Europa Blues

31

CILLA LOOKED EXPECTANT as the hardened couple made their way in through an elegant doorway in Birkastan. The expression remained as they climbed the stairs – genuine art nouveau – and when it was still there as they reached a door marked with the neighbourhood’s only foreign name, even Paul Hjelm allowed himself to feel expectant.

Though it was almost half past seven.

She took hold of his arm in a way he remembered from their youth. It had been so long since she had done it that he almost felt moved.

‘Just think, finally getting to meet everyone,’ she said as he ceremoniously folded back the paper on the bunch of flowers he had just bought from the 7-Eleven on the corner.

‘You’ve met them before, haven’t you?’ he said, surprised.

‘No,’ she said, squeezing his arm.

He rang the bell.

Sara answered. She was wearing barely any make-up below her greenish crop, which seemed more straggly than usual in honour of the party; the simple, dark blue dress she was wearing made no attempt to hide her figure. She hugged them both and welcomed them in. The half-wilted bouquet from 7-Eleven was thankfully accompanied by a bottle of malt whisky.

She glanced at it, nodded, and whispered to Paul: ‘You haven’t forgotten the golden rule, have you?’

Paul chuckled and shook his head.

To say not a single word about the ongoing case.

He would do everything in his power to keep that promise. But it wouldn’t be easy.

Jorge came to greet them from somewhere in the bowels of the flat. He was wearing a blue shirt and a brand-new beige linen suit. It looked exactly like his old one.

‘The food’s ruined now,’ he said, forcing two glasses of Martini Rosso into their hands.

‘Oh,’ said Cilla as she hung up her coat. ‘Are we late?’

‘Ah,’ said Jorge. ‘You’re glowing, Cilla.’

‘Glowing?’ she said, hugging him.

He glanced at the bottle of whisky Sara handed him.

‘Cragganmore?’ he said.

‘Perfect for when you’re tired of the excesses,’ said Paul.

‘Well, come in and have a look round, then,’ Jorge said with a confident, welcoming gesture to the late-arriving couple. ‘To think that not even you’ve been here, Paul. That’s what I call social misery.’

They moved on from the narrow hallway through a curtain of knotted Indian beads.

‘Chilean,’ said Jorge.

The scent of garlic-saturated food beckoned them into the living room. On the way, Paul glanced into the kitchen. It was big and old and looked cosy. Though a wooden floor in a kitchen seemed a bit unusual. On the gas hob, a couple of stews were bubbling away.

‘Gas,’ he said, pointing.

‘Unrivalled,’ said Jorge. ‘But don’t peep yet.’

The women had already reached the living room. They were leaning over a group of people sitting around a small Indian-looking glass table. Each of them seemed to be holding a glass of reddish liquid.

Apart from one, who was holding a baby bottle. She was sitting on Viggo Norlander’s lap.

Paul gave them a general wave and cast a quick glance around the room. It was quite big, with a relatively large amount of mixed furniture. There wasn’t much space – probably because of the abnormally big circular table in the middle of the room taking it all up. A surprising number of books, and a couple of genuine-looking paintings on the walls. The overall impression was one of good, albeit chaotic, taste.

Something which probably matched Jorge and Sara fairly well.

Slightly distracted, he ruffled little Charlotte’s thin, dark blonde hair. Then he held his hand out to the woman by Viggo’s side. She had the same colour hair as her daughter and was wearing a sober floral dress; she looked as though she was rapidly approaching the fifty-year mark.

‘Paul,’ he said.

‘Astrid,’ she replied. ‘So you’re the famous Paul Hjelm. The master detective.’

Paul cast a surprised glance at Viggo, who shrugged ambiguously and threw a giggling Charlotte up in the air.

‘Congratulations,’ Paul said.

‘What for?’ asked Astrid.

Paul cast yet another glance at Viggo, more uneasily this time, but Viggo simply continued throwing his daughter up in the air.

‘For the new addition to the family.’

‘Ah,’ Astrid replied, surprised but not angry. ‘Right, yes. Thanks.’

He turned to Viggo, pointed at little Charlotte, and said: ‘You must’ve been videotaping her too?’

‘She’s the one I’ve been practising on,’ Viggo replied, deadly serious.

Paul moved further along the sofa. He could see Cilla talking to Kerstin Holm out of the corner of his eye; it felt slightly odd.

A small, dark woman dressed in black held out her hand to him and exclaimed: ‘Ludmila.’

He couldn’t quite make the connection. He felt sluggish and ungainly. A fish on dry land.

‘Paul,’ he said, his gills flapping. ‘Hi.’

A bookcase swung to one side and an enormous body squeezed out from behind it.

‘Christ, that loo’s small,’ Gunnar Nyberg said, coming over to them. He headed straight for Cilla and greeted her politely, like a retired officer from the old guard.

