AXEL LINDWAL threw his cigarette into the empty grate when he heard the trap approaching. He took the valise from his wife, helped her down, and paid the driver.
“Axel,” she said, in a tone of bright affection, once they were inside the house, “why do you always smoke when I am not here?”
He looked at her. He did not know what to do or say. He did not want to ask her questions in case that made her tell him lies. Or in case that made her tell him the truth. He feared them equally. The silence continued. Well, he thought, we cannot live together in silence for the rest of our lives. So, eventually, he answered, “Because I like smoking.”
She laughed a little. They were standing in front of the unlit grate; he still held her valise. For all he knew, it contained all the secrets, all the truths and all the lies he did not want to hear.
“I returned sooner than I thought.”
“Yes.”
“I decided not to spend the night in Falun.”
“Yes.”
“The town smells of copper.”
“Yes.”
“But the roof of the Kristina-Kyrka blazes in the setting sun.”
“So I have been told.”
It was painful for him to watch his wife in such a state. It would only be humane to let her tell whatever lies she had prepared. So he allowed himself a question.
“And how is . . . he?”
“Oh, he is very well.” She did not know how absurd this sounded until she had said it. “That is to say, he is in the hospital. He is very well, but I suspect this cannot be the case.”
“Generally speaking, people who are very well do not go to hospital.”
“No.”
He regretted his sarcasm. A teacher had once told his class that sarcasm was a moral weakness. Why did he remember that now?
“And . . . ?”
She had not realized until now that she would have to account for her visit to Falun; not its incidentals, but its purpose. She had imagined, when she left, that on her return everything would be quite changed, and that it would merely be necessary to explain this change, whatever it might be. As the silence prolonged itself, she panicked.
“He wishes you to have his stall. At church. It is number 4.”
“I know it is number 4. Now go to bed.”
“Axel,” she said, “I was thinking on the train that we can become old. The sooner the better. I think things must be easier if you are old. Do you think that is possible?”
“Go to bed.”
Alone, he lit another cigarette. Her lie was so preposterous it might even have been true. But it came to the same thing. If it was a lie, then the truth was that she had gone, more openly than ever before, to visit her lover. Her former lover? If it was the truth, Bodén’s gift was a sarcastic payment by the jeering lover to the wronged husband. The sort of gift that gossip loved and never forgot.
Tomorrow the rest of his life would start. And it would be changed, quite changed, by the knowledge of how much of his life up till then had not been as he thought. Would he have any memories, any past, that would remain untainted by what had been confirmed tonight? Perhaps she was right, and they should try to be old together, and rely, over time, on the hardening of the heart.
“WHAT WAS THAT?” asked the nurse. This one was starting to become incoherent. It was often the case in the final stages.
“The extra . . .”
“Yes?”
“The extra is for gunshots.”
“Gunshots?”
“To awaken the echoes.”
“Yes?”
His voice toiled as he repeated the sentence. “The extra is for gunshots to awaken the echoes.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Bodén, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Then I hope you never find out.”
AT THE FUNERAL of Anders Bodén, his coffin, made from white fir cut and seasoned within a gull’s cry of the town’s crossroads, was placed in front of the carved altar brought from Germany during the Thirty Years War. The vicar praised the sawmill manager as a tall tree which had fallen beneath God’s axe. It was not the first time that the congregation had heard this comparison. Outside the church, stall number 4 stood empty in homage to the dead man. He had made no provision in his will, and his son had moved to Stockholm. After suitable consultation, the stall was awarded to the captain of the steamboat, a man conspicuous for his civic merit.
The Things You Know
1
Coffee, ladies?”
They both looked up at the waiter, but he was already advancing the flask towards Merrill’s cup. When he’d finished pouring, he moved his eyes, not to Janice, but to Janice’s cup. She covered it with her hand. Even after all these years, she didn’t understand why Americans wanted coffee immediately the waiter arrived. They drank hot coffee, then cold orange juice, then more coffee. It didn’t make sense at all.
