Agnes did not want any trouble. She just wanted to disappear from the house.
“Hags,” the professor snorted.
“I am no hag to you!”
Greta held up an index finger in front of his face as if she were scolding a child.
“Is this the thanks I get?” the professor shouted. “Here we have fed you all these years. You’ve had it good here. Agnes! Don’t say otherwise, don’t try to lie!”
Agnes had not expected an affectionate farewell, but not this anger either, this aggressiveness, this injustice.
“Silence!” Greta thundered with Aron’s voice. “You should be grateful that we have been so loyal for all these years.”
She also assumed some of her father’s features: the face which despite its wrinkles stood out as sculpted, the prominent jaw and flaming eyes. The preacher who did not stand aside.
“Loyal,” the professor said with a sneer.
He twisted his lips but the effect was missing when he was forced to support himself with both hands on the back of the chair in front of him so as not to fall down. He was breathing with great exertion.
“Daddy!” Birgitta pleaded.
Despite Agnes’s renewed attempts to silence her Greta did not let herself be stopped. She placed herself close to the professor and forced him to meet her eyes. Agnes could glimpse fear in his eyes for the first time since she had been in the house. Was it due to Greta’s fury or was he worried about having a heart attack? It would be embarrassing for him to ask for a pill, it would be an illustration of his dependence and weakness.
“We know about everything that has happened here in the house,” said Greta. “Everything! And there are so many skeletons in the closet that it’s enough for a whole cemetery. Last night I rescued you from disgrace, but now I don’t know if I did the right thing. You have bullied Agnes all these years and it is a miracle that she put up with it. But now it’s over. We have done our part. And we don’t deserve to be scolded.”
The words positively rushed out of Greta’s mouth. She talked about the long shifts and the lack of freedom, the constant attending. Agnes stared at her sister. She recognized all this, but what was the disgrace Greta mentioned?
“Daddy,” Birgitta pleaded again, “we don’t care about that! Come!”
By pulling him on the arm she tried to get her father to leave the kitchen, lead him away from the verbal barrage. But such a retreat was inconceivable, Agnes understood that. That went against everything the professor stood for. He was not the one who stepped aside. On the contrary, he shook himself free and appeared to be recovering from the attack of dizziness. Then came the counterattack.
“Not free? If there is anyone who hasn’t been free it’s me, who has taken responsibility for everything and everyone. Have you ever had to make a single decision about anything? Get out, you ungrateful cows!”
Greta’s reply came like a whiplash. “So you said that to Anna too?”
The professor stiffened. Liisa who had so far kept in the background took a couple of steps into the kitchen.
“Anna disappeared without saying anything,” said the professor.
“She was struck dumb,” said Greta. “Silenced. I don’t know what happened, but I can guess. And then the old professor went out to Father and talked nonsense about Anna.”
“You know nothing about that,” the professor snarled.
With his superior manner the professor had retaken command. It was as if nothing really had any effect on him. Greta did not have the same experience either in the art of being disrespectful and shameless. She closed her eyes for a few seconds and when she opened her eyes again she looked completely powerless. It was as if she had shot off all of her ammunition and more than anything wanted to disappear from the house and Uppsala.
“Ronald is waiting,” said Agnes, in an attempt to make contact with her sister.
Greta raised her eyes and took her hand. Together they left the kitchen, went through the hall, opened the door, and stepped out onto the stairs. When Agnes caught sight of Ronald, who was leaning against the car-unexpectedly enough with a broad smile on his face-she squeezed her sister’s hand. She was happy about Greta, about the smiling Ronald from Gräsö, and about being free. She had made it through.
Thirty-six
There was something strange about the flower bed. He saw it immediately, even if it took awhile before it became completely obvious. It meant he had to take out the binoculars. He had done that before, sneaked it out between the plants in the tower, to check the surroundings. He was ashamed, but not enough to keep him from doing it.
The perennials were sitting wrong. Haller would never be guilty of such amateurish planting. Maybe he had been in a hurry, been sloppy, been eager to get away? No, he had not gained any time by planting that way. It was simply poorly executed.
However, in the long run it did not matter much, the wintergreen would quickly spread over the whole surface and hide the mistake.
“Strange,” murmured the associate professor.
Then he caught sight of the bicycle that was leaned against Lundquist’s wall, which made him even more perplexed. Haller had said that he had finished the work but perhaps there was some task he had forgotten on the front side of the lot?
He looked at the clock. They had decided that Haller would come by for mid-morning coffee. Gregor was curious about the gardening books Haller was bringing. “Duplicates,” he had said, but the associate professor suspected that partly it was an excuse for a visit. There was something vague and introverted about Haller. It was obvious that there was something on his mind, perhaps it would come out today? He smiled to himself, satisfied over the sprouting friendship with the gardener.
Why did it feel as if the end was approaching? Not his own death, he did not want to imagine that, but something ominous-he smiled at the ridiculous word-rested over the house and the whole block. An endpoint was approaching. Perhaps it was something that Torben Bunde, quite certainly unconsciously, expressed in his article about Ohler and the Nobel Prize? The associate professor could not put his finger on what it was other than that it was about existence in the nature reserve that constituted the Kåbo district.
Perhaps it was only his customary dissatisfaction making itself known? He had become a recluse, somewhat of a misanthrope. It was not something he was proud of. But the lifelong feeling, since he left his parental home in Rasbo, of not feeling really at ease with his colleagues, his position, had developed over the years into a slightly contemptuous attitude toward his surroundings. He was no longer indulgent, but instead condescending, sometimes spiteful, when he thought back on his experiences. There was no reconciliation of old age.
With the publication of the article in Upsala Nya Tidning-only a month ago a completely unimaginable action-he had joined an academic quarrel, but also, through his conclusions about the inbred isolation and camaraderie of the research world, placed himself outside, distanced himself. It was as if he recounted his own private quarrel that had followed him his whole life. Nice to finally speak out, he might think now, if a trifle unpleasant to make himself known.
Now he was tagged, out of the game. Even if perhaps he won some people’s sympathy he had defined himself out, pooped in his own nest, as his uncle would have put it.
For that reason he looked forward to the gardener’s visit. Haller stood for something else.
What had originally caught his attention was not Lundquist’s flower bed but instead the big car that was parked on the street outside the professor’s house.
The associate professor could not figure it out. He did not recognize the young man who was lugging out sacks and suitcases from the house. At first he thought hired help had been brought in to do a big cleaning but when the housekeeper’s sister showed up on the sidewalk he realized that something else was up.