The Swimmer (2 page)

With his back to the window, he sat down in his chair, moving away two books on the privatization of state functions and human rights. Soon, if all went as planned, he too would be the proud author of a book on the same subject.
The Privatization of War
. That was the title of his dissertation. He’d written about half of it.

What he’d written so far was actually quite traditional. It probably contained more fieldwork than the usual doctoral thesis in law. But that was the idea: something modern, interdisciplinary. He’d interviewed fifty employees of various American and British companies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Companies who performed functions that used to be carried out by armies, everything from transport and supply to different types of guard duty and even actual combat.

Initially he’d hoped for a scoop, an Abu Ghraib or a My Lai. To be the academic who revealed the great, terrible crimes. And his background had been an advantage, he knew that. But he hadn’t discovered anything spectacular. Just done a good enough job of surveying and cataloging the companies and the rules to publish an article in the
European Journal of International Law
and a summary in
Dagens Nyheter
, Sweden’s largest daily. And after that there came an unexpected interview with CNN in Kabul, which led to invitations to international conferences and symposiums. It wasn’t a scoop, but it was the sweet, sweet taste of imminent success.

Until the message came, that is.

Mahmoud lifted a fifty-page-thick stack of papers from his desk and sighed: his latest chapter. Already the first page was covered with comments scribbled in red. His army reserve officer turned academic adviser saw through any attempt at taking shortcuts with the material. Lysander, with his gray suits and French cigarettes, was a legend at the faculty and Mahmoud had feared him already when he was a student. No less so now, when he was essentially his boss. Mahmoud felt his heart sink and put down the stack. E-mails first.

The old computer grumbled when Mahmoud tried to open up his e-mail program, as if protesting against working on a Sunday. The department’s hardware was far from new. But that was a status symbol. You didn’t come to this department for its modern facilities. You came for the opposite: five hundred years of tradition.

Mahmoud glanced at the December darkness outside his window. His office might be small, but it had one of the best views in Uppsala. In the foreground was the Fyris river and the house Ingmar Bergman used in
Fanny and Alexander
. What was it called? The Academy Mill? Behind it, the way the cathedral and the castle were lit, they looked almost ghostly in all of their immaculate academic high bourgeoisie.

Finally the computer gave in and allowed Mahmoud to access his messages. Only one new e-mail, with no subject. Not surprising, since he’d checked his e-mail only fifteen minutes ago in the library. He was about to delete it as spam, when he saw the return address. [email protected].

He felt his heart begin to pound. This was the second message he’d received from that address. The first came just after his most recent trip to Afghanistan, and it was the reason for his reluctant paranoia over the last few weeks.

The message had been brief, in Swedish, and obviously sent by someone who was on the ground in Afghanistan:

Shammosh,

I saw you on CNN a few days ago. Looks like you’re real serious these days. Can we meet in Kabul? I have information that’s of interest to us both. Be careful, you’re being watched.

Determination, courage, and endurance.

That intimate tone. ‘Determination, courage, and endurance.’ Familiar words from another time. It was obviously someone who knew him.

And the ending, ‘You’re being watched’. Mahmoud had dismissed it. Laughed at it. It had to be from a friend. Someone was just joking around. Soon he’d get a new message: ‘LOL! Gotcha!’ There were aspects of his background that were unique within his current social circles, and sometimes that was the source of jokes among his new friends. But nothing else arrived. He slowly became more aware of his surroundings. Just to be on the safe side. Old routines and processes reactivating, taking over his system. Methods once practiced until automatic. It surprised him that they were still there, latent, waiting.

And then that very evening, he’d seen it. An ordinary Volvo V70. Bureaucrat gray. Parked under an unlit streetlight in front of his small studio apartment in the Luthagen part of town. And later that week, he saw it again while coming out of the campus gym after his weekly basketball game. It had been enough for him to memorize the registration number without even actively thinking about it.

He turned toward the computer and opened the new message. Would the joke be revealed now? He’d never admit to the jokester that he’d been somewhat affected by it.

The message was in Swedish:

Shammosh,

I’ll contact you in Brussels. We have to meet.

Determination, courage, and endurance.

