On the remaining four days of the week, even Friday, Ante Valdemar Roos drove the thirty-eight kilometres between Fanjunkargatan in Kymlinge and Lograna. There and back every day. He spent eight hours round and about the cottage, but not inside it – although on the Wednesday, when they signed the contract in Espen Lund’s office in town, he only fitted in five hours. The contract set a date of 1 September for him to take possession of the property; Anita Lindblom wasn’t going to compromise on principles just for the sake of it and had no intention of handing over the keys early.
He made the most of these warm and pleasant late summer days to either take walks in the surrounding forest or sit on his chair by the wall of the outbuilding with the sun on his face. He drank coffee from his thermos and ate his sandwiches, one cheese and one salami, as he pondered on the directions life could take you in.
And he didn’t mind which. Whether he was sitting there against the red-ochre wall of the shed, or out walking – beneath the stately pines towards the Rödmossen road, heading south through boggier areas of spruce trees and coppice shoots, or up to the higher ground in the west – he could feel something insistent within him.
Yes, insistent was the right word, thought Ante Valdemar Roos. Almost like insemination, and becoming aware of a space inside him filled with new life. Pregnant, you might say. At his advanced age, certainly not a moment too soon.
It does happen sometimes, he thought with a smile, an inward chuckle. Even that sort of truly remarkable thing can happen to us pyrophytes and such is life, as I may have mentioned.
He had bought himself a detailed map of the district. A so-called Green Map, with a scale of 1:50,000, on which he could see all the features in the landscape: forest, open fields, settlements right down to individual farms and houses. Roads, paths, watercourses and contour lines. He couldn’t remember poring over a map like this since the obligatory autumn orienteering runs during his time in upper secondary at Bunge high school.
He checked the map against reality, too, confirming with pleasure that Lograna was just as isolated as he had thought. A little black dot in a great big forest. The nearest property was more than two kilometres away, and it was Rödmossen, the name he had seen on the rusty signpost out on the Dalby road. He had walked there through the forest one morning and stood observing the property from the edge of the trees, just an ordinary farm as far as he could see, with a house, a cowshed and some kind of machinery store. The fields around had just been harvested, except on the western side where about ten cows were grazing. Two dogs barked from a kennel.
The narrow and uneven track leading past Lograna itself continued in an extended u-shaped curve and emerged back onto the Rödmossen road about a hundred metres from the farm, and apart from his own house he only came across one other building along the forest track: another old crofter’s cottage about the same size as Lograna, but in a considerably worse state of repair. It lay a kilometre to the west, further into the forest; half the chimney had fallen in, sheets of hardboard had been fixed over the windows and he doubted anybody had set foot in it for the past twenty-five years.
There weren’t many other roads. One day he tried to walk south in a straight line to hit the 172, the main road between Kymlinge and Brattfors, hoping to come out somewhere around Vreten. It ought to have been about two and a half kilometres, according to the map – but the going was far too difficult: untamed thickets and areas of wet bog, and he had to turn back after an hour.
On the Tuesday and Thursday he took two walks a day. A longer one in the morning and a shorter one in the afternoon. I’m taking control of my landscape, he thought. This is what people do, it’s the nub of everything and it’s what I’ve been missing.
Every day he also slept for a while, twenty to thirty minutes in his chair after lunch; he found it a bit tricky orientating himself at the moment he woke up after these naps, but it passed. By Friday he knew where he was the moment he opened his eyes.
Lograna. His place on earth.
On Friday he didn’t go for an afternoon walk. He stayed in his chair instead, thinking about one thing and another; he did that while he was in motion too, of course, but that day there was something very special about just sitting there with the comfortably warm sun on his face, doing nothing but breathing and just being.
No aim in view. If the apple trees or currant bushes or pump had the gift of speech, we could have a little chat, he thought.
Not that he felt the need, but it would have been interesting to hear what they had to say. Maybe they could have taught him a thing or two. He took the opportunity of sampling the apples, too, but they were sour and hard. Some winter variety, he supposed; perhaps you were supposed to pick them, store them in paper bags and save them for Christmas. He remembered that kind of thing happening in his childhood in K–.
