In the week that had elapsed since he signed the documents and became a smallholder, not a drop of rain had fallen, and this Monday promised another day of glorious weather. Not a puff of cloud in the sky, and having picked up the keys from Espen Lund, he was driving the now pretty familiar forty kilometres westwards when he caught himself singing.
The old Anita Lindblom song, ‘Such is Life’, seemed to have stuck in his mind, which wasn’t so very odd in the circumstances. He remembered Uncle Leonard once declaring – when he’d had a few too many, presumably, and Valdemar couldn’t have been more than nine or ten – that life, life itself, contrary to what many people believed, didn’t go on the whole time. A couple of hours a week, that was about what you could count on, fourteen days a year if you added it all together, whereas all the other time, the wretched grey and sticky mass of it, was something else and totally different. Like porridge going cold as you waited for your coffee, or a persistent state of constipation.
But what matters, Uncle Leopold had stressed, tapping Valdemar’s chest with his nicotine-stained index finger, what matters is knowing when it starts. And keeping up when life really gets going. Otherwise you can miss out on the whole lollipop. By God you can.
The door gave a squeal of complaint as he attempted to open it. Over the years it had clearly warped and it caught on the floorboards inside so he had to put his shoulder to it and give it a real shove. This was only to be expected, of course.
But in all other respects, everything looked fine. A little hallway, a kitchen and one bigger room. That was it. Wide floorboards, painted grey. A couple of rag rugs. Light brown walls. An old iron range in the kitchen, but also two electric rings. A small fridge, a table and two kitchen chairs, a sink and draining board with an overhead cupboard. The living room, which until now he had only seen through the window, featured a fireplace, a bed in an alcove tucked behind it, a table, three upright chairs, one basket chair and a sideboard with a little bookshelf on the wall above it.
On the walls hung not only the mirror but also two small pictures that appeared to him to be original oil paintings, both of them nature scenes. One a meadow in winter with a hare, the other a reed-edged shoreline and some grazing cows. The kitchen walls were adorned with a clock that had stopped at a quarter to four, a 1983 calendar from Sigge & Benny’s Car Repairs Co. Ltd., and an embroidered wall-hanging with the motto ‘Live for one another’.
All the contents were included in the contract of sale. Widow Lindblom had no interest in coming out to Lograna to rummage around. Ah yes, thought Ante Valdemar Roos, surveying the room, what more could a person need?
He tried the basket chair. It creaked.
He tried the bed. It was silent, but a bit lumpy.
He let up the blinds and opened the windows to air the place. The windows initially stuck but eventually opened without too much trouble, in both the kitchen and the living room. His nose told him there was a slightly stuffy smell, but that was all. Nothing rotting. No mouse droppings. He opened the door, too, so the wind could blow through more easily.
He sat down at the kitchen table, unscrewed the top of his thermos and poured his coffee.
Never any better than this. He could feel the tears rising in his throat, but when he took a bite of his cheese sandwich they subsided again.
He spent the rest of the day being practical. He did a quick inventory of household utensils and other useful items. In the drawers, kitchen cupboards and sideboard he found most of what one might need. China, cutlery, saucepans and a frying pan. Sheets, blankets, pillows. He sniffed all the fabrics and they needed airing, of course, but he thought that was all. Not that the idea was for him to spend the night here anyway, but it might be nice to stretch out on the bed for a while during the day, too.
Though the very thought of not being able to spend a night out here made him feel sad again, and he realized he would have to come up with some solution to the problem. Preferably in the not too distant future.
For the night is mother to the day.
The electricity hadn’t yet been reconnected, but a man was due on the Tuesday to sort it out. This was something Espen had arranged, not because it was strictly part of his estate-agent duties, but because he was a decent guy. Valdemar contemplated trying to light the range, but decided to put it off for a couple of days. He realized it was going to be a delicate operation – there could be birds’ nests and Lord knows what else in the chimney after all these years.
He didn’t take his walk in the forest on this first day, but allowed himself his usual nap outside in the sunshine after lunch. He awoke at quarter past one with a slight backache and decided to get himself a more comfortable deckchair. He added this article to the list he’d already started, and as there were various items he needed to buy he left Lograna a bit earlier than usual, so he would have time to do at least some of his shopping before it was time to get back to Alice and the girls.
Maybe not the deckchair today, it could be a bit tricky to get into the car, but a few carrier bags’ worth of general necessities could easily spend the night in the boot. Alice had her own car so there was no risk of her catching him out.
No risk at all.
