The Summer of Kim Novak

by Haakan Nesser

  I’d never heard anyone our age say anything like that, not even the smarty pantses in our class, but when I thought about it, it actually made me happy.

  “I guess I would, too,” I said.

  It was also worrying.

  “But seriousness shouldn’t be taken too far,” Edmund said after a while. “Then you sort of get stuck in it.”

  “Like in a swamp,” I said.

  “Exactly like in a swamp,” said Edmund.

  And that was that.

  During the first week out at Gennesaret the weather was varied, but mostly fine. The day we rowed out to Seagull Shit Island and spoke in two-word sentences was scorching, and we dived off the boat and from the island.

  “Intolerable heat,” said Edmund.

  “I agree,” I said.

  “Fancy rowing?” said Edmund.

  “Yes, please,” I said.

  “Swim now,” Edmund said.

  “Me, later,” I said.

  The rules were simple. Every statement had to consist of two words: no more, no less. We alternated each line. If you wanted the other to be quiet, you kept quiet.

  “Water cools,” I said.

  “The feet,” said Edmund.

  We’d sat down in a crevice where the rocks at our backs were slanted at an accommodating angle. Legs dangling in the water. Picnic basket within reach. Transistor radio on. Dion, if I remember correctly. And Lill-Babs singing “Klas-Göran.”

  “And legs,” I corrected him.

  “Cools legs,” Edmund agreed.

  “Yes, exactly,” I said.

  “A sandwich?” asked Edmund.

  “Not yet.”

  “Thirsty, then?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Cheers, brother.”

  “Cheers, you.”

  “Good life.”

  “In deed.”

  “One word!”

  “Two words!”

  “In … deed?”

  “Yes, naturally.”

  “Not indeed?”

  It was my turn and to mark that I was tired of splitting hairs, I kept quiet. After a while Edmund started to cough in such an exaggerated way that I was about to say “Shut up!” but I managed to stop myself. Instead I shut my eyes, turned my face to the sun, and controlled the silence between us.

  I felt as though I had power over something I couldn’t actually have power over. Words. Language.

  It felt strange, too. Like when you thought too hard about something.

  “Your father?” I asked without opening my eyes.

  “My father?” said Edmund.

  “Has magazines?” I said.

  “You mean?” said Edmund.

  “Special magazines,” I elaborated.

  Edmund sighed wearily.

  “Special magazines,” he said.

  I considered his tone.

  “My apologies,” I said.

  Edmund stretched one foot up to the sky and spread his toes. The delicate scar made a rare appearance.

  “No need,” he said.

  “Rumbling stomach,” I said.

  “Mine, too,” said Edmund.

  Henry came up and woke us on Saturday morning.

  “I’m going into town,” he said. “You’ll be fine here; there’s hot dogs and mashed potatoes for dinner. I’ll be late, so you’ll have to fix it yourselves.”

  “What are you up to?” I asked.

  Henry shrugged and lit a Lucky.

  “Gotta take care of a few things. By the way …”

  “Yes?”

  “Are you going to Lacka Park tonight?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Why?”

  Henry took a few drags and seemed to be thinking.

  “We need a signal,” he said.

  “A signal?” said Edmund.

  Edmund didn’t usually get involved when Henry and I were talking, and Henry looked at him with mock surprise.

  “If I get lucky,” he said.

  “Aha,” I said.

  “I get you,” said Edmund.

  “Listen,” Henry said after taking a couple more drags on the fag. “If there’s a tie around the flagpole, that means you go right up to bed if you come home later than I do. Okay?”

  Edmund and I looked at each other.

  “No objection,” said Edmund. “A tie on the flagpole.”

  “All right,” said Henry, and disappeared.

  A swath of smoke and irritation lingered in the room. We lay there, waiting for it to disperse. We heard Henry slam the door downstairs and walk up the path.

  “Your brother doesn’t like me,” said Edmund after a few minutes.

  I didn’t know how to respond to that.

