Håkan Nesser

A Summer with Kim Novak

Translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel

World Editions

breda 2016

Published in Great Britain in 2015 by World Editions Ltd., London

www.worldeditions.org

Copyright © Håkan Nesser, 1998

English translation copyright © Saskia Vogel, 2015

Cover design Multitude

Image credit © 123rf.com

The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published as Kim Novak badade aldrig i Genesarets sjö by Albert Bonniers Förlag, Stockholm, Sweden 1998. Published in the English language by arrangement with Bonnier Rights, Stockholm, Sweden.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

isbn 978-94-6238-026-4

The cost of this translation was defrayed by a subsidy from the Swedish Arts Council, gratefully acknowledged

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1

This story is going to be about the Incident, and of course it will be, but there’s so much more to it. That fateful event is why I remember the summer of 1962 more clearly than any other summer of my youth. It cast its dismal pall over so many things. Over me and over Edmund. Over my poor parents, my brother, and that entire time of my life. My memories of that town out on the plain—the people, our experiences and the particular circumstances of our lives—would have been lost to the well of time if it weren’t for that grisly act. The Incident.

Where to begin? I could have started anywhere, and eventually I got tired of considering all the possibilities, so I decided to pinpoint an average weekday, at home in my kitchen on Idrottsgatan. Just my father and me, one balmy evening in May.

‘It’s going to be a difficult summer,’ my father said. ‘Let’s face it.’

He swilled the burnt gravy into the sink and coughed. I looked at his slightly hunched back and pondered. He wasn’t usually a Jeremiah, so I suspected that this was serious.

‘I can’t manage any more,’ I said and rolled the undercooked potatoes to the meat side of the plate, to make it look as though I’d at least eaten half. He came over to the kitchen table and looked at my leftovers for a few seconds. Sadness flickered across his face. He could see right through me, but still he took the plate and scraped the remains into the bucket under the sink without a word.

‘Like I said, a difficult summer,’ he replied instead, his crooked back turned toward me.

‘It is what it is,’ I answered.

Those words were his cure-all, and I used them so he could see I wanted to be supportive. To show that we were in this together and that I had indeed learned a thing or two over the years.

‘Truer words were never spoken,’ he said. ‘Man proposes but God disposes.’

‘You said it,’ I replied.

Because it was a rather fine May evening, I went to Benny’s after dinner. As usual, Benny was in the loo so first I had to talk to his miserable mum in the kitchen.

‘How’s your mother doing?’ she asked.

‘It’s going to be a difficult summer,’ I said.

She nodded and took her handkerchief from her apron pocket and blew her nose. Benny’s mum suffered from allergies off and on during the summer. They said it was hay fever. When I think back, I think she had ‘hay fever’ all year round.

‘That’s what my dad said,’ I added.

‘Ah yes,’ she said. ‘Only time will tell.’

Recently, I had begun to understand that this was how adults spoke. It wasn’t just my father; this was how you showed that you weren’t wet behind the ears. Since my mother had fallen ill and ended up in hospital, I’d noted the most important expressions and used them accordingly.

It is what it is.

Same old, same old.

It could have been worse.

Life is a mystery.

Or why not ‘Keep your chin up, and your feet on the ground’, as Cross-eyed Karlesson at the corner shop declared a hundred times a day.

Or ‘Only time will tell,’ à la Mrs. Barkman.

Benny was called Barkman, too. Benny Jesias Conny Barkman. Some people thought it a strange string of names, but I never heard him complain.

We find many names for those we love, his mum would say with a grin that exposed her grey-tinged gums.

And then Benny would tell her to shut her mouth.

Even though I had one foot in the adult world, I couldn’t help but wonder why people didn’t just keep quiet when they had nothing to say. Like Mrs. Barkman—and Cross-Eyed Karlesson, who sometimes jabbered so incessantly he didn’t stop to breathe. It made an awful sound.

When she’d taken the handkerchief away from her nose, Mrs. Barkman asked, ‘How’s she doing?’

‘Same old, same old,’ I said and shrugged. ‘Not great, I reckon.’

Mrs. Barkman wrung her hands in her lap and her eyes filled with tears, but it was probably just the hay fever. She was a big woman who always wore floral dresses, and my father said she was a touch simple-minded. I had no idea what he meant by that and I didn’t really care. I wanted to talk to Benny, not his weepy mum.

‘He goes to the loo a lot,’ I said, mostly to seem grown-up and to keep the conversation going.

‘He has a nervous stomach,’ she said. ‘He gets it from his dad.’

A nervous stomach? That was the stupidest thing I’d heard all day. A stomach can’t be nervous, can it? I guessed she’d said that because of her simple-mindedness, and it wasn’t worth pursuing.

