Sail of Stone

6

Fredrik Halders lay on the sofa with his feet on its arm. An odd lamp hung from the ceiling above the sofa. Or maybe it was his perspective.

“Have I seen that lamp before?” he asked, pointing up.

“That’s a question you probably have to ask yourself,” said Aneta Djanali from the floor, where she was sitting and leaning over some photographs.

Halders giggled; at least that’s how it sounded to Aneta’s ears.

He tried to turn his head from his supine position, but that was a mistake. His neck would never be the same again. He had taken a blow once when he was being a bigger idiot than usual, and it could have been his last mistake. He would never regain his original bull neck. That was just as well. Everyone knew what happened with bull necks in the end.

“Is it from Africa?” he asked.

“What do you think?” she asked, without looking up.

He studied the underside of the lamp again. It had a pointed base and something else above that was green.

“It’s from Africa,” he said.

“Good, Fredrik.”

He applauded himself. That was called Chinese clapping.

“Can you guess from which country?” He heard Aneta’s voice from the floor. “And to make it harder I want to know what the country was called before what it’s called now.”

“That is a tricky question,” he said.

“I realize that.”

She was aware of the level of difficulty. They had talked about her homeland only three times per hour every day since they started working together and since they started to see each other during their free time. Speaking of talking. It was Fredrik who kept on talking about her exotic origins and her wonderful homeland, which he pretended not to be able to find on any map of the world, but which he, under all the talking, kept close tabs on, just as he actually kept close tabs on most things, under his tough exterior.

“This country’s former name starts with the letter u,” she said.

“Uuuuuh…,” he said.

“Yes, that’s a good start,” she said.

“Ukraine,” he said.

“That’s not in Africa,” she said.

“Well, shit.”

“The second letter is p,” she said.

“Uuu… Upper Silesia!” he shouted at the ceiling.

“Where’s that?”

“In Africa,” he said.

“Not in my Africa, anyway,” she said.

“Isn’t that a film?” he said. “My Africa?”

“To get you on the right track, I can tell you that this country’s name is made up of two words,” she said.

“Uuu… Upper Soppero!”

“One of them is right,” she said.

“Lower Soppero!”

“But it started with u, didn’t it?”

“Shit, right.”

“Now I’m done helping you,” she said.

“If we talk about something else maybe I’ll think of it,” said Halders. He propped himself up on his elbow. He could feel it in his neck. “What are those pictures?”

“From last summer,” she said.

“Am I in them?” he asked.

She held up a photo that she’d developed and copied herself. She and Fredrik were standing behind Fredrik’s children, Hannes and Magda. She could see the cord of the shutter cable coming from Hannes’s hand. He looked like he was concentrating, but happy. Everyone looked happy in that photograph.

They looked like a family.

“Where did we take that?” Halders asked from the sofa.

“Guess,” she said.

“Don’t start that again,” he said.

“Do you see the waves behind us?” she asked.

“Yeah, yeah, but which sea is it?”

“The North Sea, of course.”

“The Old North Sea, it roars and rooolls,” said Halders.

“Not that day,” she said. “There wasn’t a single ripple.”

“Do you think an African would dare to jump in the North Sea no matter the season?”

“I will refrain from answering,” she said.

“Have you heard about the African who came to Sweden as an exchange student for a year and went home afterward, and his friends asked him how the weather was up there, and he said that the green winter was okay but the white one was horrible?”

“No, I haven’t heard that one,” said Aneta, “please tell me.”

“Uuuu…,” said Halders.

“I hear you’re still working on the name of that country.”

She looked at the photograph in her hand again. That day had been perfect. Such a perfect day. Fredrik had played Lou Reed in the evening. Lou Reed sounded like Fredrik looked.

The perfect family.

She thought suddenly of Anette Lindsten, safe in a secret location, maybe her childhood home or some other secret place.

Somewhere there must be a wedding picture. The perfect day. A light across their faces. Anette and Hans, their origins in nature, linden, stone, rapids, leaves…

Do you take this woman… to love her in sickness and health…

To beat her in sickness and health.

Nature to nature, dust to dust.

“Did you ever want to hit Margareta?” she asked.

Halders’s jaw dropped, it dropped.

“What the hell kind of question is that?”

“Don’t be so shocked. You know what I was doing yesterday. I’m just trying to imagine how it can happen. How things like that can happen.”

“Jesus, Aneta, this is like a parody of the question ‘Have you stopped beating your wife?’ It’s a question you can’t answer yes or no to.”

“That’s not the question I was asking.”

He didn’t say anything. She looked at him. He was a violent man; she had always seen him as an intense man, but in a literal sense. I take down the bad guys literally, as Halders put it. He almost always did. He was a desperate man, and he wasn’t alone in that. He could control his rage. He walked through life angry, but he could control it. Many others could not.

