In 1943 came the deathblow. Just as the fortunes of war on the continent were turning, the luck of the family also turned. His father fell down from the hayloft, broke his hip and an arm, opened an ugly wound in his belly, with inflammation and blood poisoning as a result, an injury which after five days in the hospital in Uppsala would prove to be fatal.
Gregor was then thirteen years old. His father had decided that his son should be educated as a control assistant, he would work with livestock but unlike his father he would not need to toil as a cowhand in the animal stalls. Everything was prepared for him to start in the secondary school in Uppsala, as a lodger with a cousin of his father, a childless widower who was foreman at Nyman’s bicycle factory.
There began the long migration that led to the university. A path he actually had not chosen himself, and which in retrospect he looked back on with mixed emotions.
He had been helped along, with the combined exertions of a whole family and later with scholarships, and he realized already during the first month of secondary school, when it turned out that “things come easy to him,” that he would never need to tramp along the roads and beg for a cup of coffee and a sandwich, perhaps an odd job.
At the same time, the absence of his father, of the odors of his childhood, sat like an aching wedge in his body. In times of worry it was as if someone struck a blow and drove the wedge a little further into his chest.
He woke from his slumber and sat up. Perhaps it was the overwhelming events of the past twenty-four hours, with the Nobel Prize and Bunde’s unexpected appearance, that made the associate professor dream about strange things. In his dream his parents had appeared, but also the old people at the estate, Björks in Sandbacken, where he got to go to buy eggs, the smith who was called “Phew Pharaoh,” his grandfather who outlived his son by twenty years, and many others, in a cavalcade where the dead appeared and talked about the sorts of things they had never been allowed, or even wanted, to talk about when they were alive.
He knew that it was time to get up, that lingering on the bench was not a good idea. Once the shabbily clothed started wandering it was time to get up and do something else.
He decided to have his afternoon coffee in the tower, ordinarily an effective cure for melancholy, so he brought a package of cookies from the kitchen and started the climb up the stairs.
The seesawing flight of a green woodpecker caught his attention. He had always liked woodpeckers and had left behind a stump from a pear tree as an intended food source and perhaps nesting tree and been rewarded. Every day the woodpecker came to visit.
From the pear tree the associate professor let his eyes wander over to Bunde’s and then to Lundquist’s. Immediately he caught sight of the figure crouching behind the overgrown honeysuckle. The man, because of course it must be a man, was standing completely still. The associate professor could only glimpse parts of his back and legs, and perhaps something that might be a dark cap.
“Strange,” said the associate professor to himself, and looked quickly toward Bunde’s.
He was right, thought the associate professor, there is someone sneaking around here. Should he go downstairs and call the police? No, that would seem almost silly. What would he say? That there is a man standing in his neighbor’s yard? He would be laughed at.
The coffeemaker hissed and the associate professor left his lookout point to pour a cup and take out a cookie.
The whole maneuver did not take many seconds, and when he returned to the window the figure was gone. He quickly checked the surroundings but no stranger was seen anywhere.
He did not like that. He did not like obscurity and mysteries. There must be a reasonable explanation. Perhaps it was as he himself had said to Bunde, that this concerned hired gardening help. The honeysuckle really needed pruning, and not just that. All of Lundquist’s yard needed a proper facelift. But the honeysuckle stood undisturbed, not a single branch was weeded out.
The man simply had to pee, was the associate professor’s next thought, he had withdrawn, tried to conceal himself in the bushes at the back side of the house. A tradesman who did not have access to a toilet, perhaps the explanation was that simple. Perhaps some work was being done on the front side of the neighbor’s house? Plastering the façade or window repair were two possibilities that occurred to the associate professor.
He decided to take a walk around the block to check the whole thing. He wanted certainty. Not least he wanted to have something to say to Bunde if they were to meet again.
Suddenly he saw the comic side of all this, this activity that had developed on the otherwise so calm little street. He stopped by the gate, laughed to himself, but quickly became hesitant.
He remained standing a good while, with his hand on the gate handle and his eyes fixed on the street, while his thoughts wandered back to the cottage in Rasbo and the “big road,” in this strange interplay that had marked the whole afternoon.
No shabbily clothed people ever come here, it struck him, and the familiar irritation came over him. It was an irritation, not to say anger, at himself that he had felt so many times. Why in the world should he continue to go over the old days? Times are different now and the smells are different, so why?
I became a doctor, I became an associate professor, if not a Nobel Prize winner, nonetheless respected and appreciated by my colleagues, but still so afraid of the shabbily clothed. No, not afraid, more like ashamed that I was so afraid then. But I was a child. I was alone, with no siblings to defend me, explain to me. Mother’s words that they were not dangerous did not take, because I knew intuitively that Father didn’t like it that the shabbily clothed were entertained by the gate.
He went out onto the sidewalk and began his walk around the block. It was just starting to get dark. The associate professor quickened his pace. He walked with long strides, staring straight ahead, anxious not to appear curious.
At Tibell’s he turned left. Linda Tibell shared his interest in Japanese maples and had a magnificent Ozakazuki, whose leaves were now orange-red, at one end of the house.
Then the associate professor turned left again. Lundquist’s house was number three in line. In the other house, belonging to the Winblad family, with whom he shared the privet hedge on the back side, small lamps were shining invitingly in all the windows on the ground floor. On the steps Winblad’s Irish setter was sitting, following the associate professor with his eyes.
He seemed to sense how the neighbors were also peering behind their curtains. What would he do if no one was seen in the yard? Could he go up to the house and ring the doorbell?
He stopped outside Lundquist’s gate, pretended to retie his scarf. The morning newspaper was sticking up out of the mailbox. That convinced him that it was not Lundquist himself he had glimpsed in the bushes and that there was no point in ringing the doorbell. He continued his walk. A stranger, in other words; the question was whether he had a valid reason to be in the yard.
Suddenly the entry light above the front door came on and a figure emerged from the darkness between a pair of extensive spindle trees.
The associate professor stopped abruptly.
“Sorry, I think I frightened you.”
The same man whom the associate professor had glimpsed earlier-he recognized the knit cap-came up to the fence.
“Yes, I was a little startled, I’ll admit.”
Just then the outside light turned off.
“It must have a loose connection,” said the associate professor.