  “Of course he does,” I said. “Why wouldn’t he?”

  “It’s fine,” said Edmund. “You don’t have to pretend.”

  Cancer-Treblinka-Love-Fuck-Death, I thought. Why would I pretend?

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said and went out and sat on the toilet.

  -

  7

  We hung around the Sjölycke jetties for an hour on our first Saturday morning, but it was mostly grown-ups and kids splashing around and pissing in the water, so at noon we decided to row out to Shit Island.

  I’d pinched six Lucky Strikes from a couple of Henry’s many open packets, and we lay there surrounded by bird poop, drinking apple juice and smoking while we listened to Sveriges bilradio, a radio show for drivers, and the summer hit parade. It was as hot as it had been in the previous days and Edmund’s back was already starting to peel. We played the two-word-sentence game, but got bored, and we didn’t really talk about anything.

  As I said, silence wasn’t a problem with Edmund. We lay there smoking, sharing cigarette after cigarette, and passing bottles of juice between us. We were almost like an old married couple who’d spent their whole lives together and had no need for words anymore.

  No pressing need, anyway.

  On the whole, it felt pretty good.

  “Do you think about your life?” Edmund asked after we’d lain around for a few minutes listening to “Young World” with our eyes closed in the sun, digging it, as the waves lapped at our calves. Edmund and I both thought that “Young World” was a bonafide hit, no doubt, almost on par with “Cotton Fields.”

  “My life?” I said. “How do you mean?”

  “You know, what it’s like,” Edmund said. “Compared to other lives.”

  “No,” I said. “I guess I don’t really think about that.”

  “If it could’ve been different somehow,” Edmund went on.

  I paused before I said:

  “You only have one life. The one you have. I don’t see what good it would do to dream about anything else.”

  Edmund drank some juice and scratched the bridge of his nose, as he did when he wasn’t wearing his glasses.

  “I mean, what if you had different parents?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “How’s it really going with your mom?”

  “The cancer,” I said after a while. “It is what it is.”

  “Is she going to die?” Edmund said.

  “No one knows,” I said.

  “Us and our moms,” Edmund said, laughing.

  “What do you mean by that?” I said.

  “They’re similar,” said Edmund. “Yours has the cancer and mine has the bottle.”

  “They’re not alike at all,” I said. “They are actually really different.”

  My irritation didn’t pass Edmund by. When he started talking again, he’d changed his tone.

  “She’s drying out this summer, my mom is.”

  I only vaguely knew what he meant.

 
“Drying out?”

  “Vissingsberg,” said Edmund. “The whole summer. She’s going to learn to live without alcohol; she’s done it a few times already. That’s why it was such a good thing for me to be able to come out here with you. Didn’t you know?”

  “No,” I said. “But I don’t see why it matters. If we’re going to talk, let’s talk about something else.”

  “Okay,” said Edmund.

  I knew he would have wanted to keep talking about his alcoholic mom, but I didn’t. Instead we lay there and listened to the rest of the summer hit parade, smoked the last Lucky, and rowed back to Gennesaret to eat hot dogs and mashed potatoes and to fix ourselves up for the night ahead.

  We’d figured out that if we ate enough at home we wouldn’t have to spend our cash on hot dogs in Lacka Park. So we ate the whole fifteen-pack of Sibylla; Edmund eight, me seven. And six portions of instant mashed potatoes. I felt queasy afterward, but Edmund said he was on top form. We took a quick dip off the side of the boat—the pontoon dock wasn’t finished yet and it was tricky getting in from the shore—whacked a little Brylcreem in our hair, pulled on clean nylon shirts, and rode off on our bikes through the woods.

  It wasn’t more than five kilometers from Gennesaret to Lacka Park, but we took a few wrong turns and it was an hour before we arrived.

