“Water in two days,” he said.
He picked up the egg cartons that had held the seed potatoes and carried them over to the trash barrel by the road, while Ann let her thoughts wander to the man who had called. If it really was who she thought it was, he had nothing to do with the village. She had a hard time seeing him in the country at all. How many years ago was it, maybe fifteen? They had met a few times since then, most recently four years ago. That was before she resigned from the force. He had looked a bit scruffy, resembling his uncle in that respect, but said he’d gotten a job after a period of unemployment. They’re building, he had commented. He lived in the same neighborhood where he grew up. Safest that way, he’d said with a laugh. Safety wasn’t exactly something you associated with him.
A light soil, she repeated silently to herself. A light life with a light soil. She knew that the season was far advanced. Gösta had got his Early Puritans in two or three weeks ago, but that didn’t matter. It really didn’t matter if any tops came up, or if there was any harvest to brag about. Wrong! She changed her mind immediately. It would be great if their joint exertions could produce an amazing outcome. Something to talk about, even remember.
It felt strange to work together with Edvard. As if they were a couple, like many years ago. They had collaborated nicely, but she couldn’t say anything about that, so as not to appear childish, or rather, because she and no one else had seen to it that the collaboration was broken.
Edvard returned, picked up the rake, but rested on the shaft, looking around, as if he was searching for more tasks.
“Listen, Ann,” he said in a strangely serious tone, and she started, fearing the worst. Now he would tell her that he’d met a woman on his damned island and for that reason couldn’t visit anymore, because that woman on the island, or in Östhammar, or in Hökhuvud, or wherever he’d met his ladies over the years … because that bitch was jealous. She recalled one of them, an artist who moved up from southern Sweden, red-haired and big. She’d seen them outside the state liquor store at Gränby Center. That’s the kind of woman he wants, she’d thought, with large breasts and a capable pelvis.
“Yes?”
“I met a woman last winter.”
“I don’t want to hear.”
Damn you! she thought about screaming, but her jaws were locked.
“I putter around in my Gräsö place. My habits are somewhat eccentric, and even though I might long for a little company sometimes, I’m used to being on my own. During the winter it gets especially gloomy. It’s dark and dreary.”
Jeez, she thought, coming from Edvard this was like a whole novel.
“She still calls, pretty often actually.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Spring and summer there’s always the sea. You can get out, scatter your thoughts.”
“You trawl for herring or set out duck decoys when you get horny, in other words.”
He looked at her in surprise and then burst into laughter.
“I’ve shot birds a single time in my whole life. It wasn’t fun.”
“It was also illegal.”
“I didn’t know that,” he said with a smile.
Ann snorted. He was scared, it was that simple. Scared that he could fall in love with her again. Why did he even come to visit? To deliver herring and plant potatoes? She wanted to ask flat out, but was just as afraid as he probably was, injured as they were by life, by each other. By her betrayal, when she went to bed with an unknown guy, and that probably could have been overlooked, but against all odds she got pregnant. How many times hadn’t she looked at Erik and thought, dreamed about, wished: if Edvard were your father anyway, and then immediately regretted it, because it was somehow like rejecting her own son.
Did he want to make her jealous? Or were his nonchalant comments about women a primitive way to get back, to show that he truly was desired, but not particularly interested himself? As if intimacy and love were all the same, he had his homestead on Gräsö and the sea.
He smiled! That alone. The feeling of happiness made her ashamed, but she loved his smile.
“Shall we set up the greenhouse?”
She had mentioned that she’d bought a greenhouse by mail order, which now lay in a pile of unopened packages under a tarp.
“A neighbor has promised to help out.”
“Is that the carpenter?”
“He’s sweet and helpful, but he’s gotten a little sad since the fire. He found one of the missing refugee boys. It took a toll on him.”
“How did that happen?”
“The boy got into Gösta’s car, and he froze to death there. He was lying curled up in the backseat with a blanket around him, but it was almost ten degrees below freezing that night.”
“Was he going to steal the car?”
“No, they think he was seeking shelter. He probably got scared and ran from the fire, it was chaotic. Gösta doesn’t use the car much in the winter, so he didn’t discover the boy until a few days later. Then the car was completely snow-covered. Imagine what a shock, you start to brush snow and scrape windows, and discover a dead boy on the other side of the windshield.”
“Poor thing,” Edvard mumbled. “Where did he come from?”
“Afghanistan, I think,” said Ann.
“Many years ago I was forced to open Viola’s old atlas and look for all the countries they were talking about on the news. You want to understand a little in any event. All the wars, all the refugees. And now it’s even worse.”
Ann was forced to turn away. Edvard’s innocent expression and the humanity in his comments, wanting to know, touched her. She knew his worry, even anxiety, so well, where people who suffer was concerned. And who used an atlas these days to get oriented?
“Then he sold the car,” said Ann, “and bought another one.”
“I’m out there on my island … they talk about the climate, refugees, and all the misery … I have no connection to anything, other than the little jobs I get, patching a foundation, excavating some pipe, fixing a veranda, or whatever it is. It’s a world that rolls along on its own. People are nice, we shake hands, I excavate, they pay, we shake hands again. Then I go home. Make dinner. The next day I take the boat out to the skerry. It goes around like that. There are so many pages in this atlas that I’ve never visited.”
“Are you happy on the island? You saw more people before, didn’t you?”
He shuddered at the question, shied away immediately, and she regretted it at once.
“You were pretty active before, in the union, I mean,” she threw out to smooth over her question.
“I was,” he said, without taking the thread further.
“Where I work no one is in the union, except for me.”
“Are you in the union? In the confederation?”
Ann nodded. “The food workers’ union.”
He looked at her, laughed, and gave her a tap on the shoulder. It was intended as a friendly gesture, she understood that, but she almost lost her balance.
That was the closest to physical contact they came. While he helped her to clean the herring—he’d brought a whole bucket with him—she contemplated her hopes prior to his visit. She had changed the sheets. Admittedly she did that every Saturday, but not with such cool sheets as this time. She had brought home wine, which she also did every Saturday, but seldom such a good, expensive wine. In the fridge there was veal entrecôte and packages of various delicacies that she bought over the counter in Uppsala.