His thoughts had a tendency to take him backwards, but occasionally they also took him forwards. Overall he found himself positioned at a harmonious intersection between the present, the past and what was to come, and he imagined this had to do both with his age and with the new circumstances in his life.
The here and now. What lies ahead. What has been.
It all weighed equally. And what was more, it seemed whole and indivisible in a way he hadn’t experienced before. A sort of trinity, or near enough.
His women, he thought about them too. Lisen and Alice. They both existed, not only then but now and in the future. His thoughts of them, that is. Admittedly Lisen was dead, that was undeniable – but on closer consideration he was disposed to consign them both to the past. Not just Lisen, but also Alice. Both she and her daughters were entirely out of place in his new existence in Lograna. Incompatible, in the modern parlance. A word that had often struck him as sounding like some kind of preliminary stage of incontinence.
There were so many ill-judged words nowadays. What was wrong with not getting along and having a weak bladder?
His thoughts seemed somehow unfettered, fresh and daring, particularly as he closed his eyes after he’d finished his coffee and waited for sleep to claim him.
I ought to tell Alice to get lost, for instance. The thought suddenly came into his mind. Just like I told Wrigman to get lost. And if they hadn’t had such idiotic trolleys at the supermarket I wouldn’t have been lumbered with her at all.
Or she with me, more to the point.
This was the way it had happened. One Friday twelve and a half years earlier, he had been pushing his trolley through the ICA Express store at Norra torg in Kymlinge, and as he turned right into the soup and sauce aisle, a woman careered straight into him. She came from the left, going far too fast, and their trolleys got caught in each other.
The staff said they simply couldn’t understand it, nothing like that had ever happened before. Her broken eggs ran all over his chipolatas and it took almost half an hour before they managed to untangle the trolleys. By that time Valdemar and Alice had started to chat; they were both without partners, it transpired, and one thing led to another and eight months later they got married in Holy Trinity Church. Neither of them was particularly religious, but Alice insisted on a church wedding. The last time she’d made do with a civil ceremony and just look how that had turned out.
As for Lisen, Valdemar had virtually forgotten how they first met. He thought they had probably slowly floated together like two rudderless jellyfish, in the late-sixties sea of love, peace and understanding. And what on earth had all that been about? Anyway, they had sex for the first time on a patch of grass in Gothenburg after an outdoor concert featuring some English band and a couple of home-grown ones, and Lisen got pregnant so they moved in together. Then she had a miscarriage, but since they were already a couple they continued on the same track and Greger came into the world a couple of years later.
Did I really experience all that? was a thought he liked to return to. Is that my life?
It didn’t feel that way, not in either case. But if it actually was, then it still couldn’t have been his real purpose, could it?
So what was his real purpose?
This was a fine thing to be asking himself at the age of almost sixty, of course. People generally got such questions out of the way before they left college or while they were doing their military service, and could then devote themselves to more sensible matters for the rest of their lives. Home, work, children and all that.
Or so Ante Valdemar Roos assumed. He had never asked his women, neither Lisen nor Alice – nor his son or stepdaughters for that matter – what answer they would give to the purpose question.
And he had a fair idea that Alice, at least, would be furious if he did.
You’re nearly sixty, he assumed she would say. Just listen to yourself.
No, when it came to existential quests he was sure it would be more rewarding to address himself to the pump, the apple tree and the currant bushes.
His father would certainly have agreed. Before he hanged himself he had worked as warehouse foreman at a shoe factory. It was a job as good as any other, but Eugen Sigismund Roos’s soul was not to be found amongst the shoes.
That was what his elder brother Leopold said at the funeral. Valdemar could still remember it word for word.
You were a great man, my dear brother Eugen, and far too great for your surroundings. And your soul did not fit into Larsson’s down-at-heel shoe factory, no, we must look for your soul in other places entirely.
In the sighing of the forests, the surging of the streams, the incurable solitude of the human heart. Where it has now found its final abode.
Back then, when he was only twelve, Valdemar had thought the sighing of the forests and the surging of the streams had such a lovely ring to them and it had irritated him that the incurable solitude of the human heart didn’t sound anywhere near as good, or fit in properly with the rest. Surely Leopold could have tried a bit harder and made his ending better?
But as he grew older he tended to the view that the incurable solitude of the human heart was something that simply did not fit with anything else, and that had been the whole point.
