Let the Old Dreams Die (25 page)

‘It didn’t “feel like that”. It
was
like that. Death is something that comes from outside. A big parasite that enters the body, stays there for a while, gathers what it needs, then leaves the body. Then you’re dead. That’s the way it is.’

Josef nodded slowly to himself, rubbing a corner of the sheet between his fingers. Suddenly he said, almost defiantly, ‘It’s colourless. It changes shape. At least when it’s in the water. It can think. It has a language. You can talk to it.’

‘Did you talk to it?’

Josef gazed searchingly into Anna’s eyes, looking for any sign that she might be making fun of him. He found none. He shook his head. ‘No. It’s heard everything. There’s nothing to say. In that situation.’ He sucked at the corner of the sheet and went on, ‘We human beings are just…material to them.’

Tentatively Anna asked, ‘What do you mean,
them
?’

Josef looked at her, glanced shiftily to the side as if she’d asked
an unusually stupid question, then said, ‘Well, there are lots of them, of course.’ He snorted. ‘It’s a big planet, after all.’

He seemed to be on the point of saying something else, but stopped himself and said instead, ‘I’m sorry. This is hard to believe. I understand that. Sorry.’ He took her hand again, said imploringly, ‘But listen…that’s how it
is
. I’m absolutely certain. Death, Anna, is a creature capable of thought. There are ways of…negotiating with it.’

Anna nodded and got to her feet. For a while she had been aware of a clicking sound from Josef’s tongue when he was speaking. ‘Would you like a drink of water?’ she asked. ‘Or…?’

Josef smiled.

‘It’s all right, I’m not afraid it’s going to leap out of the tap or anything, it’s not like that. Yes please.’

Anna gave a slightly forced laugh and went over to the washbasin, filled a paper cup and gave it to Josef, who knocked it back in one. His movements suddenly seemed easier, his expression clearer. The happiness was there again. Anna would have preferred to talk about pleasant things, forget all this. But still she said; ‘But you’re alive. You’re sitting here.’

Josef nodded. ‘Yes. I was rescued before it had finished. It left me. When the boat came…when I saw the boat and thought,
I’m going to live after all
, it withdrew. Slowly. Like when…like when we’ve made love and I pull out really slowly so that it won’t hurt. Like that.’

That thought gave birth to the next one. He glanced at Anna’s belly and asked, ‘And how are
you
feeling?’

Anna stroked her stomach absentmindedly. Somewhere deep inside there was a life, as small as a dust mote, like a tick.

‘I don’t know. I feel…empty. Empty and happy.’

They didn’t sleep much during the night. The unfamiliar surroundings and the itching in Josef’s hands and feet kept them awake. They
lay close together in Josef’s narrow bed, made up a story together and played twenty questions. In the morning Josef was discharged from the hospital.

Anna was not by nature a sceptic. Gabriella, the only friend from art school she still saw, once told her that she almost fell in front of a subway train. At the very last moment a great hand had caught her and pushed her back up onto the platform. Gabriella believed it was her guardian angel. Anna didn’t contradict her. Personally, she didn’t believe in angels and that kind of thing, but you couldn’t rule out the possibility.

What worried her about Josef’s vision was the business of not dying, of living forever. That was a little bit more serious than seeing a ghost, for example.

They would talk about it in due course. Josef had experienced something that had come between them. It would take several evenings of conversation before they got back in step. But they would. They had to.

One day passed. Two, three. The supervisor at the nursery realised that Josef needed time to recover, and suggested he sign himself off for a week at least.

He stayed at home during the day, and Anna had no real contact with him. He did little jobs in the garden, brought up seaweed and spread it around the shrubs and on the vegetable patch. He got the boat back from the coastguard and tried to fix the engine. When he couldn’t do it himself, he took it over to the marina to be repaired. He spent a lot of time down on the jetty, gazing out to sea.

On the fourth day a fat envelope arrived. It was full of drawings from the children at the nursery: ‘GET WELL SOON’ and ‘HOP YOU SOON FEEL BETER’, written, by those who could, in spidery letters. Most of the drawings were the usual red cottages with the sun and a tree. A couple showed a matchstick man lying
in a billowing sea. The children had obviously been told what had happened.

Anna was making an omelette for lunch. Suddenly she heard Josef laughing out loud, the first real laughter she had heard from him in four days. She switched off the hotplate and went over to him. He was still laughing as he held out a drawing.

The picture, which must have been done by one of the older children, showed a person floating in the water. The child had talent; the figure was more than a matchstick man, and you could tell that it was supposed to be Josef from the medium-length brown hair.

The surface of the water was represented by blue wavy strokes that crossed the figure at approximately chest height. On the left-hand side a boat was on its way into the picture. Nothing remarkable there. The funny part was what was beneath the figure. A shark. An enormous shark with its mouth wide open, heading for the figure’s feet. A speech bubble coming out of the man’s mouth contained one word: ‘HELPHELP’.

Josef doubled up with laughter. Anna smiled and placed her hand on the back of his neck. He looked up at her with tears in his eyes. Pointed at the drawing, said, ‘helphelp’, and started laughing again.

He rocked back and forth, clutching his stomach. The laughter slipped into a long drawn-out howl that was hacked to pieces, became a sob. Anna fell to her knees next to Josef’s chair and put her arms around him. After a while the sobbing subsided, he extracted his arms from her embrace and hugged her back. Everything went quiet. Anna stroked his back, said, ‘You’re alive. You’re alive. You’re here. With me.’

‘It’s too much. I can’t.’

‘Josef. You nearly died. It’s going to take time.’

