The Summer of Kim Novak

by Haakan Nesser

  “We’re bunking together this summer.”

  “So I hear.”

  He took a drag.

  “It’s probably for your own good.”

  I nodded and looked out of the window. The sun was shining brightly. On a day like this, you could swim in Lake Möckeln.

  “Mom’s situation isn’t too good,” said Henry.

  “Yup,” I said.

  With his elbows on the table, he looked out at the sunshine.

  “Nice weather.”

  I nodded.

  “We could take a spin and check the place out. Gennesaret, I mean.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Are you game?”

  “I’ve got nothing else to do,” I said.

  Henry and I did some sorting out in Gennesaret that Sunday.

  We tidied up and prepped for the summer. We dragged all the mattresses and pillows and blankets on to the lawn so the sun could draw out the winter’s damp. We aired out the house and swept the floors. Upstairs and down. There wasn’t really that much to do. On the ground floor there were two rooms and a small kitchen with a basin that drained into a dry well, a refrigerator and a stove. To get to the top floor you walked up a stairway on the gable wall. Two rooms in a row. A slanted roof. When the sun was out, it was scorching up there.

  We had a swim. We found the dock in its usual spot among the reeds at the southern end of the point. Henry said he’d turn it into a floating pontoon dock this year. I nodded and said that it was a boss idea.

  “But we’ll need better planks,” Henry said.

  We sunbathed on the mattresses and chatted. Well, actually, we smoked. Henry gave me two Luckys and swore he’d wallop me if I told Dad.

  I wasn’t planning on saying anything anyway. We drove home in the middle of the afternoon, during the hottest part of the day. Henry had a soccer game to watch that night. We brought both propane tanks with us, the one for the stove and the one for the refrigerator, so we could get them refilled in time for the summer.

  It wasn’t a bad Sunday at all, and I thought the summer might even be bearable.

  Difficult, but bearable.

  I was more interested in Edmund’s dad’s magazines than I was in Edmund’s Fleischmann, but I kept that to myself.

  Edmund’s room was around eight square meters in size and the fiberboard holding the model railway took up about six of them. All in all it was well organized. He slept on a mattress under the board, where he also had a lamp, a bookshelf, and a few drawers of clothes. I didn’t see any Wild West magazines.

  “Should we rebuild it?” said Edmund.

  “Okay,” I said.

  We rearranged the whole landscape in two hours, drove the train around, and orchestrated some nifty crashes before we got bored.

  “Building it up is actually the best part,” said Edmund. “After that, it just sits there.”

  “Agreed,” I said.

  “One of my cousins gave me all this,” Edmund said. “He got married and his wife wouldn’t let him keep it.”

  “Well,” I said. “That’s how the cookie crumbles.”

  “You have to choose your woman wisely,” Edmund said. “Let’s grab a Pommac from the kitchen.”

  We grabbed a Pommac in Edmund’s kitchen and I wanted to ask him about the pin-up mags and about him having twelve toes instead of ten, but I never quite found the right moment.

  Instead, we cycled home to Idrottsgatan and had an old apple juice. I took Edmund into the woods, too, and showed him the cement pipe. He thought it was choice—at least, that’s what he said. Then he realized he should have been home for dinner half an hour ago, and we each went our separate ways.

  Stava School’s staffroom was on the girls’ end of the third floor. It featured a sizable balcony, the only one on the building, and as summer vacation approached the teachers would sit up there under colorful parasols, drinking coffee and smoking. We never actually saw them from the playground, but we heard them arguing and laughing and we could see their clouds of smoke.

  During Ewa Kaludis’s brief sojourn at the school, the balcony routine changed quite a bit. People had started to stand while smoking instead of just sitting. They leaned over the railing and gazed out over the playground. She was the one who started doing that, and of course the studs crowded around her, puffing away and grinning.

  Stensjöö, the deputy head teacher. Håkansson the Horse. Brylle.

  “Check out Brylle, fer Christ sake,” said Benny. “He’s giving it to her from behind.”

  “Fat chance,” said Balthazar Lindblom. “No way he’d dare. You can look but you can’t touch, right? If they so much as laid a finger on her, Super-Berra would come down here and beat them up.”

  “No question,” said Veikko. “He’d knock their heads right off with one throw of his ball. What a guy.”

  The girls’ side was unusually crowded during those days in late May. Quite a few soccer players seemed to have developed nobler interests, and the bike shed was packed. Ewa Kaludis only taught our class and one other, so most kids had to grab any opportunity they could to gawk at her.

  Like during breaks when she was up on the balcony. Kim Novak. Ewa Kaludis. Super-Berra’s super-girl.

  I was one of the lucky ones. We’d had Sintring in English and Geography before she stumbled over the pommel horse. Håkansson had jumped in and subbed for a few weeks, but now we’d been hit with Ewa Kaludis. With only three weeks to go until summer vacation. It was torture.

  She didn’t have to teach us. There was no need. We were plugging away. Whenever she entered the classroom, we sat in rapt silence. She would smile and her eyes sparkled. It gave us all the chills. Then she would sit down on the teacher’s desk, cross one leg over the other, and tell us to keep working on one page or another. Her voice reminded me of a purring cat.

