A summer with Kim Novak (14 page)

I don’t know if
Kurren
’s regular readers believed him. I certainly had my doubts.

Henry moved to Göteborg in early November and on
3
December, my mother died. My father had been at her side during her last ten days, but I couldn’t cope.

The funeral was a week later in Kumla’s church. For the first time in my life, I wore a suit. About twenty of us followed my mother to her final resting place: Henry, my father and I sat on the first pew in the church; behind us sat relatives, a few colleagues, Benny’s mother and father and Mr. Wester.

I’d cried the whole night long, and in the church, I didn’t have any tears left.

III

The following February, my father applied for a job at AB Slotts, and at Easter we moved to Uppsala. I was fourteen going on fifteen when I left my childhood home and arrived in the city of mustard and education. I started at Cathedral School among the children of senior lecturers and doctors, let my hair grow, got spots and a gramophone.

The first year we lived in a cramped two-room flat behind Östra station, and then we moved to Glimmervägen in Eriksberg, a newly built residential area. We had a two-bedroom apartment with a view of cliffs and forest from the balcony. My father livened up; his shifts at the mustard factory were difficult, but the atmosphere was more relaxed there than at the prison. He made a number of new friends at work, started playing bridge once a week and gingerly pursued a friendship with a widow in Salabacke. As for me, I soon fell in love with a dark-haired girl who lived in the building next to ours, and in the summer I turned sixteen I lost my virginity on a blanket in Hågadalen while listening to ‘The House of the Rising Sun’ on the transistor radio she’d brought along. I’m not sure if she was losing hers then too, but she said she was.

Henry continued living in Göteborg and was given increasingly secure employment at
Göteborgs-Posten
. Two years and two months after Berra Albertsson’s murder, his debut novel
Coagulated Love
was published by Norstedts. It was well received by both
Svenska Dagbladet
and
Dagens Nyheter
, and his own paper gave it a decent review, but Henry never wrote another book. I read
Coagulated Love
over the Christmas holidays that same year and once again a few years later, but I didn’t get much out of it on either occasion. When my father died in
1976
I found his signed copy of the book among his possessions; all of the pages had been sliced open, but there was a grocery receipt used as a bookmark between pages eighteen and nineteen.

My aunt, the victim of the moose-based tragedy, died in the Dingle madhouse a few weeks before I graduated from college; we managed to sell Gennesaret at a decent price, and when I started studying philosophy in the autumn, I was able to move into my own one-and-a-half-room flat on Geijersgatan. By this time, my virginity was but a distant memory. Even though I didn’t look as much like Rick Nelson as my brother, I still had good luck with the opposite sex; female students came and went and then there was one who stayed.

She was called Ellinor and by the start of the eighties we’d managed to bring three children into the world. At that point Geijersgatan was also but a memory. We bought a house in Norby among the bourgeoisie and the boxwood; I taught history and philosophy at a college, and when Ellinor wasn’t at home raising our children, she was employed as a lab assistant at a pharmaceutical company out in the Boländer area.

One May evening in the mid-eighties
Expressen
ran a two-page article about unsolved murders in Sweden, with a focus on cases where the statute of limitations was running out in a year or so.

One of these was Bertil Albertsson’s murder. We were sitting out in the garden, Ellinor and I, the lilacs were about to bloom, and for the first time I told her what had happened at Gennesaret. When I got going, I realized just how much it fascinated my wife, and I strove to dredge up as many memories as I could out of the well of time and forgetting. Leaving out the odd detail, of course—even though we had a completely open and uninhibited relationship, I still felt embarrassed when I recalled how Edmund and I had masturbated by the window while Henry and Ewa Kaludis were making love inside. For instance.

When I finished talking, my wife asked: ‘And Edmund? How did it go for Edmund?’

I shrugged.

‘I don’t have the faintest idea, actually.’

My wife gave me a bewildered look and wrinkled her forehead in a way that usually signalled that I had exposed her to some sort of deep-seated male incomprehensibility. Again.

‘My God,’ she said. ‘You mean you lost touch, just like that?’

‘My mother died,’ I pointed out. ‘We moved.’

My wife took the newspaper and read through the summary of the murder again. Then she leaned back in the lounger and thought a while.

‘We’ll look him up,’ she said. ‘We’ll look him up and invite him to dinner.’

‘Like hell we will,’ I said.

