Frozen Tracks

13

THE LIGHT OVER THE FIELDS WAS AS SOFT AS WATER. IT SEEMED as if everything was sinking down toward the ground. Trees. Rocks. Fields glowing black, the soil plowed into furrows, like a sea that had stiffened and would not thaw and come to life until the spring.

What am I doing? What have I done? What have I done?

He could see a tractor in the distance. He couldn’t hear anything, but saw that it was moving. It had been working out there in the fields for so long that its paint had rubbed off and disappeared, and so everything out there was the same color, the machine and the countryside, the same rubbed-off November glow that always seemed to be gliding through the day toward dusk.

He felt calmer now, after driving for an hour, but he knew that was only temporary, just as everything all around him was temporary. No. Everything around him was not temporary. It’s eternal, he thought. It’s bigger than anything else.

I wish I loved it, but I hate it.

He turned in through the gates that seemed to have acquired a new layer of rust on top of the old one. The farm road was almost the same as the fields out there, churned up by the tractor wheels that were still rotating out on the prairie.

He was standing in the farmyard now.

I once dreamed about the prairie. I could have had a horse and ridden through that glade and never come back.

I could have flown in the sky. Lots of people could have seen me.

I’ll do that one day.

The wind was whipping pieces of straw and twigs into a circle in the middle of the yard.

There was a smell of dung, as always, and straw and seeds and soil and rotten leaves and rotten apples and rotting wood. The smell of animals lingered on even though there were no animals left.

Not even Zack. He walked over to the dog pen that seemed to be hovering above the ground, as if waiting for the wind to come and whisk it away over the fields and roads.

He missed Zack. Zack was a friend when he needed a friend, and then Zack had passed away and everything had been as it had always been.

He heard the tractor approaching down the road, and soon it would grunt its way in through the gate and stop more or less where he was standing now.

He turned around. The old man parked the tractor, turned off the engine, and clambered down in a way suggesting habit rather than agility. His body would keep on moving as per routine long after it had lost all its softness.

All its softness, he thought again. When you’re a child everything inside you is soft and everything outside you is hard, and you eventually become hard as well.

The old man limped up to him.

“Been a long time,” he said.

He didn’t reply.

“I didn’t recognize the car,” said the old man.

“It’s new.”

“It don’t look new,” said the old man, staring at the hood.

“I mean it’s one you haven’t seen before.”

The old man looked at him. There were specks of dirt on the old man’s face. He’d always looked like that. It had nothing to do with age, didn’t mean that he could no longer take care of his personal hygiene or anything like that.

“Shouldn’t you be at work?” the old man asked. “It’s the middle of the day, a weekday.” He looked up at the sky as if to get confirmation of the time. Then he looked back at his visitor and snorted: “But you couldn’t have driven your streetcar here.” He snorted again. “That’d been something to look at.”

“It’s my day off,” he said.

“A long way to drive.”

“Not all that far.”

“You might as well live at the other side of the globe,” said the old man. “What could it be?” He looked up again at the Big Calendar in the Sky. “Is it four years since you were last here? Five?”

“I don’t know.”

“Typical.”

He heard the beating of wings overhead. He looked up and saw a few crows flying from the cowshed to the farmhouse.

“Now that you’re here you’d better have a cup of coffee,” said the old man.

They went in. He recognized the smell in the hall, and suddenly he was back here again, but at a different time.

He was a little boy again.

Everything in the house looked just the same as before. There was the chair he used to sit on at that other time. She had sat opposite him, big, red.

She had been nice, at first she had, that was when he could still feel that his boyish body had softness in it, when it still wasn’t too late.

Was that the way it was? Did he remember correctly?

It belonged to that other time. Then those misters and ladies had decided that he shouldn’t live with his mom. He’d gotten a foster father, and the old man was fussing at the stove now and the water was bubbling away after a while, and the old man produced a couple of cups and saucers from the cupboard behind him.

“Yes, nothing’s changed, as you can see,” he said, and served up a little basket full of buns, still in their plastic wrapping.

“Yes.”

“Not as neat and tidy as it used to be, but apart from that, nothing’s changed,” said the old man.

He nodded. Assumed it was a joke.

The old man served coffee, then sat down again and looked at him just as he used to do, with one eye sinking down and the other lifted up.

“Why did you come here?”

“I don’t know.”

He’d been back a few times. Perhaps because this was the nearest he’d had to anywhere that could be called home. And he’d liked the countryside, no doubt about that. All those smells.

“I wrote,” he said.

“That’s not the same thing.”

He took a sip of coffee that tasted like the soil in the fields outside must taste, or the tar that had been used to upgrade the farm road when he used to live here. That was a smell to remember.

“What are you after, then?” said the old man.

“What do you mean?”

“What do you want?”

“I don’t want anything. Do I have to want something?”

The old man drank some coffee and took a bun, but only held it in his hand.

“I’ve got nothing to give you,” he said.

“Since when have I asked for anything?”

“Just so as you know,” said the old man, who then took a bite of the bun and kept on speaking with his mouth full. “There’s been a break-in here. In the cowshed, just imagine that. Somebody breaks into a cowshed where there’s no animals and nothing to steal. For Christ’s sake.”

