The ceiling looked good, it was like lying beneath a white cloud.
Suddenly he heard a tentative knocking through the silence. Hard knuckles against rattling glass.
Joakim turned his head.
Bad news? He was always ready for more bad news.
The knocking came again, more energetic this time.
It was coming from the kitchen door.
Slowly he got up from the bed, went through the kitchen and out into the hallway.
Through the glass he could see two people dressed in dark clothes standing on the steps outside.
It was a woman and a man of Joakim and Katrine’s age. The man was wearing a suit, the woman a dark blue coat and skirt. Both smiled pleasantly at him as he opened the door.
“Hi,” said the woman. “We’re Filip and Miriam. May we come in?”
He nodded and opened the door wide. Were they from the funeral director’s office in Marnäs? He didn’t recognize them, but several people from the office had been in touch over the past few weeks. They’d all been very nice.
“Oh, this is lovely,” said the woman as they walked into the kitchen.
The man looked around, nodded and turned to Joakim. “We’re traveling around the island this month,” he said, “and we noticed someone was home.”
“We live here all year round… my wife and I and our two children,” said Joakim. “Would you like some coffee?”
“Thank you, but we don’t use caffeine,” said Filip, sitting down at the kitchen table.
“What’s your name?” said Miriam. “If you don’t mind my asking.”
“Joakim.”
“Joakim, we would really like to give you something. Something important.”
Miriam took something out of her bag and placed it on the table in front of Joakim. It was a brochure.
“Look at that. Isn’t it beautiful?”
Joakim looked at the slim brochure. On the cover was a drawing of a green meadow beneath a blue sky. In the meadow sat a man and a woman in white clothes. The man had his arm around a lamb that had lain down on the grass, and the woman had her arm around a big lion. They were smiling at each other.
“Isn’t that paradise?” said Miriam.
Joakim looked up at her. “I thought this place was paradise,” he said. “Not now, but before.”
Miriam looked at him in confusion for a few seconds. Then she began to smile again.
“Jesus died for us,” said Miriam. “He died so that things could be as wonderful as this for us.”
Joakim looked at the drawing again and nodded. “Wonderful.” He pointed at the huge mountains in the background. “Fantastic mountains.”
“It’s the kingdom of heaven,” said Miriam.
“We go on living after death, Joakim,” said Filip, leaning across the table as if he were revealing a great secret. “Eternal life… isn’t that fantastic?”
Joakim nodded. He couldn’t stop looking at the drawing. He had seen brochures like this before, but had never realized how beautiful the pictures of paradise were.
“I’d really like to live in those mountains,” he said.
Fresh mountain air. He could have lived there with Katrine. But the island they had moved to was completely flat; there were no mountains. And no Katrine…
Joakim suddenly found it difficult to breathe. He leaned forward, feeling thick tears welling up in his throat.
“Don’t you feel… don’t you feel well?” said Miriam.
He shook his head, leaned over the table, and began to cry. No, he didn’t feel well. He wasn’t well, he was suffering from lean bone fever.
Oh, Katrine… and Ethel…
He wept and sniveled uncontrollably for several minutes at the kitchen table, shut off from the outside world. Somewhere in the distance he could hear whispering voices and the gentle scraping of chairs, but he couldn’t stop weeping. He felt a warm hand on his shoulder, which remained there for a few seconds before it was removed. Then the outside door closed gently.
When he finally blinked away the tears, he was alone. He heard the sound of a car starting up outside.
The brochure with the people and the animals in the meadow was still on the table. When the sound of the engine had died away, Joakim sniveled in the silence and looked at the drawing.
He had to do something. Anything.
With a tired sigh he stood up and threw the brochure in the trash can under the sink.
The house was completely silent around him. He went along the corridor into the empty drawing room and looked for a long time at the tins, bottles, and rags that were lined up on the floor. Katrine had obviously started cleaning the window frames the week before.
She had had much clearer views on the décor than Joakim, and had chosen all the colors, wallpaper, and wooden detailing throughout. And the material had already been bought; it was lying on the floor by the walls waiting to be used.
Joakim sighed again.
Then he opened a bottle of cleanser and picked up a rag. He started working on the window frames, stubborn and focused.
The sound of the rag rubbing against the wood sounded desolate in the silence.
Don’t press too hard, Kim, he heard Katrine saying in the back of his head.
The weekend came. The children were at home, playing in Livia’s room.
Joakim had finished the windows in the big room, and this Saturday he was going to start wallpapering the room in the southwest corner. He had set up a table and mixed a bucket of wallpaper paste after breakfast.
This was a smaller bedroom, that, like many of the others, had a 120-year-old tiled stove in one corner. The flower-patterned wallpaper in most of the rooms looked as if it dated
from the beginning of the twentieth century, but unfortunately it was too badly damaged to be preserved. There were a huge number of damp stains, and in some places the paper had been hanging off in long strips. Katrine had pulled them away earlier in the fall and then smoothed down the walls, filled in the holes, and prepared everything ready for wallpapering.
Katrine had particularly liked this little corner room.
But Joakim wasn’t going to call up any more memories of her right now. He wasn’t going to think, he was just going to wallpaper.
He picked up the rolls of zinc-white paper, a heavy English handmade wallpaper of the same type they had used in the Apple House. Then he picked up the knife and the long ruler and started cutting lengths.
He and Katrine had always done the wallpapering together.
Joakim sighed, but started working. It wasn’t possible to get stressed out when you were wallpapering, and so the work turned into something close to meditation. He was a monk; the house was his monastery.
When he had put up the first four lengths and smoothed them down with a brush, Joakim suddenly heard a faint thudding noise. He got down from the ladder and listened. The thuds were regular, with a few seconds in between, and they were coming from outside.
He went over to the window facing out from the back of the house and opened it. Bitterly cold air swept in.
A boy was standing on the grass down below, perhaps a year or two older than Livia. At his feet he had a yellow plastic soccer ball. The boy had curly brown hair, poking out from underneath a woolen winter hat; his padded jacket was inaccurately buttoned, and he was looking up at Joakim with some curiosity.
“Hi,” said Joakim.
“Hi,” said the boy.
“It’s not a good idea to kick your ball around here,” said Joakim. “You could break a window if your aim isn’t great.”
“I’m aiming at the wall,” said the boy. “I always hit what I’m aiming at.”
“Good. What’s your name?”
“Andreas.”
The boy rubbed his nose, red with the cold, with the palm of his hand.
“Where do you live?”
“Over there.”
He pointed toward the farm. So Andreas was one of the Carlsson family’s children, out and about on his own this Saturday morning.