Open Grave: A Mystery (12 page)

“Excuse me, but what’s your name?”

“Karsten Haller.”

“Gregor Johansson,” said the associate professor, smiling too.

When Haller left the associate professor decided to dig up part of the witch alder later in the day. It had spread well and it would not entail any exertion at all to separate a powerful side shoot.

Then he happened to think about the strangely certain statement that it was a stone that the policeman found, and that perhaps it came from an excavation, and how Karsten then quickly started talking about leaves.

He leaned over the gate and looked but could not discover anything in particular, other than a car that drove up and parked outside Ohler’s.

The associate professor decided not to be curious, mostly out of pure instinct for self-preservation; he did not want to think about the professor anymore. Today he would be happy about his new acquaintance. He sensed that they would soon see each other again.

Eleven

“A
swine, a damned
Prussian
swine!” the professor shouted.

Agnes backed away a step from the table.

“He visited me at the lab, do you remember that? Then he was a young, promising talent. Now he’s sticking the knife in me. I even invited him to lunch here at the house! Do you remember that? Now that infantile swine is sitting there sneering in his bunker. German bastards should never be trusted!”

How could I remember every lunch?
Agnes thought quietly. It wasn’t her fault that some jealous German wrote something in the newspaper.

All morning he had been bossing her around, yelled at her, and to top it off now he refused to concern himself with the lunch she had carried in.

“The food will get—” Agnes tried to interject, but the professor was not to be stopped.

“What!” he shouted. “How … Scrambled eggs, what kind of food is that? You know I can’t stand eggs.”

“Professor, you have eaten eggs without difficulty your whole life.”

“Nonsense! Take that goo away!”

Agnes chose to leave the dining room. A hellish day, which started with a visit by the police—cretins and bunglers, he had called the two constables—and then that devastating phone call, God knows from whom, about that German Svimmel, or whatever his name was.

She stared at the golden-yellow scrambled eggs and the sausage from Tuscany. A salad of arugula, tomato, and cucumber in a bowl, with a few splashes of olive oil. A bottle of mineral water. Linen napkin. Knife and fork.

She sat down at the kitchen table and ate her own food. He can sit there and shout at himself in the dining room, she thought.

Soon he would get dizzy and need help getting up and making his way to the library. As a substitute for lunch she would fix tea, toast a few slices of bread, one with salami and one with soft cheese, which he would put away muttering, and then take a nap on the couch, even if he stubbornly insisted that he didn’t sleep, only “closed his eyes to think better.”

Although his fury unjustly affected her she felt a certain satisfaction. Or downright schadenfreude.

The last few days he had been wakened out of the increasingly gentle rut that had come to mark both him and the house in recent years. The gradual winding down of the pace had occured, without her actually reflecting on it that much. The time of big gestures was over. Then came the news about the prize and everything changed. The professor was altered beyond recognition or, rather, he resumed his old form, but without the potency and energy of middle age. He became a whining, sometimes shaky old bag of bones that stamped around the house. It seemed as if he was searching for something, rummaging about, moving things that had stood unmoved for decades, except during her own intermittent dusting. He picked up and inspected objects as if he had never seen them before. In the study he took out papers whose print had faded long ago. He had even gone down into the cellar on his own, God knows why.

Every now and then he shouted for her and wanted her to help him, most recently with some boxes that had been shoved in under a table in a room on the top floor, a room that no one had set foot in for years.

“Pull them out,” he ordered.

He was sitting on a piano bench, breathing heavily through his nose. His skinny, veined hands rested on the edge of the table.

“Why is that?” she ventured to ask.

“There are papers,” he said curtly. “Don’t babble so much, just pull out the boxes.”

When an hour or so later she went up to check that everything was fine he was sitting leaned over quantities of letters spread out all over the table. He had pulled up a floor lamp whose sharp glow lit up the scene: an old man who when she peeked into the room twisted his body and set his arms on the table, as if to conceal what he was occupied with.

He wanted afternoon tea, but after to be left in peace. “Not a lot of running around,” he said. A few envelopes had fallen on the floor and when she bent down to pick them up he had shoved her and shouted, “Leave it be.”

*   *   *

“Leave it be,”
she thought at
the kitchen table, observing the congealed scrambled eggs.
If I were to “leave it be” now
 … That was something Greta had returned to upon Agnes’s latest visit to Gr
ä
s
ö
n—what would happen to the professor then? Who would take care of him? Hiring a successor was impossible, times were different now, no one would accept the conditions that prevailed in the house. Birgitta could step in but not full-time. If nothing else the Finnish woman would never accept that.

And what would happen to her? Could she return to that island and the house she left in the fall of 1953? How would she and Greta manage? Neither of them were young, even if Greta seemed spryer than she’d been in a very long time.

It was as if the shove both literally and figuratively put her off balance. The more she thought about it, the more inconceivable and offensive the action appeared. In reality he had not touched her in thirty-five years, other than involuntarily when he needed help getting dressed or to stand up when the dizziness struck him, and on those occasions he dared to lay hands on her.

That time, on June 20, 1973, the touch had been draped in alcohol-soaked talk and tears, but now it was with a kind of bitter irritation that bordered on loathing. She had done nothing to deserve this reception, this unprovoked rancor, this humiliating shove.

She stared at the increasingly unappetizing film over the scrambled eggs. So unnecessary, it struck her, for a hen’s work to now go to waste. It was a thought that made her smile. She pictured the hens of her childhood, how while strutting and clucking they eagerly followed her wherever she went in the hope that she would toss them a few crumbs.

