This was one of the great childhood mysteries. How could his father think he had been swindled when every time he had collected a wad of money in exchange for those boring paintings, all identical, with a landscape illuminated by a sun that was never allowed to set?
Just once he had been present at a visit of these unknown men when the ending turned out otherwise. There were two of them, and he had never seen them before—as he skulked in the shadows behind the remains of an old laundry mangle, he gathered from the conversation that they were new business contacts. It was an important moment, for it was not a foregone conclusion that they would approve of the paintings. He had helped to carry the canvases to the car, a Dodge on this occasion (he had learned how to open the trunk on all different kinds of cars). Then the two men had suggested they should all go out for something to eat. He remembered that one of them was called Anton and the other something foreign, possibly Polish. He and his father had squeezed in among the canvases on the backseat; the fantastic men even had a record player in the car, and they had listened to Johnny Bohde as they drove to the park. His father had gone to one of the restaurants with the two men, and Wallander had been given a handful of one-krona pieces and sent to play on the merry-go-rounds. It was a warm day in early summer, a gentle breeze was blowing in from the Sound, and he planned out in great detail what he would be able to buy for his money. It would have been unfair to save the money, it had been given to him for spending, to help him enjoy that afternoon and evening in the park. He had been on the merry-go-rounds and taken two rides on the big wheel, which took you so high you could see as far as Copenhagen. Occasionally he checked to make sure that his father, Anton, and the Pole were still there. He could see even from a distance that lots of glasses and bottles were being carried to their table, and plates of food and white napkins that the men tucked into their shirt collars. He remembered thinking how, when he had crossed that river after Class Seven or Nine or whatever, he would be like one of those men who drove in a shiny car and rewarded artists by peeling off bills and dropping them on a table in a dirty studio.
The afternoon had turned into evening, and rain threatened. He decided to have one more ride on the big wheel, but he never did. Something had happened. The big wheel and the merry-go-rounds and the rifle range suddenly lost all their attraction, and people started hurrying toward the restaurant. He had gone along with the tide, elbowed his way to the front, and seen something he could never forget. It had been a rite of passage, something he had not realized existed, but it taught him that life is made up of a series of rites of passage of whose existence we are unaware until we find ourselves in the midst of them.
When he pushed and shoved his way to the front he found his own father in a violent fight with one of the Silk Knights and several security guards, waiters, and other complete strangers. The dining table had been overturned, glasses and bottles were broken, a beefsteak dripping with gravy and dark brown onion rings were dangling from his father’s arm, his nose was bleeding, and he was throwing punches left, right, and center. It had all happened so quickly. Wallander shouted his father’s name, in a mixture of fear and panic—but then it was all over. Burly, red-faced bouncers intervened; police officers appeared from nowhere, and his father was dragged away along with Anton and the Pole. All that was left was a battered broad-brimmed hat. He tried to run after them and grab hold of his father, but he was pulled back. He stumbled to the gate, and burst into tears as he watched his father being driven away in a police car.
He walked all the way home, and it started raining before he got there. Everything was in turmoil, his universe had crumbled away, and he only wished he could have erased everything that had happened. But you cannot erase reality. He hurried on through the downpour and wondered whether he would ever see his father again. He sat all night in the studio, waiting for him. The smell of turpentine almost choked him, and every time he heard a car he would run out to the gate. He fell asleep in the end, curled up on the floor.
He woke up to find his father bending over him. He had a piece of cotton wool in one of his nostrils, and his left eye was swollen and discolored. He stank of drink, a sort of stale oil smell, but the boy sat up and flung his arms around his father.
“They wouldn’t listen to me,” his father said. “They wouldn’t listen. I told them my boy was with us, but they wouldn’t listen. How did you get home?”
Wallander told him that he had walked all the way home through the rain.
“I’m sorry it turned out like that,” his father said. “But I got so angry. They were saying something that just wasn’t true.”
His father picked up one of the paintings and studied it with his good eye. It was one with a grouse in the foreground.
“I got so angry,” he said again. “Those bastards maintained it was a partridge. They said I had painted the bird so badly, you couldn’t tell if it was a grouse or a partridge. What else can you do but get angry? I won’t have them put my honor and competence in doubt.”
“Of course it’s a grouse,” Wallander had said. “Anybody can see it isn’t a partridge.”
His father regarded him with a smile. Two of his front teeth were missing. His smile’s broken, Wallander thought. My father’s smile’s broken.
Then they had a cup of coffee. It was still raining, and his father slowly calmed down.
“Imagine not being able to tell the difference between a grouse and a partridge,” he kept protesting, half incantation, half prayer. “Claiming I can’t paint a bird the way it looks.”
All this went through Wallander’s mind as he drove to Simrishamn. He also recalled that the two men, the one called Anton and the Pole, kept coming back every year to buy paintings. The fight, the sudden anger, the excessive tipples of brandy, everything had turned into a hilarious episode they could now remember and laugh about. Anton had even paid the dentist’s bills. That’s friendship, he thought. Behind the fight there was something more important, friendship between the art dealers and the man who kept making his never-changing pictures so that they had something to sell.
He thought about the painting in the apartment in Helsingborg, and about all the other apartments he had not seen but where nevertheless the grouse was portrayed against a landscape over which the sun never set.
For the first time he thought he had gained an insight. Throughout his life his father had prevented the sun from setting. That had been his livelihood, his message. He had painted pictures so that people who bought them to hang on their walls could see it was possible to hold the sun captive.
He came to Simrishamn, parked outside the police station, and went in. Torsten Lundström was at his desk. He was due to retire and Wallander knew him to be a kind man, a police officer of the old school who wanted nothing but good for his fellow men. He nodded at Wallander and put down the newspaper he was reading. Wallander sat on a chair in front of his desk and looked at him.