“No coffee?” the waiter asked, as if her gesture could have been ambiguous. He wore a green linen apron and his hair was so gelled that you could see every comb-mark.
“I’ll have tea. Later.”
“English Breakfast, Orange Pekoe, Earl Grey?”
“English Breakfast. But later.”
The waiter moved off as though offended, and still without making eye contact. Janice wasn’t surprised, let alone hurt. They were two elderly ladies and he was probably a homosexual. It seemed to her that American waiters were becoming more and more homosexual, or at least more and more openly so. Perhaps they always had been. It must, after all, be a good way to meet lonely businessmen. Assuming that lonely businessmen were themselves homosexual, which wasn’t, she admitted, necessarily the case.
“I like the look of the poached egg,” said Merrill.
“Poached egg sounds nice.” But Janice’s agreement didn’t mean she’d be ordering it. She thought poached egg was lunch, not breakfast. There were a lot of things on this menu that weren’t breakfast either in her book: waffles, home-style pancakes, Arctic halibut. Fish for breakfast? That had never made sense to her. Bill used to like kippers, but she would only let him have them when they were staying at a hotel. They stank the kitchen out, she’d tell him. And they repeated all day. Which was largely, though not entirely, his problem, but still. It had been a matter of some contention between them.
“Bill used to love a kipper,” she said fondly.
Merrill glanced at her, wondering whether she’d missed some logical step in the conversation.
“Of course, you never knew Bill,” said Janice, as if it had been a solecism on Bill’s part—one for which she was now apologizing—to have died before he could meet Merrill.
“My dear,” said Merrill, “with me it’s Tom this, Tom that, you have to stop me or I’m off and running.”
They settled down with the menu again, now that the terms on which breakfast was to be conducted had somehow been agreed.
“We went to see The Thin Red Line,” said Janice. “We enjoyed it very much.”
Merrill wondered who “we” might be. “We” would have meant “Bill and I” at one time. Who did it mean now? Or was it just a habit? Perhaps Janice, even after three years of widowhood, couldn’t bear to slip back into “I.”
“I didn’t like it,” said Merrill.
“Oh.” Janice gave a sidelong glance to her menu, as if looking for a prompt. “We thought it was very well filmed.”
“Yes,” said Merrill. “But I found it, well, boring.”
“We didn’t like Little Voice,” said Janice, as an offering.
“Oh, I loved it.”
“To tell you the truth, we only went for Michael Caine.”
“Oh, I loved it.”
“Do you think he’s won an Oscar?”
“Michael Caine? For Little Voice?”
“No, I mean—generally.”
“Generally? I should think so. After all this time.”
“After all this time, yes. He must be nearly as old as us by now.”
>
“Do you think so?” In Merrill’s opinion, Janice talked far too much about getting old, or at least older. It must be on account of being so European.
“Or if not now, he soon will be,” said Janice. They both thought about this, and then laughed. Not that Merrill agreed, even allowing for the joke. That was the thing about movie stars, they managed not to age at the normal rate. Nothing to do with the surgery either. They somehow remained the age they were when you first saw them. Even when they started playing maturer characters, you didn’t really believe it; you still thought of them as young, but acting old—and often not very convincingly.
Merrill was fond of Janice, but always found her a little dowdy. She did insist on greys and pale greens and beiges, and she’d let her hair go streaky-grey which didn’t help. It was so natural it looked false. Even that big scarf, pinned across one shoulder in some kind of a gesture, was greeny-grey, for God’s sake. And it certainly didn’t call for pants, or at least, not pants like those. A pity. She might have been a pretty thing once. Never a beauty, of course. But pretty. Nice eyes. Well, nice enough. Not that she did anything to draw attention to them.
“It’s terrible what’s happening in the Balkans,” said Janice.
“Yes.” Merrill had long ago stopped reading those pages of the Sun-Times.
