by Håkan Nesser
Yes, in any event, not until that day when Kerr and I sat at the Cloister Cellar and pondered over why not a word had yet been mentioned about his death, either in the newspapers or on radio and TV. Even though more than half a day must have passed, more or less.
‘What was this business about a manuscript?’ I asked.
Kerr reached down and dug in his briefcase, which was leaning against the table leg. Took out a yellow folder, held together with rubber bands this way and that.
‘This is what is so damned strange,’ he said, wiping the edge of his mouth a little nervously with the napkin.
He removed the rubber bands and opened the folder. Took out a sheet of paper, the top one in the bundle, and handed it over to me. It was handwritten; black ink, rather sweeping handwriting. I recognized it.
A. 17.XI.199–
Sending you my final manuscript for translation and publication. Forbid all contact with my publisher and others. The book may under no circumstances come out in my native language. The utmost secrecy is necessary.
Sincerely
Germund Rein
P.S. This is the only copy. I assume that I can rely on you.
I looked at Kerr.
‘What the hell does this mean?’
He threw out his hands.
‘Don’t know.’
He explained that the folder arrived the previous day, with the afternoon mail, and that he tried several times to make contact with Rein by phone. His attempts, as he expressed it, had come to a natural end when Zimmermann called and told him that Rein was dead.
After these clarifications, we sat silently and turned our attention to the food for several minutes, and I recall that I had a hard time keeping my eyes off the yellow folder, which Kerr placed to his right on the table. Naturally I felt an ever-so-strong curiosity, but also a certain distaste. My last meeting with Rein had taken place six months earlier in connection with his most recent book having come out in my translation. The Red Sisters, it was called. We had met up at the publisher just very briefly, and as usual he had been very secretive, autistic in a way, even though we followed his instructions for the press conference to the dot. We had toasted with both champagne and sherry, Amundsen expressed his hope that the book would be a success, and Rein just sat there in his disintegrating old corduroy suit and looked as if the only emotion he could possibly foster with respect to it all was contempt. A grey, indifferent and disinterested contempt, which he had no intention of trying to conceal.
No, it would be a lie to maintain that I harboured any warm feelings for Germund Rein.
‘Well?’ I said at last.
Kerr finished chewing and swallowed deliberately before he raised his head and looked at me with his pale publisher’s eyes. At the same time, he set aside the tableware and started lightly drumming his fingers on the yellow folder.
‘I’ve spoken with Amundsen.’
I nodded. Naturally. Amundsen was head of the publishing house and the one who had ultimate responsibility.
‘We’re in complete agreement.’
I waited. He stopped drumming. Folded his hands instead and looked out the window down towards Karl’s Plaza and the trams and hordes of pigeons. I understood that through this simple gesture he wanted to grant the moment the weight that it rightly deserved. Kerr was not one to neglect an effect.
‘You can take it. We want you to get started immediately.’
I did not reply.
‘If it contains as many references as the last one, it’s probably best if you stay down in A. too. You have nothing that binds you, as far as I understand?’
That was obviously a completely correct presumption. For three years I had not had anything that kept me here on the home front other than my dubious work and my own inertia, and Kerr knew that damned well. Of course I could not decide just like that; perhaps I felt that I wanted to keep them on tenterhooks a few hours, so I asked for time to consider. A couple of days at least – or until the details about Rein’s death had been properly explained. Kerr went along with my request, but when we parted outside the restaurant I could clearly see how the suppressed excitement was brimming inside him.
That was naturally no surprise. While I wandered homeward in the biting wind I thought about the matter and tried to clarify the conditions a bit more closely. If what Rein had written in the letter was true, then this concerned a completely unread manuscript. Unread and unknown. It was not difficult to imagine what a sensation it would provoke in publishing circles and among the book-reading general public if it came out. Germund Rein’s final work. First edition in translation! Why not on the anniversary of the author’s death, even?
Regardless of content, the book would surely climb to the top of the bestseller lists rather quickly and bring much-needed money into the publishing house, which – it was hardly a secret – had been going through some lean times the past few years.
One prerequisite, naturally, was that Rein’s conditions of confidentiality and secrecy had to be respected. Exactly what the circumstances were around this peculiarity was of course hard to know at such an early stage, but if it was as Kerr hoped, then there were perhaps only four people in the world who knew of the manuscript’s existence. Kerr and Amundsen. Myself and Rein.
And Rein was dead, evidently.
While we sat there at the Cloister Cellar I had never asked to look more closely in the folder, and Kerr had not invited me to either. Until I gave a positive response I, of course, had to accept hovering in ignorance of the contents. It was with almost ritual precision that Kerr put on the rubber bands again and stuffed the manuscript back down into the briefcase. When we put our coats on out in the cloakroom he also secured the handle with a chain around his wrist, and I realized that he truly took the whole thing with the strictest seriousness. I also realized that both he and Amundsen had presumably taken note of Rein’s request and not made an additional copy.
