The Lonely Ones

  HÅKAN NESSER

  THE LONELY ONES

  Translated from the Swedish by

  Sarah Death

  Contents

  Prologue, September 1958

  ONE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  TWO

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  THREE

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  FOUR

  65

  66

  67

  68

  69

  70

  71

  72

  Epilogue, September 1958

  The town of Kymlinge and its environs do not exist on the map and certain military and academic circumstances have been changed to fulfil the requirements of decency. That aside, this book is in many other respects a truthful story.

  ‘Can we speak of a human being’s innermost core?’

  asked Regener. ‘Is there any point?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ replied Marr. ‘Perhaps.’

  Erik Steinbeck, The Gardener’s Horizons

  Prologue, September 1958

  He awoke to the sound of voices arguing.

  It wasn’t Mother or Father. They never argued. You don’t get arguments in the Holy Family, do you now? Father would say and laugh in that serious way that left you not knowing if he was joking or really meant it.

  It wasn’t Vivianne arguing, either, or any other living person. No, the voices were inside his own head.

  Do it, said one. It would serve them right. They’re not fair on you.

  Don’t do it, said the other. You’ll get a thrashing. He’s bound to notice.

  It was odd that you could be woken by voices that didn’t really exist, he thought. He looked at the clock. It was only half past six. Twenty minutes before he normally got up. That was odd, too. He hardly ever woke of his own accord. Mother generally had to wake him, and sometimes twice.

  It was because it was a special morning, of course.

  Yes, that was it. And because of what he’d been thinking last night. Before he went to sleep, that thing the voices were arguing about. He had no doubt dreamt about it, too – he must have, though he couldn’t remember having done so. He lay there for a while and tried to get back into the same sleep, but it didn’t work.

  He sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed. I’ll do it, he thought. It’s quite possible nothing at all will happen, but I’m so angry. It isn’t fair and, when something isn’t fair, you’ve got to do something about it, just as Father says.

  Don’t do it, that other voice told him. He’s bound to notice, and how on earth will you be able to explain it then?

  He won’t notice, said the first voice. Don’t be such a bloody coward. You’ll regret it and feel ashamed that you were too scared, if you don’t. It’s such a little thing, after all.

  Far from it, said the other voice. You’ll regret it if you do it. And it’s not a little thing.

  But it wasn’t so clearly audible any more, the voice that wanted to stop him. Not much more than a whisper, really. He got up and went over to the chair where his clothes were hanging. He put his hand in the pocket of the light-blue cardigan to check.

  Yes, the box of pastilles was still there. As easy as pie, he thought. It would be as easy as pie, and the likelihood of him getting caught was less than a fart in a storm. That was another thing Father used to say. Other people said a needle in a haystack, but Father always said a fart in a storm.

  The other voice tried to whimper something but it was so faint that he couldn’t hear it any longer. No more than you could hear – well, yes, and he couldn’t resist a giggle about it – a fart in a storm.

  He went into the bathroom and realized his whole body was tingling. The decision felt like a warm ball inside his head.

  ONE

  1

  Rickard Berglund was in many respects a rational young man, but he had an unusual aversion to Tuesdays.

  This hadn’t always been the case. The rationality had always been there, certainly, but in the closing years of the 1950s – before he had taken the step up from Stava School to junior secondary in Töreboda – Tuesdays had been just the opposite. They used to have a certain glow about them, at least in the late winter and the spring. The reason was a simple one, or a dual one really: Tuesday was the day his Donald Duck & Co. comic plopped into the mailbox, and it was also the day his mother served Shrove Tuesday buns in hot milk when he came home for his lunch break.

  This combination, sitting down to a big bun, freshly dusted with icing sugar and just keeping afloat in a big bowl of milk with sugar and cinnamon, and with a still-unread comic – it seemed virtually untouched by human hand – placed to the left of his bowl on the red-and-white-checked oilcloth . . . well, the simple awareness of this impending delight often made him run the 400 metres between school and the white house in Fimbulgatan.

  It was only later that Tuesdays assumed a different complexion. Above all in the years 1963 and 1964, when he had changed schools and grown out of Donald Duck, and his father Josef was in the sanatorium at Adolfshyttan before he died.

  Because that was the day of the week he and his mum Ethel took the bus and went to visit him. The bus was blue, had worn seats and four times out of five it was driven by the vastly overweight father of Benny Persson – his tormentor at Stava School. It was dark by the time they got back to Fimbulgatan, he hadn’t done his homework and his mother’s eyes were red with the tears she had surreptitiously shed on the journey home.

  But his father didn’t die on a Tuesday, it happened in the night between a Friday and a Saturday. The funeral was held quietly, about a week later. It was November 1964 and it rained all day long.

