1
It was the summer Evy Carlén got very sick, realized she didn’t have long to live, and confided in me that she knew what had happened to Sven Jörgensson and his son, Vidar, up in Tiarp.
We hadn’t known each other very long. I knew Evy had been a police officer and had moved to the house near Tofta a few years after retiring. Her husband, Ronnie, had died, and in her widowhood she devoted her days to the beautiful garden surrounding their house. It was situated a few kilometers up in the woods. That was how we met.
Ever since my return, I’ve lived a relatively quiet life. That’s how I like it. I’m over forty now, and my days don’t include any children, women, or other distractions. I spend my time writing or reading. Once or twice a week I take the car and go grocery shopping, drop by the bookstore, or visit my parents. They’re in their seventies now. On occasion I drive down to Lund, where my brother works and where my editor spends half his time. I don’t do much else. If I like I can walk down to the bus stop on Växjövägen and ride into town to see an old friend over a cup of coffee or a beer. Those trips are increasingly scarce now.
The only truly regular facet of my existence, beyond writing and reading, is taking walks. I hardly ever took walks during my years in Stockholm, unless I had some destination in mind, but down here I walk a few kilometers almost every day. I don’t know quite why I need it, but I do. Alongside the treat of a glass of whiskey a few times a week, after an especially productive workday, my walks are one of the few rewards I allow myself.
—
The first time I met her was in late June. The old woman was in her garden next to an open bag of potting soil. The quiet nature of her surroundings meant that she noticed me right away as I came walking by. She looked up, spotted me, nodded, and smiled.
“Aren’t you the one who moved in down by the road? Into the yellow house?”
“Yes, that’s me, I moved here recently,” I said.
“Where did you live before?”
“Stockholm. But I’m from here originally.”
“I’ve seen you on walks in the neighborhood.”
“It’s become a habit. This is a beautiful stretch.”
“Oh. Maybe it is. It’s like I don’t see it myself anymore.” She strode over to the fence and put out her hand. “I’m Evy.”
Once I’d introduced myself, she said, “That’s right. You’re the one who writes books. Aren’t you?”
“Yes,” I said, even though I hadn’t been able to write a word since I came back. “I suppose I am.”
“I haven’t read any of them, I have to confess.”
“There’s no need to. Have you lived here long?”
“For almost fifteen years. My husband and I bought the house. Now it’s just me. I’ve thought about selling it, of course,” she went on, as if anticipating a question she heard often, “but I don’t know, where would I go? I’m eighty years old. I guess I’ll just keep living.”
The next time we met, a week or so later, she invited me in for a cup of coffee and we exchanged phone numbers. We sat in her kitchen. Evy had a new cellphone, which she’d received from one of her grandchildren, and I showed her how the alarm clock worked.
She visited me sometimes. We drank wine, chatted, played cards, and kept each other company. She told me stories from her life as a police officer, hilarious and tragic stories of criminals and addicts, victims and next of kin. How it had been different, being a woman on the force at the time, and yet not. She showed me pictures from a photo album and spoke about her late husband, Ronnie, about her children and grandchildren, about her brother, Einar. I told her I’d moved back to my childhood home, that I was trying to get it in order but didn’t know how, that I hadn’t been able to write, and hadn’t even had anything to write about, in ages.
“That sounds lonely. You, I mean. You sound lonely.”
“So do you,” I said.
She chuckled. “It’s not the same.”
Her eyes were alert and disarming in a way I wasn’t used to, as if her gaze were an art she had perfected and used to great advantage during years’ worth of encounters with those who found themselves in the clutches of law enforcement. It would take time for me to realize that, despite her austere background, there were years when she’d relied on cigarettes and gin to calm her nerves and make it through.
—
Then one day in early August, something went wrong. Evy had gotten up early that morning and felt strange. Her equilibrium was off; she felt dizzy as she brewed her morning coffee, and when she walked into her front hall she had to grab the wall for support because everything was tilting weirdly. Her stomach began to churn. Standing before the mirror, she straightened up and tried to smile, even though she didn’t feel like smiling. One side of her mouth didn’t move. She looked off-kilter. She raised her arms and began to count to ten, but stopped when she saw her left arm fall back down. She made her way to an easy chair and called the emergency number.
“My name is Evy Carlén. It’s a lovely morning. Can you hear what I’m saying?”