The terrain of her childhood stood out increasingly often and ever clearer to her. She sensed that it was age. She had reached the crown and could only look back, and down, at the laborious uphill ascent that had been her life. In retrospect the early years, before the move to Uppsala, stood out as the happiest. Despite the scarcity and privation. Despite the isolation, the congregation was small and tightly knit and the island lacked a ferry connection to the mainland and the summer visitors were few—despite all that there was joy, a kind of faith in the future. Perhaps it was the landscape that created this will to live and confidence? Or was it simply because she was young?

Her father had said something to the effect that to behold God a person had to be able to see far. You could on the island, it was enough to go up on the cliff at Sigvard and Tall-Anna’s. There the whole sea was open. Glistening in the sunshine, or dark and threatening, with cloud banks towering up over the
Å
land Sea, or more often toward the inland. Because that’s how it was: the storm might lay its shadow over the island, but if you turned eastward the sea was bathed in sun, only weakly rippling from the breeze. Perhaps God was out there among the islets and skerries? In that case she had turned her back on Him.

In K
å
bo there was no such perspective. Here villas were seen in every direction, all of which expressed the same thing: money and power. Power to command, power to shove. No God was there to see. The fact was that Agnes had gradually lost much of her faith. It was as if there was no room for Him with Ohler. Or rather, He became superfluous, all the glory she dreamed about as a child: heat—no more cold floors and shocking chill in the outhouse; richly set tables—no more scarcity and the melancholy of tastelessness; beautiful, soft clothes—no more of her sisters’ discarded rags and the roughness of the flour-sack towel; beauty—no more clumsily cobbled-together furniture and the flaking vase on the sideboard.

Everything was here. Everything was perfect. God was not needed.

During the first months she had wandered around the house and run her hand over the crystal, the foreign types of wood, the linen cloths, the decorated and gilded frames, marveled at all that was fragile, light, excellent, well worked.

Now she knew better. She would give a lot for a time with the roughness against her skin or for the sensation of drinking coffee from a chipped cup with a mended handle. But all the old things were long since thrown away or put away in a box in the attic or in some half-demolished shed.

The cliff at Sigvard and Tall-Anna’s remained, however, in unchanged condition. The last time she “went home” to the island she had made the now strenuous ascent and remained there until twilight. Afterwards she could not account, either for herself or for her sister, what made her stay so long or what was going on in her head.

To her great surprise Greta did not criticize, or even comment on her unexpected expedition. Perhaps she too tottered up on the rock sometimes?

*   *   *

Agnes stood up, cleared the
kitchen table, tipped the professor’s lunch in the garbage pail, and did the dishes.

She happened to think about the policemen. One of them had a shrewd smile, the other mostly looked shy, while the professor was carrying on almost scared. Perhaps he was taken by the seriousness of the moment, being confronted with a Nobel Prize winner.

When the professor turned away the shrewd one said something in a low voice that it was probably not the last stone, but when she asked what he meant he just smiled. Did the police know something that she and the professor were not aware of?

The familiar buzz from the bell made her jump. She could picture him leaning over the dining room table with his finger prepared to repeat the ringing at any moment, if she did not show up quickly enough.

She went up to the window. There was movement in the bushes in the neighbor’s yard. She assumed it was the same man she had seen digging so industriously the day before.

The bell buzzed again. She twisted her head and observed the shaking metal box. Let it buzz, she thought, and at the same moment a trembling went through her too, as if the connection from the dining room was linked directly to her body. It was an alarm that went from her stomach and spread like a shooting pain up through her trunk and down into her legs. It reminded her of the inner agitation she experienced on the cliff at the island.

She could not identify what happened but sensed that it was the professor’s shove and the thoughts it awakened that affected her so strongly that she remained motionless when the bell rang. She heard but did not react. Fifty years ago this would have entailed a sharp reprimand, perhaps dismissal, and only a week ago an improbable defiance.

Just as it buzzed a third time she heard him call. She left the kitchen, took the long way, and entered the dining room from an unexpected direction. He stood, as she suspected, leaning over the table and the bell.

“Yes?”

He twirled around as if he had been struck by a blow to the back. The veins in his face were swollen and the forceful lower lip quivered.

“Have you gone on strike perhaps, Agnes?”

Saliva was spraying out of his mouth.

“No, but I’ve retired,” she said with forced composure.

She could not keep from staring at the archipelago of drops of saliva on the shiny tabletop.

“Retired?”

“Like you did, professor, many years ago.”

The words made her worried in an undefined way, as if she was guilty of something indecent and she was forced to repeat the word “retired” silently to herself to try to understand its full import.

“What kind of talk is that!”

She did not answer, did not dare try her voice.

“Are you feeling unwell?”

“Thanks,” she mumbled.

“What kind of answer is that?” he barked, but immediately changed his tone. “You’re simply exhausted, Agnes. There’s been a lot going on the past few days. Isn’t that so?”

She was unable to say anything.

“Make a couple sandwiches, please, but no salami or liverwurst. Then you can take off the rest of the day, in any event until dinner. Forslund is coming over, but he’s not much for food, you know that. Just throw something together. He likes home cooking. You’ll solve that splendidly, Agnes.”

Algot Forslund was the lawyer who had served the family almost as long as she had. If he was not much for food he made up for it in drink. “Home cooking” in Forslund’s case meant a plate of herring, but primarily aquavit.

She looked intently at the professor, but was unable even to confirm that she had understood his words.

“There’s been a lot for me too,” said the professor.

She withstood the impulse to go up and wipe off the table.

“Maybe we’re burnt out,” the professor said with a grin.

She left the dining room, mute and with a sense of having been betrayed.

Twelve

“You can never have too
many leaves,” said Karsten Heller.

He smiled more broadly than the associate professor could remember anyone in his company having done for years.

The gardener had packed half a dozen trash bags full of beech leaves. They resembled swollen black eggs, ready to burst at any moment.