“He’ll be fine,” I said.
“You think?” said Edmund.
“Henry always comes out on top.”
“I hope you’re right,” said Edmund.
We lay there. It had been cloudy in the morning, but now the sun was breaking through and it was getting hotter. The dock was swaying slowly and clucking in the waves.
I was a little curious about what Detective Lindström had asked Edmund, and about what Edmund had said, but I didn’t want to discuss it.
So I asked: “Should we take a trip to Seagull Shit Island … while we still can?”
Edmund sat up and dipped his feet in the water.
“Sure,” he said. “Let’s do it. They’ll be picking us up soon, don’t you think?”
“Probably,” I said. “It won’t be long.”
Edmund sighed and squinted at the lake.
“One last boat trip,” he said. “It’s too sad for words. It really was one hell of a good summer.”
“It was,” I said. “Yes, it was.”
Our fathers were already waiting for us by the time we’d begun rowing back to shore. They’d been there for over an hour and our things were out on the lawn, packed and ready to go.
“You’re coming with us to town,” said my father. “It’s enough now.”
Albin Wester said nothing, and it looked as though he had sold all the prisoners at the Gray Giant and then lost the money. Edmund and I changed our clothes and ten minutes later we left Gennesaret. This time my dad had borrowed an old Citroën from the Bergmans, who lived two doors down on Idrottsgatan. It was an old jalopy and, even though we only had to drive twenty-five kilometers, we had to stop twice because the water in the radiator started boiling.
“We could have taken our bikes,” said Edmund.
“We’ll get the bikes later,” Edmund’s dad said, irritated. “You know there are more important things to think about right now, don’t you?”
“French cars aren’t built for the Swedish summer heat,” my father said. Then he burned himself on the radiator cap.
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21
The weeks after Henry was taken into custody had a strange quality to them. Although the world was upside down and it felt like all sorts of things were happening, it was still pretty monotonous.
Almost every day my father and I drove Killer into Örebro. First we visited Henry at the police station, then my mother at the hospital. The very fact that my father, not Henry, was driving Killer was a sure sign that things were out of whack. My father probably didn’t really fit in anywhere, but he stuck out like a sore thumb behind the wheel of the black VW. Under normal circumstances he was a terrible driver, in Killer his driving was catastrophic; I remember thinking more than once: “Here we go again,” and, “The last thing we need now is a car accident. On top of everything else.”
Still, we got through each day with our hides intact. Off to Örebro in the morning and back again in the evening. None of us had much to say during those visits to Henry’s pale yellow cell in the police station’s basement, not me, not my father or my brother. There was a bed attached to the wall, a small table, two chairs, and a lamp. Henry was usually lying on the bed, my father and I sat on the chairs. Every day my father brought a copy of Kurren with him and a pack of Lucky Strikes and every day Henry’s sock had a hole by his right big toe. I started to wonder if he ever changed his socks, but I didn’t want to ask.
“How are they allowed to treat honest people this way? They should be ashamed of themselves,” my father would say.
Or: “This time tomorrow, you’ll be out of here, you’ll see.”
Henry rarely commented. Usually he’d start reading Kurren as soon as we’d sat down, smoking ardently, as if he’d gone without cigarettes for days.
After our visit to the slammer, we’d go to the bakery. Three Roses or New Pomona on Rudbecksgatan. My father would drink coffee with his cinnamon bun, I’d have a Pommac and a rosette, or a Pommac and a Mazarin tart.
“I’ve taken some extra vacation days,” my father would explain halfway through his cinnamon bun each day. “I thought I might as well, until this sorts itself out.”
“It’s been a rough summer,” I’d reply.
At the hospital everything was the same except for two things: my mother looked much worse, and my father had started crying at her bedside.
When I saw it coming, I’d usually make a point of going to the toilet. It was a pretty nice one—large and spacious. The walls were adorned with small not-quite-square tiles and while I sat there with my trousers and pants pushed down around my ankles, I tried to play tic tac toe against myself in my head. It was very hard, considering the tiles weren’t quite square, and I was never really on board with beating myself at my own game.
“You’re being a good boy, Erik?” my mother would ask before we left her.
“Yes, I am,” I’d promise.
“Keep your courage up,” she’d say. “Once you let it drop, it’ll be too heavy to pick back up.”
And then my father and I would nod earnestly.
Truer words were never spoken.
I think it was Wednesday when a piece about the Berra Albertsson murder first appeared in Kurren. It was signed “R.L.”
Rogga Lundberg didn’t mention Henry by name, but he wrote about Gennesaret and about Ewa Kaludis, and wrote that the perpetrator who was now in police custody in Örebro was most likely a former reporter for the newspaper. The article also said that the motive behind the gruesome deed had been established and it was a so-called “crime of passion.”
And that it was only a matter of time before Detective Lindström and his capable men would crack the accused and extract a confession.
A confession of his infamous deed.
Henry kept bursting into laughter as he read Rogga Lundberg’s article. He was laughing so hard my father and I wondered if everything was all right with him.
