Intrigo

by Håkan Nesser

  The most natural thing in the world.

  I did not press him further either. I did not know what circles he moved in and what people he associated with – to the extent he had any associations at all. The simple control I had to perform was at this point not particularly dependent on more or less informed speculations. At my wondering whether he believed that the marriage between Rein and Mariam Kadhar had been happy, he simply dismissively shrugged and countered by asking if I had possibly heard tell of something called woman’s nature. Evidently he considered this both ingenious and exhaustive, and I dropped the subject.

  We parted late, as stated. Because I had a few months left in A. in any event, we also decided to be in touch in a couple of weeks, when he figured that his work for TV would be completed. His idea was that perhaps we could spend a weekend out by the sea in Molnar – only a couple of miles from Rein’s house – where he evidently had inherited a small cottage from his father, the not entirely unknown military historian Pieter Hoorne.

  I said that I looked forward to such an arrangement, but at the same time I had a feeling that in a few weeks things might well have taken such a turn that it would likely not happen.

  The day after my meeting with Janis Hoorne I devoted an hour to investigating the train and bus connections out to Behrensee, the town that was closest to Rein’s house. After that I gave up. If I wanted to take public transport, it would involve a number of complicated transfers and a four-kilometre-long walk along the coast. Consequently I decided to rent a car for a day instead.

  Right before closing time at a Hertz office at Burgisgracht I reserved a little Renault for all of Wednesday, and it was when I came out of this office that I once again ran into my pursuer.

  He was standing on the other side of the narrow canal, apparently trying to look as if he was observing something down in the black, motionless water. He had exchanged his long coat for a leather jacket with fur collar and had a dark woollen hat on his head, but even so I could immediately see that it was him. The same long horse face, the same hunched shoulders and bad posture. The same glasses.

  For a brief moment I hesitated about what I should do, and perhaps that was enough for him to understand that I had noticed him. I started slowly walking towards the city centre and he dutifully followed me, but somewhere on Kalverstraat he turned into an alley and disappeared.

  Even though I wandered around a good while I never caught sight of him again, and at last I gave up and took the trolley home to Ferdinand Bol. Swore to myself too, while I stood there dangling from the ceiling strap, that I would not let him get away next time, but whether it would then be best to simply confront him or try to reverse the roles, I could not decide.

  I had a hard time in general getting a handle on what was actually going on these first days of March. The weather had suddenly switched over to pure spring warmth, and in some way it seemed as if this also involved a shift in quite different respects. In the game that was going on around me (I know that I formulated it just that way) my own positions seemed to constantly shift between various moves and pieces, and if there was any feeling that took hold during this time, it was one of being manipulated. The illusion that my decisions and actions were truly being governed by some kind of free will of my own was without a doubt hard to maintain, and I remember that more than once I decided that this was also probably just what the whole thing was about.

  An illusion.

  ‘But don’t you understand that this is a delusion?’ I said.

  ‘It’s no delusion,’ Ewa said without even looking at me.

  We got no further while we sat at the restaurant at Gasthof number two. We ate in silence instead, and I felt that language and words had suddenly become heavy as lead, and that neither of us would be able to pull them up from the deep mire we had ended up in. As before an imminent war, we found ourselves very close to the point where all negotiations break down and then only naked action remains.

  Afterwards we took a drawn-out walk in the village. Then sat for a long time under one of the chestnuts alongside the schoolhouse, closed for the summer, and observed the black-clad, elderly gentlemen who were playing boules a little ways further down towards the river.

  ‘I have had other women,’ I said.

  Ewa did not say anything. A squirrel jumped down from the chestnut, stopped a moment in front of our feet and looked at us, before it continued. I don’t really know why I remember this little animal and the brief second when it stood quite still and looked at us from only a metre away, but I do and I understand that I am never going to forget it either. Perhaps there is something about the animal’s eyes and about the unformulated question that is always there that I cannot cope with, I think that is it.

  ‘It never meant anything,’ I explained.

  She took a breath.

  ‘That’s exactly what the difference is,’ she said.

  ‘What is that?’ I asked.

  ‘I have only had one, and it means everything.’

  I did not answer and after a while we got up and started back to the hotel.

  The next day, our fourth in Graues, I explained to Ewa that I wanted to spend the day on my own to think things over. I said that I needed the car too, our white Audi that we rented for the summer, and she did not make any protests. It struck me that Mauritz Winckler had a car of his own in his village on the other side of the pass, so if they intended to meet again, there were no obstacles.

  I set off immediately after breakfast and my attention was intensely directed on all the details of the drive up to the pass. It was a clear day with only light wisps of clouds in the sky, and when I reached the pass I could see that it truly was just as I had calculated. The only critical point seemed to be right at the exit from the hotel, but assuming that you did not need to stop for any vehicle that came out on the road, there was no real reason to put the brakes on here either. The ten-minute-long drive up included a few hairpin curves, but the climb was so steep that I never even thought about removing my foot from the accelerator.

