A summer with Kim Novak Read online

  I wondered about the page that had been left in the typewriter, the one I’d read and committed to memory a few weeks earlier. The one about the body and the gravel road and the summer night. I leafed through the stack of paper three times without finding it. I tried to remember it word for word, but so much had happened since, it had fallen out of my head.

  I only remembered that it had been beautiful. Beautiful, surprising and a little frightening.

  The next day we brought both the Facit and the typescript to Henry, because he’d asked for them. And a new packet of typing paper. You could tell he was eager for us to leave so he could start writing.

  I thought it was a good sign that he wanted to sit down and clatter on again.

  That in spite of it all, there was hope.

  One evening a few days later I ran into Ewa Kaludis. I had been at Törner’s and bought the sausage special because my father didn’t have the energy to cook, and I could have sworn that she was there waiting for me. It was right by Nilsson’s Cycle and Sport on the corner of Mossbanegatan and Östra Drottninggatan, and as far as I knew she had no other reason to be standing there. No apparent reason, anyway.

  ‘Hi, Erik,’ she said.

  ‘Hi,’ I said, perking up.

  She was wearing the Swanson shirt and those black slacks again. And the hairband. Her bruises were barely visible and I was struck once again by how terribly beautiful she was.

  So beautiful it hurt. It was as if I had somehow managed to forget this.

  ‘Where are you going?’ she asked.

  ‘Home,’ I said.

  ‘Are you in a rush or can we chat? We can walk your way.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I’m in no hurry.’

  We started to walk along Mossbanegatan. Even though I was only fourteen years old I was as tall as she was, and I got it into my head that from a distance people might think we were a couple out for a stroll. A young man and his girlfriend. My head was spinning with this thought and because she was walking so close to me.

  And because we’d gone quite a way before she said anything. Almost all the way to Snukke’s old asbestos-ridden villa.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ she then said.

  ‘Of what?’ I asked.

  ‘Of visiting Henry at the police station.’

  ‘Why?’ I said. ‘It’s not bad; I go every day.’

  ‘It’s not that. I wonder what the police would make of it.’

  ‘I see,’ I said. ‘Well, I don’t know what they’re thinking.’

  ‘Neither do I,’ said Ewa. ‘And I don’t want them to get the wrong idea.’

  I wondered what idea they’d get that they didn’t already have. What could make this worse?

  But I didn’t ask what she meant.

  ‘Would you give him this letter for me?’ she asked when we’d almost reached Karlesson’s shop.

  I took the sealed envelope, which had neither a name nor an address written on it. All that distinguished it was that it was light blue.

  Then we didn’t say much else, but before we parted I plucked up the courage. An incredible courage. I don’t know where it came from.

  I stood before Ewa Kaludis. Our faces were no more than twenty centimetres apart. I reached out both of my hands and placed them on her upper arms.

  ‘Ewa,’ I said. ‘I don’t care that I’m only fourteen years old. You are the most beautiful woman on earth and I love you.’

  She gasped.

  ‘I had to say it,’ I said. ‘That’s all. Thank you very much.’

  Then I kissed her and walked away.

  I dreamed of Ewa Kaludis for the rest of the summer. Images of her making love to my brother Henry came to me and sometimes I was the one who was lying there instead of Henry. Often I was in two places at once: both outside the window and underneath Ewa. Underneath her and inside her. When I woke in the mornings I couldn’t always remember if I’d dreamed of her or not, but if I wanted to find out I just had to look at the sheets to see if there were new spots. More often than not there were.

  Of course it wasn’t easy keeping her out of my thoughts during the days either; I made a point of fantasizing about her while I was in the loo at the hospital. It was a good alternative to noughts and crosses, and sometimes I would think about her when we were in Killer on our way to Örebro.

  I’m going to the slammer to see Henry, my brother. Then I’m going to visit my dying mother in the hospital and think about Ewa Kaludis and have a wank.

  When I put it that way, I felt ashamed.

