Sail of Stone (7 page)

“
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.

I
t took a few seconds for her to understand. No one had touched her. The darkness was part of the room, the hall.

He had shut two doors, a sound she hadn’t heard. The light had suddenly disappeared when the doors closed. She heard him on the other side of the bedroom door. It wasn’t a pleasant sound. She felt the SIG Sauer in her belt, its weight against her hip, security.

He had no business there. That was the law and it was on her side; it stood here next to her in a black robe and white wig, an orb in its hand.

A fat shadow.

She just wanted to turn and leave this house. Leave quickly.

These people’s problems were not hers. And the problem wasn’t there anymore. The two of them had split up and gone their separate ways, or paths, to find happiness. There was happiness somewhere, maybe everywhere, like a promise to everyone: The grass is greener here, the sky is bluer.

Now she could hear a scream from inside. He hit the door, one, two, three. Soon she would be able to see the axe through the chips of plywood. After that, something that might look like Jack Nicholson’s crazy face. But there was no one here who could yell “Cut!”

If someone could, it would be her.

He opened the door, wild eyes, blank, no focus, until now.

“Who are you?”

“Police,” she said, and held her identification so he could see.

“Po … police? What are you doing here?”

“What are
you
doing here?” she said. “This isn’t your apartment.”

“My apartment? I
lived
here. I
lived
here, for fuck’s sake!”

“Not anymore,” said Aneta. “I must ask you to leave.”

Yes, she thought. I’ll do it this way. It could get messy otherwise. Unpleasant.

“I have no intention of going,” said Hans Forsblad.

“Do you want to come with me?” she said. “I could arrest you.”

“
You?
” He tried to laugh but it was a weak attempt. “How the hell would you manage that?” He took a step forward.

“
Stand still!
” shouted Aneta. Her weapon was in her hand, her arm straight out in front of her. No. But she was on her way there.

“Are you crazy?” he said.

He was close to her; he towered up over her like a shadow that was bigger than the shadow of the law, which was no longer visible. The only thing that was visible was the damned pistol she had been forced to draw. Or hadn’t been forced. She hoped that he wouldn’t see that it was trembling in her hand.

She waited for his next step. God, make me disappear. I don’t want to shoot this man. I don’t have time for that kind of investigation. He doesn’t have time. The health care system doesn’t have time. Only the funeral industry has time, eternal time.

She had him in her sight.

He sat on the floor, just collapsed.

He cried.

It was a loud noise, the same one she had heard through the door a moment ago. He lifted his head. They were real tears. His face was naked, his hair was like an ill-fitting wig, she could see now that he was wearing a suit that seemed expensive, of a label that managed to look more fashionable when it was wrinkled.

He blew his nose with the handkerchief that had been sticking out of his breast pocket. He’s not even missing that, she thought.

“You don’t know how it feels,” he said. “You don’t know what it’s like.”

Aneta had lowered her SIG Sauer but hadn’t replaced it in her holster.

“What?” she said.

“Being shut out of your own apartment,” he said, sniffling, “from your own home.”

“I heard that you haven’t lived here for a long time,” she said.

“Who said that?”

She didn’t answer.

“It’s them,” he said, focusing his gaze on the door behind her. “They’re the ones that said it. But they don’t know anything.”

“Who is
they
?” she asked.

“Surely you know,” he said.

She put away her weapon. He followed her movement with his gaze.

“So I’m not under arrest anymore?” he said.

“Get up,” she said.

“You don’t know what it’s like,” he repeated.

Now he got up, swaying.

“May I leave?”

“How did you get in?” she asked.

He held up a key.

“The locks have been changed,” she said.

“That’s why I have this,” he said, waving the key in his hand. The tears were gone now.

“How did you get hold of it?” she asked.

“You must be able to figure that out,” he said. He had suddenly grown, straightened out.

He was someone else now.