Open Grave

Five

“Agnes, would you please get the medicine.”

He had called several times before she heard his voice. Before they had a functioning bell system from the library too. That was when the male guests gathered there to have a cognac after dinner. Then sometimes the housekeeper’s attention might be called for.

She was standing a couple of steps inside the room, looking at him with that inscrutable expression he had such a hard time with. It might entail willingness just as well as total repudiation and contempt.

Needing to involve Agnes in this was not something he was happy about, but now he was feeling so dizzy that he did not dare try to get up from the chaise longue.

Agnes organized most everything in the house but he wanted to take care of the heart medicine himself. He knew that she kept track of how many pills he took, because several times she had pointed out that he had to renew the prescription.

“Shall I call Birgitta?”

Agnes twisted her head slightly, her lips pressed together, the eyes somewhat clouded by cataracts, expressionlessly observing an oil painting that was hanging above the fireplace, a portrait of a woman attributed to Arvid Lagerstedt.

The professor had the feeling of being a very obstinate patient, who for the hundredth time was trying his caregiver’s patience, and where conventional surface politeness alone kept the caregiver from slapping the patient across the mouth and then leaving him to his fate.

He chose not to answer the question, the customary tactic. It was theater, their single combat tested over decades. A theater where he always got the last line.

“Thanks, that’s fine, Agnes, the medicine.”

She disappeared without a word but returned immediately. While he rinsed down the pill he observed how Agnes circled the library, while she waited for him to set down the glass. He got the impression that there was something she wanted to say, but knew there was no point in asking.

“Do you remember, Agnes-”

She turned around.

“How long have you worked here, Agnes?”

“Fifty-five years.”

“That’s a long time,” the professor observed.

She nodded. He wanted so much to hear her say something, make some kind of judgment, or at least make a comment, about the fifty-five years she had served three generations of Ohlers.

Agnes Andersson had never, as far as he could recall, let slip any appraisal of either the family or her position. She had always been there, like the so-called Stockholm bureau in the hall, the table service from France, the framed sketch of a bladdernut, signed Linnaeus, the oil painting by Roslin, the swords from the time of Charles XII that hung crossed over the fireplace in the library, the spear from the parts around Lake Tanganyika, and everything else that filled the house.

It was as if the news about the Nobel Prize, a kind of receipt for his achievement but also an endpoint, made him want to sum up, and Agnes was the only one he could talk with. It was the two of them, no one else, who could confirm each other’s stories.

He was still holding the glass. She was waiting by the window, fussing with something on the windowsill. He got the impression that she experienced the tension in the room the same way he did. Wasn’t there something unusually tense about her shoulders and the somewhat crooked back, perhaps an expression of a suppressed desire to speak?

While his story was public property hers was mute, and trying to coax it out of her was pointless, he knew that. That after a whole life of distance they could come together and write a common story was a vain hope.

I’m looking for affirmation from a domestic servant, he thought indignantly, a woman who can barely read a newspaper, who never in her entire life lifted a finger to improve herself and considered learning as something sickly. I, a von Ohler who has received the Nobel Prize, am fawning on an illiterate fisherman’s daughter from an inbred island. As if I needed her approval!

He set aside the glass. Agnes turned immediately and gave him a quick glance. Once again he thought he glimpsed that desire in her to say something, before she hurried over, picked up the glass, left the room, and closed the door behind her.

He stared at the closed door.

“Ungrateful hag,” he muttered, got up slowly, smiled contentedly when the fit of dizziness did not appear, and went into the bedroom. It was time to get dressed, to meet the first foreign journalists, who were surely already on the scene at University Hospital, where he laid the foundations for his Nobel Prize.

Agnes had chosen and set out clothes, newly pressed trousers, white shirt, bow tie, and a somewhat worn blazer. A slightly surprising choice-he had expected something more formal, if anything a suit with vest-but realized immediately how well the choice of clothing agreed with the image he wanted to create, and which Agnes immediately and intuitively seized upon.

In the hall were a pair of newly brushed dark shoes. Agnes helped him tie the laces.

“I’ve called for a taxi,” she said. “Professor, you can go out and wait. It will be here soon.”

He lingered at the door, hesitated, heard a car drive up, nodded, and opened the door wide.

“Thank you, Agnes,” he said, “that’s excellent.”

“Professor Ahl will meet you at the clinic,” said Agnes, closing the door behind him.

He felt driven out of his own home, but attempted a smile. In the near future he would be forced to smile a lot.

He didn’t like smiling. In general he didn’t like it when old people smiled, it looked like a death grin.

“Mr. Olen!”

The taxi driver’s enthusiasm was if possible even greater this time. He opened the gate as the professor approached.

“You again?”

“Yes, Professor Olen, I asked for it. Stephania calls for me.”

“So every time there is a fare from this address you’ll be coming?”

“If I’m working.”

This pleased the professor, it was like having your very own chauffeur. He got into the backseat, only hired hands insisted on sitting next to the driver, his father had maintained, and it was an understanding that Bertram von Ohler shared.

“Everything fine?”

“Thanks,” said the professor.

The taxi took off. It was warm and pleasant in the car. The professor leaned back, closed his eyes, and for a few moments he was back in his youth, in the family’s old Packard, with Olsson at the wheel. That was his name, Gerhard Olsson, strange that I even remember his first name, because no one called him anything other than Olsson. Then he disappeared during the military call-up, somewhere in Norrbotten, drowned in a river. The new one, what was his name, Wiik it definitely was, but no first name showed up. He was not many years older than Bertram himself, with one leg shorter than the other, which was probably why he was rejected by the military, smelled of tobacco. He stayed with the family until…

The professor opened his eyes. Wonder if Agnes knows? She ought to.

Then there was no more chauffeur. The caretaker had to manage the little driving there was, and then mainly in the summer to the house on Rådmansö that his father Carl bought during the war. It was a real find, a classic Victorian mansion, owned by an alcoholic factory owner who became insolvent and quickly needed cash.

It was Consul Wendt who had tipped him off about the house, because even though he backed Hitler while the Ohlers, despite their German background, had always been Anglophiles, they socialized. After the war all quarrels were forgotten and the Wendt son later was elected to parliament as a conservative.

But he did not want to think about former caretakers and Nazis. That led too far, there was simply not room for all the history. Or it was not allowed to take up room. Like the story with Wiik, his behavior when Anna quit, threatened unbelievably enough to report Carl. That invalid who could not even become a private, and whom Carl took on out of pure charity, threatening with the police!

Or else with Dagmar, why should he think about her? That they fell in love and got married, what did that mean today? Nothing! Three new leaves on the family tree were the result, good enough, but brooding about Dagmar and all the other dung in the story was of no use.

“My father always took taxis,” he said.

The driver laughed. A happy fellow, the professor observed, yet not insistent. He drove nice and easy too, no sudden careening, an ideal chauffeur.

“Was he a professor too?”

“That’s right. How did you guess?”

The chauffeur shrugged his shoulders.

“You see that sort of thing,” he said.

“He was one of the country’s foremost gynecologists.”

“I see,” said the driver, braking in front of the entry to number seventy.

“That was quick.”

The driver turned around.

“Here is my telephone number,” he said, handing over a card. “Call if you need a taxi.”

The professor pulled out his wallet with some effort.

“Keep the change,” he said, extending a hundred-kronor bill.

“It’s too much.”

“I’m not exactly destitute,” said the professor, “and it will soon be December. Then there will be replenishment.”