  Orientation at Kumla County Junior Secondary School was on 27 August and it was the same day my brother was remanded in custody. I was in a class called I:3 B, had a head teacher called Gunvald who had a lisp, thirty-two new friends and twelve new teachers. I was subjected to a string of hitherto unknown subjects like physics, chemistry, German and morning assembly, and generally gained new perspectives on life.

  One Friday, about a month into the school year, Henry turned up. He was waiting for me outside the school gates when we’d finished for the day. I walked out with a handful of classmates whom I didn’t know very well, and they fell silent around me. Of course everyone knew who Henry was and his sudden appearance reminded them that I was the murderer’s brother.

  I went up to him. He was wearing sunglasses, an unbuttoned nylon shirt and had a Lucky Strike hanging from the corner of his mouth. He was the spitting image of Ricky Nelson. Or Rick.

  ‘Hi, Henry,’ I said.

  ‘Hi, brother,’ said Henry and smiled his crooked smile. ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘Bloody great,’ I said. ‘Have they let you go?’

  ‘Yep,’ said Henry. ‘It’s over now.’

  He put his arm around my shoulder. We walked across the street and climbed into Killer. My new friends stayed by the school gate and pretended that they’d just fallen out of the sky and didn’t really know which way to go.

  Henry fired up Killer and we drove away leaving a cloud of dust in our wake. I thought about what he’d said at the start of June.

  Life should be like a butterfly on a summer’s day.

  The autumn was a bridge that led to new territory. I never quite got a foothold at KJCSS. Edmund also went there, but he was in another class and we didn’t socialize. I didn’t really socialize with anyone any more. Not with people I knew already and not with new people. Benny and I sat out in the culvert and chatted a few times, but it wasn’t like before. We grew apart and it happened more quickly than I could comprehend.

  Generally, I did all my homework and was quite the model pupil, I think. I got an A-plus on my first German exam and an AB on my maths test. I finished Colonel Darkin and the Mysterious Heiress, but didn’t start on another adventure. I read books, mostly English and American detective stories, and started listening to Radio Luxembourg. I dreamed about Ewa Kaludis but never saw her.

  Every so often Kurren would run an article about the murder of Berra Albertsson and the police’s efforts to find the perpetrator. One Saturday they ran a lengthy summary of the case with maps and Xs where the body had been found and all that, but no new clues or suspects were uncovered. The police kept working on the case and Detective Lindström spoke to the newspaper in optimistic terms, claiming that it was only a matter of time until the murderer would be behind bars.

  I don’t know if Kurren’s regular readers believed him. I certainly had my doubts.

  Henry moved to Göteborg in early November and on 3 December, my mother died. My father had been at her side during her last ten days, but I couldn’t cope.

  The funeral was a week later in Kumla’s church. For the first time in my life, I wore a suit. About twenty of us followed my mother to her final resting place: Henry, my father and I sat on the first pew in the church; behind us sat relatives, a few colleagues, Benny’s mother and father and Mr. Wester.

  I’d cried the whole night long, and in the church, I didn’t have any tears left.

  III

  22
/>   The following February, my father applied for a job at AB Slotts, and at Easter we moved to Uppsala. I was fourteen going on fifteen when I left my childhood home and arrived in the city of mustard and education. I started at Cathedral School among the children of senior lecturers and doctors, let my hair grow, got spots and a gramophone.

  The first year we lived in a cramped two-room flat behind Östra station, and then we moved to Glimmervägen in Eriksberg, a newly built residential area. We had a two-bedroom apartment with a view of cliffs and forest from the balcony. My father livened up; his shifts at the mustard factory were difficult, but the atmosphere was more relaxed there than at the prison. He made a number of new friends at work, started playing bridge once a week and gingerly pursued a friendship with a widow in Salabacke. As for me, I soon fell in love with a dark-haired girl who lived in the building next to ours, and in the summer I turned sixteen I lost my virginity on a blanket in Hågadalen while listening to ‘The House of the Rising Sun’ on the transistor radio she’d brought along. I’m not sure if she was losing hers then too, but she said she was.