To my surprise, getting a hold of Edmund Wester was no problem. Personally, I didn’t lift a finger in the search, but in early June, just before graduation, Ellinor told me that she had found him and that he was going to come and eat crayfish with us in August.

‘You went behind my back,’ I said. ‘Admit it.’

‘Of course, my eagle,’ my wife answered. ‘Sometimes foolish men need to be circumvented.’

‘Where is he living?’ I asked. ‘How did you reach him?’

‘It wasn’t hard,’ my wife explained. ‘He’s a vicar in Ånge.’

I couldn’t help but smile. Norrland again.

‘He sounded friendly and genuinely happy to hear from me. He thought it was about time that you met up again. You should have plenty to talk about, he said.’

‘Really?’ I said. ‘Well, don’t get your hopes up.’

‘He’s coming out this way in August anyhow,’ said my wife. ‘It’ll be interesting to meet him, whatever happens. You know, I’ve never met anyone who knew you as a child.’

‘You’ve met my father,’ I pointed out. ‘And Henry.’

My wife waved her index finger dismissively.

‘They don’t count,’ she said. ‘Your father is dead. And I’ve seen your brother three times.’

She had a point. My father had been dead for almost a decade by now, and I hadn’t been in contact with Henry at all since he emigrated to Uruguay at the end of the seventies. The most recent Christmas card had arrived four years ago on Maundy Thursday.

During the first week of the summer holidays that year I spent most of my time reflecting on my childhood, and one warm, fragrant night I dreamed of Ewa Kaludis for the first time in twenty years. Oddly, it wasn’t an erotic dream; it was filled with images and impressions from the day after she’d been beaten up and had sat in the sun lounger massaging my shoulders.

Anyway, I thought it was strange when I woke up. And a bit of a shame, but you don’t get to choose your dreams, now do you?

Only a few weeks before Edmund’s visit did I realize that if he’d joined the priesthood he must have studied in Uppsala. I didn’t leave that university town for a long time after I first set foot in it, so we would have been near each other as adults, Edmund and I. At least for a few years. Had we ever crossed paths in town—when I was a student, perhaps? Why wouldn’t we have recognized each other? I brought this up with my wife, but she said that a person can change a lot between the ages of fourteen and twenty and that it was the rule rather than the exception that you missed people in a crowd.

When Edmund Wester turned up I saw that she was dead right.

The gargantuan man with a dense beard standing on our steps when I opened the door reminded me as much of fourteen-year-old Edmund as a duck reminds me of a sparrow. I did some rough sums in my head and concluded that if his weight gain had followed a steady trajectory then he’d have put on about five kilos a year since I’d last seen him at school in Kumla. It wasn’t just the beard that hid the clerical collar, but his double chins. His worn corduroy suit had room for another three to four years of growth at the same rate.

‘Erik Wassman, I presume?’ he said, hiding the bouquet for my wife behind his back.

‘Edmund,’ I said. ‘You haven’t changed one bit.’

The evening was more pleasant than I’d dared hope. In each of our professions, we’d learned to make both frivolous and serious small talk, and the crayfish were truly exquisite, since my wife had made her signature marinade. Our children behaved quite well and went to bed without much of a fuss. We drank beer and wine and schnapps and cognac, and any disappointment Ellinor might have felt about our reluctance to discuss the summer in Gennesaret eventually ebbed away.

It’s not that we didn’t mention Berra Albertsson and the murder, but both Edmund and I changed the subject when she brought it up. I remember how we’d kept the same distance when it was all going on, and realized how remarkably easy it was to pick up where you had left off with some people, even after such a long time.

If my wife hadn’t raised the subject of a priest’s vow of silence and crises of conscience, it would have been a wholly successful night. Unfortunately we were already in deep when I noticed that Edmund was troubled by the question.

We were well on to the coffee and cognac too, so maybe it wasn’t odd that I had a momentary lapse in concentration.

‘I’ve never understood it,’ said my wife. ‘What gives a priest the right to keep quiet about things that normal people can’t? Things they’d be punished for if
they
kept them quiet?’

‘It’s not that simple,’ said Edmund.

‘It couldn’t be any simpler,’ said my wife. ‘What kind of God keeps murderers and miscreants under his wing?’

‘There is more than one law,’ said Edmund. ‘And more than one judge.’

