A summer with Kim Novak

Håkan Nesser

Translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel

breda 2016

Published in Great Britain in
2015
by World Editions Ltd., London

www.worldeditions.org

Copyright © Håkan Nesser,
1998

English translation copyright © Saskia Vogel,
2015

Cover design Multitude

Image credit ©
123
rf.com

The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
1988

First published as
Kim Novak badade aldrig i Genesarets sjö
by Albert Bonniers Förlag, Stockholm, Sweden
1998
. Published in the English language by arrangement with Bonnier Rights, Stockholm, Sweden.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

isbn 978-94-6238-026-4

The cost of this translation was defrayed by a subsidy from the Swedish Arts Council, gratefully acknowledged

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Phone: +
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. Email: [email protected].

In memory of Gunnar

This story is going to be about the Incident, and of course it will be, but there’s so much more to it. That fateful event is why I remember the summer of
1962
more clearly than any other summer of my youth. It cast its dismal pall over so many things. Over me and over Edmund. Over my poor parents, my brother, and that entire time of my life. My memories of that town out on the plain—the people, our experiences and the particular circumstances of our lives—would have been lost to the well of time if it weren’t for that grisly act. The Incident.

Where to begin? I could have started anywhere, and eventually I got tired of considering all the possibilities, so I decided to pinpoint an average weekday, at home in my kitchen on Idrottsgatan. Just my father and me, one balmy evening in May.

‘It’s going to be a difficult summer,’ my father said. ‘Let’s face it.’

He swilled the burnt gravy into the sink and coughed. I looked at his slightly hunched back and pondered. He wasn’t usually a Jeremiah, so I suspected that this was serious.

‘I can’t manage any more,’ I said and rolled the undercooked potatoes to the meat side of the plate, to make it look as though I’d at least eaten half. He came over to the kitchen table and looked at my leftovers for a few seconds. Sadness flickered across his face. He could see right through me, but still he took the plate and scraped the remains into the bucket under the sink without a word.

‘Like I said, a difficult summer,’ he replied instead, his crooked back turned toward me.

‘It is what it is,’ I answered.

Those words were his cure-all, and I used them so he could see I wanted to be supportive. To show that we were in this together and that I had indeed learned a thing or two over the years.

‘Truer words were never spoken,’ he said. ‘Man proposes but God disposes.’

‘You said it,’ I replied.

Because it was a rather fine May evening, I went to Benny’s after dinner. As usual, Benny was in the loo so first I had to talk to his miserable mum in the kitchen.

‘How’s your mother doing?’ she asked.

‘It’s going to be a difficult summer,’ I said.

She nodded and took her handkerchief from her apron pocket and blew her nose. Benny’s mum suffered from allergies off and on during the summer. They said it was hay fever. When I think back, I think she had ‘hay fever’ all year round.

‘That’s what my dad said,’ I added.

‘Ah yes,’ she said. ‘Only time will tell.’

Recently, I had begun to understand that this was how adults spoke. It wasn’t just my father; this was how you showed that you weren’t wet behind the ears. Since my mother had fallen ill and ended up in hospital, I’d noted the most important expressions and used them accordingly.

It is what it is.

Same old, same old.

It could have been worse.

Life is a mystery.

Or why not ‘Keep your chin up, and your feet on the ground’, as Cross-eyed Karlesson at the corner shop declared a hundred times a day.

Or ‘Only time will tell,’ à la Mrs. Barkman.

Benny was called Barkman, too. Benny Jesias Conny Barkman. Some people thought it a strange string of names, but I never heard him complain.

We find many names for those we love, his mum would say with a grin that exposed her grey-tinged gums.

And then Benny would tell her to shut her mouth.

Even though I had one foot in the adult world, I couldn’t help but wonder why people didn’t just keep quiet when they had nothing to say. Like Mrs. Barkman—and Cross-Eyed Karlesson, who sometimes jabbered so incessantly he didn’t stop to breathe. It made an awful sound.

When she’d taken the handkerchief away from her nose, Mrs. Barkman asked, ‘How’s she doing?’

‘Same old, same old,’ I said and shrugged. ‘Not great, I reckon.’

Mrs. Barkman wrung her hands in her lap and her eyes filled with tears, but it was probably just the hay fever. She was a big woman who always wore floral dresses, and my father said she was a touch simple-minded. I had no idea what he meant by that and I didn’t really care. I wanted to talk to Benny, not his weepy mum.

