‘How good it is to be home,’ said his father. ‘We shall never go to the North again.’
In the shimmering mirror of water Bjorn could see time. Images kept coming forward one after another: walking across the frozen sea, reading the Bible, the campfire on Alvaret, the brilliant light in the forge, the ship sailing in, building the low wall above the precipice, the flock of sheep running straight to their death, moving to the deserted farm, working on the King’s wall at Ottenby, the pastor’s house in Stockholm, prison, vagrancy, serving in the stable, his father’s funeral, their departure by galleon from the place where they now were. The images collided with each other like canoes; time had closed its circle and stopped. Bjorn knew that he no longer had to wander. He felt deep, ineffable happiness.
In spring a coast guard from Brömsebro found the remains of the shepherd from the Ventlinge estate in the partly thawed, frozen snow. He was buried in the local cemetery, from where there stretches a beautiful view of the island of Öland. The parish register records that he was caught in a snowstorm, after walking across the frozen strait for inexplicable reasons. The coast guard from Brömsebro did not confess to anyone that beside Bjorn the shepherd he also found the remains of a dog. Improbable, devilish tales could have arisen from that fact. Nor did he admit that in the dead man’s bundle he found a silver cup. And next spring the reverend pastor Jons recovered his valuable Bible when, on the steward’s orders, the house on the cliff was searched.
Doctor Cheng
ONLY ON THE plane did it dawn on him that the decision to make this journey, taken a good fifteen months ago, was a reckless one. Nothing really drew him to the country where he had spent the first twenty years of his life and which had no positive associations for him. Or at least positive enough to long for and dream about. All right, once, when he was on his way down to Luigi’s diner in the lunch hour and had passed two pretty girls twittering away in his native language, something had shuddered inside him. But it was barely a twitch. No more at any rate than the time when, flicking from channel to channel, he had chanced upon the image of the Pope and a cheering crowd whose singing reminded him, as if through a fog, of a blazing hot day in June and a Corpus Christi procession.
To tell the truth, right from the start – if only there were such a possibility – he would have loved to press the button marked ‘instant rewind’ and then watch the passengers’ stunned expressions. But there was no such button. So he considered another, entirely realistic possibility. Straight after landing he would check the return flights, buy a ticket and if necessary even spend half a day at the airport. Perhaps if they had a hotel near the terminal he would take a room, stretch out on the bed and sleep through the time until departure.
Like a pendulum over the Atlantic, he thought – why on earth not?
But at once he came to his senses. As he was returning to his home country rather half-heartedly and for no real reason, how was he supposed to explain to himself this next, even more rapid return, or rather escape? And what in the end would he be running away from?
A little bit of common sense, he mused, with his eyes closed, never does any harm!
Eventually he decided that everything would proceed just as he had so precisely planned it: a taxi from the airport to the train station, then four hours travelling in a rickety train – an express in name only – and finally a walk by the sea, where he would recognise two lighthouses, a few miles apart: the one at the entrance to the port and the one that cast its light over the roofs of an old health spa. Then he would look for a boarding house for two or three weeks, and live from one day to the next, perhaps taking the opportunity to renew some old acquaintances, but with no obligation and no expectations. His plans went no further than that. He was single and wealthy. He could just as well spend the rest of his life on exotic journeys, or settle in some quiet spot in the south – as far as there were still any quiet spots left on earth.
The lighthouses were the same as years ago, the boarding house was perfectly suitable, and his daily walks along the sandy beach afforded him immense pleasure. He immediately noticed that there were far fewer of the small, yellow fishing boats than in the past. But the number of fish bars and restaurants had increased, stretching along a new promenade. From dawn to dusk, roller-skaters and cyclists went racing along a dedicated path that ran parallel to it. Where coastal meadows run wild had once given shelter to truants and lovers, there was now a city park. The tower in the pine forest, from which the military used to monitor the state border delineated within the waters of the bay, had disappeared. But not everything had yielded to such thorough change. When he alighted from the tram on the main avenue of his old neighbourhood – and he only made his way there after a couple of days – literally two steps beyond a strip of banks and elegant shop fronts, he could tell that although much had changed here, in actual fact almost nothing had changed. He was greeted by crumbling garages, rubbish bins full to overflowing, sickly little gardens and peeling plaster. From gateways, courtyards and toolsheds yawned the same, eternal odour of drunkards’ piss, mothballs, weeds, puddles that never dry up, vegetable soup, fag ends and feline nuptials. On the other hand, there were definitely more cars and dog mess. Instead of sentimental sighs, a few of which he had been expecting in this place, he felt rising disgust. He did not take a single photo, and when he returned to the boarding house by taxi, instead of heading off on his afternoon walk along the sea, he sat down in a bar and drank vodka, while browsing the papers. The politicians annoyed him: a child could have told lies with more charm than these gentlemen, casting aspersions at one another. They were like drunken, sweaty porters, competing to snatch the suitcase of the only passenger at a badly lit, provincial station, long after hours. In hope, he reached for the local supplement, furnished with the heading ‘kultukultu’, but this time too he was disappointed. Everything that over the past thirty years had been devised, consumed, masticated and excreted as art in the city and the country he came from, the entire phantasmagoria of installations, videos with genitals and without, sawing grand pianos in half, smashing violins to smithereens, drinking or excreting urine in full view of the public, in short, all those passé entertainments had been produced here as the revolutionary doings of local geniuses. As, with a stifling sense of weariness, he put the supplement aside, he noticed an announcement on one of the advertising pages: ‘Doctor Cheng has a wide selection of dreams to offer.’ There wouldn’t have been anything unusual about it, if not for the fact that there was no address or even a phone number given in the advertisement. He came to the conclusion that it must be one of those adverts that develop: in a day or a week, let’s say, the reader would find further information in the same spot. A description, for instance, of the hypnotic state in which a patient encountered her dead husband. Or found out the numbers that would win her the jackpot on the lottery.
Next day when he looked through the new edition of the paper he was quite surprised. The announcement had not been repeated, either in a fuller form, or in its previous, useless version. From then on, every day at breakfast he scoured the small ad columns, but to no effect: no one called Cheng ever advertised again. Moreover – and he checked carefully at the reading room in the local library one rainy day – this strange message had not been printed earlier either. In short, it only appeared once, and that was the time he had read it. He felt anxious, as if an invisible hand had opened a door into the past.