“I’m sorry,” said the operator on the other end. “Can you repeat that? I didn’t hear you. What’s your name?”
“My name is Evy Carlén, and I said: It’s a lovely morning. Can you hear what I’m saying?”
“I see you’re calling from Norteforsen near Tofta. Is it Norteforsen 195? What’s your name? I’m having trouble hearing you.”
“Okay,” Evy said with a sigh. “I understand. Well, I suppose you’d better come over here, then.”
She struggled to walk to the front door, phone in hand, and tu
rned the lock so they could get in. She collapsed on the floor, because the living room was too far away. By the time the ambulance arrived, she was unconscious.
—
I heard that she’d had a stroke. And when she woke up in the hospital bed she seemed to have lost her speech. All she did was burst into tears. Days went by before she could say much of anything, and when she did, what she said was a name. But it wasn’t the name of her late husband or the friend she sometimes met at Kupan; it wasn’t her brother, Einar, or her children or grandchildren. She said: “Sven Jörgensson.”
And burst into tears again.
By that point, she’d probably realized that I hadn’t been completely honest with her, that in fact I had basically deceived her. But what was I supposed to do? In the time leading up to Evy’s stroke, my life had slowly begun to revolve around what happened up in Tiarp, in that early spring long ago.
Moral suffering is strange. It can strike the strong as easily as the weak, and no surgery, painkillers, or artificial respirations can help. Moral pain is a different beast. The only solution is to let yourself be slowly consumed, or to resort to drastic measures to free yourself.
That was what she would come to teach me.
2
When I grew up, I used to see Sven Jörgensson several times a week. That’s the way of it, when you come from a place like Tofta, you learn an awful lot about everyone without even trying.
I lived with my brother, Rasmus, and my parents near Lake Tofta, along the highway that goes to Simlångsdalen. The year I turned ten, 1986, I started riding the school bus to Snöstorp School. Each morning, I walked down to the mailboxes at the side of the road and waited for the old orange-and-white bus to appear over at the bend in the road over toward Skedala. I don’t remember the bus driver’s name, but it was always the same thin-haired and quiet man. He came from town, stopped for us, and then headed up to Marbäck until the bus turned around at Tofta Art Center, came back down the highway, and turned off at Snöstorp.
My brother is three years younger than me, and when he started school we waited by the mailboxes together. Never had I felt so grown up as when I stood next to him in the early mornings, keeping an eye on the road and making sure he didn’t get too close, making sure that the reflective accents on his coat were visible in the autumn and winter, when the mornings were dark, and that he had brought everything with him. You can never be sure, with little seven-year-olds.
That’s when we would see Sven Jörgensson. He came driving by from Marbäck, wearing his uniform, looking tired, a cigarette in the corner of his mouth and the window rolled down just a little, squinting at the morning as if he were in the middle of some great trial of which we kids were still unaware. Sometimes he was in a patrol car, but most of the time he was driving his own vehicle, a red Volvo station wagon. Those times, it was a little harder to pick him out at a distance, but it was still possible.
One morning, as the Volvo passed, we gasped. A thick red sludge had run down from the roof of Sven’s car, onto the rear windows and the fenders, and congealed there.
My brother and I were thoroughly intrigued. All the way to school we tried to guess what might have happened, whispering imagined events and exchanging scenarios, each more thrilling than the last. Maybe he’d caught a robber and beat him up. Maybe he even shot him. We knew Sven carried a handgun—all cops did. Or maybe he’d had to fight someone on the roof of the car, someone who obviously lost, maybe a man who had stolen something expensive from a store and tried to flee. Sven might have beaten the robber half to death with his baton.
When we told Dad about it that evening, he—a man who, even back then, had a good sense of humor—was as taken aback as we were.
“To think that such criminal drama took place so close to us. Maybe that’s what I heard. The shot, that is.”
“The shot?” I looked at my brother. “What shot?”
“I woke up around three this morning. You know how sometimes you’re dreaming, and real life creeps into your dream?”
“Yeah,” said my brother, his eyes wide.
“Yeah. So, I remember I was dreaming about a door slamming really hard, and it made a hell of a bang.” Dad squinted and lowered his voice. “Maybe that was actually Sven, shooting t
he robber.”
