Intrigo

by Håkan Nesser

  This is just one of all the little things I have to take care of. But it will have to wait until tomorrow. Right now I just want to sit here and rest.

  Remember and browse in the albums. A few lines from Barin come to me.

  I miss my mother’s mild odour of sweat –

  and those short pants they forced me to wear

  that first day of school.

  I miss Ursula Lipinskaja, and waking up well-rested

  to completely unwritten summer days.

  But most of all I miss the unattainable smoke

  from those cigarettes I never smoked at the cafes.

  I light one now instead. A feeling of restrained satisfaction vibrates within me.

  As if something long foreseen is about to come off.

  The dogs are sleeping in front of the hearth and they don’t seem to miss him either.

  To:

  Agnes R.

  Villa Guarda

  Gobshejm

  Grothenburg, 26 September

  Dear Agnes,

  Forgive me for writing to you so soon after you have become alone, I hope you are not completely shattered after your difficult loss. I liked seeing you again so much, even if I wish of course that the circumstances had been a little different. And of course I should have exchanged a few words with you since I was there anyway, but something held me back. I don’t know what, sometimes it’s just the case that we are obstructed by forces we have no name for. Isn’t that right, Agnes?

  But it was a lovely and dignified ceremony, I never did know your husband, so of course I can’t say whether it was also ‘becoming’, as the English say.

  Anyhow, I would appreciate resuming contact with you, so many years have passed and I feel that you shouldn’t cut off threads so casually. We were so close to each other, dear Agnes.

  So, may I write to you? Tell a little about myself and my family? If you have a desire to respond?

  We can probably start by mail, then we’ll see. I have a hard time with email, it gets so lightweight and superficial.

  If you have no desire to resume this old friendship, you absolutely must say no.

  Awaiting hopefully your reply.

  Yours, Henny

  To:

  Henny Delgado

  Pelikaanallé 24

  Grothenburg

  Gobshejm, 30 September

  Dear Henny,

  Good Lord, you sound as if we were eighty!

  Of course you can write, and I will gladly write back. I’m sure we have a lot to talk about, but because you’re the one who is taking the initiative, I will let you tell first.

  So feel no hesitation. Write soon, please, we have a nineteen-year gap to fill!

  Yours, Agnes

  If you are simply kind and good, sooner or later you get your reward.

  It is the second day in Grothenburg, and even though I am just a skinny eleven-year-old I know that she’s lying.

  Or maybe not lying. The red-haired girl, whose name is Henny, and who already came to visit with her mum yesterday, before we unpacked a single box, has simply misunderstood everything. Hasn’t really understood what life is like and how things work.

  But I don’t protest. Don’t have words for such things at my tender age, and besides it’s not important. It’s in the evening, we’re standing on the bridge over the river and looking down into the brown water; our mothers have sent us out on a little walk so that Henny can show me the neighbourhood and the area. My mother has felt a so-called instantaneous confidence in Henny, despite her innate and cherished suspicion.

  And Henny has by all means behaved both well-bred and charming, I won’t deny that.

  And plum jam was a welcome gift between good neighbours.

  A clever laugh and a sincere gaze.

  If you are simply kind and good, that is.

  I don’t remember how I answer, maybe I say nothing. We’ve been taking a circuitous walk around the neighbourhood. The playing field. Hengerlaan down to the railway tracks. The shops along Klingerweg. We stopped by Smytter the butcher, who is her uncle; each of us got a white sausage and a coin from him. Bought gum in the tobacconist at the corner out toward Zwille.

  And the church and the cemetery, where we strolled and looked at the graves: Henny’s grandfather and grandmother are here and some day she herself will take a place here too; it’s a substantial and roomy family plot with space for numerous generations.

  Stumpstrasse, Gassenstrasse, Jacobs steeg and whatever they’re called. And the Wallman School, where Henny has already gone for five years and where I will start in September. It is an old stone fortress with a Latin quotation above the big oak doorway. Non scholae sed vitae discimus! Henny intones, and then we say it together a few times so that it will be clear to me before it’s time to sit down at a desk and listen to Master Pompius and Miss Mathisen and a stooped little sewing lady whose name is Keckelhänchen, of all things.

  Non scholae sed vitae discimus.

  We learn not for school, but for life.

  But now we are hanging over the railing on the bridge; it is called Karl Eggers Bridge. Henny doesn’t know why it’s called that, or who Karl Eggers was, but the river is named Neckar, of course. It flows around our district, at least to the east and north, and marks the boundary with Gerringstadt, which is a completely different neighbourhood about which Henny has no knowledge other than that her cousin Mauritz lived there before they moved to Marseilles, which is by the Mediterranean Sea, because of Mauritz’s failing health, but he died anyway even though he was no more than eight going on nine, so the Mediterranean is probably overrated when all is said and done.

  Maybe he wasn’t sufficiently kind and good, I think, but I don’t say that. I spit the gum out in the flowing water instead.

  ‘You mustn’t spit chewing gum into the water,’ says Henny. ‘A fish might get it in its mouth and suffocate.’

  The hell you can suffocate a fish, I think, they don’t need to breathe.