‘Is she still in hospital?’

I nodded. I didn’t see the point in talking to her any more.

‘Have you been to visit her?’

I nodded again. Of course I had. What was she on about? It had been a week since my last visit, but it was what it was. The important thing was that my dad went to the hospital nearly every day. Even someone like Mrs. Barkman should know that.

‘Well, you know what they say,’ she said. ‘We all have our crosses to bear.’

She sighed and blew her nose. The toilet flushed and Benny came running out.

‘Hi, Erik,’ he said. ‘I shat like a horse. Let’s get out of here and raise hell.’

‘Benny,’ his mum said wanly. ‘Language.’

‘Damn it, right,’ said Benny.

Nobody swore as much as Benny did. Not on our street. Not in our school. Probably not even in the whole town. When we were in third grade, or maybe fourth, a tetchy teacher with an underbite arrived at school. All the way from Göteborg. They said she had a natural gift for teaching, and her main subject was Religious Education. After hearing Benny curse a blue streak for a few days, she decided to sort him out. She was given permission by the headmaster, Mr. Stigman, and our class teacher Mr. Wermelin to work on Benny’s speech twice a week. I think they started in September and carried on throughout the autumn term. Around Christmas Benny developed a stutter so severe that no one could understand him. Come spring, the teacher from Göteborg was fired, Benny started swearing again and by the summer holidays he was back to his old self.

On the May evening that my father said it would be a difficult summer, Benny and I went out to sit inside the culvert. Or rather, we started our evening there. The culvert was a point of departure for whatever the night had in store for us. It lay in a dry ditch fifty metres into the forest, and God knows how it ended up there. It was about one and a half metres in diameter and the same in depth. Because it was tilted on its side, it was a good hideout if you wanted to be left alone. Or needed shelter from the rain. Or were hatching plans and sneaking a few John Silvers that you made some little kid buy for you, so you didn’t have to show your face at Karlesson’s shop. Or, as a last resort, that you had bought yourself.

On this particular evening we had a couple of cigarettes stashed in a can under a tree-root right beside the culvert. Benny dug them out. We smoked with our usual reverence. Then we discussed what sounded better: ciggies or fags. And the right way to hold a cigarette. Thumb–index finger or index finger–middle finger. We didn’t reach a verdict on any of those issues that day either.

Then Benny asked me about my mother.

‘Your mum,’ he said. ‘Shit, is she going to …?’

I nodded.

‘Think so,’ I said. ‘Dad says so. The doctors say so.’

Benny searched his vocabulary.

‘That’s bloody horrible,’ he finally said.

I shrugged. Benny had been close to his aunt, and she had died, so I knew that he knew what he was talking about.

On the other hand, I had no idea what it was like.

Dead?

When I thought about it—and I’d thought about it often this cold, comfortless spring—all I knew was that it was the strangest word in the entire language.

Dead?

Inconceivable. The worst part was that my dad seemed to have as weak a grip on the concept as I did. I could tell by his face the one time—the only time—I asked what it actually meant. What it actually meant to be dead.

‘Hmm, well,’ he had muttered, still staring at the TV with the sound turned down. ‘Only time will tell.’

‘A difficult summer,’ Benny repeated thoughtfully. ‘For Christ’s sake, Erik, you’ll have to write to me. I’m going to be up in Malmberget until school starts, but if you need any advice, you can count on me.’

There was a sudden lull in our conversation, as if we had been touched by an angel. I felt it as clearly as anything, and I knew that Benny had felt it, too, because he cleared his throat and solemnly repeated his offer.

‘Bloody hell, Erik. Write and tell me how you’re doing.’

We shared the second and last wrinkled cigarette. I think I did write a letter to Benny; sometime in July, when everything was at its worst, but I can’t really remember. What I do know is that I never heard a peep from him.

Benny Barkman wasn’t one for pen and paper.

During these years in the early 1960s, my dad worked at the jail. It was a taxing job, especially for someone as sensitive as he was, but he never talked about it. He avoided unpleasant topics, in general.

Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, and all that.

He’d arrived in the town on the plain in the 1930s, in the middle of the Depression; met my mother and got her pregnant around the time the world went mad for the second time that century. My brother Henry was born on 1 June 1940; three days later, after taking leave from his post up in Lapland, my father arrived at the bedside of his wife and child, bearing freshly picked lilies of the valley and forty cans of military-issue liver pâté.

So the story goes.

He never went back up north. After his first son was born, he managed to get out of his military service for the rest of the war. He blamed it on his back, I think. He found a job in one of the town’s many shoe factories, where the army’s winter boots were made. So in a way he was still doing his duty. A few years after the end of the Second World War, the family moved into a flat on Idrottsgatan.

