He rolled over in his bed, pressed his face against the place where she had slept, sniffed. Nothing. He moved his nose back and forth across the sheet trying to discern the tiniest glimmer of her presence, but nothing. Not even that smell of gasoline.
Had it really happened? He lay down on his stomach, thought about it. Yes. Yes.
It was real. Her fingers on his back. The memory of her fingers on his back. Bulleribock. His mom had played it with him when he was little. But this was now. Not long ago. The hairs on his arms and on his neck stood up.
He got out of bed and started to pull his clothes on. When he had his pants on he walked up to the window. No snowfall. Four degrees below zero. Good. If the snow had started to melt it would be too slushy to set the bags of advertising down outside. He thought about crawling naked out of a window when it was four degrees below zero outside, down into snow-covered bushes, down into ...
No.
He leaned forward, blinked.
The snow on the bushes was completely undisturbed.
Last night when he had stood there he had looked out onto a clean sweep of snow that ran down to the path. It looked exactly the same now. He opened the window a little more, stuck his head out. The bushes reached all the way up to the wall below his window, the snow cover as well. And it was undisturbed.
Oskar looked to the left, along the rough surface of the outside wall. Her window was three meters away.
Cold air swept over Oskar"s naked chest. It must have snowed last night after she went back to her room. That was the only explanation. But anyway .. . now that he thought about it: how had she made it up up to the window? Had she climbed up the bushes? to the window? Had she climbed up the bushes?
But then the snow couldn"t look like this. And it hadn"t been snowing when he went to bed. Neither her body nor her hair had been damp, so it couldn"t have been snowing then. When did she go?
Some time between the time that she left and when she was here it must have snowed enough to cover the tracks of. . . have snowed enough to cover the tracks of. . .
Oskar shut the window, continued to dress. It was unbelievable. He started thinking it was all a dream again. Then he saw the note. Folded and left under the clock on his desk. He took it out and unfolded it. THEN WINDOW, LET DAY IN AND LET LIFE OUT.
A heart, and then: SEE YOU TONIGHT, ELI.
He read the note five times. Then he thought about her, standing here by the desk as she wrote it. Gene Simmons" face on the wall, half a meter behind her, his tongue sticking out.
He leaned over the desk and took the poster down from the wall, crinkled it into a ball, and threw it into the trash.
Then he read the short note three more times, folded it, and put it in his pocket. Put on the last of his clothes. Today there could be five papers in each advertising packet as far as he was concerned. It would still be as easy as pie.
The room smelled of smoke and the dust particles danced in the rays of sunlight that filtered in through the blinds. Lacke had just woken up, was lying on his back in bed, coughing. Dust particles were doing a funny dance in front of his eyes. A smoker"s cough. He turned, managed to get a hold of the lighter and cigarette packet that was on the nightstand next to an overflowing ashtray.
He helped himself to a cigarette-Camel lights, Virginia was starting to get health conscious in her old age-lit it, rolled over onto his back again with one arm behind his head, and reflected on the situation. Virginia had left for work a few hours earlier, probably fairly tired. They had stayed awake for a long time after making love, talked and smoked. It was close to two in the morning when Virginia put out the last cigarette and said it was time to sleep. Lacke had slipped out of bed after a while, had drained the dregs of the bottle of wine, and smoked a few more cigarettes before he went back to bed. Maybe mostly because he liked this: crawling into bed next to a warm sleeping body.
Too bad he hadn"t managed to arrange his life so he always had someone next to him. If there could have been someone, it would have been Virginia. Anyway ... d.a.m.n it, he had heard from others how things were for her. Rollercoaster times. Times when she drank too much in city pubs, dragged home any old guy. She didn"t want to talk about that, but she had aged more than she needed to these past few years.
If he and Virginia could have ... yes, what? Sell everything, buy a house in the country, grow their own potatoes. Sure, but it wouldn"t last. After a month they would be getting on each others" nerves, and she had her mom here, her job, and he had . .. well, his stamps.
No one knew about that, not even his sister, and he had kind of a guilty conscience about that.
His dad"s stamp collection, which had not been drawn up in the estate, was worth a small fortune as it turned out. He had raided it, a few stamps at a time, when he needed the cash.
Right now the market was at a low, and he didn"t have many stamps left. But soon he would have to sell them anyway. Maybe sell those special ones, Norway number one, and buy a round of beer in return for all the beers he had gotten people to buy him the last while. That"s what he should do.