‘Yeah,’ Jorge said loudly. ‘That’s the problem with this place. There’s no room for a washing machine.’

Only when Paul caught sight of Gunnar did he make the connection. Still holding the small, dark woman’s hand, he blurted out: ‘Right! Ludmila. The professor.’

‘Titles are important, Detective Inspector,’ Ludmila said with gentle irony. He smiled to himself. It went quite well.

Gunnar Nyberg laughed a loud, rumbling laugh. Paul Hjelm wondered what Cilla had said to evoke such a bellow. He managed to elicit very few of them himself.

He had reached the inner corner of the sofa. An elderly lady with greying hair and pronounced lines around her eyes held out her hand with a neutral expression. That was enough for him to make the connection. It was getting better and better. He was starting to find his feet again.

‘Mrs Hultin, I presume,’ he said archaically.

‘Stina,’ the lady said neutrally.

‘Paul,’ he said, unnecessarily adding: ‘Hjelm.’

It was that whole thing with first and last names. He still found it ridiculously difficult calling Hultin anything other than Hultin and so his wife was automatically none other than ‘Mrs Hultin’. Anything else would require far too much willpower. Deep down, he wished he knew why. It was probably some kind of hierarchical imprint he had never quite managed to escape.

The hour of the trial had arrived. Hultin was squashed into the corner, his glass so dry it seemed almost to have been licked clean. They greeted one another.

‘Jan-Olov,’ Paul said with a display of sheer willpower. ‘Your glass is empty, I see.’

‘We got here forty-five minutes ago,’ said Hultin. ‘I’ve never trusted that saying “Better late than never”.’

‘Me neither,’ said Paul. ‘And I’m still always last.’

Just then, Sara appeared in the kitchen doorway, clapping her hands together like an old-fashioned hostess.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ she said in a firm, resolute voice, ‘come to the table. Jorge – help carrying.’

‘Help and help,’ said Jorge, reluctantly peeling away from the others. ‘I cooked the food.’

‘And I’m the prime minister,’ Sara said, disappearing back into the kitchen.

The guests got hesitantly to their feet; there are very few people who want to be first to an empty table. Especially if there are no designated places set out, which turned out to be the case.

On their way over, Paul bumped into Cilla and Kerstin. He gave Kerstin a hug. Cilla stood alongside, watching them. It still felt slightly odd. Despite the fact that years had passed, spreading a comforting blanket of reconciliation over everything that had happened. If we want to wallow in clichés.

‘Everything OK, Kerstin?’ he asked.

‘Yup,’ she replied.

With that, nothing more was said. Gunnar climbed up onto a chair. It strained as best it could to prove it could withstand all possible laws of physics. And it succeeded: it held his weight.

The great man on the chair counted out loud.

‘One, two, three, four, five, six women. Seven including Charlotte. One, two, three, four, five men. Clearly uneven.’

‘We can sit next to one another,’ Kerstin and Cilla said.

Paul looked at them with suspicion.

‘Let’s do it like this,’ said Gunnar who, in his new-found euphoric condition seemed also to have been struck by a fondness for leadership. ‘Astrid next to me, then Jan-Olov, Sara, Paul, Stina, Viggo, Ludmila, Jorge, Cilla, Kerstin. And Charlotte can sit with…?’

‘Astrid,’ said Viggo, just as Astrid said: ‘Viggo.’

‘Perfect,’ said Gunnar, hopping down from the chair with the freedom of movement of a newly-svelte man. And with that, it was settled.

Sure enough, Charlotte ended up sitting on Viggo’s lap. They were served a Chilean meat stew containing a surprising amount of garlic. The wine, Duca d’Aragona 1993, was perfectly suited to it, and was subsequently consumed in near-bacchanal quantities.

‘Wine consumption is a sign of Europeanisation,’ Ludmila said towards the end of the meal. She said it in a tone that didn’t leave any room for objection.

‘What do you mean?’ Hultin asked, surprising the group by being responsible for the majority of it. The wine consumption, that was.

‘When I first came to Sweden,’ Ludmila said, ‘you were as much a part of the vodka-drinking nations as us Russians – just not quite to the same extent. But you’ve slowly switched to wine. You’ve moved from spirits like brännvin to wine.’

‘Hmm,’ said Viggo, stroking his sleeping daughter’s head.

Ludmila ignored him without comment.

‘But in Russia, or actually across the whole of Eastern Europe, vodka is getting even more of a hold. We’re on the way to becoming a lost cause.’

‘And not just for that reason, right?’ said Paul, drawing dangerously close to breaking the golden rule. A few of the others looked at him askance.

The women in particular.

‘I’m utterly convinced,’ Ludmila continued, ‘that the condition of a nation can be measured by the proportion of wine in its total alcohol consumption. The greater the proportion of wine, the greater the spiritual prosperity.’