As for me, I was born eight years and eight days after my brother, and I grew up with the feeling that the age difference between us was much greater than between him and our parents. Now, at the start of the sixties, I had begun to see that this was a misconception. Perhaps my mother’s cancer had helped clarify matters.

My mother and father were quite old, you see. The summer my mother was about to die, they were both fifty-seven. One hundred and fourteen years between them. A dizzying sum. Henry turned twenty-two in June. I was fourteen. My father had worked in the prison since it opened its doors to the country’s most dangerous criminals a year and a half earlier.

Or rather, it shut its doors behind them.

He was a screw; a word that had never been uttered in the town before the Grey Giant appeared out on the plain.

He called himself a prison guard. Everyone else said screw. A screw at the Grey Giant.

Previously, he’d worked as a shoe-binder at a number of factories. The disappearance of the word ‘shoe-binder’ roughly coincided with the factory shutting down and the arrival of the screws. This was the way of the world, it seemed. One thing disappears, only to be replaced by something else. And that goes for events and all manner of phenomena as well as people.

It seems that the only place where everything stays put is inside your head, but there, too, things go missing.

One factory that didn’t shut down during those years was the Jam & Juice where my mother worked. Until she fell ill, that is. Having a father at the shoe factory and a mother at the Juicy had its perks. You always had swish shoes and there was usually a generous supply of apple juice down in the cellar.

But that summer, we were nearing the end of an era. Having a screw for a dad came with no perks at all.

As for my brother Henry, he was expected to continue his studies and then move up a rung or two on the social ladder, but that didn’t really go as planned. He did matriculate at the secondary grammar school—a prestigious all-boys school in Örebro that stood opposite a thousand-year-old castle surrounded by a moat. Up to that point, it was looking good. He studied and took the train to the county capital and back every day.

Just after his second semester, Henry ran away. It was the autumn of 1957 and it would be more than a year before he knocked on the door at Idrottsgatan again, carrying a sailor’s bag and with a bunch of bananas on his back. He had been around the world, he explained, but had spent most of his time in Hamburg and Rotterdam. He had a rose tattooed on his arm. It was clear to us all that he didn’t really want to move up in the world, at least not in the way our parents had hoped. When Henry returned, my mother cried. I’m not sure if it was for joy or out of despair over his tattoo. After taking it easy for a few months, Henry set off again, roving the seven seas until 1960. When he came home the next time, on the same day that Dan Waern failed to win the bronze medal for the 1,500 metres in Rome, he said that he’d had enough of the sea. He started freelancing for Kurren, the regional newspaper, and found himself a fiancée. One Emmy Kaskel, who worked at Blidberg’s men’s outfitters. She had the best breasts in town.

Probably in the whole world.

In just about the same breath he found a flat twenty kilometres from home in Örebro, where Kurren also had their headquarters. His bedsit was roughly the size of two ping-pong tables; it didn’t have its own toilet or running water, and yet every now and then Emmy Kaskel bared her glorious breasts and more in that tiny flat.

At least that’s what Benny and I assumed.

But she didn’t move in with him. Emmy was two years younger than Henry and still lived at home with her parents. They were missionaries and had a discount at Blidberg’s. My brother said half of the town was involved in the Free Church malarkey, so their affiliation was nothing to worry about.

There’s nothing we do out here that they don’t do in there, he’d say with a wry smile.

‘Look who it is,’ my father said when I came home that balmy evening in May.

I could tell he had something on his mind, so I sat down at the kitchen table with last year’s apple juice and some biscuits and flipped through an old issue of Reader’s Digest, which Grandpa Wille gave us a massive stack of for Christmas every year. He was the twelfth best chess player in Sweden and owned a milk bar in Säffle.

‘Erik, this is big,’ said my father.

‘It is what it is,’ I answered.

‘You’re probably going to have to go and stay at Gennesaret this summer.’

‘Sure,’ I said.

‘You’ll have a good time. I’ve had a word with Henry. He and Emmy’ll be there as well and they’ll take care of you.’

‘I’ll be fine,’ I said.

‘I know,’ said my father. ‘Edmund might join you.’

‘Edmund?’ I said.

‘Why not?’ said my father and scratched his neck nervously. ‘So you’ll have some company your own age.’

‘Well,’ I said. ‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.’

2

The school was three storeys tall—shaped like a shoebox and built from yellowish Pomeranian stone that had darkened to brown over the years. On one side of the building was a gravel yard used as a football pitch at breaktime. On the other side was another playground where you could have played football, but no one did.

