Europa Blues

14

IT WAS SUNDAY afternoon and three different cars were en route to three different addresses. They had drawn lots to decide which. ‘Channa Nordin-Sheinkman, Kungsholmen’ was written on the scrap of paper Chavez had picked; Holm’s read ‘David Sheinkman, Näsbypark’, and ‘Harald Sheinkman, Tyresö’ was printed on Hjelm’s. The three names belonged to the late professor’s three children. Given that he had been eighty-eight when he died, not arriving in Sweden before 1945 when he was thirty-three, that put the children around the fifty mark. As much as ten years older than Hjelm himself.

Only once he was on the way to Tyresö did he realise that the address to which he was heading – a street called Bofinksvägen in a place called Nytorp – was identical to the address listed for Leonard Sheinkman in the telephone directory.

The old man must have been living with his eldest son.

Paul Hjelm ploughed on through the Sunday traffic on Tyresövägen and felt a certain relief at not having to be the bearer of bad news; Sheinkman’s son could hardly have missed hearing about his father’s awful death by now – it had been all over the papers and television for the past twenty-four hours. Hjelm just hoped that someone from the local police had stopped by to break the news before that.

The sun was low in the sky, which was an unusually deep shade of blue. Not quite like when a sly thundercloud camouflages itself as clear blue sky and dumps its heavy artillery on astounded sun worshippers with a dark laugh; it was more like a blue film had been stretched over the firmament, to disguise the fact that the sky was no longer blue. There was a dead weight bearing down on the pretty spring landscape and the light seemed artificial; as though an opera set designer had tried to imitate nature.

Or maybe it was just because Paul Hjelm was filled with dread.

Dread about having to barge in to a house deep in mourning. Dread about having to put all the usual questions to a grieving son. Dread about being a blond, secularised Christian, raised in a sheltered environment. And – here came the real admission – dread about having to bring up the Holocaust and concentration camps and European anti-Semitism.

He was Swedish, after all, and Swedes did not like taboo subjects. Their armpits started sweating. Ideally, they avoided them, but if they absolutely had to broach them, they did so with a kind of remote reverence and a string of clichés about never allowing it to happen again. The Holocaust was an abstraction they liked to talk about from a pedestal, using big words. They didn’t like to tackle it properly. They hadn’t been a part of it, they could never understand it, they had nothing to do with it, everyone else could look after all that. Sweden’s lack of a sense of history and its pseudo-neutrality in an unholy alliance. Because they had been involved, to the highest degree. They did have something to do with it, to the highest degree. They could understand it, to the highest degree. They had to.

World champions at brushing things under the carpet.

Yes, Paul Hjelm admitted. His agitation stemmed from the fact that it was about him. Him and his pitiful, pitiful knowledge. Fragmented images of dead, emaciated bodies. Dates. 1939. 1945. D-Day. The Desert War. Stalingrad as the turning point. Sterile and doctored, like the laminated crash-landing procedures in the back pockets of plane seats. Docile and happy, we pull on our oxygen masks, breathe slowly and calmly and make our way to the emergency exits. Then, with grins on our faces, we speed down inflatable slides into the blue waves lapping invitingly beneath a clear blue sky.

Soon, though, all the witnesses would be gone.

There really was a great weight bearing down on the countryside. The blue sky wasn’t blue. The greenery wasn’t green.

And he had arrived, on Bofinksvägen in Nytorp.

The house where Leonard Sheinkman had lived, where his son Harald was still living, could hardly be described as luxurious. Still, it was pretty. An original functional house. A stylish thirties building, set back from the road, with a pretty sea view. Presumably an architectural original from those days when houses like that weren’t just reserved for the newly rich, insistent on designing everything themselves. In line with their IKEA-tinged style.

He clambered out of the old Audi which, in the absence of any traffic, had been well behaved on the way over. He hoped his sweaty armpits didn’t smell. There were two types of armpit sweat, after all: the kind that smells and the kind that doesn’t. The odourless kind was the sweat of exertion. The other kind, nervousness. Time would tell which variant was currently pouring from his armpits beneath his linen jacket and pale yellow T-shirt.

Maybe he should have worn something more respectable?

Too late, he thought, ringing the bell.

A girl, aged around sixteen, opened the door. The same age as his own daughter, Tova. She was dark-haired and soberly dressed, and she looked genuinely sad.

‘Hi,’ he said, holding up his ID. ‘My name is Paul Hjelm, I’m from the police. Are your parents in?’

‘Is it about Grandpa?’

‘Yes.’

She disappeared. In her place, a well-dressed man in his early fifties appeared.

‘Yes?’ he asked.

‘Paul Hjelm, CID. Harald Sheinkman?’

The man nodded and gestured for him to come in.

