Thursday passed, and Friday.
Then it was the weekend, which lasted for centuries. Never in his life had Valdemar Roos experienced anything so horribly protracted and pointless.
After morning coffee on Saturday, and after he had explained several times that he happened to step on his glasses in the shower and break them, the day fell into three parts.
First they went to the Co-op superstore in Billundsberg and bought all the essentials at a cost of about two thousand kronor. It took three hours. Then they went home and started chopping up and preparing all these essentials in various ways. That took almost as long again.
Then they showered and got themselves ready. This took Valdemar fifteen minutes, and Alice an hour and a half. Valdemar fitted in a ten-minute nap.
At seven, the doorbell rang and Alice’s old friend from college days, Gunvor Sillanpää, and her new partner Åke Kvist made their entrance.
Then they socialized and consumed the variously prepared ingredients – plus a selection of wines and spirits – for four hours and forty-five minutes. The evening’s conversation was structured around the four pillars of clay pigeon shooting, the TV programme Who Wants to be a Misanthrope?, personality disorders and the general burden of taxation, and it was quarter past one by the time all the washing-up and clearing away was done. Valdemar had heartburn when he finally collapsed into bed and neither of the daughters had been seen in the house since four in the afternoon. One of the new set of matching Kosta-Boda glasses had got broken.
‘What did you think?’ Alice wanted to know.
‘About what?’ asked Valdemar.
‘About him, of course,’ said Alice.
Valdemar thought.
‘He was a bit short.’
‘Short?’ said Alice, switching on the bedside light she had just turned off. ‘What do you mean, he was short? What does a person’s height matter?’
‘All right,’ said Valdemar. ‘No, you’ve got a point. He was just about right.’
‘I simply don’t understand you,’ said Alice.
‘It was interesting to learn so much about clay pigeon shooting,’ said Valdemar. ‘I had no idea so many people went in for it. And I’m sure it’s an advantage not to be too big when you have to . . .’
He stopped talking when Alice raised herself up on one elbow and glared at him from a distance of twenty centimetres. ‘Do you think you’re being funny, Valdemar?’
‘No, I’m just trying—’
‘Because I don’t think so.’
She turned her back on him and put out the light.
Tomorrow’s Sunday, thought Ante Valdemar Roos. Tomorrow I’ll have to be very careful what I say.
On Sunday they went to Västra Ytterboda and visited Alice’s father Sigurd, who was in a nursing home there. It was his eighty-sixth birthday, but he was as oblivious to that as to everything else. He didn’t recognize Alice but he instantly identified Wilma – bribed into coming by the promise of an iPod (some new kind of music gadget everybody had nowadays) for her birthday (which was in about a fortnight’s time) – as Katrina from Karelia, a woman he’d been mad about in his youth. She wasn’t Alice’s mother, who had died a number of years before. Oh no, Katrina was a much better woman. Of an entirely different calibre, declared Sigurd loudly about thirty times in the course of the hour they spent with him. He also tried repeatedly to squeeze Wilma’s breasts, but his decrepitude and Wilma’s demonstrative unwillingness thwarted his efforts.
‘I’m never going to come and visit that disgusting old man again,’ she said once they were back in the car.
‘He’s your grandfather.’
‘I couldn’t care less,’ said Wilma. ‘He’s a perverted old weirdo.’
‘But you can’t help feeling sorry for him,’ said Alice.
‘I feel sorry for anyone who has to be near him,’ said Wilma.
Valdemar hadn’t uttered a word during the visit and he held his tongue now. He maintained the same silence throughout the long 130-kilometre drive home.
I’m in internal exile, he thought.
I’ve got to find some excuse for getting away at the weekends, too, was his next thought. I can’t stand this.
Before he went to bed that night he had a long soak in the bath and did some thinking. He had locked the door and lit a candle in the holder on the wall; the flicker of its flame cast lovely dancing shadows over the Italian tiles Alice was so proud of, but what preoccupied his mind above all else was provisions.
The provisions he would buy the following day. What he would stop and buy at the little ICA store in Rimmersdal with the nice cashier. He tried to make a mental list and memorize it: coffee, filter cone, filter papers, milk, sugar, salt, black pepper, bread, biscuits, crispbread, butter, cheese, fruit, chipolatas, eggs, tinned foods, yogurt, toilet paper . . . It would be ideal, he thought, if he could get by with shopping once a week, on Monday mornings, and then make his stores last for five days. In his mind’s eye he could see a series of little conversations with that cashier with the dark eyes, and it wasn’t hard to imagine the contact between them being reinforced, each Monday meeting more than just an encounter between a cashier and her customer. Until one day she would confide in him, tell him a few details about her own life, which was definitely not the most comfortable, and no wonder with a bastard like that for a husband, and Valdemar would say he understood her, he had lived a limited life like that once, but there was no need to believe it would last for ever, it just took patience and eventually, in a year or so, or maybe just a few months, he would ask her if she felt like coming with him to look at his place in the forest. At first she would hold back, for a week, a month perhaps, but in the end she would say yes of course, why not, nothing ventured nothing gained, and he would agree and say that was exactly how life worked. And she would step out of her seat at the till and go with him, and he would hold the car door open for her and together they would go out to Lograna and when she saw it she would be struck dumb at first, but after that she would put her hands to her mouth, and then place one of them on his arm and say that . . . that all her life she had been longing for a place like this. And then he wouldn’t be able to control himself any longer but would . . .
