Sail of Stone

“The Old North Sea, it roars and rooolls,” said Halders.

“Not that day,” she said. “There wasn’t a single ripple.”

“Do you think an African would dare to jump in the North Sea no matter the season?”

“I will refrain from answering,” she said.

“Have you heard about the African who came to Sweden as an exchange student for a year and went home afterward, and his friends asked him how the weather was up there, and he said that the green winter was okay but the white one was horrible?”

“No, I haven’t heard that one,” said Aneta, “please tell me.”

“Uuuu…,” said Halders.

“I hear you’re still working on the name of that country.”

She looked at the photograph in her hand again. That day had been perfect. Such a perfect day. Fredrik had played Lou Reed in the evening. Lou Reed sounded like Fredrik looked.

The perfect family.

She thought suddenly of Anette Lindsten, safe in a secret location, maybe her childhood home or some other secret place.

Somewhere there must be a wedding picture. The perfect day. A light across their faces. Anette and Hans, their origins in nature, linden, stone, rapids, leaves…

Do you take this woman… to love her in sickness and health…

To beat her in sickness and health.

Nature to nature, dust to dust.

“Did you ever want to hit Margareta?” she asked.

Halders’s jaw dropped, it dropped.

“What the hell kind of question is that?”

“Don’t be so shocked. You know what I was doing yesterday. I’m just trying to imagine how it can happen. How things like that can happen.”

“Jesus, Aneta, this is like a parody of the question ‘Have you stopped beating your wife?’ It’s a question you can’t answer yes or no to.”

“That’s not the question I was asking.”

He didn’t say anything. She looked at him. He was a violent man; she had always seen him as an intense man, but in a literal sense. I take down the bad guys literally, as Halders put it. He almost always did. He was a desperate man, and he wasn’t alone in that. He could control his rage. He walked through life angry, but he could control it. Many others could not.

“There was one time during the divorce,” he said slowly. “Or before. One time, or a few. I would get so angry that I wanted to… wanted to…” He looked straight at Aneta. “Wanted to hit something, but there was never never ever the slightest risk that it would be her. Never.”

“What was it, then? Or who?”

“Dammit, Aneta, you know me. Not a person… well, some thief once, but you get what I mean. No one close to me. At home.” He started to rub his neck, suddenly, a nervous gesture. “I would bang my fist into a cupboard door. It happened. I kicked a leg off a kitchen chair once.”

“My God.”

“It was a chair.”

“My God again.”

He stopped rubbing. She saw that his eyes had taken on a different light, as though they had turned inward. It was as though he, all of him, had turned inward.

“And at the same time, I knew it was my fault. Do you understand? That I was the cause of my own rage, or whatever it’s called. That I was the biggest reason that we had ended up in that situation. That I was the one who was splitting up my family, was just about to do it. And that made me so desperate that I lashed out.” He seemed to snap back from inside himself and now he was looking at her. “There’s a paradox, huh? You hit your way out of your own responsibility.”

She didn’t answer.

“But those few times I’m talking about, when I hit something, it was dead things.”

Dead things, she thought. There’s another expression.

She had seen dead things. Halders had seen dead things. It was part of the job. Part of the routine of the job. Routine: What was a body that no longer had a life?

Calm down, Aneta. This evening isn’t part of the routine. There’s a man lying on your sofa and you’re sitting on the floor with pictures of summer happiness and soon you’ll both be sitting at the kitchen table eating and drinking something good. There’s a light in here, in this room. You don’t need to drag in the shadows right now. Kontome is lighting up the room, lighting the way.

“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.”