‘Isn’t our legal system built on Christian ethics?’ she insisted. ‘Isn’t the West built on a Christian system of values? Isn’t that clause a construct that’s ready for the scrap heap?’

Edmund sat quietly and scratched his beard and suddenly looked sombre. I prepared a change of topic, but wasn’t quick enough.

‘There are cases,’ he said. ‘There will always be situations where a person needs to get something off their chest … We could never impose a vow of silence on everyone, but there have to be people who have taken one. There have to be options. Someone who listens; someone to whom you can turn and ask for his ear when you need to the most. Where your words are taken and sealed.’

‘I don’t understand it,’ said my wife.

‘It’s a difficult question,’ Edmund repeated. ‘There have been moments when I’ve had my doubts.’

Soon thereafter he took his leave. We promised to keep in touch, but it was clear to all three of us that this was mostly a concession to custom.

After he left, my wife and I sat in our armchairs for a while.

‘It has something to do with the Gennesaret murder,’ she said suddenly. She poured a finger of cognac for each of us.

‘What do you mean?’ I said. ‘No more cognac for me.’

‘The crisis of conscience, of course. His discomfort with the question. It’s related to the murder of Berra Albertsson twenty years ago.’

‘Twenty-three,’ I said. ‘Oh, nonsense.’

‘It has nothing to do with being part of the clergy.’

‘How much have you had to drink?’ I asked. ‘Of course something’s happened to him. Someone confessed to a crime and he feels he can’t go to the police. Every priest is bound to face that conflict at some point. It wasn’t particularly polite of you to bring it up.’

My wife sipped her cognac pensively.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘It was rude of me, but I still think I’m right. He’s very nice, anyway.’

‘I liked him then,’ I said.

For about a week I was preoccupied by what had been said and what was left unspoken between Edmund, my wife and me. I finally called him in Ånge and got straight to the point.

‘You know what happened that night, don’t you?’

‘Whatever do you mean?’ Edmund asked indignantly.

‘I mean, when you went out for a piss, for instance. That wasn’t all, was it?’

There was a pause. The line crackled and, for a moment, I thought it might be Edmund’s thought processes materializing in the bad connection.

‘I have no reason to discuss this further with you,’ he said finally. ‘But I’d like to ask you the same question, if you don’t mind. Do you know who killed Berra Albertsson?’

‘How should I know?’ I answered crossly. ‘I was asleep, you know that perfectly well.’

We both sat in silence for a while at our ends of the line, and then we hung up.

Perhaps you could describe running into Ewa Kaludis that same autumn as an event that looked like a fantasy.

During a conference about educational materials, I stayed at a hotel in Göteborg for two nights, and if I’d had a hard time recognizing Edmund after several decades, I had no problem recognizing Ewa. No problem at all.

She was standing behind the reception desk when I checked in, and time didn’t seem to have touched her. Same beautiful posture. Same high cheekbones. Same crescent eyes. Her blond hair was now red, a hue that suited her even better—I imagined it was her natural colour. Though she was surely approaching fifty, she was still an astonishing beauty.

At least in my opinion.

‘Dear God.’ The words slipped from me. ‘Ewa Kaludis.’

She looked at the list of reservations.

‘Aha, you’ve arrived,’ she said. ‘Yes, I saw your name.’

Ellinor and I had been unswervingly faithful since we’d been married, but I knew that in less than a minute, I’d crack. It wasn’t just because I wanted to, but because—more importantly—I could tell Ewa wanted it, too. She called into the reception area and ordered a young blonde girl to take her place at the desk; she clearly held some sort of managerial position at the hotel. Then she flipped up the counter and walked over to me.

‘I’ll show you to your room,’ she said. ‘What fun to see you again after all these years.’

We rode the lift up.

‘Do you remember the last thing you said to me that summer?’ she asked when we were in the room.

I nodded.

‘And what you did?’

I nodded again.

‘Do you still have that fourteen-year-old inside of you?’

‘Every single inch of him,’ I answered.

She’d just had her period—and was a bit preoccupied—so on the first night we just talked.

‘I want to thank you for what you did that summer,’ said Ewa. ‘Thank you and Edmund for how you acted afterward and whatnot. There was never really the right moment to say it.’

‘I loved you,’ I explained. ‘I think Edmund loved you, too.’

She smiled.

‘It was Henry who loved me. And I who loved Henry.’