‘But there are hidden statistics too,’ said Gunnar, seemingly unaffected by the wine. ‘I should think Sweden has the highest in the world.’

‘You mean home-distilled?’ asked Paul.

‘And black-market spirits. But above all, home-distilled schnapps.’

‘Why’s it called brännvin?’ asked Viggo, still incessantly stroking his daughter’s head. ‘It’s not wine, is it?’

Ludmila searched her linguistic memory banks and came up with an answer.

‘The word came to Swedish in the Middle Ages. It was called “brännevin” back then, from the Low German “bernewin”, which means “burnt, or distilled, wine”. In Dutch, it’s called “brandewijn”, which eventually became “brandy”.’

Paul noticed how admiringly Gunnar was looking at her. After all these years, it transpired that this was what his taste in women was like.

‘But that’s no answer,’ Viggo obstinately pointed out. ‘We’re still in the same old spot. Why did they call it a wine when it was a spirit?’

‘Because the word “spirit” didn’t exist,’ said Ludmila. ‘It didn’t appear in Swedish until the end of the eighteenth century, and it was a French import, not a German one. It comes directly from the French “esprit”.’

‘So wine meant spirit and spirit didn’t mean shit?’ Viggo half rhymed, unexpectedly aggressively.

‘Language is constantly changing, Viggo,’ Ludmila said calmly.

‘And don’t you shout at my lady,’ Gunnar said, equally calmly.

It wasn’t the fact that the bells of the Gustav Vasa Church had just struck nine in the distance that interrupted the slightly soured discussion, but the fact that Jorge had just placed a laptop computer in the middle of the dining table.

The nine peals reverberated through Paul’s conscience. With each one, a realisation grew. It was as abrupt as it was absurd. Eventually it was so complete and so overbearing that he had to gulp down an entire glass of Duca d’Aragona to stop himself from breaking the golden rule.

Jorge had attached a little device to the top of the laptop screen. Then he spun the computer around so that it was facing his seat at the table, sat down and called out to the group.

‘Gather round, people!’

They got reluctantly and sluggishly to their feet. Hultin took a couple of elegant sidesteps and smiled awry. His wife Stina propped him up and said, neutrally: ‘They say wine counteracts strokes, but somehow I doubt that’s true.’

Gunnar squeezed his former giant’s body in behind Ludmila’s chair and touched her lightly on the neck. Kerstin launched herself sidelong over Cilla, who laughed loudly and, Paul thought, entirely without cause. Astrid moved over to Viggo and knocked fondly on his head; Viggo simply kept stroking his sleeping daughter’s thin hair. Paul shuffled over and stood at the back. Sara came over and put an arm around him. He barely noticed.

The screen crackled and a strange figure appeared.

‘Hello, wage labourers,’ the strange figure said.

‘I’ll be damned,’ Viggo exclaimed. ‘Everyone’s favourite Finn.’

‘Arto,’ said Jorge, who had seemingly sobered up, ‘how’re things? We’re having a house-warming.’

‘So I see,’ said Arto Söderstedt’s slightly jumpy image. ‘I’ve just given up my daily Vin Santo, myself. From today. Came to that drastic decision after three glasses.’

A general murmur broke out in the flat on Birkagatan. Jorge hushed them with great authority.

‘How are things?’ he asked.

‘Great, thanks,’ said Arto. ‘If it weren’t for an upcoming trip. Don’t people get robbed all the time in Ukraine?’

‘You’ve just broken the golden rule, haven’t you?’

‘Right, yes. Sorry. No, but like I said, things are great. Aside from the fact my daughter lost her virginity, that I’ll be having another baby, and that ancient goddesses of revenge are creeping among the basil plants.’

Kerstin and Sara cleared their throats loudly. The Söderstedt-like figure put his hand to his mouth and made the sign of the cross.

‘Apologies,’ he said. ‘Slip of the tongue.’

‘Baby?’ Viggo shouted. ‘For God’s sake, you old buck. We’re having another one, too.’

‘Speaking of bucks?’ Arto replied. ‘That’s great, congratulations. Good for the babysitting, too.’

‘The family OK?’ asked Jorge.

‘Yes, yes,’ said Söderstedt. ‘We had a little Heimlich incident a couple of hours ago, but otherwise fine. Show me the flat.’

Jorge detached the little camera from the top of the screen and slowly turned it round, round, round.

‘Wow,’ said Arto. ‘Such green hair.’

‘Twenty laps every Sunday,’ Sara said laconically.

‘Though we’ll see tomorrow,’ said Jorge.

‘No, listen, it looks really nice. Is the nursery ready?’

‘What is this, kids’ club?’ said Jorge.

Sara said: ‘Soon.’

