Frozen Tracks (12 page)

Neither Halders nor Djanali said anything. They just
kept on looking at the girl, who gazed out of the window
that was letting in the mild November light. She turned
to look at them.

'I didn't know Gustav all that well,' she said.

Halders nodded.

'Not at all, really.'

Halders nodded again.

'But there was something,' she said, and stared out
of the window again as if looking for that something
so that she could show it to them.

'What, exactly?' Halders asked.

'Well, a row, to use your word.' She looked at Halders.
'Not quite anti-aircraft fire, but there were a few occasions
– several occasions – when he yelled down the
telephone, and sometimes there was shouting, sort of,
coming from his room.'

'What kind of shouting?'

'Well, the sort of shouting you come out with when
you're having a row, as it were. You couldn't hear what
they were shouting. It was just a few occasions.'

'Who is "they"?' asked Djanali.

'Gustav, and the person in there with him.'

'Who was that?'

'I don't know.'

'Was it a he or a she?'

'A he. A bloke.'

'Was there more than one?'

'Not as far as I could see.'

'You mean you saw him?'

'I don't know for sure if it was the one who was
shouting. But a bloke did come out of his room shortly
after I'd heard them. I was on my way to the kitchen
and he came out of the room and headed for the stairs.'
She nodded in the direction of the landing. 'From the
corridor.'

'Did you see him on several occasions?'

'No. Only the once.'

'Who lives in Gustav's old room now?' asked Djanali.

'A girl,' she said. 'I've hardly met her either. She's
only just moved in.'

'Would you recognise the guy who came out of
Gustav's room?' asked Halders.

'I really don't know,' she said, looking at Aneta
Djanali. 'It's not all that easy. It was just the colour of
his skin. And there are lots of people living here.'

'Now you've lost me,' said Aneta Djanali.

'Just because people have the same colour skin, that
doesn't mean that they look alike,' said the girl, and
started gesticulating. 'This has always bothered me. The
fact that people's appearances get tied up with the
colour of their skin.' She seemed to smile, briefly. 'And
it's not just us, in the so-called Western world. There
are people in China who can't tell one white person
from another.' She nodded at Aneta Djanali. 'I expect
you are familiar with this. Or have thought about it,
at least.'

'So this guy who came out of Gustav Smedsberg's
room – you're saying that he wasn't white?' asked
Djanali.

'No, he looked like you. He was black. Didn't I say
that?'

He saw a flash of sunlight as he emerged from his block
of flats, a reflection. It was an ugly building, but the
flash of sun was beautiful.

Other people said that the sun comes from the sky,
but he knew better than that. The sun comes from somewhere
else, where it's warm and quiet and everybody is
nice to one another. A place where there's nobody who
. . . who does things people ought not to do. Where children
dance, and grown-ups dance alongside them and
play and laugh.

He suddenly felt sweat on his brow, but it wasn't the
sun – it wasn't as warm as that.

Since he'd been forced, yes, actually
forced
to stay
away from work, things had got worse.

Pacing round and round the flat.

The films? No, not now. Yes. No. Yes, yes.

Things had got worse.

He'd gone to the chest of drawers and taken out the
things that had belonged to the children and held them
in his hand, one after another. That amusing little silver
thing that was a bird. He spent ages wondering what
bird it was. A canary, perhaps? It certainly wasn't a
rotty, ha ha.

The green ball was also fun, soft and terrific for
bouncing. It didn't look as if it would be a good bouncer,
and felt very soft when you picked it up – but boy,
could it bounce!

Now he was holding the car. The little blue and
black car he'd got from the boy he'd chatted with that
first time. It was the same car. No, it was the same
make. He wasn't exactly an expert, but surely it was
the same make as his own car? Yes. Kalle, that was the
boy's name, and it had been such fun, sitting in the car
and talking to Kalle. What's that you've got? Can I
have a look? Hmm. Lovely, isn't it? I've got a car as
well. It looks just like this one. But a bit bigger. No,
not just a bit. A lot bigger! Much, much bigger! It's
the one we're sitting in now. We can go for a little drive
in this car, and you can drive your car at the same time,
Kalle.