Mahmoud felt his heart pound even harder. Surely only his adviser knew that he’d accepted an invitation to speak at a conference organized by the International Crisis Group a week from Thursday. Maybe it was still a joke after all? The Volvo was just in his imagination? Still… Somewhere inside he felt a familiar sense of excitement, a small, barely perceptible surge of adrenaline.

He shook his head. Perhaps he should just wait and see if someone approached him in Brussels. But he had one more thing to do before he left the office, a message he had to write. Someone who’d been waiting a long time to hear from him.

Klara Walldéen had appeared in his life suddenly and from a completely unexpected direction. One day she was just there with her arms around him, with her head on his shoulder, with her hands in his ever-longer hair. It had been such a tumultuous period in his life. He’d been empty and confused, exhausted and sleepless. Utterly, utterly alone. And then, one day, she was just there in the doorway of his bleak, unfurnished apartment.

‘I’ve seen you at lectures,’ she had said. ‘You’re the only one who looks even lonelier than I feel. So I followed you. Crazy, right?’

Then, without saying another word, she’d stepped over his threshold and laid her loneliness down next to his. And Mahmoud left his loneliness there, until they began to merge, until they grew together. Until they were not lonely anymore. It was a relief that they often didn’t even need to talk. That they could just lie there on his Spartan mattress or in Klara’s narrow, hard bed on Rackarberget listening to her worn-out portable record player play one of those crackling soul singles she bought at flea markets.

Not a day went by that he didn’t think about it. About how they used to breathe as lightly as they could to avoid injuring the fragile membrane that enveloped them, how their heartbeats would harmonize to the rhythm of Prince Phillip Mitchell’s ‘I’m So Happy.’

Still, he’d known from the beginning it wasn’t going to work out. That there was something inside him that wasn’t enough, something inconsistent with what he and Klara were creating. Something he kept to himself, deep down in the most hidden corner of his heart. When Klara had been admitted to a master’s program at the London School of Economics at the end of law school, they solemnly swore that they’d commute, that they’d make it work, that distance was irrelevant to a relationship as strong as theirs. But Mahmoud had already known it was the end. Inside of him the light he’d struggled so long to stamp out blazed with a new, resolute flame.

He would never forget Klara’s eyes as they stood at the airport, as he stammered through his memorized speech. That he thought it might be good to take a break. They’d be a burden to one another. They shouldn’t see this as an ending, but as an opportunity. All of which were good reasons, but not the truth. She said nothing. Not a single word. And she never looked away. When he was finished, or when words finally failed him, all love, all tenderness had left her eyes. She looked at him with a contempt so merciless that tears began to stream down his cheeks. Then she picked up her bags and walked to the check-in desk without turning around. That was three years ago. He hadn’t spoken to her since.

Mahmoud bent over his computer and opened a new message. He drummed on the keyboard. It was the only thing he’d thought about since he’d been invited to that conference in Brussels: he should contact Klara. But he hadn’t. He hadn’t been able to bring himself to write to her.

‘Come on, man!’ he said out loud to himself. ‘Come on!’

It took him almost a half hour to write a message of only five lines. It took yet another fifteen minutes to delete whatever might be construed as ambiguity, desperation, or references to a history that he no longer had access to. Finally, he took a deep breath and hit ‘send’.

The first thing he saw when he left the building twenty minutes later was the gray Volvo, sitting in a dimly lit parking lot down by the river. When he unlocked his bike, he heard the engine start, saw the headlights turn on, a ghostly cone of light lit up the old metal railing along the Fyris river. For the first time in a very long time, he actually felt afraid.

Sankt Anna’s Outer Archipelago, Sweden

The silence that followed was almost as deafening as the two ear-splitting explosions of the shotgun. The only sounds were ducks quacking on their way over the bay and the dog struggling against its leash, whimpering weakly. Anxiously. Everything was gray. Cliffs and sea. Bare trees and bushes. The wind rustled in the faded reeds at the water’s edge.

‘You missed,’ said the old man holding the binoculars.

‘Not a chance,’ replied the young woman at his side. She was still resting the shotgun against her shoulder. The cherrywood of its butt felt cool against her cheek.

‘Maybe the first round, but no way I missed on the second,’ she said. ‘Let Albert go, and then we’ll see.’

