Axel Riessen feels the stitches in his shoulder as he climbs out of the taxi to walk the last steps up Bragevägen. Under the bright sun, the asphalt appears pale, almost white. As he puts his hand to the gate, the outer door of the house opens and Robert comes out. He’d been waiting at the window.
“God, what you’ve been through!” Robert says, shaking his head. “I’ve been on the phone to Joona Linna and he was telling me this crazy story—”
“You know how tough your big brother is,” Axel says, smiling.
They hug and for a moment hold each other tightly. Then they walk together to the house.
“We’ve set the table for lunch in the garden,” Robert says.
“How’s your heart? It hasn’t given you further trouble, has it?” Axel asks as he follows his brother.
“Actually, I was scheduled for surgery next week,” Robert answers gravely.
“I didn’t know that,” Axel whispers.
“I’m getting a pacemaker instead. I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned it to you—”
“So, an operation.”
“Well, anyway, it was cancelled.”
Axel looks at his brother and he feels a dark twist in his soul. He understands who had booked Robert’s operation and that it was meant never to succeed. The details of the patient in a coma had come from Robert’s medical data. He would have gone into an induced coma on the operating table. Axel would have been given the donation from his own brother.
Axel has to sit abruptly on a hall chair. He feels the flush of guilt. Tears come to his eyes.
“Aren’t you coming?” Robert says easily.
“Yes, of course.”
Axel takes a deep breath, stands up, and follows his younger brother through the house and into the garden. Underneath the shade of the big tree in the centre of the garden, a table set with their finest tableware is waiting on the marble paving.
Axel starts towards Robert’s wife, Anette, to greet her, but Robert takes his arm to steer him away.
“Remember when we were kids? We had fun together,” he says quietly, looking serious. “Why did we grow apart and stop talking? What happened?”
Axel looks at his brother in surprise. He notices the wrinkles in Robert’s face and the stubbly hair around a large bald spot.
“Life happens—”
“No, there’s something else,” Robert says. “We must talk about something I could not discuss over the phone.”
“What could that be?”
“Beverly told me that you blame yourself for Greta’s death,” Robert says.
“I refuse to discuss that.”
“But you must listen,” Robert insists. “I was backstage at the competition. I heard everything. I heard Greta with her father. She was crying the whole time. She’d played a passage incorrectly and her father was furious she’d lost the competition.”
Axel breaks free of Robert’s hold.
“I already know—”
“Let me tell you what I have to tell you,” he says.
“Go ahead, then.”
“Axel … if only you’d just said something. If only I’d known you blamed yourself for Greta’s suicide. I was the one who overheard her father. It was his fault, his fault and only his fault. They had a horrible fight, and he said horrible things to her. He told her he was completely humiliated. He said that she’d shamed him and that he didn’t want her as his daughter any longer. She was to leave his house. He would no longer finance her at the music academy. She was to drop her whole world here and go back to her drug-addicted mother in Mora.”
“How could he ever have said such a thing!”
“I’ll never forget Greta’s voice,” Robert continues bitterly. “How frightened she sounded. She pleaded that she’d done her best. She said that everyone makes mistakes and there’d be other competitions … That this was the only life she knew, the only one she loved.”
“I always told her there would be other competitions,” Axel says slowly.
He looks around, dazed, and doesn’t know what to do. He slowly sits down on the marble patio and holds his face in his hands.
“She was crying and said she’d kill herself if he didn’t let her keep her life in music, let her stay at the academy and continue to play.”
“I don’t know what to say,” Axel whispers.
“You should thank Beverly,” Robert replies.