At first his mind was blank. What he saw could not be explained. But in the next moment he was overcome by rage that someone was destroying their patio. He switched on the pocket torch and directed the beam of light at the person moving outside. The black silhouette became a man, and when the glare focused on him he turned to face the light. Jan-Erik recognised him immediately. The foundling who was going to inherit from Gerda Persson.
He opened the window.
‘What the hell are you doing out there?’
The man didn’t answer. He turned his back to Jan-Erik and kept digging.
‘Do you hear me? If you don’t stop I’ll call the police!’
He got no reaction.
Jan-Erik slammed the window shut and went out to the hall, put on his shoes and a jacket, and made sure he had his mobile in his pocket, in case he had to ring for help. He flipped the switch for the outside light but nothing happened. Annoyed, he slammed the door and stumbled down the stairs and across the lawn. The light from his torch played over the ground, and he avoided the bushes and unweeded flowerbeds until the light reached the hole that Kristoffer had dug. The flagstones lay spread about under a layer of dirt.
‘What do you think you’re doing? This is private property, and if you don’t stop right now I’ll call the police.’
Kristoffer sniffed and wiped his hand across his face before he resumed digging. Jan-Erik reached for the shovel, but Kristoffer knocked his hand away.
‘Did you know the whole time?’
Jan-Erik shone the light at the young man’s face. His eyes were red and swollen, and tears were running down his cheeks. Kristoffer put his hand up against the blinding light and then continued digging. Jan-Erik was baffled. The absurd situation, the intruder’s obvious mental instability, Louise wanting a divorce, all the alcohol he had downed: everything was a maelstrom. He lowered the torch, suddenly exhausted.
Because he didn’t understand. Nor did he know if he really wanted to understand, really wanted to know why the foundling who was Gerda’s heir was digging a hole in their garden.
Kristoffer stopped and took a folded piece of paper from his pocket. He held it out across the hole to Jan-Erik, who was incapable of raising his arm. He was about to contract a deadly virus; a chronic disease that would never leave him.
Kristoffer shook the paper at him.
‘Read it!’
Now it would be proved. That this stranger standing in front of him was his half-brother. That yet another part of the inheritance would vanish to someone who hadn’t lifted a finger to deserve it.
But that didn’t explain the digging. The dread awakened inside him was unthinkable.
The paper was burning his fingers. In the light of the torch Gerda’s flowing handwriting took shape, curling along the lines like an ornamental work of art. At a quick glance it all looked so harmless. But slipped in under the innocent surface he understood that something terrible was hidden. If he allowed the words to form into sentences, something would be destroyed that could never be restored.
To the sound of earth being shovelled he began to read.
My dear Kristoffer,
I don’t know whether it’s the right thing to do to write this letter, but I blame myself so much that I just can’t leave it be. I believe I’m doing this to try to put right what I was once forced to take part in. Many years have gone by, but not a day passes that I don’t think about everything that happened, and now I’m old and can feel that the end is approaching…
Why does the eye follow the line that it doesn’t want to read? Why does the brain interpret the words it doesn’t want to understand? With each word he read, something was lost. Silently the secret had slunk after him through all the years. Disguised behind their misleading behaviour his parents had allowed him to build his conceptual world and his life on something that had actually never existed. Underneath the gilt cover was nothing but a hole. The very root of his existence was pure fantasy.
…and the morning after the terrible event, I found you in the woodshed. Mrs Ragnerfeldt was in bed and had taken a sedative, so she knew, and still knows, nothing. Mr Ragnerfeldt didn’t know what to do, but then he told me to drive into the city and leave you somewhere where someone would find you, and I didn’t dare refuse. I saw all the evil happen, but I was brought up in a home where I was taught not to talk back to my superiors. I hate that man for everything he’s done and for what he made me do…
‘But this is total madness. Gerda must have been struck by dementia. Anyone can see that. You can see that someone senile wrote this, can’t you? She claims all these things about Axel Ragnerfeldt. Don’t you know who he is? You have to understand, it’s totally impossible he would do something like that!’
Kristoffer stopped, breathless with exertion.
‘So your sister didn’t kill herself?’
‘What?’
‘Did you read all of it? About why she did it?’
Something heavy and impenetrable slammed down inside him. A defensive wall surrounded his soul. A few seconds passed and by then, without even realising it, he had taken sides.
‘My sister was run over by a car!’
… outside Mr Ragnerfeldt’s office there was a broom cupboard. From there I could hear everything that was said in his office, and sometimes I stood there listening, because it seemed easier to bear if I understood what was going on in the household. I know it was wrong of me, but that’s what I did. Some months after Mr Ragnerfeldt received the Nobel Prize, the writer Torgny Wennberg came to visit, and since I knew he had known your mother, I was afraid he had revealed everything and I would be held responsible. I listened in the broom cupboard and heard when…
In front of him Kristoffer had fallen to his knees. Jan-Erik shone the light from the torch down into the hole and felt the horror spread through his body. Kristoffer had found what he was looking for. All at once Gerda’s words were confirmed and could never be denied again. Jan-Erik turned off the torch to make what he’d seen in the hole disappear.
‘Turn it back on!’ Kristoffer yelled. ‘Turn it on, I mean it!’
Jan-Erik turned on the torch, suddenly afraid that someone would hear them.
For a long while Kristoffer just sat there breathing hard and staring down into the dark hole. Time after time he wiped his nose on his sleeve, and his wet cheeks glistened in the faint light.
‘You never abandoned me.’
Jan-Erik needed something to drink.
With difficulty Kristoffer got to his feet.
‘Do you know what a survivor is?’
Jan-Erik didn’t reply. Everything that had mattered before now had suddenly been obliterated, and it was impossible to comprehend what had taken its place.
‘A survivor is someone who does something so unique that the memory of him always lives on. Someone like Axel Ragnerfeldt was to me. But if it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to make sure that he goes down in history as the fucking bastard he is.’
Inside himself Jan-Erik heard his own voice. The words he had repeated so many times in the spotlight. My father realised that our actions are like our children; they live on, independent of us and our will. Joseph Schultz and my father belong to the minority who realise that the reward for a good deed is the very fact of having done it.