The landing gear was unfurled with a muffled thud and Sven-Arne was shaken out of his reflections.
After having collected his bag and passing through the passport check without significant problems – were they alerted to his arrival? – he sat down in the arrival hall and bought himself a cup of coffee for the astounding price of three dollars.
Passengers and relatives, taxi drivers with signs in their hands with names such as ‘Lundgren’ and ‘Ullberg,’ airport staff – everyone arrived and disappeared just as fast, without giving him more than a distracted glance. He was a man on a bench, so far as anonymous as in the crowd in Bangalore.
His hand shook as it brought the cup to his lips. He slurped up the coffee, drinking it without milk for the first time in a long time. I’m going to be stuck here, he thought, suddenly desperate over hearing all the voices around him, Swedish voices. The coffee was drunk up and he placed the cup gently on the floor.
He ought to get up and go, but couldn’t make himself. He saw through the windows how it began to snow.
Most of all he wanted to lie down, curl up and feel some merciful person spread a blanket over him. He would live under that blanket.
Sven-Arne Persson sat as if turned to stone, for over an hour. He could have been an installation. Lone Man atAirport. He had turned off all systems, his breathing was barely noticeable, not a movement betrayed that he belonged to the world of the living. It was his eyes that betrayed him as they scanned the arrival hall. If he shut them he would collapse, he was convinced of it.
When he finally got up, the ground swayed and he took a side step. The coffee cup on the ground clattered.
‘What am I doing here?’
After a couple of seconds everything became still and the floor stopped swaying. He reached for his bag, took a couple of tentative steps toward the exit, and stepped out into the cold December air.
He was dressed in a pair of brown, baggy trousers of unknown origin, a blue and white nylon jacket, and his best sandals.
In his wallet – the same one he had started out with twelve years ago – he had twelve hundred American dollars, which constituted the extent of his earthly possessions.
Subconsciously he had assumed that he would be met by a delegation at the airport, perhaps police officers, and that they would be in charge of the program. But no one cared about the suntanned and somewhat stooped man in the out-of-place clothing. He wasn’t sure where he should go. Arlanda he knew well. He had travelled from here many times during his political career. Back then he would take a taxi or be picked up.
He was cold and had to make some kind of decision. He looked around. A taxi marked UPPSALA TAXI was pulled up to the curb. The fact that the company still had the same phone number, which was written in large numbers on the side of the car, set him in motion.
‘Uppsala,’ he said, once he had sat down in the backseat.
The driver turned around and examined his passenger. The snowflakes in his thin hair started to melt in the warm interior.
‘What address?’
‘I don’t know,’ Sven-Arne Persson said truthfully. ‘What do you suggest?’
He received a chuckle in reply.
‘Home, perhaps?’
Sven-Arne Persson tried to visualise the town house. He felt a need to explain himself to the still smiling driver, suddenly convinced that he would make time to listen to him, understand his situation, and after some additional questions produce a sensible solution.
‘Where do you come from?’
‘Iran,’ the driver replied. His smile had disappeared.
‘What did you do when you came to Sweden? Where did you live?’
‘I was at a refugee centre in Alvesta for eight months.’
‘I am like a refugee, but the opposite, do you understand? I am a refugee in my own country.’
‘You don’t have a home?’
Sven-Arne shook his head.
‘No family?’
‘No.’
The Iranian had an almost pained look on his face.
‘No family? You must have a cousin or something.’
‘I have an uncle.’
‘Where does he live?’
The suburb of Eriksdal had basically been levelled in the midseventies. Only a few houses had been spared. Sven-Arne Persson had been party to the decision. The construction company Anders Diös had won the contract – he still remembered the negotiations. It took place within a kind of brotherly understanding between representatives of the county and the builder. Everyone breathed good intentions and mutual understanding.
He recalled the protests and the demolition. The renters in some buildings had refused to move out. The diggers had begun their work, taking out roofs and walls, breaking up concrete, demolishing one-hundred-year-old sheds as if they were houses of cards. Once upon a time they had been used as outhouses, then were transformed into storage areas for the surplus objects of the renters, finally to fall together into an unsorted pile of rubble.
A flat had been revealed when an outer wall disappeared in a cloud of dust. Sven-Arne had been standing on the street and had studied the scene. A guitar had been hanging on the wall. There was a bed below it. The whole thing looked like a stage set. No one would have been surprised to see a person get out of the bed, take down the guitar, and play a song.
The digger had stopped its enormous shovel. A photographer from the newspaper Upsala Nya Tidning had rushed forward. Sven-Arne Persson had hurriedly left the area.
Thirty years later he was back on the same street. The area was no longer called Eriksdal except by some older Uppsala residents who still found some value in the old names. Now rows of town houses dominated. Sven-Arne thought they looked like barracks in an internment centre with small exercise yards surrounded by high fences.
A number of day care children in troop formation marched by on the pavement. A rubbish lorry was driving along on Wallingatan. The sour smell lingered in the air, reminiscent of the canal behind Russell Market in Bangalore. The children screamed and held their noses.
On the way here, he had stepped out of the taxi at the Central Station, gone in and located the storage lockers that were still in the same place, pushed in his bag, and quickly returned to the taxi, which proceeded to take him to Ringgatan as far up as the Sverker school. For the past hour he had been wandering aimlessly through the neighbourhoods, and now he approached the nursing home with great dread.
THIRTY-TWO
The night was long. Sweaty. At half past two he got up and walked over to the window. The sky was clear and starry. Once upon a time, a long time ago, he had loved the silence of the night. Now there was only terror and emptiness in the vaulted heavens, an endless longing.
On the way to the kitchen he tripped on the vacuum cleaner and fell headlong against the doorpost. A pain seared above his temple and in his shoulder as he landed on the floor. The pain was almost pleasurable.
‘I need to vacuum,’ he muttered, and chuckled.
He rolled over onto his back on the cold floor and stared up at the ceiling. He remembered the dream now. The Magpie had come to him. Her breath was bad but her body warm. She spoke with intensity, almost frenzied, in a foreign language. He knew it was the language of women and did not attempt to understand any of her prattling. Instead he studied her features and noticed for the first time that she was beautiful. She lay on him, her body light as a feather. Had they made love?