The anti-football crowd kept to this other side, as did the girls, who clustered together, trading things and gossiping. Well, I don’t actually know if they traded things, or what they got up to, because I always kept a safe distance.

I belonged to a group of a dozen or so boys who didn’t spend their breaktime getting dirty on the football pitch. We were the anti-football crowd. In my heart of hearts, I had to admit that I hated sports, and I had no idea how all the football players fitted on the pitch each break; there must have been at least fifty of them. But perhaps only a score of the best players actually kicked the ball, leaving the others to stand around and shout and get as grimy as possible. I don’t know. I never watched them play. I was on the girls’ side, as I said. My choice of location wasn’t going to impress anyone, but I tried to convince myself that there were more important things in life.

And I wasn’t alone. Benny was there, along with Snukke, Balthazar Lindblom, Veikko, Arse-Enok, and a few others.

And Edmund.

After my father had suggested that we might spend the summer together, I realized I didn’t actually know anything about him.

I knew what everyone knew: his father read girlie mags, and he was born with six toes on each foot.

Otherwise, he was a blank page. He was tall and hefty. His glasses always seemed to be missing a lens or a side piece. We’d only been in the same class this past year, and there were rumours that he had a great big model train set and a great big collection of Wild West magazines, but I didn’t know if either was true.

His father was also a screw; that was the connection. He and my father had been working together for the past year, and that’s probably how they had come to discuss their plans for the summer, and one thing must have led to another.

I didn’t exactly have any commitments—except perhaps with Benny, who was out of the picture the whole summer anyway—so after circling each other warily over the course of a few breaktimes, I tested the waters.

‘Hi, Edmund,’ I said.

‘Hi,’ said Edmund.

We were standing by the bike racks under the corrugated metal roof, casually kicking gravel at the girls’ bikes.

‘My dad mentioned something,’ I said.

‘I heard,’ said Edmund.

‘Oh yeah?’ I said.

‘Yep,’ said Edmund.

Then the bell rang. And that was it for a few days. It was a promising start.

Gennesaret wasn’t the name of the lake. It was the name of a house by a lake called Möckeln. It’s still called Möckeln, incidentally.

It was twenty-five kilometres from town and it took more than two hours to get there by bike, but only an hour and a half back. The journey times varied because of Kleva, a punishing hill that rose to 1,300 metres about halfway there.

Möckeln—a large, almost circular brown lake—was surrounded by a number of villages, but it was dominated by forest-fringed beaches. Gennesaret sat in solitary splendour on a pine-clad point and was part of my mother’s inheritance. A two-storey tumbledown wooden shack with no comforts other than a roof over your head and fresh lake water ten metres away. The ice usually took the jetty out every winter, and there was an outboard motor for the rowing boat that had lain in pieces in a shed since I was born.

My dying mother wasn’t the sole owner of this house. There was an Aunt Rigmor who had inherited half of it, but she wasn’t of sound mind and therefore couldn’t lay claim to it.

Rigmor’s tragic condition was the result of an accident that took place during one of the first summers of the war. The story had as firm a place in our family history as the Fall does in the Bible: she had collided with an elk; but what gave the story its mythological air was the fact that she was riding a bicycle at the time. Aunt Rigmor, that is, not the elk. She and a friend had been on a cycling holiday in Småland, and while freewheeling down one of the hills in the uplands she’d charged right into a magnificent twelve-pointer and then straight through the doors of the notorious Dingle asylum on the West Coast.

Never to be discharged, it seemed. I had only seen pictures of her and she didn’t resemble Mum in the slightest. She looked more like a seal, actually, but with glasses and no moustache. Fitting for someone in Dingle.

If my tragic aunt hadn’t been in the picture in the first place, it’s likely that my parents wouldn’t have held on to Gennesaret. For some reason, they never seemed to like it out there.

It wasn’t cosy. Maybe that was it. Or maybe it was because my mother never learned how to swim. The lake was deep. In parts. Certainly beyond our neck of land.

Whatever the case, that May I had a hard time picturing how the summer would unfold. Or how things would be with Henry and Emmy. I couldn’t think about Emmy without picturing her breasts. Covered by clothing, but still. And I couldn’t picture her breasts without getting a boner. It was what it was.

The thought of what my brother would get up to with Emmy Kaskel wasn’t easy to cope with either. Gennesaret wasn’t a big house.

And on top of all that, there was Edmund. I had no idea how things would play out.

But sod it, I thought. Only time will tell.

Ewa Kaludis began work at Stava School on a Thursday. We’d just had double woodwork and I’d comprehensively ruined the magazine rack I’d been working on for the past seven months. Our carpentry teacher Gustav wasn’t happy about it, but it felt good. Whether it was sewing or woodwork, I didn’t like arts and crafts; they never turned out quite the way you thought they would, and they always took bloody ages.

