The Hand that Trembles

by Kjell Eriksson

Morell looked at the floor and drew a breath as if she was bracing herself.

  ‘I’ve had men,’ she said. ‘Many men. I mean, not like that, that makes it sound worse than it is, but I am not exactly a virgin. But now, the past two, three years – nothing. I can’t bring myself. Even though I love pine cones, which are a result of reproduction, I can’t bring myself to reproduce myself. Even though I love flowers, stamens and pistils, the delicate and beautiful in their construction and whole function, despite this I myself am wilted. Isn’t that ironic? Or sad, perhaps? I don’t know. Perhaps I am a sterile bloom, like the white outer blooms of the Snowball tree. Or a hybrid, a false flower, beautiful and long-flowering but not fertile. A flower for looks but not for seed. Sometimes I long for a child, but I don’t want to bring one into the world. I don’t trust the men who are in power. My stigma will never swell up.’

  She finished and stared into the floor again, before she gathered herself and anticipated Lindell.

  ‘Yes, I know what you want to say, but if you live with a man the question of children always comes up in the end. To deny a man children is to deny him, isn’t it? A man can’t take that. It upsets him. The male wants to reproduce himself, sire offspring. It is the proof of his virility.’

  Lindell sensed that she was speaking from her own experiences. There was much to say, but she chose to nod and mumble something about how she understood. Continuing the discussion might cause Lisen Morell to go off-kilter, to revert to the state of mind she had been in the other day, and Lindell wanted to prevent this at all costs.

  They said goodbye outside the cottage. Once she reached the car, she opened the door and tossed her bag onto the passenger seat and looked back. Lisen Morell was still standing outside. She was moving her right hand in what looked like a wave.

  Lindell hesitated for a second before she quickly walked back over.

  ‘What do I smell of other than soap and jasmine?’

  ‘Loneliness,’ Lisen Morell immediately answered.

  THIRTY

  ‘It took you a while,’ commented Bosse Marksson, who was sitting at Frisk’s kitchen table, a stainless steel thermos in front of him.

  ‘She wanted to talk,’ Lindell said, ‘and I didn’t have the heart to leave.’

  She told him what Lisen Morell had said about her neighbour, but mentioned nothing of the rest of the conversation, nothing of Watanabe, pistils, and loneliness.

  ‘Want some coffee?’

  He poured a cup without waiting for an answer.

  ‘Complicated,’ Marksson said. ‘I can’t get my head around Frisk. I thought I knew him.’

  Lindell drank the coffee, which was strong and good.

  ‘There are cinnamon buns,’ he said, but Lindell thought they might be from the bakery where Frisk had worked and declined the offer.

  ‘I’ll bet a lot of people have had the wrong idea. Remember what Ahlén said: He’s never had a better person on his staff.’

  ‘He probably meant as a baker,’ Lindell said.

  ‘No, the way he said it, it included the whole personality.’

  ‘People have been wrong before. The fact is that Tobias Frisk had a woman living with him, a woman of foreign extraction that no one says they had any knowledge of, a woman that he most likely murdered and hacked into pieces. And then when you are going to drop in, decides to shoot himself in the head in his best TV couch.’

  ‘But—’ they both said, and broke into laughter.

  ‘You start,’ Marksson said with a gesture of invitation.

  ‘Morell’s story,’ Lindell said. ‘The woman’s foot appears at the end of November while – if we are to believe Morell – Frisk changed back into his old ways and started to smell like a drooling male already at the start of September.’

  ‘Maybe she stopped putting out, like that woman from ancient history. Finally Frisk got tired of it and cut her to pieces.’

  ‘It’s possible,’ Lindell said.

  ‘Three things,’ Marksson said. ‘First: Why does he take his own life? Fear of being discovered, that he can’t stand the shame of being accused of murder. But he must have realised that we didn’t have anything on him with regard to the killing and mutilation?’

  ‘But the chainsaw?’ Lindell interjected.

