‘By the end, I was burnt out. Utterly passive for a few months; it’s only now that it’s starting to affect journalists that people have started taking notice. Health workers have been burnt out for decades. My wife left me and took our daughter with her, I couldn’t pay the mortgage on our flat in Södermalm and had to move in with Dad. Out here. That was twelve years ago. I just lay here on the sofa, completely out of it. I was thirty-nine and had suddenly lost everything.
‘That was when Dad had the idea of signing the house over to me and building a flat for himself in the attic. I suppose you could say it saved me. I started over. Built everything up from scratch. Got access to my daughter. Started working again, started writing too. I’m back up to my old workload again now, though it’s a bit different.
‘I started by writing reports on the current situation within the Swedish health care system and in the refugee-dense suburbs. It was hard to get anything published. I started writing… well, literature after that. I’ve had a couple of short stories published in cultural magazines and I’m working on a novel. You might say that I went in the complete opposite direction to my dad.’
He fell silent. Paul Hjelm observed him. It had been a warning: that was how easy it was to get the wrong impression of a person. That was how easy it was to decide, in advance, what kind of person someone was. He had seen Harald Sheinkman as nothing more than the professor’s son, born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and in some ways that was true. But in others? Not at all. It was a life lesson: never come to hasty conclusions about other people. It always ended badly.
He would have liked to say something to Harald Sheinkman about his thoughts on the present day. That we really did need to keep a close eye on contemporary right-wing extremism – but that history probably wouldn’t repeat itself in such a straightforward manner. He was quite convinced about the return of fascism, but suspected it would probably take place in a much more subtle, indirect way – it would sneak in by a back route while we kept watch over its more obvious, simplistic manifestations – and then we would suddenly find ourselves standing face-to-face with a person but see them as an object instead, an item, a potential return. He was convinced that economism was the first step towards the new fascism.
But he said nothing. Instead, he became a policeman once more.
‘In what way did you go in the complete opposite direction to your father?’
‘I’m the doctor who became an author. He was the author who became a doctor. Before the war, he was an author – I know that much about his past. He was from Berlin and he had a family, a wife and a young son who died in the camp; so in other words, I’ve got a long-dead half-brother.
‘His entire family was wiped out; he was the only one left. He couldn’t cope with that, so he started over. You could say he turned the page on that chapter of his life. He’d been an author before, a fairly dreamy and lyrical poet, judging from his diaries, but after the war he turned to the natural sciences and to medicine. I guess he needed something more concrete and permanent. His soul died in the camp, but the material survived. I suppose that’s one way of looking at it.’
‘He kept a diary in Buchenwald? Does it still exist?’
Sheinkman nodded. ‘Up in his room.’
‘Speaking of which,’ Hjelm said. ‘I have to ask, could I take a look at his apartment?’
‘Of course,’ said Harald Sheinkman, nodding and getting up. Hjelm followed him through the house and up a spiral staircase which seemed to have only quite recently been installed. They came to Leonard Sheinkman’s neat little annexe. It was bright and warm. Here, too, the walls were covered with books, primarily medical texts but also a number of literary classics. Just as Harald Sheinkman had said, the solved Dagens Nyheter crossword was lying on the kitchen table – nothing else. The place was clinically clean.
‘Did you tidy up?’ Paul Hjelm asked.
‘No,’ said Sheinkman. ‘He managed all that himself. He didn’t like disorder, that’s my main memory from childhood. Always clean and tidy. It was really hard work. For Mum too, if I recall. Though I don’t remember her so well. The memories are slowly fading. Soon there’ll be nothing left.’
‘Is it OK if I have a look around myself? We’ll send some forensic technicians over later.’
‘Of course,’ Harald Sheinkman replied, disappearing without a sound.
Paul Hjelm watched him leave. Then, slightly awkwardly, he began wandering around the little flat; he counted two rooms and a kitchen. The light was pouring in through a line of sloping skylights and each of the walls was leaning inwards. It was some kind of slanted existence. And that slanted existence was, without a doubt, impeccably well kept. Not a speck of dust in sight.
First a Jewish poet in cosmopolitan Berlin during the 1920s and 30s. Then a wife and family. And then the concentration camp where his son, wife, mother, father and all other relatives had died under awful circumstances. The man emerged an undernourished and tortured surviver. All illusions, all beliefs, all hope was gone. He moved to a new country, away from it all. He started over, from scratch. Learned the language, began a new family, got an education and a respectable job, became an esteemed researcher, bought a functionalist house straight from the architect, saved a son spiralling out of control and lived in the house together with him after his wife’s death.
It sounded as though Leonard Sheinkman had managed the impossible – like such a remarkable number of others. He had managed to create a good, new life for himself. But how he had felt, deep down, that was impossible to know. His obsession with order and cleanliness was entirely natural after years in the concentration camp; you couldn’t draw any conclusions from that.
Paul Hjelm needed to read his diary.
It was essential.
He eventually found it on a shelf, resting on top of a row of books; it was the only thing in the entire flat which seemed slightly askew. The yellowed, dog-eared, handwritten pages had been intensively read, turned and thumbed. The little book was no more than ten or so pages thick.
And it was in German.
An unforeseen obstacle. But compared with Leonard Sheinkman’s achievement, it was nothing. It was simply a matter of brushing up his long-forgotten high-school German.
The pages were meticulously dated and numbered, and none seemed to be missing. It was just a matter of getting started.
Just…
He grabbed the little book and whirled down the spiral staircase. Harald Sheinkman was sitting on the sofa, looking exhausted. He stood up when Hjelm came spinning downstairs, walking over to him.
‘This must be the diary,’ Paul Hjelm said, fluttering the pages. ‘Is it OK if I take it with me? You’ll get it back.’
‘Sure,’ Harald Sheinkman said. ‘So you read Yiddish?’
Hjelm blinked, staring in confusion down at the yellowed pages. The words changed shape before his eyes. Then he looked up at Sheinkman. A faint smile was playing on his lips.
‘I was just joking,’ said Harald Sheinkman. ‘It’s German.’
Paul Hjelm looked at him and started chuckling. He liked this man.
‘One more question,’ he eventually said. ‘What kind of man was your father?’
Sheinkman nodded, as though he had been expecting the question.
‘I’ve spent a while thinking about that. It’s hard to say, really. When we were kids, he demanded a lot of us. He was always fairly strict, a classic patriarch. We were to be doctors, all three of us, there was never any discussion. His campaign succeeded, to an extent. It went best with my little brother, David; he works as a brain surgeon and lecturer at the Karolinska hospital, he’ll probably be made professor soon. Later than Dad was, though. He’s forty-three now.