‘He’s talked about me, hasn’t he? That a man would turn up and ask for him, say he was hiding out in Bangalore.’
Svensk felt energised, enjoying the Indian man’s confusion and unease, and he knew that his offensive had had the intended effect.
‘He has asked you to be quiet, hasn’t he? You may be protecting a criminal. What do you really know of this Swede who goes by an assumed name?’
‘Are you a policeman?’
‘It doesn’t really matter who I am.’
They stood quietly across from each other. Lester pretended to study a couple of small birds who were jumping around on the ground, and he was markedly disturbed. Jan Svensk also felt anxiety rise in his body – why was he putting pressure on this man? What did he have to do with Sven-Arne Persson? As far as he knew, he had not made himself guilty to anything criminal. Why then burst in like someone from the Gestapo and beset peaceful civilians?
‘He was my neighbour,’ Svensk said finally.
Lester nodded absently but Svensk took it as encouragement.
‘I don’t wish to hurt him, but you have to understand that you get curious if you see a man who has been missing for twelve years. What do you know of his background?’
‘Nothing,’ Lester said softly.
‘Can we sit down somewhere?’
Lester waved toward some recessed areas of the garden. Svensk started walking toward them without a word, came around a shrubby area, and sat down on a log. Lester followed and crouched down, two or three metres away. Svensk thought he glimpsed a smile before he resumed his expressionless face.
‘Why don’t you tell me where he is?’
Lester stood up and walked over to a shed, the door of which was hanging from one hinge, reached in behind the door, turned his head and gave Svensk a look before he held out an axe.
Svensk stood up. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I have a job to do,’ Lester said, and again sat down in a crouch. The axe rested against the ground, the handle against one knee.
Svensk was struck by the scene. An image, a stereotype, and at the same time a vivid illustration of a worker of the third world, the axe an expression of underdevelopment but also of power. All at once, he became afraid.
Lester’s inscrutable expression as he gazed at the Swede did not reveal anything directly threatening but nonetheless a feeling of danger hovered over the little clearing in front of the shed. Perhaps it was Lester’s blankness that was most alarming. It could conceal anything.
Svensk looked around. A faint murmur of traffic could be heard, muted by a thin hedge and a high fence.
‘I could kill you,’ Lester said.
‘Why would you do that?’
‘You don’t know why.’
‘Will you let me guess?’
Jan Svensk felt the sweat run down his back and under his arms. I should sit down again, he thought. The Indian nodded and it struck Svensk that he – as opposed to all other Indians – used the nod as an affirmative.
‘Our mutual friend is hiding something, and you may be guilty by association.’
‘That may be,’ Lester said, with an indifference in his voice that increasingly irritated Svensk.
Lester picked up the axe and tested the sharpness of the blade against his thumb.
‘I know that John is an honest man, but are you? What do you want with him? What has he done to you?’
‘Nothing, as I said. But he is a friend of the family and it is understandable that I am curious.’
He proceeded to tell him about Sven-Arne, that he had been a public figure and that his disappearance had attracted a great deal of attention.
The Indian man did not appear to be listening. He stood up in one swift motion. The axe lay at his feet.
‘You may leave now. There is nothing for you here.’
‘I can speak with the office.’
Lester shook his head. Suddenly Jan Svensk realised the entire conversation had simply been an evasive manoeuvre.
‘He’s given me the slip, hasn’t he?’
‘I am sorry,’ Lester said, ‘but John does not wish to meet with you. I don’t know why, and I don’t want to know.’
‘Are you involved?’
‘In what?’
Jan Svensk did not reply. He turned on his heel but a sudden fury brought him to a halt. Lester jerked back. Jan registered the axe on the ground, had an impulse to pick it up and swing it toward the Indian, but controlled himself at the last moment.
‘Fucking hell,’ was the only thing he managed to get out.
He ached with a feeling of having been deceived. Sven-Arne Persson had probably been nearby but was now gone and probably in a rickshaw on his way somewhere where he would never be found again.
‘I am staying at Hotel Harsha. Please let him know I do not want to hurt him,’ he said finally, and left the nursery at a rapid clip, without looking back, without bothering to find out how everyone was reacting to his exit. He was certain they were laughing at him behind his back.
‘Damned Indian scum,’ he muttered, and kicked a pot so that it rolled off, struck a fence post by the entrance, and cracked.
A lizard crossed his path and Jan Svensk was gripped by an irrational hatred of the land to which he had been dispatched. He found a deep unfairness in the fact that he was forced to put up with this chaos of exhaust fumes, lizards, and fugitives.
Sure, he could leave Sven-Arne Persson to his fate and round off his last days in Bangalore in the same routine that he had worked up, like that last time when he had put up with Singapore for three whole months. For three months he had perspired on the streets on the way to work only to freeze in the air-conditioned offices.
But the feeling of having had the wool pulled over his eyes constituted a bigger defeat than having been taunted. His search for the county commissioner had unconsciously been what he had used to repress the ever-intensifying discomfort at his stay in India. The creeping feeling that everything was partly a chimera, all this chaos that his work and the work of other people was creating.
For his overall impression of Bangalore was chaos. The new technology that was to revolutionise and improve life, speed up communications between people and continents, had a back side that appeared in a clearer light. He had sensed this before, all puffed-up successes in the IT industry, all castles in the sky that had been built up and collapsed, and then the short memories of people as new bubbles were blown up.
They said the future was being built in Bangalore. Was this what it was supposed to look like? Was this the price we were supposed to pay? Or ‘we,’ he thought as he walked quickly through the avenue of mango trees, it is all of these stressed Indians with their exhaust-induced coughs who will pay the highest price. Was it progress that more and more could ride motorcycles in a country where hundreds and millions had to struggle for their day-to-day survival?
Most of all, he wanted to pull out of the entire mess. But not to return home. During his last conversation with Elise the resentment had bubbled up in both of them, the growing aversion to a marriage and life that was running on autopilot. He sensed a connection but could not grasp it clearly.
His humiliating exit from the nursery was now added to the string of failures. He stopped and watched a group of schoolchildren that had sat down on a large lawn. The children’s clothing was identicaclass="underline" The girls had blue dresses and the boys were in blue shorts and white, short-sleeved shirts. Their backpacks were neatly stacked against each other. One of the teachers was trying to attract the children’s attention and managed to do so surprisingly quickly given that there were at least fifty children.
The teacher spoke in a stern voice, reprimanding, a little nagging. He looked displeased, not to say outright mean. Jan Svensk sat down on a bench and studied the children. They whispered to each other, moving around almost imperceptibly, teasing, in appearance unconcerned about their teacher, accepting a blow on the back or head without a change of expression or desisting from their civil disobedience. The mass of children was admittedly obedient, but in such a way that their freedom appeared limitless. They led a life out of reach of the tired and increasingly irritated teacher. He was large, he had a stick, but he was powerless.