My mother and father were quite old, you see. The summer my mother lay dying, they were both fifty-seven. One hundred and fourteen years in all. A dizzying sum. Henry had turned twenty-two in June. Or was he twenty-three already? I was fourteen. My dad had worked in the prison since the day it opened its doors to the country’s most dangerous criminals a year and a half earlier.
Or rather, since it shut its doors behind them.
He was a screw; a word that had never been uttered in the town before the Gray Giant appeared out on the plain.
He called himself a prison guard. Everyone else said screw. A screw at the Gray Giant.
Previously, he’d worked as a shoe-binder at a number of factories. The disappearance of the word “shoe-binder” roughly coincided with the last factory shutting down and the arrival of the screws. So it goes, it seems. Whatever we lose, there’s always something there to replace it—events, phenomena, even people. Your head is the only place where everything stays put, but even in there things can go missing.
One factory that didn’t shut down during those years was the Jam & Juice where my mother worked. Well, until she got sick, that is. Having a dad at the shoe factory and a mom at the Juicy had its perks: you always had boss shoes and there was usually a stockpile of apple juice down in the cellar.
But we were at the end of an era that summer. There were no perks to having a screw for a dad.
As for my brother Henry, he was expected to continue his studies and then climb up a rung or two on the social ladder, but that didn’t really go as planned. He did matriculate at the secondary grammar school—a prestigious all-boys school in Örebro that stood opposite a thousand-year-old castle surrounded by a moat. So far, so good. He busted the books and took the train to the county capital and back every day.
However, just after his second semester, Henry ran away.
It was fall 1957 and it would be more than a year before he knocked on the door at Idrottsgatan again, carrying a sailor bag and a bunch of bananas slung over his shoulder. He’d been around the world, he explained, but had spent most of his time in Hamburg and Rotterdam. He had a rose tattooed on his arm. It was clear to us all that he didn’t actually want to move up in the world, at least not in the way our parents had hoped. When Henry returned, my mother cried. I’m not sure if it was out of joy, or in despair over his tattoo. After taking it easy for a few months, Henry set off again, roving the seven seas until 1960. When he came home the next time, on the same day that Dan Waern missed out on the bronze medal for the 1,500 meters in Rome, he said he’d had enough of life on the ocean. He started freelancing for Kurren, the regional newspaper, and found himself a fiancée. One Emmy Kaskel, who worked at Blidberg’s men’s outfitters. She had the best rack in town.
Probably in the whole world.
In just about the same breath he found a studio apartment twenty kilometers away in Örebro, where Kurren also had their headquarters. The studio was roughly the size of two ping-pong tables, it didn’t have its own toilet or running water, and yet every now and then Emmy Kaskel bared her glorious breasts and more in that shoebox.
At least that’s what Benny and I assumed.
But she didn’t move in with him. Emmy was two years younger than Henry and still lived with her parents. They were missionaries and had a discount at Blidberg’s. My brother said half of our town was involved in the Free Church choir so it was nothing to worry about.
Whatever they’ve got, the Free Church has, too, he’d say with a wry smile.
“Well, look who it is,” my father said when I came home that mild evening in May.
“Yup,” I said. “It’s just me.”
I could tell something was on his mind, so I sat down at the kitchen table with last year’s apple juice and some rusks and flipped through an old issue of Reader’s Digest, which Grandpa Wille gave us a stack of each year for Christmas. He was the twelfth-best chess player in Sweden and owned a milk bar in Säffle.
“Brace yourself,” said my father.
“I’ll do my best,” I replied.
“You’re probably going to have to stay at Gennesaret this summer.”
“All right,” I said.
“You’ll have a good time. I’ve had a word with Henry. He and Emmy’ll be there as well and they’ll take care of you.”
“I’m sure I’ll survive,” I said.
“I’m sure you will,” said my father. “Edmund might come along.”
“Edmund?” I said.
“Why not?” said my father, and scratched his neck. “So you can have some company your own age.”
“Well,” I said. “It could be worse.”
-
2
The school was three stories tall—shaped like a shoebox and built from yellowish Pomeranian stone that had darkened to brown over the years. On one side of the building was a gravel yard used as a soccer field at recess. On the other side was another playground where you could have played soccer, but no one did.
The anti-soccer crowd kept to this other side, as did the girls, who clustered together, trading things and gossiping. Well, I don’t actually know if they traded things, or what they got up to, because I always kept my distance.
I belonged to a group of a dozen or so boys who didn’t spend their recess getting dirty on the soccer field. We were the anti-soccer crowd. In my heart of hearts, I hated sports, and I have no idea how all the soccer players fitted on the field each break; there must have been at least fifty of them. But maybe only a score of the best players actually kicked the ball, leaving the others to stand around and shout and make themselves look as though they were in on the action. I don’t know. I never watched them play. Like I said, I was on the girls’ side. My choice of location wasn’t going to impress anyone, but I tried to convince myself that there were more important things in life.
And I wasn’t alone. Benny was there, so were Snukke, Balthazar Lindblom, Veikko, Enok, a few others.
