“Don’t listen to him. Unceremonious disposal of a dead body is not necessarily an indication of a lack of respect for these birds, or for nature. Animals die. This is normal in any ecosystem. We die, they die. It’s nothing.”
Lennart watched the Germans finish their work. They took down the blind and disassembled the net and the poles, neatly packing everything. Lennart helped as he felt he could, but mostly he just watched. He tried not to look at the dead bird.
He helped take equipment back to the car, following a short distance behind Anneke and Matthias, who seemed to have been energized by the success of the net and their work and spoke loudly about a restaurant they wanted to try in Skagen that evening. They were nearly back to the car when Lennart remembered the newspaper. He helped the Germans load the equipment in the trunk and the backseat, and then he went back for the paper.
He walked quickly down the trail, struggling to keep his pace in the sand. Up ahead he saw some birds, gulls maybe, circling above. He reached the place where they’d set up the blind and the net. Some larger birds had landed and were pecking at the plover’s carcass. When Lennart got close, the larger birds flew off. Anneke had said this would happen, of course, and he knew enough to know it was natural, but something about the tiny, bloodied body of the bird in the sand bothered him. He kicked some sand at it to cover the body, but this didn’t feel right either, so he took the paper and opened it and picked the carcass up and wrapped it in the paper as tightly as he could. He didn’t know what to do after this, so he opened his backpack and placed the bird carefully inside.
The Germans were waiting in the car when he got back. When he left the trail for the asphalt of the parking lot, he waved and began to jog, no more quickly than he could have walked probably, toward the car. Matthias put the car in gear and started driving before Lennart was settled. The door slammed with the momentum. He held his backpack on his lap. Anneke, her hand rested on Matthias’s shoulder, turned in her seat to look over her own shoulder at Lennart. “Did you find what you were looking for?”
He hadn’t said why he was going back. “I left my newspaper,” he said.
“What did you think of the Mile, Lennart?” Matthias asked.
The grasses and the waves of sand were pretty, a little boring, unsurprising, maybe. He’d liked watching the Germans work, though he still hadn’t decided whether Anneke had been joking about her and Matthias. The joke or whatever it was wasn’t particularly funny, but given that he didn’t know Anneke at all, it hardly seemed like an honest admission. He’d tried to imagine telling Marie about it, but there wasn’t really a way, as far as he could tell, to do so without seeming to betray an intimacy with Anneke that he hadn’t had. Marie would be curious about the context for such a story and he knew she’d have the same questions he did about the arrangement, whether it was true or not. “There were fewer people than I’d expected,” he said finally.
“We’re so far from everything up here,” Anneke said. “One might really do anything at all.”
On the drive back to the hotel, Matthias and Anneke talked more about the restaurant, which had been recommended to them. They were going to leave before lunch the next day. He looked at Anneke for a sign that she was disappointed about the end of the trip. She’d kept her hand on Matthias’s shoulder the whole drive, and when Matthias brought up the return trip, suggesting that they stop for the night in Hamburg on the way home, Anneke dropped her hand to his leg and looked away.
At the hotel, he helped the Germans take the equipment inside. He carried his backpack and a black plastic case about the size of his chest. He hadn’t remembered seeing the case at the Mile but assumed the Germans’ work required all kinds of equipment that he hadn’t seen in just one day spent with them. They gathered everything in the lobby, close to the elevators. Matthias went back to the car for the last of the things. It was late in the afternoon, and the sun, low on the horizon, shone in brightly through the tall windows. A nicely dressed couple came out of the bar and crossed the lobby. They walked slowly and deliberately around the equipment. Lennart heard the woman ask the man in a whisper, “Are they making a film, do you think?” The man looked at Lennart and shrugged. He passed very close and Lennart smelled the alcohol on his breath. The day he’d arrived, he’d bought two bottles of Japanese whiskey in Frederikshavn. The first bottle was already empty. He was looking forward to a drink when he got up to his room. When the couple had gone, Anneke leaned close to Lennart. She smelled like sweat but not unpleasantly so. “I know what you did,” she said.
“I’m sorry?” Lennart said. His face got warm and he looked past her.
“I’d only guessed it before,” she said. “But I can tell I was right by the way you’re acting. You did something with the plover, didn’t you?”
“I went back for the newspaper,” he said quietly. “Like I told you.”
“We can’t tell Matthias. I think it’s kind of funny, even a little sweet, but he’d be angry. Did you bury it? Is that what took so long?”
“Of course not.”
“What then?” she said. “You don’t have it with you.”
“Of course not,” he said again.
Anneke looked at his backpack and up at Lennart. “We know something about each other now,” she said.
Matthias came in holding the last of the gear. A bag was slipping from his shoulder.
“We were just talking about dinner,” Anneke said. “He isn’t going to join us after all.”
“It’s the last night of your trip. I’m sure you’ll want some quiet before you go home to your family.”
“Well,” Matthias said coolly, “come down for a drink later.”
In his room, Lennart placed his backpack on the dresser beneath where the television was mounted to the wall. He poured himself a drink and sat down on the bed with it. He flipped through the television channels, watching short flashes of American sitcoms and Danish news programs and a German documentary film about the plastic garbage patch in the Pacific. Several times larger than Switzerland. The narrator said this repeatedly as if it was a precise measurement of size. Lennart got up to refill his glass. He opened the bag and looked inside. The weather forecast was the first thing he saw. A sun and a cloud a single day apart. He reached in and unwrapped the paper and lifted the bird’s carcass from the bag. He placed it on the dresser beside his drink. The bird had stiffened a little bit and the beak was tucked tightly against the body. He lifted the bird and looked at the feathers, stretched each wing out to see how long they were. He turned the body in his hands, mimicking as best he could the movements Matthias and Anneke had performed earlier. The bird wasn’t tagged. He guessed this meant it was probably young, hadn’t had the time to get caught. He put it down and picked up his glass. The glass was nearly empty and this shocked him, though the feeling passed quickly and left a tingle in his chest as if he’d thought he’d lost his car keys or telephone and suddenly remembered they were only in his pocket. The body is so much more immediate to all we experience than the mind. He lifted the glass, held it at eye level, watched the liquid calm, and measured with disappointment how much he’d already had. He finished what was left in one gulp.
Early the morning after his father died he’d received a phone call from the summerhouse. The police had called the evening before to confirm the death, so he was surprised and a little frightened to see his father’s number flash across the screen of his phone early the next morning. The call was from Henrik Brandt, the man who owned the house up the road and nearest a little outcropping of rock his father had always called Bull’s Head. Henrik had woken him with the call. It was before dawn. He didn’t want anything and he didn’t say why he was in the house. He just apologized for calling so early and told Lennart he was sorry to have heard the news. Lennart didn’t know how to respond, so he thanked the man for his concern. It wasn’t until later that it occurred to him that this situation was strange. That afternoon, Lennart looked up the number for the Uppland County Police Authority and called to report Henrik’s phone call. He was transferred to a woman who introduced herself as a case officer in the Norrtälje Police Department. She assured him that the police would investigate the call but that it was nothing he should be concerned about. When he pressed her on this, insisting he didn’t suspect that Henrik was involved in the death, only that it seemed odd that he would enter the house of a person he knew was dead and then call that person’s son, the woman said, “People sometimes act in unusual ways following a death.” After he hung up, he tried to rest the telephone in its cradle but was distracted and his hand slipped and he dropped the telephone to the floor, where it broke apart. He spent that afternoon resoldering a wire to the microphone and gluing the plastic casing back together as best he could. Then he called himself from his cell phone several times to check that the microphone on the landline worked.