Could he be crumbling under the pressure? Was he about to crack, just as Rogga Lundberg had predicted?
“Pressure?” Henry asked when my worried father asked him how he was doing. “As if I’d take what that arch-cretin writes seriously. What do you take me for? I thought we were related?”
I didn’t know what an “arch-cretin” was, but it was something of a relief to hear Henry respond like that.
My father seemed to think so, too, because that day he didn’t cry at the hospital, and in the car on the way home he said:
“That’s some kid, Erik. You can’t keep him down.”
Soon after he said that, he overtook a car for the first time in five days.
Edmund and I met only one other time that summer: when Lasse Side-Smile’s dad had driven his Ford van to the town square to deliver our bikes the Sunday after we left Gennesaret. I asked Edmund if he wanted to come to Idrottsgatan for a bit, but he said he had to hurry home and pack. His dad had arranged for him to spend the rest of the summer vacation at his cousins’ in Mora.
Edmund had told me about his cousins once when we rowed to Laxman’s, and he’d described them as two deaf-mute bed-wetters with underbites. Now they seemed to have grown into themselves a bit; Edmund thought he’d probably have an all right time up there.
“They have rabbits and everything.”
“Rabbits?” I said.
“And everything,” said Edmund, fidgeting.
We said “See you later” and wished each other luck.
About a week after Henry was taken into custody, my dad and I went back to Gennesaret to pick up whatever had been left behind. Clothes and groceries and so on. It was raining buckets the entire time we were there and we stayed no longer than necessary. When my father looked through the shed, he noticed the sledgehammer was missing. He called me over to ask if we’d used it.
“Not that I remember,” I said
. “Maybe when we were building the dock?”
“Take a look around and see if you can find it,” my father said.
I went out in the rain and looked for it, then explained that I couldn’t find it and I didn’t know where it could have got to. My father had a strange look in his eyes, but didn’t say anything. He just stood there, staring at me as if he’d never seen anything like me before.
As if I were a rebus—yes, that’s what came to mind standing there in the kitchen at Gennesaret that rainy day. I was a rebus my dad had been trying to solve my whole life and now he was getting close. Maybe all people were rebuses to each other, and some of us were rebuses to ourselves.
It didn’t take much time. We locked up, and jogged up the path to the parking spot with our luggage and our grocery bags. Loaded them into Killer and drove off. About halfway to Hallsberg, my father asked:
“You don’t have to answer. You absolutely do not have to answer, but do you think he did it?”
I considered his question and said:
“How could you think your own son is a murderer?”
Henry’s typewriter and his stack of typed pages were among the things we brought home from Gennesaret. That evening I counted the sheets of paper in the pile: there were eighty-five pages. There were quite a few strike-throughs and additions made in ballpoint pen. If this is what my older brother’s handwriting looked like, perhaps it was no wonder that mine—a source of constant frustration for Brylle and the others at Stava School—looked like chicken scratch, too.
I wondered about the page that had been left in the typewriter, the one I’d read and committed to memory a few weeks earlier. The one about the body and the gravel road and the summer night. I leafed through the stack of paper three times without finding it. I tried to remember it word for word, but so much had happened since that I’d lost it.
I only remembered that it had been beautiful. Beautiful, surprising, and a little frightening.
The next day we brought both the Facit and the typescript to Henry, because he’d asked for them. And a new packet of typing paper. You could tell he was eager for us to leave so he could start writing.
I thought it was a good sign that he wanted to sit down and start clattering away again.
In spite of it all, there was hope.
One evening a few days later I ran into Ewa Kaludis. I’d gone to Törner’s for a hot-dog special because my father didn’t have it in him to cook, and I could have sworn she was there waiting for me. It was right by Nilsson’s Cycle and Sport on the corner of Mossbanegatan and Östra Drottninggatan, and as far as I knew she had no other reason to be right there. No apparent reason, anyway.
“Hi, Erik,” she said.
“Hi,” I said, and stopped.
She was wearing the Swanson shirt and those black slacks again. And the hairband. Her bruises were barely visible and I was struck once again by how terribly beautiful she was.
So beautiful it hurt, I’d almost managed to forget about it.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“Home,” I said.
“Are you in a rush or can we have a word? We can walk in your direction.”
“Sure,” I said. “I’m in no rush.”
We started to walk along Mossbanegatan. Even though I was only fourteen years old I was as tall as she was, and I got it into my head that from a distance people might think we were a couple out for a stroll. A young man and his woman. My head was spinning with this thought and because she was so close to me.
And because we’d walked quite a ways before she said anything. Almost all the way to Snukke’s old asbestos-ridden house.
“I’m afraid,” she said.
“Of what?” I asked.
“Of visiting Henry at the police station.”
“Why? It’s not bad; I go every day.”
“It’s not that. I’m thinking about what the police would make of it.”
“I see,” I said. “Well, I don’t know what they’re thinking.”
“Neither do I,” said Ewa. “And I don’t want them to get the wrong idea.”
