Open Grave

Nine

Karsten Haller had drawn the conclusion that the woman was Bertram von Ohler’s daughter. Who else would be stumbling around barefoot in his yard? There was something frightening about her, like when you observe a person unable to contain herself, control her movements or bodily fluids. She was a grown woman, not a child that could be excused, and it was a cold and damp October day. It all made him feel very ill at ease.

Then when she broke out in hysterical laughter he got the impulse to call to her to stop, pull herself together.

Then an apple dropped and she fell silent immediately. Despite the distance he could see with what a blissful look she rubbed the apple against her cheek. By no means did this make him calm; on the contrary, it underscored a kind of capriciousness in her that he sensed could lead anywhere.

He knew nothing about her. Maybe she was crazy?

For a few moments he toyed with the thought of calling her to him, exchanging a few words, perhaps coaxing a little information out of her. But her look made him give up on that idea.

Now she was standing under the tree, lightheartedly leaning against the trunk, chewing on the apple she had previously handled so lovingly. He got the impression that like a female spider she devoured her lovers.

It was a strange environment, so quiet, aside from the music from the neighboring house that he had noticed with surprise was playing almost all the time, and whose ominous organ rumble only underscored the desolation that rested over the neighborhood.

The only one who generated any kind of activity was the man in the glassed-in, illuminated, and circular greenhouse on the roof of his house. The same man he had run into the evening before and who had given a somewhat confused but nevertheless sympathetic impression. It was not just the greenhouse and the gigantic climbing hydrangea that testified that he was interested in plants. On the lot were several interesting bushes, even one he could not identify at a distance, and whose deep red leaves caught your eye.

He tried to imagine how it had looked here decades ago. Probably not much had changed, all the houses appeared to have been built eighty or ninety years ago, solid stone houses, on good-sized lots, which left room for fruit trees, lawns for croquet and sunbathing, and in a few cases pools.

A nature reserve, it struck him, with protected species that were treated with the greatest respect and care and which in contrast to Etosha, where he had worked as a guide for several years, was not subjected to caravans of insolent tourists with binoculars and expensive photographic equipment.

He was an intruder, carefully disguised and equipped with tools that gave him access to the domains of the elect, to the cream of Uppsala’s population, to the “educated and cultivated,” as his mother had called them.

Those who owned at least a couple of expensive cars parked outside the house, who sailed in the Caribbean and skied in the Alps, shopped in London and New York, while they complained about the tax burden under the dictatorship of the social democrats. All this as his father had talked about and which during his youth often sounded like envious complaining.

It was his experiences from Africa that first caused him to understand more of the context. It took a village in north Namibia to understand Uppsala.

The cold crept up his leg. The woman had left the garden long ago. He did not understand why he was still standing there, what he could achieve by this insolence. He had no plan. Not even a sensible idea, other than the thought of the deep injustice that Bertram von Ohler was being honored in every conceivable way.

Injustices exist to be fought against, his father had maintained, and he, if anyone, ought to have known. Yet in his attitude there was an indulgent aspect, in the midst of the rhetoric he might fall silent and laugh, at himself and his tirades, belittle what he had just asserted and with emphasis at that.

Perhaps the weight he carried when he came ashore at Trelleborg, with his son pressed against his skinny chest under a stinking coat, was so great that it made everything else seem small?

Shortcomings and everyday discord paled in light of the evil he had experienced during the war, turned into a temporary irritation like when a fly buzzes around your head. Was that how his father would have seen it? Was that how he himself should view Nobel Prize-winner Bertram von Ohler? Like a fly?

But you swat at flies by reflex, he thought. You don’t always think you’ll make a hit, it’s more a movement to give vent to the fury at the persistent presence. And then the ridiculous pride at your quickness when surprisingly enough the little carcass tumbles around and down, struggles with its shitty feet and pale wings, dies a painless, bloodless insect death, an insect’s kind of reasonableness. Blame yourself, you think a little carelessly, perhaps a trifle ashamed that you resorted to violence against such an insignificant and in most respects, strictly speaking, innocent creature.

No plan, no idea why he was still standing there. Only a growing anger.

He should forget it all, for who was really served by dragging old rubbish out into the light? Perhaps his parents would not have approved? What has been cannot be made undone, they would surely reason in their heaven.

But the anger was too great.

His father would have taken action! The insight came traveling like a black projectile that struck his body with such force that he was forced to support himself against the wall. That’s the way it was! Ludwig Haller’s love for his family was greater than anything else, unashamedly unconditional. A love that cleared its own paths, ground down all resistance, overcame every obstacle, even his own history. Against the painful memories of a whole continent Ludwig Haller, who had lost everything and almost everyone, a refugee who had seen everything a human eye should never have to see, against all this he placed love for his only son and his wife.

In that case revenge, when it concerned those near and dear, would also be just as obvious, categorical, and immediate as love. His father would not have hesitated a second.

Vacillation was betrayal. His grandfather, Ludwig’s father, had vacillated and it had cost him and several in his family their lives.

