Normally he would have rented a small excavator and done the work in a jiffy, but on that issue too he was met with opposition. No machinery could be brought onto the property. So now he had to dig by hand, though actually he had nothing against that. It was hard work that tried your patience, but after a while the precisely weighed movements created a pleasant pace, an almost hypnotic rhythm, where the repetition gave him the time he needed for reflection, or rather a kind of meditative calm.
The rain did not bother him-on the contrary, it made the ground softer. He toiled on as always, occupied by the monotony. Every shovelful demanded a similar thought and muscular effort, but with a little variation in every stroke, invisible to an outside observer, a kind of automated and polished finesse that amused him, granted him satisfaction. A visitor at the edge of the excavation would think, Nice that I don’t have to do this mechanical job.
He had experienced so many times how the uninformed felt sympathy for him, that he should have to toil in this old-fashioned way, that he did not let it bother him. He saw it differently: Others were missing out on something valuable and were to be pitied. They saw only the sweat that appeared on his forehead and in his armpits and how his muscles were forced to work. Nothing else.
It was not until twilight came that he straightened up, set aside the spade, and surveyed the situation. It was at moments like this that he wished he still smoked. The thought came to him every day, even though he quit more than ten years ago.
The planting was intended to cover about fifteen square meters and more than half of that was dug up. He kicked at a stone on the bottom of the excavation and it obligingly loosened from the grip of the clay. He took it as a good sign. Tomorrow he would finish the excavation and then refill it with his own mixture for acid soil plants, needles, cones, and branches from spruce, peat, leaves, compost, and a little gravel. The proportions varied from time to time, it was not that exact, he worked by feel, tossing in what might be suitable at the moment. If he came across a rotten log or stump he threw that in too. This time he would layer the mixture with twigs from the pruned spindle tree in the front.
It struck him that there must be an excess of beech leaves on the neighbor’s property. He had glimpsed the stately beech above the roof. Should he perhaps ask whether he could gather some leaves in sacks and carry them over?
He peered up toward the tower. The “tower man,” somewhat hidden behind plants but completely visible, stood observing him. He raised his hand, but the old man withdrew without responding to the greeting.
A lonely old fogey, he thought, while he gathered up his tools and turned the wheelbarrow over, but he can probably part with a few leaves.
Once again he observed the excavation and made the association that he was standing before an open grave. Most recently it was at the burial of his mother; that was also a rainy day, six months ago. Those who were assembled huddled under umbrellas, a woman whispered something inaudible, another nodded at him, before they all dropped off, apparently reluctant to prolong the ceremony and their own presence more than necessary. And he appreciated that, no gathering had been arranged, no uncertain, wary talk over clattering coffee cups and saucers. There were too few mourners, five besides the minister. His mother’s lonely life would have stood out as more pitiable if they had exerted themselves to observe convention with a funeral reception.
But afterwards, when the grave was filled in and the few wreaths and flowers laid out, when everything was quiet in the little cemetery, he thought, What memories did the others have of his mother? And then he regretted that they hadn’t gathered to talk for a little while. It did not have to be strained, he could simply have been able to express his gratitude for their presence in a more emphatic way, perhaps coax out a few remembrances. He had no idea, however, who two of the guests were.
And those who were not present, what did they have to tell? There were many gaps in his mother’s own story and now there was no one who could fill them in. The war years she had talked very little about, perhaps out of consideration for his father, and he understood that quite well. But her early years? He knew so little.
Now it was too late, was his only thought, as he stood in the rain in the cemetery. Was that perhaps only an expression of self-pity? His own solitude stood out as even more obvious now that his mother was gone. And she had actually expressed a wish to “be able to end it,” tormented as she was the last years by rheumatism and migraine-like headaches.
Not only was it too late to fill in the gaps in mother’s life, it was also too late for himself, for as far as he knew no one was interested in his own story. Even fewer would come to his funeral, he was sure of that-a thought that made him stop on the gravel path. A few broken lines from a hymn his mother used to sing when he was a child came to him. He wanted to cry but pulled himself together.
From where he was standing in the cemetery he could see how the caretakers were waiting in the background, they had observed him, quietly curious. One was sitting in a garden tractor, the other was standing alongside with a shovel in his hand, perhaps they had things to take care of, he thought, but did not want to get started until he was gone.
He started to leave, as controlled as he could, nodded to the caretakers, stepped out through the gate and caught sight of his car. At the same moment the tractor started up. He suppressed the impulse to return to the cemetery, go up to the caretakers, shake their hands, say something appreciative and then some small talk about the weather or about the signs of spring that were also to be seen in a cemetery.
Instead he jumped into the car and drove to his mother’s small apartment on Norrtäljegatan to start clearing up and cleaning out. There, in a drawer under the kitchen counter, strangely enough, he found the diaries, eleven small notebooks with black, soft covers of a kind he had not seen in many years. The slightly wavy lines were filled with his mother’s barely legible scribbling. He realized that what he thought had been his mother’s handwriting during old age had already been established in her youth.
Considering where he found them, in direct proximity to the garbage can, he got the idea that she had intended to discard them, but death in the form of a massive heart attack had intervened.
It’s strange, he thought then with rising irritation, collapsed on a kitchen chair, how everyone hides their lives. Not just strange, but also dreadful, as if no intimacy was possible.
“It was just the two of us,” he sobbed.
He had become agitated, not because she kept a diary, but because she did not have the sense to get rid of them in time, her typical indecisiveness, many times stemming from a kind of fatalistic passivity that always annoyed him. If she had not wanted to share while she was still alive, shown him that confidence, then why deliver a few limp notebooks reeking of garbage in a kind of scornful afterbirth?
Since then, after the initial irritation in his mother’s apartment, he had been reconciled with her. He had read the diaries, depressed and confounded, but also filled with a mournful gratitude when little by little he realized her greatness.
And now he could stand by an open grave, which would soon be filled with rhododendron and other lime-intolerant plants, without introverted anger or tears, instead filled with resolve to let her life shine, just light up the dark corners where the “educated and cultivated” tried to hide their dirty laundry.