The Hand that Trembles

SEVENTEEN

After leaving his workplace, Sven-Arne Persson immediately went home. He had a mist before his eyes that only let up once he was lying on his bed. He did not speak, he did not think. All his energy was focused on staying in motion.

Slowly but surely the impact of what Jan Svensk had told him started to seep into his consciousness. He accepted the fact that Elsa had been run over, without much surprise. He tried to imagine her under a thundering lorry but could hardly recollect her face anymore.

The fact that Uncle Ante was writing his memoirs, however, and that in these he would ‘tell everything,’ terrified him, since he knew what Ante was capable of. When his uncle decided on something he was almost impossible to divert from his cause. The fighter from the Teruel front took no orders.

Sven-Arne tossed and turned on the bed, thumping his fist into the wall and cursing all damned Swedes and above all the one with the very name of the Swedes, Svensk. He went through the events of the past few days, and above all he returned to the visit to Koshy’s. Why had he gone there when he had received so many signs along the way that something was up? He should have better interpreted the signals. Instead, he had walked straight into the establishment in a foolhardy manner, to his doom.

What had Ante told Elsa that had made her so upset? What was there to tell, except one thing? Elsa had heard, seen, and understood everything that had to do with him, perhaps even better than Ante. She was the one who had seen through him both in public life as well as in the bedroom. He was for her the impotent rhetorician, the personification of hypocrisy. When he had claimed that it was her coldness and clumsy manner that had made him impotent, she was not hurt – as he had intended – she laughed. She had laughed straight in his face, and in order to humiliate him further, had taken out the dildo she had bought many years ago.

‘This is my county commissioner.’ She had grinned and moved the mechanical member up and down.

She, who had shown no genuine happiness for years, had laughed.

Now she had become bewildered to the point that she had stepped out in front of a lorry. Not intentionally – Sven-Arne was convinced of that. Elsa would never willingly take her own life, that much he knew. Not the Elsa he knew, not with her calculating logic.

And yet now she had been thrown off her stride. Unconscious. He came upon himself wishing she would die. No, he recalled those thoughts. It was too low. The one whose turn it was to die was Ante. He was old. Why should he start to blabber? The last time they talked, half a year ago, he had seemed spry, at least not confused and demented. Quite the opposite: He had analysed the Swedish political situation of the day more clear-sightedly than in a long while. He had taunted the prime minister, who, like a nobleman, was renovating a manor house in his castle-rich home district.

‘He probably also has tenant farmers,’ Ante had declared cheerily, as he always did when he wanted to take aim at some elevated social democrat.

No, it was not very likely that he was confused. He would probably die with a cutting phrase ready on his lips.

Sven-Arne decided that Ante must have upset Elsa by saying that it came as no surprise to him to hear that Sven-Arne was in India. It must have hit hard, the discovery that his uncle – a man that Elsa had always disliked – had known these past twelve years what had happened to her husband. It must have been a blow to her pride. She had been doubly betrayed. Thus her bewilderment, and the anger that had come after the initial shock.

He decided that this was what had transpired. Everything else was unthinkable. The mention of memoirs was just idle talk. But on the other hand, if they were published posthumously he would be victorious even in death. For who would seriously be able to criticise the old man, and what would be the point? It was Sven-Arne who would become the target, he would be publicly flogged, hung out to dry. His sentence would be another matter altogether.

He stood up from the bed so quickly that he grew dizzy.

‘What’s the point?’ he screamed.

He already knew the answer. He would have been able to live with the consternation and the general hullabaloo, the critique, the outrage, yes all this he would have been able to take, but he would never again find peace. Not one second of peace. He would be pursued wherever he steered his course. Public interest would never wane, everyone would want to know. To know! All of these damned Swede-bastards who devoured all the shit, hair and all, wallowing in the mass media’s rubbish. They consumed the rotting headlines with a ravenous appetite, as if they were delicacies, and slurped up the offerings of retarded hoaxers as if they came from the king himself.