And Edmund.
After my father said we might be spending the summer together, I realized I didn’t actually know anything about Edmund.
Well, I knew what everyone knew: his father read pin-up magazines, and he was born with six toes on each foot.
Otherwise, he was a blank page. Quite tall and hefty. His glasses always seemed to be missing a lens or a side piece. We’d only been in the same class this past year, and rumor had it he had a whopping model train set and a whopping collection of Wild West magazines, but I didn’t know if either rumor was true.
His dad was also a screw; that was the connection. He and my dad had been working together for the past year, and that’s probably how they’d started talking about their plans for the summer. One thing must have led to another.
I didn’t exactly have any commitments—except maybe with Benny, who was out of the picture the whole summer anyway—so after circling each other warily over the course of a few recesses, I tested the waters.
“Hi, Edmund,” I said.
“Hi,” said Edmund.
We were standing by the bike racks under the corrugated metal roof, casually kicking gravel at the girls’ bikes.
“My dad said something,” I said.
“I heard,” said Edmund.
“Oh yeah?” I said.
“Yep,” said Edmund.
Then the bell rang and that was that for a few days. Not a bad start, I thought.
Gennesaret wasn’t the name of the lake. It was the name of a house by a lake called Möckeln. And it’s still called that today.
It was twenty-five kilometers from town. It took more than two hours to get there on a bike, but only an hour and a half back. The journey times varied because of Kleva, a punishing hill of over 1,300 meters somewhere around the halfway mark.
There were a number of villages around Lake Möckeln—a large, almost round, brown
lake—but mostly it was made up of forest-lined beaches. Gennesaret sat in solitary splendor on a pine-clad headland and was part of my mother’s inheritance. A two-floor tumbledown wooden shack with no comforts other than a roof over your head and a fresh-water lake ten meters away. The ice usually took the dock out every winter and there was an outboard motor for the rowing boat that had lain in pieces in the shed since I was born.
My dying mother wasn’t the sole owner of this house. There was an Aunt Rigmor who technically co-owned it. However she couldn’t be held responsible for her actions and so couldn’t claim her share of the inheritance.
Rigmor’s tragic condition was the result of an accident that had occurred during one of the first summers of the war. The story had as firm a place in our family history as the Fall does in the Bible: she’d crashed into a moose. What gave the story its mythological shine was the fact that she’d been on a bicycle when it happened. Aunt Rigmor, that is, not the moose. She and a friend had been on a cycling holiday in Småland, and while freewheeling down one of the hills in the uplands she’d charged right into a magnificent twelve-pointer and then straight through the doors of the notorious Dingle asylum on the West Coast.
Never to be discharged, it seemed. I’d only seen pictures of her and she didn’t look like Mom in the slightest. She looked more like a seal, actually, but with glasses and no mustache. Fitting for a patient in Dingle.
Who can say if Mom and Dad would have tried to sell Gennesaret, had my tragic aunt not been in the picture, but I think they would have. For some reason, they never seemed to like it out there.
It wasn’t cozy. Maybe that was it. Or maybe it was because my mother never learned how to swim. The lake was deep. In parts. Certainly beyond our headland.
Whatever the case, as I went around thinking about it that May I had a hard time picturing how the summer would unfold.
Henry and Emmy, for instance. I couldn’t think about Emmy without picturing her breasts—while she was fully dressed, but still—and I couldn’t picture her breasts without getting a boner. It was what it was.
And I was hung up on the thought of what my brother would be doing with Emmy Kaskel. Gennesaret wasn’t a big house.
And on top of all that, there was Edmund. It was anyone’s guess how things would play out.
Whatever, I thought. Only time will tell.
Ewa Kaludis started her job at the Stava School on a Thursday. We’d just had a double period of woodwork and I’d demolished the magazine rack I’d been working on for the past seven months. Our carpentry teacher, Gustav, wasn’t happy about it, but it felt pretty good. Whether it was sewing or woodwork, I didn’t like arts and crafts; those projects never turned out quite the way you thought they would, and they always took forever.
As usual, I was hanging around the bike shed with Benny and Enok, waiting for recess to end, and then there she was on the street.
I’d like to say I saw her first, but both Benny and Enok are equally sure that they did. Same difference; the point is that she appeared. I realized she must have passed the soccer field first, because within a few seconds the girls’ side was overrun with people gawking. Swarms of filthy soccer players.
“Christ,” said Benny. He was gawping with his mouth open so wide he might have been waiting for Dr. Slaktarsson, the dentist, to start drilling.
“Would you look at that,” said Enok. “It’s Kim Novak.”
As for me, I said nothing. I wasn’t normally one to comment for the sake of it, but at this particular moment I was dumbstruck. It was like in a movie. But better. The birdie who came roaring into the schoolyard on her moped really did look like Kim Novak. Big wheat-blond hair tied back with a foxy red hairband. Dark foxy sunglasses and a full foxy mouth that made me weak at the knees. She wore slim black slacks, a black top that was tight across her chest, and a red-and-black-checked Swanson shirt, open and billowing in the wind.