As usual, I was hanging out around the bike shed together with Benny and Arse-Enok, waiting for the end of break, when she appeared on the street.

I’d like to say that I saw her first, but both Benny and Arse-Enok are equally sure that they did. It doesn’t really matter; the point is that she arrived. I realized she must have passed the football pitch first, because within a few seconds the girls’ side was chock-a-block with people gawking. Swarms of filthy football players.

‘Bloody hell,’ said Benny. His mouth was so wide open that it looked as if he was at the dentist waiting for Dr. Slaktarsson to start drilling.

‘It’s Kim Novak,’ said Arse-Enok.

As for me, I said nothing. Under normal circumstances, I wasn’t one to comment for the sake of it, but at this moment I was dumbstruck. It was like in a film. But better. The woman who came roaring in on her moped really did look like Kim Novak. Big wheat-blond hair, tied back with a foxy red hairband. Dark, foxy sunglasses and a full, foxy mouth that made me weak in the knees. She wore slim black slacks, a thin black top that hugged her breasts and a red-and-black-checked Swanson shirt, unbuttoned and billowing in the wind.

‘Holy bloody hell, what a fox,’ said Balthazar Lindblom.

‘It’s a Puch,’ said Arse-Enok. ‘Bloody hell, Kim Novak is rolling in to our schoolyard on a Puch. Kiss me, stupid.’

With that, Arse-Enok fainted. He suffered from some sort of mild epilepsy that knocked him out on occasion. It came as no surprise that this proved to be too much for him.

Kim Novak switched off the Puch. She straddled it for a moment with her feet on the gravel, smiling and taking in the 108 students standing as still as statues in the playground. Then she climbed off, elegantly flipped out the kick-stand, took a flat briefcase from the rack, and marched right through the petrified crowd and into the school.

When she was out of sight, I noticed Edmund was standing beside me. Nearly shoulder to shoulder, though he was a bit taller.

When he spoke, his voice was thick with emotion.

‘That’s what I call a mature woman.’

I nodded, thinking of his dad’s girlie mags. I reckoned he knew what he was talking about.

Within two hours, we’d got to the bottom of it. Those who kept to the football-side of the school had long known that Bertil ‘Berra’ Albertsson was moving to town; we might have worked it out as well if we’d given some thought to what we’d read in the local news. Berra was a handball legend who had competed in over 150 international matches. It was said that his shots were so hard that goalies died when they were hit in the head. After twelve seasons in the All-Swedish and national teams, he was going to wind things down by becoming a player-coach for our town’s handball team, with the aim of taking it to the top of the league. Even someone like Veikko knew what this meant, and we’d all read about it in Kurren a few weeks ago. Super-Berra was going to move into one of the newly built houses over in Ångermanland, and he was taking up his post as vice president of parks on the first of July.

What wasn’t in the papers was that he was engaged to Kim Novak, and that her name was actually Ewa Kaludis.

And that she’d be standing in for hopeless old Eleonora Sintring, who had broken her femur while spring-boarding over a plinth during Housewives’ Gymnastics earlier that month.

The day after Ewa Kaludis arrived, several football players passed around a volunteer sign-up sheet that you could add your name to if you were willing to break Sintring’s other leg when she came back to work. The idea was that all the willing participants would then draw straws to see who would do the deed.

By the time Benny and I wrote our names down, the list was already several pages long.

The next Saturday I bumped into Edmund in the library.

‘Do you come here often?’ I asked.

‘Sometimes,’ said Edmund. ‘Quite often, actually. I read a lot.’

It might have been true. I came here once a month at most, so I wasn’t surprised that we hadn’t run into each other here before. After all, Edmund was relatively new in town.

‘What do you like to read?’ I asked.

‘Crime,’ he answered without hesitation. ‘Stagge and Quentin and Carter Dickson.’

I nodded. I hadn’t heard of any of them.

‘Jules Verne, too,’ he added after a pause.

‘Jules Verne is damn good,’ I said.

‘Damn good,’ said Edmund.

We stood around avoiding each other’s eyes.

‘What about the summer?’ he then asked.

‘What about it?’ I said.

‘With that place,’ Edmund said. ‘Your house.’

I couldn’t see where he was going with this.

‘Huh?’ I said.

He removed his glasses and adjusted the tape that held them together. This time he seemed to have broken them at the bridge.

‘Shit,’ he said.

I didn’t answer. There was a long silence.

‘Can I come or not?’ he finally said.

‘Can I?’ I said. ‘What do you mean?’

He sighed.

