Open Grave

Twenty-six

It was with mixed emotions Agnes noted that Birgitta and Liisa Lehtonen had decided to spend the night in the house. After finishing the wallpapering they shared a couple bottles of wine and then decided to continue the renovation work the following day.

Cleaning and mess-dust and garbage to take care of-Agnes had thought the evening before, but now at the breakfast table having the two women there felt refreshing. The Finnish woman was in an unusually good mood besides and entertained the others with hilarious episodes from the time she was active as a competitive shooter.

The professor preferred to have breakfast in the dining room and had then withdrawn to his study.

“Did you hear all the commotion last night?” asked Birgitta. “Were you the one who was up?”

She looked with a curious expression at Agnes, who realized that Birgitta saw a chance to ventilate her theories about night sleep, the position of the planets, and inner harmony. Agnes denied having left her bed.

“I usually sleep like a log,” she said. “You know that.”

“And then someone screamed,” said Birgitta. “But that was probably Daddy having a nightmare.”

Agnes had also heard the scream but was convinced it was not the professor, the scream had come from the ground floor. She thought Birgitta and Liisa had quarreled, and fell back asleep almost immediately.

“Maybe it was a ghost,” Liisa suggested. “Strange things do happen here in the house. And probably always have. What was his name, that chauffeur who worked here long ago that we saw a year or so ago?”

“I don’t remember,” said Birgitta.

“Don’t be that way, of course you remember!”

Birgitta shook her head.

“What was it? Something short, like Malm or Berg,” Liisa forged ahead. “Maybe we can ask Bertram? He must know.”

“Wiik,” said Birgitta.

“That’s it!” Liisa exclaimed. “He maintained that you could hear someone sighing and moaning in the cellar.”

Agnes saw that Birgitta was becoming more and more irritated.

“What was that?” she asked.

“It was before your time,” said Birgitta, “and the old man was ancient and gaga when we saw him.”

“I think he was as clear as anything,” said Liisa with an unconcerned expression. “He maintained that awful things had happened in the house.”

“Talk,” Birgitta said.

Now there was not just irritation but also discomfort in her face.

“When was that?” asked Agnes.

“During the war,” said Liisa. “He claimed that he was fired by the old Ohler. That he knew about things that-”

“Stop now!” Birgitta screamed suddenly and started sobbing. “I don’t want to hear a rehash of untrue old rumors. It’s enough with all the new untruths.”

“What do you mean?”

Liisa’s voice sounded unusually melodic. Agnes sensed the breakdown. From a pleasant conversation at the kitchen table to a stormy quarrel. She had experienced it before. There was something in the Finnish woman’s voice that called forth these recurring eruptions.

But this time Birgitta’s customary vehement reaction and the accompanying escalated dispute did not appear. Instead she leaned her head in her hands and Liisa mumbled something that could be understood as an apology.

Agnes had listened to and observed it all with increasing astonishment. She had never heard mention of any Wiik who might have worked in the house. Whatever the story was about, untruthful rumors or not, they must have been buried deep in the hidden chambers of the house. Rumors had a habit of propagating among the employees, sometimes for generations. There were few circumstances that the servants did not know about. Here was evidently a case that had been effectively hushed up. Agnes understood that it meant several things: The rumor was completely or at least mainly true; it concerned something sensational; and the servants had been properly frightened and certainly warned. Her coworkers during the early 1950s, who surely would have known who Wiik was, had kept their mouths shut, probably out of fear of losing their positions.

It struck Agnes that perhaps it was about homosexuality. Did the old professor have a relationship with Wiik, perhaps exploit him? That could explain the Finnish woman’s hectoring-she loved to mercilessly swoop down on all forms of double standards and fear of deviant sexual behavior. Agnes had been astonished many times at her frankness.

But now Liisa too fell silent, surely out of consideration for Birgitta, who calmed down and wiped away the tears with the back of one hand. The other hand held Liisa’s.

Agnes got up from the table and started clearing. Experience told her that the two women would withdraw for a while. That was not something she had an opinion about any longer.

“We’re going to rest a little,” said Birgitta.

The two women left the kitchen. They could at least say thank you, thought Agnes, but more out of old habit than because she was actually displeased. Nor did the fact that they disappeared to “rest” right after breakfast surprise her.

She picked up and did the dishes at the same time as she kept an eye on whether the gardener would show up. Perhaps he was working on the front side of Lundquist’s lot? She had become more and more curious about the man, although the connection to Anna was too vague for words. A saying, a few words, no more than that. But still, the uncertainty about who he was and where he came from was there, and it worried her more than she wanted to admit to herself.

The house was silent. She recalled a time when there was life and movement. Birgitta and her friends especially could make a racket. And then Dagmar, “the professor’s wife,” as she was called by the employees, she could also live it up so that it resounded in the whole house. Above all when the drinking started getting more serious. At night Agnes could sometimes hear her tripping across the floor, the sound of the liquor cabinet being opened, then a short silence-when Agnes could imagine how Dagmar was bringing the bottle to her mouth and taking a few swallows-followed by a contented “ahh.” And then the tripping back to the bedroom. Sometimes she vomited early in the morning. Agnes was always the one who had to tidy up.

Strangely enough the professor never realized the extent of his wife’s boozing, but on the other hand there was a lot at that time that he didn’t notice. He lived for his research, showing his family and home only a preoccupied, duty-bound interest.

Everyone knew that he was unfaithful. There was talk of a younger woman who worked at the hospital whom he, like an old-fashioned benefactor, supported with an apartment and certainly other things too. Agnes suspected that his trips to Italy did not have that much to do with his work but instead were outings together with his mistress, or “the piece” as the cook called her.

Dagmar was deeply unhappy. Everyone in the household realized that, but no one actually showed any pity on her. The professor’s wife took out her frustration on the servants, she was spiteful and unfair. The professor could be obstinate and really mean.

Their quarrels poisoned existence for everyone. When Dagmar died after a heart attack, Palmér, who used to come and potter around in the garden, adjust the furnace, and take care of other practical tasks, summed up everyone’s opinion when he said, “It was probably all for the best that she was called home” and made a gesture with his hand to show in which direction he thought that Dagmar von Ohler’s new “home” was.

She was written out of the story with ease and with relief, but so many years later Agnes was prepared to partly reconsider her judgment of Dagmar. She was probably driven to drinking and ill temper. Agnes could also recall a considerably more obliging and friendly woman.

Why these mental outings back in time? It only made her depressed and slowed her down. But was it perhaps her own departure, her own “calling home” that was approaching, and which therefore evoked this review of memories? She needed to melt down all her recollections, all the fifty-five years in service, into a manageable clump, in order to be able to take bus 811.

She would get off at the state liquor store in Öregrund, buy a bottle of liqueur of the kind she knew Greta drank in secret, then go down the hill by the ICA grocery store, past the square and the loathsome snack bars that were housed in the old boathouses, to come at last to the ferry landing. From the ferry she would dump the black clump in the water and see how it disappeared in the depths.

This time there would be no Fredell that she could share the transit with, and at Lidbäck’s no old mare would be standing there to talk to. But everything would be the same. She would walk home at a calm pace, this time without getting pneumonia.

She was going home! Home to Gräsön! It was like a revelation. She smiled to herself and automatically ran the dishcloth over the already shining counter, while she looked out into the garden. The few apples that were still hanging in the trees rocked alarmingly vehemently in the strong wind. It was a pity if the fruit were to go to waste so she decided to pick the last ones and make a few more apple cakes. One they could have today and the rest could be frozen. Those the professor could chew on in his solitude, she thought, with a tingling sense of mischief.