But that wasn't what had happened. Not that time.

He drove Kalle's car over the floor, through the living
room and then over the threshold into the kitchen,
brrrmmm, BRRRMMM; it echoed all round the room
when he imitated the sound of the engine, BRRRRMMMMM!

And now he was opening the door of the big car.
The sweat was still there on his brow. Worse than ever.

He drove. He knew where he was going. His face
hurt because he was clenching his teeth so hard. No,
no, no! He only wanted it to be fun. Nothing else,
nothing else
, but as he drove, he knew that it would be
different this time, and so it didn't matter that when he
tried to turn left he actually turned right at the first
crossroads, and then at the second one.

He could have driven with his eyes closed. The roads
followed the tram tracks. He followed the tram tracks.
He could hear the trams even before he saw them. The
rails glinted in the sun, which was still shining. He kept
as close to them as possible, because when he did that
he didn't feel so frightened.

The light over the fields was as soft as water. It seemed
as if everything was sinking down towards the ground.
Trees. Rocks. Fields glowing black, the soil ploughed
into furrows, like a sea that had stiffened and would
not thaw and come to life until the spring.

What am I doing? What have I done?
What have I
done?

He could see a tractor in the distance. He couldn't
hear anything, but saw that it was moving. It had
been working out there in the fields for so long that
its paint had rubbed off and disappeared and so everything
out there was the same colour, the machine and
the country side, the same rubbed-off November glow
that always seemed to be gliding through the day
towards dusk.

He felt calmer now, after driving for an hour, but he
knew that was only temporary, just as everything all
around him was temporary. No. Everything around him
was not temporary. It's eternal, he thought. It's bigger
than anything else.

I wish I loved it, but I hate it.

He turned in through the gates, which seemed to have
acquired a new layer of rust on top of the old one. The
farm track was almost the same as the fields out there,
churned up by the tractor wheels that were still rotating
out on the prairie.

He was standing in the farmyard now.

I once dreamed about the prairie. I could have had
a horse and ridden through that glade and never come
back.

I could have flown in the sky. Lots of people could
have seen me.

I'll do that one day.

The wind was whipping pieces of straw and twigs
into a circle in the middle of the yard.

There was a smell of dung, as always, and straw and
seeds and soil and rotten leaves and rotten apples and
rotting wood. The smell of animals lingered on even
though there were no animals left.

Not even Zack. He walked over to the dog kennel,
which seemed to be hovering above the ground, as if
waiting for the wind to come and whisk it away over
the fields and roads.

He missed Zack. Zack was a friend when he needed
a friend, and then Zack had passed on and everything
had been as it had always been.

He heard the tractor approaching down the road.
Soon it would grunt its way in through the gate and
stop more or less where he was standing now.

He turned round. The old man parked the tractor,
switched off the engine and clambered down in a way
suggesting habit rather than agility. His body would
carry on moving as per routine long after it had lost all
its softness.

All its softness, he thought again. When you're a
child, everything inside you is soft and everything
outside you is hard, and you eventually become hard
as well.

The old man limped up to him.

'It weren't yesterday I last saw you,' he said.

He didn't reply.

'I didn't recognise the car,' said the old man.

'It's new.'

'It don't look new,' said the old man, staring at the
bonnet.

'I mean it's one you haven't seen before.'

The old man looked at him. There were flecks of soil
on the old man's face. He'd always looked like that. It
had nothing to do with age, didn't mean that he could
no longer take care of his personal hygiene or anything
like that.

'Shouldn't you be at work?' the old man asked. 'It's
the middle of the day, a weekday.' He looked up at the
sky as if to get confirmation of the time. Then he looked
back at his visitor and snorted. 'But you couldn't very
well have driven your tram here.' He snorted again.
'That'd be something to look at.'

'It's my day off,' he said.

'A long way to drive.'

'Not all that far.'

'You might as well live at the other side of the globe,'
said the old man. 'What could it be?' He looked up
again at The Big Calendar in the Sky. 'Is it four years
since you were here last? Five?'

'I don't know.'

'Typical.'

He heard the beating of wings overhead. He looked
up and saw a few crows flying from the cowshed to the
farmhouse.