  Henry continued living in Göteborg and was given increasingly secure employment at Göteborgs-Posten. Two years and two months after Berra Albertsson’s murder, his debut novel Coagulated Love was published by Norstedts. It was well received by both Svenska Dagbladet and Dagens Nyheter, and his own paper gave it a decent review, but Henry never wrote another book. I read Coagulated Love over the Christmas holidays that same year and once again a few years later, but I didn’t get much out of it on either occasion. When my father died in 1976 I found his signed copy of the book among his possessions; all of the pages had been sliced open, but there was a grocery receipt used as a bookmark between pages eighteen and nineteen.

  My aunt, the victim of the moose-based tragedy, died in the Dingle madhouse a few weeks before I graduated from college; we managed to sell Gennesaret at a decent price, and when I started studying philosophy in the autumn, I was able to move into my own one-and-a-half-room flat on Geijersgatan. By this time, my virginity was but a distant memory. Even though I didn’t look as much like Rick Nelson as my brother, I still had good luck with the opposite sex; female students came and went and then there was one who stayed.

  She was called Ellinor and by the start of the eighties we’d managed to bring three children into the world. At that point Geijersgatan was also but a memory. We bought a house in Norby among the bourgeoisie and the boxwood; I taught history and philosophy at a college, and when Ellinor wasn’t at home raising our children, she was employed as a lab assistant at a pharmaceutical company out in the Boländer area.

  One May evening in the mid-eighties Expressen ran a two-page article about unsolved murders in Sweden, with a focus on cases where the statute of limitations was running out in a year or so.

  One of these was Bertil Albertsson’s murder. We were sitting out in the garden, Ellinor and I, the lilacs were about to bloom, and for the first time I told her what had happened at Gennesaret. When I got going, I realized just how much it fascinated my wife, and I strove to dredge up as many memories as I could out of the well of time and forgetting. Leaving out the odd detail, of course—even though we had a completely open and uninhibited relationship, I still felt embarrassed when I recalled how Edmund and I had masturbated by the window while Henry and Ewa Kaludis were making love inside. For instance.

  When I finished talking, my wife asked: ‘And Edmund? How did it go for Edmund?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘I don’t have the faintest idea, actually.’

  My wife gave me a bewildered look and wrinkled her forehead in a way that usually signalled that I had exposed her to some sort of deep-seated male incomprehensibility. Again.

  ‘My God,’ she said. ‘You mean you lost touch, just like that?’

  ‘My mother died,’ I pointed out. ‘We moved.’

  My wife took the newspaper and read through the summary of the murder again. Then she leaned back in the lounger and thought a while.

  ‘We’ll look him up,’ she said. ‘We’ll look him up and invite him to dinner.’

  ‘Like hell we will,’ I said.

  To my surprise, getting a hold of Edmund Wester was no problem. Personally, I didn’t lift a finger in the search, but in early June, just before graduation, Ellinor told me that she had found him and that he was going to come and eat crayfish with us in August.

  ‘You went behind my back,’ I said. ‘Admit it.’

  ‘Of course, my eagle,’ my wife answered. ‘Sometimes foolish men need to be circumvented.’

  ‘Where is he living?’ I asked. ‘How did you reach him?’

  ‘It wasn’t hard,’ my wife explained. ‘He’s a vicar in Ånge.’

  I couldn’t help but smile. Norrland again.

  ‘He sounded friendly and genuinely happy to hear from me. He thought it was about time that you met up again. You should have plenty to talk about, he said.’

  ‘Really?’ I said. ‘Well, don’t get your hopes up.’

  ‘He’s coming out this way in August anyhow,’ said my wife. ‘It’ll be interesting to meet him, whatever happens. You know, I’ve never met anyone who knew you as a child.’

  ‘You’ve met my father,’ I pointed out. ‘And Henry.’

  My wife waved her index finger dismissively.

  ‘They don’t count,’ she said. ‘Your father is dead. And I’ve seen your brother three times.’

