In the Name of Love (19 page)

He was in his stride now and, even though Dan caught some of Lena’s arguments in what he said, it was Anders’s voice, his depth of concern, that dominated.

‘She told Madde that although she was only fifteen when she left home her mother didn’t bother to report her missing. The only refuge she’s ever found was with that old couple out here, her father’s uncle and aunt. They treated her like their own grandchild. And she loved them. The old woman wrote to her wherever she was. Then those Arabs moved in and changed things.’

‘I really don’t—’

‘These people may not be what you think they are, Dan. Just remember that. They have another culture, other ways of getting what they want. Lena was kind to them the first summer she met them here and all the time they were manoeuvring to get her out.’

‘Anders, I don’t know what happened and really it’s none of my business, but they don’t seem to be the manipula­tive kind.’

‘They come from a different world, that’s why you don’t see what they’re doing. Lena’s told Madde the whole story. That nephew or whatever he is tried to rape her as soon as he arrived from France. But they saw to it that Lena got the blame.’

‘I don’t know, I haven’t heard anything about it, but Lena’s lost an inheritance that had been promised to her and she’s sore as hell about it. I understand that. But if there’s a will it’s difficult to see what can be done.’

Anders had raised his coffee mug, about to drink from it, but his hand stopped in mid-air as he looked across the table.

‘You have to search beyond appearances, Dan. Sure, these people’s story would wring anyone’s heart. But Lena’s point is how convenient it is that they were driven out by Muslims. Everyone’s against the Muslims, they’re painted in the papers as violent, merciless, savage.’

‘But these people are here, they—’

‘Dan, don’t forget that Lena is here too. She’s had years of living without a foothold in society. She can’t be forced back to posing nude for second-rate photographers in Gothenburg. Or playing come-hither hostess to businessmen at shoddy exhibitions. It’d kill her, Dan. That farm means everything to her now, it’s her birthright that’s been taken from her. Ask Madde if you don’t believe me. Give Madde a ring and ask her. She’ll tell you exactly the same thing.’

To cover his dismay, Dan shrugged. It wasn’t a gesture that came naturally to him and he felt ill at ease as Anders held out his hands, his eyes on Dan’s, as if to say, Why can’t you understand? But it was Anders who didn’t understand. He knew nothing of what the Selavas family had done to help the old woman keep her farm.

‘I know someone who works on the Migration Board,’ Anders went on, ‘and you should hear some of the tales these people tell. They’ll come with photocopies of exactly the same biographical documents with only the names changed. And you hear the same story a dozen times a month. Down to the kind of clothes the killers were wearing when they attacked the neighbours or the cousins or whatever. I feel sorry for some of these people, the ones with genuinely tragic cases. They need all the help we can give them. But lying is second nature to many of them. It can’t be right that a young Swedish woman like Lena, who is just as penniless as they are, should be cheated out of her inheritance because of a hard-luck story no one can verify.’

Dan knew it was pointless going on and he sought for some way to put an end to the conversation.

‘I agree Lena had a tough childhood,’ he said, repeating Sune Isaksson’s argument, ‘but she’s out of it now. She’s got a future to look forward to with her looks and personality and good friends like you and Madde, friends who will help her. She has everything she needs to create a new life in a city like Stockholm. But the Selavas…’

Anders said nothing more. Dan went with him to his car, promising he’d keep an eye open for a suitable property. Back in the kitchen it struck him that Anders couldn’t have made a more impassioned plea for Lena if she had been his own daughter. Had Kajsa brought out the fatherly instinct in him? Now Madde was somehow involved as well, and that was a plus. Madde wouldn’t hesitate to give Lena the support she needed if she risked falling into the hands of the wrong sort of businessman.

The next day, with the Anders talk fresh in his mind, he ran into Nahrin and Jamala in the forest. Nahrin whirled around, startled at the sound of his approach. Jamala, who had heard nothing, seemed glad to see him. She made a sign, pointing with her thumb and forefinger to her eyes, then her nose and then her mouth. They were looking for something that smelled and was good to eat. ‘Wild spices,’ Dan said. Her grandmother laughed with delight. ‘You learn!’ she told him. Despite the difference in their ages, she and Jamala had the same quick manner, the same wide-apart eyes. The love between them was almost tangible.