Leopold had died only a year after his younger brother, and Valdemar had never had a chance to ask him.
He’d had no chance to ask his dad Eugen either, of course, about what was important and what wasn’t. That was a shame, because Valdemar had a distinct feeling his father had known a good deal about that. The fact that he had decided at the age of fifty-four not to go on living was a sign of just that: of having gained insight into certain things.
Life can never be any better than this.
He remembered an episode from when they lived out on the west side of town. It was before the fire in the basement, so he must have been seven or eight.
He’d been outside playing, maybe kicking a ball around in the park with the boy next door, and had come into the kitchen – dusk was in the air both indoors and out and his father was sitting at the kitchen table. A bottle and a glass stood on the checked oilcloth in front of him, so he had presumably taken a drink or two, and he was sucking on his crooked pipe.
Blue twilight, lad, he said. I expect you know why twilight’s blue?
Valdemar had admitted that he did not.
Because it’s grieving for the day, his father had explained, blowing out a cloud of smoke. The same way a man can grieve for a woman he’s about to lose.
You could hear in his voice that he was a bit drunk, but he didn’t normally come out with odd statements like that, even then. Valdemar didn’t know how to reply, and in fact he didn’t need to say anything, because just then his mother came into the kitchen.
The strange thing was that she was naked.
You could have told me the boy was home, she said to her husband, but he just smiled and squinted at her through screwed-up eyes, his pipe dangling from the corner of his mouth.
But she didn’t make any attempt to cover herself, just wandered round for a while, apparently looking for something in cupboards and drawers; her breasts swung softly and attractively and the gingery bush of hair between her legs looked like . . . well, the very opposite of blue twilight.
It was his father who put that into words too, of course it was.
What you see there, lad, is the very opposite of a sad blue twilight, he said, pointing with the stem of his pipe.
Valdemar didn’t answer that, either, and his mother went over to his father and hit him. It wasn’t a full box round the ears, but it wasn’t just a friendly pat, either, when her half-clenched fist made contact with the back of his neck, and afterwards, when she had left them alone in the kitchen again, his father had sat there for quite a while, massaging the spot where the blow had landed.
He made no further comments to Valdemar, either. He poured himself another shot and just carried on staring out of the window. It turned bluer and bluer outside. Never any better than this?
What helped to fix this episode indelibly in Ante Valdemar Roos’s mind was, he supposed, that this was the only time in his entire childhood he saw his mother naked.
And he couldn’t for the life of him work out what had preceded the short scene in the kitchen.
Neither then nor later. His father had been fully dressed and it was hard to imagine his mother had just had a bath. They had no access to a shower in those days, and only took a bath once a week, whether they needed it or not, and his parents always had theirs on Saturday nights, after he was in bed.
But his tipsy father at the kitchen table, talking about blue twilights and the grief of losing a woman, his mother’s nakedness, her gingery opposite and the punch to his neck – much later, Valdemar would sometimes think that if only he had been able to interpret that remarkable scene from his childhood, he might have managed to handle his own life with significantly greater success.
And now, as he sat outside his barred and bolted cottage in the depths of an unfamiliar forest, half a century had passed since that day in the kitchen. Where had the years gone?
He had always finished at Wrigman’s Electrical at half past four – he presumed he had occasionally worked overtime, but very rarely and then only for an hour or two.
On these first days he also got into the habit of leaving Lograna at the same time. Each time it was with a touch of blue melancholy in his breast, but he could bear it. He knew, after all, that he would be back the following morning.
Except on the Friday. It was with an unmistakable lump in his throat that Ante Valdemar Roos got into his car and left Lograna on Friday 29 August. The imminent weekend appeared to him in prospect interminably long and depressing, and he couldn’t help wondering how things were going to be in future.
Would he ever be able to spend a night out here? Would he ever wake up at dawn to the chatter of the birds, light the stove and put on his morning coffee?
Well, he’d cross that bridge when he came to it, he thought. It was sometimes a useful skill to be able to put things off for a while – not all decisions had to be made here and now – and on Monday 1 September, just after nine o’clock in the morning, Ante Valdemar Roos put the key in the lock for the first time and took possession of the crofters’ cottage of Lograna.