minus fifteen degrees Celsius. One of my companions, who was from southern Italy, was also whining. He kept talking about Sicily and the heat. He was a farmhand and used to hard labour. But he hated the cold.’
Sven-Arne never figured out what the bridge stood for. It was just one of the stories he had grown up with.
He rolled over onto his back. It was almost ten o’clock. The voices in the corridor had died down. The hotel had suddenly grown unbelievably quiet.
Sven-Arne stared up at the ceiling where Ante crawled on toward the bridge. The Italian was right after him, thereafter the two Bulgarians. One of them was a miner, he was the one who was going to set the explosives. He was big, almost too big, well over six feet tall and ‘wide as a barn door’ and Communist like most Bulgarians. He had been a body guard for Dimitrov and spoke both Russian and German fluently.
‘I felt safe when “the Brush” was around,’ Ante said. ‘That was what we called him; the hair stuck straight out of his ears like a brush. He did everything right. He was a good buddy.’
That was the highest praise one could get. Once he had called Sven-Arne ‘my little pal.’
But did the Bulgarian actually do what was right?
‘It was war,’ Ante said. ‘Not everything goes like you think it will. You die. No one thought they were going to die. At least not when we landed or came hiking through the Pyrenees; there we were invincible. The Brush did what he could, and more. He was a piece of fly shit, like the rest of us. A speck of dust.’
A good buddy was suddenly a piece of fly shit who didn’t mean anything. Sven-Arne wanted everyone to be a hero. Surely the Bulgarian miner did not blow himself up for nothing.
‘No, maybe not,’ Ante said, and Sven-Arne noticed that his uncle was close to the big silence.
It was as if there was always a fight going on inside him, a battle flowing back and forth. All of the battles had a place inside his head, nothing was forgotten. Not a single speck of dust.
That afternoon on Rosberg’s rooftop, when Ante stood up and screamed something in Spanish, was the only time Sven-Arne had seen him really worked up, off-kilter in a way he had never seen him either before or after, but he calmed down almost immediately. Rosberg waved. Perhaps he thought Ante was yelling something to him?
‘War is so damned dirty,’ he said, before he climbed down.
On their way home, Sven-Arne walked as close to his uncle as was possible.
‘Aren’t your hands freezing?’
Ante had left his gloves on the roof.
‘You can borrow mine. They’re big.’
Ante shook his head.
He stood up reluctantly and studied the filthy floor. Then he let his gaze travel over the sparsely furnished room, before he got himself together and walked to the bathroom. The cracked glass of the wall mirror reflected a divided image where the two sides of his face did not quite connect, as if the picture had been cut in two and someone had tried to paste it back together again.
In his reflection, a wide black line ran down his forehead, nose, and mouth like a monstrous column. He turned his head, made a face, monkeyed around, creating new images, fully conscious of the fact that it was a game, a way of postponing the inevitable decisions that had to be made. Soon he would have to decide where to go. The filthy hotel room was a bus stop, the starting point for his new life. His journey to death started here. What was it he had dreamt during the night, a nightmare that had bathed him in cold sweat? In his reflection, he saw himself as an old man with tired features and a muddied gaze that begged for mercy. The nightmare had ridden him like a young woman. She had laughed at his impotence. Weeping, he had tried to hold her fast, but she shrugged off his limp arms.
He looked away and turned on the tap but out came only a few drops and a hissing sound that caused the pipes to vibrate and sing.
‘I don’t feel so good,’ he said out loud but somewhat haltingly, mostly in order to calm himself with the sound of a voice, prove that he could still talk, that he was alive. A dream was a dream.
The shocking encounter with Jan Svensk had shattered much of the defences he had built up over the better part of a decade. He looked straight into himself and it was not an encouraging sight. The repressed feelings of alienation and emptiness, despite the friendship with Lester, his work in the garden and teaching at St Mary’s, lay bared, woven together with the lies of his flight.
He realised that the complicated dreams of the night were the answer from his unconscious. They had not let go yet and at night he could not escape. His thin legs trembled, his chest rose in ragged breaths, his hands unconsciously found their way to his genitals, shaped like the faucet and as dry, and he felt a shiver of the impotent lust he had experienced during the night. Staring into the cracked mirror he tried in vain to satisfy his lust while his inner vision of the mocking woman – more and more coming to resemble a young Indian woman in his neighbourhood – became increasingly difficult to catch hold of, blurred at the edges, only to disappear completely.
Not even this, not even his desire remained. He had not made love to a woman for many years. The last time was with a young Indian woman, too young, whom he had been with for a short time. Every time she fumbled for his wrinkled member, he became depressed. Finally he had been unable to achieve an erection. His self-disgust conquered his self-pity and his need for another’s hands on his body. He cut himself off, did not want to be some old white lech for whom gratification and artificial warmth were bought for a few simple rupees.
Before this brief adventure, he had had a relationship with a co-worker, a widow barely forty years old, originally from Chennai, who had moved to Bangalore and her brother’s family. When her brother died in a head-on collision on the road to Mysore, she was thrown out. She got a job at the botanical garden, living very simply and not speaking much, and she lived near Sven-Arne. Sometimes he accompanied her on the way home; from time to time they had had a meal at some street café.
The whole thing had started with an accident. Sven-Arne was clearing the area around the Japanese garden, picking up fallen branches, sweeping up leaves and paper. It was trivial work, but gave him a great sense of satisfaction. He liked the little oasis, even if the division was painfully neglected and did not have many similarities with a Japanese garden.
When he completed his work, he sat down on the slope to the drained pond. It was early in the morning, still cool in the air, at least in the shade of the trees surrounding the pond. He remembe
red that he felt happy, not simply because his morning work was done – new sticks, leaves, and papers waited – but because of the stillness of the entire garden. Before the school groups and other visitors arrived, he was shielded from their curious gazes and could think in peace. He used to plan his lectures at St Mary’s during this time. These did not take a great deal of preparation but it gave him pleasure to think through some subject or theme.
He stood up in order to make his way down the slope and toward the nursery. Perhaps he had been sitting too long, he had been training himself to sit in a crouch, so that his muscles had become stiff and his joints immobile, for after only a couple of steps he tripped and pitched forward headlong. He automatically threw his hands up to break his fall. When he landed, a root poking out of the ground cut into his right arm, into the flesh from his wrist to his elbow. He remained prone for a while, in shock, shaken by his flight, experiencing a burning pain. Shortly thereafter he felt blood running down his arm. At first he did not even want to look at his injury, as he knew it was serious. His thoughts went – strangely enough – to Ante, and how his uncle with his all-seeing gaze, like a worshipped but also feared god, pointed his finger as if to say that sin punishes itself.
Finally he lifted his head and looked at his arm. The blood was flowing and had already formed a neat pool at the bottom of the pond. He managed to crawl to his feet and felt at that point that one knee had been banged up and that blood was also flowing from his forehead. He fumbled with his shirt, pulled it off, and wrapped it around his forearm.
On his way over to the nursery, he started to think of the consequences. He was not insured, but that was less important as he – in contrast to his co-workers – had enough money to pay for healthcare. What was much worse was the fact that he would be unable to work. He would have to take it easy and recuperate for a while. The routine of going to the garden every day gave his life meaning. A long convalescence, with a lack of assigned tasks and the anxiety-infused thoughts that he knew would come, would throw him off balance just at the time when he after many years had managed to find a kind of equilibrium and peace of mind.
The Hand that Trembles Page 7