  We worked diligently. Ewa Kaludis either sat on her desk, sparkling, or walked around swiveling her hips as she moved between the desks. If you raised your hand, she’d almost always stand behind you, a little off to the side. When she leaned forward, her breasts would rest against your shoulder. Or, rather, one of her breasts would. Only the boys seemed to need any help, and the air in the classroom was heavy with her perfume and with restrained young desire.

  I didn’t really know what the girls thought of Ewa Kaludis, because the girls and I never shared our experiences, but I reckoned that they benefited from her presence as well. In their own female way. I could be wrong. Maybe they were all jealous as hell.

  Once when I raised my hand and she came over to help, I almost fainted when her breast brushed against my shoulder and cheek. I remember thinking: if this is my time to go, then so be it.

  She noticed, I think, because she put her hand on my arm and asked me how I was. Of course, that only made it worse, but then I bit down on my tongue, which helped straighten me out.

  “I’m not feeling very well,” I said. “I think I’m getting my period.”

  I have no idea why I said that, and Ewa Kaludis just laughed. Benny, who was sitting next to me and was the only other person who heard that gem, said he’d never heard any damn thing like it.

  “Aw hell, Erik. You’ll be sitting pretty after that. No doubt about it.”

  Maybe he was right. Who knows? Mostly I was just relieved that she didn’t get angry.

  “Let’s wait a sec,” my father said. “They’re not done with their rounds yet.”

  I nodded, hugging the bag filled with grapes from the Pressbyrån kiosk, wrinkling it even more.

  “Don’t crush the grapes,” my father said.

  “I won’t,” I said.

  We sat in silence on the green benches. Nurses whizzed by, smiling kindly at us.

  “The rounds always take time,” said my father. “They’ve got lots to do.”

  “I know.
”

  “Why don’t you go comb your hair. You have time. There’s a bathroom over in the corner.”

  I went and combed my hair with my new steel comb. I had broken off five of the teeth from the slim end so I could pick the locks on the toilets at the train station. It didn’t work, but that was beside the point. The important thing was that those teeth were missing. If you were someone who kept to the girls-side and didn’t have a steel comb, you were worth less than a burst bicycle tube. It was what it was.

  “It’s almost time,” said my father when I came back out.

  “I know,” I said. “But there’s no rush.”

  “You bet,” said my father.

  She tried to hug me, but I stroked her arm instead, which was just as good. My father sat to her right, and I to her left.

  “We brought grapes,” said my father.

  “Lovely,” said my mother.

  I put the Pressbyrån bag on top of the yellow hospital blanket.

  “How’s school?” my mother asked.

  “Good,” I said.

  “You’re taking the day off?”

  “Yes.”

  She peered into the bag, then closed it.

  “And how are things at home?”

  “No problems there,” I said. “Dad burns the gravy sometimes, but he’s getting better every day.”

  My mother smiled, shutting her eyes as though it was taking a lot out of her. I looked at her. Her face was grayish-blue and her hair looked like wan grass.

  “No problems at all,” I said. “Is there a bathroom here?”

  “Of course,” my mother said, her voice weak. “It’s out in the corridor.”

  I nodded and left. I tried to take a dump for twenty-five minutes, and then I went back in.

  My mother and father were sitting very close to each other, whispering. They fell silent when they noticed me. I took my seat on her left.

  “Are you going to Gennesaret soon?” my mother asked.

  “Yes, we are,” I said. “Henry and I have been there already to put some things in order.”

  “I’m glad Emmy and Henry are taking care of you.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Henry’s getting along well,” my father said.

  There was a pause.

  “It was nice of you to visit,” my mother said.

  “It was nothing,” I said.

  “I think we’ll get going now,” my father said. “So we can catch the quarter-past bus.”

  “You do that,” said my mother. “I’m all taken care of here.”

  “I’ll stop by tomorrow after work,” my father said.

  “No need,” said my mother.

  I got up and patted her on the arm and then we left.

  I took out my Colonel Darkin books and counted them. Yes, right. Six of them. Six black waxed-paper notebooks with forty-eight pages in each. Five of the notebooks were full; the sixth had almost been brought home.

  I stuffed Darkin’s completed adventures back into the plastic bag and pushed them to the back of my underwear drawer. It wasn’t an ideal hiding place; I’d often thought of finding someplace better—maybe I could bury them in a bag out in the forest. Further along in the dried-out ditch: they’d be safe and sound out there.

  But I hadn’t got around to it. Of course, the underwear drawer was much safer now that my mother was in hospital. My father wasn’t the one who rooted around in my things. He barely ever came into my room at all.

  I’d created Colonel Darkin about two years earlier. I’d been given one of those notebooks as a birthday present by Linda-Britt, my fat, buck-toothed cousin who thought I should keep a diary because she kept one herself and found it very enriching.

  There weren’t even any lines in the notebook, which was strange considering that she wanted me to write in it. So I used a ruler and divided each page up like a comic book, four panels per side, only on the right-hand pages, forty-eight parts; and with that I was on my way with Colonel Darkin and the Golden Gang. It was an adventure story set between London, Askersund, and the Wild West, and it had everything you could ask for: double-crossing, incorruptible honor, and razor-sharp lines.

