It took more than an hour to inspect the over fifteen hundred square meter lot. Every now and then they stopped, made comments, and exchanged experiences.
“Oh, a witch alder!” the visitor exclaimed, when they came to the back side of the house. “I saw it from a distance but didn’t realize what it was. What a magnificent specimen, what divine autumn color!”
The associate professor felt almost intoxicated. He caressed the deeply bloodred leaves with a loving motion, incapable of adding anything. He was filled with a deep gratitude that the man had pulled him from the kitchen table and his gloomy thoughts about the Nobel Prize and the royal family. He felt as if they were two good friends who had known each other for decades.
The visitor was very tactful besides. He generously overlooked a few less successful arrangements. To start with, the associate professor was ashamed of the obvious deficiencies, grateful that his yellow perennial bed was not in bloom and showing its peculiar mixture of pale and bright, but as he realized that the man’s opinions focused on the successful parts of the garden his discomfort subsided.
It was hard for the associate professor to handle this natural friendliness and rare feeling of affinity. How could he repay it? Could he invite him in for a cup of coffee? Or perhaps even better, dig up a plant as a present to the man?
“Perhaps you would be interested in a witch alder,” the associate professor suggested. “I mean, for the bed you’re working on. It thrives in a slightly acid soil.”
“Maybe so. Definitely a few white azaleas. I have a weakness for white.”
“Yes, you need something that brightens things up.”
So it continued a good while, a garden fanatic’s ping-pong, while they slowly wandered back to the entry side, where they remained standing.
“You didn’t by chance see the police earlier?” the associate professor broke the silence.
“Yes, and I meant to ask what they were doing here.”
“They were at Ohler’s,” said the associate professor. “They picked up something from the ground and left.”
“What was it?”
“An object,” the associate professor answered crossly, who despised imprecise information.
“A stone,” said the man, and his whole face was smiling.
“Stone?”
“Perhaps from an excavation,” said the man in a gentle tone. “So it’s okay if I fill a few trash bags with leaves?”
“Yes, sure… of course,” said the associate professor, surprised by the sudden shift in subject.
The man extended his hand.
“Very nice,” he said in a hearty voice.
The associate professor took his hand, but the thought that he wanted to offer the visitor something meant that he could not get out even the most trivial phrase. It was only when the man was standing by the gate that he found his tongue.
“Excuse me, but what’s your name?”
“Karsten Haller.”
“Gregor Johansson,” said the associate professor, smiling too.
When Haller left the associate professor decided to dig up part of the witch alder later in the day. It had spread well and it would not entail any exertion at all to separate a powerful side shoot.
Then he happened to think about the strangely certain statement that it was a stone that the policeman found, and that perhaps it came from an excavation, and how Karsten then quickly started talking about leaves.
He leaned over the gate and looked but could not discover anything in particular, other than a car that drove up and parked outside Ohler’s.
The associate professor decided not to be curious, mostly out of pure instinct for self-preservation; he did not want to think about the professor anymore. Today he would be happy about his new acquaintance. He sensed that they would soon see each other again.
Eleven
“A swine, a damned Prussian swine!” the professor shouted.
Agnes backed away a step from the table.
“He visited me at the lab, do you remember that? Then he was a young, promising talent. Now he’s sticking the knife in me. I even invited him to lunch here at the house! Do you remember that? Now that infantile swine is sitting there sneering in his bunker. German bastards should never be trusted!”
How could I remember every lunch? Agnes thought quietly. It wasn’t her fault that some jealous German wrote something in the newspaper.
All morning he had been bossing her around, yelled at her, and to top it off now he refused to concern himself with the lunch she had carried in.
“The food will get-” Agnes tried to interject, but the professor was not to be stopped.
“What!” he shouted. “How… Scrambled eggs, what kind of food is that? You know I can’t stand eggs.”
“Professor, you have eaten eggs without difficulty your whole life.”
“Nonsense! Take that goo away!”
Agnes chose to leave the dining room. A hellish day, which started with a visit by the police-cretins and bunglers, he had called the two constables-and then that devastating phone call, God knows from whom, about that German Svimmel, or whatever his name was.
She stared at the golden-yellow scrambled eggs and the sausage from Tuscany. A salad of arugula, tomato, and cucumber in a bowl, with a few splashes of olive oil. A bottle of mineral water. Linen napkin. Knife and fork.
She sat down at the kitchen table and ate her own food. He can sit there and shout at himself in the dining room, she thought.
Soon he would get dizzy and need help getting up and making his way to the library. As a substitute for lunch she would fix tea, toast a few slices of bread, one with salami and one with soft cheese, which he would put away muttering, and then take a nap on the couch, even if he stubbornly insisted that he didn’t sleep, only “closed his eyes to think better.”
Although his fury unjustly affected her she felt a certain satisfaction. Or downright schadenfreude.
The last few days he had been wakened out of the increasingly gentle rut that had come to mark both him and the house in recent years. The gradual winding down of the pace had occured, without her actually reflecting on it that much. The time of big gestures was over. Then came the news about the prize and everything changed. The professor was altered beyond recognition or, rather, he resumed his old form, but without the potency and energy of middle age. He became a whining, sometimes shaky old bag of bones that stamped around the house. It seemed as if he was searching for something, rummaging about, moving things that had stood unmoved for decades, except during her own intermittent dusting. He picked up and inspected objects as if he had never seen them before. In the study he took out papers whose print had faded long ago. He had even gone down into the cellar on his own, God knows why.
Every now and then he shouted for her and wanted her to help him, most recently with some boxes that had been shoved in under a table in a room on the top floor, a room that no one had set foot in for years.
“Pull them out,” he ordered.
He was sitting on a piano bench, breathing heavily through his nose. His skinny, veined hands rested on the edge of the table.
“Why is that?” she ventured to ask.
“There are papers,” he said curtly. “Don’t babble so much, just pull out the boxes.”
When an hour or so later she went up to check that everything was fine he was sitting leaned over quantities of letters spread out all over the table. He had pulled up a floor lamp whose sharp glow lit up the scene: an old man who when she peeked into the room twisted his body and set his arms on the table, as if to conceal what he was occupied with.
He wanted afternoon tea, but after to be left in peace. “Not a lot of running around,” he said. A few envelopes had fallen on the floor and when she bent down to pick them up he had shoved her and shouted, “Leave it be.”