Were there perhaps other reasons he spent so much time staring at a house with an old man personally unknown to him, a man he had never met, only heard and now read about? And who by an unfathomable chance now found himself so near to.

It felt as if he had pulled off a cistern cover and was now staring down into a deep, dark well, whose stone-lined sides were dripping with dampness and covered by spotted moss that resembled black, clotted blood.

Down there in the depths were his parents, they spoke to him. His father with his slight accent and his mother with her gentle voice, two things he instinctively despised when he was a child.

Down there Nouibiwi was also lurking, or Miss Elly as she preferred for him to call her before they got married, and which he continued to call her, despite her express disapproval. Otherwise she did not talk that much, neither then nor later, but what she said was often filled with wisdom.

She did not say anything from the depths of the well either, only looked at him with her big eyes, the whites shining in the darkness, and encouraged him to do something for once!

He looked over toward the Ohler house, which had now assumed quite different proportions, been reduced. The plaster façade, with its dark patches after the rain, no longer looked as imposing. If you looked at it closer the cracks could be seen, perhaps depending on the seepage from the heavy clay that everything in the city rested on. The birches were simply too close to the house, he said to himself, they ought to be removed, if only to let more sun onto the lot.

The windows, so inviting before with their neat candlesticks and potted plants, now in the dark of the afternoon resembled black eyes that malevolently stared out over the surroundings.

From the wheelbarrow he picked up a trenching shovel, for its form and usability his favorite tool, and weighed it in his hand. On the shaft, at seventy and ninety centimeters, notches had been carved, like bowl hollows, to make planting easier. They were not really necessary, he had the measurements ingrained in him, but it was a habit to carve in these markings.

He stared at the tools in the wheelbarrow: a sledgehammer, a string trimmer, a crowbar, and much more.

I ought to rough-hew a pillory, he thought, rough and scratchy, and erect it in the midst of this reserve of high culture. The organ music could rumble.

“I ought to,” he mumbled, before he set aside the trenching shovel and instead reached for the concrete shovel and spade that were leaning against a tree.

He continued his strenuous labor. The ground was hard and invaded by all kinds of roots; once again he muttered something about the birches. He had decided to excavate to a depth of forty centimeters. If he encountered large stones he would let them be. The planting depth should be at least sixty centimeters, but when he discovered how hard it was to dig, he decided to raise the beds somewhat. He had proposed that to start with but the homeowner rejected it, thought it would look unnatural. Now it had to be like that anyway. He could explain it such that in time the planting would settle somewhat.

Normally he would have rented a small excavator and done the work in a jiffy, but on that issue too he was met with opposition. No machinery could be brought onto the property. So now he had to dig by hand, though actually he had nothing against that. It was hard work that tried your patience, but after a while the precisely weighed movements created a pleasant pace, an almost hypnotic rhythm, where the repetition gave him the time he needed for reflection, or rather a kind of meditative calm.

The rain did not bother him-on the contrary, it made the ground softer. He toiled on as always, occupied by the monotony. Every shovelful demanded a similar thought and muscular effort, but with a little variation in every stroke, invisible to an outside observer, a kind of automated and polished finesse that amused him, granted him satisfaction. A visitor at the edge of the excavation would think, Nice that I don’t have to do this mechanical job.

He had experienced so many times how the uninformed felt sympathy for him, that he should have to toil in this old-fashioned way, that he did not let it bother him. He saw it differently: Others were missing out on something valuable and were to be pitied. They saw only the sweat that appeared on his forehead and in his armpits and how his muscles were forced to work. Nothing else.

It was not until twilight came that he straightened up, set aside the spade, and surveyed the situation. It was at moments like this that he wished he still smoked. The thought came to him every day, even though he quit more than ten years ago.

The planting was intended to cover about fifteen square meters and more than half of that was dug up. He kicked at a stone on the bottom of the excavation and it obligingly loosened from the grip of the clay. He took it as a good sign. Tomorrow he would finish the excavation and then refill it with his own mixture for acid soil plants, needles, cones, and branches from spruce, peat, leaves, compost, and a little gravel. The proportions varied from time to time, it was not that exact, he worked by feel, tossing in what might be suitable at the moment. If he came across a rotten log or stump he threw that in too. This time he would layer the mixture with twigs from the pruned spindle tree in the front.

It struck him that there must be an excess of beech leaves on the neighbor’s property. He had glimpsed the stately beech above the roof. Should he perhaps ask whether he could gather some leaves in sacks and carry them over?

He peered up toward the tower. The “tower man,” somewhat hidden behind plants but completely visible, stood observing him. He raised his hand, but the old man withdrew without responding to the greeting.

A lonely old fogey, he thought, while he gathered up his tools and turned the wheelbarrow over, but he can probably part with a few leaves.