“Jesus Christ, what a fox,” said Balthazar Lindblom.
“A Puch,” said Enok. “Holy hell, Kim Novak is rolling into our schoolyard on a Puch. Kiss me, stupid.”
With that, Enok fainted. I would have been surprised if he hadn’t. He suffered from some sort of mild epilepsy that knocked him out on occasion.
Kim Novak switched off the Puch. She straddled it for a moment with her feet on the gravel, smiling and taking in the 108 figures frozen on the playground. Then she climbed off, elegantly flipped out the kick-stand, took a flat briefcase from the rack, and marched right through the petrified crowd and into the school.
When she was out of sight, I noticed Edmund was standing beside me. Nearly shoulder to shoulder, though he was a bit taller.
When he spoke, his voice was thick with emotion.
“Now that …” he said, voice thick. “That’s what I call a grown woman.”
I nodded, thinking of his dad’s pin-up mags. I reckoned he knew what he was talking about.
Within two hours, we’d gotten to the bottom of it. The soccer-side of the school had known for a long time that Bertil “Berra” Albertsson was moving to town; we might have known that too if we’d given it some thought. Berra was a handball legend who’d competed in over 150 international matches. It was said that his shots were so hard a goalie would die if they were hit in the head. After twelve seasons in the All-Swedish and national teams, he was going to wind things down by becoming a player-coach for our town’s handball team, with the aim of taking it to the top of the league. Even someone like Veikko knew what this meant, and we’d all read about it in Kurren a few weeks ago. Super-Berra was going to move into one of the newly built houses over in Ångermanland, and he was taking up his post as Vice President of Parks on the first of July.
What wasn’t in the papers was that he was engaged to Kim Novak, and that her name was actually Ewa Kaludis.
Not to mention: she’d be substituting for hopeless old Eleonora Sintring, who’d broken her femur while spring-boarding over a plinth during Housewives’ Gymnastics earlier that month.
The day after Ewa Kaludis arrived, several soccer players passed around a sign-up sheet where you could add your name to volunteer to break Sintring’s other leg when she came back to work. The idea was that the volunteers would draw straws to see who would do the deed when the time came.
By the time Benny and I wrote our names down, the sheet was already full.
The next Saturday I ran into Edmund in the library.
“Come here often?” I asked.
“Sometimes,” said Edmund. “Quite often, actually. I read a lot.”
He probably did. I came here once a month at most, so it was no surprise we hadn’t run into each other here before.
After all, Edmund was relatively new in town.
“What do you like to read?” I asked.
“Crime,” he replied without hesitation. “Stagge and Quentin and Carter Dickson.”
I nodded. I hadn’t heard of any of them.
“Jules Verne, too,” he added after a pause.
“Jules Verne is some pretty choice stuff,” I said.
“Choice,” Edmund said.
We stood there, not making eye contact.
“So, summer, huh?” he asked.
“What about it?” I said.
“You know, with that place,” Edmund said. “Your house.”
I couldn’t see where he was going with this.
“Huh?” I said.
He removed his glasses and adjusted the tape holding them together. This time he seemed to have broken them at the bridge.
“Christ,” he said.
I didn’t answer.
After a long silence, he asked: “Can I come or not?”
“‘Can I?’” I said. “What do you mean?”
He sighed.
“Well, hell, it’s your decision to make,” he said.
And then it clicked. I stood there with my tail between my legs and a prickling in my spine.
“Damn straight you can,” I said.
Edmund put his glasses on.
“Are you sure?”
“Of course,” I said. The prickling stopped.
Then Edmund said: “Cool.” He had that thickness in his voice again. “Um … which trains do you like better: Märklin or Fleischman?”
-
3
Henry, my brother, was a beanpole. Everyone said so.
He was handsome, too; at least that’s what women said. Personally, I didn’t have an eye for men’s looks at the time, but he did remind me of Ricky Nelson—or rather “Rick” as he had been called since the previous year. I didn’t think that was a bad association at all.
Henry smoked Lucky Strikes. He pulled them out of the breast pocket of his white nylon shirt with a gesture that said, “I’ve been working like a dog, and now it’s time to recoup with a smoke.”
The year before our mother ended up on her deathbed, he bought his first car—the family’s first car, in fact. A black VW Beetle that he drove around in when he was reporting from the countryside. He’d bought a camera, too, so he could take pictures of his accidents and the “victims” of his interviews. I was under the impression that things were moving along pretty well with the freelancing.
Our father used to say so:
“He’s getting along well, our Henry.”
I didn’t really know what “freelance” meant. Henry only seemed to be writing for Kurren, but that word was bound up with the others. Lucky Strike. Beat. Freelance. He’d christened the VW Beetle “Killer.”
The following Sunday morning, we were sitting in the kitchen.
“Hey, Erik.”
“Yes, Henry?”
Killer was parked out on Idrottsgatan. He’d lit a Lucky and was slurping the dregs of the coffee Dad had made before catching the bus to the hospital.
The Summer of Kim Novak Page 2