  Perhaps it wasn’t even those sanatorium visits that lay at the heart of his antipathy to Tuesdays, but it was hard to know. From an early age Rickard Berglund had a very definite conception of how the various days of the week appeared. Their colours, for example, and their temperaments – even though it would take a number of years for him to understand what the word ‘temperament’ meant. So Saturdays were black but warm, Sundays red of course, just like on the calendar, Mondays were dark blue and safe . . . while Tuesdays always presented a hard surface, greyish-white, cold and dismissive, and working your way into them sometimes felt pretty much like biting down on the porcelain of a handbasin.

  Then came Wednesday, a dark, dark blue, which especially towards evening often contained a promise of both prosperity and warmth, Thursday with its sky-blue sense of freedom and then white Friday – but the whiteness of Friday was of a completely different kind from the icy chill of Tues
days.

  He didn’t know where he had got this clear image of the week’s wheel – or how he could even know it was a wheel – and he had sometimes wondered if other people perceived it in the same way as he did. But he had never, at least not until his twentieth year, discussed the matter with anyone. Possibly for fear it would be interpreted as some defect in his own head.

  The Tuesday phobia had persisted, at any event. In his years at upper secondary it was always with a sense of gloom that he awoke in his lodgings on Östra Järnvägsgatan on that day of the week, well aware that he could expect nothing good to come out of the next fifteen to sixteen hours. Neither in his school work nor in relations with his classmates. The nature of Tuesdays was hostile and as hard as enamel, and all you could do was try to get through it. Steel yourself and survive.

  Perhaps in the long run it would prove useful in some way.

  But today wasn’t Tuesday. It was Monday. The date was 9 June 1969 and the railbus from Enköping stopped with an extended screech and a jolt at platform four at Uppsala Central. It was twenty past eleven in the morning. Rickard Berglund picked up his green canvas bag and stepped out into the sunshine on the platform.

  He stood stock still for a few seconds, as if trying to preserve the moment and imprint it on his mind – this long-anticipated moment when his feet first touched the ground of this oft-serenaded seat of learning. The student duets, the folk songs, the male-voice choir. It was all so grand.

  Although, as he stared down at those feet and their immediate surroundings, he could unfortunately not detect anything particularly special. They could have been any old feet on a platform in Herrljunga or Eslöv or some other godforsaken backwater in the kingdom of Sweden. He gave a reluctant sigh. Then he shrugged, joined the flow of people heading straight through the station building and took possession of the city.

  At least that was how he expressed it to himself. Here I am, taking possession of the city. It was a way of keeping his anxiety at bay; thinking in italics meant taking charge of reality. He knew it was something he’d got from a book he’d read sometime in upper secondary, but he couldn’t remember the title or the author’s name. But anyway, it was a simple and effective trick: thoughts in italics overcome the hostility of your surroundings.

  Out on the station forecourt he stopped again. He looked at the overblown and slightly garish sculpture in the centre of the paved circle and thought it was probably famous. There were so many famous things in a university town like Uppsala. Buildings, monuments, historic places, and in good time he would discover them all, calmly and purposefully; there was no hurry.

  He walked on, straight ahead, crossed one big, busy street and a couple of smaller ones, and a few minutes later he was down by the river. The Fyris. He crossed it via a wooden bridge, saw the cathedral reaching into the sky from the heart of the old town, rising away to his right, nodded happily to himself and set off towards them.

  Everyone needs a big plan and a little one. The big one is for how you intend getting through life, the other one is for getting you through the day.

  This wasn’t his own italicized phrase, unfortunately, but came from Dr Grundenius. Of all the teachers of varying degrees of oddity that Rickard Berglund had encountered in his three years at Vadsbog upper secondary, Grundenius was the one who had made the strongest impression on him. Domineering and unpredictable, he was sometimes downright moody, but always interesting to listen to. Often both surprising and keen-sighted in his observations and questions. Religion and philosophy. A reputation for being stingy with his marks, but Rickard had got a very good final grade in both subjects; it was hard to know if he had really been worth it. Hard to judge your own worth.

  At any rate, he had a big plan and a little one. As he tramped along by the river towards the cathedral, its pointed spires appearing to brush the cloud-tufted sky, the big plan surfaced for inspection in his head. Life. Rickard Emmanuel Berglund’s time on earth, as envisaged and calculated.

  Theology.

  That was the foundation stone. The land he had been set to till, or something along those lines. It wasn’t a decision he had taken at any specific moment; it was more as if the conclusion had gradually seeped into him, inexorably and as if decreed by fate, over a long succession of years. Perhaps even with his mother’s milk; because there was a God, he had known that fact all his conscious life, but with the death of his father Josef he had also realized it wasn’t just a question of the safe and benevolent bedtime-prayer God of his childhood, but more complicated than that. Considerably more complicated.

  Worth enquiring into.

  Josef Berglund had been a pastor in the branch of the free church known as Aaron’s Brothers. It was an early offshoot of the Missionary Society, but the collective prayers of its parishioners in their shepherd’s last difficult days had not lessened his suffering one jot, nor that of his wife and son, and this was what had prompted Rickard Berglund’s reappraisal of his less-than-nuanced image of God.