‘He goes to the loo a lot,’ I said, mostly to seem grown-up and to keep the conversation going.

‘He has a nervous stomach,’ she said. ‘He gets it from his dad.’

A nervous stomach? That was the stupidest thing I’d heard all day. A stomach can’t be nervous, can it? I guessed she’d said that because of her simple-mindedness, and it wasn’t worth pursuing.

‘Is she still in hospital?’

I nodded. I didn’t see the point in talking to her any more.

‘Have you been to visit her?’

I nodded again. Of course I had. What was she on about? It had been a week since my last visit, but it was what it was. The important thing was that my dad went to the hospital nearly every day. Even someone like Mrs. Barkman should know that.

‘Well, you know what they say,’ she said. ‘We all have our crosses to bear.’

She sighed and blew her nose. The toilet flushed and Benny came running out.

‘Hi, Erik,’ he said. ‘I shat like a horse. Let’s get out of here and raise hell.’

‘Benny,’ his mum said wanly. ‘Language.’

‘Damn it, right,’ said Benny.

Nobody swore as much as Benny did. Not on our street. Not in our school. Probably not even in the whole town. When we were in third grade, or maybe fourth, a tetchy teacher with an underbite arrived at school. All the way from Göteborg. They said she had a natural gift for teaching, and her main subject was Religious Education. After hearing Benny curse a blue streak for a few days, she decided to sort him out. She was given permission by the headmaster, Mr. Stigman, and our class teacher Mr. Wermelin to work on Benny’s speech twice a week. I think they started in September and carried on throughout the autumn term. Around Christmas Benny developed a stutter so severe that no one could understand him. Come spring, the teacher from Göteborg was fired, Benny started swearing again and by the summer holidays he was back to his old self.

On the May evening that my father said it would be a difficult summer, Benny and I went out to sit inside the culvert. Or rather, we started our evening there. The culvert was a point of departure for whatever the night had in store for us. It lay in a dry ditch fifty metres into the forest, and God knows how it ended up there. It was about one and a half metres in diameter and the same in depth. Because it was tilted on its side, it was a good hideout if you wanted to be left alone. Or needed shelter from the rain. Or were hatching plans and sneaking a few John Silvers that you made some little kid buy for you, so you didn’t have to show your face at Karlesson’s shop. Or, as a last resort, that you had bought yourself.

On this particular evening we had a couple of cigarettes stashed in a can under a tree-root right beside the culvert. Benny dug them out. We smoked with our usual reverence. Then we discussed what sounded better: ciggies or fags. And the right way to hold a cigarette. Thumb–index finger or index finger–middle finger. We didn’t reach a verdict on any of those issues that day either.

Then Benny asked me about my mother.

‘Your mum,’ he said. ‘Shit, is she going to …?’

I nodded.

‘Think so,’ I said. ‘Dad says so. The doctors say so.’

Benny searched his vocabulary.

‘That’s bloody horrible,’ he finally said.

I shrugged. Benny had been close to his aunt, and she had died, so I knew that he knew what he was talking about.

On the other hand, I had no idea what it was like.

Dead?

When I thought about it—and I’d thought about it often this cold, comfortless spring—all I knew was that it was the strangest word in the entire language.

Dead?

Inconceivable. The worst part was that my dad seemed to have as weak a grip on the concept as I did. I could tell by his face the one time—the only time—I asked what it actually meant. What it actually meant to be dead.

‘Hmm, well,’ he had muttered, still staring at the TV with the sound turned down. ‘Only time will tell.’

‘A difficult summer,’ Benny repeated thoughtfully. ‘For Christ’s sake, Erik, you’ll have to write to me. I’m going to be up in Malmberget until school starts, but if you need any advice, you can count on me.’

There was a sudden lull in our conversation, as if we had been touched by an angel. I felt it as clearly as anything, and I knew that Benny had felt it, too, because he cleared his throat and solemnly repeated his offer.

‘Bloody hell, Erik. Write and tell me how you’re doing.’

We shared the second and last wrinkled cigarette. I think I did write a letter to Benny; sometime in July, when everything was at its worst, but I can’t really remember. What I do know is that I never heard a peep from him.