‘Well, shit, you’re the one who gets to decide if I can come with you,’ he said.

And then the penny dropped. Suddenly I felt ashamed. Goosebumps prickled my spine.

‘Too damn right you can,’ I said.

Edmund put his glasses on.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Of course I am,’ I said. The goosebumps vanished. There was a pause.

‘Cool,’ he said then, with the same thick voice he’d used in the playground. ‘Umm, do you prefer Märklin or Fleischman trains?’

3

Henry, my brother, was a beanpole. Everyone said so.

He was handsome, too; at least that’s what women said. Personally, I didn’t have an eye for men’s looks at the time, but he did remind me of Ricky Nelson, and I assumed that was a good thing.

Or Rick, as he was called as of the previous year.

Henry smoked Lucky Strikes. He pulled them out of the breast pocket of his white nylon shirt with a gesture that indicated he had been working hard, goddammit, and it was time to regroup with a smoke.

The year before our mother ended up on her deathbed, he’d bought his first car—the family’s first car, in fact: a black VW Beetle that he drove around in when he was reporting from the countryside. He’d bought a camera, too, so he could take pictures of accidents and the ‘victims’ of his interviews. I was under the impression that things were going well with the freelancing.

Our father used to say so: ‘He’s getting along well, our Henry.’

I didn’t really know what was meant by the term ‘freelance’. Henry only seemed to be writing for Kurren, but that word was intertwined with the others. Lucky Strike. Beat. Freelance. He’d christened the VW Beetle ‘Killer’.

The next Sunday morning, we were sitting in the kitchen.

‘Hey, Erik.’

‘Yes, Henry?’

Killer was parked out on Idrottsgatan. He’d lit a Lucky and was slurping the lukewarm dregs of the coffee Dad had left behind before he took the bus to the hospital.

‘We’re mucking in together this summer.’

‘That’s what I hear.’

He took a drag.

‘It’s probably the best thing for you.’

I nodded and looked out of the window. The sun was shining brightly. On a day like this, you could swim in Möckeln.

‘This situation with Mum … it’s horrible,’ said Henry.

‘Definitely,’ I said.

With his elbows still perched the table, he leaned back a bit and looked out at the sunshine.

‘Nice day.’

I nodded.

‘We could go for a spin and check the place out.’

‘Sure,’ I said.

‘Are you up for it?’

‘I don’t have anything else to do,’ I said.

Henry and I did some sorting out in Gennesaret that Sunday. We tidied up and prepared for the summer. We dragged all the mattresses and pillows and blankets on to the lawn so the sun could draw out the winter’s damp. We aired the house and swept the floors. Upstairs and down. There wasn’t really that much to do. On the ground floor there were two rooms and a small kitchen with a basin that drained into a dry well, a refrigerator and a stove. To get to the top floor you walked up a stairway on the gable wall. Two rooms in a row. A slanted roof. When the sun was out, it was scorching up there.

We also had a swim. The jetty was in its usual spot at the southern end of the point. Henry said he’d turn it into a floating dock this year. I nodded and said that it was a damn good idea.

But we’ll need better planks, Henry said.

We sunbathed on the mattresses and chatted. Well, actually, we smoked. Henry gave me two Luckys and swore he’d wallop me if I told Dad.

I had no intention of saying anything anyway. We drove home in the middle of the afternoon, during the hottest part of the day. Henry had a football game to watch that night. We brought both propane tanks with us, the one for the stove and the one for the refrigerator, so we could get them refilled in time for the holidays.

Overall, it was a good Sunday, and I thought it might turn out to be a bearable summer, after all.

Difficult, but bearable.

I was more interested in Edmund’s dad’s magazines than I was in Edmund’s Fleischmann, but I didn’t let on.

Edmund’s room was around eight square metres in size and the fibreboard sheet holding the railway took up about six of them. All in all it was well organized. He slept on a bed under the sheet, where he also had a lamp, a bookshelf and a few drawers with clothes. I didn’t see any Wild West magazines.

‘Should we rebuild it?’ said Edmund.

‘Okay,’ I said.

We rearranged the whole landscape in two hours, drove the train around, and orchestrated some nifty crashes until we grew bored.

‘Building it up is the most fun,’ said Edmund. ‘After that, it just sits there.’

‘Agreed,’ I said.

‘One of my cousins gave it to me,’ said Edmund. ‘He got married and his wife wouldn’t let him keep it.’

‘Well,’ I said. ‘That’s how the cookie crumbles.’

‘You have to choose your old lady carefully,’ said Edmund. ‘Should we go to the kitchen and have a Pommac?’