  I drove over the crown and stopped at a little parking spot with an expansive view of the landscape on the other side. A tourist plaque informed that the elevation above sea level was 1,820 metres and that the surrounding peaks were close to 3,000. I sat on the guardrail while I smoked a cigarette and tried to follow the winding asphalt ribbon down towards the town, which I could more sense than see far below me. The road appeared and disappeared behind rocks and outcrops; it was naturally a question of the same lengthy descent as the one I had just come up. Some way below me, at a distance of only a kilometre or two, I could glimpse the artificially level surface of the Lauern reservoir, a gigantic dam that I had read about in the tourist brochures. The colour was an impenetrable green and, if I remembered correctly, the brochures had said that it could store up to a billion cubic metres of water.

  I put out the cigarette. Closed my eyes and tried to visualize the whole thing. It wasn’t particularly difficult.

  Not difficult at all.

  Instead of continuing down towards the dam and the town, I decided to first check the ascent one more time. I drove back down to Graues, had a beer at the cafe on the square, and then set off upwards again. Thus I happened to pass our hotel two times, but I refrained from stopping and examining this critical point at the exit – I did not know of course if Ewa was still in our room, or if she was already in the arms of Mauritz Winckler.

  There was nothing to contradict the thought that she was doing both.

  Lying in his arms in our room, that is.

  My second attempt confirmed the conclusions from the first one. From the hotel up to the pass between the mountain massif took just under eleven minutes, and I was not in the vicinity of the brake pedal a single time. So far all was well, but of course the decisive part still remained.

  The descent.

  It took me almost three hours to figure out the most probable scenario, and during that time I drove the same stretch down and
up no less than eight times in either direction. Sat up at the viewpoint several times too, while I smoked and thought. In order to get as realistic a picture as possible of it all, I tried to make my way down as far as I was able without using the brakes, and the last two times it was with obvious risk to my own life that I rushed through the curves in lowest gear. I also checked that there were no arrester beds or other conceivable safety islands along the road, and it was with grim satisfaction I was able to dismiss all such possibilities.

  The furthest I managed to make my way down was just over a kilometre along the road, but then I proceeded with the utmost preparedness and in first gear from the start. The first four curves were not at all impossible to manage; I got the idea that even a driver in a state of shock ought to be able to get around them, and there was no question of any hairpin curves affording a chance of achieving a relatively soft stop into one of the rock walls. What then followed was even worse – an almost hundred-metre-long, sharply descending stretch with vertical rock face on the right side and an equally vertical drop to the left. No matter what I did it was impossible, without using the brakes, to lower the speed enough before the right-hand curve that followed at the end of the stretch. When I went into it, the car was irresistibly pulled out towards the drop-off on the left; an almost thirty-centimetre-high stone guardrail, eroded away in places, was the only protection, and I gradually came to the conclusion that it was here, right here, that it was going to happen.

  So the drop was almost vertical, and about fifty metres deep. Below that an incline began, sharp cliffs and boulders, but no vegetation – and then, the best of all: the motionless dull surface of the Lauern reservoir.

  A combined drop from the road of perhaps a hundred metres. An occasional blow on the side of the mountain, and then plop, down into a billion cubic metres of green meltwater.

  No, it was not difficult at all to visualize.

  I had dinner in Wörmlingen, the first village in the valley below the dam. Wrote a few postcards to friends and acquaintances, and told them about what a marvellous holiday we were having. To L and S I revealed that both Ewa and I experienced this trip as a kind of second honeymoon, and that it truly was no problem to find secluded love nests up in the mountains.

  When I drove through the pass for the last time, I had already started thinking about the technical aspects of the enterprise, but I have always been handy with machinery and cars, and I knew that it wouldn’t involve any major worries. The only thing that might possibly demand a little extra care and planning was the question of where I should do the work. After all, I needed an hour or two undisturbed, but I was quite sure that this detail would also work out.

  In the afternoon of the following day, Ewa said that she would really like to take the car the next morning, by which point, sure enough, I had solved the remaining little problems.

  ‘Of course,’ I answered without looking up from the book I was browsing. ‘Listen, take it. I filled up yesterday, so all you have to do is take off.’

  I remember that she also came up to me and placed her hand on my shoulder for a brief moment, but it was a very quickly passing phenomenon, and I still did not raise my eyes.

  I had presumably slept rather poorly the night before I drove out to Rein’s house, because even though it was only a matter of a hundred kilometres, I had to stop and drink black coffee roughly halfway there.

  To keep myself awake, that is.

