Slowly but surely he became an islander and during that journey he lost his sons. Lindell had seen that early on, but there was not much she could do.
Sammy’s theory that it was Jens or Jerker who called was unlikely. They had never liked her.
* * *
Ann played the call again and felt that she had to struggle against the tears, looked at the hand resting on the table, the cheese hand, as her son Erik called it. Everything had turned out so different, but now the old days came rushing toward her and from all directions. She turned the hand, studied the lines, the police hand. Her colleagues stepped forward, first the old ones, but also the others, Haver and Fredriksson, even the sly Evert Lundkvist with a past in the secret police, with whom she worked in the investigation where Edvard tramped into her life. He had found a young man in the forest, murdered and barely concealed under a spruce tree, and the macabre find started a process that he was never really able to explain to her. Ann had come to the insight that Edvard lacked the tools for analyzing that journey. There was nothing like that in his family, in his culture. There you worked, suppressing everything that could obstruct your livelihood. For that reason many times he was incapable of stepping right. That he nonetheless didn’t stumble all too many times was due to a kind of morality and pride that also was part of the Risberg inheritance.
“That’s how you travel,” he’d said once, when he had been lured out into deep water by Ann, “without knowing where to. Some are built for outings, carefree in a way that I can admire. I’m not. I was happy as a worker on a farm, proud of my father and grandfather, but suddenly it was as if we weren’t worth anything. Our efforts, I mean. It was enough to read the headlines, or look at all the damned game shows on TV, to get that. I was active in the union, but then the local division was suddenly shut down. I was happy with Marita, but we went our separate ways. Can you understand?”
Then he fell silent. Go on, continue! Ann wanted to shout. Talk with me! But he fell silent.
“You still loved her when you moved to Gräsö, is that it?” she asked, but got no answer. She wanted to hear it, wanted to get him to take on part of the guilt that things went the way they did between them.
* * *
She listened to the audio recording one more time, like someone who can’t stop picking at a scab. Should she tell Sammy? No, she decided for the umpteenth time, that would be betraying a confidence. She had to search for the boy herself. Well, not “boy.” Now he was a young man.
* * *
Her free afternoon was ruined. She had looked forward to cleaning up in the flower beds, perhaps plant the perennials she had bought. The bags had been standing for several days outside the porch, with the blossoming bleeding heart that waved seductively, but she stayed sitting in the garden, rocking back and forth. Edvard had a good laugh when he saw that she’d bought a hammock, and she felt a little ridiculous, but mostly wounded by his merriment. She could not say why she’d bought it. In a hammock you rock, and in motion it’s harder to drink wine. And it’s impossible to place a table in front of a hammock, in other words there’s no place for a glass.
In the trees and the thicket the finches were talking away. Ann went in and poured a glass of wine, took a sip, but left glass and bottle behind in the pantry. She brought the phone with her to hopefully find the desperado, as Sammy had called the man who was looking for her.
Seven
“Stay with me, linger here, while I still have hands, skin, and body.” With one hand she stroked her belly, the other was raised in front of the window. Her whisper was inaudible to Edvard, but even so he turned around where he was crouching by the potato patch. His one hand rested flat on the ground, his eyes were closed. Was he gauging the temperature, or what was he doing? Was it a kind of primitive ritual, where contact would be established? She knocked on the windowpane.
“It’s time,” he said when he came into the kitchen. “I can help you trench. It won’t take long.”
Let it happen slowly, she almost blurted out. He smiled; maybe he was thinking about potatoes, maybe he was thinking about her. Did he see something in her eyes and movements? Perhaps she emitted an aroma, which she’d read that butterflies do when they want to attract a partner.
“It’s a good variety,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“Maris Bard,” he said, taking one of the sandwiches she had made. He had dirt on the back of his hand. “But you should have pre-sprouted.”
“I did,” she said. “The pantry is full of egg cartons with potatoes.”
That was Gösta the carpenter’s idea.
“I’ll be damned,” he said, taking a bite. She took it as a compliment and felt how she blushed, and got irritated at herself, but not really. She wanted to be there, in the borderland, like a half-grown young girl, on her way to conquering something. Something big, significant, even essential.
“There’s room for a late variety too. Asterix is good. Red-skinned. I plant it every year. It likes the soil you have.”
“What kind of soil do I have?”
“Light.”
He smiled at her. “And you should be happy about that,” he added.
“I am.”
Something in her voice betrayed her, because he looked up. He was often insensitive to moods, but sometimes he was like a finely calibrated seismograph, whose needle shook a little at the slightest tremor.
“Asterix,” she repeated, to hide her embarrassment.
He finished the last of the sandwich and licked his fingers. “Egg and caviar,” he said contentedly.
* * *
While they planted potatoes she told him about Sammy Nilsson’s visit and the audio file he brought with him. Edvard had met him on several occasions and Sammy was the colleague of hers he liked best.
He made the final furrow straight as an arrow before he commented.
“Do you know whose voice it is?”
“Maybe,” said Ann.
“What will you do?”
“I don’t really know. That’s a life I’ve left behind.”
“Didn’t you play private detective a little when the school burned down?”
“I just asked around a little.”
“And what did you come up with?”
“That the arsonist is in the village.”
“Maybe the call was about that?”
“Sammy was thinking that way too.”
She placed the last potatoes in the final furrow. She did it with care and strove to keep an exact distance between the tubers.
“There now,” Edvard said, picking up the rake.
She remained crouching a moment before she straightened her back. She studied the grip of his hands around the shaft and was struck by how easy, almost unresisting, everything seemed to be for Edvard, in any event as long as it was about tools and gear. And he did it nicely, stroking the rake with precise movements over the hills of earth, sometimes tapping a little clod that willingly fell apart, covered the seed potatoes with careful pulls so as not to injure the sprouts, evened out and left a completely flat surface behind him.