They stood quietly across from each other. Lester pretended to study a couple of small birds who were jumping around on the ground, and he was markedly disturbed. Jan Svensk also felt anxiety rise in his body – why was he putting pressure on this man? What did he have to do with Sven-Arne Persson? As far as he knew, he had not made himself guilty to anything criminal. Why then burst in like someone from the Gestapo and beset peaceful civilians?
‘He was my neighbour,’ Svensk said finally.
Lester nodded absently but Svensk took it as encouragement.
‘I don’t wish to hurt him, but you have to understand that you get curious if you see a man who has been missing for twelve years. What do you know of his background?’
‘Nothing,’ Lester said softly.
‘Can we sit down somewhere?’
Lester waved toward some recessed areas of the garden. Svensk started walking toward them without a word, came around a shrubby area, and sat down on a log. Lester followed and crouched down, two or three metres away. Svensk thought he glimpsed a smile before he resumed his expressionless face.
‘Why don’t you tell me where he is?’
Lester stood up and walked over to a shed, the door of which was hanging from one hinge, reached in behind the door, turned his head and gave Svensk a look before he held out an axe.
Svensk stood up. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I have a job to do,’ Lester said, and again sat down in a crouch. The axe rested against the ground, the handle against one knee.
Svensk was struck by the scene. An image, a stereotype, and at the same time a vivid illustration of a worker of the third world, the axe an expression of underdevelopment but also of power. All at once, he became afraid.
Lester’s inscrutable expression as he gazed at the Swede did not reveal anything directly threatening but nonetheless a feeling of danger hovered over the little clearing in front of the shed. Perhaps it was Lester’s blankness that was most alarming. It could conceal anything.
Svensk looked around. A faint murmur of traffic could be heard, muted by a thin hedge and a high fence.
‘I could kill you,’ Lester said.
‘Why would you do that?’
‘You don’t know why.’
‘Will you let me guess?’
Jan Svensk felt the sweat run down his back and under his arms. I should sit down again, he thought. The Indian nodded and it struck Svensk that he – as opposed to all other Indians – used the nod as an affirmative.
‘Our mutual friend is hiding something, and you may be guilty by association.’
‘That may be,’ Lester said, with an indifference in his voice that increasingly irritated Svensk.
Lester picked up the axe and tested the sharpness of the blade against his thumb.
‘I know that John is an honest man, but are you? What do you want with him? What has he done to you?’
‘Nothing, as I said. But he is a friend of the family and it is understandable that I am curious.’
He proceeded to tell him about Sven-Arne, that he had been a public figure and that his disappearance had attracted a great deal of attention.
The Indian man did not appear to be listening. He stood up in one swift motion. The axe lay at his feet.
‘You may leave now. There is nothing for you here.’
‘I can speak with the office.’
Lester shook his head. Suddenly Jan Svensk realised the entire conversation had simply been an evasive manoeuvre.
‘He’s given me the slip, hasn’t he?’
‘I am sorry,’ Lester said, ‘but John does not wish to meet with you. I don’t know why, and I don’t want to know.’
‘Are you involved?’
‘In what?’
Jan Svensk did not reply. He turned on his heel but a sudden fury brought him to a halt. Lester jerked back. Jan registered the axe on the ground, had an impulse to pick it up and swing it toward the Indian, but controlled himself at the last moment.
‘Fucking hell,’ was the only thing he managed to get out.
He ached with a feeling of having been deceived. Sven-Arne Persson had probably been nearby but was now gone and probably in a rickshaw on his way somewhere where he would never be found again.
‘I am staying at Hotel Harsha. Please let him know I do not want to hurt him,’ he said finally, and left the nursery at a rapid clip, without looking back, without bothering to find out how everyone was reacting to his exit. He was certain they were laughing at him behind his back.
‘Damned Indian scum,’ he muttered, and kicked a pot so that it rolled off, struck a fence post by the entrance, and cracked.
A lizard crossed his path and Jan Svensk was gripped by an irrational hatred of the land to which he had been dispatched. He found a deep unfairness in the fact that he was forced to put up with this chaos of exhaust fumes, lizards, and fugitives.
Sure, he could leave Sven-Arne Persson to his fate and round off his last days in Bangalore in the same routine that he had worked up, like that last time when he had put up with Singapore for three whole months. For three months he had perspired on the streets on the way to work only to freeze in the air-conditioned offices.
But the feeling of having had the wool pulled over his eyes constituted a bigger defeat than having been taunted. His search for the county commissioner had unconsciously been what he had used to repress the ever-intensifying discomfort at his stay in India. The creeping feeling that everything was partly a chimera, all this chaos that his work and the work of other people was creating.
For his overall impression of Bangalore was chaos. The new technology that was to revolutionise and improve life, speed up communications between people and continents, had a back side that appeared in a clearer light. He had sensed this before, all puffed-up successes in the IT industry, all castles in the sky that had been built up and collapsed, and then the short memories of people as new bubbles were blown up.