Ante’s triumphant voice would ring in his ears, whether or not the old man was dead. He had nourished himself with bitter fruit ever since he had returned from Spain, now some seventy years ago. The old man had become broken down, but his ideology had turned to stone and remained unchanged by the tooth of time. He was going to rub his poisonous balms into Sven-Arne’s open wounds.

As a fourteen-year-old on the roof of Rosberg’s barn he had sensed something of Ante’s dream, it was as if he could touch it, and since then he had never been able to cut that feeling out of his chest. When Ante said ‘someone has to do it, it’s just that simple,’ Sven-Arne had interpreted it literally. That time it had been about Rosberg’s roof. Twenty years before it had been about the Spanish Republic.

But Sven-Arne had also seen something deeply tragic in his uncle. The adults had quarrelled about Budapest in Grandmother Agnes’s kitchen. The fact was that the people of Hungary were being trampled.

Sven-Arne chose a different path. He joined SSU, which pleased his father but gave rise to a lifelong conflict with Ante.

Now he just wanted some peace and quiet, to work in the garden, to teach the children at St Mary’s, get his shave at Ismael’s once a week, chitchat with his neighbours on the street, have a beer and drinks with Lester. Nothing else. He had no passions left.

Lies! He could touch the lie, it lay like a swollen cadaver before him, stinking, but as a politician he could close his nostrils. He had done that so many times before. At the budget preparations, in pre-election discussions, at county and judicial meetings, in Poland on the fuck-and-drink trip underwritten by the Skansa company in return for which they were allowed to buy land at bargain prices, on the way to New Zealand when Lisbet Manner vomited on the plane, started to cry and became emotional. Conservative bitch, he had thought then, but pushed it away. Once they arrived, more sobbing and tears, but he had held his tongue rather than reveal the whole spectacle.

He should have dragged everything into the light, but shadowed it instead, playing along like the power politician that he was. How often had he not kept silent with the truth in order to protect his own position and due to his loyalty to the party? And perhaps also out of consideration for a political system that appeared to be the only one possible.

But deep inside – this was a conclusion he had arrived at after many years of pondering in India – he had not wanted to grant Ante that he was right when he thundered about corrupt politicians bought by the capitalists, even if he agreed with much of what his uncle had to say. It would have been too painful. The decision he made as a fourteen-year-old to get involved would have been a gigantic mistake. The fact was also that Ante’s dream society did not seem so tempting. The constant, hardened defence of eastern socialism undermined Ante’s legitimacy. He disqualified himself, even if Sven-Arne understood that Ante in his heart and soul did not approve of either Stalin or Gomulka. What Ante was defending was something else, the right of the worker and the dream of revenge.

You made it so damn easy for yourself, Ante! You placed yourself outside, leant on a Bulgarian miner who ended up blowing himself up, you sang your old songs and you shovelled snow. You did actually shovel snow. You put your gloves down on the ridge of the roof so that I would have a warm place to sit.

But you couldn’t save the republic. You blamed the governments of Western Europe while your Communists were advocating the same superpower politics. How many times hadn’t they gone over this subject?

1956. How old you were already – forty-one years – used up in a way that not even Grandmother or Rosberg were. Your movements were often impulsive but in a reflexive way, as if nerves and muscles allowed themselves to be steered by old, accustomed signals but did not reflect an inner life. The spark you showed was habitual, sadly antiquated.

You were strong – no one in our family could measure up to you – but at the same time inexplicably weak. Back then there was an oomph in your movements, it was reminiscent of a time when physical labour gave a man the legitimacy to speak for many.

I understood all this – others saw only your impetuousness, your anger and dogmatism. You became a clown.

The years after the Spanish War were hard. No one wanted you. You were a skilled plumber but got no work. You were – like the others who joined up – blacklisted. Anders Diös laughed right in your face, as did Lindgren and Quiet Kalle. As Europe was choking under the Fascism that you had tried to fight, you were being mocked.