“There was one time during the divorce,” he said slowly. “Or before. One time, or a few. I would get so angry that I wanted to… wanted to…” He looked straight at Aneta. “Wanted to hit something, but there was never never ever the slightest risk that it would be her. Never.”

“What was it, then? Or who?”

“Dammit, Aneta, you know me. Not a person… well, some thief once, but you get what I mean. No one close to me. At home.” He started to rub his neck, suddenly, a nervous gesture. “I would bang my fist into a cupboard door. It happened. I kicked a leg off a kitchen chair once.”

“My God.”

“It was a chair.”

“My God again.”

He stopped rubbing. She saw that his eyes had taken on a different light, as though they had turned inward. It was as though he, all of him, had turned inward.

“And at the same time, I knew it was my fault. Do you understand? That I was the cause of my own rage, or whatever it’s called. That I was the biggest reason that we had ended up in that situation. That I was the one who was splitting up my family, was just about to do it. And that made me so desperate that I lashed out.” He seemed to snap back from inside himself and now he was looking at her. “There’s a paradox, huh? You hit your way out of your own responsibility.”

She didn’t answer.

“But those few times I’m talking about, when I hit something, it was dead things.”

Dead things, she thought. There’s another expression.

She had seen dead things. Halders had seen dead things. It was part of the job. Part of the routine of the job. Routine: What was a body that no longer had a life?

Calm down, Aneta. This evening isn’t part of the routine. There’s a man lying on your sofa and you’re sitting on the floor with pictures of summer happiness and soon you’ll both be sitting at the kitchen table eating and drinking something good. There’s a light in here, in this room. You don’t need to drag in the shadows right now. Kontômé is lighting up the room, lighting the way.

“Try to hit your way out of responsibility,” she said. “You can’t escape.”

“There are so many people who try,” said Halders.

She got up. The photographs still lay on the floor like a sunburst. That was a good expression. It summed up the content and mood of these pictures.

“And are going to try again,” she said.

Winter turned around in the doorway and watched the sleeping Elsa. She held her arm tight around her stuffed animal, Pelle, a black and white panda whose head was bigger than Elsa’s. Pelle studied Winter as he stood there. Pelle never dropped his gaze. Pelle’s face expressed a belief in the future.

“She knows all the books inside and out,” he said. Angela was sitting on the sofa with Femina magazine in her lap. “She recites them for me. Like an actress.” He was standing in the middle of the room. “Until she falls asleep.” He stretched his arms upward; they had become stiff in Elsa’s bed. “I think Pelle knows them all too, but he doesn’t say anything.” He brought his arms down. “But Elsa talks enthusiastically until she crashes in the middle of a sentence.”

“Or you do.”

“Not tonight,” he said.

She looked up.

“Can’t you fix something?” she said.

“Something? What kind of something?”

“Something. Something good.”

He walked across the hall to the kitchen.

There was phyllo dough and eggs and dill and butter, and a little smoked salmon left over from last Sunday. White pepper.

He drank a glass of white wine while the packets were in the oven. They smelled good. He listened to Wynton Marsalis on the little Panasonic in the kitchen. Or Marsalis was on, but he wasn’t really listening. He watched the multilayered blanket of dough rise up over its contents.

He carried the tray into the living room. Angela was sitting with her legs tucked under her and she was looking out at the sky, which was clear and dark above Vasaplatsen.

“Mmm,” she said.

He poured some wine.

“It is Tuesday, after all,” she said, raising her glass.

“Tuesday all week,” he said, toasting.

She sliced into her packet and inhaled.

“Ahhh!”

“I try my best,” he said. “I try to make the most of my limited abilities.”

“I like you anyway, Erik,” she said, smiling.

“You haven’t tasted it yet.”

They drank coffee in the dark. The only light was the nighttime light of the city, outside. It was constant, like an eternal day.

“This used to be called ‘sitting twilight,’” said Angela. “One of the nurses on my ward says it sometimes.”

“Good expression.”

“Mmhmm.”

“Is that what it’s called in German too?” asked Winter. “Is there an expression like that?”

“No idea.”

Angela was originally from Germany, old East Germany actually, die sogenannte DDR, Leipzig, an old, devastated center of culture according to her father, and that was why he took his wife and their only child at the time, a son, and moved to Berlin, East Berlin. Soon after, he had seen the wall, die Mauer, rise up against the free sky; that was in 1961. Surgeon Günther Hoffmann had seen this from one of the large windows at the hospital that had ended up in the shadow of the wall; the lower floors were already dark in the early afternoon.

The next year they had made it across, hidden in the chassis of two VW Beetles. Günther Hoffmann had been sure that his wife and son would manage; the arrangement was based on that. He came later, when it was dangerous but possible.

