Sail of Stone (6 page)

“She didn’t have a restraining order,” said Aneta. “Unfortunately.”

“As though it would help,” said Lindsten in a muffled voice, with his head lowered.

“He could have been issued a restraining order if Anette had reported him,” said Aneta. “Or someone else. I could have made the decision myself, for the short term. I was prepared to do it now. That’s why I came here.”

He looked up, his eyes still glistening.

“It’s not a concern anymore,” he said, “none of it.”

Suddenly it was as though the father didn’t believe his own words. She heard another thud in the hall, another curse. It was time for her to go. These people had a move to undertake, a departure that would lead to a new era in their lives. She truly hoped that it would be so for the woman whose face she had seen for only three seconds.

“You know someone from there?” asked Johanna Osvald. She looked like she was about to get up. Winter remained standing by the map. “From Inverness?”

“I think so.”

“A colleague? You mean a policeman?”

“Yes. He lives in London but he’s a Scot.”

Winter thought, searched the archives of his memory. There were many corridors. He saw London, an inspector his own age with a Scottish accent, a picture of a beautiful wife and two beautiful children who were twins, the inspector’s face, which perhaps couldn’t be called beautiful, but was probably attractive to one who could judge such things.

The face had an origin. A farm outside of Inverness. That’s what
Steve had said. Winter looked at the map; it was of an impossibly large scale.

“Steve Macdonald,” said Winter. “He’s from there.”

“Do you mean that you could ask him?” said Johanna.

“Yes,” said Winter.

“He could probably check if Dad rented a car?” she said.

“We can do that,” he said. “You can do it yourself.”

“Yes, but if your colleague is from there maybe he knows someone who can … oh … check if it … no, I don’t know.” Now she was standing next to Winter, in front of the map. It seemed as though she didn’t want to see it, didn’t want to see any of the country that had played such a large and tumultuous role in the Osvald family’s lives. And might continue to do so, he thought.

He felt her nearness, heard her breathing. At that second, he thought of how the years go by, a completely banal thought, but true.

“If you want to know more, maybe Steve knows who we should ask,” said Winter, turning toward her.

What am I getting roped into here? he thought. In normal cases, this conversation would have been finished before it started. Now it has almost become a case. An international case.

H
e stood at the summit. The church lay below him. He had prayed there sometimes, in earlier years, prayed to Jesus for his soul. The church was the only thing from the really old days that was still there in Newtown.

When Lord and Lady moved the village in 1836, the church was allowed to remain where it was. It was from the 1300s, after all. That sounded like before all time, before the great sailing voyages. The great discoveries.

Still, what a brutal story it was! Lord and Lady moved the village. They didn’t want it next to the castle.

They didn’t want the railroad next to the castle.

He could see the viaducts down there, clanging in the air from the bite of the wheels. They had to be built down there, far away from Lord and Lady. A superhuman act, but possible.

Lord and Lady were gone now, like so much else here. The sea remained, but even that seemed to pull away, little by little each year. The trawlers ended up farther away during ebb, their shining bellies like jaws in the twilight, as though a school of killer whales had started to attack the city but had gotten stuck in the ebb.

He stood above the docks. There was sulfur in the air. In the air, he thought: What seemed to be physical floated away in the wind.

His hips hurt, more each day. He shouldn’t have walked, but he did. It was his body, after all. This was nothing. He knew what was something. He knew.

When he came there for the first time, the city was the primary harbor for fishing fleets along this part of the coast, south of Moray Firth.

Bigger than Keith, Huntly; even bigger than Buckie.

The Buckie boys are back in town.

He didn’t stay long that time. It was when he still didn’t know who he
was or where he was. That’s how it had been. Like a blindness. He knew now that he had walked and stood and talked then, but he hadn’t been aware of it.