They quickly moved on from that topic without further ado. Arto said goodbye to each of them in order. Anja appeared on-screen for a moment and said, sceptically: ‘The wonders of technology.’

At that very moment, the picture vanished into a cluster of peculiar multicoloured squares. The screen looked more like a church window.

That was what Paul Hjelm thought, at least. The church bells were still echoing through him.

He was about to shatter.

The bacchanal group moved slightly unsteadily back to the sofas and armchairs after that.

Paul paused at the bookcase on his way over. For a brief moment, the ringing of the church bells disappeared, only to be replaced by something else. He pulled a book from the shelf. It was called The Big Nowhere. The author was James Ellroy.

Jorge was puffing on a cigarette with the inexperience of a schoolgirl. He laughed and pointed.

‘There are your wolverines. James Ellroy.’

‘Though there aren’t actually any wolverines,’ Kerstin said, smoking just as inexpertly and with a portion of snus tobacco shoved beneath her lip.

‘“Wolverine Blues”,’ said Jorge, giving Sara a wet, smoky kiss.

The bottle of Cragganmore was opened and asymmetric waves of discussion poured through the little flat until salsa music started streaming from hidden speakers and their unrhythmic feet began pounding the neighbours’ ceilings. Hultin and Stina were dancing a waltz. They looked like a couple of wounded lemmings on their way towards a cliff edge. Jorge smoothly asked Cilla to dance, and they glided around the room with professional dance steps. In just a few minutes, she was transformed from blonde dishcloth to dark, mysterious Latino dance queen. The lights were probably just too low. Gunnar and Ludmila were dancing cheek to cheek. It looked lethal: a cat in the arms of a grizzly bear. A sucker fish on a shark. Viggo and Astrid reluctantly handed Charlotte to Sara, who sat there stroking her with long, lingering movements, and headed out onto the dance floor like a couple of mediocre folk dancers.

Only Paul and Kerstin remained standing where they were, watching the spectacle from a distance.

He was suddenly struck by a vision of a dying civilisation’s staggering dance steps over an abyss. He saw figures like empty, storyless shells which, like marionettes, carried out their capers over depths they would never come close to unless their puppeteer let go of the strings and they tumbled loose-limbed down into the abyss. And by that point, it was already too late.

It lasted just a moment, and ultimately wasn’t particularly rewarding. Distance is simply cowardice, he thought in confusion, finding Kerstin’s hand and leading her to the dance floor. She let herself be led. In reality, it was more like she was leading and he was simply imagining that he was the one doing it. As he buried his cheek in her unruly dark hair, smelling scents he hadn’t smelled for years, the internal church bells disappeared, and when he put his ear to the thin, thin patch above her left temple, he imagined he was making direct contact with her thoughts. And that wasn’t the worst.

He had no idea how they ended up in the taxi, but there he was, with Cilla’s blonde hair flowing over his shoulder, hearing her say: ‘I know the two of you had an affair.’

He should probably have been indignant, but he wasn’t. He slowly stroked her hair, staying silent.

‘It’s OK,’ said Cilla. ‘It was a long time ago, I know.’

‘Did she say that?’

‘She said plenty of things. I really like Kerstin.’

‘You already knew?’

‘I suspected. But I also knew it had been over a long time.’

‘Did you ask her?’

‘No. She told me herself. It seems like she’s putting the past behind her. Fixing the holes in time, she said.’

Paul actually smiled. He really had been in direct contact with her thoughts earlier. Maybe they were Kerstin’s thoughts he had been thinking. Maybe that was the real reason her cranium had been thinned out. So that her thoughts could reach him more easily.

Cilla continued: ‘It’s OK, Paul. I had an affair too. Back then.’

What about now? he thought. Shouldn’t I be feeling indignant now?

‘When we were separated?’ was all he asked.

To restore a little order.

‘Yeah, that spring, whenever it was. It was just a short thing. But oddly enough, I wouldn’t undo it.’

‘Nor would I,’ said Paul.

‘Haven’t you noticed that something is happening to her?’

‘To Kerstin? No, not really.’

‘She said she went through a crisis. A metamorphosis, she called it. She hadn’t really even dared admit it to herself, she said.’

‘Did she say what it was?’

‘Not exactly. But I think she’s finding religion.’

They fell silent. That was that with the direct contact, then, Paul thought, feeling the everyday come rushing back into the taxi.

Religion?

When they finally crawled into bed and were much too tired and preoccupied to carry out all they had been thinking about in the taxi, the church bells returned. Just before he fell asleep, he realised he had been released from his vow of silence. The golden rule no longer applied.

He told Cilla. The fact that she was sleeping deeply, snoring away peacefully next to him, didn’t make a difference.

The main thing was that he didn’t burst.

He might already have been half asleep himself when he said: ‘Surely there wasn’t a church in Buchenwald.’