It was a strange environment, so quiet, aside from the music from the neighboring house that he had noticed with surprise was playing almost all the time, and whose ominous organ rumble only underscored the desolation that rested over the neighborhood.
The only one who generated any kind of activity was the man in the glassed-in, illuminated, and circular greenhouse on the roof of his house. The same man he had run into the evening before and who had given a somewhat confused but nevertheless sympathetic impression. It was not just the greenhouse and the gigantic climbing hydrangea that testified that he was interested in plants. On the lot were several interesting bushes, even one he could not identify at a distance, and whose deep red leaves caught your eye.
He tried to imagine how it had looked here decades ago. Probably not much had changed, all the houses appeared to have been built eighty or ninety years ago, solid stone houses, on good-sized lots, which left room for fruit trees, lawns for croquet and sunbathing, and in a few cases pools.
A nature reserve, it struck him, with protected species that were treated with the greatest respect and care and which in contrast to Etosha, where he had worked as a guide for several years, was not subjected to caravans of insolent tourists with binoculars and expensive photographic equipment.
He was an intruder, carefully disguised and equipped with tools that gave him access to the domains of the elect, to the cream of Uppsala’s population, to the “educated and cultivated,” as his mother had called them.
Those who owned at least a couple of expensive cars parked outside the house, who sailed in the Caribbean and skied in the Alps, shopped in London and New York, while they complained about the tax burden under the dictatorship of the social democrats. All this as his father had talked about and which during his youth often sounded like envious complaining.
It was his experiences from Africa that first caused him to understand more of the context. It took a village in north Namibia to understand Uppsala.
The cold crept up his leg. The woman had left the garden long ago. He did not understand why he was still standing there, what he could achieve by this insolence. He had no plan. Not even a sensible idea, other than the thought of the deep injustice that Bertram von Ohler was being honored in every conceivable way.
Injustices exist to be fought against, his father had maintained, and he, if anyone, ought to have known. Yet in his attitude there was an indulgent aspect, in the midst of the rhetoric he might fall silent and laugh, at himself and his tirades, belittle what he had just asserted and with emphasis at that.
Perhaps the weight he carried when he came ashore at Trelleborg, with his son pressed against his skinny chest under a stinking coat, was so great that it made everything else seem small?
Shortcomings and everyday discord paled in light of the evil he had experienced during the war, turned into a temporary irritation like when a fly buzzes around your head. Was that how his father would have seen it? Was that how he himself should view Nobel Prize-winner Bertram von Ohler? Like a fly?
But you swat at flies by reflex, he thought. You don’t always think you’ll make a hit, it’s more a movement to give vent to the fury at the persistent presence. And then the ridiculous pride at your quickness when surprisingly enough the little carcass tumbles around and down, struggles with its shitty feet and pale wings, dies a painless, bloodless insect death, an insect’s kind of reasonableness. Blame yourself, you think a little carelessly, perhaps a trifle ashamed that you resorted to violence against such an insignificant and in most respects, strictly speaking, innocent creature.
No plan, no idea why he was still standing there. Only a growing anger.
He should forget it all, for who was really served by dragging old rubbish out into the light? Perhaps his parents would not have approved? What has been cannot be made undone, they would surely reason in their heaven.
But the anger was too great.
His father would have taken action! The insight came traveling like a black projectile that struck his body with such force that he was forced to support himself against the wall. That’s the way it was! Ludwig Haller’s love for his family was greater than anything else, unashamedly unconditional. A love that cleared its own paths, ground down all resistance, overcame every obstacle, even his own history. Against the painful memories of a whole continent Ludwig Haller, who had lost everything and almost everyone, a refugee who had seen everything a human eye should never have to see, against all this he placed love for his only son and his wife.
In that case revenge, when it concerned those near and dear, would also be just as obvious, categorical, and immediate as love. His father would not have hesitated a second.
Vacillation was betrayal. His grandfather, Ludwig’s father, had vacillated and it had cost him and several in his family their lives.
Were there perhaps other reasons he spent so much time staring at a house with an old man personally unknown to him, a man he had never met, only heard and now read about? And who by an unfathomable chance now found himself so near to.
It felt as if he had pulled off a cistern cover and was now staring down into a deep, dark well, whose stone-lined sides were dripping with dampness and covered by spotted moss that resembled black, clotted blood.
Down there in the depths were his parents, they spoke to him. His father with his slight accent and his mother with her gentle voice, two things he instinctively despised when he was a child.
Down there Nouibiwi was also lurking, or Miss Elly as she preferred for him to call her before they got married, and which he continued to call her, despite her express disapproval. Otherwise she did not talk that much, neither then nor later, but what she said was often filled with wisdom.
She did not say anything from the depths of the well either, only looked at him with her big eyes, the whites shining in the darkness, and encouraged him to do something for once!
He looked over toward the Ohler house, which had now assumed quite different proportions, been reduced. The plaster façade, with its dark patches after the rain, no longer looked as imposing. If you looked at it closer the cracks could be seen, perhaps depending on the seepage from the heavy clay that everything in the city rested on. The birches were simply too close to the house, he said to himself, they ought to be removed, if only to let more sun onto the lot.
The windows, so inviting before with their neat candlesticks and potted plants, now in the dark of the afternoon resembled black eyes that malevolently stared out over the surroundings.
From the wheelbarrow he picked up a trenching shovel, for its form and usability his favorite tool, and weighed it in his hand. On the shaft, at seventy and ninety centimeters, notches had been carved, like bowl hollows, to make planting easier. They were not really necessary, he had the measurements ingrained in him, but it was a habit to carve in these markings.
He stared at the tools in the wheelbarrow: a sledgehammer, a string trimmer, a crowbar, and much more.
I ought to rough-hew a pillory, he thought, rough and scratchy, and erect it in the midst of this reserve of high culture. The organ music could rumble.
“I ought to,” he mumbled, before he set aside the trenching shovel and instead reached for the concrete shovel and spade that were leaning against a tree.
He continued his strenuous labor. The ground was hard and invaded by all kinds of roots; once again he muttered something about the birches. He had decided to excavate to a depth of forty centimeters. If he encountered large stones he would let them be. The planting depth should be at least sixty centimeters, but when he discovered how hard it was to dig, he decided to raise the beds somewhat. He had proposed that to start with but the homeowner rejected it, thought it would look unnatural. Now it had to be like that anyway. He could explain it such that in time the planting would settle somewhat.