“Milošević must be taught a lesson.”
“I don’t know what to think.”
“The Serbs never change their spots.”
“I don’t know what to think,” repeated Merrill.
“I remember Munich.”
That seemed to clinch the discussion. Janice had been saying “I remember Munich” a lot lately, though in truth what she meant was that she must, in early childhood, have heard grown-ups referring to Munich as a recent and shameful betrayal. But this wasn’t worth explaining; it would only take away from the authority of the statement.
“I might just have the granola and some whole wheat toast.”
“It’s what you always have,” Merrill pointed out, though without impatience, more as a matter of indulgent fact.
“Yes, but I like to think I might have something else.” Also, every time she had the granola she had to remember that shaky molar.
“Well, I guess I’ll have the poached egg.”
“It’s what you always have,” Janice replied. Eggs were binding, kippers repeated, waffles weren’t breakfast.
“Will you make the sign for him?”
That was just like Merrill. She always arrived first and chose the seat from which you couldn’t catch the waiter’s eye without getting a crick in your neck. Which left Janice to flap her hand a few times and try not to get embarrassed when the waiter displayed other priorities. It was as bad as trying to hail a taxi. They just didn’t notice you nowadays, she thought.
2
They met here, in the breakfast room of the Harborview, among the hurrying businessmen and lounging vacationers, on the first Tuesday of every month. Come rain or shine, they said. Come hell or high water. Actually, it was more, come Janice’s hip operation and come Merrill’s ill-advised trip to Mexico with her daughter. Apart from that, they’d made it a regular date these last three years.
“I’m ready for my tea now,” said Janice.
“English Breakfast, Orange Pekoe, Earl Grey?”
“English Breakfast.” She said it with a nervous crispness which made the waiter stop checking the table. An indeterminate nod was as near as he came to an apology.
“Coming right up,” he said, as he was already moving off.
“Do you think he’s a pansy?” For some reason unknown to her, Janice had deliberately avoided a modern word, though the effect was, if anything, more pointed.
“I couldn’t care less,” said Merrill.
“I couldn’t care less either,” said Janice. “Especially not at my age. Anyway, they make very good waiters.” This didn’t seem right either, so she added, “That’s what Bill used to say.” Bill hadn’t said anything of the kind, as far as she could remember, but his posthumous corroboration was useful when she got flustered.
She looked across at Merrill, who was wearing a burgundy jacket over a purple skirt. On her lapel was a gilt brooch large enough to be a small sculpture. Her hair, cut short, was an improbable bright straw, and seemed not to care that it was unconvincing; instead, it merely said, this is to remind you that I was once a blonde—some sort of blonde, anyway. More an aide-memoire than a hair-colouring, thought Janice. It was a pity about Merrill: she didn’t seem to understand that after a certain age women should no longer pretend to be what they had once been. They should submit to time. Neutrality, discretion, dignity were called for. Merrill’s refusal must be something to do with being American.
What the two of them had in common, apart from widowhood, were flat suede shoes with special gripper soles. Janice had found them in a mail-order catalogue, and Merrill had surprised her by asking for a pair too. They were very good on wet pavements, as Janice still called them, and it did rain an awful lot up here in the Pacific North-West. People constantly told her it must remind her of England, and she always said Yes, always meaning No.
“I mean, he didn’t think they ought to be allowed in the armed forces, but he wasn’t prejudiced.”
In response, Merrill stabbed her egg. “Everyone was a darned sight more discreet about their private business when I was young.”
“Me too,” said Janice hastily. “I mean, when I was too. Which would have been at about the same time.” Merrill glanced at her, and Janice, reading a reproof, added, “Though of course in a different part of the world.”
“Tom always said you could tell from the way they walked. Not that it bothers me.” Yet Merrill did seem a little bothered.
“How do they walk?” In asking the question, Janice felt transported back into adolescence, back before marriage.
“Oh, you know,” said Merrill.