  Otherwise it was the same high sky and spring breezes as during the past few days – it must have been almost fifteen degrees Celsius and you could feel the ground swelling under your feet. The weather had also without a doubt had a favourable effect on my state of mind and my energy; the decision to drive out and dig for the compromising letters, or whatever might turn up, in the Cherry Orchard had not been easy to make, and I needed whatever support I could get. Surely I was also searching – consciously or unconsciously – for any signs that in the slightest way could be interpreted positively and filled with implications that I was on the right path. Something I actually devoted myself to during my entire stay in A. – it just felt unusually tangible this particular day. A warming sun. White and yellow flowers sticking up by the roadside. An obliging smile from the girl at the register when I paid for the coffee. Anything at all.

  Perhaps the opposite – bad omens and surly cashiers – would also have made me refrain from it all; in retrospect of course it is hard to know. It happened the way it happened, but naturally it is not an unreasonable thought that things would have taken a different path if the weather had simply been a bit more neutral that second week in March.

  At the square in Behrensee it was market day. I parked outside the church and with Hoorne’s sketch in hand I went out into the throng and got oriented. I still saw no sign of the sea, but could sense it quite clearly in my nostrils. Maybe hear it too: as a muffled, distant murmur under all the human voices and all the clamour that hovered over the square. In any event, a half rusted-away road sign gave notice that the distance to the beach only amounted to one and a half kilometres.

  For some reason I got an irresistible desire to browse in the stalls and stands before I continued and when, half an hour later – the clock in the low, whitewashed town hall had just struck one – I took off towards the beach, I had a rather well-filled bag beside me on the passenger seat. Fruit, bread, home-made marmalade and cheese. Also a bottle of cider, which I understood you should probably be a bit careful with.

  A hundred or so metres before the bank with tall grass and wind-whipped bushes, the road divided and I turned south. According to Janis Hoorne it was now a question of just over three kilometres and keeping an eye out for a dilapidated mill on the left – at that point you could glimpse the Cherry Orchard inside a sheltering wreath of pines right below the bank itself. I drove carefully along the narrow asphalt road, which was covered for the most part by drifting sand and, sure enough, after a few minutes I was at the crumbling mill. I stopped and looked around.

  Yes indeed, there was a house that corresponded to the description in among the trees to the right. There was also a flaking mailbox painted blue and a lane that led up to a kind of natural garage between the trees with room for four or five vehicles.

  That was also the problem. There was a red Mercedes parked under the braided roof, and I realized that the warm weather was not entirely the ally I had imagined it to be. Evidently it had also enticed other people out to the sea, and because I did not have any particularly great desire to run into Mariam Kadhar or anyone else, I released the clutch and slowly rolled further south.

  When I was out of sight of the house, I drove off the road and parked in another grove of knotty pines; I assumed they were planted along the shore to bind the sand, but certainly they also served a good purpose as shady lunch spots for families on Sunday outings during the summer months. At least on these stretches between the beach houses, which were spread out rather sparsely, at a safe distance from each other. I had no clear impression of the appearance of Rein’s house, but nonetheless drew the conclusion that it belonged in one of the very highest price classes.

  And why shouldn’t he have allowed himself that?

  With my bag in hand I made my way out into the wind and down to the shore. Wandered back quite a long way north; I kept to the firm, damp sand which now and then was licked by the foaming breakers and walked at a leisurely pace with my face almost turned backwards at an angle up towards the flooding sun. Out over the water, gulls hovered and filled the air with their complaining screeches. I met a solitary jogger in a red tracksuit and a woman with a dog, but otherwise the beach was deserted; all the way over to the point outside Behrensee, where the land started to rise, and southward as far as you could see.

  After perhaps twenty minutes I climbed up over the bank again. Started making my way back through the sand dunes and when I gradually found myself level with the Cherry Orchard, I crawled down in a protected hollow and prepared to wait.

&
nbsp; The sun warmed thoroughly. I ate a little of the cheese and bread, took a few sips of the strong, sweet cider, and within ten minutes I had fallen asleep.

  When I woke up I did not know where I was.

  Like many others – I have discussed the matter with both doctors and laymen – I am struck now and then by a few blank seconds in the morning. These absolutely immobile, frozen moments when you are thrown out of sleep to the mute surface of reality and could actually be anyone at all. In any time and any room at all. Ever since Ewa’s disappearance I had also understood to make use of the sense of freedom in those moments of unconsciousness – and in that way, during the three years that had passed, had gathered together a couple of minutes when I still, so to speak, had her there. That is something anyway, I would think, but this time – out by the sea at Behrensee – it was not a question of something that simple and consoling. It was something much stronger; perhaps essentially different.

  I was lying on my back. Above me the gulls were circling around in a high blue celestial sphere. The sun warmed. I could hear the sea and the wind that rustled in the shore grass.