  This early summer evening was like early summer evenings were at that time. Rich with perfume and promise. Equal parts lilac, jasmine, and moonshine. At least around Lacka Park. We agreed that it was dumb to spend three kronor on admission and parked our bikes a ways into the woods. We chained them together too; we couldn’t have some drunk steeling our bikes, leaving us to walk home in the middle of the night. You never knew.

  Outside the entrance we bumped into Lasse Side-Smile, whose parents had a cottage in Sjölycke. Side-Smile was a little older than us, had left Stava School a few years back, and his nickname came from his deformed head. Part of the lower half of his face was just sort of missing and when he spoke it looked like he was trying to whisper in his own ear. I didn’t know him particularly well. No one did; he usually kept to himself, whether on account of his looks or something else, I don’t know.

  “Mad Dog Raffe is on duty,” he said, looking worried and even more deformed.

  “Oh crap,” I said.

  When Mad Dog Raffe was working it was hard to get in without paying. There were spots where you could slip through the decaying wooden plank fence that surrounded the fairground—especially behind the stinking “conveniences” in the most densely wooded corner—but Mad Dog Raffe was known for his ability to tell at a glance which visitors hadn’t paid for admission. And because this was probably his only talent, he liked making the most of it. When he found some underage kid who couldn’t show him a valid ticket, he was especially intimidating and stubborn. Not to mention heavy-handed. That’s why he was in demand as a security guard; I could hardly imagine him taking payment for it, either. The uniform seemed to be payment enough. Whatever the case, there was no point in arguing with Mad Dog Raffe; saying you’d paid but lost the ticket was about as futile as talking back to the police when they caught you riding your bike without lights.

  “You gonna pay?” Lasse Side-Smile wondered.

  Edmund and I dug into our pockets and counted our cash.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Are there any people in there?”

  “Tons,” said Lasse Side-Smile. “The hell with it. I’ll take my chances. I’m out of money anyway.”

  Edmund and I decided to compromise. I would pay, and Edmund would hang back with Side-Smile behind the urinals. Mad Dog Raffe didn’t really know who Edmund was because he was new in town, but he knew me more than well. He’d kicked both Benny and me out of Tajkon Filipson’s World Famous Fun Fair at Hammarberg’s field just under a month ago.

  This logic proved to be sound. Half an hour later, Mad Dog Raffe came over as the three of us were hanging around the shooting gallery. Edmund slipped away and I showed him my yellow ticket with restrained triumph and Lasse Side-Smile was kicked out with a ruckus.

  “You shithead, you belong in the loony bin!” he shouted when he was a safe distance down the road.

  Mad Dog Raffe just grinned and packed in more snus under his lip. He rolled his yellow eyes, straightened his uniform and slid into the crowd, on the hunt for new victims.

  Duty above all.

  I’d only visited Lacka Park twice before, both times were during last summer. There wasn’t actually much for Edmund and me to do there. The dancing, necking, and drinking were more for an older crowd.

  But there was enough to interest us flashes of what life had in store in a few years’ time. In addition to dancing and necking, that is.

  Take the poker tent, for instance. We made a beeline for it as soon as Lasse Side-Smile was out of the picture. The smoky den was crowded with dozens of local talents trying to beat poker pro Harry Diamond and his wife, Vicky Diamond. They were quite the attraction. You could feel the heat of their sins burning in your trousers as you neared the tent.

  The game was a variation of stud poker; Harry played against three or four others at a time and Vicky dealt. She handled those cards like she was born with a deck in her hands, and it was impossible to tell if she was dealing from the top or the bottom. When the game was at a critical junction, she’d lean so far forward that her burnished breasts threatened to spill from her dress, and when that happened, no one could keep their eyes on the cards. Everyone playing the game knew this trick, but it made no difference. Your eyes glued themselves to her cans and you got taken for a ride, and that was that.

  On this particular evening we watched Big Anton, Balthazar Lindblom’s older brother, lose fifty kronor in under fifteen minutes, and later a fat egg-seller from Hjortkvarn stormed out of the tent, promising to return to cut the balls off Harry and the boobs off Vicky.