Janice watched Merrill eat a mouthful of poached egg. If she was being given a hint, she couldn’t imagine what it might be. She hadn’t noticed how their waiter walked. “I don’t,” she said, feeling her ignorance as culpable, almost infantile.
“With their hands out,” Merrill wanted to say. Instead, uncharacteristically, she turned her head and shouted, “Coffee,” surprising both Janice and the waiter. Perhaps she was calling for a demonstration.
When she turned back, she was composed again. “Tom was in Korea,” she said. “Oak leaves and clusters.”
“My Bill did his National Service. Well, everyone had to then.”
“It was so cold, if you put your tea on the ground, it turned to a mug of brown ice.”
“He missed Suez. He was in the reserves but they didn’t call him up.”
“It was so cold you had to tip your razor out of its case into warm water before you could use it.”
“He quite enjoyed it. He was a good mixer, Bill.”
“It was so cold, if you put your hand on the side of a tank, your skin came away.”
“Probably a better mixer than me, if the truth be known.”
“Even the gas froze solid. The gas.”
“There was a very cold winter back in England. Just after the war. Forty-six, I think, or maybe it was forty-seven.”
Merrill felt suddenly impatient. What did her Tom’s suffering have to do with a cold spell in Europe? Really. “How’s your granola?” she asked.
“Hard on the teeth. I’ve got this molar.” Janice picked a hazelnut out of her bowl and tapped it on the side. “Looks a bit like a tooth, doesn’t it?” She giggled, in a way that further annoyed Merrill. “What do you think about these implant things?”
“Tom had every tooth in his head when he died.”
“So did Bill.” This was far from true, but it would be letting him down to say anything less.
“They couldn’t get a shovel into the ground to bury their dead.”
“Who couldn’t?” Under Merrill’s stare, Janice worked it out. “Yes,
of course.” She felt herself beginning to panic. “Well, I suppose it didn’t matter in a way.”
“In what way?”
“Oh, nothing.”
“In what way?” Merrill liked to say—to herself and to others—that while she didn’t believe in disagreement and unpleasantness, she did believe in telling things straight.
“In . . . well, the . . . people they were waiting to bury . . . if it was that cold . . . you know what I mean.”
Merrill did, but chose to remain implacable. “A true soldier always buries his dead. You should know that.”
“Yes,” said Janice, remembering The Thin Red Line but not liking to mention it. Odd how Merrill chose to comport herself like some high-faluting military widow. Janice knew that Tom had been drafted. Janice knew a thing or two more about him, for that matter. What they said on campus. What she’d seen with her own eyes.
“Of course, I never met your husband, but everyone spoke so highly of him.”
“Tom was wonderful,” said Merrill. “It was a love match.”
“He was very popular, they all told me.”
“Popular?” Merrill repeated the word as if it were peculiarly inadequate in the circumstances.
“That’s what people said.”
“You just have to face the future,” said Merrill. “Look it full in the face. That’s the only way.” Tom had told her this when he was dying.
Better to face the future than the past, thought Janice. Did she really have no idea? Janice remembered a sudden view from a bathroom window, down behind a hedge, a red-faced man unzipping, a woman putting out her hand, the man pushing at her head, the woman refusing, an argument in dumbshow as the party’s noise swirled below her, the man putting his hand on the woman’s neck, pushing her down, the woman spitting on the man’s thing, the man slapping her across the top of the head, all in twenty seconds or so, a cameo of lust and rage, the couple parting, the war hero and love match and famous campus groper zipping himself up again, someone rattling the handle of the bathroom, Janice finding her way downstairs and asking Bill to take her home immediately, Bill commenting on her colour and speculating about that extra glass or two she must have downed when he wasn’t looking, Janice snapping at him in the car and then apologizing. Over the years, she had forced herself to forget this scene, pushing it to the back of her mind, almost as if it were about Bill and herself in some way. Then, after Bill had died, and she had met Merrill, there was another reason for trying to forget it.