You became a farmhand and felled trees in the forest in the winter. It was not a good fit for you. You wanted noise and masses of people around you. A farmer in Rasbo – even if he was decent enough – was nothing for you. You were widely known as ‘the Bolshevik.’

The royal family and nobles gathered at the county manor house. There were hunting parties and dinners. You knew what they were toasting to, the table servants reported it back to you.

You refused to work as a beater at the great elk hunt.

You lived in a tumbledown cottage among other tumbledown cottages. The old woman Björk and her daughter in Sandbacken gave you cheese, eggs, and rugs. There was never enough of anything, your large body begged for more, and the floors were cold. You held Björk in high regard. In her there was nothing of the blood-red that you were fighting for, only humility, but also a warmth that must have saved you from the deep despair you must have felt.

Then it turned. In 1943 the forest was a terrible place to work but you were warmed by the news from the eastern front. The manor house dinners did not decrease in frequency but the intoxication of victory was transformed into a fear of the red hordes that threatened to roll back the German war machine. How far it would reach was the question they anxiously posed.

You triumphed in 1944, agitating in Film, where the party received twenty-six percent of the vote, you got a job with a smaller construction manager firm, you were put on foundation-laying jobs in Almtuna and Svartbäcken, moved into town. The tide had turned.

You fell in love unexpectedly. Ann-Marie, who lasted eight years, even managed to get you to learn to dance.

Is this what you are going to cover in your memoirs? If so, they could be good. If you could start in the poor cottage kitchen of the forties, when desperation overcame you, to the sound of a weaving loom and the rattle from the neighbour’s kitchen in Sandbacken, among the only confidantes you had, and then look back, to Spain, to the hovel on Dragarbrunn where Emil, Erik, and you grew up, then it could be really good. But I know you, Ante, you want to get even.

You neither can nor want to write some sugary working-class epos, because how would the Bulgarian miner fit in? There would be no place for your never-ceasing fury, it would fight itself free and destroy the inveterately sentimental. No, it would be overwhelmingly sentimental, because in actuality Ante was a romantic, something that Sven-Arne had pointed out on many occasions but that Ante had always dismissed with an angry snort.

Sven-Arne Persson was in agony as never before. His entire life – a mirror image of his uncle’s – was mercilessly exposed, and it was hardly an encouraging sight.

‘That bastard,’ he said out loud.

For a long time, Sven-Arne had wanted to become like Ante, but also not. He wanted to be, if not loved, then at least liked, and Ante was neither. Sven-Arne wanted to win but Ante had always bet on the wrong horse, and what irritated Sven-Arne the most was that his uncle appeared to favour the losers.

He sat down on the bed and tried to think clearly. He laid out the problems as if in a numbered list: First, he had been recognised. Rumours that the former county commissioner was alive – and how he lived! – had probably already started to circulate in Uppsala. Second, Elsa had discovered Ante’s duplicity. Third, Elsa was badly injured, lying unconscious in a hospital. Fourth, his situation in Bangalore would become untenable – journalists would soon appear. Fifth, Sven-Arne Persson was dead. He was John Mailer. He had no passport and could not leave India.

These were the known facts. Then came some hypotheses: Elsa knew of Ante’s plans to write his memoirs but did not know what they might uncover. Or did she? Was that why she had become so upset? Lastly, if Ante felt that it would benefit him and his survivors then he would tell all.

He lay down, stared up at the ceiling, and went through the seven items. After half an hour of deliberation, he got up and went out to make two calls, the first to Delhi and the second to a former colleague in Sweden. A man who did not hesitate to make himself guilty of manipulation if it were to the benefit of the party or himself, a man who Sven-Arne Persson did not believe had ever planted a tree his whole life, a man who had had enough of scandal and would probably do everything to avoid yet another.

After the calls he felt ashamed. He thought of Lester and the others at Lal Bagh.