Let the Old Dreams Die (29 page)

Enough.

Out out out have to get out

She yelled, ‘Josef! I can’t, I don’t want to, I…’

The corpse’s hand shot out and grabbed her between the legs, squeezing hard. She tried to pull away in a panic, but lost her balance and fell flat on the floor.

‘Josef, it…’

She couldn’t get another word out, because at that moment she felt a wet, icy chill spreading across her belly, her thighs, and in a second it passed through her trousers and carried on moving inwards.

Josef hurled himself forward and tore away the corpse’s hand, but it was too late. Death was already inside. Anna’s womb turned to ice. A cloud of living cold occupied her belly, which swelled up to double its normal size as she screamed with pain, and because she knew, knew what was happening.

The balance was restored.

‘Anna, Anna, Anna…’

The flight of the seabirds. Through the rushing of their wings his voice was the last thing she heard before the wings became visible,
came closer, filled her field of vision and everything became white darkness.

With shaking hands Josef managed to pull off her trousers, her underpants without any idea of what he was going to do; there was just one clear thought pulsating through his head:
Got to get it out, got to get rid of it…

Perhaps he would have done something horrendous in his confusion if Death hadn’t left her at that point. Anna’s belly collapsed as what had been inside it came pouring out. A cascade of pink fluid gushed out onto the floor in a fan shape, soaking his knees, and soon he was sitting like an island in a pink sea as the fluid continued to pour out.

In the end the foetus came too.

It was about the size of a tern, already fully human and attached by the umbilical cord to the placenta that followed it, a dark red clump of pure life. Something that had been life.

Josef shuffled backwards on his knees, banged into the coffee table, couldn’t take his eyes off what would have been his child. Its foetal sac had burst with the pressure, it had drowned in salt water.

He screamed until his vocal cords were on fire. He kept on screaming when his scream was nothing more than a hoarse bark, when he saw the blood from Anna’s womb growing darker as Death removed itself. In the end there was only a foetus lying in a pool of blood. Two bodies on the floor. And a pool of water.

The pool of water retracted, forming itself into a thin, transparent rope.

Josef stopped screaming and stood there open-mouthed.

It could be outside…

The rope began to move towards the door. He laughed, but no sound came; he began to stamp on the rope. It split it two, ran across his foot, kept on going. He laughed, sobbed, kept on stamping,
jumping on the rope, but it simply slipped away, reformed.

When it reached the door it slid out between the hinges.

He tried to grab it. It slipped out of his hands. He opened the door, ran after it down towards the sea. Just as the front end of the rope reached the water and slid in, he stumbled on the treacherous rocks and fell forwards.

He heard a crunching noise inside his head as some of his teeth smashed, and his mouth filled with blood.

He lay face down on the rocks until the dawn came.

What else is there to tell?

Anna survived. After a few days in hospital her physical recovery was complete. She didn’t even need a D and C. Death had done its job meticulously. She would never be able to have children.

The case featured in the papers for a week or so, and Josef got four years for contributing to the death of another person. A psychiatrist who had been working with Kaxe was able to confirm that he had strong suicidal tendencies, and that Josef’s version of events was not at all unlikely.

There was no mention of Death, which lives in the sea.

Anna visited Josef in prison a few times, but their relationship was untenable after what had happened. She said he shouldn’t blame himself, that it had been her own choice, but it didn’t help much. Josef was lost to the world.

After a couple of years Anna started painting again, taking up the thread she had begun in the days before the thing that had happened, but without the comic element. Things went well for her. She was never happy again, but she kept going.

When Josef came out of prison he went back to the house. Spent a few months sorting it out.

In prison he had had plenty of time to consider his impressions from the hours spent in the company of Death. In spite of the fact that he had striven for eternal life, it came as a relief when he realised that the immortality given to him through the pact applied only to death by water.

He would age, like other people. He could take his own life if he wanted to. But he would never drown.

The years passed. Josef was unable to return to any kind of work. At the age of thirty-eight he was an old man, sitting in his cottage and living on benefits, drinking as much as he could.

The locals avoided him. They knew who he was, what he’d done. Perhaps their attitude might have mellowed over the years if he hadn’t also stopped washing, stopped eating more than was absolutely necessary to stay alive.

One evening as he sat there, mercifully drunk, staring out at the lighthouse sending its flashes of light across the water as it had always done, he realised with a bitter laugh that he was becoming exactly like Kaxe.

Life lost more and more of its meaning. He was incapable of enjoying anything any longer. Even the booze didn’t help. In this desert the importance of his only oasis grew and grew, the reason why things had turned out like this, the only gift he had been given. The fact that he couldn’t drown.

One October day he fetched an anchor with a chain from the boathouse, heaved it into the boat and set off. He sailed to the same spot where he had sunk Kaxe. There he fastened the chain tightly around his waist with a lockable split pin so that he would be able to open it again once he was convinced.

When he threw himself into the water with the anchor, he felt a kind of happiness.

The water was cold. He quickly sank three metres below the surface, stopped. Floated. His ears popped and he equalised the pressure by holding his nose and breathing out with his lips pressed together. Above him he could see the silhouette of the underside of the boat, highlighted against the sky. Thought he had been stupid not to fasten himself to the boat as well. It would drift away.

He floated on the spot. After a minute or so he was no longer able to hold his breath. He opened his mouth and breathed in.

Whatever might come, let it come.

The water poured into his lungs, chilling him completely in just a few seconds. A moment of panic, the panic that always clings to life. But nothing happened. He was no longer breathing, but he was fully conscious.

