‘What is the third thing?’
‘The gun,’ Marksson said. ‘No one out here claims to recognise it, which is fucking unbelievable. Out here you know what kind of microwave oven your neighbour has, what kind of fishing rod, lawnmower, and definitely the contents of the gun rack. You hunt together, get to talking about hunting and fishing, you discuss guns, you brag.’
‘The gun was unregistered,’ Lindell said. ‘Is that normal “out here”, as you put it?’
‘There are probably old rifles tucked away, but not more out here than in other places. Lasse Malm’s father killed himself with an unregistered weapon, an army gun that no one knew the origins of. Or so they said.’
‘I thought you didn’t know he had committed suicide?’
‘No, but Dad did. I called him. As usual he had a bunch of good advice for me.’
‘I don’t think I got a single piece of good advice from my dad,’ Lindell said. ‘The ones he gave me I didn’t take, thank God. He wanted me to become a hairdresser. When I was around nineteen or twenty they closed up three hair salons in Ödeshög, so he saw potential.’
‘Smart guy,’ Marksson said with a smile. ‘He was thinking of your future.’
‘I know, but what a future, to stay out there. I would have died of boredom.’
‘Like on this point. How long would you last out here?’
Lindell hesitated. Her colleague was born in this area, had his friends here, this was where he hunted and fished, and she didn’t want to put down his home. She also thought, for a single brief moment, of Edvard and Gräsö Island.
‘It would depend on the context,’ she said.
‘Everything depends on the context,’ he said, smiling.
‘Once upon a time I was planning to move out here. We would have been colleagues.’
‘To Gräsö,’ Marksson said.
Lindell nodded.
‘You know,’ she said.
‘Dad,’ Marksson said.
Lindell looked quizzically at him.
‘He saw you on the Gräsö ferry with a man.’
‘He recognised me?’
‘You’ve been in the papers a couple of times and Dad is the kind of guy who keeps track of things, colleagues above all. I think he’s a good man,’ Marksson said, and Lindell guessed who he was referring to but had to ask, perhaps in order to hear someone say his name.
‘Edvard.’
‘It didn’t work out,’ Lindell said.
‘The context,’ Marksson said.
She wanted to hear him tell her a little about Edvard, but Marksson appeared to have dropped the subject. Was it out of consideration for her? Was Edvard living with another woman? She swallowed hard, audibly. She wanted to tell, she wanted Marksson to understand what even she herself didn’t understand. She wanted to talk about things she had never before mentioned to anyone.
Where did this sudden desire for openness come from? And why now in the presence of a man whom she had known all of a week, and who to top it off had a central communications centre of a father. Was it Lisen Morell’s words about how she smelt of jasmine but also ‘loneliness’?
She was sitting in the killer and suicide victim’s kitchen waiting for something, a word, an insight, or perhaps intimacy. She didn’t know which and did not dare to take a risk.
‘Maybe it’s not too late,’ Marksson said suddenly, and stood up in the same breath. The chair was sent backward but he stopped it from tipping over with a swift hand. ‘Shouldn’t we get going? There’ll be no babies made this way. Time to show a little nerve.’
He rattled off encouraging stock phrases one after the other as he screwed on the thermos stopper and replaced the cap that also functioned as a mug.
‘I’m headed to the big village to pick up some stuff for the wife. She must have sent away for something new.’
Lindell got up from the table. Edvard doesn’t have another, she thought jubilantly. As if it made any difference. She would never see him again, she knew that. Maybe see him by chance, but never touch.
When she had dropped off Marksson at his car she ended up sitting for a while. She counted the mailboxes at the side of the road. Seven in all, arranged in order from north to south. Andersson came first, Frisk was the last in the row. Lisen Morell had none. She must get her mail in Uppsala.
Why do I expose myself to this, this masochism? Why air this old story, over and over again? There were no obvious answers. She had accepted the job on the coast even though she was aware that the old thoughts would come up.
She sighed heavily, longing for her flat, Erik’s chatter, the sofa, a glass of wine. This isn’t normal, she said to herself. You aren’t normal. Something went wrong.
THIRTY-ONE
On the day of the Virgin, the eighth of December, Sven-Arne Persson returned to his homeland. That was the word he mouthed as he looked out of the aeroplane window, the first time in almost exactly twelve years that he had seen Sweden. Homeland. What a sick word, he thought, and recalled one of Uncle Ante’s timeworn phrases from his usual rant: internationalism.
The working class doesn’t have a homeland, has never had one, Ante Persson would preach. Sven-Arne smiled to himself. Apart from this, the trip had given him little to smile about. His temporary passport – issued in Delhi – had created problems at the Bangalore airport as well as in Paris. Prior to his departure three phone calls had been required: one to the Swedish ambassador himself, one to the consular section of the embassy, and finally a call with a roaring voice at the other end of the line, likely a local official, before he was allowed to leave the country. He did not know what had been said in these calls, but he guessed that the embassy had assured the Indian immigration serviceman that Sven-Arne was not a criminal, just a depressed Swede who – perhaps with religious searching as his source – had confusedly made his way to India and lived there under great privation. A non-threatening man who now had to be sent back home, perhaps in order to receive care. That was how he himself had strategized.
In Paris it had been only marginally smoother. That Sven-Arne’s French was non-existent had not made it easier.
It was with ambivalence that he spun his way from India to Sweden. He hated himself for having gone the political way to get his passport, knowing it was the only possibility to get around the Indian bureaucracy. At the same time he was relieved that the whole process had been so relatively painless. He would not have had the energy to do real battle with some overzealous and self-important Indian clerks. He would rather have backed down.
But now, a thousand metres above Uppland, on his way down to Arlanda, he felt only exhaustion. His joints ached. Strangely enough even his arm hurt, the one he injured in the Japanese section, which it had never done before. He saw it as a reprimand from Lal Bagh: ‘You are betraying us.’ He also saw Jyoti’s face before him: ‘You betrayed me.’ Where was she now? Perhaps in Chennai, a place that now seemed as foreign as it had done twelve years ago. And then Lester, who with a tone of amazement but also irony made his voice heard: ‘You were a powerful man in your country, a kind of governor.’
Even Ismael in his salon fluttered past. The Dalit women in the neighbourhood who swept the street and kept the worst of the filth at bay, who carried bricks when the city razed the old weaving factory and built a police station, who sold bananas in the corner toward the market – all of them looked at him with an unfathomable gaze, not repudiatingly, but with a painful distance that no words or assurances, no decency, could surmount. He had been a decent fellow. No one could say anything else. He convinced himself that he had been respected and regarded as a relatively honourable man given the circumstances. His clothing, his rough hands and feet – the emblematic mark of class – and his entire being on the street bore witness to a man who did not think of himself as above others. But still, he had never been able to overcome the distance, and it had pained him. The temporary passport burning like fire in his shirt pocket, and the fact that he was sitting in an aeroplane, were evidence enough to this.