The electrician turned up on Tuesday afternoon, a surly, long-haired young chap who tinkered around in the fuse box for a while, took his payment and drove away. Valdemar checked that the lights worked in the kitchen and living room, and that the electric hotplates worked. He switched on the fridge, and it awoke with a growl of surprise but gave every sign of being in good health.
Then he turned his attention to the pump. He had already tried to pump up some water the week before, but without success. He remembered having heard that you needed to add some water from the top to get old mechanisms like this one started, so that was what he did. He carefully poured some in from the can he had filled at the Statoil petrol station in Rimmingebäck, and it only took a couple of litres before he could hear something happening down below. The screeching noise took on another, deeper pitch and after a mere twenty or thirty pumps of the handle, the first drops emerged.
And soon it was in full flow. To start with the water was browny-black, but it soon turned a slightly lighter brown and faded to dirty yellow before finally running clear and transparent. He cupped his left hand, still pumping with his right, let it fill and then tasted the water.
Earth and iron, he thought. Maybe some other mineral as well; it wasn’t like the water in town, because this had a taste. But he didn’t dislike it. And it was cold and clear.
He gulped down a few handfuls. There’s no doubt about it, he thought. This is water that quenches your thirst. He felt something stirring inside him at this thought, a string starting to vibrate with a base note so low and melodious that he realized it must be linked to life itself. He took the two buckets he had bought, filled them and carried them into the kitchen.
There we are, he thought. Time to tackle the range.
It took a while. But not all that long, in fact; he’d been afraid he might have to get up on the roof – and there was a serviceable ladder out in the shed – but there turned out to be no need. When he lit the first sheets of newspaper he couldn’t detect even a hint of a draught in the flue, but he used a broom handle to dislodge a compacted lump of something fairly unidentifiable – conceivably an old abandoned wasp’s nest –and before long fires were burning merrily in both the kitchen range and the living-room fireplace. He washed himself clean of soot and emptied the pail of dirty water through the kitchen window. Out in the yard a bit later, seeing the smoke curling from the chimney and evaporating in the bright autumn sun, he was put in mind of his father’s pipe.
And he wished that he were a smoker himself. Wished that right now, at this very moment, he could have taken tobacco and pipe out of his trouser pocket, filled the pipe and lit it. There was something about that careful sequence of hand movements that felt so strangely genuine and complete. As if he had already inherited them in his hands and was therefore in harmony with something vital and yet mysterious at the same time.
He had no idea where these thoughts came from, but he decided that if they started to recur, he would make sure he took up smoking a pipe. It was never too late in life to start appreciating tobacco; on the contrary, by starting at such an advanced age one ran considerably less risk of falling prey to any of the well-known harmful effects. No risk at all, really.
Naturally, Ante Valdemar Roos had smoked a cigarette or two in his youth, but he’d never gone in for it seriously.
It was the same with drinking. The alcohol thing, getting smashed, had never really appealed to him. His over-indulgence at that unbearable Hummelberg crayfish party the other week genuinely was a one-off.
No, it is as it is, he thought as he stood out there in the long grass, watching the wisps of smoke spiral upwards on their journey to higher strata of the air. There are a lot of things in my life I haven’t taken seriously.
Not as I should have done and not as I intended to.
On the Wednesday he didn’t make himself a packed lunch. He simulated the usual rituals in the kitchen at home in Fanjun-kargatan so as not to arouse any suspicions, but as soon as Alice and the girls had left the house he stopped. He took his usual bag with him, all the same, but didn’t put anything in it until he got to the little ICA in Rimmersdal. He bought coffee, butter, bread and some salami and cheese. A box of eggs, too, plus salt, pepper and a bit of fruit, and as he paid and thanked the friendly woman at the checkout, he thought he could sense a kind of mutual understanding in her warm smile.
I’m sitting here and you’re standing there, she seemed to want to say. I can see from your look that you’re on your way into a good day but it’ll be nice to see you back again sometime soon, I shall be here tomorrow as well. And all the other days.
She seemed about Alice’s age, but she wasn’t at all the same type. She looked as though she could have come to Sweden from another country, with her dark, medium-length hair and lively brown eyes. Next time I come in here for my shoppping I shall have a little chat with her, Ante Valdemar Roos decided.
I shan’t say much, just something about the weather, or Rimmersdal. Ask her if it’s a nice place to live, perhaps.
And how about you? she would ask. Have you just moved to Rimmersdal?
I’ve got a place a few kilometres from here, he would be able to answer. But this is a well-stocked shop, so you’ll be seeing me a fair few times, I expect.
She would give him a smile and say he was always welcome.
Always, maybe there’d be some kind of hidden meaning in that.