He was roused by a banging on the door. The water was cold and he realized he’d been lying there dreaming for a long time.
Signe shouted something, he couldn’t make out what.
‘I’m in internal exile,’ he called back.
‘What?’
Valdemar stood up and got out of the bath. ‘I said I’ll only be a couple of minutes.’
‘I need to get in.’
‘There’s another bathroom, if you ask your mum I’m sure she’ll be—’
‘I don’t want the loo. How can you be so dim? I’ve got some things in the cabinet.’
‘Five minutes,’ said Valdemar.
‘Fucking hell,’ said Signe.
He heard her moving away as he pulled the plug out and started drying himself. He blew out the candle so he wouldn’t have to look at that flabby white body in the mirror. The human race would feel better if everyone was blind, he thought.
‘Valdemar, there’s something I’ve got to ask you,’ said Alice once they were finally in bed on Sunday evening.
‘Oh?’ said Valdemar. ‘What sort of thing?’
‘You seem so different. Has anything happened?’
‘Not as far as I know. I think everything’s just the same as usual.’
‘The girls are saying it too. They hardly recognize you.’
‘Recognize me?’
‘Yes, that’s exactly how Wilma put it. It’s as if you’re hiding something, Valdemar.’
‘What on earth would I have to hide?’
‘Only you can know that, Valdemar.’
‘Alice, I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about.’
She lay there in silence for a while. Put her mouth guard in and then took it out again.
‘We don’t talk to each other any more, Valdemar.’
‘We never really have, have we Alice?’
‘Is that supposed to be funny?’
‘What?’
‘Us never talking to each other. I don’t know why you say things like that. What’s it meant to achieve?’
‘It’s not meant to achieve anything. But it’s the same with everything I say, or ever have said. None of it has achieved anything. So there isn’t really any change to speak of.’
Alice turned her head. He could feel her gaze heating a patch on his left temple and he began to suspect he had said something slightly ill-considered. Two or maybe three minutes passed without a word from either of them; to have something to occupy his brain, he started going through his provision list in his mind: coffee, filter cone, filter papers, milk, sugar, salt, black pepper, bread, sweet biscuits, dry biscuits, butter, cheese . . .
‘I think you’re depressed, Valdemar,’ Alice finally said. ‘I actually think you’re having a classic bout of depression.’
He broke off his provisioning and pondered this. Maybe it wasn’t such a stupid idea when it came to it.
‘You know what, Alice?’ he said. ‘Now that you say it, well . . . I have been feeling a bit out of sorts recently.’
‘There we are,’ said Alice. ‘That explains things. You’ll have to start taking something for it tomorrow.’
She inserted her mouth guard and put out the light on her side. Valdemar picked up the book he had on his bedside table, a novel by a Romanian author that he’d been reading for two months. He was a bit unclear what the book was about but his reasons for carrying on with it were twofold: partly he didn’t like leaving books unfinished, and partly he came across occasional sentences in the text that seemed to him extraordinarily true. As if the author had in some strange way been addressing him directly, and him alone. This evening he had not read more than half a page before he found the following:
Like a pore that happens to arise in the hard ivory surrounding one’s inner reservoir of living light, a winding pore akin to the passages of a wood-eating beetle, so a tunnel can suddenly open up to the eye, into the immortal fire within, as one circles in dreams and fantasies around and around the great Enigma.
How can any individual have that thought? wondered Valdemar. And find a way of putting it into words? . . . the hard ivory surrounding one’s inner reservoir of living light, how could anyone come up with something like that? He had found the book in a wire basket in Åhléns’ department store at the start of the summer, for the knock-down price of twenty-nine kronor.
He reread the sentence three times and tried to memorize it, then he had a sudden brainwave and added an item to his shopping list: a notebook.
Every day I spend at Lograna, he decided, I shall write a sentence like that. Weigh every word and craft a genuine thought about life and its terms and conditions. Enter it with its day and date in a book – that is, an ordinary lined notebook with soft black covers, the sort that would doubtless be readily available in ICA in Rimmersdal.
Pleased with this decision, and with the fact that it would finally be Monday morning when he woke up, he laid the Romanian aside, switched off his light and did his best to fall asleep.
The final time he opened an eye and looked at the clock the display had dragged its way to 01.55.