  ‘Yes, that’s the second thing. If he had got rid of it, he would have been scot-free, even if we would have been able to place the woman in his house. All he would have to do would be to claim that she up and left. He didn’t even know you were collecting chainsaws, did he? If we can assume he was so stupid he didn’t think of the saw, that there were remains of the woman on it, then he wouldn’t need to get so nervous that he would have to kill himself, at least not because of your visit. And if he was a smart guy, well, he would have dumped the saw into the Baltic and everything would have been roses. Then he would have been able to offer you cake and take it easy.’

  ‘What is the third thing?’

  ‘The gun,’ Marksson said. ‘No one out here claims to recognise it, which is fucking unbelievable. Out here you know what kind of microwave oven your neighbour has, what kind of fishing rod, lawnmower, and definitely the contents of the gun rack. You hunt together, get to talking about hunting and fishing, you discuss guns, you brag.’

  ‘The gun was unregistered,’ Lindell said. ‘Is that normal “out here”, as you put it?’

  ‘There are probably old rifles tucked away, but not more out here than in other places. Lasse Malm’s father killed himself with an unregistered weapon, an army gun that no one knew the origins of. Or so they said.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t know he had committed suicide?’

  ‘No, but Dad did. I called him. As usual he had a bunch of good advice for me.’

  ‘I don’t think I got a single piece of good advice from my dad,’ Lindell said. ‘The ones he gave me I didn’t take, thank God. He wanted me to become a hairdresser. When I was around nineteen or twenty they closed up three hair salons in Ödeshög, so he saw potential.’

  ‘Smart guy,’ Marksson said with a smile. ‘He was thinking of your future.’

  ‘I know, but what a future, to stay out there. I would have died of boredom.’

  ‘Like on this point. How long would you last out here?’

  Lindell hesitated. Her colleague was born in this area, had his friends here, this was where he hunted and fished, and she didn’t want to put down his home. She also thought, for a single brief moment, of Edvard and Gräsö Island.

  ‘It would depend on the context,’ she said.

  ‘Everything depends on the context,’ he said, smiling.

  ‘Once upon a time I was planning to move out here. We would have been colleagues.’

  ‘To Gräsö,’ Marksson said.

  Lindell nodded.

  ‘You know,’ she said.

  ‘Dad,’ Marksson said.

  Lindell looked quizzically at him.

  ‘He saw you on the Gräsö ferry with a man.’

  ‘He recognised me?’

  ‘You’ve been in the papers a couple of times and Dad is the kind of guy who keeps track of things, colleagues above all. I think he’s a good man,’ Marksson said, and Lindell guessed who he was referring to but had to ask, perhaps in order to hear someone say his name.

  ‘Edvard.’

  ‘It didn’t work out,’ Lindell said.

  ‘The context,’ Marksson said.

  She wanted to hear him tell her a little about Edvard, but Marksson appeared to have dropped the subject. Was it out of consideration for her? Was Edvard living with another woman? She swallowed hard, audibly. She wanted to tell, she wanted Marksson to understand what even she herself didn’t understand. She wanted to talk about things she had never before mentioned to anyone.

  Where did this sudden desire for openness come from? And why now in the presence of a man whom she had known all of a week, and who to top it off had a central communications centre of a father. Was it Lisen Morell’s words about how she smelt
of jasmine but also ‘loneliness’?

  She was sitting in the killer and suicide victim’s kitchen waiting for something, a word, an insight, or perhaps intimacy. She didn’t know which and did not dare to take a risk.

  ‘Maybe it’s not too late,’ Marksson said suddenly, and stood up in the same breath. The chair was sent backward but he stopped it from tipping over with a swift hand. ‘Shouldn’t we get going? There’ll be no babies made this way. Time to show a little nerve.’

  He rattled off encouraging stock phrases one after the other as he screwed on the thermos stopper and replaced the cap that also functioned as a mug.

  ‘I’m headed to the big village to pick up some stuff for the wife. She must have sent away for something new.’

  Lindell got up from the table. Edvard doesn’t have another, she thought jubilantly. As if it made any difference. She would never see him again, she knew that. Maybe see him by chance, but never touch.

