What did Agnes really have to complain about? She had been free to leave the house at any moment whatsoever but had chosen to stay for over fifty years. She had reasonable pay and free food and lodging, had never needed to suffer want, after only six years of elementary school and a couple of courses at some kind of housekeeping school as her only asset.
She wanted to scream out this simple fact in the kitchen, but realized that it would not lead to anything good. Birgitta was aware that it was crucial to keep Agnes in a good mood, because after all she was the one who kept the household running. Her father, Nobel Prize winner or not, would be in a bad way without her, and Birgitta was the one who would have to step in. Bertram would never accept any kind of municipal home assistance, he would rather die of neglect.
Behind her restraint was also a lingering respect for Agnes from her childhood. It would never disappear, she realized that. Agnes was unapproachable, always had been, with a kind of lower-class sovereignty that, without putting it into words, Birgitta still felt if not fear then a certain discomfort about. Birgitta had always felt as if the servants saw through her, they could look into every corner where the family dirt accumulated, and their expressions never revealed what they were thinking, what conclusions they made.
Their relationship to the servants was based on a contract where the foundation was obedience and silence. Agnes, and others in her position, were assumed to be loyal, but no one could take that for granted. The threat of a Trojan horse by the pans in the kitchen, serving in the dining room or cleaning the bedroom with the most intimate garments and stenches, always awakened an apprehension of a conceivable fifth column, a worrying factor and a source of irritation that never left the upper class.
Liisa was the one who, in her efficient Finland-Swedish-it was as if the tone in the language underscored the thought-put Birgitta on track, draped the unspoken discomfort into words. It was only in recent years that Birgitta could fairly confidently look back on her childhood and adolescence. With her calm and her coolness, certainly acquired during many long training sessions at the firing range, Liisa served as a factual corrective when Birgitta digressed in metaphysical explanatory models about how and why things developed as they did in the Ohler family.
To the general picture could be added the peculiarity that Agnes’s background offered. Not because she preached-Birgitta had never heard her resort to religion in the form of an apt Bible quotation, never seen her pray. But God was present, or rather the sense that God was greater than everything, more significant than Ohler’s combined prestige and worth, and that He thereby had priority when paltry earthly matters were to be organized or interpreted. Agnes had always viewed the family tree with a certain skepticism, always listened to the tales of the family’s achievements with an absent expression.
The damp grass did Birgitta good. She looked around, studied the wobbly prints she produced and then let her eyes travel around the surroundings. From the neighbor’s house organ music was heard. Hyllenius had hoisted the flag, perhaps it was someone’s birthday in the house, but she then discovered that it was hanging soaked at half mast and realized that someone had died. In the tower Gregor was visible among his plants. Somewhere the sound of some kind of machine was heard, a power saw Birgitta thought, perhaps it was at the publisher, the most anonymous neighbor.
She sensed that Agnes was keeping an eye on her through the kitchen window, just like when she was a child, and that produced mixed emotions in her, like so much else that concerned the house. And not just the house, it struck her, the whole neighborhood called forth a claustrophobic feeling, as if the whole area was enclosed in a fog, an unhealthy haze, where the same shadow figures schematically moved year after year. Who was directing this mechanical dance of death? Perhaps Liisa’s words about headshrinkers applied to all of Kåbo?
She raised her eyes and observed Gregor Johansson in his tower. Perhaps he was heading for confusion and dementia, their encounter on the sidewalk had suggested something along those lines. And then this Torben Bunde, who staggered around in an organ rumble, a comic Bach poisoning, which made him write such peculiar things. Farther away Hyllenius, now in mourning, who was trying to maintain a kind of respectability with his purchased titles and poorly imitated mannerisms. In mourning? Perhaps it was just the opposite? Perhaps they were celebrating an inheritance.
Better to have grown up in Salabackar or at Kvarngärdet in a family without ancestry and fortune, then I would not have anything to defend other than my right to live more or less respectably. That was a thought that constantly occurred to her, and more and more often, now as she approached the age for summation, fifty.
She felt a kind of loss of something, of what she didn’t know, what it smelled or tasted like, but that obviously must be there.
This something, which the Ohler family and the entire neighborhood despised, spoke badly of, and lived in fear of, enticed with words in a language that she had never mastered.
It was a fear that sometimes took comical expressions. Birgitta had never seen it that way until her Liisa pointed out that the fear of others was completely unfounded and pathetic. The people from Kvarngärdet, whatever they smelled like, would never invade Kåbo. It was as if Agnes were to revolt, a completely absurd thought.
Birgitta peered toward the kitchen window. Agnes was toiling away in there. Birgitta was filled with compassion but also anxiety that a person had been locked in so long. She herself, like her brothers, had fled.
What she understood was that Agnes never had a man and was most likely a virgin. A married housekeeper was inconceivable, if she was not living together with a man employed by the family. Birgitta had seen that sort of thing during her childhood, apparently happily married servants, and been astonished, tried to imagine Agnes with a man. An impossible thought, not least considering what a contrast it would have made to her own parents’ embittered, and later downright hate-filled, coexistence.
The organ music from Bunde was booming ever louder, clearly the piece was approaching its resolution, and Birgitta suddenly started laughing. It was as if the built-up tension was released in a violent paroxysm, which was only interrupted when an apple fell down with a dull thud in front of her. She leaned over, picked up the apple and stroked it against her face.
Nine
Karsten Haller had drawn the conclusion that the woman was Bertram von Ohler’s daughter. Who else would be stumbling around barefoot in his yard? There was something frightening about her, like when you observe a person unable to contain herself, control her movements or bodily fluids. She was a grown woman, not a child that could be excused, and it was a cold and damp October day. It all made him feel very ill at ease.
Then when she broke out in hysterical laughter he got the impulse to call to her to stop, pull herself together.
Then an apple dropped and she fell silent immediately. Despite the distance he could see with what a blissful look she rubbed the apple against her cheek. By no means did this make him calm; on the contrary, it underscored a kind of capriciousness in her that he sensed could lead anywhere.
He knew nothing about her. Maybe she was crazy?
For a few moments he toyed with the thought of calling her to him, exchanging a few words, perhaps coaxing a little information out of her. But her look made him give up on that idea.
Now she was standing under the tree, lightheartedly leaning against the trunk, chewing on the apple she had previously handled so lovingly. He got the impression that like a female spider she devoured her lovers.