The meeting was over. Everyone exhaled and left as fast as they could. Only Ottosson lingered as usual, as did Lindell. It was a habit they’d had for a long time, a kind of post-meeting, filled with familiarity. Sometimes it was only about work, other times about private things and then mostly about Ann’s life, but most often it was a mixture.
The others on the squad had accepted these brief conferences, realized that the bond between the chief and Lindell was somewhat special. What made her colleagues feel well-disposed or indulgent to Ann was that she never used her status as favorite to appropriate benefits for herself.
It was just this relationship, their slightly peculiar relationship, that Ann now brought up.
“Who am I going to make small talk with after the end of the year?”
Ottosson smiled, but said nothing. He picked up his papers. They both knew that there was no answer. Instead he picked up another thread.
“I was thinking about this business with the professor. Could it be someone who was wrongly treated once upon a time? He worked at University Hospital, right? Someone who wants to get revenge, who has fumed about it a long time and now when the old man has gotten some notoriety wants to mess with him a little.”
“I think he worked as a researcher. He probably didn’t have much to do with the general public. Seeing patients, performing operations and that. He’s a virologist. Viruses.”
Ottosson nodded.
“And that was probably a good thing,” Lindell added.
“I see, he’s one of those.”
Now it was her turn to nod.
“Have you talked with Ola at all?”
“Not for a couple of weeks,” said Lindell. “When he was in Stockholm visiting someone.”
“A lady?”
“Hard to believe.”
At one time, Lindell had felt attracted to Ola Haver. It was not long after the separation from Edvard. Now, in retrospect, she had a hard time understanding why.
“Is he coming back?” asked Ottosson.
“Don’t think so.”
“He doesn’t want to talk with me. The last time he hung up. So he’s probably coming back when I’m gone.”
Ottosson sounded sincerely worried. He was not self-pitying, instead sad that perhaps he had said or done something that upset Haver.
“No,” said Lindell. “He’s angry, not at you personally but at the department in general and you’ll have to take the blame since you’re the boss. He’s angry at life, at Rebecka, at everything and everyone.”
Ottosson observed her.
“There are many who are angry these days,” he said a bit cryptically.
“Complaints?”
“No,” said Ottosson. “Sometimes you wish that more people complained.”
“Go visit our Nobel Prize winner,” Lindell encouraged him. “He complains about most everything.”
After a few minutes Lindell left. She felt a certain impatience and she knew why. She wanted to call Gräsö.
Seventeen
The notes from Africa no longer interested him. He had long intended to edit the scattered paragraphs into a coherent text. Obviously a lot would have to be deleted, but there was enough that held up to closer inspection.
Now he didn’t know. Small observations of nature by a white man in a black country, what would that be good for? Miss Elly would have been immensely amused, he smiled at the memory of her merciless laughter. He read a couple of sentences: “I know nothing about fireflies. That worries me.” Miss Elly would have choked.
No, I’ll throw the piles of papers in the garbage can, he decided, but changed his mind at the same moment. What if his mother had thought the same way and actually thrown away her diaries? Then he would be suspended in ignorance of who she really was, and above all he would never have gotten an answer to questions he had wondered about ever since childhood. Perhaps the answers came a bit late, but he experienced a great warmth at the sight of his mother’s primitive scribbling.
But on the other hand, he had no children who would read and understand in retrospect. They never had any children. That was why Miss Elly died, there was no other explanation. Her shame at being a barren cow was too great. Her despair hollowed her out until only a dry skin remained. She weighed nothing when she passed away. He carried her casket alone on one shoulder.
So who would read his notes? He had no ambition to stand out as intelligent, because he had never seen himself that way. He was good at a number of things, he could track, haul wood, imitate bird calls, likewise lay an acid-soil bed and a whole lot more. None of this was especially remarkable. The birds sang better than he did. Millions of people in Africa could track, but he had been given a talent that not many white people had, Miss Elly thought. In that area she was impressed by his skills. Otherwise his experiences could be sorted under the “everyday” category.
He harbored no ambitions to be an author either. He had never read that much; during the years in Africa there had simply been a lack of books. At his uncle’s in Windhoek there were only German novels of miserable quality and pornography of even lower quality. Then, in the northern provinces, he never experienced any need for books.
If he had at least been agitated when he jotted down his lines, then perhaps it would be instructive or at least readable for a wider audience. Strangely enough, though, he thought in retrospect, the notes were chemically free from comments about what was happening in the country. Not even when the resistance struggle intensified and the armed groups went past, sometimes only gangs of boys from the high plateaus equipped with a few automatic rifles, did it leave any traces in his writing. He had not hesitated a moment about where his sympathies were; many times he had ended up in arguments with other whites, not least the Haller family in the capital, but none of this appeared in his writings, not a single expression of anger.
In his texts animals and nature dominated, skies, stars and desert sand, rain that fell or was absent, mooing, bellowing, and shrieks in the night, sunrises so beautiful that he wept with gratitude.
A few lines about Miss Elly. If I had written more about her and love anyway, he thought, I could have filled however many pages. No, instead I wrote about fireflies. No wonder she laughed.
The conclusion was that what was most interesting to others, most universally applicable or exciting in a more conventional sense, was lacking.
But perhaps, he concluded his train of thought, perhaps in the future could there be a person, in Sweden or in Namibia, who would find the text interesting? The problem was how this person would get hold of his notes. That was an insurmountable problem. When he died the text would die with him.
He should let chance decide! As part of his estate, his typed-out African meditations would be neatly collected. Those to whom the task fell of cleaning up after him would have to decide. Either the papers would end up in a black garbage bag along with old vouchers, warranties for the toaster, and everything else he had collected, or else the finder would sit down and start browsing, perhaps enticed by the exotic photo on the front page depicting Miss Elly sitting on the skull of a hippopotamus, and after a couple of pages would say to his assistant, “This is really interesting.” Then the other person, tired of the first person’s passivity, would encourage him to take the papers home and continue reading there.
That is what would happen when the text started to have a life of its own. What would happen then no one could know. The number of possibilities made him dizzy.
He laughed, stirred a little absentmindedly the bowl of pasta he was cooking, and thought about the police officers he had met earlier in the day. The man, Nilsson he had introduced himself as, stood out as a cheerful fellow. Or was he just pretending? No, Karsten thought to himself, he seemed genuinely pleasant, open and talkative. But the woman who came up later looked like seven years of famine.