No skimping at the end.
Someone had said that to him long ago, he couldn’t remember who. It sounded like something Uncle Leopold would have said, around the time of the funeral, but Valdemar was not entirely sure it had been him.
Whatever the case, he remembered the advice: No skimping.
He was aware of a kind of lightness inside him as he walked round the centre of Maardam, buying the things he needed. There were really only two – a fiendishly sharp knife and a fiendishly expensive whisky – but he took his time. No rushing either, he thought. At the end.
He had lunch at an outdoor cafe. It was beside a canal. The weather was nice and he treated himself to two glasses of red wine with his pasta, and left a generous tip. He stayed on for a while over a cup of coffee, smoking his pipe and watching the dark water, the trees with their branches almost dipping into it and the moored boats bobbing up and down.
The people strolling by. All sorts.
Never better than this.
It took a couple of hours to find a good forest. He drove west, into the sun, and he was still not rushing. He left the motorway at random, at the junction for a place called Linzhuizen, turned onto a narrower road that led south, drove on through a small place with a name he couldn’t pronounce, starting with Sz–, then through an even smaller one called Weid, and eventually eased the car along the base of a tree-covered ridge running parallel to the road, along by a little river.
He crossed the river via a narrow iron bridge and turned left onto a simple dirt road heading up over the ridge. The road wound its way in gentle curves, a couple of hairpins, too, and eventually came to a car park that seemed to be the starting point for a footpath for walkers.
Here, he thought. He turned in, parked and switched off the engine. This is it.
There was still some warmth in the air as he got out of the car. Hardly a breath of wind, and way down in the valley he could hear a dog barking. There were no other vehicles in the parking area, just a rubbish bin and a little noticeboard telling him that there was a choice of three walking routes, marked in red, yellow and white.
He opted for the red one. The noticeboard proclaimed it to be 6.2 km long. It doesn’t matter, he thought, I won’t be doing the whole thing anyway.
He put what he needed in a plastic carrier bag and set off.
Whisky, knife, notebook and pen.
When he had been walking for about twenty minutes, he could suddenly hear his father’s voice. Gruff and a little out of practice after all these years, but still fully recognizable.
Look around you, Valdemar my lad.
He stopped. Wiping his forehead with the arm of his jacket, he realized it was just the right advice. A little to the west he caught sight of a clearing; it was not large, about the size of a circus ring, but there were lots of rocks to sit on and it had a view of the countryside below. He had topped the crest of the ridge now and was on the far side, looking west.
He made his way over to the clearing and sat down on one of the rocks; the sun had warmed it up, although it was well into October. It’s different down here on the continent, he thought. The summers and autumns last so much longer. Maybe I should have lived my life here. Like Greger.
He uncorked his whisky and took a mouthful. It was a litre bottle, the stuff was called Balblair and it had cost him €229.
It was smooth and delicious. Thank bloody goodness, thought Ante Valdemar Roos, it’s the best spirit I’ve tasted in my entire life.
Not before time. He got out his pipe and tobacco. Shuffled down onto the ground and leant his back against the rock instead. That was better. Even better.
The afternoon sun in his face. Pure, clear air, still pleasantly warm. Yellowy-green broadleaved trees that were whispering all around him in the lightest of breezes.
He lit his pipe and drank another gulp. Took out his notebook.
Its contents were extremely varied.
As he slowly and purposefully worked his way through the bottle of whisky, and as the sun sank in the west with the same slow pace and firm purpose, allowing the shadows free rein in the clearing, he read everything he had written since he started – in those five or six weeks, or however long it was.
He did not rush this, either. He stopped now and then to think, reflect and make a correction. He replaced one word with another, or found a better expression. Some of the maxims, those that had come from Anna or the Romanian, he left untouched. Got to respect the moral rights of the author, he thought. It was not his business to express an opinion on them.
He had made his last entry the day before, after Anna had left him and he had paid a visit to his son on Keymerstraat. He had spent a long time in that hotel room – it had been the longest night of his life, though by no means the worst – leafing back and forth in the Romanian before he found it.
For when two people travel side by side, this generates the narrative of the love between them, the narrative that is always another and always has a personality which could not have been foreseen, like a child conceived from their minds in passionate embrace, and at the same time the leaden, lacklustre book is not the book itself but the tool by which the book has a chance to be born.
That is not exactly, he had thought – and was thinking again now, as he took another swig of whisky and his eyes scanned the open vista – that is not exactly how my life has panned out. I have none of the prerequisites for understanding this, and yet I do.
And yet I do.
He could feel the whisky starting to play its intended role. He filled his pipe and lit it for a final smoke, turned over to a fresh page and started to apply himself to his closing remarks.
He wanted something short. Pithy, certainly, but also a sort of summing up.
And his own words, not borrowed ones.
No words came into his head. But people did, a whole succession of them:
Alice.
Signe and Wilma. Wrigman, Red Cow and Tapanen.
Espen Lund. Greger and his wife, whatever she was called. He’d only ever seen her in a photo.
His father. His mother. Someone he did not recognize, claiming to be called Nabokov and wanting to make some kind of elucidation. He took no notice of him.
And finally – but only once the others had run riot inside him for a good while – Anna. And when she came, everything else faded into the background.
Yes, everything and everyone else made way for her and he had a sense of his whole life, all these hours and days and years, suddenly assembled at this single point. Just here, just now. And Anna was with him in some unfathomable but at the same time completely natural way; perhaps she was not really aware of it herself, but she would come to realize it, he knew. One day when she was well again she would understand everything, and know that his last thought was of her. She was the one he carried in his arms as he walked through the Twilight Land.
In some goddamned unfathomable way, that is.
With Anna, the final words presented themselves. He took a last swig of whisky as he weighed them in his mind, so they would be absolutely right.
He swallowed, put pen to paper, and wrote.
Events, always so infernally overestimated, are nothing compared to the parentheses around the spaces in between. You do well to bear that in mind, all you people who blindly rush about the world and think you are on the way somewhere – everything is in the pauses. It is also worth noting that expensive whisky tastes significantly better than the cheap kind. Now I am done and have nothing more to add.
He read it through twice, nodded to himself in confirmation, and took out the knife.
He suddenly felt doubtful.