It could make him scream at night. He could be awoken by his own screams and discover that he was sitting straight up in bed in the ice-cold room with his own breath like a white cone before him. The scream was caught in that breath. It was a dreadful feeling, dreadful. His whole throat felt mangled, as though it had been squeezed in an iron grip. What had he screamed? Who had heard him? He had gone out into the street but hadn’t seen any movement behind the black windows in the house on the other side.

No one had heard him.

He had seen the light from the city above, only a few lights.

He had thought of her then, briefly.

He had seen the telephone booth that shone in the fog. It never rang.

He would ask her.

She would do it.

She had done as he’d asked.

Now he was no longer certain.

She had looked at him last time with an expression he didn’t recognize.

He hadn’t asked.

He left the harbor behind him and walked through Seatown. The houses clung to one another, squatting under the viaducts. He walked toward his house through the streets that didn’t have names. This is where the streets have no names, he thought. He often thought in English, almost always.

Sometimes there might be a fragment of the old language, but it was only when he was very upset. There were only two other places where the streets had no names, and those were heaven and hell.

He had been to both places. Now he was traveling between them.

The houses had numbers, apparently without any order. Number seven stood beside number twenty-five, six beside thirty-eight. He lived in the black house, at the southern gables. It was number fourteen. That meant that the house had been the fourteenth one built in Seatown. That was the system here. His was the only black house.

F
redrik Halders lay on the sofa with his feet on its arm. An odd lamp hung from the ceiling above the sofa. Or maybe it was his perspective.

“Have I seen that lamp before?” he asked, pointing up.

“That’s a question you probably have to ask yourself,” said Aneta Djanali from the floor, where she was sitting and leaning over some photographs.

Halders giggled; at least that’s how it sounded to Aneta’s ears.

He tried to turn his head from his supine position, but that was a mistake. His neck would never be the same again. He had taken a blow once when he was being a bigger idiot than usual, and it could have been his last mistake. He would never regain his original bull neck. That was just as well. Everyone knew what happened with bull necks in the end.

“Is it from Africa?” he asked.

“What do you think?” she asked, without looking up.

He studied the underside of the lamp again. It had a pointed base and something else above that was green.

“It’s from Africa,” he said.

“Good, Fredrik.”

He applauded himself. That was called Chinese clapping.

“Can you guess from which country?” He heard Aneta’s voice from the floor. “And to make it harder I want to know what the country was called before what it’s called now.”

“
That
is a tricky question,” he said.

“I realize that.”

She was aware of the level of difficulty. They had talked about her homeland only three times per hour every day since they started working together and since they started to see each other during their free time. Speaking of talking. It was Fredrik who kept on talking about her exotic origins and her wonderful homeland, which he pretended not to be able to find on any map of the world, but which he, under all the talking, kept
close tabs on, just as he actually kept close tabs on most things, under his tough exterior.

“This country’s former name starts with the letter
u,
” she said.

“Uuuuuh …,” he said.

“Yes, that’s a good start,” she said.

“Ukraine,” he said.

“That’s not in Africa,” she said.

“Well, shit.”

“The second letter is
p,
” she said.

“Uuu … Upper Silesia!” he shouted at the ceiling.

“Where’s that?”

“In Africa,” he said.

“Not in my Africa, anyway,” she said.

“Isn’t that a film?” he said. “
My Africa?
”

“To get you on the right track, I can tell you that this country’s name is made up of two words,” she said.

“Uuu … Upper Soppero!”

“One of them is right,” she said.

“Lower Soppero!”

“But it started with
u,
didn’t it?”

“Shit, right.”

“Now I’m done helping you,” she said.

“If we talk about something else maybe I’ll think of it,” said Halders. He propped himself up on his elbow. He could feel it in his neck. “What are those pictures?”

“From last summer,” she said.

“Am I in them?” he asked.

She held up a photo that she’d developed and copied herself. She and Fredrik were standing behind Fredrik’s children, Hannes and Magda. She could see the cord of the shutter cable coming from Hannes’s hand. He looked like he was concentrating, but happy. Everyone looked happy in that photograph.