What I have now reported occurred on Thursday, the week before the first Sunday in Advent, and to the extent I had not already decided, the matter was settled the next day when I came to my job at the department.
Schinkler and Vejmanen met me with gloomy faces and I understood immediately what had happened. Our request for additional project funding had been rejected.
I asked, and it was confirmed through a long oath from Vejmanen. Schinkler waved the letter from the Ministry of Education that had arrived half an hour earlier and looked generally despairing.
The situation was clear to all three of us. Even if we hadn’t spent very much time discussing it, we knew what that meant.
We had to cut back. There were three of us and we had project funding for two.
One full-time and two half-time. Or two full-time and one dismissal.
Schinkler was oldest on the farm. Vejmanen had a wife and kids. When I look back, I still think that I didn’t have much choice.
‘I think I can get a translation grant,’ I said.
Vejmanen looked down at the floor and scratched his wrists nervously.
‘How long?’ Schinkler asked.
I shrugged.
‘Six months, I would think.’
‘Then let’s do that,’ said Schinkler. ‘We’ll probably be able to dig up some money for next autumn.’
With that, the matter was settled. I spent the morning cleaning my desk and drinking my rightful share of the whisky bottle that Vejmanen went down and bought in the store on the other side of the street, and when I got home I called Kerr and asked if he had heard anything more about Rein’s death.
He had not. I explained that I had decided to take on the assignment in any event.
‘Excellent,’ said Kerr. ‘It does you credit.’
‘Under the assumption that you pay for six months in A.,’ I added.
‘We had intended to propose that,’ Kerr stated. ‘You can probably stay at Translators House, I assume?’
‘Presumably,’ I answered, and because I was feeling the whisk
y rather clearly in my temples, I ended the call. I decided to take an afternoon nap. It was 23 November, and before I fell asleep I lay there awhile and thought about how quickly life can switch onto a completely new track.
This was not a new thought, but it had been lying fallow for a couple of years. Whether it then followed me into the illusory world of dreams, I have no idea. In any event I have no memory of that. Generally I am unable to recall my dreams, and the few times that I have, it has almost always had a complicating effect on my mental state.
And it is certainly the case that forgetfulness is a much more reliable ally than memory; that I’ve learnt from one thing and another.
The third of January was a dreadfully cold day. The temperature stayed down towards fifteen degrees below freezing, and out at the airport a hard, tempestuous north wind was blowing, which meant that most departures were delayed several hours. Personally, I was forced to spend the whole afternoon in the cafeteria waiting for my flight, and I had plenty of time to think about what I was really getting myself into.
Maybe it was only natural that this old feeling of interchangeability came over me. The sensation that all these people who were sitting and waiting around me, or pacing impatiently between the various duty-free shops – all torn out of their normal contexts – in reality could have changed place and identity with each other as easily as anything. That it would simply have been a question of setting our passports and travel documents in a big pile on the floor and letting chance – represented by some bored, anonymous security officer – peel off new lives for us. Arbitrary and just, and completely without preferences or engagement.
I tried to read, too. Not Rein’s manuscript, which Amundsen and Kerr had solemnly delivered at a little ceremony the evening before – I had decided to wait for a better moment before starting on it – no, what I browsed in and tried to concentrate on were a couple of dubious crime novels that I’d bought in the after-Christmas sales, but neither of them was able to capture my interest sufficiently for me to follow the plot.
Instead, I mostly sat and thought about the situation, as I said. About Ewa, of course, and about how I would organize the search for her down in A.: whether I should try to manage it on my own, or if it would be wiser to make contact with some kind of private detective. At that moment I was leaning towards starting alone, and then engaging help later on to the degree that it seemed necessary.
I don’t think I had any great illusions that it was not going to be necessary.
Mostly I was still wondering about Rein. It was hard to keep my thoughts away from him, even if I truly had no desire to go over his damned death in my head every day and every hour. I had done that for a while; there were a number of question marks, and they would no doubt remain until they at least located the body.
If it ever were to show up. News of Rein’s demise had taken almost four days to come out after Kerr got the phone call from Zimmermann. As far as we understood, this was because the author’s widow refused to give credence to the authenticity of the suicide note, and demanded a lot of analyses and investigations before she accepted it and it could be released to the press. It was not until the abandoned motorboat was found, and all other indications pointed in the same unambiguous direction, that she gave in and the message was cabled out over the world.
From the viewpoint of dragging, the place he had chosen – or, rather, the probable place – was not favoured by either winds or underwater currents this time of year, and so there was much that indicated the body had been carried out to sea. If it was true besides that he had been weighed down in some way, there was ever so much that argued that the remains of the great neo-mystic Germund Rein were presently somewhere at a depth of between three and four hundred metres, twenty to thirty kilometres out to sea. This was the cautious assessment made by C. G. Gautienne and Harald Weissvogel in den Poost, the newspaper that went furthest in its attempts to determine a probable resting place.