Two houses in the country. Cottages. Close to each other. Cottages cost almost nothing. Then there was Virginia"s mother. almost nothing. Then there was Virginia"s mother. Three Three cottages. And cottages. And then her daughter, Lena. Four. Sure. Buy a whole village while you"re at then her daughter, Lena. Four. Sure. Buy a whole village while you"re at it. it.
Virginia was only happy when she was with Lacke; she had said so herself. Lacke wasn"t sure he had the capacity to be happy, but Virginia was the only person he liked being with. Why shouldn"t they be able to make things work out somehow?
Lacke set the ashtray on his stomach, flicked the ash from the tip, put the cigarette in his mouth, and inhaled deeply.
The only person he liked being with these days. Since Jocke had ... disappeared. Jocke had been good. The only one among all his acquaintances he counted as a friend. This thing about his body being missing was f.u.c.ked up. It wasn"t natural. There should be a funeral at least. A corpse that you can look at, that prompts you to say: yes, there you are, my friend. And you are dead.
Lacke"s eyes teared up.
People always had so many d.a.m.ned friends, tossed the word around so lightly. He had had one, only one, and he happened to be the one who was taken from him by a cold-blooded mugger. Why the h.e.l.l did that kid have to kill Jocke?
Somehow he knew that Gosta wasn"t lying or making it up, and Jocke was gone, but it seemed so d.a.m.ned meaningless. The only reasonable explanation was that drugs were involved. Jocke must have been involved in some drug s.h.i.t and double-crossed the wrong person. But why hadn"t he said anything?
Before he left the apartment he emptied the ashtray, stowed the empty wine bottle on the floor of the pantry. Had to put it in upside down so it would fit with all the other bottles.
Yes, d.a.m.n it. Two cottages. A potato patch. Earth on your knees and lark song in springtime. And so on. Some day. lark song in springtime. And so on. Some day.
He put on his coat and went out. When he walked past the ICA store he threw a kiss to Virginia, who was sitting at a register. She smiled and pouted at him.
On his way back to Ibsengatan he saw a young boy laden with two large paper bags. Someone who lived in his complex, but Lacke didn"t know his name. Lacke nodded at him.
"Looks heavy, what you"ve got there."
"It"s OK."
Lacke gazed after the boy struggling on with his bags in the direction of some nearby apartment buildings. Looked so d.a.m.ned happy. That"s how you should be. Accept your burden and carry it, with joy.
That"s how you should be.
Inside the courtyard he hung around hoping to b.u.mp into the guy who had bought him the whisky drinks. The man was sometimes up and walking around at this time. Walked in circles around the courtyard. But he hadn"t seen him the last couple of days. Lacke peeked up at the covered windows to the apartment where he thought the man lived. Probably in there drinking, of course. Could go ring the doorbell. Probably in there drinking, of course. Could go ring the doorbell. Maybe another day. Maybe another day.
When it was starting to get dark Tommy and his mother went down to the graveyard. His dad"s grave was just inside the dike that bordered Racksta Lake. His mom was quiet until they reached Kanaanvagen, and Tommy had thought it was because she was grieving but when they walked onto the little road that ran parallel to the lake his mom coughed and said, "So you know, Tommy."
"What."
"Staffan says that something has gone missing from his apartment. Since we were there last." I see.
"Do you know anything about it?"
Tommy scooped up some snow with his hand, shaped it into a ball, and threw it at a tree. Bull"s eye.
"Yeah. It"s lying under his balcony."
"It"s quite important to him because . .."
"It"s in the bushes under his balcony, I said."
"How did it end up there?"
A section of the snow-covered wall around the graveyard came into view. A soft red light illuminated the pine trees from below. The grave lantern that Tommy"s mom was carrying made a clinking sound. Tommy asked: "Do you have a light?"
"Light? Oh yes. I have a lighter. How did it-"
"I dropped it."
Once he was inside the gate to the graveyard Tommy stopped and looked at the map; the different sections were marked with different letters. His dad was in section D. If you thought about it, it was actually pretty sick. To do this. Burn people up, save the ashes, bury them in the ground, and then call the spot "Grave 104, section D."
Almost three years ago. Tommy had fuzzy memories of the funeral, or whatever it should be called. That thing with the coffin and a lot of people who alternated between crying and singing.
He remembered he had been wearing shoes that were too big for him, Daddy"s shoes, that his feet had slipped around in them on the way home. That he had been afraid of the coffin, sat staring at it the whole time, sure his dad was going to get up out of it and come alive again, but...changed.
Two weeks after the funeral he had gone around with a total fear of zombies. Especially when it was dark, he looked in the shadows and thought he could make out the shrivelled being in the hospital bed, who was no longer his dad, coming at him with arms held out stiffly, like in those movies.
