The photographer was a Senegalese man from the southern regions of the country who had traveled around taking pictures for many years.
Slobodan wanted to lay it on thick. He was going to invest in the “gilded package,” as he put it. The goal was to convince diners to overlook the restaurants Svensson’s Guldkant and Wermlandskällaren in favor of Dakar.
“That old bolshevik,” he said disdainfully about the owner of the fish restaurant where the bourgeois Uppsala establishment liked to lunch. “I’m going to make sure the ladies sashay on over here. I’m going to get so many stars that the world press will line up outside. My menus will be printed in schoolbooks as examples of the complete kitchen.”
There was no limit to Slobodan’s visions and conviction that he would take Uppsala and the world by storm.
“I need chefs!” he exclaimed at the first meeting with Hammer and Armas.
“What you need is money,” Hammer said.
Slobodan turned sharply to him and the chef awaited the invectives that usually followed objections of this sort, but the restauranteur’s steely gaze was this time replaced with a grin.
“That’s been taken care of,” he said.
Three
“On my way,” Johnny Kvarnheden mumbled, and turned up the volume on the car stereo. The late-evening sun was bathing in Lake Vättern. Visingö looked like a towering warship, steering south, and the ferry to Gränna resembled a beetle on a floor of gold.
There was something cinematic about his flight, as if someone had directed his melancholia, set the lights, and added the music. He was conscious of this cinematic effect and was steered, allowed himself to be steered, caught in the classic scene: a lone man leaving his old life behind, on his way to something unknown.
A telephone call was all it had taken, a split second of deliberation in order for him to make up his mind, pack his few possessions-too few, and in too much of a hurry-and set out on the road.
He wished that his road trip could last forever, that the contents of the gas tank, his hunger, and his bladder were his only constraints. That the trip could be the focus, that he could fly down the highway unconnected to everything except the friction between his tires and the asphalt.
If there had been a camera, he would have turned it on the road, toward the black of the asphalt, the traces of traffic, and the grooves from the teeth of the snow-clearing trucks, not at his face or the landscape that flickered past. The sound track would not be Madeleine Peyroux’s voice from the CD player, but the rhythmic thumping from the roadway. The stiffness of his shoulders and the cramplike grip of his hands on the steering wheel would be the voice that spoke to the viewer.
He kept his disappointment and grief at bay, but also his hopes and dreams. He thought about descriptions of food, plates of one prepared dish after another. The fact that he was a chef saved him for the moment.
He was worthless as a lover, couldn’t even get it up anymore, and was just as worthless as a partner. This had slowly but surely become clear to him, and this insight had struck him with full force yesterday evening when Sofie described his attempts as “pathetic.”
“You aren’t living,” she said, in a sudden burst of volubility, “and your so-called attentions toward our relationship are ridiculous. It is nauseating. You don’t know how to love.”
He reached out and touched her, pressed his body against her, and felt desire for the first time in months. Repulsed, she shook him off.
“Nauseating,” he said out loud. “What kind of a word is that?”
He passed Linköping and Norrköping. Then he thundered on into Sörmland with an accelerating desperation that made him drive much too fast. The direction no longer worked. He turned the volume up higher, playing the same album over and over again.
As he approached Stockholm he tried to think of his new job. Dakar sounded good, like a solid B. He didn’t know more about the restaurant than what he had learned on the Internet the night before. The menu looked all right on paper, but there was something about the presentation that was jarring, as if it was aspiring to be high class but couldn’t quite manage to live up to its own superlatives. There was no lack of self-confidence. The writer had simply put in too much.
It was his sister in Uppsala who had told him about the job and he had called the owner. The latter had quickly jotted down his references and called back half an hour later to say he had gotten the job. It was as if he sensed Johnny’s situation.
He didn’t know more about the city than that it had a university. His sister hadn’t told him very much, but that had not been necessary. He was going to… yes, what? Cook, of course, but what else?
Four
“Imagine being able to sail.”
Eva Willman smiled to herself. The newspaper article about the holiday paradise in the West Indies was accompanied by a photograph of a yacht. It was at half sail and waves were breaking against the bow. A pennant fluttered at the top of the mast. There was a man dressed in blue shorts, a white tank top, and a blue cap standing in the stern. He looked relaxed, especially for someone with the responsibility for such a big boat. Eva sensed that he was the one who was steering. His gaze was directed up at the billowing sails. She thought she could see a smile on his face.
“I wouldn’t even be able to afford the cap,” she went on and pointed.
Helen leaned over and looked quickly at the page before she sank back into the sofa and continued to file her nails.
“I get sea sick,” she said.
“But just think what freedom,” Eva said and read on.
The article was about the island cluster of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao.
They were described as paradise islands, an el Dorado for snorklers and divers. A place where you could leave your troubles behind.
“The Antilles,” she muttered. “Think of how many places there are.”
“Sailing isn’t my thing,” Helen said.
For a while Eva studied the map of the string of islands north of Venezuela. She followed the coastline and read the foreign place names. The rasping sound of the nail file was getting on her nerves.
“I would like to see the fish, those tropical kinds in all the colors of the rainbow.”
She glanced at the digital clock on the VCR before she continued to browse.
“Maybe I should enroll in a class,” she said suddenly. “Learn to sail, I mean. It’s probably not that hard.”
“Do you know anyone with a sailboat?”
“No,” Eva said, “but you can always get to know someone.”
She stared unseeing at the next story. It was about a school in southern Sweden that had burned down.
“Maybe I’ll meet some hottie with a boat. It has to be a sailboat, not anything with an engine.”
“And who would that be?”
“A nice, handsome guy. A good man.”
“One who would want a middle-aged bag with two kids? Dream on.”
The words struck Eva with unexpected force.
“Well, what about you?” she said aggressively.
The nail file stopped in the air. Eva kept flipping through the magazine. She felt Helen’s gaze. She knew exactly how her friend looked: one corner of her mouth turned down, a vertical wrinkle in her forehead, and the birthmark between her eyebrows like the period in an exclamation point.
Helen was adept at looking displeased, as if someone was always trying to put one over on her. Which was true. Her man was constantly unfaithful to her.
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing in particular,” Eva said, and shot a quick look at her friend.
“What the hell has gotten into you today? I can’t help the fact that you feel dumped.”
“I haven’t been dumped! I’ve been laid off after eleven long fucking years.”
Eva pushed the magazine away and got to her feet. It wasn’t the first time that Helen was using the word dumped. Eva hated it. She was thirty-four years old and far from washed up.