A PERMIT FOR THIS AND A PERMIT FOR THAT! UNBELIEVABLE! If I’d known about all this bureaucracy, I wonder if I’d have suggested that we open a restaurant,” said Martha, red in the face with a fat bundle of papers in her hand. Her hair stood out in all directions and she breathed with short, panting breaths.
“Take your medicine, Martha dear,” Brains urged her in a worried voice and he didn’t give in until she had found her bronchial sprays and inhaled her daily dose. Then she quickly wiped her mouth, licked her lips and popped the inhaler into her handbag. She picked up the bundle of papers again.
“All these permits! We simply want to open a restaurant, not build a whole town!” she muttered.
The members of the League of Pensioners sat on the benches in front of a foldout table in the stern of the barge, all except Rake, who had sat down on an old seaman’s chest. In front of them lay the application forms, blueprints, sketches and color samples.
“Now listen. The premises must be approved for the preparation and serving of food. And also we need a permit to serve alcohol, of course,” said Martha.
“Ah, don’t bother about the permits. We’ve never been particularly law-abiding,” Anna-Greta put in.
“It says quite a lot about spirits too. To serve alcoholic beverages we must take a little exam about the alcohol laws,” Martha went on.
“I volunteer for that,” said Rake.
“But it isn’t about trying out spirits, it’s about knowing the laws, Rake,” Christina enlightened him.
“Oh, well, then I won’t bother,” Rake said.
“The restaurant premises must be registered with the building and environmental department as a place where foodstuffs are handled,” Martha read in a loud voice, “and when alcoholic beverages are served there must be an authorized person on the premises who is responsible and has good knowledge about the alcohol laws.”
“Oh heavens above, the five of us are almost five hundred years old together and we have drunk spirits for, well, at least more than four hundred years. What we don’t know about alcohol isn’t worth knowing. So, in that case, we can say that we have knowledgeable people on the premises,” Brains said, and immediately the others agreed with him.
“But listen to this too,” Martha went on as she pulled yet another piece of paper out of the bundle. “The department issuing permits shall examine the personal and economic background and suitability of the owners of the restaurant.”
“Examine us!” said Anna-Greta with a joyful cry, pushing up her 1950s spectacles onto her forehead. “If only they knew that our income goes to the Cayman Islands.”
“You mean we do our tax planning so that we can give away even more money, if I’ve understood this properly?” Christina stated, to be on the safe side.
“Yes indeed, that’s just how it is. Shady deals are not our style,” Martha confirmed.
“Oh really, then I must have misunderstood,” muttered Rake sarcastically.
“I heard that, Rake. But the League of Pensioners only gets involved where the government and parliament fail in their duties. Not otherwise,” Martha clarified.
“Government and parliament? Yes, right, Martha. You haven’t thought about becoming the boss of NATO too?” he answered, but only loud enough for Brains to hear. His comrade grinned.
“Ugh, all these regulations for every tiny thing. Now I know what we shall do, we’ll put up a list of them in the entrance so that the authorities will think that we follow them,” said Martha.
They all agreed that the logic of this was brilliant and Anna-Greta immediately pulled out her laptop. She composed a fancy-looking list of all the regulations and they agreed that Brains would frame this later and that they would hang it up in the entrance. That decided, they all thought they had finished the day’s discussion, but no:
“Now listen, it’s high time we decided on the decor,” Martha went on and she arranged a tea break. They all sat down on the red sofa on the afterdeck, and while Martha served tea with ginger and cloudberry liqueur, the five of them sank deep among the cushions. They had purchased the luxurious armchairs and the magnificent plush sofa for their future VIP guests. Eight comfortable velvet armchairs on a little raised stage framed with plants.
“Well?” Martha wondered, letting her gaze wander over the premises.
“I vote for model ships hanging from the ceiling,” said Rake. “They must be magnificent specimens, everything from clippers to steamboats. And it should smell of tarred rope.”
“That sounds lovely,” said Martha.
“Has anybody thought about banknotes?” Anna-Greta wondered. “Wouldn’t it be really fancy to frame them and hang them up on the walls? All sorts of different banknotes and denominations.”
“But Anna-Greta, that reminds us of work; I mean, bank robberies and such. No, forget it,” said Rake.
“Christina, you are the artist among us. How would you like to decorate the restaurant?” Martha wondered, turning to her friend. Martha had worried a long time that she decided too much herself and she was now going to let the others decide too—even if it was so, oh dear, so terribly difficult to give up control. And yes, why not delegate the responsibility to Christina, who was their own artist? She pushed the blueprints across to her friend.
“Christina, can you deal with this?”
And as she suspected, Christina immediately looked so extremely pleased that Martha felt really warm inside. Christina didn’t need any more encouragement but let her artistic soul take over.
