The screen crackled and a strange figure appeared.
‘Hello, wage labourers,’ the strange figure said.
‘I’ll be damned,’ Viggo exclaimed. ‘Everyone’s favourite Finn.’
‘Arto,’ said Jorge, who had seemingly sobered up, ‘how’re things? We’re having a house-warming.’
‘So I see,’ said Arto Söderstedt’s slightly jumpy image. ‘I’ve just given up my daily Vin Santo, myself. From today. Came to that drastic decision after three glasses.’
A general murmur broke out in the flat on Birkagatan. Jorge hushed them with great authority.
‘How are things?’ he asked.
‘Great, thanks,’ said Arto. ‘If it weren’t for an upcoming trip. Don’t people get robbed all the time in Ukraine?’
‘You’ve just broken the golden rule, haven’t you?’
‘Right, yes. Sorry. No, but like I said, things are great. Aside from the fact my daughter lost her virginity, that I’ll be having another baby, and that ancient goddesses of revenge are creeping among the basil plants.’
Kerstin and Sara cleared their throats loudly. The Söderstedt-like figure put his hand to his mouth and made the sign of the cross.
‘Apologies,’ he said. ‘Slip of the tongue.’
‘Baby?’ Viggo shouted. ‘For God’s sake, you old buck. We’re having another one, too.’
‘Speaking of bucks?’ Arto replied. ‘That’s great, congratulations. Good for the babysitting, too.’
‘The family OK?’ asked Jorge.
‘Yes, yes,’ said Söderstedt. ‘We had a little Heimlich incident a couple of hours ago, but otherwise fine. Show me the flat.’
Jorge detached the little camera from the top of the screen and slowly turned it round, round, round.
‘Wow,’ said Arto. ‘Such green hair.’
‘Twenty laps every Sunday,’ Sara said laconically.
‘Though we’ll see tomorrow,’ said Jorge.
‘No, listen, it looks really nice. Is the nursery ready?’
‘What is this, kids’ club?’ said Jorge.
Sara said: ‘Soon.’
They quickly moved on from that topic without further ado. Arto said goodbye to each of them in order. Anja appeared on-screen for a moment and said, sceptically: ‘The wonders of technology.’
At that very moment, the picture vanished into a cluster of peculiar multicoloured squares. The screen looked more like a church window.
That was what Paul Hjelm thought, at least. The church bells were still echoing through him.
He was about to shatter.
The bacchanal group moved slightly unsteadily back to the sofas and armchairs after that.
Paul paused at the bookcase on his way over. For a brief moment, the ringing of the church bells disappeared, only to be replaced by something else. He pulled a book from the shelf. It was called The Big Nowhere. The author was James Ellroy.
Jorge was puffing on a cigarette with the inexperience of a schoolgirl. He laughed and pointed.
‘There are your wolverines. James Ellroy.’
‘Though there aren’t actually any wolverines,’ Kerstin said, smoking just as inexpertly and with a portion of snus tobacco shoved beneath her lip.
‘“Wolverine Blues”,’ said Jorge, giving Sara a wet, smoky kiss.
The bottle of Cragganmore was opened and asymmetric waves of discussion poured through the little flat until salsa music started streaming from hidden speakers and their unrhythmic feet began pounding the neighbours’ ceilings. Hultin and Stina were dancing a waltz. They looked like a couple of wounded lemmings on their way towards a cliff edge. Jorge smoothly asked Cilla to dance, and they glided around the room with professional dance steps. In just a few minutes, she was transformed from blonde dishcloth to dark, mysterious Latino dance queen. The lights were probably just too low. Gunnar and Ludmila were dancing cheek to cheek. It looked lethaclass="underline" a cat in the arms of a grizzly bear. A sucker fish on a shark. Viggo and Astrid reluctantly handed Charlotte to Sara, who sat there stroking her with long, lingering movements, and headed out onto the dance floor like a couple of mediocre folk dancers.
Only Paul and Kerstin remained standing where they were, watching the spectacle from a distance.
He was suddenly struck by a vision of a dying civilisation’s staggering dance steps over an abyss. He saw figures like empty, storyless shells which, like marionettes, carried out their capers over depths they would never come close to unless their puppeteer let go of the strings and they tumbled loose-limbed down into the abyss. And by that point, it was already too late.
It lasted just a moment, and ultimately wasn’t particularly rewarding. Distance is simply cowardice, he thought in confusion, finding Kerstin’s hand and leading her to the dance floor. She let herself be led. In reality, it was more like she was leading and he was simply imagining that he was the one doing it. As he buried his cheek in her unruly dark hair, smelling scents he hadn’t smelled for years, the internal church bells disappeared, and when he put his ear to the thin, thin patch above her left temple, he imagined he was making direct contact with her thoughts. And that wasn’t the worst.
He had no idea how they ended up in the taxi, but there he was, with Cilla’s blonde hair flowing over his shoulder, hearing her say: ‘I know the two of you had an affair.’
He should probably have been indignant, but he wasn’t. He slowly stroked her hair, staying silent.
‘It’s OK,’ said Cilla. ‘It was a long time ago, I know.’
‘Did she say that?’
‘She said plenty of things. I really like Kerstin.’
‘You already knew?’
‘I suspected. But I also knew it had been over a long time.’
‘Did you ask her?’
‘No. She told me herself. It seems like she’s putting the past behind her. Fixing the holes in time, she said.’
Paul actually smiled. He really had been in direct contact with her thoughts earlier. Maybe they were Kerstin’s thoughts he had been thinking. Maybe that was the real reason her cranium had been thinned out. So that her thoughts could reach him more easily.
Cilla continued: ‘It’s OK, Paul. I had an affair too. Back then.’
What about now? he thought. Shouldn’t I be feeling indignant now?
‘When we were separated?’ was all he asked.
To restore a little order.
‘Yeah, that spring, whenever it was. It was just a short thing. But oddly enough, I wouldn’t undo it.’
‘Nor would I,’ said Paul.
‘Haven’t you noticed that something is happening to her?’
‘To Kerstin? No, not really.’
‘She said she went through a crisis. A metamorphosis, she called it. She hadn’t really even dared admit it to herself, she said.’
‘Did she say what it was?’
‘Not exactly. But I think she’s finding religion.’
They fell silent. That was that with the direct contact, then, Paul thought, feeling the everyday come rushing back into the taxi.
Religion?
When they finally crawled into bed and were much too tired and preoccupied to carry out all they had been thinking about in the taxi, the church bells returned. Just before he fell asleep, he realised he had been released from his vow of silence. The golden rule no longer applied.
He told Cilla. The fact that she was sleeping deeply, snoring away peacefully next to him, didn’t make a difference.
The main thing was that he didn’t burst.
He might already have been half asleep himself when he said: ‘Surely there wasn’t a church in Buchenwald.’
32
ON COMPASSIONATE GROUNDS, we should skip over Sunday without comment, leaping forward in time to Monday instead.
Monday 15 May.
Monday mornings can vary greatly. For some, they represent nothing more than the pure joy of being able to get back to work again after a long, boring weekend of loneliness or matrimonial misery. For others, they represent the endless suffering of having to drag themselves up out of bed and face the meaningless, creativity-crushing week ahead of them. For others still, they are a torment, a reminder that everyone else is off to work, all those joyful souls who actually have a job to go to.