  When she had dropped off Marksson at his car she ended up sitting for a while. She counted the mailboxes at the side of the road. Seven in all, arranged in order from north to south. Andersson came first, Frisk was the last in the row. Lisen Morell had none. She must get her mail in Uppsala.

  Why do I expose myself to this, this masochism? Why air this old story, over and over again? There were no obvious answers. She had accepted the job on the coast even though she was aware that the old thoughts would come up.

  She sighed heavily, longing for her flat, Erik’s chatter, the sofa, a glass of wine. This isn’t normal, she said to herself. You aren’t normal. Something went wrong.

  THIRTY-ONE

  On the day of the Virgin, the eighth of December, Sven-Arne Persson returned to his homeland. That was the word he mouthed as he looked out of the aeroplane window, the first time in almost exactly twelve years that he had seen Sweden. Homeland. What a sick word, he thought, and recalled one of Uncle Ante’s timeworn phrases from his usual rant: internationalism.

  The working class doesn’t have a homeland, has never had one, Ante Persson would preach. Sven-Arne smiled to himself. Apart from this, the trip had given him little to smile about. His temporary passport – issued in Delhi – had created problems at the Bangalore airport as well as in Paris. Prior to his departure three phone calls had been required: one to the Swedish ambassador himself, one to the consular section of the embassy, and finally a call with a roaring voice at the other end of the line, likely a local official, before he was allowed to leave the country. He did not know what had been said in these calls, but he guessed that the embassy had assured the Indian immigration serviceman that Sven-Arne was not a criminal, just a depressed Swede who – perhaps with religious searching as his source – had confusedly made his way to India and lived there under great privation. A non-threatening man who now had to be sent back home, perhaps in order to receive care. That was how he himself had strategized.

  In Paris it had been only marginally smoother. That Sven-Arne’s French was non-existent had not made it easier.

  It was with ambivalence that he spun his way from India to Sweden. He hated himself for having gone the political way to get his passport, knowing it was the only possibility to get around the Indian bureaucracy. At the same time he was relieved that the whole process had been so relatively painless. He would not have had the energy to do real battle with some overzealous and self-important Indian clerks. He would rather have backed down.

  But now, a thousand metres above Uppland, on his way down to Arlanda, he felt only exhaustion. His joints ached. Strangely enough even his arm hurt, the one he injured in the Japanese section, which it had never done before. He saw it as a reprimand from Lal Bagh: ‘You are betraying us.’ He also saw Jyoti’s face before him: ‘You betrayed me.’ Where was she now? Perhaps in Chennai, a place that now seemed as foreign as it had done twelve years ago. And then Lester, who with a tone of amazement but also irony made his voice heard: ‘You were a powerful man in your country, a kind of governor.’

  Even Ismael in his salon fluttered past. The Dalit women in the neighbourhood who swept the street and kept the worst of the filth at bay, who carried bricks when the city razed the old weaving factory and built a police station, who sold bananas in the corner toward the market – all of them looked at him with an unfathomable gaze, not repudiatingly, but with a painful distance that no words or assurances, no decency, could surmount. He had been a decent fellow. No one could say anything else. He convinced himself that he had been respected and regarded as a relatively honourable man given the circumstances. His clothing, his rough hands and feet – the emblematic mark of class – and his entire being on the street bore witness to a man who did not think of himself as above others. But still, he had never been able to overcome the distance, and it had pained him. The temporary passport burning like fire in his shirt pocket, and the fact that he was sitting in an aeroplane, were evidence enough to this.

  The landing gear was unfurled with a muffled thud and Sven-Arne was shaken out of his reflections.

  After having collected his bag and passing through the passport check without significant problems – were they alerted to his arrival? – he sat down in the arrival hall and bought himself a cup of coffee for the astounding price of three dollars.

  Passengers and relatives, taxi drivers with signs in their hands with names such as ‘Lundgren’ and ‘Ullberg,’ airport staff – everyone arrived and disappeared just as fast, without giving him more than a distracted glance. He was a man on a bench, so far as anonymous as in the crowd in Bangalore.