Benny Barkman wasn’t one for pen and paper.

During these years in the early
1960
s, my dad worked at the jail. It was a taxing job, especially for someone as sensitive as he was, but he never talked about it. He avoided unpleasant topics, in general.

Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, and all that.

He’d arrived in the town on the plain in the
1930
s, in the middle of the Depression; met my mother and got her pregnant around the time the world went mad for the second time that century. My brother Henry was born on
1
June
1940
; three days later, after taking leave from his post up in Lapland, my father arrived at the bedside of his wife and child, bearing freshly picked lilies of the valley and forty cans of military-issue liver pâté.

So the story goes.

He never went back up north. After his first son was born, he managed to get out of his military service for the rest of the war. He blamed it on his back, I think. He found a job in one of the town’s many shoe factories, where the army’s winter boots were made. So in a way he was still doing his duty. A few years after the end of the Second World War, the family moved into a flat on Idrottsgatan.

As for me, I was born eight years and eight days after my brother, and I grew up with the feeling that the age difference between us was much greater than between him and our parents. Now, at the start of the sixties, I had begun to see that this was a misconception. Perhaps my mother’s cancer had helped clarify matters.

My mother and father were quite old, you see. The summer my mother was about to die, they were both fifty-seven. One hundred and fourteen years between them. A dizzying sum. Henry turned twenty-two in June. I was fourteen. My father had worked in the prison since it opened its doors to the country’s most dangerous criminals a year and a half earlier.

Or rather, it shut its doors behind them.

He was a screw; a word that had never been uttered in the town before the Grey Giant appeared out on the plain.

He called himself a prison guard. Everyone else said screw. A screw at the Grey Giant.

Previously, he’d worked as a shoe-binder at a number of factories. The disappearance of the word ‘shoe-binder’ roughly coincided with the factory shutting down and the arrival of the screws. This was the way of the world, it seemed. One thing disappears, only to be replaced by something else. And that goes for events and all manner of phenomena as well as people.

It seems that the only place where everything stays put is inside your head, but there, too, things go missing.

One factory that didn’t shut down during those years was the Jam & Juice where my mother worked. Until she fell ill, that is. Having a father at the shoe factory and a mother at the Juicy had its perks. You always had swish shoes and there was usually a generous supply of apple juice down in the cellar.

But that summer, we were nearing the end of an era. Having a screw for a dad came with no perks at all.

As for my brother Henry, he was expected to continue his studies and then move up a rung or two on the social ladder, but that didn’t really go as planned. He did matriculate at the secondary grammar school—a prestigious all-boys school in Örebro that stood opposite a thousand-year-old castle surrounded by a moat. Up to that point, it was looking good. He studied and took the train to the county capital and back every day.

Just after his second semester, Henry ran away. It was the autumn of
1957
and it would be more than a year before he knocked on the door at Idrottsgatan again, carrying a sailor’s bag and with a bunch of bananas on his back. He had been around the world, he explained, but had spent most of his time in Hamburg and Rotterdam. He had a rose tattooed on his arm. It was clear to us all that he didn’t really want to move up in the world, at least not in the way our parents had hoped. When Henry returned, my mother cried. I’m not sure if it was for joy or out of despair over his tattoo. After taking it easy for a few months, Henry set off again, roving the seven seas until
1960
. When he came home the next time, on the same day that Dan Waern failed to win the bronze medal for the
1
,
500
metres in Rome, he said that he’d had enough of the sea. He started freelancing for
Kurren
, the regional newspaper, and found himself a fiancée. One Emmy Kaskel, who worked at Blidberg’s men’s outfitters. She had the best breasts in town.

Probably in the whole world.

In just about the same breath he found a flat twenty kilometres from home in Örebro, where
Kurren
also had their headquarters. His bedsit was roughly the size of two ping-pong tables; it didn’t have its own toilet or running water, and yet every now and then Emmy Kaskel bared her glorious breasts and more in that tiny flat.

At least that’s what Benny and I assumed.

But she didn’t move in with him. Emmy was two years younger than Henry and still lived at home with her parents. They were missionaries and had a discount at Blidberg’s. My brother said half of the town was involved in the Free Church malarkey, so their affiliation was nothing to worry about.

There’s nothing we do out here that they don’t do in there, he’d say with a wry smile.