They looked like a family.

“Where did we take that?” Halders asked from the sofa.

“Guess,” she said.

“Don’t start that again,” he said.

“Do you see the waves behind us?” she asked.

“Yeah, yeah, but which sea is it?”

“The North Sea, of course.”

“The Old North Sea, it roars and rooolls,” said Halders.

“Not that day,” she said. “There wasn’t a single ripple.”

“Do you think an African would dare to jump in the North Sea no matter the season?”

“I will refrain from answering,” she said.

“Have you heard about the African who came to Sweden as an exchange student for a year and went home afterward, and his friends asked him how the weather was up there, and he said that the green winter was okay but the white one was horrible?”

“No, I haven’t heard that one,” said Aneta, “please tell me.”

“Uuuu …,” said Halders.

“I hear you’re still working on the name of that country.”

She looked at the photograph in her hand again. That day had been perfect.
Such a perfect day.
Fredrik had played Lou Reed in the evening. Lou Reed sounded like Fredrik looked.

The perfect family.

She thought suddenly of Anette Lindsten, safe in a secret location, maybe her childhood home or some other secret place.

Somewhere there must be a wedding picture. The perfect day. A light across their faces. Anette and Hans, their origins in nature, linden, stone, rapids, leaves …

Do you take this woman … to love her in sickness and health …

To beat her in sickness and health.

Nature to nature, dust to dust.

“Did you ever want to hit Margareta?” she asked.

Halders’s jaw dropped, it
dropped.

“What the hell kind of question is that?”

“Don’t be so shocked. You know what I was doing yesterday. I’m just trying to imagine how it can happen. How things like that can happen.”

“Jesus, Aneta, this is like a parody of the question ‘Have you stopped beating your wife?’ It’s a question you can’t answer yes or no to.”

“That’s not the question I was asking.”

He didn’t say anything. She looked at him. He was a violent man; she had always seen him as an
intense
man, but in a literal sense. I take down the bad guys literally, as Halders put it. He almost always did. He was a desperate
man, and he wasn’t alone in that. He could control his rage. He walked through life angry, but he could control it. Many others could not.

“There was one time during the divorce,” he said slowly. “Or before. One time, or a few. I would get so angry that I wanted to … wanted to …” He looked straight at Aneta. “Wanted to hit
something,
but there was never never
ever
the slightest risk that it would be her. Never.”

“What was it, then? Or who?”

“Dammit, Aneta, you know me. Not a person … well, some thief once, but you get what I mean. No one close to me. At home.” He started to rub his neck, suddenly, a nervous gesture. “I would bang my fist into a cupboard door. It happened. I kicked a leg off a kitchen chair once.”

“My God.”

“It was a
chair.
”

“My God again.”

He stopped rubbing. She saw that his eyes had taken on a different light, as though they had turned inward. It was as though he, all of him, had turned inward.

“And at the same time, I knew it was my fault. Do you understand? That I was the cause of my own rage, or whatever it’s called. That I was the biggest reason that we had ended up in that situation. That I was the one who was splitting up my family, was just about to do it. And that made me so desperate that I lashed out.” He seemed to snap back from inside himself and now he was looking at her. “There’s a paradox, huh? You hit your way out of your own responsibility.”

She didn’t answer.

“But those few times I’m talking about, when I hit something, it was dead things.”

Dead things, she thought. There’s another expression.

She had seen dead things. Halders had seen dead things. It was part of the job. Part of the
routine
of the job. Routine: What was a body that no longer had a life?

Calm down, Aneta. This evening isn’t part of the routine. There’s a man lying on your sofa and you’re sitting on the floor with pictures of summer happiness and soon you’ll both be sitting at the kitchen table eating and drinking something good. There’s a light in here, in this room. You don’t need to drag in the shadows right now. Kontômé is lighting up the room, lighting the way.