Paul Hjelm stepped inside and was shown into a room which he assumed was the library. Its walls were clad with books, in any case, and the otherwise unassuming room was dim and cosy. Perfect for reading. He immediately felt at home. He wanted to go over to the bookshelves and pore over their spines, but sat down on the old sofa instead. Harald Sheinkman sat down next to him. The closeness didn’t even feel uncomfortable.

‘He was nearly ninety,’ he said quietly. ‘I mean, we knew he might go at any time, but the circumstances…’

He fell silent and stared down at the rough pine table.

‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ Hjelm said, feeling awkward.

‘What do you want to know, Detective Hjelm?’

‘First of all, whether you have any idea what he was doing in Södra Begravningsplatsen. Do you have relatives there, Mr Sheinkman?’

‘No. On Dad’s side, there are no relatives – for obvious reasons – and my mother’s family are all buried in Norra Begravningsplatsen in Solna.’

‘So you don’t know what he was doing there?’

‘We reported him missing to the police.’

‘Missing?’ Hjelm exclaimed, perhaps a touch too gruffly.

Sheinkman looked up. ‘I take it you didn’t know? Don’t the various police authorities talk?’

Hjelm thought for a moment. ‘I’ll check why that information wasn’t passed on to me. I’m sorry. So your father had gone missing?’

‘Five days ago.’

‘Was that unusual?’

‘He had his own routine and he was a bit of a loner, really. Plus, he had his own annexe, so we didn’t necessarily see each other every day, but as far as I know he’s never been away overnight before. Not since Mum died. We reported it after the first night.’

‘Your father was nearly ninety. Was he in any way… confused? At that age, it’s not so unusual.’

‘Not at all,’ Sheinkman said, looking up. ‘He was a brain scientist; he deliberately kept his mind active so he could avoid all kinds of senility. The day he disappeared, he’d left the big Dagens Nyheter crossword behind. Solved down to the very last letter.’

‘Did you look for him?’

‘I tried. I went up to the Karolinska hospital – he used to work there; I went to KB, he often spent time there.’

‘The Kungliga bibliotek?’

Harald Sheinkman smiled faintly.

‘Most people ask: KB? The pub? But no, he never went to the pub. The library, on the other hand… Yes. He spent whole days there, as far as I know. But when I started looking, it struck me how little I actually knew about his daily routine. I’d been working too much and neglected him, and then it was too late. That’s what I realised. I didn’t know where to look. No one I asked had seen him anyway.’

‘And there was no indication of anything having happened? Nothing unusual?’

‘No. And I can’t work out what he was doing in Södra Begravningsplatsen, either. He was an atheist and materialist, through and through – still respecting our Jewish traditions, of course – so I have absolutely no idea why he would go there.’

‘Can I ask how it came about that he was living with you?’

‘It was the other way round, actually. This is my childhood home. He bought the place in the fifties, straight from the architect. Anders Wilgotsson, if you’ve heard of him? I’m the eldest son, so Dad suggested I could take over the house and he could renovate the attic. It was a good arrangement. Family ties and complete independence at the same time. Maybe a bit too complete… I mean, he disappeared without me noticing. And then he went and got himself murdered. It’s unbelievable.’

‘What do you do, Mr Sheinkman?’

‘Can’t we stop with this “Mr Sheinkman” formality? It feels a bit forced. My name is Harald and yours is… Paul?’

‘Yes. Yeah, sure.’

‘I’m afraid I follow in my father’s footsteps. I’m a doctor. Though not in the… cerebral branch.’

Hjelm managed to disguise a hoot of laughter as a cough, followed by a peaceful smile.

‘I take it you saw our esteemed boss on TV.’

A similar smile appeared on Sheinkman’s face.

‘Not an especially dignified appearance, if I may say so,’ he said with a neutrality to rival Hultin’s.

‘No,’ Hjelm said. ‘Not especially.’

‘But they say you’re pretty good. The A-Unit – is that really its name?’

‘It’s a pet name. A nickname – whichever you like. Officially, we’re the Special Unit for Violent Crimes of an International Nature.’

‘Sounds like you’re well suited to something like this.’

‘We are, unfortunately. What your father was subjected to has to be called a violent crime of an international nature. Do you know the details?’

‘Yes,’ Harald Sheinkman said, looking down at the table. ‘It sounds like some kind of torture.’

‘Possibly. It’s not something you recognise? As a doctor? As the son of a… concentration camp prisoner?’

Sheinkman peered up at Hjelm with a different look in his eyes. It was as though he had just decided to cut the crap, to stop the euphemisms. Perhaps something was telling him to trust this anaemic policeman with serious sweat patches and a red pimple on his cheek.