They said the future was being built in Bangalore. Was this what it was supposed to look like? Was this the price we were supposed to pay? Or ‘we,’ he thought as he walked quickly through the avenue of mango trees, it is all of these stressed Indians with their exhaust-induced coughs who will pay the highest price. Was it progress that more and more could ride motorcycles in a country where hundreds and millions had to struggle for their day-to-day survival?
Most of all, he wanted to pull out of the entire mess. But not to return home. During his last conversation with Elise the resentment had bubbled up in both of them, the growing aversion to a marriage and life that was running on autopilot. He sensed a connection but could not grasp it clearly.
His humiliating exit from the nursery was now added to the string of failures. He stopped and watched a group of schoolchildren that had sat down on a large lawn. The children’s clothing was identical: The girls had blue dresses and the boys were in blue shorts and white, short-sleeved shirts. Their backpacks were neatly stacked against each other. One of the teachers was trying to attract the children’s attention and managed to do so surprisingly quickly given that there were at least fifty children.
The teacher spoke in a stern voice, reprimanding, a little nagging. He looked displeased, not to say outright mean. Jan Svensk sat down on a bench and studied the children. They whispered to each other, moving around almost imperceptibly, teasing, in appearance unconcerned about their teacher, accepting a blow on the back or head without a change of expression or desisting from their civil disobedience. The mass of children was admittedly obedient, but in such a way that their freedom appeared limitless. They led a life out of reach of the tired and increasingly irritated teacher. He was large, he had a stick, but he was powerless.
All of a sudden a flock of children broke away from the rest in order to fill up their water bottles from a tap. The teacher lunged in order to herd them back, but at the same moment a minor tumult erupted on the other side of the group. The teacher hesitated for a moment before he ran forwar
d to the tap where several of the children had already managed to get their fill. While the teacher reproached them, the other children continued to fill their bottles. Some received a rap on the arm, another one had her hair pulled, but most of them escaped the teacher’s assault.
Svensk looked on with amusement. The teacher glared at him. Svensk smiled back. The unfettered joy of the children and their anarchic behaviour made him forget about the county commissioner until a park labourer walked by pulling a cart loaded with leaves and sticks.
Jan Svensk rose hastily from his seat on the bench and walked down the rest of the avenue leading to the exit.
TWELVE
Good God, how she had cleaned house: first the anguish and the fury, thereafter the physical memories, all these objects and papers, folders and photographs, and finally, thoughts. And then the call from Rune Svensk. She was still sitting as if turned to stone, one hand on the receiver and with her gaze fixed on the spot where the hedge gave way to a poorly painted fence, the border to the Svensks’ house. Twelve years of effort to build an independent life came tumbling down in an instant. At first she did not believe her neighbour, then she was angry that he had called rather than come in person, and finally there was just paralysis.
She knew that Jan Svensk had not been mistaken. Sven-Arne lived.
The past few years the memory of him had only come back to her from time to time. It could be a smell or a phrase that made her think about Sven-Arne, but then it was never as heavy and piercing as in the beginning.
If only he had died of a heart attack she would have been able to grieve and talk about him as a widow, receive condolences and pretty talk, put on a suitable face and then slowly but surely resume her own life.
But he had been swallowed up by the earth. So typical of Sven-Arne: always the big words about solidarity, but when it came to the small details he was a worm who, egotistically enough, simply disappeared. And in this way, as always, he had the last word. She could never be done with Sven-Arne, shut the book and go on. The uncertainty and the speculations that surfaced from time to time – most recently around the ten-year anniversary of his disappearance – meant that she could not end the chapter.
She had never believed that he had committed suicide. He was too much of a coward for that. Most likely it was a woman – she did not want to use the word ‘mistress’ – who had led him to leave everything: his family, career, and politics.
During the first few months she wanted to stand on the main square, at the county labour meetings, or at City Hall, and just scream out her rage. But it was only Anna-Stina, who had been her best friend since adolescence, with whom she shared her feelings.
When a year had gone by her anger started to fade. She became reconciled with her husband’s disappearance. Or rather, the fact that he was missing made her more conciliatory.
Her financial situation had become more strained, but that wasn’t something she took hard. She had never lived extravagantly and could easily adjust to a more meagre budget. The feeling of having been abandoned gave way to a sense of freedom. She took care of everything herself, she did not have to put up with his monologues at the breakfast table and all of his papers, ‘documents,’ that lay spread out around the house. After only a couple of days she had burnt them in the fireplace.
Now she could not even think the thought that he would float up again, she did not want to imagine him alive. If he were to return to Uppsala against all expectations, she would immediately demand a divorce.
But it would make one person happy: Uncle Ante. Elsa had never understood the love-hate relationship that had existed between him and Sven-Arne. They had almost always fought; it could be about trivial matters, but above all about politics. Nonetheless, Ante was the relative that Sven-Arne had maintained the closest contact with over the years.
For a while she had suspected that Ante conspired with Sven-Arne, that the uncle was in on why and how her husband had disappeared. He denied it, but Elsa was never really sure. If there was anyone to whom Sven-Arne would confide, it would be Ante.