'Now that you're here, you'd better have a cup of
coffee,' said the old man.

They went in. He recognised the smell in the hall,
and suddenly he was back here again, but at a different
time.

He was a little boy again.

Everything in the house looked just the same as before.
There was the chair he used to sit on at that other time.
She had sat opposite him, big, red.

She had been nice, at first she had, that was when
he could still feel that his boyish body had softness in
it, when it still wasn't too late.

Was that the way it was? Did he remember correctly?

It belonged to that other time. Then those misters
and missuses had decided that he shouldn't live with
his mum, and he'd acquired a foster father. The old man
was faffing about by the stove now, and after a while
the water was bubbling away and the old man produced
a couple of cups and saucers from the cupboard behind
him.

'Yes, nothing's changed, as you can see,' he said, and
served up a little basket full of buns, still in their plastic
wrapping.

'Yes.'

'Not as neat and tidy as it used to be, but apart from
that, nothing's changed,' said the old man.

He nodded. Assumed it was a joke.

The old man served coffee, then sat down again and
looked at him just as he used to do, with one eye sinking
down and the other lifted up.

'Why have you come here?'

'I don't know.'

He'd been back a few times. Perhaps because this
was the nearest thing he'd had to anywhere that could
be called home. And he'd liked the countryside, no doubt
about that. All those smells.

'I wrote,' he said.

'That's not the same thing.'

He took a sip of coffee that tasted like the soil in the
fields outside must taste, or the tarmac that had been
used to upgrade the farm track when he lived here. That
was a smell to remember.

'What are you after, then?' said the old man.

'What do you mean?'

'What do you want?'

'I don't want anything. Do I have to want something?'

The old man drank some coffee and took a bun, but
only held it in his hand.

'I've nothing to give you,' he said.

'Since when have I asked for anything?'

'Just so as you know,' said the old man, took a bite
of the bun and carried on speaking with his mouth full.
'There's been a break-in here. In the cowshed, just
imagine that. Somebody breaks into a cowshed where
there's no animals and nothing to pinch. For Christ's
sake.'

'How do you know there was a break-in, then?'

'Eh?'

'How do you know there was a break-in if there
wasn't anything to steal?'

'You see that kind of thing if you've had the same
cowshed all your life. You see if somebody's been in
there.' He washed the bun down with a mouthful of
coffee. 'You see that kind of thing,' he said again.

'Really.'

'Oh yes.'

'But nothing was taken?'

'A few things, but that doesn't matter.' The old man
was staring into space now. 'That's not the point.'

He said nothing.

'The point is that you don't want anybody prowling
around when you're not there. Or are fast asleep in
bed.'

'I can understand that.'

The old man looked at him, his eyes pointing in
different directions.

'You don't look all that well,' he said.

'I've been, er, been unwell.'

'What's been up with you?'

'Nothing serious.'

'Flu?'

'Something like that.'

'So you came here to get a whiff of cowshit.'

'Yes.'

'Well, all you need to do is breathe in deeply,' said
the old man and snorted again, although he might have
been laughing.

'I have done.'

'Take as much as you like.'

He raised his cup to his mouth again but couldn't
bring himself to drink. The damp air in the kitchen
made him shudder. The old man hadn't had time to
light a fire after his work in the fields. God only knows
what he'd been doing out there.

'I think I have a few things here still.'

The old man didn't respond, didn't seem to have
heard.

'I was thinking about it the other day, and I remembered
a few things.'

'What kind of things?'

'Toys.'

'Toys?' The old man refilled his cup, the black sludge
that could kill. 'What do you want toys for?' He looked
hard at his visitor. 'Don't tell me you've had a kid?'

No answer.

'Have you had a kid?' the old man asked again.

'No.'

'I didn't think so.'

'They are my . . . memories,' he said. 'My things.'

'What are these toys you're on about?'

'They're in a box, I think.'

'Oh Lord, for God's sake,' said the old man. 'If there's
anything they must be upstairs, and I haven't been up
there since Rut died.' He stared at his visitor again. 'She
asked after you.'

'I'll go up and take a look,' he said, getting to his
feet.