  She had a point. My father had been dead for almost a decade by now, and I hadn’t been in contact with Henry at all since he emigrated to Uruguay at the end of the seventies. The most recent Christmas card had arrived four years ago on Maundy Thursday.

  During the first week of the summer holidays that year I spent most of my time reflecting on my childhood, and one warm, fragrant night I dreamed of Ewa Kaludis for the first time in twenty years. Oddly, it wasn’t an erotic dream; it was filled with images and impressions from the day after she’d been beaten up and had sat in the sun lounger massaging my shoulders.

  Anyway, I thought it was strange when I woke up. And a bit of a shame, but you don’t get to choose your dreams, now do you?

  Only a few weeks before Edmund’s visit did I realize that if he’d joined the priesthood he must have studied in Uppsala. I didn’t leave that university town for a long time after I first set foot in it, so we would have been near each other as adults, Edmund and I. At least for a few years. Had we ever crossed paths in town—when I was a student, perhaps? Why wouldn’t we have recognized each other? I brought this up with my wife, but she said that a person can change a lot between the ages of fourteen and twenty and that it was the rule rather than the exception that you missed people in a crowd.

  When Edmund Wester turned up I saw that she was dead right.

  The gargantuan man with a dense beard standing on our steps when I opened the door reminded me as much of fourteen-year-old Edmund as a duck reminds me of a sparrow. I did some rough sums in my head and concluded that if his weight gain had followed a steady trajectory then he’d have put on about five kilos a year since I’d last seen him at school in Kumla. It wasn’t just the beard that hid the clerical collar, but his double chins. His worn corduroy suit had room for another three to four years of growth at the same rate.

  ‘Erik Wassman, I presume?’ he said, hiding the bouquet for my wife behind his back.

  ‘Edmund,’ I said. ‘You haven’t changed one bit.’

  The evening was more pleasant than I’d dared hope. In each of our professions, we’d learned to make both frivolous and serious small talk, and the crayfish were truly exquisite, since my wife had made her signature marinade. Our children behaved quite well and went to bed without much of a fuss. We drank beer and wine and schnapps and cognac, and any disappointment Ellinor might have felt about our reluctance to discuss the summer in Gennesaret eventually ebbed away.

  It’s not that we didn’t mention Berra Albertsson and the murder, but both Edmund and I
changed the subject when she brought it up. I remember how we’d kept the same distance when it was all going on, and realized how remarkably easy it was to pick up where you had left off with some people, even after such a long time.

  If my wife hadn’t raised the subject of a priest’s vow of silence and crises of conscience, it would have been a wholly successful night. Unfortunately we were already in deep when I noticed that Edmund was troubled by the question.

  We were well on to the coffee and cognac too, so maybe it wasn’t odd that I had a momentary lapse in concentration.

  ‘I’ve never understood it,’ said my wife. ‘What gives a priest the right to keep quiet about things that normal people can’t? Things they’d be punished for if they kept them quiet?’

  ‘It’s not that simple,’ said Edmund.

  ‘It couldn’t be any simpler,’ said my wife. ‘What kind of God keeps murderers and miscreants under his wing?’

  ‘There is more than one law,’ said Edmund. ‘And more than one judge.’

  ‘Isn’t our legal system built on Christian ethics?’ she insisted. ‘Isn’t the West built on a Christian system of values? Isn’t that clause a construct that’s ready for the scrap heap?’

  Edmund sat quietly and scratched his beard and suddenly looked sombre. I prepared a change of topic, but wasn’t quick enough.

  ‘There are cases,’ he said. ‘There will always be situations where a person needs to get something off their chest … We could never impose a vow of silence on everyone, but there have to be people who have taken one. There have to be options. Someone who listens; someone to whom you can turn and ask for his ear when you need to the most. Where your words are taken and sealed.’

  ‘I don’t understand it,’ said my wife.

  ‘It’s a difficult question,’ Edmund repeated. ‘There have been moments when I’ve had my doubts.’

  Soon thereafter he took his leave. We promised to keep in touch, but it was clear to all three of us that this was mostly a concession to custom.