She walked from the ferry home. It was only a few kilometers, if you counted like when she was a child. I’ll catch pneumonia, she thought, but trudged on. There was a comfort in the landscape, late yarrow and columbines swayed at the edge of the ditch and the apples shone in the gardens. At old Lidbäck’s a mare was standing that whinnied as she walked past. She stopped and said a few friendly words.
Her childhood home, a poorly built wooden shack, looked even smaller, as if the house had adapted itself now that it needed to house only two persons instead of three. It was a gray, melancholy house and had been like that since Anna’s return from service with the “old professor.” Later on she left for Stockholm, where she got a position with a businessman with houses in both Saltsjöbaden and in France.
She was replaced by Greta, who in turn was replaced by Agnes, a relay team of sisters to keep the Ohler home in good shape.
Agnes could still remember the short walk from the road up toward the house. It was as if it was the last time, even though she realized that was not the case. But it was a painful way to go, a farewell. Thirty-five years ago, she thought, staring at her feet in the bath.
“He went first,” said her mother as Agnes stepped into the kitchen.
She was sitting at the table, and immediately poured a cup of coffee from a thermal carafe, as if she had been sitting there a long time waiting for her daughter’s arrival. They had their coffee in silence. If her father had become somewhat more easygoing with the years her mother had changed in the opposite direction.
Greta was at the funeral parlor to take care of the practicalities. Agnes helped pack clothes in boxes and bags, which would most likely end up in the attic. Agnes did not ask what her mother intended.
“The office,” the box room under the stairs, which Aron had furnished as his own little den, was mostly cleaned out. Agnes suspected that her sister had been there. But in a drawer she found her childhood. In the warped drawer in a worm-eaten cupboard he had stored the loose tobacco, the only vice he allowed himself. He did not smoke, instead he cut up the long braids and drew the tobacco into his nose. He did it to “clear his nasal passages.”
That aroma was her father, but also a kind of worldly perfume, an almost sensory reminder that there was an existence beyond the home and the congregation.
She had pulled the drawer out completely and brought it to her nose, breathed in deeply, and experienced her father’s mute devotion. So certainly she had been loved, in his reserved way, but loved all the same.
Agnes knew that Greta had tried to get hold of Anna and before she returned to Uppsala she asked whether their big sister had been heard from. Her mother did not answer and Agnes took that as a no.
A few days later Agnes got pneumonia, was bedridden, and could not be at the funeral.
The water had long since cooled in the tub. Her feet were wrinkled and softened. Agnes filed them long and well, a task that brought her a kind of pleasure.
Eight
“There are rats!”
“It’s mice,” Agnes Andersson corrected.
“Doesn’t matter.” Birgitta von Ohler looked around the library as if she would discover more. “They are rodents,” she continued, “and they can eat up a household from inside.”
Maybe it was the fatigue that made Agnes’s eyes tear up.
“Don’t be sad,” Birgitta exclaimed, taking hold of her arm. “It’s not your fault. I’m just so surprised that it’s happening in this house.”
“Mice make no distinctions,” said Agnes, freeing herself from her grasp. “They make their way indoors this time of year. I usually set out a few traps every fall.”
Birgitta observed her wide-eyed.
“I’ve been doing that all these years,” Agnes added.
“Have you talked with Daddy?”
“About what?”
“The mice.”
“I didn’t know you were so afraid of-”
“I’m not afraid! Don’t you understand? People are coming here now, journalists and others, from all over the world, and you’re walking around with a rat trap. And tonight Daddy’s colleagues are coming here. I’m sure they’ll be sitting in here after dinner.”
Agnes looked at Birgitta with an expression that did not express any of what she felt inside, but possibly Birgitta sensed Agnes’s fatigue, a fatigue that perhaps unconsciously let the contempt be glimpsed from behind the mask she had polished for half a century.
“I know what you’re thinking!”
Agnes turned away.
“You think I’m stuck-up and impertinent.”
“Not at all,” said Agnes with her back toward Birgitta.
“Look at me!”
“I have a few things to do,” said Agnes, but then turned around slowly, as if the movement were associated with an awful pain.
“You believe-”
“Believing you can do in church,” said Agnes, but fell silent out of pure astonishment at her own reply.
Birgitta was staring at her.
“I must say”-this was one of Bertram’s stock phrases that his daughter had inherited-“this prize has certainly stirred things up properly.”
“It’s been stirred up a long time,” Agnes mumbled.
“What do you mean?”
Agnes walked over to one of the windows that looked out from the back of the house.
“Palmér planted the apple tree outside here the same week I came to the house. It was a cold October, I remember the steam from his mouth.”
Agnes’s voice was raspy, as if it hadn’t been used in a long time, and she cleared her throat before she continued.
“I was standing right here, it’s like it was yesterday. He was out there and I was inside here where it was warm. I remember that I wanted to call him into the kitchen for coffee, but that sort of thing was not done. I didn’t know my place and the cook was not gracious either. Your grandfather and grandmother were still alive then, your father had a position at Academic Hospital and I… I didn’t know…”
“What didn’t you know?”
Birgitta had joined her at the window and also observed the tree, heavy with fruit. All that was heard was the sound of the rain striking against the window.
“How life would turn out.”
“Who knows that when you’re young?”
Agnes did not reply. Her eyes rested intently on the shiny fruit that rocked in the wind and was rinsed by the rain.
“I think I’ll make an apple cake,” she said at last.
“Do you regret taking a position here?”
Agnes cast a quick glance at Birgitta.
“Regret or not, I was sent here as a replacement for my sister.”
Agnes made an almost imperceptible movement with her head and left the window, taking quick steps toward the door. With her hand on the doorknob she turned around to say something, but remained standing without a word.
“Are you not feeling well?”
“I should see about the food for dinner,” Agnes replied, leaving the room and carefully closing the door behind her.
Perhaps it was the rain that made Birgitta von Ohler linger a long while by the window, the way you stay standing by a fire or in front of a fireplace, staring into the flames. Now it was the steady lashing against the windowpane and the stubborn, almost aggressive sound of the drops against the windowsill that captivated her.