He didn’t like smiling. In general he didn’t like it when old people smiled, it looked like a death grin.
“Mr. Olen!”
The taxi driver’s enthusiasm was if possible even greater this time. He opened the gate as the professor approached.
“You again?”
“Yes, Professor Olen, I asked for it. Stephania calls for me.”
“So every time there is a fare from this address you’ll be coming?”
“If I’m working.”
This pleased the professor, it was like having your very own chauffeur. He got into the backseat, only hired hands insisted on sitting next to the driver, his father had maintained, and it was an understanding that Bertram von Ohler shared.
“Everything fine?”
“Thanks,” said the professor.
The taxi took off. It was warm and pleasant in the car. The professor leaned back, closed his eyes, and for a few moments he was back in his youth, in the family’s old Packard, with Olsson at the wheel. That was his name, Gerhard Olsson, strange that I even remember his first name, because no one called him anything other than Olsson. Then he disappeared during the military call-up, somewhere in Norrbotten, drowned in a river. The new one, what was his name, Wiik it definitely was, but no first name showed up. He was not many years older than Bertram himself, with one leg shorter than the other, which was probably why he was rejected by the military, smelled of tobacco. He stayed with the family until…
The professor opened his eyes. Wonder if Agnes knows? She ought to.
Then there was no more chauffeur. The caretaker had to manage the little driving there was, and then mainly in the summer to the house on Rådmansö that his father Carl bought during the war. It was a real find, a classic Victorian mansion, owned by an alcoholic factory owner who became insolvent and quickly needed cash.
It was Consul Wendt who had tipped him off about the house, because even though he backed Hitler while the Ohlers, despite their German background, had always been Anglophiles, they socialized. After the war all quarrels were forgotten and the Wendt son later was elected to parliament as a conservative.
But he did not want to think about former caretakers and Nazis. That led too far, there was simply not room for all the history. Or it was not allowed to take up room. Like the story with Wiik, his behavior when Anna quit, threatened unbelievably enough to report Carl. That invalid who could not even become a private, and whom Carl took on out of pure charity, threatening with the police!
Or else with Dagmar, why should he think about her? That they fell in love and got married, what did that mean today? Nothing! Three new leaves on the family tree were the result, good enough, but brooding about Dagmar and all the other dung in the story was of no use.
“My father always took taxis,” he said.
The driver laughed. A happy fellow, the professor observed, yet not insistent. He drove nice and easy too, no sudden careening, an ideal chauffeur.
“Was he a professor too?”
“That’s right. How did you guess?”
The chauffeur shrugged his shoulders.
“You see that sort of thing,” he said.
“He was one of the country’s foremost gynecologists.”
“I see,” said the driver, braking in front of the entry to number seventy.
“That was quick.”
The driver turned around.
“Here is my telephone number,” he said, handing over a card. “Call if you need a taxi.”
The professor pulled out his wallet with some effort.
“Keep the change,” he said, extending a hundred-kronor bill.
“It’s too much.”
“I’m not exactly destitute,” said the professor, “and it will soon be December. Then there will be replenishment.”
Six
Associate Professor Gregor Johansson was taking a nap. It was a lifelong habit. When he was a student and in the early years of his professional career it was sometimes hard to get away, find a place to stretch out for a while. No more than ten or fifteen minutes was needed, even if since retirement it had become considerably longer than that.
He used his father’s method, and also his parlance. If he were to be encouraged to remember any special expression from his childhood it was just these words, “I’m going to lean back awhile,” that would come to him unbidden.
There was also a childhood odor track: the smell of barn and a hint of sour milk, “pungent” as his father put it, born in Rasbo, a not completely unpleasant aroma, but “different” as his mother, originally from Karungi in Norrbotten, would have expressed it.
And then naturally the kitchen sofa bench, inherited goods that stood under the south window in the otherwise quite modern kitchen. A completely misplaced piece of furniture, most of all because the associate professor had done nothing to improve its worn appearance. On the contrary, it was with great tenderness that he observed the worn, dirty brown original paint that could be glimpsed under the equally worn-down green outer layer that was his childhood shade.
It was the work of a village carpenter, with a few curves and flourishes on the back, a couple of carved, stylized flowers on the front of the drawer. Otherwise nothing exaggerated, instead a worthy and typical representative of the furniture used most by poor people, indispensable day and night. He had spent his first thirteen years in it.
He was lying on his back on the bench staring up at the ceiling. The usual calm would not appear. He understood what the cause of it was. They were arguing. His father in his languid Uppland way, his mother in her bare Norrbotten dialect. It was as if their respective provinces shaped their speech and gestures.
They carried on, wreaked havoc, pulsed in his circulation, his cheeks burned, made him remember and sense the sweet-and-sour in his childhood and life.
With the years the din had become louder and increasingly frequent. Perhaps natural, he thought, the older you get, the more strongly the odors and veins of memories appear, it’s an old truth.
He had no major problems with these memories, there were seldom any really gloomy recollections that floated up, but sometimes they came traipsing, like the shabbily clothed men on the road outside the family’s little cottage, those his mother insisted on offering coffee, sometimes a little food. Despite his mother’s assurances that they were harmless, just hungry, he was afraid of their mournful appearance; perhaps he had been frightened sometime when he was very small. Perhaps it was his mother’s words that it could just as well be themselves who were tramping along the roads.
It was called the “big road” but was no more than a narrow and crooked, poorly maintained gravel road that connected the station in Bärby with the highway toward the coast. There, a few kilometers north, his grandfather lived in a cottage on the farm in Ströja. These points-the cottage, his grandfather’s place, and then Frötuna, the estate where his father worked-formed a triangle whose few square kilometers basically constituted Gregor Johansson’s whole life during his early years.
Sometimes they went to see Aunt Rut and her husband Karl in Selknä, less than ten kilometers north. “Kalle” had been a road worker, and in northern Sweden met his future wife. Later he got work on the Roslag line, brought Rut with him, and moved to Selknä. Then, when his mother rode the twelve hundred kilometers to visit her sister, she met the cattleman Harry Johansson at a barn dance in Gråmunkehöga. So she too moved to the province.
The outings to Selknä, and a few times by train into Uppsala, were adventures. The station hand in Bärby, also named Kalle, was already exciting enough.
Then came the black years, as his mother called the war. For Gregor the period was a strange mixture of worry and a kind of expectation. Worry that the strange men with hard voices from the radio would come to Rasbo, but also a time when the adults seemed exhilarated. There had probably never been so much talk between the farms and houses, gossip and speculation, with constantly new rumors in circulation.