3.

Things can change when you’re gone for a long time. Time waits for no one.

Emrik Jansson, however, did wait. He stood on the narrow stretch of paved road with the black tires of his bicycle lined up on the gray band of gravel along the shoulder. His long, white beard was yellowed with nicotine around his mouth, as were the fore and middle fingers of his right hand. He gripped the handlebars tightly with both hands. He had stopped biking over a year ago. These days he only used the bicycle for support. Better that than one of those four-wheeled contraptions you always saw the old biddies at the home wandering around with. You had to accept your fate, there was no getting around that, but you could do it with a little more decorum. He was eighty-seven years old, so there wasn’t really much to say on that score. He was heading downhill. Singing his last refrain. Whistling his evensong.

A small dragonfly with an iridescent blue abdomen came buzzing along the road in fitful flight. Emrik Jansson followed the dragonfly with his gaze until it vanished out across a field. There was nothing wrong with his eyes. But his legs were unsteady and his hearing wasn’t too good.

His hand trembling slightly, he reached laboriously into his inside jacket pocket and took out a pouch of tobacco. He unfastened the tape seal, rolled open the pouch, and inhaled the aroma of moist rolling tobacco. Inside the pouch lay three ready-rolled cigarettes he had had the foresight to prepare ahead of time. Trying to roll one while holding onto his bicycle was more than his strength and coordination could handle. He took one of the cigarettes, put it in his mouth, and returned the pouch of tobacco to his inside pocket before pulling out a plastic lighter from his trouser pocket and lighting his cigarette.

Emrik Jansson awaited Arvid Traneus’s return with a certain trepidation. According to what he had heard it wouldn’t be today. But you couldn’t always trust the grapevine. Rumors. There had been a lot of talk over the years about Arvid Traneus and his long trips to Japan. Every so often, somebody would pop up claiming to have it on good authority that he was supposed to be on his way home, but then he didn’t show up and it all turned out to be just talk. Or else he really did show up, only to leave again just a few days later.

This time was different. Word had it that he was coming to stay for good.

That’s what Emrik Jansson had heard when he’d popped into his neighbor’s the day before yesterday to buy some potatoes. That was how it worked. When you couldn’t see something with your own eyes, there was always someone else who had the facts. And it spread. In simple phrases, said in passing. It wasn’t gossip exactly, but subjects came up, names were named.

He heard a tractor approaching behind him. The driver slowed down and rolled past the old man with the bushy white beard who, despite the heat and the strong sun, was dressed in a thick black woolen suit. Beneath his suit he wore a slightly yellowed shirt that had once been white.

Emrik squinted toward the driver’s cab of the green tractor and slowly raised his hand in greeting. He got a wave back. It was Magnus Hjälmrud from Kauparve, the eldest son of Hans-Göran. Emrik Jansson had taught him in school the last three years before retiring. But that was not why he remembered him. He remembered all of them. His mind didn’t need any extra support. Not yet anyway. He remembered every student that had passed through the little community’s school system during his roughly forty years as a teacher. He knew their names and what years they had been in his class. And if they lived close enough he knew the names of their children and parents and where they lived. He saw them drive by on the road. How they came and went. Weather permitting, he could spend hours slowly shuffling back and forth along the road. It was his self-appointed task to keep track of people and in doing so keep track of himself.

He had also had Arvid Traneus in his class. Arvid, his cousins, and his eldest child. He had seen them almost every day since they finished school. Those of them who were still alive, that is. He saw them, followed them, saw cars arrive and drive off again. Comings and goings that did not mean much to most, those who did not have the time to reflect on it and remember.

But Emrik Jansson did have time and he remembered. Today he was spending his time waiting for Arvid Traneus. But also for something else, it had to be said. Something else. He sighed heavily and looked up at the sky. Not a cloud, he thought to himself, not a single dark cloud on the horizon. But he could see them nonetheless.

*   *   *

HE WAS TALL and wan, standing there with his left hand shoved deep into the pocket of his washed-out black jeans. He had burrowed his chin down into the collar of his dark-blue tracksuit top, the zipper pulled all the way up. He had recently celebrated his thirtieth birthday at Norrtälje Prison. If celebrated was the right word for it. Turned lay closer to the truth. He had turned thirty. Nobody had cared, he barely did himself. He was out now, and that was the main thing.

The wind knocked the ash from the cigarette he was holding in his right hand and sent it dancing off in an ascending spiral along the quayside and on out over the Baltic.

He had called up an old friend, yesterday to be precise, and they had started to talk about Stefania. He had started to talk about Stefania. And it was then that his friend had mentioned that Arvid Traneus was coming home. At least that’s what he had heard anyway, that whatever it was he had been doing over there in Japan, it was over now, and that he was coming home to Levide.

“Bullshit!”

That was his first reaction. His second was that he didn’t want to know about it. What the hell did he have to do with Arvid Traneus anymore? But something else had already begun to stir inside him, that soaked up that information like a bone-dry sponge soaks up water. Inexorably it started to grow, plans took form as if by themselves, demanding his attention. And he listened, of course he couldn’t stop himself from listening to that voice, and the more he listened the more obvious it seemed to him that this was something that had come to him as some kind of gift. That it was as if fate, which seldom, if ever, had anything good to offer him, had tapped him on the shoulder and given him an opportunity.

He let his gaze slowly drift from the sea to the big stacks of timber behind the sawmill’s chain-link fence. The sea breeze had stiffened over the afternoon and his shoulder-length strands of hair were tossing about in the wind.

He took a deep drag from his cigarette. What the hell had happened? Nobody smoked anymore. When he had lighted a cigarette at the ferry terminal, people had glared at him as if he were a junkie who’d taken out his gear to shoot up. He had apologized. Of course he knew about the ban, but it wasn’t second nature to him. Once he was standing there with a cigarette in his fist it just didn’t occur to him. Perhaps he had apologized a little too loudly and profusely; he had felt that people had avoided looking at him, moved away a few yards, held on to to their children more tightly. Perhaps not. It was probably all in his mind. The feeling that he stood out, that he didn’t quite know how to behave to blend in with ordinary people.

He tossed his cigarette over the edge of the pier. It was crazy his being here. Completely fucking crazy. Just two days after being released, he had boarded a ferry back to the place he had once promised himself he would never again set foot. “Over my dead body,” he had sworn.

“Guess we’ll just have to see about that?” he told himself out loud.

He was there now, and he was there for one sole reason. Arvid Traneus. He had no plan, no idea what might happen. All he knew was that he had had no choice. He had been compelled to get onto that ferryboat.

He had really believed that he had succeeded in forgetting Stefania, that she was gone from his mind forever, but during the years in prison she had stubbornly clawed her way back into his head. The very first time she had appeared in a dream, and he had woken up shocked and dismayed. After that she had remained in his thoughts, sporadically in the beginning, and then with ever-increasing frequency, until she never gave him a moment’s peace. Not even for a single day. That’s how dead she was.

He abruptly turned his back on the sea and started to walk away; his emotions battling inside of him. One moment an intense feeling of joy at being on his way, a searing fire like a lodestar in the night; the next moment a cold wind that caused him to shut his eyes and see himself from the outside, making him shake his head in doubt. And then the heat and the light again that with each powerful wave grew a little stronger at the cold wind’s expense.