  But I don’t say that either.

  It’s my mother and I who have moved to Grothenburg. My father and my brother are still living on Slingergasse in Saarbrücken, and even though Claus is three years older than me and we have been at odds as long as I can remember, I long for him so that my chest aches these first few days.

  I found out that my parents were getting a divorce on 1 July, and we took off exactly one month later. They had planned the whole thing in detail before they dropped the bomb: we were at the Kraus restaurant, I don’t know if it’s usual or unusual that parents take their kids out to a restaurant when they intend to tell them that they’re going to separate. But they were extremely amiable, both to each other and to Claus and me, that shouldn’t be denied. Best friends in the world, but now it was the way it was, and it had turned out the way it had. It goes that way sometimes in life and this vale of tears, that’s not something you can control, hey diddle diddle. I ordered the most expensive main course I could find on the whole menu, sole with white wine sauce and seasonal vegetables, and they went along with that without protest.

  Dad and Claus would stay behind, they explained over dessert – citrus sorbet on wild raspberry mirror glaze with candied hazelnuts and powdered sugar – that was for the best, considering both work and school. Mum had already found a new position in Grothenburg, with a dentist named Maertens. And an apartment on Wolmarstrasse. Four rooms and kitchen, I would have my own room with a tiled stove and view of a park.

  That my father had had another woman on the side for almost three years my mother only mentioned a few weeks later, when we were packing.

  I cried for ten days. In any event I cried myself to sleep those first ten evenings. Then I stopped. Got that ache in my chest instead, like now when I’m thinking about Claus.

  Something in my stomach too. Butterflies are dancing down there, every other day I’m constipated, every other day I have diarrhoea.

  There really is a tiled stove in my room, but it’s not possible to have
a fire in it. The chimney flue was closed up back in the fifties, the caretaker Mr Winter has explained. There are cracks and the whole building could burn down in a jiffy if an ember worked its way out.

  I think that it would be no skin off my nose if all of Grothenburg burnt down in a jiffy. I don’t want to live here, I hate this city, and if we got burnt to death, it would just feel like a pleasant relief. I would never need to start in that new school and never see that silly neighbour girl again with her silly braids and clever smile.

  But I don’t cry in the evenings here either. It’s just the ache in my chest and the fluttering in my stomach.

  Her name is Else, by the way, my father’s new woman. She has already moved in with them on Slingergasse. And her daughter lives in my old room.

  The worst thing of all is that her name is Agnes too.

  To:

  Agnes R.

  Villa Guarda

  Gobshejm

  Grothenburg, 4 October

  Dear Agnes,

  Thanks for your quick reply, and thanks for not having anything against our resuming contact in this way. I don’t know if it has to do with the years that run by, but however we count, Agnes, we have to admit that we’re starting to approach middle age. I turn forty in February – and you, I remember it so well, on 1 May. Do you remember your first birthday here in Grothenburg, when you got the diary from me? You said that you never intended to write a line in it, but when school started in September you showed me that you already had to buy a new one.

  Although I don’t feel old, far from it, but I see by the girls that time is passing. Rea is eleven now, the same age you and I were when we met for the first time – Betty turns nine in December.

  And David turned forty-seven last spring, he’s the one who is the actual reason that I am writing to you, but I will get to that later. Soon enough, I feel that I must approach the heart of the matter in a roundabout way, that’s how we function sometimes, don’t you think, dear Agnes?

  Where the funeral is concerned, however, I never felt any hesitation, I knew that I had to go the very moment I saw the obituary in the newspaper. It was not for your husband’s sake, of course, I never knew him, but because I wanted to see you again. Over the years I have of course acquired many girlfriends – male friends too, don’t get me wrong – but there is something special about those people you’ve known since you were a child. Don’t you think so too, Agnes? Regardless of how much time has passed, how much water has run under the bridge, there is something there that connects us with each other. I truly hope that you understand what I mean, Agnes, and that you feel the same way I do. Even if words did fail me when I saw you.

  Yes, David’s and my socializing is ever so extensive nowadays; since he became head of TV drama the invitations rain down on us, and we have people at our house at least once a week. But one gets tired of that, Agnes, oh how one tires of it. All these smiles and talented conversationalists and confidences you didn’t ask for, it makes you feel as if the theatre moved home to you and into your life, although you never wanted that. It creeps into your marrow, and under your skin somehow, so that it’s not possible to wash it off . . . I don’t know if you grasp what I’m talking about, Agnes, perhaps I’m expressing myself unclearly.

  For my part, I put all acting ambitions on the shelf once we got married, David and I; he maintained that one clown in the family was enough and I admit that he was right about that. There weren’t many professionally active years for me anyway, we have always had plenty of money and I stayed home for almost ten years to take care of the girls. But since January I’ve been working for Booms & Kristev, the law firm on Klingstrasse, I don’t know if you remember it. Translation work into French and Italian, not a particularly skilled job, but it is well-paid and at the same time satisfying to make use of the skills you put so much effort into acquiring at one time. Likewise, naturally it’s good to know that you can actually stand on your own two feet, support yourself, if that were necessary.