Once again he observed the excavation and made the association that he was standing before an open grave. Most recently it was at the burial of his mother; that was also a rainy day, six months ago. Those who were assembled huddled under umbrellas, a woman whispered something inaudible, another nodded at him, before they all dropped off, apparently reluctant to prolong the ceremony and their own presence more than necessary. And he appreciated that, no gathering had been arranged, no uncertain, wary talk over clattering coffee cups and saucers. There were too few mourners, five besides the minister. His mother’s lonely life would have stood out as more pitiable if they had exerted themselves to observe convention with a funeral reception.

But afterwards, when the grave was filled in and the few wreaths and flowers laid out, when everything was quiet in the little cemetery, he thought, What memories did the others have of his mother? And then he regretted that they hadn’t gathered to talk for a little while. It did not have to be strained, he could simply have been able to express his gratitude for their presence in a more emphatic way, perhaps coax out a few remembrances. He had no idea, however, who two of the guests were.

And those who were not present, what did they have to tell? There were many gaps in his mother’s own story and now there was no one who could fill them in. The war years she had talked very little about, perhaps out of consideration for his father, and he understood that quite well. But her early years? He knew so little.

Now it was too late, was his only thought, as he stood in the rain in the cemetery. Was that perhaps only an expression of self-pity? His own solitude stood out as even more obvious now that his mother was gone. And she had actually expressed a wish to “be able to end it,” tormented as she was the last years by rheumatism and migraine-like headaches.

Not only was it too late to fill in the gaps in mother’s life, it was also too late for himself, for as far as he knew no one was interested in his own story. Even fewer would come to his funeral, he was sure of that-a thought that made him stop on the gravel path. A few broken lines from a hymn his mother used to sing when he was a child came to him. He wanted to cry but pulled himself together.

From where he was standing in the cemetery he could see how the caretakers were waiting in the background, they had observed him, quietly curious. One was sitting in a garden tractor, the other was standing alongside with a shovel in his hand, perhaps they had things to take care of, he thought, but did not want to get started until he was gone.

He started to leave, as controlled as he could, nodded to the caretakers, stepped out through the gate and caught sight of his car. At the same moment the tractor started up. He suppressed the impulse to return to the cemetery, go up to the caretakers, shake their hands, say something appreciative and then some small talk about the weather or about the signs of spring that were also to be seen in a cemetery.

Instead he jumped into the car and drove to his mother’s small apartment on Norrtäljegatan to start clearing up and cleaning out. There, in a drawer under the kitchen counter, strangely enough, he found the diaries, eleven small notebooks with black, soft covers of a kind he had not seen in many years. The slightly wavy lines were filled with his mother’s barely legible scribbling. He realized that what he thought had been his mother’s handwriting during old age had already been established in her youth.

Considering where he found them, in direct proximity to the garbage can, he got the idea that she had intended to discard them, but death in the form of a massive heart attack had intervened.

It’s strange, he thought then with rising irritation, collapsed on a kitchen chair, how everyone hides their lives. Not just strange, but also dreadful, as if no intimacy was possible.

“It was just the two of us,” he sobbed.

He had become agitated, not because she kept a diary, but because she did not have the sense to get rid of them in time, her typical indecisiveness, many times stemming from a kind of fatalistic passivity that always annoyed him. If she had not wanted to share while she was still alive, shown him that confidence, then why deliver a few limp notebooks reeking of garbage in a kind of scornful afterbirth?

Since then, after the initial irritation in his mother’s apartment, he had been reconciled with her. He had read the diaries, depressed and confounded, but also filled with a mournful gratitude when little by little he realized her greatness.

And now he could stand by an open grave, which would soon be filled with rhododendron and other lime-intolerant plants, without introverted anger or tears, instead filled with resolve to let her life shine, just light up the dark corners where the “educated and cultivated” tried to hide their dirty laundry.

Her words, obviously written down in a mixture of resolve and terror, would grant her an hour of remembrance, he would see to that. For he had understood that much later, the thin figures at her mother’s funeral were of the same make as his mother. Then they had looked like pathetic and pitiable individuals who by chance had been blown into the cemetery. Now they stood out for him as the only allies he had.

He smiled to himself, spat toward the birches, leaned over, picked up a stone, big as a fist, moved into the shadow of a bush where four lots met, weighed the stone in his hand before with a powerful discus throw he sent it away in a wide arc toward and over Ohler’s house. He followed its track, a granite comet toward the dark sky, just as elated as when as a child one early May Day morning he pushed an abandoned baby buggy, filled to the brim with empty bottles he had picked up after the students’ Walpurgis festivities the night before, bottles that he intended to redeem at Uno Lantz’s junkyard in Strandbodkilen. The buggy rolled a little hesitantly to start with down the hill, before it took heart, picked up speed and became a projectile. In line with the statue depicting a student singer the buggy swerved, listed severely, and spewed out liquor bottles in a magnificent slow-motion movement.

The effect this time was not as noisy, but when the stone fell down on the roof on the front side of the house it produced a crashing sound anyway and then rolled clattering down the roof tiles. Then silence took over the block again.

He disappeared from publisher Lundquist’s garden after, in his opinion, a job well done.