We had a Pommac in Edmund’s kitchen and I wanted to ask him about the girlie mags and about him having twelve toes instead of ten, but I never quite found the right moment.

Instead, we cycled home to Idrottsgatan and had an old apple juice. I took Edmund into the woods, too, and showed him the culvert. He thought it was dead cool—at least, that’s what he said. Then he realized that he was half an hour late for dinner, and we both went home.

Stava School’s staffroom was on the girls’ end of the third floor. It featured a sizable balcony, the only one on the building, and as summer approached the teachers often sat up there under colourful parasols, drinking coffee and smoking. We never actually saw them from the playground, but we heard them arguing and laughing and we could see their clouds of smoke billowing.

During Ewa Kaludis’s brief sojourn at the school, the behaviour on the balcony had changed quite a bit. People had started to stand while smoking instead of sitting. They leaned over the railing and stared vacantly across the playground. She was the first to do that, and of course the studs crowded around her, puffing away and grinning.

Stensjöö, the deputy head teacher, Håkansson the Horse. Brylle.

‘Check out bloody Brylle,’ said Benny. ‘He’s giving it to her from behind.’

‘Rubbish,’ said Balthazar Lindblom. ‘They wouldn’t dare. Look but don’t touch, right? If they even brushed up against her, Super-Berra would come down here and beat them up.’

‘Too right,’ said Veikko. ‘He’d just knock their heads off with a ball. What a geezer.’

The girls’ side was unusually crowded during those days in late May. Quite a few football players seemed to have developed nobler interests, and the bike shed was packed. Ewa Kaludis only taught our class and one other, so most kids had to grab any opportunity they got to gawk at her.

Like during breaks when she was up on the balcony. Kim Novak. Ewa Kaludis. Super-Berra’s super-girl.

I was one of the lucky ones. We’d had the hopeless Sintring in English and Geography before she stumbled over the plinth. Håkansson the Horse had jumped in and covered for her for a few weeks, but now Ewa Kaludis had been inflicted on us. With only three weeks until the summer holidays. It was pure torment.

Sweet torment.

She didn’t have to teach us. It wasn’t necessary. We worked like dogs anyway. Whenever she entered the classroom, we sat in rapt silence. She would smile and her eyes twinkled. It gave us all the chills. Then she would sit down on the teacher’s desk, cross one leg over the other and tell us to keep working on one page or another. Her voice reminded me of a purring cat.

We worked diligently. Ewa Kaludis either sat on her desk, sparkling, or walked around swivelling her hips as she moved between the desks. If you raised your hand, she’d almost always stand behind you, a little off to the side. When she leaned forward, her breasts would rest against your shoulder. Or, rather, one of her breasts would. It seemed that the boys were always in need of help, and the air in the classroom was heavy with her perfume and with youthful, suppressed desire.

I didn’t really know what the girls thought of Ewa Kaludis, because I never talked to them, but I reckoned that they benefited from her presence as well. In their own female way. But I could be wrong. Maybe they were green with envy.

Once when I raised my hand and she came over to help, I felt her breast brush against both my shoulder and my cheek and I almost fainted. I began to black out, and I thought that if I died right then, it would be a happy death.

She noticed, I think, because she put her hand on my arm and asked me how I was feeling. Of course, that only made matters worse, but then I bit my tongue and things became clearer.

‘I’m not feeling very well,’ I said. ‘I think I’m getting my period.’

I have no idea why I said that, but Ewa Kaludis just laughed. Benny, who was sitting next to me and was the only other person who heard my brilliant remark, said he’d never bloody heard anything like it.

‘Fucking hell, Erik. You’ll be sitting pretty after that. You can count on it.’

I wasn’t sure that he was right, but mostly I was relieved that she didn’t get angry.

‘Let’s wait a moment,’ my father said. ‘They’re not quite done with their rounds.’

I nodded, hugging the bag filled with grapes from Pressbyrån, the corner shop, wrinkling it even more.

‘Don’t crush the grapes,’ my father said.

‘I won’t,’ I said.

We sat in silence on the green benches. Nurses whizzed by and smiled benignly at us.

‘The rounds always take time,’ said my father. ‘They have a lot on.’

‘I know.’

‘You have time to go comb your hair. There’s a loo over there in the corner.’

I went and combed my hair with my new steel comb. I had broken off five of the teeth from the slim end so I could pick the locks on the loos at the railway station. It didn’t work, but that wasn’t the point. The important thing was that I had a steel comb and it had those teeth missing. If you were a girls-sider and didn’t have a steel comb, you were worth less than a burst bicycle tube. It was what it was.

‘We can go in soon,’ said my father when I came back out.

‘I know,’ I said. ‘But there’s no rush.’