He tried to live in West Berlin but felt that the city pushed him away with its gaudy Western neon lights. This wasn’t his country. These were not his fellow citizens. He wasn’t even the cousin from the country. In the light of the advertising signs, even black Leipzig began to glow like some sort of memory of loss. It was an insane thought.

Doctor Hoffmann felt like a stranger in both of his homelands, and he suffered the consequences. He spoke with his wife and son again. They journeyed north across the sea.

He removed the final n in his last name and became Hoffman. He saw it as yet another consequence. A new era of life.

He got a job at Sahlgrenska Hospital in Gothenburg and found peace. His daughter Angela was born in 1967, in the summer.

“Known as the Summer of Love,” Angela had said once, in the beginning, and explained to the free-form jazz nut Winter what had happened in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in the summer of 1967-the flowers; the people just hanging around, which still seemed to have been something special to experience; the music: the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Peanut Butter Conspiracy. She had bought records from that time; it was her year, after all. Erik had laughed at Airplane but listened to the twin guitarists in Quicksilver Messenger Service on the live album Happy Trails with some interest. “These guys could have been something on the jazz scene,” he had said. “They sure can play.” She had put on “Eight Miles High” by the Byrds once, and Erik had flown out of the easy chair during Roger McGuinn’s intro: “But that’s Coltrane!” Later she had found that he was correct. In an interview she’d read in Mojo, McGuinn had said that he had been looking for John Coltrane’s particular atonal tenor sax in that guitar solo. The guy could play.

She got up and turned on a floor lamp near the opposite wall. The light was warm.

He was going to call Steve Macdonald soon.

He needed to say something to Angela first.

“I had a visitor from my past today,” he said.

“That sounds ominous,” she said.

“An old girlfriend.”

“I don’t know if I want to hear this,” she said.

“With emphasis on ‘old,’” he said.

“Well, what did she want?”

Her tone was not exactly warm, not like the light from the lamp.

He explained.

“He hasn’t been gone for that long,” said Angela.

“No.”

“But I would probably have gotten worried myself,” she said.

“Mmhmm.”

“What can you really do?” she asked.

“We can put out a missing person notice and issue a description of course, internationally. Interpol, as usual.”

“Are you going to do it, then?”

“She wanted to wait a day or two.”

“She? Does ‘she’ have a name?”

“Johanna.”

Angela didn’t say anything. He could tell she was thinking. He wasn’t sure what she was thinking.

“Johanna Osvald,” he said.

“Okay, okay,” she said.

She got up and took her cup out into the kitchen without saying anything.

He followed her. She was standing at the sink and looked like she didn’t know why.

“I haven’t actually seen her in twenty years,” he said.

“That’s too bad,” she said.

“Please, Angela,” he said.

She dropped the coffee cup on the counter. It bounced off the steel but didn’t break. It spun on the counter.

I will have to try to get out of this. Help her to get out of it too.

“Do you think I should call Steve?” he asked.

Angela turned around.

“What can he do?” she said. “And you said yourself that she wanted to wait.”

We’ll release it, he thought. Her dad will contact her in the morning. The letter to the “Osvald Family” is some kind of joke from the past. Maybe they’ve gotten some letters since the war, more of them. You never know.

He looked at the cup.

“It should have broken into a thousand pieces,” she said.

“Have the countertops gotten softer or have the coffee cups gotten harder?” he said.

Aneta Djanali drove to Anette’s former apartment before seven. Maybe she would have been named Anette herself if her parents had gotten it right. Was it Anette you were trying for? she had asked her mother once. Her mother had smiled in her African manner, a manner that Aneta had never really understood.

Her mother came from Koudougou, not so far from the capital. She could dance the hagra, alone when there really should have been a group of women singing and dancing to the tira flutes. It was wedding music, a wedding dance. Maybe that was why her mother had danced it. Aneta! We’re waiting for your wedding!

Aneta had records with hagra music; she could hardly keep moving with it. It was in her body, as it had been in her mother’s. She had a koso at home, the double-skinned drum, and the dried calabash filled with sand, the niabara, and the finger rings that were struck against each other in an eternal rhythm, boyo.

The houses shone in the remaining light of dusk. It had rained during the hour before dawn, and puddles had formed in the uneven asphalt. She saw women and children on the way to day-care centers or schools. She didn’t see any men. A delivery van went through a crossing on its way to a shopping center she couldn’t see.

She had a hunch.

She parked illegally on the cross street directly opposite the entrance. Her car was as anonymous as everything else before the morning begins in earnest.

The elevator mirror was missing. Despite that, she made a motion to fix her hair.

There was a smell in the stairwell from some kitchen or another.

The nameplate was still on the door.

She pushed down the door handle and the door slid open toward her. She could suddenly feel her pulse.

She opened the door a little more and saw a shadow. Then darkness.