He said: ‘I know very little about his time in the camp, actually; my dad was very reticent, as though he’d deliberately suppressed it. Plus, my competence as a medical expert is limited. I was a doctor in what we call the problem areas for practically my entire working life. I looked after people who had fled from torture and starvation and hardship. It was a round-the-clock job a lot of the time, often verging on unbearable. It was completely impossible not to take it home with me. Plus, I joined Médicins Sans Frontières and started travelling the world.

‘By the end, I was burnt out. Utterly passive for a few months; it’s only now that it’s starting to affect journalists that people have started taking notice. Health workers have been burnt out for decades. My wife left me and took our daughter with her, I couldn’t pay the mortgage on our flat in Södermalm and had to move in with Dad. Out here. That was twelve years ago. I just lay here on the sofa, completely out of it. I was thirty-nine and had suddenly lost everything.

‘That was when Dad had the idea of signing the house over to me and building a flat for himself in the attic. I suppose you could say it saved me. I started over. Built everything up from scratch. Got access to my daughter. Started working again, started writing too. I’m back up to my old workload again now, though it’s a bit different.

‘I started by writing reports on the current situation within the Swedish health care system and in the refugee-dense suburbs. It was hard to get anything published. I started writing… well, literature after that. I’ve had a couple of short stories published in cultural magazines and I’m working on a novel. You might say that I went in the complete opposite direction to my dad.’

He fell silent. Paul Hjelm observed him. It had been a warning: that was how easy it was to get the wrong impression of a person. That was how easy it was to decide, in advance, what kind of person someone was. He had seen Harald Sheinkman as nothing more than the professor’s son, born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and in some ways that was true. But in others? Not at all. It was a life lesson: never come to hasty conclusions about other people. It always ended badly.

He would have liked to say something to Harald Sheinkman about his thoughts on the present day. That we really did need to keep a close eye on contemporary right-wing extremism – but that history probably wouldn’t repeat itself in such a straightforward manner. He was quite convinced about the return of fascism, but suspected it would probably take place in a much more subtle, indirect way – it would sneak in by a back route while we kept watch over its more obvious, simplistic manifestations – and then we would suddenly find ourselves standing face-to-face with a person but see them as an object instead, an item, a potential return. He was convinced that economism was the first step towards the new fascism.

But he said nothing. Instead, he became a policeman once more.

‘In what way did you go in the complete opposite direction to your father?’

‘I’m the doctor who became an author. He was the author who became a doctor. Before the war, he was an author – I know that much about his past. He was from Berlin and he had a family, a wife and a young son who died in the camp; so in other words, I’ve got a long-dead half-brother.

‘His entire family was wiped out; he was the only one left. He couldn’t cope with that, so he started over. You could say he turned the page on that chapter of his life. He’d been an author before, a fairly dreamy and lyrical poet, judging from his diaries, but after the war he turned to the natural sciences and to medicine. I guess he needed something more concrete and permanent. His soul died in the camp, but the material survived. I suppose that’s one way of looking at it.’

‘He kept a diary in Buchenwald? Does it still exist?’

Sheinkman nodded. ‘Up in his room.’

‘Speaking of which,’ Hjelm said. ‘I have to ask, could I take a look at his apartment?’

‘Of course,’ said Harald Sheinkman, nodding and getting up. Hjelm followed him through the house and up a spiral staircase which seemed to have only quite recently been installed. They came to Leonard Sheinkman’s neat little annexe. It was bright and warm. Here, too, the walls were covered with books, primarily medical texts but also a number of literary classics. Just as Harald Sheinkman had said, the solved Dagens Nyheter crossword was lying on the kitchen table – nothing else. The place was clinically clean.

‘Did you tidy up?’ Paul Hjelm asked.

‘No,’ said Sheinkman. ‘He managed all that himself. He didn’t like disorder, that’s my main memory from childhood. Always clean and tidy. It was really hard work. For Mum too, if I recall. Though I don’t remember her so well. The memories are slowly fading. Soon there’ll be nothing left.’

‘Is it OK if I have a look around myself? We’ll send some forensic technicians over later.’

‘Of course,’ Harald Sheinkman replied, disappearing without a sound.

Paul Hjelm watched him leave. Then, slightly awkwardly, he began wandering around the little flat; he counted two rooms and a kitchen. The light was pouring in through a line of sloping skylights and each of the walls was leaning inwards. It was some kind of slanted existence. And that slanted existence was, without a doubt, impeccably well kept. Not a speck of dust in sight.

First a Jewish poet in cosmopolitan Berlin during the 1920s and 30s. Then a wife and family. And then the concentration camp where his son, wife, mother, father and all other relatives had died under awful circumstances. The man emerged an undernourished and tortured surviver. All illusions, all beliefs, all hope was gone. He moved to a new country, away from it all. He started over, from scratch. Learned the language, began a new family, got an education and a respectable job, became an esteemed researcher, bought a functionalist house straight from the architect, saved a son spiralling out of control and lived in the house together with him after his wife’s death.