‘You’re right about that,’ said my father.

She tried to hug me, but I caressed her arm instead, which was just as good. My father sat to her right, and I to her left.

‘We brought some grapes,’ said my father.

‘Lovely,’ said my mother.

I put the Pressbyrån bag on top of the yellow hospital blanket.

‘How’s school?’ asked my mother.

‘Good,’ I said.

‘You’re taking the day off?’

‘Yes.’

She peered into the bag and then closed it again.

‘And how are things at home?’

‘No problems there,’ I said. ‘Dad burns the gravy sometimes, but he’s getting better every day.’

My mother smiled and, as if that were very taxing, she closed her eyes. I looked at her. Her face was greyish-blue and her hair looked like wan grass.

‘No problems,’ I repeated. ‘Is there a loo here?’

‘Of course,’ said my mother in a tired voice. ‘It’s out in the corridor.’

I nodded and walked out. I tried to shit to no avail for twenty-five minutes, and then I went back in.

My mother and father were sitting very close to each other, whispering. They fell silent when they noticed me come in. I sat on the chair to her left.

‘Are you going to Gennesaret soon?’ my mother asked.

‘Yes, we are,’ I said. ‘Henry and I have already been over and put things in order.’

‘I’m glad that Emmy and Henry are taking care of you.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Henry’s getting along well,’ my father said.

There was a pause.

‘It was nice of you to visit,’ said my mother.

‘Oh, it’s no bother,’ I said.

‘I think we’ll get going now,’ said my father. ‘So we can catch the quarter-past bus.’

‘Do,’ said my mother. ‘I don’t need anything here.’

‘I’ll come by tomorrow after work,’ said my father.

‘No need,’ said my mother.

I got up and patted her on the forearm and left.

I took out the Colonel Darkin books and counted them. Yes, right. Six of them. Six black waxed-paper notebooks with forty-eight pages in each. Five of the notebooks were finished; the sixth was almost done and dusted.

I stuffed the completed adventures back into the plastic bag and pushed them far inside my underwear drawer. It wasn’t an ideal hiding place; I had often thought of finding something better—maybe I could bury them in a bag out in the forest. Further along in the dry ditch: they would be as safe as houses there.

But I hadn’t got around to it. Of course, the underwear drawer was much safer now that my mother was in hospital. My father wasn’t the one who rooted around in my things. He hardly ever came into my room at all.

I’d created Colonel Darkin about two years ago. Linda-Britt, my fat buck-toothed cousin, had given me one of those notebooks as a birthday present because she thought I should keep a diary. She told me she kept one herself and found it very enriching.

There weren’t even any lines in the book, which was strange since she wanted me to write in it. So I used a ruler and divided each page up like a comic book, four panels per side, all on the right hand side of the page, forty-eight parts; and with that I was on my way with Colonel Darkin and the Golden Gang. It was an adventure story set between London, Askersund and the Wild West, and it contained everything you could ask for from double-crossing and incorruptible honour to razor-sharp dialogue.

‘You have exactly one second to give me an answer, Mr. Frege, my time is valuable.’

‘That’s a mighty fine body you have there, Miss Carlson. Do you want to keep it?’

‘By the antlers of a moose, Nessie, you forgot to spike the tea with rum.’

Colonel Darkin himself was a scarred sleuth who’d retreated to his log cabin in the mountains, and only poked his head out when the world needed him. His busty blonde niece was his sidekick, and she held sway over the opposite sex. I named her Vera Lane, and from her very first panel, I was in love.

At the moment, she was locked away in an attic tower belonging to a mad scientist called Finckelberg. He had just roared off into town in his Ferrari to buy petrol so he could set her on fire. One hundred kilometres in the distance, Darkin was speeding toward the tower on his motorcycle, a BSA 300 LT with diamond spokes. I had to make sure he reached her before the flames began to lap at her lovely body; but I only had eight pages left in the notebook, and I was rubbish at drawing fire.

I knew perfectly well that I wasn’t a particularly talented comic-book artist, but I felt a certain responsibility to the characters I’d created. If I didn’t write about them and keep drawing them, they would just sit there in the underwear drawer like forgotten marionettes.

Sometimes it felt like a chore. But for the most part—especially when I was on a roll—it was one of the most meaningful things that I did during my entire childhood. Perhaps it felt that way because those were the only times that I managed to leave the troubles of the world behind.

I’d never shown them to another living soul. And I’d never told anyone about Colonel Darkin.

It was that kind of hobby.

I opened an apple juice, took two large gulps. I thought for a while.

‘Goddammit!’ I wrote in Colonel Darkin’s speech bubble. ‘I should’ve known there’d be a catch.’