  But it’s the girls that mean everything to me, Agnes, I want to underscore that. From what I understand you have no children of your own, I don’t know if you chose that, or if it so to speak turned out that way for natural reasons. People are different and everyone must of course seek heaven in their fashion, as old lecturer Nygren used to say. Do you remember him, Swede or Norwegian, I’m pretty sure?

  Rea and Betty are so different too, even though they have the same father and same mother and have lived in the same circumstances their whole life. Rea is precise and practical and ambitious, Betty is a dreamer. Almost like two sides of the same coin – or like the principles Yin and Yang, although they are both girls. And I love them just as much, perhaps mainly because there are two of them and they complement each other so well. The last few days it has struck me that they are a bit reminiscent of you and me, Agnes, the way we are – or at least the way we were at that time. You’re Rea of course, I’m Betty, isn’t it strange how it’s as if life can go on in long, drawn-out ellipses and how sometimes you get that frighteningly strong déjà-vu sensation of being back in the same play.

  We live in a big apartment on Pelikaanallé, right next to Paul’s Church; we have discussed getting a house many times, but we’re so comfortable here and the girls go to school a stone’s throw away. Besides, David has his childhood home up in the mountains – in the vicinity of Berchtesgaden – admittedly we share it with his brother and sister-in-law, but they live in Canada and aren’t home more than a week or two every year.

  I notice that I’m dwelling a lot on me and my family in this first letter, I hadn’t planned that, but perhaps it’s natural. As I hinted however I have a matter of considerably more specific nature, but I think it will have to wait until next time. It’s past midnight, David is out with some film people; it concerns a rather large-scale production of some Pirandello plays if I understood things right – the girls are sleeping and I’ve been sitting in our library for a couple of hours writing and thinking. Had three glasses of wine too, I have to admit that, but it’s a workday tomorrow, so it’s certainly time to close.

  Excuse me for having written so grandiloquently, dear Agnes, you must absolutely not feel that you have to be equally long-winded. But a few lines would make me very happy, and I promise to be more concise next time. Naturally I want to know how you are feeling. Is it just sad now when you’ve lost your life partner, or can there also be a streak of liberation in the loss? I’m sure you know that marriage is often compared to a cage, that you either long to go into or get out of. I hope you understand that you can be just as unreserved and frank in these kinds of questions as we were back then.

  But now to bed.

  Take care of yourself and write soon!

  Signed,

  Your Henny

  To:

  Henny Delgado

  Pelikaanallé 24

  Grothenburg

  Gobshejm, 7 October

  Dear Henny,

  Thanks for your long letter, which – I assure you – I got a lot out of reading. Don’t be afraid to tell, that’s the way it was for us with words back then – you used a hundred where I used ten.

  And don’t think that I don’t understand, even if you miss the nail head by a centimetre or so, it’s so fun to hear from you again. Most likely we’ve lived half of our lives at this point, and both considering that and considering Erich’s death, it feels like a good point in time to take account of where one stands a little.

  Concerning my circumstances, I don’t have as much to tell as you do, because I don’t have a family. Erich already had grown children when we met, and we chose early on not to bring any more into this doubtful world. The last eight years – since I was done with my dissertation – I’ve worked at the university in H-berg, it’s just seven or eight kilometres from here and I’ve been really happy with the academic life from the first moment. During the last few semesters I have really got a handle on the courses that are dearest to my heart – the Romant
ic period and the eighteenth-century English novel – and like you, dear Henny, I feel that I have a task to fulfil in life, even if I am never going to have children of my own and in that way continue the species.

  Erich kept that marvellous house at Molnar when he got divorced from his former wife, and we’ve lived there ever since we got married. It is a charming old thing of timber and pommerstone with an overgrown garden and a view down towards the river. If I have any worries about the future, then it’s the question of how I will manage to keep my house. Erich’s children, Clara and Henry, are naturally entitled to half the estate, and how I will be able to buy them out the gods only know. I’m not sure if you picked them out at the funeral. Henry is tall, dark and arrogant, Clara a little stooped, rat-coloured and at least ten kilos overweight; both of them were sitting in the front row in the church, although on the other side of the aisle from me. To be honest I detest them as much as they detest me, but I’m sure it will be possible to find a solution to that problem too. It surprises me a little that they still haven’t been in touch about the inheritance issue, two weeks have passed since the estate inventory, but I’m sure it won’t be long before I get a call from some renowned law firm.

  Otherwise what you suggest is completely right; there is an element of calm and relief after Erich’s death. When you marry someone who is so much older, it is almost unavoidable that you will be worried about being left alone (the medical profession is of course no guarantee of a long life, rather the contrary, I think), and perhaps one should be a trifle grateful that this happens when one is forty, instead of when one is fifty or sixty. You are also right, of course, that we are approaching middle age, Henny, but I’m sure we still have something to give and something to live for. Don’t you think?

  You write that you have a definite reason – a specific idea – in starting this correspondence, and that in some way it has to do with your spouse. I must admit that makes me curious, and I ask you therefore not to ‘move in circles and dodges in a woman’s way’ – but instead get to the point in your next letter, which I hope I won’t have to wait too long for.