  Why doesn’t He hear our prayers?

  Or if He does hear them, why doesn’t He grant our humble wishes? Why does He let the faithful suffer?

  On the rare occasions when he had raised these points with his mother Ethel, she had unerringly declared that it was not for mortals to have any conception of His deeper purposes and motivations. Not at all. For mortals’ simplistic interpretations of good and evil were always doomed to come to naught in the broader perspective of the hereafter. Not even such an eventuality as the suffering and death of a simple, God-fearing free-church pastor are we able to weigh and evaluate with any certainty.

  Something like that, and more in the same vein. But Rickard Berglund wanted to have some conception. He demanded comprehension, even as his mother insisted that such an ambition amounted to spiritual arrogance, and this was generally where their conversations ended. He couldn’t challenge her on that point; if what was needed was a battle and a wrestling match with God, then that was an enterprise he would have to undertake on his own. Rickard and Our Lord? The meaning of his life?

  He came up in front of the dark doorway. The open space before the cathedral was liberally bathed in sunshine, but the heavy doors into the sanctuary were carefully closed and lay in shadow. He decided not to go in – or, rather, had already decided on the train, when he was drawing up his plan for the day. It was too early; he wanted to study the exterior first, its majestic, slightly threatening architecture, and locate the Deanery that apparently housed the Faculty of Theology – it must be that big square building to the south of the cathedral . . . or was it west? He was already unsure of the points of the compass . . . and the much more unassuming church building beyond it must be Holy Trinity, of course. The ‘peasants’ church’, as the local people once named it. Rickard Berglund had studied the most important landmarks of the city in the illustrated volume Uppsala Then and Now, which his mother had given him for his twentieth birthday in April. She was as keen on his plan for life as he was, and he sometimes started to wonder about the way these future prospects were accepted unopposed, as a matter of course. Was it really that simple? Oughtn’t there to have been some alternatives available for him to discount, at least?

  He went on past the Deanery, round the peasants’ church and took a short flight of steps down to Drottninggatan. Up to his right he could see the imposing university library, and higher up on the ridge there were glimpses of the castle between the leafy trees. On the slope up to the castle the bird-cherry and lilac were still in bloom after a late and hesitant spring, and he thought how lovely it looked. He crossed Drottninggatan, continued along a lower road, Nedre Slottsgatan, and ended up at a cafe that looked out over a rectangular artificial pond. Mallards, a pair of swans and a few other indeterminate water fowl were floating around in languid, early-summer mood, or that was the impression they conveyed, anyway. You couldn’t really tell, of course. He ordered a pot of coffee and a cheese-and-salami sandwich – this, too, was part of the plan, he remembered, and f
elt a sense of satisfaction at having completed these opening steps so simply and elegantly. He hadn’t needed to ask the way even once, and he’d managed to incorporate almost everything he had set himself: the River Fyris. The cathedral and the Faculty of Theology. The old university building Gustavianum, and its successor. The university library, Carolina Rediviva, the castle from a distance, and a cafe with outdoor seating. Incorporated.

  It was still only a quarter past twelve. He had a bite of sandwich, savoured his coffee and fished his call-up papers out of the inner pocket of his bag. He hesitated for a second before pulling out the thick book, too, and setting it gently on the table, once he had carefully checked the surface was clean. Selected Works. Søren Kierkegaard. He had read about forty pages on the train, and found himself engaging in the same reflective process as at the bus stop back home in Hova. He assumed that in Hova there was not a single person who had read Kierkegaard; in Uppsala how many could there be? A hundred? A thousand?

  And the rest of them? Schopenhauer. Nietzsche. Kant. Not forgetting those new philosophers . . . Althusser, Marcuse and those other names that escaped him. It was a pleasing thought that in this city it could very well happen that someone at a neighbouring table in a cafe just like this one, or in the queue at the grocer’s, would be familiar with both Hegel and Sartre.

  Rickard Berglund had a canon, a reading list of all the authors he was intending to acquaint himself with over the coming year, before devoting himself to theology in earnest. Maybe he would even dip into Marx and Lenin, just to orientate himself a little. Nothing human should be alien to you, Grundenius had tried to impress on him . . . nor a good deal that is inhuman, either. If you don’t study your opponent, you’ll never be able to defeat him.

  Rickard didn’t believe in communism. America’s war in Vietnam was no doubt unjust in many ways, but that wasn’t the whole truth of it. Stalin had more lives on his conscience than Hitler, you only had to look in the history books; and Rickard had an almost physical aversion to protest marches. Frenzied crowds, slogans and simplistic demagoguery. It was the same with the hippie movement and pop music and all the long-haired freedom fighters. All this somehow wasn’t his concern. Rickard Berglund hoped, or rather presumed, that he would find the antidote to this scourge of the age, in an environment that lived and breathed classical education and tradition. Alma Mater, jerum jerum jerum, o quae mutatio rerum . . . All in good time, he thought, all in good time I shall get a foothold in this town.