We were entranced and listened intently until Mom cocked her head pointedly and gave a wry smile. Then he laughed and, in a voice that was suddenly drained of imagination and excitement, making way for boring fatherly reality, he said, well, there was no ruling out that it had been a robber. Or that a rooftop fistfight had ended poorly, or any of the other events we’d dreamed up. But, he added, once upon a time, Sven had been a hunter. He didn’t hunt anymore, he’d turned in his firearms and all that, but he was still friends with Lennart Börjesson, Göran Lundgren, and the other hunters up in the village. Sometimes he helped them with the animals they shot. Recently they’d got a moose, and Sven had had to transport it on the roof, because it didn’t fit anywhere else, and the tarp they’d wrapped it in had leaked.
We were disappointed, obviously. But when you stopped to think about it, it would be really out of character for Sven to shoot another person out of the blue, even if it was a robber. Or even to hit someone. Sven was Sven. We liked to wave at him when he drove by each morning. Sometimes he waved back. You could catch a hint of a smile, not a big one, because he’d drop his cigarette, but a smile nonetheless.
Back then, two car mechanics lived in the area surrounding Marbäck and Tofta. One was Peter Nyqvist on Svanåsvägen, up in the village. The other was my father. He worked at Rejmes in Halmstad, behind Sannarp High School and across from the fire station. When the cars of the Marbäck area broke down, people
turned to him or Peter for an initial assessment of the problem, especially in the summer or on weekends. Getting your car into a shop was a project in and of itself—better to let Dad or Peter have a look first. Cheaper, too. On any number of days I woke up to the phone ringing and heard Dad get up, answer sleepily, say, Oh, hello there, Göran and Damn, that’s too bad and Yes, I’m home, that’s fine, can you drive it over?
We got used to seeing cars that didn’t belong to us in the driveway, propped up by a jack, their hoods open, Dad on his back on a worn rubber mat that had once been yellow but was now stained dark brown with oil and dirt. I recall that car being Sven Jörgensson’s on two occasions. I don’t remember what the weather was like, what was wrong with the car, whether Dad could fix it in the driveway or whether he had to call Kenneth’s Towing. What stuck with me was Sven.
Sven’s chin was wide and chiseled like a steam shovel, and his hands were the size of sledgehammers. He had broad shoulders and thinning hair and a slight potbelly thanks to poor cop fare and the beer he liked to drink at night; he really looked more like a farmer than a police officer. But everyone knew he was a cop. It defined him. My brother and I stood by the window or sat on the steps, carefully studying how he moved, how he talked, how he held a cigarette in one hand and rested the other on his belt, as if he missed his holster, as if his world was a little skewed when it wasn’t there. While Dad took a look at the car, they talked about houses, what needed doing and what had been done, vacations, soccer, the Breared-Snöstorp match, which had ended 1–2, what was going on up in Marbäck and here in Tofta, and about us. The kids.
Sven and his wife, Bibbi, had one son, Vidar. He was just like his dad, big and strong and tenderhearted. Vidar was in high school, played offense for Breared’s soccer team, already chopped wood like a man, and was well-liked by all. We’d seen him in the village now and then, and often heard his name. Not even Vidar Jörgensson could chop that one down, no sir, we had to call the company in the city, Farmer Andersson said once, nodding at an unusually massive spruce at the edge of his cow pasture. Wow, look at that, you’re getting close to Vidar Jörgensson’s old record, our gym teacher exclaimed as he solemnly raised the high-jump bar to an astonishing one meter and sixty-six centimeters. Vidar did odd jobs for the farmers sometimes, mostly because he thought it was fun. Even then, as I recall, he appeared to be one with his environment, his life, and his dreams, whatever they might have been.
Let me know if there’s anything you need, or if I can lend a hand. So said Sven sometimes, and his words seemed to fill you
up as he looked down at you with his clear, green eyes, placed a big, meaty hand on your shoulder, and said Take care of yourself, kiddo, and be good to your parents. I took those words seriously, because they had come from him. He called me kiddo but looked at me almost like I was an adult.
It wasn’t that we wanted to be like Sven. It was just that we were so drawn in by the world we could sense in his presence, the illusion that it was possible to create around ourselves, around Marbäck and Tofta and their people and life. He made our world seem safe and secure, made us feel that even our tiny steps on earth were full of meaning and purpose, that we could make a difference, that we could trust we would never be overlooked. That someone would always be watching over us.
Sven must have been sick even then. It just wasn’t noticeable. Or, I suppose it was; we just didn’t want to see it. There are many things that exist and yet we don’t see, because it would be too painful.
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