  His hand shook as it brought the cup to his lips. He slurped up the coffee, drinking it without milk for the first time in a long time. I’m going to be stuck here, he thought, suddenly desperate over hearing all the voices around him, Swedish voices. The coffee was drunk up and he placed the cup gently on the floor.

  He ought to get up and go, but couldn’t make himself. He saw through the windows how it began to snow.

  Most of all he wanted to lie down, curl up and feel some merciful person spread a blanket over him. He would live under that blanket.

  Sven-Arne Persson sat as if turned to stone, for over an hour. He could have been an installation. Lone Man at Airport. He had turned off all systems, his breathing was barely noticeable, not a movement betrayed that he belonged to the world of the living. It was his eyes that betrayed him as they scanned the arrival hall. If he shut them he would collapse, he was convinced of it.

  When he finally got up, the ground swayed and he took a side step. The coffee cup on the ground clattered.

  ‘What am I doing here?’

  After a couple of seconds everything became still and the floor stopped swaying. He reached for his bag, took a couple of tentative steps toward the exit, and stepped out into the cold December air.

  He was dressed in a pair of brown, baggy trousers of unknown origin, a blue and white nylon jacket, and his best sandals.

  In his wallet – the same one he had started out with twelve years ago – he had twelve hundred American dollars, which constituted the extent of his earthly possessions.

  Subconsciously he had assumed that he would be met by a delegation at the airport, perhaps police officers, and that they would be in charge of the program. But no one cared about the suntanned and somewhat stooped man in the out-of-place clothing. He wasn’t sure where he should go. Arlanda he knew well. He had travelled from here many times during his political career. Back then he would take a taxi or be picked up.

  He was cold and had to make some kind of decision. He looked around. A taxi marked UPPSALA TAXI was pulled up to the curb. The fact that the company still had the same phone number, which was written in large numbers on the side of the car, set him in motion.

  ‘Uppsala,’ he said, once he had sat down in the backseat.

  The driver turned around and examined his passenger. The snowflakes in his thin hair started to melt in the warm interior.

  ‘What address?’

 
‘I don’t know,’ Sven-Arne Persson said truthfully. ‘What do you suggest?’

  He received a chuckle in reply.

  ‘Home, perhaps?’

  Sven-Arne Persson tried to visualise the town house. He felt a need to explain himself to the still smiling driver, suddenly convinced that he would make time to listen to him, understand his situation, and after some additional questions produce a sensible solution.

  ‘Where do you come from?’

  ‘Iran,’ the driver replied. His smile had disappeared.

  ‘What did you do when you came to Sweden? Where did you live?’

  ‘I was at a refugee centre in Alvesta for eight months.’

  ‘I am like a refugee, but the opposite, do you understand? I am a refugee in my own country.’

  ‘You don’t have a home?’

  Sven-Arne shook his head.

  ‘No family?’

  ‘No.’

  The Iranian had an almost pained look on his face.

  ‘No family? You must have a cousin or something.’

  ‘I have an uncle.’

  ‘Where does he live?’

  The suburb of Eriksdal had basically been levelled in the midseventies. Only a few houses had been spared. Sven-Arne Persson had been party to the decision. The construction company Anders Diös had won the contract – he still remembered the negotiations. It took place within a kind of brotherly understanding between representatives of the county and the builder. Everyone breathed good intentions and mutual understanding.

  He recalled the protests and the demolition. The renters in some buildings had refused to move out. The diggers had begun their work, taking out roofs and walls, breaking up concrete, demolishing one-hundred-year-old sheds as if they were houses of cards. Once upon a time they had been used as outhouses, then were transformed into storage areas for the surplus objects of the renters, finally to fall together into an unsorted pile of rubble.

  A flat had been revealed when an outer wall disappeared in a cloud of dust. Sven-Arne had been standing on the street and had studied the scene. A guitar had been hanging on the wall. There was a bed below it. The whole thing looked like a stage set. No one would have been surprised to see a person get out of the bed, take down the guitar, and play a song.