“How do you know there was a break-in, then?”

“Eh?”

“How do you know there was a break-in if there wasn’t anything to steal?”

“You see that kind of thing if you’ve had the same cowshed all your life. You see if somebody’s been in there.” He washed the bun down with a mouthful of coffee. “You see that kind of thing,” he said again.

“Really.”

“Oh yes.”

“But nothing was taken?”

“A few things, but that doesn’t matter.” The old man was staring into space now. “That’s not the point.”

He said nothing,

“The point is that you don’t want anybody prowling around when you’re not there. Or are fast asleep in bed.”

“I can understand that.”

The old man looked at him, his eyes pointing in different directions.

“You don’t look all that well,” he said.

“I’ve been, er, been sick.”

“What’s been up with you?”

“Nothing serious.”

“Flu?”

“Something like that.”

“So you came here to get a whiff of cow shit.”

“Yes.”

“Well, all you need to do is breathe in deeply,” said the old man, who snorted again, although he might have been laughing.

“I have.”

“Take as much as you like.”

He raised his cup to his mouth again but couldn’t bring himself to drink. The damp air in the kitchen made him shudder. The old man hadn’t had time to light a fire after his work in the fields. God only knows what he’d been doing out there.

“I think I have a few things here still.”

The old man didn’t respond, didn’t seem to have heard.

“I was thinking about it the other day, and I remembered a few things.”

“What kind of things?”

“Toys.”

“Toys?” The old man refilled his cup, the black sludge that could kill. “What do you want toys for?” He looked hard at his visitor. “Don’t tell me you have a kid?”

No answer.

“Do you have a kid?” the old man asked again.

“No.”

“I didn’t think so.”

“They are my… memories,” he said. “My things.”

“What are these toys you’re on about?”

“They’re in a box, I think.”

“Oh Lord, for God’s sake,” said the old man. “If there’s anything it’s upstairs, and I haven’t been up there since Ruth died. “ He stared at his visitor again. “She asked about you.”

“I’ll go up and take a look,” he said, getting to his feet.

The stairs creaked just like they used to.

He went into the room that was once his.

It smelled of nothing, as if this part of the house no longer contained any memories. As if everything had disappeared when the old man stopped using the upstairs and made up a bed in the small room behind the kitchen. But things hadn’t disappeared, he now thought. Nothing disappears. They are still there, and they’re getting bigger and stronger and more awful.

The faint afternoon light was trying to force its way in through the little window at the gable end. He switched on the light, which was a naked forty-watt bulb hanging from the ceiling. He looked around, but there wasn’t much to see. A bed that he hadn’t slept in. An armchair he remembered. Three wooden chairs. A wobbly table. Three overcoats were hanging on a rail to the right.

There was sawdust on the floor, in three little piles. There were a few cardboard boxes in the far corner under the window, and he opened the one on the left. Underneath a few tablecloths and handkerchiefs he discovered the two things he was looking for: He picked them up, tucked them under his left arm, and carried them down to his car.

The old man came out.

“So you found something?”

“I’ll be going now,” he said.

“When will I see you again, then?” asked the old man.

Never, he thought.

Winter parked behind the building that contained half the shops in Doktor Fries Square. It wasn’t his first time here. Once he’d had a toothache so bad that he had had double vision for a few seconds before getting out of his car. When Dan, his dentist, had touched the tooth responsible Winter had felt for his gun. Not really. But the tentative touch by the dentist had almost made him lose consciousness.

This time he wasn’t going to visit the dentist. That might have been better. Young men being viciously attacked was worse.

The square was practically deserted. This could be the 1960s, he thought. That’s what it looks like here. I must have been four years old, maybe three. I must have been here as a three-year-old. Dad’s dentist had his office here even then. It must have been around here, surely?

His mobile vibrated in the inside pocket of his overcoat.

He looked at the screen.

“Hello Mom.”

“You saw my number, Erik?”

“As usual.”

“Where are you now?”

“At Doktor Fries Square.”

“Doktor Fries Square? Are you at the dentist’s?”

“No.” He stepped to one side to avoid two young women, each of them pushing a stroller. “This is where Dad used to go to the dentist’s, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, I think so. Why do you ask?”

“It doesn’t matter.” He could hear the rustling in the mobile all the way from Nueva Andalucía to 1960s Gothenburg. Perhaps she was reading a newspaper at the same time. “What’s it like on the sunshine coast?”

“Cloudy,” she said. “It’s been cloudy all day, and yesterday as well.”

“That must be awful,” he said. “Cloudy on the Costa del Sol.”

“Yes.”

“What’s the Spanish for Cloudy Coast?” he asked, taking out his pack of Corps and lighting a cigarillo. It tasted like a part of the early winter surrounding him, a dark taste filled with heavy aromas.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“You’ve been living down there for years and years and you still don’t know the Spanish word for cloud?”

“I don’t think there is one,” she said.

He laughed out loud.

“Did you know that the Japanese don’t have a word for blue?” he asked.

“Ah, I know the Spanish for that,” she said. “It’s azul.”

“El cielo azul,” said Winter, gazing up at the gray sky overhead.