In some way all of this was typical for Germund Rein, and I had no difficulty imagining him lying down there in the depths with his contemptuous smile on his lips, while the fish nibbled on his flabby old man’s flesh.
Much too sublime, that is, to let himself be put down in the earth by ordinary mortals in the customary manner. Untouchable to the end.
Naturally, I also realized that thoughts like this hardly made a good platform for the work I had to perform in A. If there is anything that has all the prerequisites for upsetting a translation assignment, it is a feeling of hostility and animosity towards the author.
But I hadn’t started yet, as I said, and perhaps it was just as well to get rid of this aggression before it was time.
I think I tried to convince myself of that anyway.
My plane took off at ten o’clock, exactly six hours delayed, and when, after a rather bumpy flight, we landed at S–haufen outside A., it was already past midnight. The airline offered all passengers an overnight at the airport hotel, which I – like the majority of the others – accepted, and it was thus not until the morning of the fourth that I could step off the train at the central station in A. I don’t really know why I take up space with these basically irrelevant time indications, maybe it’s mostly a question of control. The feeling of control, that is: what Rimley designates as Movement’s necessary time and space load, or something similarly sententious. I don’t know if you, Reader, are familiar with Rimley, but once I had spent some time in A. – in the stationary space – I soon noticed in any event how inessential it seemed to me to keep track of concepts such as date and time. While I sat in the library and worked, they often had to tactfully shoo me out when it was time to close for the night, and I remember that on a couple of occasions – during March or April, presumably – I pulled uncomprehendingly on the door of the neighbourhood shop long after closing time or at an early Sunday hour.
But thus, on 4 January, I arrived. In the morning. And it wasn’t exactly spring in the air here either.
With two heavy suitcases and my worn briefcase (containing the yellow folder, some dictionaries and a large envelope with countless photographs of Ewa), I took a taxi to Translators House. Of the six rooms for rent, four were occupied: two Africans, a Finn, evidently, and a ruddy and puffy-faced Irishman who I met on the stairs – he smelled of cheap whisky and addressed me in some kind of German. I turned down his invitation for a drink at the bar on the other side of the street, took possession of my room and decided to try to find something better as soon as possible. I discussed the housing issue with Kerr and Amundsen, and a certain unanimity prevailed that Translators House was perhaps not the best solution after all. Presumably my stay at such a place would sooner or later come to Rein’s publisher’s knowledge, and we had decided not to compromise the great one’s final wish. Discretion a point of honour. My work in A. should be done without anyone’s attention being brought to what I was occupied with; the commotion and articles after Rein’s death had continued all of December, and there was of course a lot of money to be made on reissues of this and that old book. Not to mention what an echo his last, posthumous book could achieve. A posthumous first edition in translation. Absurd as anything, undeniably.
It was still lying there between the yellow cardboard sleeves. I’d been forced to swear, before both Amundsen and Kerr, to guard it with my virtue and my life. Even so, they had made a copy and placed it deep inside the publishing house’s most sacred safety deposit box – there still had to be some measure to risk-taking, Amundsen had let it be understood. My steadfastness against starting to read the manuscript while still on the home front may perhaps seem a trifle extreme, but it is due to the method I apply when I translate. Like so much else, I inherited it from Henry Darke, and I have understood that it is not particularly common in the guild; the main idea is that the interpretation, the translation, must start immediately on first contact with the text. To make doubly sure of this I take great pains to read as little of the text in advance as possible. Preferably on
ly a sentence or a line; at most half a page. I know that other translators work in exactly the opposite way; preferring to go through the whole work two or even three times before they get started with their own writing, but Henry Darke recommended his model and I soon discovered that it suits me better. Especially when it concerns an author like Germund Rein, where you quite often get an impression that in the moment of writing he himself is not really clear what is going to come two pages further along.
Besides rooms for rent, at Translators House there is a common kitchen with stove, fridge and freezer, and a rather well-stocked library (especially where dictionaries are concerned, naturally enough) with a number of somewhat separate and basically appealing workspaces. This first day, however, it all seemed rather deserted. In the refrigerator I found a couple of beer cans, half a stick of butter and a piece of cheese that must have been there since long before Christmas. The library looked dusty and hardly inviting; at three of the workspaces the lamps were broken. I realized that it was out of the question for me to sit down with Rein’s manuscript in this lugubrious environment. The coffee machine in reception was out of order, and Miss Franck, who sat at the so-called reception desk four hours a day, told me that a new one had been ordered in October, but the delivery had evidently been delayed. She also started going through the laundry and cleaning procedures with me, but I interrupted her and explained that I had stayed here before and was already familiar with them, and that I would only stay a week.