The terror had stopped after they interred the urn. It had only been him, Mom, a gravedigger, and a minister. The gravedigger had carried the urn and walked with a dignified stride while the minister comforted his mom. The whole thing was so f.u.c.king ridiculous. The little wooden box with a lid that a guy in carpenter overalls carried in front of him as he walked; that this had anything whatsoever to do with his dad. It was one big joke.
But the terror had lifted and Tommy"s relationship to the grave had changed over time. Now he sometimes came here alone, sat a while by the gravestone, and ran his fingers across the carved letters that formed his father"s name. That was what he came for. Not the box in the ground, but the name.
The distorted person in the hospital bed, the ashes in the box, none of that was Dad, but the name referred to the person he could remember and therefore he sometimes sat there and rubbed his finger over the depressions in the stone that formed the name MARTIN SAMUELSSON.
"How beautiful it is," his mom said.
Tommy looked out over the graveyard.
Small candles were lit all over. A city viewed from an airplane. Here and there dark figures moved among the gravestones. Mom walked in the direction of Dad"s grave, the lantern dangling from her hand. Tommy looked at her thin back and was suddenly sad. Not for his sake, or his mom"s sake, no: for everyone. For all the people walking here with their flickering lights in the snow. Themselves only shadows that sat next to the headstones, looked at the inscription, touching it. It was just so ... stupid.
Dead is dead. Gone.
Even so, Tommy walked over to his mom and crouched down next to his dad"s grave while she lit the lantern. Didn"t want to touch the letters in his name when she was there.
They sat like that for a while and watched the weak flicker make the shading in the marble block crawl and move. Tommy didn"t feel anything except a certain embarra.s.sment. To think he went along with this pretend play. After a minute he got up and started to head home. His mom followed. A little too soon, in his opinion. As far as he was concerned, she could cry her eyes out, sit there all night. She caught up with him and carefully put her arm through his. He let her. They walked side by side and looked out over Racksta Lake, where ice had started to form. If this cold snap kept up you"d be able to skate on it in a few days. One thought kept going through his head like a stubborn guitar riff. Dead is dead. Dead is dead. Dead is dead. Dead is dead. Dead is dead. Dead is dead.
His mom shivered, pressed up against him.
"It"s awful."
"You think?"
"Yes, Staffan told me such an awful thing."
Staffan. Couldn"t she keep herself from mentioning him, here of all. . . I see. I see.
"Did you hear about that house that burned down in Angby? The woman who . .."
"Yes."
"Staffan told me that they did the autopsy on her. I think that kind of stuff is so awful. That they do those things."
"Yes. Sure."
A duck was walking on the thin ice toward the open water that had formed near a drain that let out into the lake. The small fishes you could catch in the summer smelled like sewage.
"Where does that drain lead from?" Tommy asked. "Does it come from the crematorium?"
"Don"t know. Don"t you want to hear about it? Do you think it"s too awful?"
"No, no."
And then she told him while they were walking home through the woods. After a while Tommy got interested, started asking questions his mom couldn"t answer; she just knew what Staffan had told her. In fact Tommy asked so much, became so interested, that his mom regretted having brought it up in the first place.
Later that evening Tommy perched on a crate in the shelter, turning the small likeness of a man firing a pistol this way and that. He placed the statuette on top of three boxes containing ca.s.sette tapes, like a trophy. The cherry on top.
Stolen from a .. . policeman!
He carefully locked the shelter back up with the chain and padlock, put the key back in its hiding place, sat down in the clubhouse, and kept thinking about what his mother had told him. After a while he heard tentative steps walking down the corridor. A voice that whispered, "Tommy?..."
He got up out of the armchair, walked up to the door, and quickly opened it. Oskar was standing on the other side, looking nervous. He held out a bill.
"Here"s your money."
Tommy took the fifty and stuffed it into his pocket, smiled at Oskar.
"You going to become a regular here? Come in."
"No, I have to ..."
"Come in, I said. There"s something I want to ask you." Oskar sat down in the couch, hands clasped. Tommy flopped down in the armchair, looked at him.
"Oskar. You"re a smart guy."
Oskar shrugged modestly.
"You know that house that burned down in Angby? The granny who ran out into the garden in flames?"
"Yes, I"ve read about it."
"Thought you would. Have they written anything about the autopsy?"
"Not that I know of."
"No. Well, they"ve done one. An autopsy. And you know what? They didn"t find any smoke in her lungs. Know what that means?" Oskar thought about it.
"That she wasn"t breathing."
"Right. And when do you stop breathing? When you"re dead, right?"