He floated there for a long time. Saw the boat drift out of sight. Saw the sky begin to darken. He no longer had any feeling anywhere, he was merely a floating consciousness, a thinking jellyfish.

The full significance of this did not become clear to him until he had had enough. When he began to long for the cottage in spite of everything, for a few leisurely glasses of schnapps to thaw his body out slowly. For TV.

He had no feeling. He couldn’t move.

Therefore he couldn’t open the split pin.

A few hours into the night, as the billowing stars shone through the surface of the water just three metres above him, his mind gave up. A soft, sparkling madness closed around him.

But he was alive. And he would remain alive.

Forever.

(For Mia. Still.)

I want to tell you a story about a great love.

Unfortunately the story isn’t about me, but I am part of it, and now it’s all over I want to bear witness for Stefan and Karin.

Bear witness
. That sounds a bit grand, I know. Perhaps I am creating exaggerated expectations about a story that is not in any way sensational, but miracles are so few and far between in this world that you have to do your best to make the most of them when they do appear.

I regard the love between Stefan and Karin as a miracle, and it is to this miracle that I want to bear witness. You can call it an everyday miracle or a conventional one, I don’t care. Through getting to know them I was privileged to be part of something that goes beyond our earthbound constraints. Which makes it a miracle. That’s all.

First of all, a little about me. Have patience.

I am part of the original population of Blackeberg. The cement was still drying when my parents and I moved to Sigrid Undsets gata in 1951. I was seven years old at the time, and all I really remember is that we had to trudge all the way down to Islandstorget to catch the tram if we wanted to go into town. The subway came the following year. I followed the building of the station’s ticket hall, designed by none other than Peter Celsing, which is still a source of pride for many of us old Blackeberg residents.

I mention this because I actually spent a considerable portion of my life in this very station. In 1969 I began work as a ticket collector, and I stayed there until I retired two years ago. So apart from odd periods spent filling in for colleagues who were off sick from other stations along the green line, I have spent thirty-nine years of my working life inside Celsing’s creation.

There are plenty of stories I could tell, and it’s not that I haven’t thought about doing so. I enjoy writing, and a modest little autobiography of a ticket collector might well find an audience. But this is not the appropriate forum. I just wanted to tell you a little bit about myself, so that you know who’s telling the story. The anecdotes can wait.

I’ve heard it said that I am a person who lacks ambition. In a way this is true, if by ‘ambition’ you mean a desire to climb the career ladder or the staircase of status or whatever you want to call it. But ambition can be so many things. My ambition, for example, has been to live a quiet, dignified life, and I believe I have succeeded.

I would probably have fitted in much better in Athens about two thousand five hundred years ago. I would have made an excellent Stoic, and much of the attitude to life I have been able to understand from the writings of Plato fits me like a glove. Perhaps I would have been regarded as a wise man in those days. Nowadays I tend to be regarded as a bore. That’s life, as Vonnegut says.

I have dedicated my life to selling and punching tickets, and to reading. There’s plenty of time to read when you work in the ticket office, particularly when you work nights as I have often done. Dostoevsky and Beckett are probably my favourites because both of them, although in very different ways, attempt to reach a point of—

Sorry, there I go again. ‘Stillness’, I was going to say, but this is not the place to expand on my literary preferences. Enough about me, and over to Stefan and Karin.

Oh, but there must be just one more little diversion. Perhaps after all I was a little too ambitious in the conventional sense when I said I’d like to write my autobiography. I seem to find it difficult to organise my material. Oh well. You’ll just have to put up with it, because I need to say a few words about Oskar Eriksson.

I don’t know if you remember the case, but it attracted a great deal of attention and an enormous amount was written about it at the time, particularly out here to the west of the city. It’s twenty-eight years ago now, and thank goodness nothing so tragic and violent has happened in Blackeberg since then.

A lunatic in the guise of a vampire killed three children in the old swimming baths—which is now a pre-school—and then abducted this Oskar Eriksson. The newspapers wallowed in what had happened for weeks and weeks, and many of those who were around at the time can barely hear the word ‘Blackeberg’ without thinking of vampires and mass murder. What do you think of when I say ‘Sjöbo’? Integration and tolerance? No, I thought not. Places acquire a stigma, which then sits there like a nail stuck in your foot for years on end.

A lunatic in the guise of a vampire
, I wrote, because I wanted to remind you of the image that was prevalent. However, I have had good reason to revise the account of what took place, but we’ll get to that eventually.

What does this have to do with Stefan and Karin?

Well, the reason they moved to Blackeberg was that Karin was a police officer, and one of those responsible for the investigation into what was known as ‘the Swimming Pool Massacre in Blackeberg’. To be more specific, she was actually involved in the section working on Oskar Eriksson’s disappearance. Her enquiries meant that she spent a great deal of time in Blackeberg and she became very fond of the place, in spite of everything.

When she and her husband Stefan were looking for somewhere new to live a couple of years after the investigation had been put on the back burner, they came to Blackeberg, and so it was that they ended up moving into an apartment two doors down from me on Holbergsgatan in June 1987.

Under normal circumstances people come and go in the apartment blocks near me without my taking any notice at all. Even though I’ve lived here a long time, I’m not one of those who keeps an eye on things. But that summer I spent a lot of time on my balcony—I was ploughing through Proust’s
In Search of Lost Time
—and I noticed the new arrivals for one very simple reason: they held hands with each other.