The photograph of Rachel Anna Harriet arrived immediately after the call ended.
My grandchild, barely visible in the incubator, looked like no one but herself. I couldn’t see anyone else in her little face, not even Ahmed. I stood there by the bowling lane and realised I was moved. There on my phone was a new person who had just begun to participate in the dance of life. A little girl with three names who would live, if she achieved a ripe old age, until the end of the twenty-first century.
I didn’t stop looking at my phone until a group of young men arrived for a game. They spoke a language I didn’t understand; presumably they belonged to the group of refugees who had just been billeted in the town.
I drove down to the harbour, keeping an eye out for foxes all the way, but nothing happened this time. All I saw were some crows flapping away from the remains of a dead badger on the road.
Oslovski’s house was deserted; no one appeared to have crossed the neatly raked gravel drive. I carried my bags down to the boat, which was moored by the petrol pumps, and went to show Veronika the picture of my grandchild.
‘She’s very pretty,’ she said.
‘I don’t know about that. It’ll be a while before we can say one way or the other.’
‘I’ve been thinking,’ Veronika said. ‘Maybe Paris is a city I could move to? I know you’ve been there.’
‘Paris is a very big city. It’s easy to disappear if you don’t know why you’re there.’
I headed back down to the quayside, then changed my mind and called in at the chandlery, where fru Nordin was drinking coffee with a plate of Danish pastries in front of her. As a doctor I ought to say something about her obesity, but then I noticed that her eyes were suspiciously shiny, as if she had just been crying. No doubt she was still grieving for her husband.
I didn’t show her the photograph on my phone; I just asked for new batteries for my torch.
The sun broke through the clouds as I travelled home. I decided I would ask Jansson to sing at the New Year party, just as he had sung at Harriet’s midsummer party a few weeks before she died.
I couldn’t think of a better ending to the old year or a better start to the new one.
Perhaps I could even ask him to sing ‘Ave Maria’?
The same as last time. Now as then.
Chapter 22
One day Louise and Ahmed decided that their baby would be called Agnes. All thoughts of Rachel and Harriet disappeared.
Agnes. A beautiful name that no one in our family had ever had. A beautiful name for a very small person.
A few years before they died my parents had been seized by a sudden urge to find out more about their background. They both knew their maternal and paternal grandparents, but that was it; anything further back lay hidden in a thick fog. They dug through church records and regional archives; they sought information from the few relatives who were still alive. I remember sensing a silent competition between the two of them: who would succeed in tracing their family back the furthest? The only way each of them felt they could achieve some kind of nobility was to find out more than the other.
When they died, they left behind a decent family tree, but there was no Agnes. On my mother’s side they had discovered, to their boundless shame, that a brother of her great-grandfather had been executed — beheaded, in fact — on a hill just outside Västerås. He had been a guardsman; he had got into a drunken quarrel with a comrade and had killed him, stabbing him twenty-one times, as the court record meticulously noted. King Karl XV had refused to show him any mercy, and Karl Evert Olaus Tell had lost his head early one morning in 1867.
This knowledge sent an icy wind whistling through their research. When I came home for a visit from medical school, I noticed that all the papers relating to the family tree had disappeared from their place of honour on the bureau with the secret compartment where I had once found a pair of old spectacles when I was a child, but no hidden treasures. One evening when my mother had dozed off and my father had drunk a fair amount, he had revealed the humiliating truth about the executed guardsman. The discovery somehow lurked beneath the surface like a silent, grotesque, corrosive accusation against my mother.
Gradually they started looking into their past once more, but the joy and excitement had gone, replaced with a sense of anxiety about what they might find in the yellowing documents.
It is difficult to imagine two more reluctant researchers than my parents. They had taken on a task of which they were now ashamed. The archives sent a poison coursing through their veins.
Needless to say, they didn’t come across any more murderers. To their surprise they learned that they both came from the sparsely populated inland area of Västerbotten and the equally desolate forests of Härjedalen. There was Finnish blood on my father’s side, and on my mother’s an unexpected diversion to Russia.
But no Agnes. The little girl in Paris was Agnes the First.
From time to time the police contacted me, occasionally with a question but usually to tell me that they still had no answers. The fire seemed to have come out of nowhere.
Louise and I spoke on the phone every day. Occasionally Ahmed would start the call, and we would exchange a few words before he handed over to Louise. I thought I detected a new tone in her voice, although I couldn’t quite pin it down. Hadn’t the child’s arrival brought unadulterated joy? Was Louise tired? Was she experiencing the fear that so often accompanied new motherhood, particularly when it involved a premature baby? I always ended our conversation with an assurance that I was there if she needed my help.
We also spoke about the burned-out house. She told me she often dreamed about it, saw it rising from the ashes. Another recurring dream she dismissed as embarrassingly childish. Every morning the Carpenter Elves had raised the wooden walls by one metre, using their old-fashioned skills. Nobody knew where they came from, nobody heard the sound of their hammers during the night. The house kept on growing, but the ruins were still there, black and cold, just as they had been after some unknown person came along and set the fire.
I promised Louise that our house would be rebuilt; I stressed that promise again on the day she told me the baby’s name was Agnes.
‘In the old days people used to give their children several names,’ I said. ‘Even if they were poor, they could shower their children with a wealth of names. I had a classmate with seven Christian names, even though he was the poorest of the poor in my school.’
‘Do you remember the names?’
‘Karl Anton Axel Efraim Hagbert Erik Olof. His surname was Johansson.’
‘My daughter will only be called Agnes,’ Louise said. ‘She’ll never be in any doubt about what her name is.’
One morning I noted the fact that Agnes was one month old as I took my morning dip in the ice-cold water. The weather was changeable, as temperamental as an irascible human being. It snowed, the snow melted, the wind blew from all directions, then there was the kind of windless calm that really belongs to high summer. It could rain for four days non-stop, with constant cloudbursts hammering down on the fragile roof of the caravan.
No one knew what was going to happen to Oslovski’s house. There were rumours about the lights being on from time to time, so people started to believe the place was haunted. Someone mentioned her glass eye, claiming that at night it was transformed into a sparkling prism which seemed to find light in the darkness. At least these rumours meant the property was safe from break-ins or vandalism.