  After the poker tent, we went to the arcade. Even with a mere eight one-armed bandits under the sagging tarp, we still managed to lose our two kronor in the bat of an eye, and it was then—as we slunk out of the tent feeling low—that we saw Ewa Kaludis.

  She was standing all alone between the arcade tent and the dance floor, smoking a cigarette. Her dress was white, the bag hanging nonchalantly on her shoulder was also white, and I understood in an instant why she was on her own in this sea of people.

  She was just too beautiful. Like a goddess or a Kim Novak. You can’t fly too close to the sun, and everyone who saw her on that summer’s eve knew it. The park had started to fall into shadow, particularly where the glow of the lanterns could not reach, and Ewa Kaludis was standing in one of these darker spots. Even so, she seemed to have a shimmer about her—like an angel—or to be painted with one of those luminescent colors that Mr. Jonsson used for the snowmen on the window of his toy store for the Christmas display in December.

  We stopped dead in our tracks.

  “Huh,” said Edmund.

  I said nothing. I shut my eyes tightly and mustered the courage to walk up to her. The seconds felt like an eternity, and when I reached her, it felt like I had aged.

  “Hi, Ewa,” I said with more nerve than Colonel Darkin and Yuri Gagarin had put together.

  She lit up.

  “Well, hello,” she murmured. “Fancy seeing you here.”

  Her warmth left me speechless, but Edmund, only two steps behind, came to my rescue.

  “Of course we are,” he answered. “Has Madam been left all on her lonesome?”

  I felt a pang of envy for not having come up with a line like that myself. Masculine and protective yet cheeky.

  She laughed and took a drag of her cigarette.

  “I’m waiting for my fiancé,” she said.

  “And where is he?” Edmund asked.

  She shrugged, and right then Berra Albertsson stepped out of the dark together with Atle Eriksson, another han
dball player. They had their arms around each other’s shoulders and were making a show of laughing at something. They’d obviously gone behind the tent for a pee and a tipple. Berra let go of Atle and put his arm around Ewa Kaludis. Then he fixed his eyes on us.

  “So who are these ankle-biters?” he asked.

  Atle Eriksson guffawed and a mist of schnapps blasted from his mouth.

  “Erik and Edmund,” said Ewa Kaludis. “I got to know them at Stava. They’re lovely boys.”

  “I’m sure they are,” Super-Berra replied, pulling her closer to him. “But it’s high time we dance. Later, you little shits!”

  “Goodbye,” Edmund and I said in unison. And then they disappeared. We stood there, watching them go.

  “What a prick,” said Edmund. “I don’t know what she sees in him.”

  “Me neither,” I said. “Who knows what goes on in women’s heads?”

  “It’s like he’s asking for punch in the face,” Edmund added.

  “Exactly,” I said.

  We wandered around Lacka Park for another few hours, clearly Britt Laxman had other plans that night, and we got rid of what little money we had as slowly as we could. Cotton candy. The Chocolate Spin ’n’ Win. A Loranga soda and a pricey waffle with whipped cream and raspberry jam.

  Just as we were about to make our way back to Gennesaret, we realized we weren’t the only ones that night who wanted to sock Super-Berra one.

  There hadn’t been a lot of fighting going on, but the time had come. It was in the air. Edmund and I had just been behind the dance floor smoking the last of the three Lucky Strikes I’d nabbed from Henry, when we ran into the whole gang.

  Or rather, the gangs. The fighters and their back-up. On one side, Super-Berra, Atle Eriksson, and a few reeling handball players. On the other, a cocky, red-faced man whom I’d never seen before. He was tattooed from head to toe and looked dangerous. And his entourage: half a dozen men just like him.

  “You’re gonna get what’s coming to you, you no-good handball-playing ape!” slurred the red-faced one and tried to pull himself free from his back-up.

  “Calm down, Mulle,” one of them insisted. “You’ll get your shot at that darkie, but we have to lay low … the cops, and all.”