He’d bought a crossword-puzzle magazine in Rimmersdal, too, and in the afternoon he lay down on his bed and dived in. For the first time in several weeks it was overcast, and just before half past twelve it started to spit with rain. But he’d taken an hour’s walk in the forest that morning and felt entitled to rest indoors. A strangely pleasant sensation came creeping over him as he lay there trying to solve the crossword compilers’ ingenious inventions. He wasn’t a crossword devotee, but nor was he a complete beginner. Along with Nilsson and Tapanen, he had occasionally come to the aid of Red Cow when she got stuck on a clue in the lunch room at Wrigman’s.
But Wrigman never joined in. He wasn’t a man of words, experienced some difficulties with spelling and had an everyday vocabulary that would have fitted on the back of a sticking plaster. And anyway, Red Cow had started paying more attention to horoscopes than crosswords, and seldom required any assistance nowadays.
How pleasantly far away it all felt. How strange and distant. And this very moment, what was actually happening, felt correspondingly agreeable and present. Here I am in my cottage, solving crosswords, thought Ante Valdemar Roos. In the middle of the afternoon, in my sixtieth year. In a minute I shall take a nap, then I’ll light the range and make myself some coffee.
It’s four hours until I’ve got to be back.
Tomorrow I shall buy two new pillows and a blanket, he declared to himself. Maybe a little radio too; if I’d had one of those, I could have listened to the lunchtime news programme.
He thought for a while about the notion of different sorts of time – the sort that just went ticking by and the sort that could stop and give a person a bit of breathing space – and about what Uncle Leopold had said on the subject, but before he got very far with his reflections he had fallen asleep and started dreaming about the Bodensee.
He did this occasionally. Not often, but every now and then; four or five times a year perhaps. The time between the dreams was gradually lengthening, of course, a longer space of time between one Bodensee and the next as the years went by. Back then, when it happened, the images and the dream had recurred at much shorter intervals than they did now.
It was summer 1999, they had been married for two years and the Hummelbergs had offered to look after the girls. Valdemar and Alice drove down to Bavaria on their own, planning a couple of detours into Switzerland and Austria while they were about it. They’d see how things went; they hadn’t booked anything in advance and the whole trip was meant as some romantic little adventure, or at least that was how Alice had visualized it. A week, or even ten days if they wanted – the Hummelbergs had assured them that would be fine.
They checked into a little hotel in Lindau, and spent the afternoon sauntering round the picturesque town before having dinner at a posh restaurant with a view over the lake and the beautiful Swiss mountain scenery on the other side. Alice was unquestionably the youngest woman in the whole establishment; they hadn’t realized Lindau was a destination favoured by retired people, but they were very aware of it now.
Something went wrong. Perhaps Alice had a bit too much to drink; it was a seven-course menu with a different wine to accompany every dish served. They must have spent three hours eating and drinking and by the time they came out onto the paved promenade along the shore, a magnificent full moon had risen over the lake. Valdemar thought the whole thing looked like some third-rate kitschy painting, but he held his tongue, and Alice instantly fell into some kind of romantic trance. She kissed him passionately and wanted them to make love at the water’s edge. They’d done that in Samos once and very memorable it had been.
This time Valdemar didn’t think it was such a great idea. Admittedly there weren’t many people about; most of the pensioners had presumably gone to bed and various bushes could have provided cover, but even so. There was actually quite some difference between a remote Greek beach and the Bodensee. It might even be illegal.
He pointed this out to Alice without being too blunt or brusque, but she took it the wrong way. She burst into tears, claiming that he didn’t love her any more, that she was married to an unromantic and impotent ass and that she didn’t want to go on living. Then she stripped off to her bra and pants, folded her clothes neatly on a rock and threw herself into the water.
Valdemar’s first reaction was to pinch his nostril to make sure he wasn’t asleep and dreaming. This was something he’d learnt from Uncle Leopold as a young lad. Your standard dimwit pinches their arm and thinks that will wake them up, he explained, but those of us who go for the nostril, between thumbnail and index finger, we know for sure. Nobody, not a single bugger, can sleep through a pinch like that.
He wasn’t asleep. He was standing on the edge of the Bodensee, watching his generously proportioned wife swim out across the moonlit water. Calmly and deliberately, by the look of it, doing a powerful breaststroke. He tried to decide how he actually felt about this and came to the conclusion that he was utterly nonplussed.
What should he do?
What was she expecting him to do?
Was there a correct way of handling situations like this one?