The stairs creaked just like they used to do.

He went into the room that was once his.

It smelled of nothing, as if this part of the house no
longer contained any memories. As if everything had
disappeared when the old man stopped using upstairs
and made up a bed in the maid's room behind the
kitchen. But things hadn't disappeared, he thought.
Nothing disappears. They are still there and they're
getting bigger and stronger and more awful.

The faint afternoon light was trying to force its way
in through the little window at the gable end. He
switched on the light, which was a naked forty-watt
bulb hanging from the ceiling. He looked round, but
there wasn't much to see. A bed that he hadn't slept in.
An armchair he remembered. Three wooden chairs. A
wonky table. Three overcoats were hanging on a rail to
the right.

There was sawdust on the floor, in three little piles.
There were a few cardboard boxes in the far corner
under the window, and he opened the one on the left.
Beneath a few tablecloths and handkerchiefs he
discovered the two things he was looking for: he picked
them up, tucked them under his left arm and carried
them down to his car.

The old man came out.

'So you found something?'

'I'll be going now,' he said.

'When shall I see you again, then?' asked the old man.

Never, he thought.

Winter parked behind the building that contained half
the shops in Doktor Fries Torg. It wasn't the first time.
Once he'd had toothache so bad that he had double
vision for some seconds before getting out of his car.
When Dan, his dentist, had touched the tooth responsible,
Winter had felt for his gun. Not really. But the
tentative touch by the dentist had almost made him lose
consciousness.

This time he wasn't going to visit the dentist. That
might have been better. Young men being viciously
attacked was worse.

The square was practically deserted. This could be
the 1960s, he thought. That's what it looks like here. I
must have been four years old, maybe three. I must have
been here as a three-year-old. Dad's dentist had his
surgery here even then.

His mobile vibrated in the inside pocket of his
overcoat.

He looked at the screen.

'Hello, Mum.'

'You saw my number, Erik?'

'As usual.'

'Where are you now?'

'At Doktor Fries Torg.'

'Doktor Fries Torg? Have you been to the dentist's?'

'No.' He stepped to one side to avoid two young
women, each of them pushing a pram. 'This is where
Dad used to go to the dentist's, isn't it?'

'Yes. Why do you ask?'

'It doesn't matter.' He could hear the rustling at the
other end, all the way from Nueva Andalucía to 1960s
Gothenburg. Perhaps she was reading a newspaper at
the same time, but he didn't think so. 'What's it like on
the sunshine coast?'

'Cloudy,' she said. 'It's been cloudy all day, and
yesterday as well.'

'That must be awful,' he said. 'Cloudy on the Costa
del Sol.'

'Yes.'

'What's the Spanish for Cloudy Coast?' he asked,
taking out his packet of Corps and lighting a cigarillo.
It tasted like a part of the early winter surrounding him,
a dark taste filled with heavy aromas.

'I don't know,' she said.

'You've been living down there for years and years,
and you still don't know the Spanish word for cloud?'

'I don't think there is one,' she said.

He laughed out loud.

'Did you know that the Japanese don't have a word
for blue?' he asked.

'Ah, I know the Spanish for that,' she said. 'It's
azul
.'

'
El cielo azul
,' said Winter, gazing up at the grey sky
overhead.

'The sun is just beginning to break through over the
sea,' she said. 'This very minute, as we're speaking.'

He knew what it looked like. Some years previously
he had spent a few days in a hot Marbella in early
autumn while his father was dying in the local hospital.

One morning he'd left the breakfast table at Gaspar's
and walked down to the beach under a leaden sky, and
in the space of a few seconds the clouds over the
Mediterranean had been torn apart and the sun swept
over the water all the way to Africa.

'Was there something special you wanted to talk
about?' he asked.

'Christmas,' she said. 'I've been thinking about it
again. Will you be able to come here for Christmas?
You know I've asked you before.'

'I'm not sure if it will be possible.'

'Think about Elsa. She'd enjoy it so much. And
Angela.'

'What about me?' he said.

'You as well, Erik. You would as well.'

'I really don't know what the work situation is for
both of us,' he said. 'It's not quite clear what will happen
on Angela's ward.'