“The sun is just beginning to break through over the sea,” she said. “This very minute, as we’re speaking.”

He knew what it looked like. Some years previously he had spent a few days in a hot Marbella in early autumn while his father was dying in the local hospital.

One morning he’d left the breakfast table at Gaspar’s and walked down to the beach under a leaden sky, and in the space of a few seconds the clouds over the Mediterranean had been torn apart and the sun swept over the water all the way to Africa.

“Was there something special you wanted to talk about?” he asked.

“Christmas,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about it again. Will you be able to come here for Christmas? You know I’ve asked you before.”

“I’m not sure if it will be possible.”

“Think about Elsa. She’d enjoy it so much. And Angela.”

“What about me?” he said.

“You too, Erik. You would too.”

“I really don’t know what the work situation is for both of us,” he said. “It’s not quite clear what will happen on Angela’s ward.”

“There must be other doctors, surely?”

“There are not many available when it’s a big holiday.”

“Make sure that Angela can get away,” she said. “What does she say about coming to Spain?”

“Can’t you come home instead?” he asked.

“I’ll be coming in the spring. But it would be such fun to celebrate Christmas with you all down here. We’ve never done that.”

“Have you asked Lotta?”

His sister made regular visits to his mother, with her two teenaged daughters.

“She and the girls are probably going to do something with some close friends.”

“What’s his name?” asked Winter, thinking about how his sister was trying to find a new man after her grim divorce.

“She didn’t say anything about a him.”

“OK, I’ll look into it.”

“Don’t interfere in her life, Erik.”

“I meant that I’ll look into the possibility of getting time off so that we can visit you over Christmas.”

“You should have done that already, Erik.”

He didn’t respond.

“I can make a Christmas ham,” she said.

“No, no! If we come we want fish and shellfish.”

Winter found it hard to picture his mother in front of a stove; she had never been that kind of mother. She could stoop over a counter in the kitchen, but that would be in order to cut slices of lemon for some drinks, or to prepare a cocktail shaker. A drink or two too many at times. But she had always been good. She had treated her children with respect. He had grown up to become a man who tried to do the same with the people he came across. He had a reason. Far too many people didn’t have a solid base against which to brace themselves when the going got tough.

“It’s almost December,” she said. “You should be booking flights. It might be too late already.”

“So you should have called earlier,” he said.

She said nothing.

It suddenly dawned on him why. She had been waiting for as long as she could in the hope that he would ask her if they could visit her over Christmas. She’d only been hinting that they should before. Now she couldn’t wait any longer.

“I’ll look into reservations,” he said.

Why not? Over twenty degrees, lots of places with good tapas, and a few extremely good restaurants. It was only one Christmas. He’d spent so many in Gothenburg wrapped up in a shawl of freezing cold winds from the sea. Long days between Christmas and New Year’s when it never became fully light out but everything was enveloped by a mist that a poor detective was unable to see through as he staggered through the city in search of answers to riddles. Holmes. My name is Sherlock Winter Holmes.

They hung up. He stood there in the square for a moment without the slightest idea of why he’d gone there.

He drove back to town, leaving the plain behind him and all the smells associated with that world.

His head had been overfilled with memories, and now he tried to get rid of them, to let them blow away through the open window. The slipstream tugged at his hair and his cheeks. It felt good.

He followed a circular route he knew well. The network of highways sucked him slowly in toward the city center, like a spiral rotating inward. Or downward, he thought as he stopped for a red light in the Allé.

He parked at the same place as before. It might have been exactly the same spot. No. He used the maple tree as a marker, and that showed him it was a slightly different spot.

He touched his forehead and felt the sweat. The back of his neck was also wet, and the back of his head.

He touched the parrot hanging from his rearview mirror. Bill was with him. He touched the little bear on the seat next to him. Odd that he’d never given it a name. It was always Bear.

He touched the parrot lying next to Bear: It looked exactly the same as Bill. The colors were almost identical, maybe something red was yellow instead, but the difference was so slight that you could hardly see it.

“What do you want them for?” the old man had asked as he got into the car.

“They’re mine,” he’d said.

“That weren’t what I asked. I asked what in hell’s name you wanted them for now.”

“They’re mine” was all he’d managed to come out with.

The only things he had left from his childhood.

“You’ve always been an odd ’un,” the old man had commented.

Those words had almost been enough to make him run the old man over. To make a big circle around the farmyard, then come back and really show that he didn’t want people to talk about him like that.

He held up the bird so that it was looking past him and at the trees and the lawn and the playground where children were on the swings or running around and playing tag or playing hide-and-seek, and there were far too many of them and far too few grown-ups to keep an eye on the children and make sure that nothing happened to them.

He would have to help them.

He got out of the car and left his things behind, but he didn’t lock the doors.

He’d positioned the car so that it was pointing toward the road back to the park, and he walked past the square and he found himself behind the high-rise buildings after only one or two minutes, and he could feel the sweat again and he suddenly felt sick, his head was spinning. He paused and breathed deeply, and that felt better. He walked a few more paces and somebody said something.

He looked down at the boy, who was standing beside a bush.

“What’s your name?” asked the boy.