As he stood weighing up these questions, his wife made steady progress out into the lake. It was too late to swim out after her, at any rate, Valdemar thought. And if he were to try to call her back, he would really have to raise his voice for her to have any hope of hearing him – and a shouting man at the water’s edge only about thirty metres from the nearest restaurant, where he could see diners still seated at their tables, would undoubtedly attract attention.
He decided to go back to the hotel. It seemed the neatest solution, at least for him. But he still didn’t want to abandon his wife to her fate, just like that, and he felt he ought to let her know what he was doing. He thought for a moment, then cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted as loud as he could:
‘Alice, I need the toilet! I’ll come back down in a little while and see how you’re getting on!’
He hadn’t been back in their room for more than ten minutes before she turned up. She had put her clothes on again but not bothered to dry herself first, and the water had soaked through her skirt and blouse. Her hair was hanging as sadly and limply as sea grass washed ashore, and her pale suede shoes were muddy. The areolae of her heavy breasts were clearly visible through the her wet bra and blouse and seemed to be glaring at him like two angry hamburgers. The thought ran through Valdemar’s mind that his wife really did look as if she’d drowned.
She planted her feet steadily in the middle of the floor and gave him a dark look; her mascara had been washed off by the waves, but not all of it, and her right eye looked like a fresh bruise while the left had lost its false eyelash. She seemed generally off balance.
Once she’d finished glowering at him she kicked off her shoes, threw herself onto the bed face down and began to sob.
Valdemar hesitated for a few seconds. ‘There there,’ he said, stroking her back a bit clumsily. ‘Let’s have a game of Yahtzee and forget all about this.’
That made her stop. She pushed herself up onto her elbows, looked at him with her lopsided eyes and an expression he had never seen on her face before, and then punched him hard on the nose.
He was bleeding like a stuck pig. He had to stem the flow with a pillowcase because Alice had dashed straight into the bathroom and locked the door – and when things eventually calmed down, it struck Ante Valdemar Roos that their room looked as if someone had been murdered there.
That was what had actually happened. Whenever Valdemar dreamt about that unforgettable evening, however, the scenario tended to vary.
Sometimes he would heave himself into the water after his wife. Sometimes he would enlist the aid of some passing tourists, who invariably soon proved to be old enemies or military service pals of his or – more rarely – teachers he’d had at Bunge high school forty years ago. Once he dreamt he had run halfway round the Bodensee to receive Alice on the other – Swiss – side.
But however the film of his dream played out, one thing remained the same.
It never ended happily. Whatever he did, it always ended up at the moment where she whacked him and the blood spurted from his nose.
That was the point at which he normally woke, too, but on this particular day the dream was interrupted when they were still down on the shore. For some reason he was the one who had stripped off this time; he was stark naked and standing up to his knees in the cold waters of the Bodensee, staring up at the exceptionally large moon – it seemed to be giving a worried smile, but also detaching itself from him in some way – when his mobile phone rang.
It was Wilma.
‘Are you at work?’ she asked.
Valdemar looked around the room. Perhaps the signal wasn’t quite patchy enough. He sat up, swung his legs over the side of the bed and yawned. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Where else would I be?’
He looked at his watch. It was half past two, so that was entirely correct. Where would he be if not at work?
‘What do you want?’ he said. It was rare for any of them – his wife or the girls – to ring him when he was at Wrigman’s, but on the few occasions when it did happen, it was always on his mobile. He didn’t think Alice had the factory number written down or saved in any phone, and probably neither Wilma nor Signe could remember where he actually worked. As previously mentioned. Just now he had every good reason to be thankful things were that way. He gave a sigh of satisfaction.
‘I’m planning to sleep over at Malin’s tonight,’ Wilma told him.
‘The best thing would be to talk to Mum about that,’ said Valdemar.
‘I can’t get hold of her.’
‘Well I think you ought to carry on trying until you do.’
‘I can’t do that,’ said Wilma.
‘Why not?’
‘Because we finish in quarter of an hour and Malin’s dad’s coming to pick us up.’
‘Are you calling me in the middle of your lesson?’ asked Valdemar in astonishment.
‘It’s only a supply teacher,’ declared Wilma. ‘I’m nearly out of battery. So you’ll tell Mum I’m staying over at Malin’s, then?’
‘Wouldn’t it be better if—?’
‘Don’t make such a big deal of it,’ said Wilma. ‘Bye then, got to go.’
Ante Valdemar Roos pressed the relevant button and put his mobile away. He got to his feet and went over to the window. He rubbed his eyes.
There were two deer standing outside. The rain had stopped and the sun was starting to break through the clouds.
Oh my Lord, he thought, and pinched his nostril. Please let me never lose this.