I wondered what idea they might get that they didn’t already have. I didn’t know what could possibly make this situation any worse.
But I didn’t ask what she meant.
“Would you give him this letter for me?” she asked as we neared Karlesson’s shop.
I took the sealed envelope, which had neither name nor address written on it. All that distinguished it was that it was light blue.
We didn’t say much else, but before we parted I plucked up the courage. An incredible courage. I don’t know where it came from.
I stood before Ewa Kaludis. Our faces were no more than twenty centimeters apart. I reached out both of my hands and placed them on her upper arms.
“Ewa,” I said. “I don’t care that I’m only fourteen years old. You’re the most beautiful woman on earth and I love you.”
She gasped.
“I had to say it,” I said. “That’s all. Thank you very much.”
Then I kissed her and walked away.
I dreamed of Ewa Kaludis for the rest of the summer. Images of her making love to my brother Henry came to me and sometimes I was the one who was lying there instead of Henry. Often I was in two places at once: both outside the window and underneath Ewa. Underneath her and inside her. When I woke in the mornings I couldn’t always remember whether or not I’d dreamed of her, but all I had to do was check if there were fresh stains on the sheets to find out. More often than not there were.
Of course it wasn’t easy keeping her out of my thoughts during the days either; I made a point of fantasizing about her while I was in the toilet at the hospital. It was a good alternative to tic tac toe, and sometimes I’d think about her when we were in Killer on our way to Örebro.
I’m going to the slammer to see my brother Henry. Then I’m going to visit my dying mother in the hospital and to think about Ewa Kaludis and jerk myself off.
When I thought about it like that, I felt ashamed.
Orientation at Kumla County Junior Secondary School was on August twenty-seventh and it was the same day my brother was remanded in custody. I was in a class called I:3 B with thirty-two new classmates and had a homeroom teacher with a lisp called Gunvald, who was one of my thirteen new teachers. I was subjected to a string of hitherto unknown subjects like physics, chemistry, German, and morning assembly, and generally gained new perspectives on life.
One Friday, about a month into the school year, Henry turned up. He was waiting for me outside the school gates when we’d finished for the day. I walked out with a handful of classmates I didn’t know very well, and they fell silent around me. Of course everyone knew who Henry was, and his sudden appearance reminded them that I was the murderer’s brother.
I went up to him. He was wearing sunglasses, an unbuttoned nylon shirt, and had a Lucky Strike hanging from the corner of his mouth. He was the spitting image of Ricky Nelson. Or Rick.
“Hi, Henry,” I said.
“Hi, brother,” Henry said, smiling his crooked smile. “How’s it going?”
“I’m having a helluva time,” I said. “Did they let you out?”
“Yep,” said Henry. “It’s over now.”
He put his arm around my shoulder. We walked across the street and climbed into Killer. My new friends stayed by the school gate, standing around like they’d just dropped out of the sky and didn’t know what to do with themselves.
Henry fired up Killer and we drove away leaving a cloud of dust in our wake. I thought about what he’d said at the start of June.
Life should be like a butterfly on a summer’s day.
Autumn was a bridge leading to new territory. I never quite got a foothold at KJCSS. Edmund also went there, but he was in another class and we didn’t socialize. I d
idn’t really socialize with anyone anymore. Not with people I knew already and not with new people. Sure Benny and I hung out in the cement pipe and chatted some, but it wasn’t like before. We grew apart and it happened more quickly than I could comprehend.
Generally, I did all my homework and was quite the model student, I think. I got an A-plus on my first German exam and an AB on my math test. I finished Colonel Darkin and the Mysterious Heiress, but didn’t start on another adventure. I read books, mostly English and American detective stories, and started listening to Radio Luxembourg. I dreamed about Ewa Kaludis but never saw her.
Every so often Kurren would run an article about the murder of Berra Albertsson and the police’s efforts to find the perpetrator. One Saturday they ran a lengthy summary of the case with maps and Xs where the body had been found and all that, but no new clues or suspects were reported. The police kept working on the case and Detective Lindström spoke to the newspaper in optimistic terms, claiming it was only a matter of time until the murderer would be behind bars.
I don’t know if Kurren’s regular readers believed him. I certainly had my doubts.
Henry moved to Gothenburg in early November, and on December third my mother died. My father had been at her side during her last ten days, but I couldn’t cope.
The funeral was a week later in Kumla’s church. I had never worn a suit before. About twenty of us followed my mother to her final resting place: Henry, my father, and I sat on the first pew in the church; behind us sat relatives, a few colleagues, Benny’s mother and father, and Mr. Wester.
I’d cried the whole night long, and by the time I got to the church, I didn’t have any tears left in me.
-
III
-
22
The following February, my father applied for a job at AB Slotts, and at Easter we moved to Uppsala. I was fourteen going on fifteen when I left my childhood home and arrived in the city of mustard and learning. I went to Cathedral School along with the children of senior lecturers and doctors, let my hair grow, and acquired pimples and a record player.
The Summer of Kim Novak Page 15