Now he was in an assisted living facility, as good as immobile, one leg amputated below the knee.
His life had consisted of hard labour on the farm and in the forest, thereafter many years as a plumber, and the last few years doing facilities maintenance at a school. That had been easier physically, but with Ante’s temperament it was stressful enough. He was always irritated by the students, seeing them all as hooligans. In 1980 he finally reached retirement age.
Despite his handicap he was unbroken mentally. He seldom to never complained about his aching joints or the vertigo that he suffered – this, Elsa had to admit, was his greatness – but instead he had started to express himself about society with more frequency and intensity, high finance and the ‘overlords.’ He had been a Communist for seventy-five years and he was still the same: incorruptibly loyal to the ideology. Elsa knew that it was this that had both appealed to and irritated Sven-Arne.
She got up from the chair, walked out into the kitchen, but only to sit down once more. She stayed there, staring unseeing into the garden and her thoughts on her husband, whom she had once loved so much. Back then, forty years ago, when he was a plumber – which in hindsight seemed like the most honourable of all professions – he would return all filthy to their little flat in Petterslund, imbued with many smells. There was sweat, welding smoke, a rough smell of iron, and something organic that she could never figure out what it was. It was simply Sven-Arne.
He used to sit down in the kitchen, his hands resting on the table, always with raw knuckles and soiled wrists, and he would smoke a cigarette, every Friday downing a Pilsner, and talk about the events of the day. There was rarely anything out of the ordinary.
Sven-Arne was not a forceful man, but there was a strength in the stories he told and in the lazy tiredness that characterised him an hour or so after his work was done. He did not brag, but Elsa could discern a sprouting self-confidence surrounding him.
She, who had just started her studies, daughter to two teachers, let herself become intoxicated by his scent. There was something exciting, if not forbidden, then veiled in his world, concealed from her. But she could taste it by way of him, his experiences at work, and she felt it so strongly that first year that she would always remember the smell of the young, optimistic plumber, captured by the marked physicality of his being at the kitchen table. You are my man, she often thought, and she laid so much love in those words, which gave way to an increasing distance when the smells disappeared and his wrists were no longer soiled but clad in shirt cuffs.
Sven-Arne started to talk labour unions and politics at the kitchen table, at first casually and with nonchalance, but later – as he became schooled in his profession and the professional community and became more secure in his role – with increasing self-confidence and precision.
He did not appear to realise how this affected her. That was at least what she believed then, forty years ago. But a long time later, when, as a politician, he started to use his experiences from the workplace and his class background, she was struck by the thought that he had always been aware of his position in society, and their relationship. A sort of self-sufficient class pride that he may have sensed attracted her. But at the same time he excluded her – the teachers’ daughter – from his world. He was a man whose justification lay in his story, in the trade he plied and in the language that he spoke. She believed that her education and her future role as university instructor both attracted and frightened him. None of his co-workers was married to an academic.
For many years, Elsa had longed to get back to that feeling in the kitchen, the peaceful chatter and the smell of sweat and welding, even though she understood that it belonged to a time gone by. Now and again, when he had been drinking, the old words and phrases could come back. Then he laughed, for a moment freed of the politician’s mask that he had so carefully adopted. He grabbed her, heavily, drawing her to him, clumsily but wi
th determination. She liked it, but was also embarrassed, because of his lust, his own weakness. Finally she pushed him away, disgusted with her two-faced husband.
* * *
Elsa thought about calling the assisted living facility to tell Ante that Sven-Arne had been spotted in India, but she decided to wait and go to see him instead. Maybe she could surprise the old man and get him to reveal something? If he really had been in league with Sven-Arne.
THIRTEEN
He cursed himself. How could he have been so stupid as to return to the garden? He should have left town. He knew that Jan Svensk came from an unusually stubborn family. He was probably like his father.
It was only sheer luck that Svensk had not caught him. Sven-Arne had observed him entering the nursery and taken refuge in the little shop at the back of the garden, and there he had hidden himself away while Lester had detained Svensk.
He had watched him leave after a while, and in the Swede’s movements he read anger and frustration. It gave him no satisfaction. Instead, he just felt guilty. Jan Svensk was probably not a bad man, he was simply curious.
Lester immediately came into the shop. He was amused, that much was clear, but made an effort not to show it.
‘He has gone now.’
‘I saw that,’ Sven-Arne Persson said, with curiosity but at the same time unwilling to listen to what Svensk had said.
‘Do you know where Harsha hotel is?’
‘Of course,’ Sven-Arne said, ‘in Shivajinagar, not far from Russell Market.’
‘If you want to, you can find him there.’
Lester smiled, and Sven-Arne did not understand what was so funny.
‘Sven-Arne, is that your name?’
Lester had such a peculiar pronunciation of his name that at first Sven-Arne did not catch it.
‘No, my name is John Mailer. I am John Mailer. And what would I want with him?’
‘I don’t know,’ Lester said, ‘but he said that you had been a powerful man in your country. That you were a politician and in charge of many, like a governor. It confused me.’
The Hand that Trembles Page 9