Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End

CHAPTER VII

Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s End

Albany, New York, in December

[SUNDAY, DECEMBER 8]

It wasn’t like along the Ångerman River; there it was flatter and broader, and the water usually flowed gray and turgid between the green, forest-clad hills, which faded into blue and disappeared along with the sky far away. The sky was always blue when it was summer, and Lars Martin and Mama and Papa and all his siblings used to take the car and trailer down to Kramfors to do shopping and see Aunt Jenny and live it up in town and eat herring and meatballs and watch Papa swallow his shots from Aunt Jenny’s cut-crystal glass.

“How you doing, kids?” Papa used to say and wink at them just before he drank his shot, and then he used to tousle Lars Martin’s hair because he was the littlest of the ones whose hair he could still tousle. Lars Martin’s little sister was of course even smaller, but she was so little that she mostly lay in her basket and peeped when she didn’t get the breast from Mama, and Papa never used to tousle her hair.

One time when Lars Martin came out onto the farmyard he had seen his father lift up the whole basket and the baby carriage in which it sat, and then his father had walked around with his little sister and the basket and the baby carriage and said something that Lars Martin didn’t hear. He had just hugged it all and put his head down into the basket and mumbled something. Then Lars Martin got sad and decided to leave it all behind, and he walked on the old road south toward Näsåker, and when he had been walking for several hours, and there really wasn’t any way back, his big brother had suddenly shown up and taken him by the arm and asked him what in the name of all the devils of hell he was up to. Then he got to sit on his big brother’s shoulders the whole way home and it wasn’t at all as far as he had thought. And pretty soon he stopped crying too.

But this was something else, thought Lars Martin Johansson from his comfortable window seat. For this was no river in Ångermanland but rather an American river, and sometimes it was deep and sometimes it was shallow and sometimes it was narrow and sometimes it was broad and all together it was exactly like the rivers in the matinee films that he used to see at the cinema at Folkets Hus back home in Näsåker when he was only a child. Drums were heard in the background, and Indians built fires and sent smoke signals to each other and the cavalry came galloping with only minutes to spare while the trumpets blared and he and all the other kids in Näsåker cheered.

He hadn’t discovered any Indians, but after a little less than an hour’s journey he had seen the star-spangled banner fluttering on a high promontory on the opposite side of the river. West Point, thought Johansson, feeling the draft from the right wing of the eagle of history sweep past him at rather close range, and less than two hours later he was there. There was whirling snow in the air and the temperature was in the midteens, and there was only one taxi in the parking lot outside the station.

“Two-hundred-and-twenty-two Aiken Avenue,” said Johansson and leaned back in the seat while he pondered what he would say. If she’s even home, he thought gloomily, for suddenly he regretted the entire trip and even that he had gone to the United States at all, which had actually been decided long before and didn’t have a thing to do with his private expedition.

…

Best to let the taxi wait until I see that she’s home, thought Johansson when they had stopped outside a large white house with a porch, mansard roof, at least two bay windows, and a tree decorated with lights on the drive.

“Can you wait?” Johansson asked the taxi driver, who nodded, shrugged his shoulders, and mumbled something he didn’t hear.

Big house, thought Johansson. It stands to reason that she would have a family, although she was listed alone in the phone book; if there was a man in the house, snow-shoveling was clearly not his great passion. Johansson congratulated himself yet again on the purchase of his new American shoes, and now he was standing on her porch and lights were on inside and he even heard music, and there really was no going back. Johansson sighed, took a deep breath, and rang the doorbell.

She was small, with a mop of frizzy red hair. Rather pretty, thought Johansson when she nodded at him with polite expectation, making note of his taxi down on the driveway from the corner of her eyes.

“I am looking for Sarah Weissman,” said Johansson politely.

“Yes,” she said. “That’s me.”

“My name is Lars M. Johansson,” said Johansson.

“Finally,” she said and smiled broadly with white teeth. “An honorable Swedish cop. Guess if I’ve been waiting.”