  “You have exactly one second to answer me, Mr. Frege, my time is valuable.”

  “That’s a mighty fine body you have there, Miss Carlson. Are you planning on keeping it?”

  “Sweet moose antlers, Nessie, you forgot to spike the tea with rum.”

  Colonel Darkin himself was a battle-scarred sleuth who’d retreated to his log cabin in the mountains, and only poked his head out when the world needed him. He had his busty blonde niece for a sidekick, who wielded power over the opposite sex. I named her Vera Lane, and it was love at first panel.

  At the moment, she was locked away in an attic tower belonging to a mad scientist called Finckelberg. He had just roared off into town in his Ferrari to buy gasoline so he could burn her up. Darkin was a hundred kilometers away, speeding towards her on his motorcycle, a BSA 300 LT with diamond spokes. I had to make sure he reached her before the flames began to lap at her lovely body; but I only had eight pages left in the notebook, and I was terrible at drawing fire.

  I was no great comic-book artist, even I knew that. But I did feel a certain responsibility toward the characters I’d created. If I didn’t write about them and keep drawing them, they’d just sit there in the underwear drawer like abandoned marionettes.

  Sometimes it felt like a chore. But for the most part—especially when I was on a roll—it was one of the most meaningful things I did during my childhood. Maybe it felt that way because those were the only times I managed to leave the troubled world behind.

  I’d never shown them to another living soul. And I’d never told anyone about Colonel Darkin.

  It was that kind of hobby.

  I opened an apple juice, took two large gulps. I thought for a while.

  “Goddammit!” I wrote in Colonel Darkin’s speech bubble. “I should’ve known there’d be a catch.”

  -

  4

  Henry, my brother, wrote about everything for Kurren.

  City-council meetings, speedway contests, and suspected arson. Two-headed calves and siblings meeting for the first time after fifty-seven years. What he didn’t fish up from the news desk or from the local area, he found in other newspapers, both Swedish and international. He spent at least an hour a day in the Örebro library skimming the news and sensational headlines from all over the world, looking for leads for his own stories.

  He cut out everything he’d written that had made it to print and glued the clippings into large scrapbooks. By this point in the summer, he already had half a dozen scrapbooks, which he’d let me leaf through when I visited his shoebox on Grevgatan. I liked curling up in his sagging bed, which had iron bars on the head- and footboards, and perusing the headlines. I rarely read the articles, but the headlines spoke to me; at that time I didn’t know that it was usually someone other than Henry who came up with these beauties: “Sly Sow Stows Away for Seventy km Ride”; “Schnapps: Good for Your Blood Pressure”; “German Ministers on French Leave in Arboga.”

  After I read a headline as good as that, I’d close my eyes and try to picture the complicated reality hidden behind it.

  Sometimes I could, sometimes not.

  “Just one thing,” Henry said, one day when there was less than a week left of spring semester.

  I looked up from a clip about a fireman from Flen who had fractured both femurs in Frövi.

  “Yeah?” I said.

  Henry studied his cigarette and then put it out in the wet sand inside the monkey’s skull that he kept next to his Facit Privat typewriter.

  “About the summer.”

  He’s backing out, I thought. For Christ’s sake.

  “What about it?” I said.

>   “A couple of things,” he said and looked more like Ricky Nelson than ever. Or Rick, rather. I closed the scrapbook.

  “I’m taking time off from Kurren.”

  “Uhuh.”

  “The whole summer.”

  “The whole summer?”

  “That’s right. I’m going to write a book.”

  It was like he was talking about going down to Karlesson’s to buy a popsicle.

  “A book?” I said.

  “Yup. It has to happen sometime.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Some people have to. I’m one of those people.”

  I nodded. I was sure he was. I didn’t really know what to say.

  “What’s it going to be about?”

  He didn’t answer right away. He put his feet up on his desk, took a gulp of Rio Club from the bottle on the floor, and fished out a fresh Lucky Strike.

  “Life,” he said. “The real deal. Existentially speaking.”

  “Uhuh,” I said.

  He lit his cigarette and we sat there. Henry took a few deep drags, his shoulder blades hooked on the back of the chair. He stared up at the ceiling where the smoke was dissipating.

  “Good,” I said finally. “It’s cool that you’re writing a book. I bet it’ll really be something.”

  He didn’t seem to care what I had to say.

  “Was there anything else?” I asked.

  “Like what?” said Henry.

  “You said there were a couple of things. The book, that’s just one, right?”

  “You’ve got one heckuva head for numbers, brother,” said Henry. “A real-life calculator.”

  “At least when it comes to counting to two,” I said.

  Henry laughed. He had a curt, sharp laugh. It sounded cool and I tried to copy it, but it didn’t really work. It was hard to learn how to laugh like someone else.

  “Well, it’s about Emmy,” said Henry, and then he blew a ring of smoke that soared through the room like a sputnik.

  “Out of sight,” I said when it hit the wall and vanished. “What about Emmy?”