It sounded as though Leonard Sheinkman had managed the impossible – like such a remarkable number of others. He had managed to create a good, new life for himself. But how he had felt, deep down, that was impossible to know. His obsession with order and cleanliness was entirely natural after years in the concentration camp; you couldn’t draw any conclusions from that.

Paul Hjelm needed to read his diary.

It was essential.

He eventually found it on a shelf, resting on top of a row of books; it was the only thing in the entire flat which seemed slightly askew. The yellowed, dog-eared, handwritten pages had been intensively read, turned and thumbed. The little book was no more than ten or so pages thick.

And it was in German.

An unforeseen obstacle. But compared with Leonard Sheinkman’s achievement, it was nothing. It was simply a matter of brushing up his long-forgotten high-school German.

The pages were meticulously dated and numbered, and none seemed to be missing. It was just a matter of getting started.

Just…

He grabbed the little book and whirled down the spiral staircase. Harald Sheinkman was sitting on the sofa, looking exhausted. He stood up when Hjelm came spinning downstairs, walking over to him.

‘This must be the diary,’ Paul Hjelm said, fluttering the pages. ‘Is it OK if I take it with me? You’ll get it back.’

‘Sure,’ Harald Sheinkman said. ‘So you read Yiddish?’

Hjelm blinked, staring in confusion down at the yellowed pages. The words changed shape before his eyes. Then he looked up at Sheinkman. A faint smile was playing on his lips.

‘I was just joking,’ said Harald Sheinkman. ‘It’s German.’

Paul Hjelm looked at him and started chuckling. He liked this man.

‘One more question,’ he eventually said. ‘What kind of man was your father?’

Sheinkman nodded, as though he had been expecting the question.

‘I’ve spent a while thinking about that. It’s hard to say, really. When we were kids, he demanded a lot of us. He was always fairly strict, a classic patriarch. We were to be doctors, all three of us, there was never any discussion. His campaign succeeded, to an extent. It went best with my little brother, David; he works as a brain surgeon and lecturer at the Karolinska hospital, he’ll probably be made professor soon. Later than Dad was, though. He’s forty-three now.

‘Channa, the middle child, she’s the one who rebelled. She was active in the left-wing movement in the seventies; she’s teaching in a school of social studies now. And then me, the eldest son, I obediently went down the medicine route but then refused to specialise in anything other than general medicine. He took it hard to begin with; he’d seen me as the chosen one. And when I started working in the poorer suburbs, in Tensta and Rinkeby, he just shook his head. But eventually, I think he found a certain respect for what I was doing.

‘He wasn’t an impossible person. When I came up against the wall, he was a real rock. When the whole world seemed to be falling apart, he was my anchor point. Our relationship was really good back then. He’d just retired and was full of life, and he’d finally managed to pull himself back together after Mum’s death. He was a man who’d had a completely different life once, and we never made it into that life – not even Mum.’

Hjelm nodded and held out his hand.

‘Thanks very much, Harald,’ he said. ‘We’ll be in touch.’

‘I enjoyed our chat, Paul,’ Sheinkman said.

‘I did too.’

On his way out, Hjelm said goodbye to the daughter. He found himself sitting, for a while, in his old Audi. He leafed through the yellow pages. Text which had been written inside a concentration camp, in the terrible Buchenwald. Leonard Sheinkman, the poet from Berlin, had somehow got hold of paper and a pencil and managed to keep it all hidden from the guards. It was a remarkable achievement.

He turned the ignition, left Bofinksvägen and drove out onto Breviksvägen. The sky was still clear and blue, but it was as though the film had been pierced and wiped away – and the sky was actually blue behind it. The weight which had been pressing down on the landscape had been evened out. Nature was peaceful and beautifully springlike.

Summer would come once more this year, in spite of everything.

His mobile phone rang. Jorge Chavez said: ‘Yup.’

He said no more, but Paul Hjelm immediately understood.

‘They found it?’ he asked.

‘The technicians managed to gather an unbelievable amount of stuff from the wolverine enclosure, I have to say. Everything from pieces of bread – as though the things were ducks – to rat traps. They found two rat traps in there. One of them was still set.’

‘It’s a new pastime. Tormenting animals. Horses are regularly abused in our open countryside.’

‘Plus eight beer cans. The long, sharp wire was inside one of the cans. A drug-addled wolverine must’ve gobbled down the skull, found the wire in its mouth like a fishbone and somehow spat it out into a beer can.’

‘The Lord works in mysterious ways,’ Paul Hjelm said, heading home.

Home to the police station.