He shook his head vigorously as if to chase away an unpleasant thought. ‘It’s not that. It’s just that I know…what to do.’

‘What to do?’

‘To avoid dying. Ever. It’s driving me crazy.’

Anna took a deep breath. Many times over the past few days she had asked him how he was feeling, tried to get him to talk about the accident, but he had avoided the topic, answered in monosyllables or said he didn’t want to talk about it at the moment.

But here it was in all its simplicity: Josef still thought he had discovered the key to the secret mankind had been seeking for thousands of years, and Anna knew this was impossible. A wall between them.

Knew?

She knew nothing.

With an imperceptible effort she cleared her brain of all preconceptions and prepared to listen to him, to believe him if possible. Quietly she said, ‘OK. Tell me.’

‘You won’t believe me.’

‘We’ll see. If it’s as you say, and I can believe it, then we’ll talk about what we’re going to do. Together.’

Josef shook his head mechanically for a long time, then said, ‘I can’t talk about it. There’s only one thing I want to know: do you want to live with me? Forever?’

The question was posed in such a way that there was no room for manoeuvre. Anna was silent for a moment, then said the only thing she could say. She said: ‘Yes.’

Josef gave a brief nod. ‘OK.’ His gaze returned to the drawing. Anna took it away.

‘Josef, I can’t cope with this. You have to tell me what’s going on.’

‘If I tell you, you won’t believe me. Not until you’ve seen it.’

‘Seen
what?
’

Josef reached out his hand; she thought he was going to caress her cheek, and was about to move back—she didn’t want to be patted like a child who understood nothing. But his hand kept on moving
downwards, to the drawing in her hand. Pointed at the shark. His index finger right in the middle of its mouth.

‘That.’

Autumn was turning into winter.

The summer visitors no longer came out to their cottages. The jetties in the bay stretched out into the grey sea like frozen fingers, robbed of the boats that clothed them. The larger ones had been taken to Gräddö Marina to be stored over the winter, while the smaller ones had been taken out of the water and lay along the shoreline, turned upside down and as helpless as a beetle on its back.

The first snow came one night in the middle of November.

When Anna went for a morning walk through the area where the summer cottages were, she could see tracks—hare, deer, maybe foxes—crossing the deserted gardens. She smiled at a set of hare tracks heading into a garden where something, presumably garden furniture, was piled up and hidden beneath a tarpaulin. The tracks reached the artificial hillock, then disappeared. But on the thin layer of snow covering the tarpaulin there were skid marks. As if the hare had tried to clamber up. Or played at sliding down. At night, when there was no one to see.

Anna liked the idea that in winter the animals reclaimed this place, where man had pushed his way in only fifty years earlier with his holiday dreams. In fact, she liked the whole area better in winter. In the summer there was a kind of desperate relaxation cult, with barbecues sizzling, glasses clinking, games of Jenga tumbling down, and shrieks of joy or frustration slicing through the air day and night.

In the winter the houses regained their souls. Oh, not
extraordinary haunted-house souls, just little section-built-cottage souls, but still. Covered in snow, guarding their empty gardens, the cottages had a kind of dignity they lacked in the summer. They looked as if they were capable of thought.

When Anna got home she lit the paraffin heater in the garage. Soon it would be too cold to work in there, and she would have to move her paintings into the cottage for a couple of months. Even now she needed to wear fingerless gloves to stop her hands seizing up. She made herself a cup of camomile tea with honey, sat down and looked at her current project.

Current?

She had been working on it for three years; nobody could accuse her of losing faith just because it was a lost cause.

Persistent, that’s what she was. Or stupid, she thought sometimes.

It had begun as a practice piece and turned into the only thing she worked on in her free time, her seagull-free time.

She called the series Adjectives; it now comprised some fifty canvases. She just began with an adjective; among others she had already painted
Round
,
Hard
,
Yellow
and
Sad
. The simple words, the basic words that exist in every language in one form or another.

She remembered she had thought it would be
easy
, a little exercise while she was waiting for inspiration. It wasn’t. The majority of the paintings, particularly those from the first year, no longer had anything to say to her. She was very pleased with a few of the recent ones, but no doubt she would change her mind.

When she was in despair she often thought of Claude Monet and how he painted that bloody lily pond over and over again for five years. But there was a difference: Claude Monet was a great artist; Anna Bergvall had held
one
exhibition, with some of her contemporaries from art school, and the only thing she had managed to sell to an outsider was
Open
.

The woman with the big earrings and severe lips who bought the painting said she liked its powerful erotic charge. Anna had accepted the two thousand-kronor notes and nodded in agreement. When the woman had gone and Anna was finally able to attach the red dot indicating that the painting was sold, she had scrutinised it carefully to try and fathom out what the hell the woman was talking about.

In a fiery blue landscape stood a mountain pool, in the middle of which the outline of a door was just visible. Fir trees half-hidden in the mist stood guard around the pool, their branches outspread. Where was the erotic charge the woman could see?

When she told Josef and described the woman, he said he wasn’t at all surprised. The woman had tried to come on to him at the private view, and no doubt she saw an erotic charge in
everything
.

Anna put down her cup and contemplated the painting on which she was working. It was called
Vanished
, and there was a lot of white. The idea was that the person looking at the picture would get the impression that something
had
been there, but was no longer there, something that had…

‘Vanished,’ she said to herself out loud. With fingers that were already frozen she squeezed a blob of zinc white onto her palette, sighed and tried to get down to work.

Josef came home later than usual. Later than he used to
before
, that is. These days it could sometimes be two hours or more between the time he finished work and the time she heard the Toyota’s gloomy roar in the driveway.