The old man bent forward and unhooked the leash from the spaniel’s collar. The dog bolted with a shrill bark, out through the reeds and up toward the cliffs in the same direction as the gun was shot.

‘You missed both times. Believe me. You’ve gone soft, Klara.’

He shook his head in disappointment. The shadow of a smile flashed across the young woman’s lips.

‘When I come out here you always say that, Grandpa. You say I missed. That I’ve gone soft.’

She mimicked the old man’s worried expression.

‘And every time Albert comes back with our Sunday dinner in his mouth.’

The man shook his head.

‘I just say what I see in the binoculars, that’s all,’ he muttered.

He took a thermos and two cups out of the worn backpack leaning against a rock at his feet.

‘A cup of coffee, and then we go home and wake up Grandma,’ he said.

They heard a short bark followed by wild splashing down by the shore. Klara smiled and patted her grandfather on the cheek.

‘Gone soft, huh? Was that what you said?’

The man winked one of his ice blue eyes at her, poured a cup of coffee, and handed it to her. Fumbling with his other hand, he took a small flask out of a hidden pocket.

‘Would you like a little bit of lightning to celebrate your triumph, big game hunter?’ he said.

‘What? You brought booze? Do you know what time it is? You know I’m going to have to tell Grandma about this.’

Klara shook her head sternly but let her grandfather pour a little drop of moonshine into her cup. Before she could take a sip, her phone started ringing deep inside one of the pockets of her oilskin coat. She sighed and handed the cup to her grandfather.

‘You can’t hide from the devil,’ her grandfather said with a crooked smile.

Klara fished out her BlackBerry. She wasn’t surprised to see the name Eva-Karin flash across the display. Her boss. Social Democratic dinosaur and member of the European Parliament: Eva-Karin Boman.

‘Ugg,’ she moaned before answering.

‘Hello, Eva-Karin,’ she said in a voice an octave higher and considerably faster than usual.

‘Klara, darling, how lucky I am to catch you! Things are really getting tight, if you know what I mean. Glennys just called me and asked what our position was on the IT security report. And I haven’t even had time to open it yet, as you know. There’s just been so much going on with…’

Her voice disappeared for a moment. Klara threw a quick glance at her watch. Just before nine. Eva-Karin was probably on the express train to Arlanda airport. Klara’s gaze swept over the gray, windblown cliffs. It felt absurd to talk to Eva-Karin out here in the archipelago. Eva-Karin’s voice felt like an intruder into her only refuge.

‘…so if you could get a summary to me by—what time shall we say? By five o’clock today, okay? So I can look through it before the meeting tomorrow? You’ll have plenty of time, right? You’re an angel, darling.’

‘Of course,’ Klara said. ‘Actually, Eva-Karin, maybe you don’t remember, but I’m in Sweden right now and won’t be flying back to Brussels until two this afternoon. I’m not sure I can have that to you by five o’clock—’

‘Klara, of course I know you’re in Sweden,’ Eva-Karin interrupted in a voice that brooked no further discussion. ‘But you can work while you’re traveling, can’t you? I mean, for goodness sake, you’ve already had the whole weekend free, right?’

Klara squatted down in the wet moss and closed her eyes. It was Sunday morning. She’d only had Saturday free. It was as if all zest for life was being sucked out of her.

‘Klara? Klara? Are you still there?’

Eva-Karin’s voice sounded in her ear.

Klara cleared her throat and opened her eyes. She took a deep breath and tensed her voice, forcing it to sound alert, forward, and willing to serve.

‘Absolutely, Eva-Karin,’ she said. ‘No problem. I’ll e-mail the summary before five o’clock tonight.’

Half an hour later, Klara Walldéen was back in the room she grew up in, surrounded by the pink wallpaper with the floral trim that she’d begged for when she was ten years old. The smooth, worn floorboards beneath her bare feet. Outside her window the Baltic Sea glimmered through the bare trees. She could see the whitecaps on the sea. A storm would be blowing in before the day was over. They had to hurry up. Her childhood friend Bo Bengtsson, who lived farther out in the bay, was going to bring her in to Norrköping by boat and car. Then she’d take the train to the airport and a flight down to her regular life in Brussels.