Jamala signalled that Dan should come back with them to the farmhouse.

‘She has surprise,’ Nahrin said, ‘something she want to show.’

When he asked what it was and Nahrin had translated Jamala looked at him with reproach. She made a rapid series of gestures.

‘A surprise,’ Nahrin explained, ‘must be surprise. If no what is it?’

All the way back Jamala teased him about it through Nahrin, laughing and telling him to guess, which he did over and over again so that she could triumphantly indicate, ‘
No!
Wrong again!
’ It struck him that she probably knew very few people, if any, outside her family here. He and Sune were probably unique, locals who had befriended them. But whose fault was it if there weren’t more? The Selavas kept very much to themselves. For the most part, local people seemed well-disposed towards them, but still they kept apart.

Before he could think any more about this they had reached the farmhouse. Once inside, Jamala took him by the hand and led him to a storeroom behind the kitchen. Tiny pups, wild with curiosity, tumbled about their shoes as soon as they entered. Jamala gestured to their mother, a spotted mongrel and, taking a notebook with a pencil from her pinafore pocket, she wrote
Kejk
. Dan looked at the honey-coloured dots, big as cherries, on the dog’s fur and read phonetically: ‘Cake?’ Hearing him, the dog happily thumped her tail on the fresh straw that had been laid to cover the floor.

Me not give pupps
, Jamala wrote in approximately spelt Swedish.
Ever
. The choppy gestures of her small hands as she emphasized this made Dan laugh. Emphatically she wrote and underlined,
Ever!

The pups stumbled about them in the semi-dark. One of them, digging its claws into Dan’s skin through his trousers, tried to climb his leg. He picked it up and put it on his shoulder, where it started to lick his jaw.

Cake and all the other pups followed them as they paraded into the kitchen where Dan saw Nahrin’s face soften with amusement.

Using string and a piece of cloth she made a ball and showed Jamala how the pups could play with it. After that she went back to cutting leeks at the table, stopping to watch the antics Jamala led Dan into. More than once he noticed her face bright with laughter at what she could only think of as his inanity.

Later, as he was leaving, Nahrin showed him her kitchen garden. Neat rows of vegetables, then strawberry beds and, closest to the kitchen door, her pride: an area entirely given over to herbs. Some Dan recognized: thyme and dill, parsley, basil, coriander, mint, rosemary. But many others he didn’t. He understood now where the fresh unfamiliar smell of Nahrin’s kitchen came from.

‘Look,’ Nahrin said, showing him a little earthenware pot. ‘Now we plant what we find today.’ She showed him some of the wild vanilla grass they had collected. ‘This Jamala’s first garden. She and I, we make food and put wild herbs in. You come to eat, you see!’

Within a week of his visit Anders rang to say that the last of their belongings had been moved to Stockholm now. The house had been sold. The boat was tied up in the marina near the Furusund landing stage.

‘As soon as Kajsa’s a little bigger let’s all go sailing. I promise not to bring someone for you – at least not without asking your permission first. I should never have arranged that walk. It was Madde’s idea really. She said you couldn’t go on living alone out there. I know it’s not much use inviting you to dinner in Stockholm but as soon as we’ve found a house on the island you’ll have to come – and often. I don’t suppose you’ve heard of anything?’

‘Not yet. I know someone here who’ll tell me the moment anything comes up.’

Anders said he was going into partnership with Lennart Widström to open an art gallery in the Old Town, one that would specialize in the Nordic Light school of Scandinavian paintings from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They’d also act as brokers.

Art broking was something Dan associated with New York, London, Tokyo, places with rich people more interested in investment than art. Anders said that Madeleine’s father knew the right people, people who had famous Swedish and Danish and Norwegian artists on their walls and needed money but didn’t want to broadcast the fact.

‘There’s a lot of discreet business to be done. Lennart will organize the international side. We’re moving ahead.’

‘How are Madeleine and Kajsa?’

‘Great! Really great. You must come to town if only to see them. We even have a guest room. Come and stay for a weekend.’

Madeleine, he said, had already enrolled to finish her Master’s at Stockholm University. She’d be starting after Christmas. Their original plan had been to share care of Kajsa but now he could see they were going to need a nanny while Madeleine was at seminars and conferences.