“First and foremost I shall hang up my paintings, but I’ve got another idea too. Do you remember the sauna at the Grand Hotel with that green light and the jungle music? Why not turn this into an exciting jungle landscape? Not a real jungle, of course, but a little romantic with tables among the trees and some stuffed animals.”
“A sort of local version of the National Museum of Nature?” asked Rake, pulling out his tobacco.
“I’m talking about a human environment where we say yes to nature.”
“Bla, bla,” said Rake.
Then Martha kicked him in the hollow of his knee so that he turned quiet. Sometimes you must be diplomatic, and now was not the right occasion to tease Christina.
For the whole afternoon the League of Pensioners continued their discussions and Martha, who had persuaded the others to agree to Christina being allowed to decide, now started to regret her own decision. Because whatever arguments the others put forward, Christina seemed impossible to stop. She insisted on the jungle theme and stuffed animals. The others said that this was a restaurant for people and not a zoo, but Christina was insistent. To start with, she had suggested twelve exotic animals, like lions and tigers, plus a bear, but now, after two hours of tiring negotiations, they had got her to choose a smaller number of beasts and those with more of a Scandinavian connection.
“OK. A badger, a bear, a monkey, a wild pig, a fox and a squirrel, I can go along with that,” Christina said forcefully. “But then we must have birds too.”
“You forgot the guinea pigs,” said Rake. “They are better and don’t take up so much space.”
Martha kicked him in the hollow of his knee again.
“With the condition that I can have a forest scent and a greenish light on the premises. I mean organic lighting,” said Christina.
“You can’t bloody well have lighting that makes everyone look nauseous,” protested Rake.
Then Martha suggested that they could have different themes every month, for example seafaring the second month, perhaps flowers the third month, and so on. This calmed Rake and the discussion continued.
“So to sum up,” said Martha, when they had talked this through a while. “This restaurant is to be nicely furnished and fitted and will always be undergoing renewal. An Eldorado for the elderly.”
“Unless it ends up like a playground, of course,” Rake sighed.
“No, I’ve had enough of your mean comments, Rake. Pull yourself together, or I’ll abandon this project right away!” said Christina glaring at him.
“Oops, I didn’t mean it like that, I was just joking,” Rake ventured.
“I understand exactly what you think. Come up with something better yourself, then! But you can’t, can you? You just criticize others.”
“Dear friends, now I think we ought to calm down a little. What about a nice cup of tea with ginger in,” Martha intervened.
“Ginger? Not that too,” sighed Rake.
And with that, Martha realized that they wouldn’t get any further that day, so she suggested that they should go home to Djursholm. Christina could go directly to the National Museum of Nature and reconnoiter, if she wanted, find out what was available, and then they could use that as a starting point for further discussion.
“I’ll go to the museum tomorrow and see what they have in their warehouse and that will be that,” said Christina, sounding unusually decisive. They all looked at each other in surprise but thought that it would be best to let Christina have her way. If she was going to be responsible for the restaurant, then it was logical that she should decide about the furnishings and decorations too.
The next day, Martha (albeit with a certain degree of hesitation) let Christina go off with her children Emma and Anders to the museum to see if the director would be prepared to lend them some of the stuffed animals from the warehouse.
“But if you bring something with you, then for God’s sake make sure it isn’t infested,” she said as a final piece of advice before she waved them off. She wasn’t entirely satisfied with Christina’s jungle ideas and had her forebodings. But having delegated the responsibility, she must now keep her word.
LATE THAT AFTERNOON, WHEN CHRISTINA AND HER CHILDREN drove up on the quayside, Martha saw that they had rented a large trailer. Curious, she went up to the trailer, lifted the corner of the tarp and gasped. Under the green plastic there was a whole collection of stuffed animals, everything from a badger and fox to a little elk calf and a roe deer—but, thank God, no bear. There was, however, a stuffed wolf.
“They didn’t have a decent bear. They offered us one that was so moth-eaten that I didn’t dare take the wretched thing,” said Christina.
“Perhaps it hadn’t had any bilberries for a while,” said Rake.
“So you took the wolf instead? Well, of course, that animal is always in the news,” said Martha in an attempt to be positive, staring at the gray-white wolf. Christina had wanted a giant bear in the entrance, and this did at least demand less space. But . . .
Martha turned to Christina. “Do you really think that we should have this in the entrance?”
“Yes, we must welcome our customers,” said Christina.
“With a wolf?” wondered Brains.
“We can have a sign saying ‘WELCOME!’ next to it.”
Then the others tried to propose furnishing the restaurant with books instead and decorating the walls with lovely quotes from the foremost authors, but Christina was not convinced. So they shook their heads and gave up. Without knowing it, they had let loose a force of nature.