Or was it just that she was so drunk she couldn’t think straight any longer? In which case she hid it well, for apart from her obvious blossoming there were few signs of drunkenness in her behavior. On the other hand, I was not the right person to judge anyone. Spurred on by the alcohol’s ever brighter light, which was corroding more and more of my thoughts, I had begun to knock back the drinks almost like juice. And the pit was bottomless.
After pouring Sprite into my glass I took the Absolut bottle, which was obscuring my view of Grandma, and stood it on the windowsill.
“What are you doing?!” Yngve asked.
“You’ve put the bottle in the window!” Grandma cried.
Flushed and confused, I snatched the bottle and returned it to the table.
Grandma began to laugh.
“He put the bottle of booze in the window!”
Yngve laughed too.
“Of course. The neighbors have to see us sitting here and drinking,” he said.
“Okay, okay,” I said. “I wasn’t thinking.”
“No, you weren’t. You can say that again!” Grandma said, wiping tears of laughter from her eyes.
In this house where we had always been so careful to prevent others from prying, where we had always been so careful to be beyond reproach in everything that could be seen, from clothes to garden, from house front to car to children’s behavior, the closest you could come to the absolutely unthinkable was to exhibit a bottle of booze in a brightly lit window. That was why they, and eventually I too, laughed as we did.
The light in the sky above the hill over the road, which could just be glimpsed through the reflection in the kitchen window, with us three resembling underwater figures, was a grayish-blue. This was as dark as the night sky ever got. Yngve had started to slur. To someone who didn’t know him this would have been impossible to detect. But I noticed because he always slipped the same way when he drank, at first a touch unclear, then he slurred more and more, until toward the end, the moment before he passed out, he was almost incomprehensible. In my case the lack of clarity that went hand in hand with drinking was primarily an inner phenomenon, it was only there that it was manifest, and this was a problem because if it was not visible from the outside how utterly plastered I was, since I walked and talked almost as normal, there was no excuse for all the standards that at a later point I might let slip, either in language or behavior. Furthermore, my wild state always became worse for that reason, as my drunkenness was not brought to a halt by sleep or problems of coordination, but simply continued into the beyond, the primitive, and the void. I loved it, I loved the feeling, it was my favorite feeling, but it never led to anything good, and the day after, or the days after, it was as closely associated with boundless excess as with stupidity, which I hated with a passion. But when I was in that state, the future did not exist, nor the past, only the moment and that was why I wanted to be in it so much, for my world, in all its unbearable banality, was radiant.
I turned to look at the wall clock. It was twenty-five to twelve. Then I glanced at Yngve. He looked tired. His eyes were slits and slightly red at the margins. His glass was empty. I hoped he wasn’t thinking of going to bed. I didn’t want to sit there alone with Grandma.
“Do you want some more?” I asked, nodding to the bottle on the table.
“Well, maybe just a drop more,” he said. “But it’ll have to be the last. We need to get up early tomorrow.”
“Oh?” I said. “Why’s that?”
“We have an appointment at nine, don’t you remember?”
I smacked my forehead. I doubted if I had performed this gesture since I left school.
“It’ll be fine,” I said. “All we have to do is turn up.”
Grandma looked at us.
Please don’t let her ask where we’re going! I thought. The words “funeral director” would certainly break the spell. And then we would be sitting here again like a mother who has lost her son and two children who have lost their father.
However, I didn’t dare ask her if she wanted anymore. There was a limit, it had something to do with decency, and it had been crossed ages ago. I reached for the bottle and poured a drop into Yngve’s glass, then my own. But after I had done that, her eyes met mine.
“One more?” I heard myself ask.
“A little one perhaps,” she replied.
“It’s late.”
“Yes, it’s late on earth,” I said.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“He said it was late on earth,” Yngve explained. “It’s a quote from a famous Swedish poem.”
Why did he say that? Did he want to put me in my place? Oh, what the hell, I suppose it was a stupid thing to say. “Late on earth” …
“Karl Ove’s going to have a book published soon,” Yngve said.
“Are you?” Grandma asked.
I nodded.
“Yes, now that you mention it, someone must have told me. Was it Gunnar, I wonder? Goodness. A book.”
She raised the glass to her mouth and drank. I did the same. Was it my imagination, or had her eyes darkened again?
“So you didn’t live here during the war then?” I said, before taking another sip.
“No, after the war, it was a few years after when we moved here. During the war we lived over there,” she said, pointing behind her.
“What was it like actually?” I asked. “During the war, I mean?”
“Well, it was almost the same as before, you know. A bit harder to get hold of food, but otherwise there wasn’t such an enormous difference. The Germans were normal people, like us. We got to know a few of them, you see. We went down to visit them after the war as well.”
“In Germany?”
“Yes. And when they were leaving, in May 1945, they gave us a call and said we could go and help ourselves to some things they had left behind, if we wanted. They gave us the finest drinks. And a radio. And a lot of other things.”
I hadn’t heard that they had been given presents by the Germans before they capitulated. But then the Germans had been to their homes.
“Things they’d left behind?” I echoed. “Where?”
“By some cliff,” Grandma said. “They called to tell us exactly where we could find them. So we went out that evening, and there they were, precisely as they had said. They were kind, no doubt about that.”
Had Grandma and Grandad clambered around a cliff one May evening in 1945 hunting for the bottles left by the Germans?
The light from a pair of car headlights flitted across the garden and shone on the wall under the window for a few seconds, then the car was around the bend and slowly glided past along the alley below. Grandma leaned toward the window.