‘Of course,’ he said to Dan, ‘when things get going I’ll put aside time for Kajsa every week. I still want to share caring for her with Madde.’

Dan didn’t bother telling him it didn’t work that way. You couldn’t book a slot like you did with a barber. Anders was on his way into a new and exciting world. The nanny wouldn’t suffer much encroachment on her routines.

‘Dan,’ Anders was saying, ‘I know this isn’t your kind of thing but a friend of Lennart’s is giving a dinner party this weekend to let people know about the upcoming gallery. Lena’s been invited but she doesn’t want to come. I think she’s pretty low at the moment out there with that aunt of hers and nothing to do. This is a lot to ask but would you consider coming and giving her a lift?’

‘Anders, I wouldn’t know how to behave at a dinner party any longer. All that’s in the past.’

‘That’s what Madde said you’d say. But do you think for Lena’s sake you could do it? I wouldn’t ask if there were anyone else. Madde and Kajsa are with her mother in the country. Her mother’s very ill and Madde doesn’t want to leave her alone. We’re worried about Lena. Madde thinks she badly needs our help before things go too far.’

‘I don’t even know Lennart Widström, let alone his friend.’

‘Don’t worry about that. Lennart remembers you. And the hostess told Madde we could invite some friends of our own. Since Madde’s in the country the invitations are up to me. If you could bring Lena it would really do her a world of good.’

Dan thought he was probably right. He remembered Lena’s kindness to him when he’d rung her doorbell without warning in Stockholm one evening. He told Anders okay, he’d give her a ring and see.

‘Dan, I already have. I took the liberty. She said okay, if you were going she’d go with you.’

When Dan rang Lena to arrange to pick her up, she said, ‘The old banger’s been fixed again – the absolutely last time. She’ll make it as far as your place but the motorway’s out of the question.’

‘You’re sure you want to go?’

‘Of course I am!’ Her voice was too cheerful. He could tell she was faking it.

‘Or are you doing it because Anders told you I needed to get out and meet people?’

There was a brief silence. ‘What does it matter,’ she said. ‘We both need to do something. And Anders badly wants to help. He’s really concerned about you.’

‘Okay. How about coming out here early and we can go for a walk first, maybe have a picnic lunch?’

‘I’d have to change after.’

‘I promise not to look.’

‘One o’clock all right?’

By now his life was going quietly by again, but he still hadn’t got a grip on it. His son was on the other side of the ocean. They rang each other every fortnight or so, but Carlos had a busy life of his own now, staying with Zoë’s family in New York while he prepared for the bar exam. Dan’s friends in Stockholm left him in the peace he had sought. He spent his evenings watching the autumn light give the fields a patina as though of carbonate on old copper and turn the forest boulders a dusty pink. Illusions, of course, but did that make them any less beautiful? Maybe this was enough, the summer splendour and winter bleakness of the island, the knowledge that its people were well-intentioned towards him, a foreigner they knew nothing about except that his wife had died and was buried here. His home was comfortable, his neighbours respected him, his work was going well. Not many people were as lucky.

As dusk settled, the colours weakened, the trees and boulders turned grey. Of course the colours would be back tomorrow, but there’s no stepping into the same river twice, he’d learnt in school, and in the end it doesn’t help to dam the flow, it’s not the same you who steps in.

He stood up abruptly. What a strange contraption the human brain is, he thought with a half-laugh. Anything can jump out of it.

He went out for his evening walk.

Over the late summer and early autumn he had found himself spending more time with Josef Selavas, a naturally courteous man, reserved but never distant. Josef could do nothing to help in the garden because of his damaged back and Dan often went out and kept him company. They talked in a sporadic friendly fashion. Josef’s contact with grief seemed to cut him off from everything except what remained of his family. At times he looked beyond the garden, beyond the meadow, with a fixed sadness that made Dan wonder what he saw out there.

One day Dan met the priest’s wife again. Her dog, a flat-coated retriever, came bounding up in the forest and wagged its tail, standing in Dan’s way, forcing him to stop by lifting its gleaming eyes to his, waiting for them to begin the ritual gestures of head-scratching followed by hand-licking. Once these preliminaries were over the dog rushed off to find a stick for Dan to throw. Behind him a woman’s voice called out, ‘Kairos! Kairos!’